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rfmcdonaldI was pleased to come across Temple Grandin's recent Animals in Translation. Grandin is well-known for her role as a leader in the animal welfare movement, responsible for designing more human livestock handling facilities. She is also widely known, thanks to her association with Oliver Sacks, as an adult who has thrived thanks to her autism and whose personal experiences provide a remarkable look inside. Grandin famously described herself as "like an anthropologist on Mars," approaching human and animal societies from unique angles which allowed her to understand their dynamics all the more effectively.
Animals in Translation, her most recent book, brings her attention to bear on the question of consciousness. Grandin spends most of her time analyzing the behaviours of animals that humans are familiar with, with livestock, farm animals, and pets. A common theme uniting Grandin's examples, taken from her own experiences and from those of her friends, is the extreme sensitivity of animals to details that humans might well miss, to colours, shapes, and other sensory impressions that normal humans might not even be capable of detecting. This highly specific attention to detail ends up forming the linchpin of Grandin's thesis that animal intelligence differs from human intelligence in its much greater variability, in lessened general fluid intelligence but in greatly elevated intelligence relating to specific tasks (migration, for instance, or feeding). Grandin convincingly argues that there is no such thing as a straightforward division between humans and animals in this area, since autistic persons like herself exhibit greatly increased sensitivity to sensory cues not apparent to "neurotypical" humans, while even researchers relatively ignorant the sophisticated unseen improvised cultures of animals have caught individuals of species as various as dolphins, chimpanzees, and grey parrots using language creatively and making tools.
Animals in Transition isn't the easiest read, with a choppy prose style that would have benefited from an editor. This stylistic point fortunately doesn't keep the reader from understanding Grandin's central argument there is no clear difference between the experiences of animals and the experiences of human beings, that there is instead a shared continuum of experience that has to be taken to account by anyone interacting with animals. Grandin's book is, pardon the misnomer, one of the most fundamentally humane books I've read. I recommend it particularly to anyone interested in animal rights or the nature of consciousness, but anyone who's interested in how other beings think should at least pick it up.
Animals in Translation, her most recent book, brings her attention to bear on the question of consciousness. Grandin spends most of her time analyzing the behaviours of animals that humans are familiar with, with livestock, farm animals, and pets. A common theme uniting Grandin's examples, taken from her own experiences and from those of her friends, is the extreme sensitivity of animals to details that humans might well miss, to colours, shapes, and other sensory impressions that normal humans might not even be capable of detecting. This highly specific attention to detail ends up forming the linchpin of Grandin's thesis that animal intelligence differs from human intelligence in its much greater variability, in lessened general fluid intelligence but in greatly elevated intelligence relating to specific tasks (migration, for instance, or feeding). Grandin convincingly argues that there is no such thing as a straightforward division between humans and animals in this area, since autistic persons like herself exhibit greatly increased sensitivity to sensory cues not apparent to "neurotypical" humans, while even researchers relatively ignorant the sophisticated unseen improvised cultures of animals have caught individuals of species as various as dolphins, chimpanzees, and grey parrots using language creatively and making tools.
Animals in Transition isn't the easiest read, with a choppy prose style that would have benefited from an editor. This stylistic point fortunately doesn't keep the reader from understanding Grandin's central argument there is no clear difference between the experiences of animals and the experiences of human beings, that there is instead a shared continuum of experience that has to be taken to account by anyone interacting with animals. Grandin's book is, pardon the misnomer, one of the most fundamentally humane books I've read. I recommend it particularly to anyone interested in animal rights or the nature of consciousness, but anyone who's interested in how other beings think should at least pick it up.
