The pig whisperer;
Special Report; A Pig's Tale Day 10

Jun 4, 2008: The Hamilton Spectator ... I'm playing a word game with Temple Grandin. It's fascinating to hear her describe how her brain works.

Temple Grandin is a professor of livestock behaviour at Colorado State University. She also happens to be autistic.

You could make the case that she's the world's most highly functioning autistic person and I wouldn't argue with that.

She's written a handful of books on the subject, and her first, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, is thought to be the first book to give an insider's perspective on what it's like to live with autism.

Far from being a hindrance, though, Grandin's autism has given her a skill unmatched anywhere.

She is considered the guru of modern slaughterhouse design, primarily because of her commitment to improve the humane treatment of animals.

Grandin has done work for most of the giants in the pork and beef industry -- McDonald's, Maple Leaf, Smithfield Foods, Cargill, Hatfield, Swift -- and about half of all cattle in North America are processed in plants that she's designed.

Words are a foreign language to Grandin.

"All my thinking is in pictures," she explained.

Words, for her, are represented by full-colour movie clips from her life that are stored in the vast warehouse of her mind.

When she reads, or when someone speaks to her, the words are immediately translated into images that she pulls from her mental library and plays like a DVD inside her head

It wasn't until she was in her 30s that Grandin realized her method of thinking was drastically different from most people's.

"I didn't even know it was a special skill. I thought everybody could do that."

The revelation came when she asked people to describe for her a church steeple. She realized that people without autism would describe a generic steeple, almost like a stick-figure drawing or a cartoon.

"I see specific ones and I know exactly where they are," said Grandin. "There's no generalized one."

"It must be difficult for you for words where there aren't easy pictures," I said.

"OK, give me some examples," she suggested, and we played a word association game.

"What about words for emotions, like fear or love or hate?" I asked.

"Well, I saw the movie Love Story for love," she said. "For fear, I'm seeing that movie, the black and white one where they're camping out in the woods, I can't remember the name of it.

"The Blair Witch Project," she adds triumphantly after a moment. "I'm seeing a picture of a girl and she has a knitted hat on and she's very scared.

"Wow," I whistled. "What about a word like infinity?"

"I see outer space," she said. "I've got this picture from the Hubble space telescope of hundreds of galaxies and that's what I see. I see a physics textbook.

"So it's instantaneous?" I asked.

"It's instantaneous," she said. "That's what came up in my mind when you said infinity."

Grandin became interested in slaughterhouse design and animal welfare back in the early 1970s after visiting cattle feedyards.

"I was pretty horrified at what they did to the poor cattle."

Using her training as an agricultural engineer, she began to design equipment to improve the handling of animals at a slaughterhouse to reduce the amount of stress they faced.

That's where her visual thinking comes in handy.

She's able to call up images of every similar piece of equipment that she has seen, in such vivid detail that she can analyze its precise construction. But her mental videos also let her remember exactly how the animals behave in specific situations.

Her unique skill also allows her to visualize what a piece of equipment will look like in three-dimensional form, from any angle -- front, back, side, top or bottom.

She couldn't understand why people were so excited when computer-assisted design programs were developed that give 360-degree views of a drawing. To her, that was normal.

"I can do it better and faster in my head," she explained.

"I started out deciding I was going to design the best engineering systems and if I designed the best engineering systems, that would fix all the problems," said Grandin. "I thought I could fix everything with equipment in the '70s.

"Now, I've learned I can fix half of the problems with equipment," she said. "The other half is management and controlling what people do."

Grandin's real advances in the field, though, came from combining her engineering base and her visual abilities with her knowledge of animal behaviour.

She's famous for testing out designs herself, walking through the chutes with a camera at the same level as the animals' eyes so that she could see what they see.

She could point out details that seemed inconsequential to others but were significant enough to make the animals agitated.

A metal strip on the floor that the pigs might have to walk over, a change from metal grating to concrete on the path, a shadow, a bright spot from the sun shining in, a worker up ahead wearing bright green gloves -- any one of those distractions could stop the smooth flow of animals into the slaughtering chamber.

She gave the example of a processing plant that had failed two audits for excessive use of electric prods on pigs.

Grandin figured out that the hogs were balking at a reflection on the floor of the chute. She moved two overhead ceiling lights to get rid of the reflection "and then the pigs ran right up the chute," she said.

"I've taken a lot of people to big slaughterhouses that work right and they're really surprised at how easily the animals walk up the ramp," she said. "It can be done really nicely."

Not surprisingly, Grandin has given a lot of thought to the importance of what might seem to some to be a paradoxical concept -- the humane slaughter of animals.

"First of all, it's the right thing to do," she said. "Animals feel fear. Animals feel pain.

"I feel we can eat animals for meat products in an ethical way," she added, "but we've got to give animals a decent life."

There's also an economic incentive for pork processors to treat animals humanely, she noted.

Pigs are particularly susceptible to stress, which can have a significant impact on meat quality.

Certain pigs, when stressed, are prone to a condition that causes their meat to become pale, soft and watery. It's not harmful to consumers, but it does make the meat unsightly and virtually impossible to sell.

The problem for processors is that it's a little like Russian roulette. Not all pigs under stress will exhibit this condition, but it's not possible to pick out the ones that will be affected until after they've been slaughtered.

"That last five minutes in the stunning chute is very important for meat quality," said Grandin. "So that's another reason for handling pigs nicely."

Stress is not only bad for meat quality, it also can have a dramatic effect on growth rates.

One University of Illinois study showed that the growth rate for pigs subjected to a combination of stresses including heat and overcrowding declined by more than 30 per cent.

Extreme heat is a particular problem because pigs don't possess sweat glands to help them regulate their body temperature.

Grandin's principles of animal behaviour

• The flight zone is the animal's personal space. An animal will begin to move away when the handler penetrates the edge of the flight zone. The flight zone of an animal will vary depending on how tame the animal is. Completely tame animals have no flight zone and people can touch them. The flight zone gets bigger when an animal becomes excited. The flight zone is also bigger when you approach head on.
• The point of balance is at the animal's shoulder. All species of livestock will move forward if the handler stands behind the point of balance. They will back up if the handler stands in front of the point of balance. Groups of cattle or pigs in a chute will often move forward without prodding when the handler walks past the point of balance in the opposite direction of each animal in the chute.
• Cattle prefer to walk in single file. Cattle will move more easily through a curved chute because they think they are going back to where they came from. A tall chute with solid sides helps prevent cattle becoming agitated because they can't see activity outside the chute. Cattle tend to be calmer in a chute with solid sides.

From "Understanding Flight Zone and Point of Balance" and "Improving Animal Movement"