Temple Grandin: My autism made me a cowgirl superstar

[Guest guest]

Temple Grandin: My autism made me a cowgirl superstar

Temple Grandin had such severe autism that even her own father wanted her put in

an institution. Now she’s the toast of Hollywood. Tom Leonard reports.

By Tom Leonard

Published: 7:00AM BST 27 Sep 2010

Temple Grandin, a biopic film, was this year?s talk of the Emmys, gaining a

string of awards

The red carpet commentators on frock-watch at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles had

a treat in store for them this year. Clad in black and red cowgirl gear, Temple

Grandin – bestselling author, groundbreaking animal behaviour expert and

arguably the world’s most successful autistic person – gave the US television

industry’s annual hoedown a real taste of the Wild West.

At one point, she jumped up and swung her arm lasso-style at the stage. The

woman who took on the macho world of ranching over its treatment of cattle and

who was named by Time magazine as one of 2010’s 100 most influential people

wasn’t going to be cowed by Hollywood. Two days later, back at her day job

lecturing in livestock handling and behaviour at Colorado State University, she

reassured her students that the Emmy party had been “just like a US meat

industry convention, only with rather less drinking”.

Still, Grandin could not hide her excitement. Temple Grandin, a biopic film

about her early life, was this year’s talk of the Emmys, roping a string of

awards. They included honours for actress Danes in the title role, for

Mick , its British director, and for Ormond, the English actress

who played Grandin’s devoted mother. The film made by HBO, creators of The Wire

and The Sopranos, has deservedly been hailed as one of the best TV movies for

years.

However, the real star of the film is Grandin’s life story, one so extraordinary

that it is hard to imagine any of the writers in the Emmys’ audience dreaming it

up.

Born in 1947, so severely autistic that most doctors and even her father wanted

her institutionalised (the lifelong development disorder, which affects how

people communicate and interact with others, was then barely understood),

Grandin not only overcame her disability but turned it to her own advantage.

Sent one summer from her Boston home as a teenager to stay on her uncle and

aunt’s Arizona ranch, Grandin discovered that her total lack of empathy with

humans – she would jump if anyone so much as touched her – was offset by an

uncanny understanding of animals. Dr Doolittle may talk to the animals. Grandin

can think like them.

Like some – but not all – autistic people, she thinks purely in pictures rather

than language, and so, she believes, do animals, which is why she feels able to

identify with them. “One of the first things I did on the ranch was to get down

in the chutes [the disinfection channel cattle go through before being

slaughtered] to see what the cattle were seeing,” she says, speaking near her

tiny, messy office crammed with bull statues, mounted whips and other trophies.

“I could tell if an animal was spooked by a shadow, a car or a reflection.

Nobody had thought that stuff could affect their behaviour back in the early

Seventies.”

As if she had a protractor in her head, she also sees precise angles. “When I

draw a piece of equipment, I can test run it in my mind.”

From those early days observing the steers as they were herded, corralled and

finally led off to the meat plant (and after gaining a doctorate in animal

science), she went on to develop a more humane system of slaughtering cattle.

The hostility to her ideas from ranchers was intense – on one occasion they

showed their appreciation for the slim, strange East Coaster by covering her car

in bloody bulls’ testicles. But she persevered (being autistic helped as she

often didn’t notice the antagonism, she says) and, today, more than half the

cattle slaughtered in America and Canada pass through the “conveyor restrainer

system” designed by Grandin. Mc’s, among others, audits the slaughterhouse

welfare of all animals killed for its burgers – how much the cattle moo or

stumble, for instance – with a system developed by Grandin.

One of the most memorable images in the film is Grandin’s “hug machine”, a

miniaturised version of a device used to hold cattle during vaccination, which

she built and installed in her room at university. Grandin noticed that the deep

pressure it exerted calmed the steer down, and she discovered it had the same

effect on her. Some US autism therapy programmes now use it.

That she achieved all this because of, not despite her disorder, means that on

the international speaking circuit where she now spends much of her life, she

talks almost as much about autism as she does about animal husbandry.

Amazingly, there is little about Grandin now that would label her as autistic.

Gone is her Mickey Mouse voice (particular to Grandin, rather than autistic

people generally), the constant anxiety and the sensory sensitivity that

afflicted her in the past. The film shows how her mother was desperately upset

that her young daughter wouldn’t let herself be hugged but, when we meet, she

shakes hands without hesitation. Anti-depressant drugs have helped a lot in

making her – as she puts it – “better at being social” but so has her

determination to interact normally with people.

“It’s like being in a play – you have to learn how to behave in certain

situations,” she says. “You greet people, you shake hands and offer them

coffee.” There is clearly a limit to how much human emotion can be learnt or

copied: Grandin admits she still cannot relate to idle chit-chat about

relationships or what she calls, with a grimace, “emotional relatedness”.

She lives alone in a “messy” home in nearby Fort , likes sci-fi and – as

one would expect given his preference for cold logic over emotion – she is a big

fan of Mr Spock from Star Trek.

When I ask if she regrets never finding love or indulging in any of that

“emotional relatedness”, she says yes, but stresses she has “an exciting life”.

Much of her happiness comes from trying to make the world a better place for

animals. “I feel very strongly you have to treat animals right. They have a

right to go into a slaughterhouse and, bang, it’s done. People were treating

cattle really badly in the 1970s and I wanted to change that.”

Above all, she hopes that the film will help motivate young people with autism,

a disorder which in the UK is estimated to afflict four people in a thousand (a

figure which climbs to one in 100 if people with Aspergers and “atypical” autism

are included). Grandin believes the severity of the problem is on the increase

because today’s looser society no longer drums in the social skills that

autistic people need to acquire. While a mildly-autistic youth in California

might become a successful Silicon Valley geek, another in working-class Missouri

is more likely to end up wasting his life playing video games – autism’s “crack

cocaine” – in the basement, she says.

Her mother – still alive and also at the Emmys – played a crucial role in

ensuring she received the early educational intervention that Grandin believes

is key to tackling autism. “Mother had to fight off my dad because he went along

with most of the professionals, the dark forces who wanted to put me in an

institution.”

Those dark forces are thankfully a distant memory. Even Grandin’s own hug

machine is now gathering dust. “It broke two years ago and I haven’t bothered to

fix it,” she says. “Don’t seem to need it so much.” She prefers human contact,

she says. “I know I cannot go around inappropriately hugging people but I’ve got

desensitised to touch. That’s the thing about autism, if you keep doing things,

you can keep improving.”