58 pages • 1-hour read
Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
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Themes
Using Core Emotional Systems to Improve Animal Welfare
Grandin’s primary goal in writing this book is to raise awareness about the impact that core emotional systems have on animal behavior. As she explains, “the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it’s a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal, or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain” (3).Grandin argues that because all animal behavior is driven by emotions, humans should seek to better understand those emotions so that they can positively impact animal welfare for companion, commercial, zoo, and wild animals. Grandin identifies four core emotions: fear, rage, panic, and seeking.
By analyzing the manifestations of these emotions in the context of commercialized agriculture, Grandin works to improve animal welfare across various industries. She has spent the most time working with cattle, but she has also consulted for poultry and pork producers, and her work has led to a tremendous degree of change in the American meat industry. In this book, she explains how her knowledge of the core emotional systems underpins her approach to animal welfare. For example, her understanding of the panic system led to the realization that cows and pigs were being weaned from their mothers too quickly, and she introduced changes to industry-wide weaning practices that allowed young cows and pigs to remain with their mothers long enough to mitigate emotional distress at the time of separation. Similarly, after observing pigs’ hyper-developed seeking drive, she advocated for the introduction of toys and enrichment activities into sow pens. These and other changes reflect her heightened understanding of animal emotions, and her changes allow commercial animal workers to provide animals with higher quality lives, even in agricultural settings where animals are raised for slaughter.
Grandin also argues that companion animals should be understood through the framework of the core emotional systems. She states that cats and dogs are complex, emotional beings whose behavior is often the result of their fear, rage, panic, and seeking drives. Understanding those drives can help humans to better understand animal behavior and improve animals’ quality of life. She cites the example of cats’ seeking system, explaining that cats are predatory animals who spend much of their time in the wild stalking prey. Although house cats are quasi-domesticated, they nonetheless retain their wild ancestors’ need to seek, stalk, and hunt. Grandin advises cat owners to provide toys that simulate hunting so that cats will have novel stimuli that allow them to express their natural curiosity. When cat owners care for their cats with the seeking need in mind, they enrich their cats’ lives and allow them to act on their natural drives.
Grandin argues that the core emotional systems are critical to the happiness and wellbeing of zoo animals. She describes zoos from earlier eras in which animals were housed separately in small cages with no thought given to natural habitat or typical social organization. Animals were listless and often exhibited repetitive behaviors that indicate stress. Zoos now take the core emotional systems into account and provide animals with enrichment and better habitats. Big cats, like their smaller relatives, have high seeking drives and likewise benefit from feeding experiences that simulate hunting.
Grandin argues that observational research is foundational to both an understanding of the core emotional systems and the introduction of more humane animal welfare practices. She notes the importance of observational data in various fields of animal science and argues that observing animals in the wild is critical to both conservation efforts and to the cause of providing better lives to animals in captivity. She cites the way that Jane Goodall’s research changed scientists’ understanding of the differences between chimpanzees and humans, noting that Goodall’s work could not have been achieved without considerable time in the field.
Autism as a Framework for Understanding Animals
Grandin is known equally for her work with animals and for her autism advocacy. Much of her writing focuses on the ways in which her autism has been beneficial to her, and she actively reframes autism as a tool that can be harnessed for nontraditional problem-solving. For Grandin, autism allows her to better understand the ways that animals think, and she uses her unique insights to devise animal welfare innovations that help captive animals to lead happier lives. She notes the importance of sensory data to both people with autism and animals and describes how autism has directly helped her to understand cattle and dogs.
Grandin sees information processing as one key difference between people with autism and neurotypical individuals. Grandin thinks “in pictures” rather than in words, and she argues that animal cognition also follows this model., reasoning that animals do not use human language and instead interpret sensory data visually. She argues, “People with [autism] or dyslexia are often good with animals because their thinking is more sensory-based than word-based” (123). Grandin notes that she is sensitive to sensory overstimulation and that this very sensitivity has allowed her to understand when animals were experiencing a similar form of distress. For example, these insights helped her to understand horses’ sensitivity to a new bit that their handlers perceived as being only “slightly different.” What the humans saw as a tiny difference was, to a horse, a much bigger change and a distinct source of stress. Although this book long predates the seismic shift that occurred in societal approaches to what is now termed neurodivergence and neurotypical brain organization, Grandin’s work is now seen as foundational to advocacy for a more nuanced understanding of autism’s potential benefits and assets.
Grandin is famous for having invented a squeeze machine to help people with autism calm their central nervous systems after a distressing experience. The idea for the squeeze machine came from her work in the cattle industry. She observed that cows did actually calm down when led into a machine that gently squeezed their bodies to immobilize them for medical procedures. She notes, “That’s what gave me the idea to build my own squeeze chute to calm down my hyper-aroused autistic system” (207). Grandin used the machine for years and details in several of her books how much it helped her. This stands as an example of Grandin’s unique perspective on the commonalities that people with autism share with animals.
Grandin has also learned that cattle’s positive response to pressure in the form of “squeeze chutes” can apply to other animals as well. She notes her excitement at the anxiety wrap technology for dogs. Dogs are highly emotional creatures whose fear systems are easily activated. Dogs can experience distress from multiple kinds of triggers, from fear of new people to intense terror during thunderstorms. The anxiety wraps apply gentle pressure to dogs’ midsections, providing the same calming experience that cattle experience in the squeeze chutes. Because Grandin herself finds this pressure to be calming, she has an insider’s perspective on how this technology can benefit dogs. Thus, her deep understanding of the sensory experiences of people with autism informs the way that she approaches animals, and vice versa.
The Tension between Animal Ethics and Productivity
Grandin notes in her Afterword that she is often asked why she chooses to remain in an industry in which animal abuse is rampant. She argues that she can do more to enhance animal welfare standards from within the industry than she could protesting it from the outside. At the core of Grandin’s success in changing industry standards is the realization that, within the agricultural industry, there is always a complex interplay between productivity and ethics. She knows that large companies are unwilling to sacrifice productivity in order to raise animal welfare standards, and she realizes that any innovations she suggests must not adversely impact productivity.
Grandin argues that it is possible to treat animals ethically without sacrificing productivity, and she outlines her blueprint for that kind of systemic change in this book. She explains that the first step involves changing prevailing attitudes about animals. In order to do so, there must be better communication between the sciences and the agricultural industry; commercial operations must have access to cutting-edge research into animal behavior. She also advocates for a middle-of-the-road approach to animal ethics that makes use of industry knowledge in order to develop animal welfare standards.
Grandin describes numerous instances of animal abuse in this book, but she also explains that she has worked with many individuals in commercial agriculture who did treat their animals with dignity and respect. Still, she argues for a wider systemic change in the way that animals are understood in order to truly eradicate mistreatment in cattle, pig, and chicken operations. The core emotional systems come into play here, as Grandin believes that if commercial animal workers better understood that animals are emotional creatures, they would be compelled to treat them better. This means countering the misguided notions that cattle are unintelligent, that pigs are “naturally” aggressive, or that chickens do not feel pain.
Notably, when the animals themselves experience less distress, productivity rises. Grandin cites one example of a factory that kept as many hens as possible in a cage, thereby decreasing the number of eggs that each hen laid while increasing the number of eggs laid overall. However, despite this ostensible increase in productivity, the hens were extremely stressed, and their lifespans were shorter. When Grandin decreased the number of hens kept in each cage, productivity rose because the hens were happier and the birds lived longer.
In order to educate commercial animal workers about animals’ social-emotional lives, the industry needs better access to scientific research. Grandin explains that animal behavior research is typically published in scientific and academic journals. These publications circulate within the academic world and in research communities but are not readily available to the general public or to the industry of commercialized agriculture. As a result, new research like the information that Grandin describes about core emotional systems is unknown to the workers who are actually handling commercial animals. Grandin herself tries to bridge this gap in her consulting work by using scientific research to inform her innovations and by explaining the rationale behind her changes. She also brings scientific knowledge outside of the scientific community through her teaching and webinar offerings. She hopes that by these teaching efforts, she can train a new generation of individuals to approach animals with heightened welfare standards in mind.
Grandin firmly believes that animals and humans should have a symbiotic relationship, especially in the world of commercial agriculture. She reasons that animals must be given the best possible lives in exchange for their use as food. However, she does argue that the industry itself must have a voice in conversations about animal ethics. She argues that activists often meddle in fields with which they lack familiarity, and as a result, their efforts to create welfare standards often fail. By way of example, she cites a successful lobbying effort by the Humane Society to shut down horse slaughter plants in the United States. However, because horse handlers still occasionally need to euthanize horses, the closure of the plants left them with no humane options. As a result, “the unfortunate equines are getting transported down to Mexico where they’re worked and starved until they drop dead from lack of nutrition and overwork” (256). A more sustainable alternative, Grandin argues, would have been to hire a consultant like Grandin to implement knowledge of the core emotional systems to redesign slaughterhouses that could euthanize horses more humanely.
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