Temple Grandin

by Anita Lesko

  “Now they’re talking about growing ‘meat’ in the lab where they get the heme molecule, so it would be juicy like a steak, but use soybeans. But they’re going to have to modify the soybeans. No matter what you do, you’ll be making a new form of life. In the future, we are going to be able to create any form of life we want. If we want to make dinosaurs, we can create them. This is going to create huge ethical issues. There won’t be a need for slaughter houses anymore.” This is Temple the scientist at work, even when she was just starting out in her career. Her mind is never at rest, always thinking, always reading scientific journals, always analyzing ways to do new things.

  Back to those cattle! Temple said, “We also have got to give these cattle a life worth living. We’ve just got to do that. We can’t have them getting so hot that they’re getting heat stress, or rough-handling them. Fortunately, that’s been improved. Handling has gotten a lot better, that’s the good news.”

  “Temple, how do those big E. coli outbreaks occur in the meat industry?” I asked. Her answer isn’t for the faint of heart, I was sort of sorry I asked. Temple got very matter-of-fact and logical and told me, “It’s very interesting in a slaughterhouse. It took our industry twenty years to determine the critical control point on how not to contaminate the carcass when you dress out the beef. We’ve known for as long as I’ve been in the industry that when you gut the animal, you have to hold the knife a special way so that you don’t cut the guts. The thing that took them a long time to figure out was how to properly remove the skin off the back legs so that as you skin it, the hide falls away from the meat. Now, when you go into a plant and go to that area where that’s being done, you can see that it’s done with surgical precision. They found that is a critical control point for not contaminating the meat. There’s a person that skins each leg out. One person skins one leg, another person skins the other leg. As they’re skinning it, they have to be very careful to keep folding the hair side back on itself. They have a big steam device that they put on the leg after they take the hide off of it for sanitation purposes. That’s one of the most critical points for not getting E. coli on the meat. I really like the that approach.” I was picturing all this going on. Those New York strip steaks were becoming less appealing by the second.

  Temple continued, “If you tour the entire plant, you can see those critical points. Another thing we’ve known for years is called ‘tying the bung off and dropping it,’ where they cut around the rectum and tie it off. They’ve done this for years, but the leg-skinning process they had to figure out. The front legs are taken care of by a hide puller, which pulls the hide down. At a big plant there’s a thousand people per shift that work there. The plant can only do two shifts, and the third shift is clean up.” I was thinking to myself that sometimes the operating room looks like a slaughterhouse after some big bloody trauma case. There will be blood all over the floor, chunks of flesh, bloody footprints out the door and down the hall. That environment isn’t for the faint of heart, either.

  “To make it absolutely sterile is impossible,” Temple stated. “If you go into a cold room in a meat plant where they are cutting the meat, it’s clean, but it’s chaos compared to the area where they are doing the surgical precision work. The meat is tested daily, where they take samples and send it out to be analyzed. That’s done as another safety measure. If they had the testing facility right there, you’d have people walking in and out contaminating everything. The results come back on the computer from the off-site testing facility.”

  “There’s some smell on the slaughter floor because you’re taking apart a warm animal. In the cold room, it doesn’t smell,” Temple added. I was starting to feel a bit woozy at this point. Becoming a vegetarian was starting to look very attractive.

  The Great Trip to Australia

  “I just came back from Australia,” Temple continued. “I was on a really nice ranch where they had Herford and Angus cross cattle, and we went out to the feed lots and spent a day there. I gave cattle-handling talks and autism talks. Then we went to another ranch, over in Queensland. Australia is one of my favorite places because of the beautiful countryside and luxurious pastures. There, they call them a ‘property’ instead of a ‘ranch.’ I was petting a big Brahma, who was one of the ‘coachers.’ These coachers are tame cattle that are used to calm down the new arrivals. When you get new cattle in that’s super wild, they put the coacher cattle in there with them, and that helps to calm them down. I got to see a lot of the countryside, which I really enjoyed. There are great pastures, and people are really getting into good cattle handling.” I stated, “That’s pretty interesting about the coacher cattle!”

  Of course, this would have attracted Temple big time: “They have a really great program there called SUN PORK, where they’re teaching people on the autism spectrum stockmanship positions with the pigs. Since they have introduced it, it has been very successful. There’s no interviews required to participate. They start out at a ‘pig fair’ at a conference room in a hotel, where they come in dressed for the job in their coveralls. They do things like practice giving vaccinations by injecting oranges and ear-tagging cardboard pig heads, so that the equipment is not so novel.”

  Temple was having fun describing this whole thing to me. “By the time they actually get out to a pig farm, they’ve already used all the equipment and practiced, so they are ready to start for real. So when they are then handling a squealing, wiggling little pig, they already know how to handle all the needles and equipment. They’re finding about 70 percent of the students are taking to it! It gets these kids who are addicted to video games out doing something. I’m not being an old fogey (I got a kick out of Temple using the term old fogey), but what I’m finding when I go out to talk to people is that these kids have two paths they go down: get jobs before they get out of high school and do well, or get addicted to video games and you can’t pry them out of the house. That’s what I’m seeing. The parents absolutely shouldn’t be letting them do this. I tell the parents to limit the video games to one hour a day. Period. Give them choices of other things they can do, but don’t let them stay holed up in their bedroom on the computer all day. There was this boy who was addicted to video games, but he wanted to do the pig program. In Australia they call pig farms ‘piggeries!’ So he went to try it, and had a massive panic attack.”

  “I thought the idea of having the ‘pig fair’ in a conference room at a hotel was a really good idea,” Temple stated, “and they even have to wear the specified clothes for the entire day with rubber boots. What that does is reduces the ‘surprise factor.’ If there was a problem, like the uniform itching, that can be taken care of that ahead of time. One thing I suggested to them was that because they use brand new uniforms, they wash them before wearing it. If I don’t wash new clothes first, I break out.”

  Temple continued, “It all makes it less novel that the clothes they had on and the tools they use (like for tagging the pigs ear), are all familiar. Punching the hole through the cardboard is the same feeling as punching the hole on a real pig ear; the cardboard has the same resistance that a pig’s ear would have. They make the oranges cute by putting little eyes and ears on them, and the students learned to vaccinate the oranges. There was water in the vaccine bottle, and they had to draw the vaccine out. The point was to get them to learn how to use the needles so that nothing was a surprise. You couldn’t just have someone go out to a pig farm and get a squealing little pig, and then try and figure out how to use the equipment afterward. They already learn it in the conference room. There’s also record-keeping materials and computers at the pig fair to show everyone, and tons of videos they must watch as part of the experience. The videos show people working with the actual pigs and using all the same tools. After they complete the training, they are taken to an actual pig farm and they try it for real.”

  I got quite the education on pig farms, or should I say, piggeries. It’s actually pretty involved. “They also have to learn how to te
ach the piglets how to operate the automatic feeders. These feeders are triggered by the tag the pig has on its ear. You know how you have that card at a hotel that’s used as a key, that you hold it over the sensor on the door and the door opens? These feeders operate the same way. The pig must be taught how to walk through the gate, and then the feed comes out. You have to be very gentle with these pigs. Most farms realize that they need someone to be their ‘pig whisperer’ to train the young pigs. When the pig learns to open the door, they go inside the feeder and their ration comes out. If that pig gets scared during the learning process, they won’t go inside the feeder. It takes a very special person to do this, one with a lot of patience.”

  Temple is all about encouraging young people to try lots of things to find out what they like. She said, “I’ve talked to five students who tried the pig farm training. Four of them loved it and one hated it. But it’s really important to find out what you like or don’t like.”

  Did Temple Ever Get Hurt on The Job?

  I asked, “Temple, have you ever gotten hurt on the job?” Not surprisingly she answered, “Yes, very early in my career I did. At a feed yard in Texas, a gate smashed in my face and I busted my nose! I didn’t want anybody to know about it, so I went and looked in a mirror and straightened it, then went right back to the feed yard. I never let anybody know that I was hurt. That was the only time I got hurt around the cattle. I’m super careful when I’m around the cattle! The other injury was from falling on the stairs from the office; I fell flat on my back and really hurt myself. Once, I slipped and fell at a restaurant and hit my nose on the corner of a table and busted it a second time.” “Where was that?” I inquired.

  “It was in a restaurant right in Fort Collins, Colorado, the week before my trip to Germany,” she explained, “and the next day I had to talk to a room full of executives from McDonald’s. When I woke up that morning, the day after my fall, I had a big black and blue eye, and my nose looked horrible! I quickly found a store that sold makeup and bought some foundation. I went back to my hotel room and did a great cover up with that makeup—by the time I got done, you couldn’t see the black and blue area. That was the last time I wore cowboy boots!” I was right next to Temple the third time she busted her nose. I’ll share that story later on; it happened right at Colorado State University, on her seventieth birthday. I nearly fainted.

  Temple Created Her Own Internships

  Back to Temple’s job. “Temple, how did you get into all those feed yards in the 1970s?” I asked. “First, I’d go there and just say I was a student and would like to observe. I’d spend around twenty minutes just observing. Then, I’d just step forward and do something; they’d usually let me do it. But I’d watch for a good long time first. Then they’d get to know me, and they’d let me run the chute and bring the cattle up. There was a certain amount of assertiveness necessary! Just act like you’re supposed to be there. In addition to working at all these feed yards with the cattle, I went over to the Swift Plant, and they got to know me, so every Tuesday afternoon I’d go over there. My reaction was to go out and do stuff. You can fight anxiety by getting out there, or staying holed up in your room. When I started going out to those feed yards and working with the cattle, my anxiety went away.” I commented, “You were pretty brazen to pull off that whole thing at one feed yard after another!” Proudly, Temple replied, “Yes, I was indeed!”

  As is typical with highly successful people, Temple stated, “I’ve always had a goal. Like when I went up to the editor, just like the movie shows, and asked him for his card. Then I wrote an article based on my master’s thesis about head gates for cattle chutes. When I got kicked out of Scottsdale feed yard, I thought, ‘I’ll show Scottsdale feed yard, I’ll start writing columns and get a press pass, then they’ll have to let me back in.’ That was my goal! Scottsdale feed yard was something that had to be conquered. At that point, I was getting really interested in the design of cattle facilities. That press pass could get me into national meetings.”

  Remembering something from her childhood days, Temple shared this, “I’m trying to look at the assertiveness trait that we both seemed to have.” She was referring to me. “I can remember a trip we took to Canada; there was a toboggan slide. Nobody in my family wanted to go on the toboggan, so I couldn’t rent one, but I talked another family into letting me ride on theirs. I was about ten or eleven at the time of that trip. I simply asked them if I could ride with them, they let me, and I had a blast! That took a good amount of assertiveness to do. When I started painting signs at the Arizona State carnival, I just went up to an old sign painter and showed them some signs I painted, and he put me to work. Next thing I knew, I was painting signs all over the carnival. That then evolved to the cattle handing facility, but it’s the same sort of thing. I enjoyed seeing my signs in front of people’s exhibits.”

  Temple had a few more tidbits about jobs, “The oil industry is an open door to get in, get a job, and work your way up—as long as you can read at the sixth or seventh grade level. At a meat packing plant, you can learn every job and work your way up to foreman, but you’re going to have to learn fifteen different jobs.”

  A thought sprung to my head suddenly and I exclaimed, “Oh yeah, I’m reading a biography about Elon Musk!” Temple replied, “He learned how to work at a really early age. That’s the only way to do it. Did you read yet about some of the awful jobs he had when he was young?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet,” I replied.

  Temple’s Favorite Quotes

  Ok, if you’re still with me here and haven’t fainted from visions of the meat industry, I want to share some of Temple’s favorite quotes that she shared with me.

  “Obstacles are those terrible things you see when you take your eyes off the goal,” Temple told me once again. “In the seventies, I saw that on the wall of the art building at Arizona State University. That’s by Henry Ford. At that time, I didn’t know it was written by Henry Ford, and back then I had no way of looking that up. It was on the art building wall. Then I had a plant superintendent tell me I had to persevere, and a cattle buyer at the Swift plant tell me that ‘trouble is only opportunity in work clothes.’ That’s a quote by Henry J. Kaiser.”

  Here’s another one of Temple’s quotes, “Abstractification—I wrote about that in Animals in Translation. Here’s what it is: you know, you look at some philosophical writings that are so abstract you just can’t understand it. It’s like someone making policy for healthcare and they’re so far removed from the field that it’s becoming so abstract it doesn’t even apply. See, policy makers need to avoid abstractification! That’s one of my little made up words.”

  “Another good one is ‘illegal, but not bad.’ Yeah, there might be some things that are against the rules, but not really bad. Like things you have to do to get your construction projects done.”

  I really like this quote. “Here’s another, similar one, ‘“The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.’ It’s anonymous.”

  Here’s one that Temple just loves! “’Heat softens steel. Then, I can bend it into pretty grillwork.’ This is about how change takes place on animal welfare. When a video comes out with something really bad, the industry gets all excited, and gives you the opportunity to change it. This is how change takes place with a bad practice. Then, I’ll explain that we want to make pretty grillwork and not have a mess. That the steel is soft when it gets heated, and the change you make is a constructive change. You don’t want to vaporize the steel. That won’t accomplish anything.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Temple’s Friend Mark

  It may come as a big surprise to many, but Temple has a friend that she’s known for over twenty years. They go to lunch and dinner together, movie night out, or simply just hang out together. Mark told me that he has a few other acquaintances, but he’d rather spend his time with Temple. “Temple loves to read and keep up with the news and current world events. There�
��s always something to talk about with her, something really interesting,” Mark told me.

  I asked Temple how she met Mark, and it was quite a story, not surprisingly! “He came to me. He had a theory about horse hair whorls. He’d observed that horses who had the hair whorls on their forehead were flighty. He was a horse-shoer, and had observed this when he was shoeing lots of different horses. He had already tried to talk to people at other universities, and they just sort of ran him off. I listened to him, and said, ‘Let’s do an experiment!’ We did it with cattle. We used fifteen hundred cattle, and looked to see if there was any correlation of having a hair whorl on their forehead to how much they jumped around in the squeeze chute. We found that there was! In fact, I was the only one who would listen to his theories about it. So, that’s how we met each other originally; he came to talk to me at my office at Colorado State University. We did that study twenty years ago. After that, we did other scientific studies together. Then, I sent him to computer school to learn Computer Aided Design (CAD) drafting. He started doing all the drawings for me of the animal handing facilities and equipment.”

  Mark described what he does at Colorado State University. “I help Temple with her lab at the farm, I teach the kids how to draw, and help them with their homework. Temple splits the class (the undergraduate students), and half go with me and half go with her. Then at the halfway mark, they rotate. That’s been the routine with her lab for twenty years now. I designed that facility.”