Turning autism into a strength: Grandin uses neurological disorder to better understand how to handle livestock

The marriage between humane livestock handling and autism advocacy may seem an unusual one, except for Temple Grandin, the renowned researcher, author and Colorado State University professor who spent last weekend in Havre speaking about those topics at the Montana State University-Hill County Extension’s Cabin Fever conference.
Grandin, who was diagnosed with autism at age 3, has written extensively both about her animal research and about the neurological disorder that has been growing in terms of diagnoses and awareness.
Conference organizers Nicole Gray and Lea Ann Larson of Hill County Extension said Grandin’s double expertise in autism and livestock handling lent itself well to their intended audience.
“I really focus on building strengths,” Grandin said in an interview with the Tribune. “Kids get a lot of labels — dyslexic, ADHD, autism — and people get hung up on the label. Well, these labels are not precise diagnoses.”
Forget the label for a minute and focus on what the child is good at. Foster that strength, Grandin said.
“They get so hung up on the deficit, they forget about developing the strengths,” she said.
For Grandin, that strength was art growing up. She often has spoken and written about the fact that she thinks in images, and that picking up on visual details helped her design more humane facilities for cattle.
Better handling for cattle means a safer environment for both people and livestock, Grandin insists.
Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks noted Grandin’s deep connection with animals in his book “An Anthropologist on Mars.” Grandin tells Sacks in an interview that cows are similar to people with autism: certain sounds and tactile stimuli bother them, for example. She has taken that into consideration in her work with cattle handling.
“It was precisely her sense of the common ground (in terms of basic sensations and feelings) between animals and people that allowed her to show such sensitivity to animals, and to insist so forcefully on their human management,” Sacks writes.
In her research designing handling facilities, Grandin often would go through chutes at the same eye level as a cow, trying to think like a cow, noticing small details. She believes her brain has helped her to do so.
“A great deal of my success in working with animals comes from the simple fact that I see all kinds of connections between their behavior and certain autistic behaviors,” Grandin writes in her book, “Thinking in Pictures.”
Grandin believes working with those behaviors can make people with autism successful. She is an advocate of finding strengths and focusing on them. People with autism might become fixated on one or two topics. “Some teachers make the mistake of trying to stamp out the fixation,” Grandin writes.
Instead, that fixation should be encouraged — it may become a talent that leads to success in the working world, just as Grandin’s fixations on cattle and drawing led her to her work.
“I think there is too much emphasis on deficits and no enough emphasis on developing abilities,” she continues.
But helping people with autism develop strengths is made more difficult by the sheer breadth of symptoms, from low- to high-functioning.
“I’m seeing kids getting labeled autistic or ADHD and not getting skills developed, kids getting addicted to video games,” she said.
In “Thinking in Pictures,” Grandin acknowledges that, had she been a child today, she probably would have been addicted, too.
When Temple Grandin was diagnosed with autism, the doctor told her parents she may need to be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Her parents decided against it. A year later, at age 4, Grandin finally began speaking.
Grandin has said that, if it were possible, she would be against “eradicating” autism, that the disorder holds benefits, that the people who have it see the world in a unique way — these are the Einsteins, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, after all.
Perhaps, she theorizes in “Thinking in Pictures,” great creativity and intelligence is somehow linked with mental illness or neurological disorders. While Grandin is quick to point out that some people with autism are severely disabled and that living with it presents challenges, she also does not deny there may be some benefit to thinking the way she does.
“It is likely,” she writes, “that genius is an abnormality.”

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