Temple Grandin

Since the 1970’s, Temple Grandin has worked over 50 years as a consultant to the livestock industry. Cattle handling in the 1970’s was rough and abusive. Today, cattle handling has greatly improved and the industry conducts many workshops on low stress handling methods. Temple has also worked on designing better handling facilities and she trained large meat buying companies to use simple methods to assess handling and stunning practices in large slaughter plants. When large buyers enforced standards, conditions quickly improved. Over the years, she has also observed that animal advocacy organizations changed their emphasis from reforming the livestock industry to attempting to abolish it. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, large animal advocacy organizations funded research to improve slaughtering equipment. They funded the development of the center track restrainer. It is a piece of equipment she helped develop. Today they would never do this. It is also interesting how attitudes about animal emotions have changed. In 1993, journal article reviewers made Temple remove the word “fear” from one of my scientific papers. Today, it is now acceptable to use the word “personality” to describe differences in animal behavior. Scientists went from denial of animal emotions in the 1970’s to accepting them. In 1977, B.F. Skinner, the famous psychologist, wrote a paper titled “Why I am not a Cognitive Psychologist.” According to Skinner, animals had no inner lives. Nobody would believe that now.