EDMONTON – Temple Grandin’s main message was so important she repeated it twice.
“Calm animals are easier to handle. Let me say that again. Calm animals are easier to handle,” the world’s most famous animal behaviour specialist said during a University of Alberta livestock conference.
“Cattle and pigs, when they get excited, stick together. Don’t scream and yell at animals. Screaming at animals is really, really stressful.”
Grandin says her autism has given her the ability to see and feel what it’s like for cattle and other livestock as they move up a livestock chute or are herded into a corral.
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Almost half of the cattle in North America are now handled in curved cattle handling system, designed by Grandin.
When she began her work in the 1970s, Grandin was considered strange when she would drop to her hands and knees in a cattle chute or squeeze trying to figure out what they were seeing and what sometimes stopped the animals from moving forward.
“An animal’s world is sensory based. Imagine a world of pictures, audio clips, touch sensations. It’s a very detailed world. I think in pictures. To understand animals, you have to get away from verbal language. It’s a world of details,” said Grandin, a professor at Colorado State University.
“You have got to be observant.”
She showed pictures of chutes with a chain hanging down or light creating shadows that the animals tried to avoid.
“Why, after 35 years of doing talks, do I still have to say, ‘take away the chain hanging down in the chute?’ ” she said.
“Animals notice details (that) people do not.”
Grandin said when she was a child she differentiated cats and dogs by size, putting them in different memory file folders.
Animals do the same thing with sensory based information such as sound, she added.
To livestock, a man on a horse is different than a man on foot. A black hat on the ground is different than a black hat on a head. To an animal, each incident goes in different memory file folders.
Grandin said animals’ fear memories are also specific.
A dog hit by a car isn’t afraid of cars but is afraid of the location where it was hit. A horse abused by a person in a black cowboy hat is not afraid of a person wearing a white cowboy hat.
“Fear memories are very specific.”
They are also difficult to get rid of and can return at odd times, especially in horses with high strung genetics, she said.
Grandin once worked with a horse that was afraid of white saddle pads. The horse wasn’t afraid of a white saddle pad under a saddle, but disliked a plain white saddle.
Replacing the saddle pad with a different coloured pad was an easy fix, but Grandin said sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what is making the animal afraid.
As a result, it’s important to make animals’ first experiences positive.
“If their first experience is bad, it will be permanent,” she said.