Which animals do you think have a better life: family dogs or cattle on ranches?

Think about it. Cattle get branded and tagged and slaughtered. Some live only a year or two. Meanwhile, Fido gets the run of the house, a spot in front of the couch, and chew toys.

You might be surprised to know that many cattle have it better than pampered family pets. That’s the claim Temple Grandin makes in her fascinating and practical book Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals.

Grandin is not a beef industry lobbyist working smoke and mirrors PR to make ranchers look good. She’s a practical, down-to-earth, get-your-hands-dirty animal scientist who has revolutionized the beef industry and had an impact on many others. She isn’t a vegetarian, and has no intention to become one. But she does love animals. And her insight and research has made the lives of millions of animals better.

When people ask her how she can work in the beef industry instead of being an activist against it, she says that all things die. It’s the cycle of life. She has no problem eating animals. In fact, she believes that our relationship with the animals we use for food is symbiotic–mutually beneficial. But she also believes that if we’re going to raise them, or keep them as pets, we need to give these animals a quality life.

So what do animals need for a quality life? Should we give our cattle rubdowns? Let our dogs roam through city streets? What do our cats and pigs and horses need? Is it freedom?

Her answer, surprisingly, is that focusing on freedom really isn’t a good guide for trying to give animals a good life. Not because freedom is a bad thing, but because it’s too confusing. Instead, she believes that we should be basing animal welfare on the core, or what she calls the “blue ribbon,” emotion systems in the brain. The key systems are SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PANIC, and PLAY.

The rule is simple: avoid stimulating the negative emotions; do stimulate the positive ones. In the book she shares what she knows about how to do that for dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, chickens and other poultry, wildlife, and animals in zoos.

Grandin is always fascinating, and with her trademark style of stories and practical insights, she shares what the research and her more than 30 years of practical hands-on experience working with animals has taught her. You’ll learn why your chickens need a place to hide, even if you’ve fenced out every fox and skunk with thirty feet of concrete; what makes pigs happy; why clicker training is so successful with horses; why you might want to consider the color of your cat’s fur; why leaving your dog locked in the house with food and plenty of toys may actually be very stressing. You’ll even learn to look at zoo habitats differently. Each chapter focuses on a different animal and how to avoid the negative and stimulate the positive blue ribbon emotions. This is not touchy-feely fluff. It’s not the ranting and raging of someone who thinks the planet would be better of without humans. It’s the insights of someone who is rigorously scientific, down-to-earth practical, and passionate about animals.  

In her own words: “Everyone who is responsible for animals needs a set of simple, reliable guidelines for creating good mental welfare that can be applied to any animal in any situation.” Read her book to find out what she suggests these should be. If you own pets or raise animals, I think you’ll love this read. If you’d like to sample the first chapter, you can at Grandin’s website:  http://www.grandin.com/

Must-See Movie

Time magazine has named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. This summer, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s honored her with the Lifetime Achievement Award. She serves as an animal-welfare consultant for international companies like McDonalds, Wendy’s International, and Burger King. Her work has transformed the design of cattle handling facilities worldwide. In fact, fifty percent of the cattle in the U.S. and Canada are handled in equipment she has designed for meat plants.

She is one of the most fascinating people I have read or listened to. Her name is Temple Grandin. And she’s autistic. When she was four years old she couldn’t speak a word. The doctors, at the time, wanted her mother to commit her to an institution. But her mother wouldn’t accept that. Temple learned to read. She was tormented in junior high and high school. But she persevered, got into college, was almost expelled, and ultimately earned a PhD in animal science.

Recently, HBO produced a film about her called Temple Grandin. It is one of the best films I have seen in the last five years. It’s full of drama, heartache, triumph, and good humor. When you’re done, Temple Grandin will likely become one of your heroes.

Claire Danes does a fabulous job playing Temple. The movie also features Julie Ormond as Temple’s mother, Catherine O’Hara as her aunt, and David Strathairn as Dr. Carlock. Earlier this year, the film won seven Emmy Awards. But I didn’t need that to know how good it was. All I had to do was look at my wife and girls who sat rapt as the story unfolded. Get it on DVD. And if you want to know more about Grandin’s ideas, go to www.grandin.com.

Squash Devils

My wife was recently possessed by an evil squash spirit.

How do I know this?

Simple. Have any of you out there ever been sitting around and suddenly got a mighty hankering for pureed squash? Even when you were in the Gerber bottle stage?

No, didn’t think so.

So what else would explain her sudden need for a bowl of butternut bisque?

Alas, I did recall once having a tasty pumpkin soup in a fancy restaurant in California, and so I didn’t immediately call the Brethren in for an exorcism. Instead I went to allrecipes.com and looked up a recipe for her.

I found “Butternut Squash Soup II” by someone named Maplebird, which inspired tons of confidence since all the great chefs are named after tree-animal mixes.

Then Nellie made the soup. I partook. And the evil spirit must have jumped into me because I’m telling you right now that I could not get enough of it. The mouth feel, the taste—the TASTE. There wasn’t a thing squashy about it.

Folks, this is the real deal. And at least 494 other people out on allrecipes agree with me and have rated it an average of 4.5 starts out of 5.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 stalk celery, chopped
• 1 medium carrot, chopped
• 2 medium potatoes, cubed
• 1 medium butternut squash – peeled, seeded, and cubed
• 1 (32 fluid ounce) container chicken stock
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Directions

Melt the butter in a large pot, and cook the onion, celery, carrot, potatoes, and squash 5 minutes, or until lightly browned. Pour in enough of the chicken stock to cover vegetables. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover pot, and simmer 40 minutes, or until all vegetables are tender.

Transfer the soup to a blender, and blend until smooth. Return to pot, and mix in any remaining stock to attain desired consistency. Season with salt and pepper. Say a prayer and call for a priest or someone with the Melchizedek priesthood to be on hand just in case.

Burger Salvation

Okay, I know some of you are rolling your eyes. Squash? Have you got to be kidding?

If that’s you, then let me recommend Five Guys burgers and fries. Burgers started to bore me years ago. But a buddy recently recommended Five Guys, and I’m so glad I went. They’re a national chain. In Utah, we have eight of their joints from Layton to Orem.

They don’t offer salads or wraps or yogurt. They make four kinds of burgers, three kinds of dogs, and two kinds of fries. That’s it. You order the toppings you want–the regular things like grilled onion, cheese, and pickle, but you can also get grilled mushrooms, bacon, jalapenos, and BBQ sauce. More importantly, your burger is cooked fresh, right before your eyes. No microwaved unmeat retrieved from a mystery bin. It comes to you hot and juicy. The fries, cooked in 100% peanut oil, are served up sizzling. And there are a lot of them. I ate mine with a Cherry Coke.

If you’re ever in the mood for burgers and fries, you’ve got to try Five Guys.

I have read few books more interesting than Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

In it she describes her world of autism and how it helped her a perspective into animals unlike any other expert in the field. She can literally see what we block out. It’s part of what helped her make a huge impact on the meat packing industry.

And it’s had an impact on her. When she was visiting her grandparents once in Arizona, she saw a squeeze chute in operation on a ranch. She saw the cattle calm, for the most part, in the chute. “Watching those cattle calm down,” she says, “I knew I needed a squeeze chute of my own.” So when she got back home she built a human-sized one with the help of her teacher. “I got through my teenage years thanks to my squeeze machine and my horses.”

Grandin is not a vegetarian activitst (she eats meat herself) or a brutal slayer. She has taken the middle ground between the fantatics that want to prevent the consumption of all meat, on one hand, or totally disregard the life of animals on the other. She writes, she says, ”because I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. I think we owe them that.”

Temple has dozens and dozens of insights into animals, which she shares here. You’ll learn about rapist roosters and the problem of one-trait breeding, whether prediators find it ”fun to kill a groundhog” (yes, she says, they do), whether animals have true cognition, and so many other things it’s impossible to list them here. I was fascinated on every page. If you have anything to do with animals, you’re going to LOVE this book.

Get the book. Read it. In the meantime, watch a 27 minute interview of Temple by Doug Fabrizio on Utah NOW. I caught this on TV flipping through the channels and couldn’t look away. This is a fascinating interview of a fascinating woman.

Source:Temple Grandin on Utah NOW