Autism and Animal Science – Podcast with Temple Grandin
This is quite the flashback! Four years ago we interviewed Temple Grandin to hear about her life with autism and passion for animal science. We wanted to bring it back out this week.
Doctor Temple Grandin was diagnosed with autism as a child. She went on to pursue work in psychology and animal science. Listen to learn more about her life, what led her to her career, and the work she does to improve animal welfare for livestock.
Listen now!
Dr. Temple Grandin
Grandin believes having autism gives her the ability to understand animals in a way most other people don’t.
“My cognitive style is more like how an animal is,” she says, explaining how she thinks more visually than most people.
As she grew up she says she started learning how people around her looked at the world differently.
“When I was a teenager I thought everybody thought in pictures the same way I did, I didn’t know that my thinking was different,” says Grandin.
Grandin describes asking people to think about church steeples, and how most people see just one, standard image. For her, she says she can see countless different steeples when she has that thought.
This different kind of thinking led Grandin towards consulting the livestock industry. Her goal was to create the development of humane livestock holdings for cattle and other livestock.
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