And now I'm reading one of her books, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, 2005. Much more even than the books of Karen Pryor (e.g., Reaching the Animal Mind, 2009), Grandin's book thrills me on a subject that reaches to the very bottom of me.
It is a terrible irony for me, then, that Temple Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry and well-known in those circles for her innovations in the design of slaughter systems. While I can approve taking steps to avoid alarming animals as they're herded to be killed, the whole enterprise is repugnant to me.
I googled on "temple grandin moral dilemma" and found (on the Vegan Soapbox website) that
Temple Grandin’s reply to those who have identified the inherent contradiction in the statement “I design slaughter houses and I love animals,” is: “some people think death is the most terrible thing that can happen to an animal.” It follows according to Ms. Grandin that “the most important thing for an animal is the quality of its life.”Whoever's on the soapbox for the website immediately retorts:
Ms. Grandin’s argument is derived from an underlying ontological worldview that assumes a dualism between “human” and “animal.” This is a factual inaccuracy. Biological “animality” exists on a continuum: a human animal is a member of a species of bipedal primates in the family Hominidae—“higher primates.” It is from this invalid assumption that Ms. Grandin’s argument tries to follow. Her claim, then, is baseless and open to the challenge of blatant selective reasoning.I'm not going to take a final position on Grandin's ethics, for I assume I don't know the whole story (yet). But I don't see how her reply quoted in the article could rectify her presumed cognitive dissonance. Just look at how she talks of "animals and humans" to see how closely related she acknowledges that they are:
It turns out that all animals and humans have what researchers call a built-in confirmation bias. Animals and humans are wired to believe that when two things happen closely together in time it's not an accident; instead the first event caused the second thing to happen.As a matter of fact, humans are animals. We have a common ancestor with every other animal [and life form1] on the planet.
For example, if you put a pigeon in a case with a key that lights up right before a piece of food appears, pretty soon the pigeon will start pecking the lighted key to get food....
The pigeon is acting like a person who thinks his team will win the baseball game if he's got his lucky rabbit's foot with him....
Confirmation bias is built in to animal and human brains, and it helps us learn. We learn because our default assumption is that if Event 1 is followed by Event 2, then Event 1 caused Event 2. Our default assumption isn't that Events 1 and 2 happened at the same time by coincidence. Coincidence is actually a fairly advanced concept both for animals and for people. That's why in statistics courses you have to formally teach students that a correlation isn't automatically a cause. [David Hume argued for coincidence over causality in the eighteenth century.] Our brains are wired to see correlations as causes, period. Since in real life a lot of times Event 1 does cause Event 2, confirmation bias helps us make the connection.
The downside of having a built-in confirmation bias is that you also make a lot of unfounded causal connections. That's what superstition is....
...The same part of the brain that lets us learn what we need to know and find the things we need to stay alive is also the part of the brain that produces delusional thinking and conspiracy theories. [pp. 98-100]
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- Thanks to Carolyn for reminding me that I myself had realized this later, but without doing anything about it at the time.
We actually have a common ancestor with every other form of life on the planet.
ReplyDeleteI don't claim to understand your argument. But I don't see the dissonance between caring for animals and helping them come to a good end.
My concern is that Ms. Grandin's help stops short of efforts to end animal slaughter altogether. Right, it'll never happen. And therein probably lies why she (presumably) suffers no (or little) dissonance, thinking, Well, I can't do anything effective to stop animal slaughter, but I can help the animals suffer less in the process.
ReplyDeleteBut why would she want to end animal slaughter all together?
ReplyDeleteRemember, she lived with her aunt on a ranch. She was accustomed to raising animals for a purpose. She just wants to see them achieve their ends with minimal stress and anxiety.
Isn't there a chapter in her book about the dangers of anthropomorphizing other animals?
No, there is no chapter about anthropmorphizing animals, but I remember her making the point that, in order to see things from a slaughter animal's perspective, we need to put ourselves in the animal's place, not assume that the animal is seeing things as a human would in the same situation. A human would not, for example, see the details that a non-human animal would see. Grandin is better able to imagine an animal's perspective, she says, because of her autism.
ReplyDeleteRight, Grandin may have bought in to the way things (currently) are to such an extent that there is no moral problem for her at all. But, since I was unable to Grandin-omorphize myself (and assume her particular background and austism), but injected my own background and values into the situation, the problem came up for me and I uncritically assumed that it was a problem for her. I did, however, refrain from judging her before learning more of "the whole story." You reminded me of some of that story by mentioning her ranching background.