Mary Temple Grandin - American professor of animal science

Mary Temple Grandin (born August 29, 1947) is an American professor of animal science at Colorado State University, best-selling author, autism activist and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. She is the inventor of the "hug box", a device to calm those on the autism spectrum. In the 2010 Time 100 list of the one hundred most influential people in the world, she was named in the "Heroes" category. She was the subject of the award-winning, biographical film, Temple Grandin.Grandin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Eustacia Cutler and Richard Grandin. Although she was diagnosed with autism in 1951 at the age of four, she was labeled with brain damage and placed early in a structured nursery school. When a doctor suggested speech therapy for Grandin, her mother hired a nanny to assist in the child's development. The nanny would spend hours playing turn-taking games with Grandin and her sister.

Her speech development delayed, Grandin did not begin talking until she was three and a half years old. She considers herself fortunate to have had supportive mentors from elementary school onward. Even so, Grandin states that junior high and high school were the most unpleasant times of her life due to her poor conversational skills. She was the "nerdy kid" whom everyone ridiculed. At times, while she walked down the hallways, her fellow students would taunt her by saying "tape recorder" because of her habit of repetitive speech. Grandin states, "I could laugh about it now, but back then it really hurt."

After she graduated in 1966 from Hampshire Country School, a boarding school for gifted children in Rindge, New Hampshire, Grandin went on to earn her bachelor's degree in psychology from Franklin Pierce College in 1970, a master's degree in animal science from Arizona State University in 1975, and a doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.

Grandin is a prominent and widely cited proponent of the rights of people with autism and of animal welfare.

She has lectured widely about her first-hand experiences of the anxiety of feeling threatened by everything in her surroundings, and of being dismissed and feared, which motivates her work in humane livestock handling processes. She studied the behavior of cattle, how they react to ranchers, movements, objects and light. Grandin then designed adapted curved corrals, intended to reduce stress, panic and injury in animals being led to slaughter.

Her business website promotes improvement of standards for slaughterhouses and livestock farms. In 2004, she won a "Proggy" award in the "Visionary" category, from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

One of her notable essays about animal welfare is "Animals Are Not Things", in which she posits that technically, animals are property in our society, but the law ultimately gives them ethical protections or rights. She compares the properties and rights of owning cows, versus owning screwdrivers, enumerating how both may be used to serve human purposes in many ways, but when it comes to inflicting pain, there is a vital distinction between such "properties": legally a person can smash or grind up a screwdriver, but cannot torture an animal legally.

Grandin became well-known after being described by Oliver Sacks in the title narrative of his book An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), for which he won a Polk Award; the title is derived from Grandin's description of how she feels around neurotypical people. She first spoke in public about autism in the mid-1980s, at the request of Ruth C. Sullivan, one of the founders of the Autism Society of America (ASA). Sullivan writes:

I first met Temple in the mid-1980s  annual  conference. Standing on the periphery of the group was a tall young woman who was obviously interested in the discussions. She seemed shy and pleasant, but mostly she just listened. I learned her name was Temple Grandin. It wasn't until later in the week that I realized she was someone with autism. I approached her and asked if she'd be willing to speak at the next year's  conference. She agreed. The next year Temple first addressed an  audience. People were standing at least three deep. The audience couldn't get enough of her. Here, for the first time, was someone who could tell us from her own experience, what it was like to be extremely sound sensitive ("like being tied to the rail and the train's coming"). She was asked many questions: "Why does my son do so much spinning?" "Why does he hold his hands to his ears?" "Why doesn't he look at me?" She spoke from her own experience, and her insight was impressive. There were tears in more than one set of eyes that day. Temple quickly became a much sought-after speaker in the autism community.

Based on personal experience, Grandin advocates early intervention to address autism and supportive teachers, who can direct fixations of the child with autism in fruitful directions. She has described her hypersensitivity to noise and other sensory stimuli. She claims she is a primarily visual thinker and has said that words are her second language. Temple attributes her success as a humane livestock facility designer to her ability to recall detail, which is a characteristic of her visual memory. Grandin compares her memory to full-length movies in her head, that may be replayed at will, allowing her to notice small details. She also is able to view her memories using slightly different contexts by changing the positions of the lighting and shadows.

Her insight into the minds of cattle has taught her to value the changes in details to which animals are particularly sensitive and to use her visualization skills to design thoughtful and humane animal-handling equipment. She was named a fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers in 2009.

As a partial proponent of neurodiversity, Grandin has expressed that she would not support a cure of the entirety of the autism spectrum.

In 2012, when the American beef industry was struggling with public perception of its use and sale of pink slime, Grandin spoke out in support of the food product. She said, “It should be on the market. It should be labeled. We should not be throwing away that much beef."