Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin Read Free Book Online

mated laid eggs that didn’t hatch.
    The program was a huge success. It started in 1959, the United States working with Mexico, and the last case of screwworm infestation was recorded in Texas in 1982. Today there are no screwworms anywhere in the United States or Mexico. I remember those years well. You’d find the little boxes all over the ranch, seven or eight of them each summer. The box would say “USDA” and there would be a little story printed on the side explaining what it was and that it wasn’t going to hurt you.
    This was the original biotechnology and it worked. The government saved thousands and thousands of animals, maybe millions. They just did it; they didn’t get everyone’s permission.
    Today the government could never get a program like that off the ground. Some environmental activist would say, “We have to protect these flies,” and you’d have people who’d never seen a screwworm in their lives advocating to save them from extinction. The whole thing would be about ideology, not reality. The USDA would be required to file environmental impact statements and the environmental impact statements would be challenged in court, and it would never get done.
    Even worse, the government might not even get to the point of having advocates block their efforts. To put this type of project together you need a really good field staff that is in charge of things. But today the abstract thinkers are in charge, and abstract thinkers get locked into abstract debates and arguments that aren’t based in reality. I think this is one of the reasons there is so much partisanfighting inside government. In my experience, people become more radical when they’re thinking abstractly. They bog down in permanent bickering where they’ve lost touch with what’s actually happening in the real world. The only way anything can get done is when there’s an emergency. Then all of a sudden everyone has to move.
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    So the 1960s and the 1970s were the golden age; that was a time when people who were in charge of regulation, or who were running the plants, had actually done things with their hands.
    One thing I’ve noticed about animal welfare regulators who have never worked in the industry is that they always go for some kind of zero-tolerance approach. If the plant violates one or two agency rules, it has to be shut down.
    If you don’t know anything about the meatpacking business, that sounds like a good idea. Make sure no animal ever gets hurt, under any circumstances.
    But in real life that’s never the way it works out. In real life what happens is that a plant makes one or two mistakes, so the agency shuts it down. Well, shutting down a plant creates a huge uproar, because you’ve closed a whole big huge company that employs a lot of people. Management immediately protests the decision, and lots of pressure gets put on the inspector who reported the violations to clean up his report so the plant can go back to work.
    And that’s what happens. The plant goes back to work and doesn’t get inspected so closely anymore. The violations keep on piling up.
    It doesn’t have to be that way. I constantly argue that what we really need to do to protect animals is set high standards. People can live up to high standards, but they can’t live up to perfection. When you give a plant a good standard—like 95 percent of all cattle have to be stunned (killed) correctly on the first shot every single day—they always do better than they do under zero-tolerance regulation. A lot of times they beat the standard, too.
    But regulators today are too abstract in their thinking to see that. They’re focused on their thoughts about the animals, not on the real animals in the real plants, so more animals end up suffering. It’s not right.
    H OW P EOPLE S EE THE W ORLD
    Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with animals, all normal human beings