Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

Temple Grandin · Catherine Johnson

Jan 2009 · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

About this ebook

The best-selling animal advocate Temple Grandin offers the most exciting exploration of how animals feel since The Hidden Life of Dogs.
In her groundbreaking and best-selling book Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin drew on her own experience with autism as well as her distinguished career as an animal scientist to deliver extraordinary insights into how animals think, act, and feel. Now she builds on those insights to show us how to give our animals the best and happiest life--on their terms, not ours.
It's usually easy to pinpoint the cause of physical pain in animals, but to know what is causing them emotional distress is much harder. rawing on the latest research and her own work, Grandin identifies the core emotional needs of animals. Then she explains how to fulfill them for dogs and cats, horses, farm animals, and zoo animals.Whether it's how to make the healthiest environment for the dog you must leave alone most of the day, how to keep pigs from being bored, or how to know if the lion pacing in the zoo is miserable or just exercising, Grandin teaches us to challenge our assumptions about animal contentment and honor our bond with our fellow creatures.
Animals Make Us Human is the culmination of almost thirty years of research, experimentation, and experience.
This is essential reading for anyone who's ever owned, cared for, or simply cared about an animal.

Ratings and reviews

I did enjoy this book quite a bit - particularly the chapters on dogs, cats, wildlife and zoos. But, overall, I found it to be a bit repetitive of the information previously presented in _Animals in Translation_. It wasn't bad, or boring, just a little less "meaty" than _Animals in Translation_. I really liked how she went further into what makes a wolf pack, and the domestication of the wolf. All in all, it was quite interesting.

If you think that your dog is crazy, it might be you and not the dog. Animals have their own characteristics and personalities. This is a good book, written for the the individual who would like to get to know their pet. ANIMALS DO MAKE US HUMAN. A great book to give as a gift.

About the author

Temple Grandin was born August 29, 1947 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is a bestselling author, doctor and professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and leader of both the animal welfare and autism advocacy movements. Grandin was diagnosed with autism in 1950. She was immediately placed in a structured nursery, had speech therapy, and had a nanny spend hours playing turn-based games with her. At the age of four, she began talking and her progress continued. In 1970, Grandin received her bachelor's degree in psychology from Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire. She received her master's degree in animal science from Arizona State University in 1975, and in 1989, she received a Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Grandin, being a high-functioning autistic, is widely-known for her work in autism advocacy. She has been featured on major televisions programs such as the Today Show and ABC's Primetime Live. She has also been featured in Time magazine, People magazine, Forbes, and the New York Times. Grandin was the subject of the Horizon documentary "The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow" and was described by Oliver Sacks in the title of his narrative book: An Anthropologist on Mars. Grandin's bestselling book: Thinking in Pictures is scheduled to be released as an HBO film in 2009. Grandin's Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human have also been bestsellers. Grandin lives in Colorado, but has speaking engagements on autism and cattle handling around the world. CATHERINE JOHNSON, Ph.D., is a writer specializing in neuropsychiatry and the brain. She cowrote Animals in Translation and served as a trustee of the National Alliance for Autism Research for seven years. She lives with her husband and three sons—two of whom have autism—in New York.