To keep cattle calm, Grandin gets in the mind of a cow

When cattle aren’t panicked and stressed, Grandin said, handling them is easier and more humane — slaughterhouse floors don’t have to be places of cruelty. Some describe Grandin’s methods as “killing them softly.” Her curved and shielded loading chutes and squeeze system holds them gently in place like a hug at the final moment. Her designs have changed the industry.

“Gradually, it’s getting a lot better,” Grandin said. “Handling has improved. It’s not as bad as the ‘70s and ‘80s when handling was really, truly terrible.”

Grandin, who is autistic, seems able to see the world from a cow’s point of view.

Cows have lousy depth perception, she said, and can only see blue and yellow, no red. They have good night vision. They naturally walk in single file and they don’t like to be alone. They balk at little distractions — moving objects, a coat hanging on a fence, a paper cup on the ground, string blowing in the breeze, blinding light, sunbeams, reflections and slippery flooring. She flashed a slide of a cow staring intently at a patch of sunlight. In another, a cow seems frightened of her own shadow.

While Grandin is now treated with almost reverent respect in the livestock world, that wasn’t always the case. At one time, the industry didn’t know what to make of the plain talking, ultra-focused researcher and designer.

The professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University first got interested in cows during a summer spent in Arizona on her aunt’s ranch. The teenager rode horses and spent time around cattle, noticing how they seemed to calm down in squeeze chutes used to hold them still during routine veterinary care, ear tagging and branding. She even got into a squeeze chute herself and found it calmed her own autism-related anxiety attacks. The teenager built a special squeeze machine for herself that she used regularly.

The HBO award-winning movie “Temple Grandin” depicts her life from childhood. As a graduate student, Grandin spent time at stockyards and other handling facilities, even climbing into pens and chutes with the cattle and seeing life from their perspective. In the movie, she faced sexism and other barriers as she stubbornly stood by her ideas for innovative ways to handle cattle.

At the convention center, Grandin told her audience she has no doubt that cows feel fear and other emotions.

“Twenty years ago when I wrote journal articles, I was told not to use the fear word,” she said. “I had journal article reviewers who told me to call it excitement or agitation. They didn’t want to admit that animals actually have emotions.”

Research, however, backs her up and Grandin has spent a lot of time figuring out how to calm fearful cattle. Yelling at cows, she said, or using dogs or cattle prods only makes things worse.

“The first thing you’ve got to do is calm down and stop screaming,” she said. “Calm animals are easier to handle than excited, fearful animals.”

She said 20 or 30 minutes is required to calm cattle after they become agitated.

“Research shows very, very clearly that a positive person who likes their animals is going to have more productive animals,” she said. “There’s both old research and new research that shows this, so why aren’t more people doing it?”

The Pendleton audience reacted to Grandin’s presentation with rapt attention. Beth Robinette, rancher and founder of Roots of Resilience, spoke briefly about Grandin before the professor took the podium.

“I’m starstruck today,” Robinette said.

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Contact Kathy Aney at kaney@eastoregonian.com or 541-966-0810.