Quotes by Temple Grandin

Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.

If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave.

We should assume that some captive animals feel frustrated being locked up inside. Many captive animals try to escape as soon as they have an opportunity.

All animals and people have the same core emotion system in the brain. When people are suffering mentally, they want to feel better-they want to stop having bad emotions and start having a good emotions. That's the right goal with animals, too.

Animals don't have purely behavioral needs, and if an animal expresses a normal behavior in an abnormal environment, its welfare may be poor.

Lot of animals living in captivity don't mate successfully because there's something wrong with their living conditions that stops them from acting naturally.

Livestock producers observe that when rough, stressful handling practices are eliminated, cattle resume eating a full day earlier.

I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.

Seeking is a combination of emotions people usually think of as being different: wanting something really good, looking forward to getting something really good and curiosity. Seeking gives you the energy to go after your goals.

Curiosity is the other side of caution.

It's OK to be an eccentric; it's not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric.

The worst thing you can do is nothing. (re: teaching children with autism).

I'm pure geek, pure logic.

People can live up to high standards, but they can't live up to perfection.

My mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.

We found if you took the dog out for 45 minutes a day and worked with it that the solitary stress hormone, cortisol, went down. But then it went right back up again because they didn't keep doing it.

A cat can be social, but a dog, we've bred this hyper social animal that's really truly different and will do stuff for us just to please us with praise and stroking.

Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, Oh, he has autism. That's the problem--and then he didn't treat the GI problem.

Medication should never be considered the only tool for helping a person.

My problems are sort of more on a nuisance level. I can't stand scratchy clothes, I've got to have soft kinds of cotton against my skin, and I don't know why some 100% cotton t-shirts itch and others don't; it has something to do with the weave.

I'm seeing too many geeky, nerdy kids get addicted to video games and they're going nowhere. It's making me crazy.

I've got a lot of other people who do a lot of things for me, so I've gotten to a part in my career where I'm doing a lot of talks because I want to get kids turned on. I want to see these kids, these geeky nerdy kids, go out there and do something.

There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

I want get people to think about sensory based of thinking.

What do I do when I go home? Work. That's basically my social life. I'm married to work.

One of the big areas I'd like to see a lot more research done on is the sensory problems, and it's real variable. One kid's got sound sensitivity; another one can't tolerate fluorescent lights. I can't stand scratchy clothes.

Different cats don't like certain litter. They also don't like an unstable floor, no animal like's unstable floor. So if you put a thin piece of plastic down under a litter box and the cat walks on it and starts to slip, they don't like that. Any animal doesn't like an unstable floor.

Research is starting to show that a child should be engaged at least 20 hours a week. I do not think it matters which program you choose as long as it keeps the child actively engaged with the therapist, teacher, or parent for at least 20 hours a week.

Cats are great with clicker training. There's a great video you can get called Clicker Magic. There's a scene in that video where a cat is trained to go through a mini dog agility course -- it's all done with food motivation and clicker training. You can train them to do all sorts of thing.

Whereas an elephant that was scared to death that diesel powered equipment, equipment that ran on a gas engine, was just fine. Because somebody had attacked it with construction equipment. But if it had a diesel engine, it was bad.

The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.

I know a lot of animal communicators and I think a lot of them are just good behaviorists because they pick up on a lot little posture things like how the eyes look, the posture of the cat ears, is it tense? They're picking up just a lot of their body cues from the dog, the cat or the horse.

You can't punish a child who is acting out because of sensory overload.

I've been on antidepressants for years, and it worked to stop my anxiety and didn't limit creativity. Some of the best work I've done, in fact, is after I started taking the antidepressants.

I look at the successful people that have, you know, high functioning autism and Asperger's, they're ones where maybe the parents were in the computer industry and they just taught the kids programming at, you know, age eight and nine and they just went on into the industry with their parents.

You got barn cats and you want to make them tamed, you need to get them as kittens.

Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.

Here's certain things that are similar to cats and dogs. Dogs are just hyper social and they have a want to please you way more than a cat does.

I'd rather have a kid come up to me and tell me that he loves dinosaurs or he loves airplanes or he likes training dogs or I like Shakespeare. I mean, just something.

I'm seeing too many kids where they get fixated on their own autism. I'd rather have them get fixated that they like programming computers or they like art or they want to sing in the church choir or they want to train dogs, you know, something that they can turn into a career.

I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life, and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.

Fear was my main emotion until I started taking anti-depressant medication. And I was one of the people where, as I got older, the fear got worse and worse. So I can really relate to an animal getting, you know, scared and traumatized.

Us visual thinkers like me, be good at things like industrial design, graphics, art, those kind of jobs.

You could train cats do things, a lot of people don't think cats aren't trainable. Cats can be trusted just a friend.

If you get a little kitty and he's down on the bottom, and he's laying on his chest, you know tucked up underneath, then that cat is not relaxed.

Things like microphones are dangerous things because you never know when they might feedback and squeal.

The animal that I have worked with the most is beef cattle, so that's my favorite animal, but I like all animals.

I think sometimes parents and teachers fail to stretch kids. My mother had a very good sense of how to stretch me just slightly outside my comfort zone.

I can remember being bullied and teased. It was absolutely horrible. I got kicked out of ninth grade for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. It was absolutely terrible.

It is important that our relationship with farm animals is reciprocal. We owe animals a decent life and a painless death. I have observed that the people who are completely out of touch with nature are the most afraid of death.

I'm a believer in biochemistry. But I tell people to try only one thing at a time to see if it works. And if you do give a powerful drug to a kid, it better have a big wow factor.

Some cats don't like different types of kitty litter. So might try different types of kitty litter sometimes that works. You know, they don't like one type that sticks to the paws and they don't like it.

I've got my one area I work in and I want to educate people about autism and I also want to improve, you know, animal handling and transport and make a real change out in the field on the ground.

I'm seeing too many smart kind of socially awkward kids, a lot milder than I was, not getting employment because they're not learning job skills.

I'm seeing too many kind of socially awkward kids that get through schools and then they can't hold a job because they haven't learned the discipline of get up in the morning.

The people that were socially awkward from my generation, they all had paper routes and that taught them the discipline of work.

I'm a child of the 50s. I was expected to have table manners. There needs to be some expectations for behavior. I'm seeing some children today, they don't push them enough.

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up -- you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

I've got a lot of people that are really good at taming animals and working with animals; and they can't explain how they do. They just get a feeling from the animal.

One area of study that still needs to be done is the kind of autism where kids have speech and they lose it. Some parents say it's happened right after vaccines. That group needs to be studied separately from others.

In my opinion, one of the greatest animal-welfare problems is the physical abuse of livestock during transportation.... Typical abuses I have witnessed with alarming frequency are; hitting, beating, use of badly maintained trucks, jabbing of short objects into animals, and deliberate cruelty.

I feel very strongly that we need to give beef cattle a really good life. When they go to slaughter, it needs to be painless.

One big question that's come up is: Has autism increased on the mild side of things? I don't think so -- they've always been here. Some of this is increased detection.

I was fascinated with optical illusions.

The thing is, autism is a big spectrum. Going from folks who remain nonverbal, all the way up to, ya know, famous scientists and musicians. And we've got to work on strengths. We also have to work on teaching basic manners and skills.

Costs for liability insurance are higher than costs for many procedures. There is a need to reform liability laws to stop out-of-control health care costs.

I played around with vegetarianism back in the '70s. One thing, my physiology just got to have animal protein. I get hypoglycemic, I get all light-headed unless I eat animal protein.

Animals do have emotion. But fear tends to be one of the most primal emotions.

I think one of the worst things schools have done is taken out all of the stuff like art, music, woodworking, sewing, cooking, welding, auto-shop. All these things you can turn into careers. How can you get interested in these careers if you don't try them on a little bit?

The reason why feral kitties are hard to tame is because they have missed socialization the period -- you need to be touching and petting those kittens when they are real young.

In special education, there's too much emphasis placed on the deficit and not enough on the strength.

I think there's some kids that need to go from being a child to being a grown-up. You get out in the tech communities, the parents just apprentice their kid into the industry and they just skip being a teenager.

Some people with autism who don't talk, all they hear are vowel sounds. Like if I said 'cup,' they might just hear 'uh.'

I think a brain can be made more thinking or made more emotional. At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.

People are getting too far away from the real-world. Politics is just ridiculous, it's totally dysfunctional.

One of the places where research is needed is all the sensory problems. And you get sensory problems not just with autism, but with dyslexia, learning problems, ADHD, attention deficit, you know, things like sound sensitivity, problems with fluorescent lighting.

These diagnostic profiles like depression, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, it's half science and the other half is a committee of doctors bickering over what it should be, and it has changed. It's not precise like a diagnosis of tuberculosis would be very precise.

Sometimes you have to go outside your field of study to find the right people.

Nature is cruel but we don't have to be.

If you have a 2 or 3 year old who is not talking, you must start an early intervention program. The worst thing you can do with an autistic 3 year old is to do nothing.

Engineering is easy -- it's the people problems that are hard.

One of the ways to reduce that barking would be to have volunteers come in especially for hte for the dogs and take each dog out for 45 minutes each day and spend quality time with the person -- that would help reduce the stress and in fact, one of my students did a study on that.

The most important thing in a shelter is that volunteers, especially with dogs, come in everyday, take that pet out for an hour of quality time.

In dealing with autism, I'm certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths.

In the 50s and 60s, kids were taught how to shake hands. They were taught how to have manners. There needs to be a lot more of that kind of stuff because the autistic mind doesn't pick up social things and subtle cues.

There is three different ways that autistic kids will interact with animals.And they also need to make sure that they're not getting too rough with their animals -- they need to learn how to pet the dog properly, they can't be pulling its ears and things like that.