Marlene Wagman-Geller

Aug 18, 2025 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“If I could snap my fingers and be non-autistic, I would not. Autism is part of who I am.”  ~Mary Temple Grandin (sister who fought for the rights of the autistic and animals)

In Forrest Gump, the principal told Mrs. Gump, “Your boy’s….different.” Mrs. Gump replied, “Well, we’re all different, Mr. Hancock.”  A woman who society deemed different was Temple Grandin. She beat the proverbial odds and became an animal and autism advocate.

When people think of autism many visualize Dustin Hoffman in Rainman. In his title role as Raymond, while unable to make emotional connections, he memorialized the Cincinnati telephone book, “A” through “G,” and noticed there were 246 scattered toothpicks on the floor. When Templin was a child, autism had not yet exited the closet.

What does husbandry, a biopic, and the University of Colorado have in common? The answer is a woman as unique as her name. For anyone in the bull’s eye of bullies, Temple’s life illustrates hope is on the horizon. Her parents, Eustacia and Richard Grandin, were a wealthy old money Bostonian couple, members of the Episcopalian church. When Eustacia was nineteen, she dropped out of Harvard when she gave birth to daughter Mary Temple who she christened after her mother. Eustacia was apprehensive when her baby did not make eye contact and, when held, clawed “like a trapped animal.” As a toddler, she had never uttered a word. Frustrated at her inability to communicate, Temple had temper tantrums in which she screamed and flapped her arms. She chewed the pieces of her jigsaw puzzles and spat them out as mush. Shoes were projectiles. On the other extreme, sometimes she was eerily quiet, and rocked back and forth. She spun coins and lids over and over; at the beach, Temple endlessly dribbled sand through her fingers. Any self-doubt Eustacia entertained that she was an abject failure in motherhood ended with the arrival of her following three children who did not display bizarre behavior.

In 1951, a doctor diagnosed Temple as suffering from infant schizophrenia, (now referred to as autism) and placed the blame on “a refrigerator mother.” The theory had gained traction through Austrian-born Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of Buchenwald and Dachau, the author of The Uses of Enchantment. Richard declared Temple was retarded and needed to be institutionalized. Although Eustacia was twelve years younger than her husband, and as a 1950s housewife was supposed to acquiesce to her husband, she refused to consign her daughter to an environment devoid of stimulation, of love. Her mantra regarding her first born, “Different, not less.” 

Speech therapy did for Temple what Anne Sullivan provided for Helen Keller-it freed her from the prison of silence. By age five, Temple used complete sentences and became a nonstop talker though her speech was devoid of inflection. Nevertheless, the tantrums continued as her sensory perceptions were on high alert: a ringing phone sounded like an alarm. While human interaction left Temple in a state of high anxiety, she relished the company of her golden retriever, Andy- who followed along as she rode her bike- her cats Bee Lee and Bootsie, and mouse, Crusader.

Temple enrolled in kindergarten in Dedham Country Day School, less than a mile from the Grandin’s stately three-story home. Some of the draws of the private school was there was only thirteen students per class, and they remained together until sixth grade. Per policy, everyone received an invitation to birthday parties. Some of the mannerisms that set Temple apart was she called the other students by both their first and last names just as Forrest Gump always introduced himself, “My name’s Forest, Forrest Gump.” On one occasion, when Temple was in the vise of a tantrum, she bit her teacher, Mrs. Deitch, on the leg. Temple’s aspiration was to become an inventor like those in her picture book that profiled Thomas Edison, Eli Witney, and Elias Howe.

Junior high did not make for the best years. Classes were large, and there were different teachers for each subject. The other students called Temple “tape-recorder” due to her habit of repeating words. One afternoon, as she walked down the hallway, when a girl called out “Retard!” Temple threw a textbook that hit her tormentor in the eye. The principle called the Grandins informing them of Temple’s expulsion. Richard was furious; Eustacia searched for a solution.

Her next educational experience was a New Hampshire boarding school geared towards gifted students with emotional issues. Situated amid 1,700 acres of nature, with a student population of thirty-two, provided the calm Temple craved. Because the barn housed nine horses, Temple spent as much time there as possible. After Temple smacked a classmate for laughing at her when she tripped on a coquet wicket, the staff banned her from riding for week. She took the punishment to heart and kept her hands to herself.  Temple pronounced classes “Boring, boring, boring” as she could not grasp abstract principles. While able to decipher the myth of Icarus-it made sense that the wax of his wings melted in the sun-she was out of her depth regarding the love life of the gods. Of Romeo and Juliet, she said, “I never knew what they were up to” and it seemed much ado about nothing.

Unfortunately, puberty resulted in panic attacks, “Imagine the worst stage fright you ever had but worse. It is like you would feel if you were locked in a room with a cobra.” Adolescence also brought on the realization she might never experience a romantic relationship. To make up for a life of enforced celibacy, she envisioned her future as encompassing her consuming passion for science.

The Grandins divorced and Eustacia remarried saxophonist Ben Cutler. Her new sister-in-law invited the teenaged Temple to spend her summer vacation at her Arizona cattle ranch. Her niece loved the wide-open spaces and felt an affinity with the cattle, a connection she could not make with humans. A machine that greatly impacted her emotional well-being was a cattle chute that holds an animal in place while undergoing a vaccination. While the contraption reminds most people of a Puritan pillory post, for Temple it was her equivalent of Linus’s blanket. She relayed how she experienced experiencing a hug without being touched.

While Templin would have been thrilled to spend her life on the cattle ranch, her mother insisted that she had too much academic ability not to pursue her education. Temple fashioned her own “squeeze machine” that she installed in Franklin Pierce College to use as a coping mechanism. When her new roommate entered their dorm room and saw Temple nestled in the contraption, she was not reassured when the kneeling woman explained, “It feels like a hug.” The roommate fled, without her squeeze machine, she could not have survived college. The invention became the basis of Temple’s senior thesis in psychology. The taunting experienced in the ninth grade followed her to college, but she persevered and graduated second in a class of 400.

As news spread of the young researcher with an unusual condition, Harvard University arranged a meeting between the acclaimed behaviorist, B. F. Skinner, author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity and   the college student. She was ecstatic and said of her forthcoming visit that it would be like having a meeting with God. As she sat with Skinner on the couch, he did not offer any interesting insights. Temple recalled of the visit, “He tried to touch my legs. I was shocked, I wasn’t in a sexy dress. I was in a conservative dress, and that was the last thing I expected.” Temple told Skinner, “You may look at them, but you may not touch them.”

The girl whose father and pediatricians had deemed hopeless received a master’s from the University of Arizona and a doctorate from the University of Illinois. Her thesis was on the study of pigs’ brains: how the socialized pigs were placid while their feral counterparts were aggressive. Of her porcine subjects she stated, “I got to love my enriched pigs. I was very attached.” Despite her affinity, at the conclusion of the experiment, she sacrificed them to examine their brains. She led her companions on their last walk where she talked and stroked them. Distressed at their deaths, “I wept and wept.”

Temple’s focus was on animal science, specifically how cattle behaved in variations of chutes. However, in the 1970s the only courses of study in her field revolved around livestock feeding/breeding, and medicine, none on how animals felt. To investigate, the cattle whisperer visited the Scottsdale Feed Yard, (where farmers send livestock to fatten before slaughter.) The alpha male ranchers did not welcome her with open arms. The cowboys felt the female Bostonian with her doctorate had no business on their testosterone turf. Moreover, her inability to read emotions, (Temple relates to Dr. Spock) increased hostility. To make their point, a ranch foreman placed bloodied bull’s testicles from newly castrated cattle on her windshield. She used her wipers to wash away the carnage as she drove off. When Temple showed up the next day, Ron, a ranch-hand, blocked her path and told her women were trespassers. Undeterred, she contacted the Arizona Farmer Ranchman and offered to write a monthly column. The press pass proved her open sesame.

What caused Temple grief was when she observed the ranch hands mistreat animals that resulted in her new focus: the welfare of livestock. Unlike Ingrid Newkirk who argued for veganism, Temple realized that America would never forego its dietary staples that provided the country with hamburgers, steaks, and ribs. Indeed, Temple frequents a restaurant that has a Western décor, replete with swinging doors, and walls that display guns and steer heads. Her typical dinner consists of ribs and beer. Her expertise was that cattle should die with dignity-that they deserve our respect. Her task was to convince the owners of the slaughterhouses to adopt more humane methods. The problem she encountered was they only cared about profit, not the animals behind their livelihood. After Temple proved that peaceful methods of killing livestock was financially sound, the owners beat the path to her door. The reason she was able to make her novel reforms was because while Dr. Doolittle could talk to the animals, she was able to relate to the four-footed.  

Prior to Temple, cattlemen yelled at cattle and poked them with “hot sticks,” electric prods to lead them to their deaths. Instead, as Temple explained, shaking plastic strips from garbage bags produced the same result. Her weapon for fighting against animal abuse was her argument that panicked animals made for a chaotic situation that resulted in an inefficient use of time and manpower. After visiting a kosher plant, Temple declared, “If Hell exists, I am in it.” To rectify the situation, Temple made modifications to dispatching the cattle that led to an instant death-devoid of electric prods. She also made improvements that prevented the cows from witnessing their fellow creatures’ end, a sight that warned them they were in danger. She named her slaughterhouse system “The Stairway to Heaven” after the Led Zeppelin song.

Because of Temple’s reforms, her methods became college courses, and her name is on the spines of the textbooks. More than half the slaughterhouses in North America pass through her “conveyor restrainer system,” and many kosher ones no longer hang live animals upside down by one leg. By the late 1990s, through her intercession, McDonald’s-the largest purchaser of meat-established new guidelines for the creatures who ended up as its burgers and McNuggets. She also launched investigations into chicken and pig farms where she uncovered gargantuan abuse that also led to desperately needed reform. To keep owners accountable, she arranged for the installation of cameras in barns, feedlots, and slaughterhouses. In her book, Animals Make us Human, she suggested the facilities should have floor to ceiling walls so people could witness the treatment of livestock. When the owners scoffed “she is off her rocker” Templin shrugged her shoulders at the words she had heard all her life-and then proved them wrong.

When interviewers ask Temple if she feels cheated that she never found romance, marriage, or children she replied that she has had “an exciting life.” Despite her loss, she says her sense of purpose derives from her crusade to help animals.

In addition to her activism on the behalf of animals, Temple is the poster woman for autism. Her stellar achievements:  doctorate, assistant professor at Colorado State University, author, journalist, and scientist. The founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, stated, “Temple Grandin has done more to reduce suffering in the world than any other person who has ever lived.” The Meat Industry Hall of Fame inducted her as a member. Dr. Grandin showed that those with a similar condition are, indeed, “different not less.”

The girl who was a late bloomer lectures to audiences with hundreds of attendees. After one engagement entitled “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds,” a boy thanked her with the words, “Thank you for showing my brain isn’t broken. It’s just different.” Her unique appeal is she imparts first-hand experience of her condition, rather than having a psychologist lecture from information gleaned from books, college courses, and their patients. In her speeches, Temple states she has Asperger’s Disease, a form of autism that includes poor social skills, repetitive actions, and an inability to think in abstractions. The condition received it name after Austrian child psychologist Dr. Hans Asperger. Only after his death, the world discovered he was the children’s Dr. Mengele who consigned his youthful patients to Aktion 74, the Third Reich’s euthanasia program. Her dual activism is reflected in her home where she has I.D. from the American Meat Institute and the American Psychiatric Association. She has published hundreds of papers on these two disparate, but interconnected fields. Next to her bed is the squeeze machine. In her university office she has an array of bull statues, mounted whips.

In 2010, Time magazine voted Temple one of its 100 Most Influential People. The editors included a photo that showed her nose-to-nose with a black cow. The year also marked the release of the biopic Templin Grandin that starred Clare Danes in the title role. During the Emmy Awards Los Angeles collided with the Wild West as Temple stood out from the couturier-clad crowd in her black and red cowgirl attire. (Eustacia was also in the audience.) At one point, caught up in the excitement, Temple jumped from her seat and mimicked swinging a lasso at the stage. The veteran of cow testicles on her windshield held her own in the Hollywood crowd. She said her greatest hope for the film was that it would have a positive impact on children with autism.

Throughout her life, the different abled cowgirl/academic has worn many labels. When asked to describe her life, she answered with her own self-assessment, “I’m an anthropologist from   Mars.”

 

 

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