Temple Grandin Quotes

Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test.

One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.

For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

It may be true in the case of autism that if you start off with a deficit in terms of empathy or mind reading, you've just got more time to devote to understanding the world by systemizing.

He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

Basically when it comes to autistic kids and animals there's kind of three ways that they work, some of them are instant best buddies, they understand a cat, they understand a dog - they're best studies with it, they just know how to communicate with it. Then there's other kids that begin with a little bit of fear of the cat or the dog, but then they begin to like it and then there are other kids where you have a sensory problem - the cat meows and it hurts their ears, so they want to stay away from the cat because you never know when he might meow.

I studied a lot of animal behavior and one of the things I find really interesting is the whole idea that animals are sensory based thinkers and I wrote about this in my book, Animals in Translation. That an animal's memory is not in words, they've got to be in pictures - it's very detailed so let's say the animal gets afraid of something - they'll get afraid of something that they're looking at or hearing, the moment the bad thing happens.

If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.

Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.

In fact, when we as neuro-typical people encounter a person with autism spectrum syndrome who's always been that way it is that we have to adjust. Just because we can read people with autism correctly, whatever that word is why do we always default to saying, 'Well, that kid is not normal?' What is normal?

A dog, I will maintain, is a very tolerable judge of beauty, as appears from the fact that any liberally educated dog does, in a general way, prefer a woman to a man.

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.

There's a saying within the Asperger community: if you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome, you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome ... Within this condition, beneath this label, the variety of personality, of humor, of behavior, is infinite.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.

My brother is severely autistic, so when I was a kid I spent a lot of time as a teenager in camps and programs for autistic kids. When I went to McGill as an undergraduate, I figured I'd be a therapist working with these kids. The truth is, and I knew this even back then, I'm just not good at this. I'm too empathic to do this sort of thing.

Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be? A: You already are an animal.

If a pig could give his mind to anything, he would not be a pig.