Jennifer's Reviews > Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior

I have mixed feelings about Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation". On the one hand, she writes about interesting and useful concepts. On the other hand, parts of her book are outdated (I checked the publication date 3 times while reading to confirm the book was written this century) and oversimplified.

I'm a professional dog trainer, so I'm constantly trying to figure out better and different ways to explain reinforcement (positive and negative), punishment (positive and negative), the hyper-specificity of fear, generalization of behaviors, the need for socialization, etc., to my students. These are all hard concepts for many to understand, and Grandin does a magnificent job of explaining them plainly. Her simple way of explaining these training concepts was wonderful, but doesn't work nearly so well when applied to more complex scientific concepts.

If Grandin's book had been filled to the brim with journal citations and science vocabulary, it wouldn't have reached nearly as wide of an audience. However, she has dumbed things down to the point that she makes dramatic and overgeneralized statements. (For instance, her inaccurate statements about "normal people". It makes me wonder how many of her statements about people with autism, or animals, are also inaccurate.) Her writing style also makes it hard to differentiate fact, from theory, from hypothesis, from her own speculation. Her use of outdated hypotheses was especially grating.

One example of this, was her use of the triune brain model (the reptile, animal and human brain) as fact. I learned about this model in college, but only in the sense that it hasn't been embraced by the scientific community as a valid hypothesis since the 1990's.

Based on her writings, she is also appears to be a believer in dominance theory. Dominance theory originated with a study of captive wolves back in the 1940s. This study spawned more studies of captive wolves. Captive wolves act nothing like wolves in the wild. Wolves in zoos are (usually) unrelated and forced to live together in an unnatural environment--as a result they do engage in violent social struggles. These findings on captive wolves were then wrongly applied to wild wolves, and then our pet dogs. In the wild, struggles for "dominance" would simply take too much energy. Wolf packs work like a family depending on each other to survive, and fighting would inhibit the pack's ability to do so.

The definition of "dominance" is not what most people believe it to be (which is also the way that Grandin uses this word). Dominance only describes the relationship between two individuals in terms of one individual having pick of a specific resource (such as food, water, toys, etc.) over the other individual. Dominance of a resource is not achieved through force, but through through one individual peacefully allowing the other first pick. It's like letting your little brother have the chicken leg out of the bucket of fried chicken. Technically, you could physically assault your brother to claim the chicken leg for yourself, but it's easier just to let you brother have it. When you see a dog use force to get what they want, it isn't dominance, but instead an anxiety-based behavior. This tends to be exacerbated when followed up by verbal/physical threats from a human owner attempting to show their "dominance" over the anxious dog. Dominance theory is not only flawed and dangerous, but also ignores that fact that wolves are NOT dogs. Dogs are about 14,000 years (or possibly 100,000 according to Grandin) of evolution away from wolves. Dominance theory has widely penetrated our society, but has been on it's way out of dog training for about 20 years now.

Due to this, Grandin's book was incredibly hard to get through. Most any time she talked about dogs, I ended up putting the book down and walking away out of frustration. The plain language of this book leads me to believe its intended audience is readers with little science background. This combined with the blurred lines between outdated concepts, current theories, and personal speculation, I worry that many readers won't think critically about the concepts she's introducing.

There are ideas in this book that are accurate and would be helpful in interacting with animals, but others that are outdated or (like dominance theory) even harmful. The title "Animals in Translation" implies this book will gives readers a greater understanding about the inner workings of an animal's mind. However, I mostly feel like I need to fact check everything I learned from reading this book.