Ren's Reviews > Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

This was a very hard book for me to rate. Please note that 3 stars on good reads means, I liked it. This book focused on core emotions in the brain: SEEKING, PLAYING, RAGE, PANIC and FEAR. It was about how to keep animals feeling the positive emotions and not the negative ones and each chapter went through a species or group such as dogs, cats, cattle, zoo animals. What you might find difficult to believe is that I DO RECOMMEND READING this book.

In Temple Grandin's favor: she knows cattle and pigs well and these sections of the book were very well done. This is her expertise, it is what she has worked on for most of her life. They are great. It is also really interesting to read her last little epilogue, why she stays in the business of fixing slaughterhouses and such when she loves animals so much.

Update: I took my dog to the vet today and used her advice to try training her at the vet to turn on her SEEKING area and keep her from feeling FEAR. It totally worked! Usually she is trempling and sitting in my lap. Today she was watching intently, trying to figure out how to get the treat. She had the happy dog mouth open smile and wasn't trembling at all.

What I didn't like:

I never understood how the title fit the book. The whole book was about how using these core emotions found in the lower brain could be used to make animals lives better. Nothing really about how that connected to us as humans or why that would make us "human".

Temple Grandin does not know dogs. She states (in the cat section) that dogs are too neotonized to have passive aggressive urinating behaviors where when they are mad at you, they pee on your pillow on your bed when you leave the room. My dog does that. I know that is not scientific, but her evidence that cats do is her cat bee tee. Throughout the dog section, she makes statements I would have liked more evidence for. For example, she states some very large number of years (I think it is hundreds of thousands of years) for when dogs were domesticated without a citation. There is huge amounts of research on when dogs are domesticated based on archeological evidence and DNA evidence. She could have found something. Especially because other books I have read focused solely on dogs have a smaller number. If you want information on dogs, read the Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet or The Genius of Dogs.

There are also parts of the animal training in the zoo section I would debate. Right after a section stating that animals want to work for their food and noting machines that were made to do this, such as an auditory bird call that was used to get a tiger to run around her cage before getting her dinner, Grandin has a whole section stating that you have to have special treats to train the zoo animals. That the treats have to be better than normal food. There are no references for this section. Really, whatever the animals normally eat works perfectly fine. Maybe you want to have a mix of their normal dinner and some special treats for when they do something particularly well while you are training them. But you don't need special treats to get them to do behaviors for training. I helped train harbor seals and penguins at an aquarium. They worked for their normal meals. One seal was so happy to train, if he was full he would spit his food out and keep participating. He didn't even need food.
*Thinking back on this, she only appears to have experience with highly fearful prey animals in zoo environments like nyala (a kind of antelope). They may need much greater rewards than the less fearful predator species. But she doesn't say this in that section. She says they all need special treats.

In general, there are a couple sections of this book that are great. And the whole core emotions things is a great way of assessing whether an animal is happy or not, I totally agree (although it got repetitive going through every species). It was something I didn't know about and a very interesting read. There were great tidbits throughout. But I came across many sections I didn't agree with completely and so could not give it a high rating.