Relationships With Animals
Temple Grandin, autistic designer of cattle handling systems, said that one reason she can easily figure out how a cow would react is because autistic people can easily "think the way that animals think." According to Grandin, animals do not have "complex emotions such as shame or guilt" and they do not think in language. She says that, although not everything about animals is like a person with autism, the similarity is that they think visually and without language. She says people do not make this connection because the study of autism and the study of animal behavior are parallel disciplines involving different individuals. Despite these similarities, the degree to which autistic individuals can be said to think like animals remains undetermined; non-human animals as well as humans have evolved cognitive specializations that may or may not share characteristics with other species.
Dawn Prince-Hughes, diagnosed with Asperger's, describes her observations of gorillas in Songs of the Gorilla Nation.
Read more about this topic: Sociological And Cultural Aspects Of Autism
Famous quotes containing the word animals:
“Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph.... “Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?””
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)