Abstract
This article brings animal protection theory to bear on Temple Grandin’s work, in her capacity both as a designer of slaughter facilities and as an advocate for omnivorism. Animal protection is a better term for what is often termed animal rights, given that many of the theories grouped under the animal rights label do not extend the concept of rights to animals. I outline the nature of Grandin’s system of humane slaughter as it pertains to cattle. I then outline four arguments Grandin has made defending meat-eating. On a protection-based approach, I argue, Grandin’s system of slaughter is superior to its traditional counterpart. Grandin’s success as a designer of humane slaughterhouses however is not matched by any corresponding success in offering a moral defence of meat-eating. Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of her work, Grandin’s arguments for continuing to eat animals are noteworthy only in how disappointing and rudimentary they are. If we can thank Grandin for making a difference in the lives of millions of farm animals, her work can also be criticized for not engaging the moral status of animals with the depth and rigor that it deserves.
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Notes
For a small sampling of Grandin’s electronic media coverage see Grandin (2009c). Typing Grandin’s name into the Factiva newspaper database calls up over 1600 articles from across the English-speaking world.
Gary Francione and Jeff McMahan are among the few animal theorists to comment on Grandin. See the brief discussions in Francione (1996: 99–100, 199–202, 2008: 74–75) and McMahan (2002: 200–203). Peter Singer discusses lobbying efforts to persuade McDonald’s to hire Grandin in Singer (1998: 166–177). I have not been able to find any scholarly discussion of Grandin’s defence of meat-eating.
For critical discussion of Singer’s view on killing animals see Višak (2013: 46–70).
For an analysis of Grandin’s system of slaughter for chicken see Chapter Five of Lamey (2019).
Karen Davis has challenged Grandin’s claim that her system of slaughter is inspired by her autism. “Many of the problems Grandin presents herself as uniquely spotting in the slaughterhouse environment are the kinds of things that an intelligent non-autistic sees on entering an inbred culture” (Davis 2005: 1). Grandin’s emphasis on a link between autism and animal behaviour is noticeably more pronounced in her popular books than in her academic writings and may sometimes be slightly exaggerated. However, I am more inclined to accept it than Davis is. Among other reasons, there have been cases of other autistic people identifying strongly with animal behaviours (e.g. Price-Hughes 2004).
Grandin has separate guidelines for electric stunning, a potentially painless method used on pigs and sheep, and ritual slaughter methods (kosher and halaal) that prohibit stunning and require placing the animals in a head-immobilizing device before its throat is slit. See respectively Grandin (2008) and Grandin and Regenstein (1994).
Grandin’s system also currently does not involve any labelling program. This means that unless one eats only meat from McDonald’s, Burger King or other restaurant chains whose suppliers employ Grandin’s system, there is no way for consumers to know when they are buying meat from animals killed in one of Grandin’s facilities.
An anonymous reviewer raised this objection.
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Lamey, A. The Animal Ethics of Temple Grandin: A Protectionist Analysis. J Agric Environ Ethics 32, 143–164 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-019-09761-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-019-09761-8