If we need inspiration to take on a challenge, face adversity and make a difference, consider the role Temple Grandin has made to the lives of food animals, particularly cattle.
Temple is now a household name amongst ranchers and livestock managers. She is also a passionate advocate of people with autism. She herself is autistic. She achieved her PhD in spite of being a different learner. She thinks in pictures not in words, as she says. Thinking outside the box has been her key to successfully changing the way livestock is handled in North America and probably the rest of the world.
As a young woman she spent time at a relative’s ranch and learned to “see” what cattle saw as they were being handled and moved through corral systems. She didn’t like what she saw so this became her passionate objective: to design a different way of handling animals in holding facilities.
The essence of her corral system is the utilization of the natural circling behavior of cattle and therefore allowing handlers to work the cattle’s flight zones despite being in the confined space of a handling facility.
The flight zone is the point at which the animal can no longer tolerate the approach of a person or other animal and moves away.
A decade ago Temple was credited with changes made in the major feed yards and slaughtering facilities to use her handling facility designs.
The uptake by the major consumers of meat products such as McDonald’s and those who supply them reached 50 per cent of industry. I am sure it is higher now.
There are no doubt people who want to make improvements on her methods but the fact remains that the cattle industry is now more caring about the life of cattle when under their management. Animals are healthier; being stressed less because of her.
She is aware of the fact that confined animal operations (as opposed to open or free range operations) result in often lower priced food.
When I had the privilege to hear her speak someone asked her about implementing free-range production of eggs, to which she replied that America’s poor could never be fed with $4 a dozen eggs. The price of battery eggs was then about $1 at Walmart in the U.S. That was her compassion for people being expressed.
Now here, I am told, egg producers who got together recently to determine the price of eggs raised essentially organically is about $7 a dozen. Again, hard to feed the poor at those prices!
I commend Temple Grandin to those of you interested in better facilities for livestock.
We hope to bring her here sometime during the Thompson Rivers University’s first year of the Applied Sustainable Ranching program, starting next week, at the Williams Lake campus.
David Zirnhelt is a member of the Cariboo Cattlemen’s Association and chair of the advisory committee for the Applied Sustainable Ranching program which is starting at Thompson Rivers University in Williams Lake this January.