Animals have feelings too

Temple GRANDIN'S fame came for the wrong reason. She's known as an autistic woman with a doctorate in animal science because neurologist Oliver Sacks devoted an essay to her in his book "An Anthropologist on Mars." But Sacks' book came after Grandin quietly made life better for farm animals. All over the world, her livestock management systems made animal husbandry more profitable and humane.

"Animals in Translation" is basically a book about the mammalian brain, ours and those of other (mostly furry) creatures. Animal behaviorists are learning that what we believe makes us unique -- language, emotions, the ability to reason -- exists throughout the animal world. The main way we differ from animals is that our minds filter what we see.

To understand filtering, imagine watching a basketball game. Your job is to count the passes, and at one point, a woman in a gorilla suit wanders by. You think you'd notice, right? Well, in a noted experiment, subjects were asked to count passes in a video of a basketball game. Half didn't notice when the woman in the gorilla suit wandered onto the court. That's filtering -- what neurologists call "inattentional blindness." Meaning humans tend not to see what we're not looking for.

Animals don't have inattentional blindness. They don't filter information. Autistic people filter far less than the rest of us. And people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia filter somewhat less than the rest of us. Grandin believes that she sees the world more as an animal sees it, visually -- without much of a subconscious. Without denial or repression.

But animals do have emotions and desires. Love, curiosity, attachment to offspring and friendship are survival tactics that evolution bred in. An animal that is not curious is less likely to find food. Love and friendship allow animals to work together. Reading Grandin, one wonders whether Freud should have looked more to the animal kingdom when formulating his theories. Grandin makes her philosophical challenges through simple descriptions of scientific data -- she has more than 300 articles to her name -- but without scientific murkiness. Her literal prose, almost completely without metaphor, allows ideas to sink in until they feel like your own.

Unfortunately, what will sell the book are the National Enquirer-style animal stories: rapist roosters; sex-crazed stallions; superstitious pigs. Or, more interesting, that prairie dogs use language to describe the individual personalities of hawks and wolves. Communicating with language is simply what some animals do to keep from being eaten.