Not only is sustainable agriculture more economically and socially sound long-term, failure to empathize with our fellow animals weighs on the human race’s prospect for a sustainable future on our one and only planet. No one has offered mankind a more reasoned approach to the challenges of large-scale contemporary livestock farming than Temple Grandin. She is a realist: agribusiness is here to stay. It’s unreasonable to expect a widespread conversion to vegetarianism, and it’s unthinkable to enslave animals in the ways we’ve seen all too often in factory farming. With all of that in mind, and in the context of the ethical treatment of animals, we are duty-bound to design better systems to ensure the livelihood of those animals we raise for food. And, for some reason, we’ve been heretofore unable to address these problems adequately without the wisdom from someone like her. Someone with autism.

For years, journalists have picked her brain for clues on how we may all better understand our fellow animals. What strikes me each time is the common-sense solutions she gives on such designs as non-slip flooring in slaughter houses. Anyone could surmise that the feeling in slaughterhouse air must be frightening for an animal. Add to that some stressful events like slippage and shouting herders and you’ve got what amounts to a terrifying end-of-life experience for these animals.

Regarding shouting, Grandin stressed in a recent interview on NPR (link needed) that “first of all, we need to get everyone to calm down.” Anyone with a house-pet knows the effect a stressful environment has for their beloved animal. Imagine the discussion of implementing calm handling at feed lots and slaughter houses turning to the catalyst for their stress-levels in the first place. Maybe factory farming is stressful for animal and human alike. Maybe that dialog would then lead to the discussion of the true cost of cost-cutting in the farm industry.

Maybe since autistic individuals tend toward honesty, a society could rely on them to point out problems in the system before anyone else even notices the problems. How much more could we learn if we focused not on some “cure” for autism, but on ways to foster the very special, and sometimes very specialized, talents that appear to be the hallmark of this “disorder”? We’ve effectively proven that “normal” psychology is not the definitive mindset in addressing to the problems we face: we wage war on everything, imprison animals and humans with impunity, destroy our planet, etc. Are these really the traits we want to recognize as “normal”?