Rescued By A Cow And A Squeeze

Temple Grandin was diagnosed with autism and suffered severe learning disabilities as a child. Bright lights and strong smells bothered her, and background noises other people couldn’t even hear boomed inside her head. She first encountered cows on a trip to a cattle ranch when she was a teenager and realized that they experience the world in many of the same ways that she did—and were bothered by the same kinds of sights and sounds she was. She determined to find a way to ease their stress. Combining her remarkable ability to create building designs inside her head and her cow’s eye view of the world, Temple became the foremost designer of humane animal facilities in the U.S. She persuaded fast food chains like McDonald’s to adopt her standards for the humane treatment of animals and spurred a revolution in the American meat industry. Temple Grandin’s life was documented in a PBS documentary entitled “Stairway to Heaven” and by Oliver Sacks in his essay “An Anthropologist on Mars.” In Rescued by a Cow and a Squeeze, Medical Reporter Mary Carpenter brings Temple’s remarkable achievements to children and young adults for the first time.