Temple Grandin is a real example of overcoming difficult obstacles. Being that she is autistic she can’t feel regular human emotions like sadness or happiness because she doesn’t understand it and she can’t relate to it. Although she is autistic she has accomplished a great deal of work and is an autism advocate. She holds a Phd in animal science as well as running her own business. She created the Stairway to Heaven for animals, and she has created a squeeze machine for autistic people to calm them down. Human beings do not really need emotions to connect with other human beings or animals or to behave morally with a sense or right and wrong.
Temple Grandin although she is autistic she has made connections with people and especially animals, but they aren’t the connections that are the same for non autistic people. For example Oliver Sacks writes, “she introduced me to the secretaries in a somewhat brusque manner, giving me the feeling once again of someone who learned roughly how to behave in such situations” (sacks 5). Examining this quote shows that Temple Grandin had to rather learn a behavior that normal people acquire, like introducing people that don’t know each other. There is clear evidence that she can connect with animals because she feels for them even though she is autistic. Temple says “I got to love my enriched pigs, I was very attached so attached that I couldn’t kill them” (sacks 7). Temple being autistic cant really comprehend complex emotions like love yet she understood her emotions she had with these pigs that she was writing about for her thesis. Sacks then continues to say “she was very distressed at their deaths” (sacks 7). She doesn’t have any real emotional understanding yet she became so close to these animals that she didn’t want to just kill them for her thesis. This proves that maybe you don’t need emotions to emphasize with animals.
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