Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior asin: 0743247698 binding: Hardcover list price: $25.00 USD amazon price: $16.50 USD

I gotta say it: Temple Grandin rocks.

If you're not familiar with her, she's a high functioning autistic who feels a strong connection with animals mainly due to the fact that her thinking is purely visual. She's greatly concerned with animal welfare and is perhaps best known for her humane slaughterhouse design which is used throughout the world.

I've often wanted to know more about her work for animals, but most of her writing on the subject is technical and written for fellow professionals. I'd read about the gist of her ideas but always wanted to get a first hand account of them...outside of that time I saw her speak and she signed one of my books. Yay!

Overall, this book is a great read. It goes into great detail about her work for slaughterhouses and the animal welfare audits she does for the fast food industry, which is what I was most interested in reading. She's seen sime strange stuff, ranginging from mundane things like cows that were spooked by yellow objects to bizarre things like mudering, rapist, roosters. She sometimes dicusses accidents that have taken place in slaughterhouses and how she works to prevent them, but the details are rarely graphic. At worst, she'll say what happened followed by, "It was horrible." And it probably was.

Not all of the book's about her work, though. She talks a lot about behavior in pets, such as how pets can tell when you're coming home. She also speculates about how animals think and if they think more like autistic people than "normal people" (as she calls them).

Her writing style is often times...well...austistic and she repeats herself sometimes, but it really doesn't detract from the book's enjoyability. Besides, any book that talks about parrots that spell can't be all bad.