Renowned animal behaviour specialist Dr. Temple Grandin will be coming to Olds College for a one-day workshop on Jan. 18, organized by Mountain View County and the Foothills Forage and Grazing Association (FFGA).The workshop is already sold out, much to the delight of the organizers.ìPeople are so excited. It is still a month before the conference and we have filled up,î said Amber Hines, sustainable agriculture specialist for Mountain View County.ìWe were not sure how many participants we would get, but we are at almost 350.îMountain View County was able to book Grandin because she will be speaking at another FFGA event in Lethbridge on Jan. 19.ìLaura Gibney, the manager of the FFGA, knew about our conference and spoke with the organizers,î said Hines.ìGibney wanted to bring Grandin up but wanted to have her somewhat farther north, just so she was not speaking at two places that were close togetherî.At the workshop, Grandin will give two talks: one on understanding cattle behaviour to improve handling and one on reducing stress during handling.The workshop will be mandatory for many agriculture and animal sciences students at Olds College.Grandin, who is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, became well known in the 1990s for championing people with autism and their families. Born in 1947, she was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, according to her Colorado Sate University page.She did not learn to speak until she was three and a half years old. Thanks to her parents and various teachers' support, she went on to graduate from Franklin Pierce College with a BA in psychology, before earning a master's degree in animal science from Arizona State University in 1975 and a PhD in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.She has been called the most accomplished and well-known autistic adult in the world.As a teenager and a young adult, she spent her summers working at her aunt's Arizona ranch, where she quickly developed a connection with animals, turning her into an animal welfare advocate.Drawing from her experience as an autistic person living in a world that often feels strange, threatening and overwhelming, she started designing humane livestock-handling equipment and campaigning for better standards in slaughter plants and livestock farms. According to her business website, almost half of the cattle in North America are handled in a centre-track restrainer system that she designed for meat plants. All her inventions aim to reduce stress in cattle during handling.Grandin gained fame recently after her life was turned into an eponymous HBO movie starring Claire Danes, for which Danes won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.In 2010, Grandin was named by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world. She has published eight books, two of which appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list.
