At the 2025 American Association of Equine Practitioners Convention, well-known academic Temple Grandin, PhD, gave the keynote address entitled “Understanding Animal Behavior,” which elucidated why animals react the way they do. Grandin has published several books on this subject, including Animals in Translation, Animals Make Us Human, and The Autistic Brain. She also shared personal stories to illustrate the differences in how she experiences the world as a person with autism.
Animals Are Visual Thinkers
Grandin began by explaining that animals live in a sensory world where they think visually. They experience and react to the world based on what they see and feel, and they don’t require language for thinking. She cited a passage from the 2024 article, “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought,” by Fedorenko et al., stating that “although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.”
Animals also use visual thinking to solve problems, said Grandin. New things are attractive if an animal is allowed to approach them voluntarily—they react with curiosity because the new object is a novelty. However, sudden appearances or forced approaches are frightening, she explained. For example, she cited work that observed animals’ reactions to a children’s playset before and after it was rotated 90 degrees. The rotation caused the visual effect of a new object. In other words, she said, an umbrella is not equivalent to a tarp or a flag.
Through her work with cattle, Grandin discovered that cattle commonly refuse to move forward when there are sharp shadows in an alleyway, because the shadows on the ground look like danger. Similarly, a dark trailer represents a chasm into which they fear to fall. By carefully observing the conditions in which livestock are being handled, work can be more efficient and cause the animals less stress.
First Experiences Are Important
Because animals retain their first experiences with an object to form future expectations of similar objects, those first experiences are very important. She told the story of a horse that was frightened of black hats on a person’s head, particularly if that person was a man. Desensitizing the horse to black hats was difficult because animals’ fears are very specific, she added.
Creating conditions where animals remain calm and have good experiences reduces fear and makes them much easier to handle. This could include the use of food rewards, nonslip flooring, and careful construction of handling facilities. Because forced animal handling increases stress, she recommends training to create voluntary cooperation, which dramatically decreases stress in all parties. In addition, she advised acclimating animals to potentially frightening experiences and trying to ensure their first experiences are good ones.
Animals’ Core Emotions
Grandin explained that fear is the main emotion in autistic people, who have an enlarged amygdala; a 2020 University of Utah study revealed that the amygdala of individuals with autism is three times that of individuals without autism. She described the core emotions of animals as:
- Fear, based on the amygdala’s job of ensuring survival.
- Rage, often a reaction to fear or a competitive male drive.
- Panic, which is typically separation anxiety. Being in a herd increases survival chances, so being alone feels dangerous.
- Seeking, which creates the drive to approach novel objects.
- Lust, caring, and play.
Final Thoughts
Grandin warned against “bad becoming normal.” “Don’t reward bad behavior!” she urged. She exhorted the audience to always consider looking through the lens of the animal to understand them better.
Related Reading
- Disease Du Jour: Intersection of Equine Welfare and Veterinary Medicine
- The State of Sport Horse Welfare
- Disease Du Jour: Fear Free Veterinary Care
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