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Very different. For one thing there is a lot of research being done by people who are far more concerned with the welfare of the animals than they economics for the humans. These people are driving the animal welfare research agenda. People like Joseph Garner or Temple Grandin. Temple is world famous for her work on improving welfare in cattle slaughter plants. I met Joe back when he was a professor at Purdue. He has spent a lot of time working through the moral implications of various management techniques, cage size, environmental temperatures (performance ideal vs animal preferences), etc. His whole group at purdue were some of the most compassionate researchers I've ever known with regards to their research animals.

Your jaded view is just not consistent with the actual work being done by actual people I know in the field, or the actual changes I've witnessed in the last 15 years. I won't argue that we didn't need a kick in the ass, but there is a point where we should start to get credit for the progress we've made and the things we were already doing right, and I think that time has already come.

I have emphasized the importance of removing distractions that cause balking from cattle handling facilities.

How has technology been employed to automatically detect and either alert or mitigate potential distraction situations? For example, using sensors to alert when external sound and motion levels become an issue or when livestock shows above normal signs of stress. Another example might be the tailored use of CAD to design facilities that take into account "other common distractions [such as] reflections on shining metal or wet floors. In indoor facilities, a ceiling light to eliminate a reflection will improve animal movement."

I frequently think of the behaviors I see in terms of human behavior and human emotional responses even though I know that they are wrong. The motivation and perception of a pig is incredibly different from that of a human, even a child at a similar level of intellectual development. The perfect person to readup on to learn about how fundamentally damaging the "anthropomorphic" view is to our understanding of animals is Temple Grandin.

From what I have read, Temple Grandin does not support your arguments. From her essay Animals Are Not Things: A View on Animal Welfare Based on Neurological Complexity:

Science has shown that animals such as mammals and birds feel pain in a manner similar to humans. Insects, viruses and microbes are not able to feel pain or suffer. More research is needed to determine the extent that fishes and amphibians feel pain. Present research shows that they do experience fear. Fear is very aversive and animals should be shielded form situations that cause great fear. Fear will cause a great rise in stress hormones.
[...]
When the structure of the brain and nervous system is studied, there is no black and white line between people and higher mammals such as chimps, dogs or cows.
[...]
As nervous system and brain complexity increases the welfare needs of the animal increase and become more complex, but all animals that have sufficient nervous systems complexity to suffer from either pain or fear need basic welfare protections. Animals with complex brains also have greater social needs and a need for greater environmental enrichment.
[...]
It is obvious to me that intelligent animals such as elephants experience emotions that are more complex than simple pain or fear. They will need different legal protections than animals with simpler nervous systems. The degree of protection, and environmental and social enrichment an animal will require will be dependent on the level of complexity of its nervous system.

Her opinions do not support your assertion that "the motivation and perception of a pig is incredibly different from that of a human," or that animals do not resemble human behavior or emotional responses.

Temple Grandin. www.grandin.com. Fascinating person. Wrote a couple of books that are well worth reading.

Are you saying that the concept of 'Autism Spectrum Disorder' doesn't exist?

Of course not, the concept of walking through walls exists since there is more empty space in my body and the wall, but in my experience people don't walk through walls.

rocking back and forth in chairs

This is a symptom of a psychological problem, not a neuroligical one. Its very common for humans, especially those when psychologically hurt to rock back and forth. However, most humans grow out of that kind of behavior with socialization by the time they reach 9-10 years old, but some still do this kind of behavior when they are alone. Is there documentation of Bill Gates rocking back and forth in a chair as an adult in public? If so, then he has some pretty strong psychological problems. I've known people with mild terrets syndrome that could control their chirps and whatnot in public, but it wasn't worth their energy to do so with friends.

Oh, and what about Temple Grandin?

She is the poster child for autism, Asperger's, or something. After all, she has a PhD, and people that sell books for a living http://www.fhautism.com/ created a website for her, http://www.templegrandin.com/ so she must have it, or something right?

On her own, personal website, http://www.grandin.com/ she says she has a visual thinking problem _like_ some people that were not clinically diagnosed with autism here http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html .

Here is an interview with her where the editor and interviewer say over and over again she has autism, but the only instance where she says anything remotely that she has autistic-like features is "I can remember, after lunch, I had a rest period when I could revert to autism, and I would pick the fuzz off the rug and eat it, and dribble sand through my hands -- I can remember just getting hypnotized doing this. If I had been allowed to do that all day, I wouldn't be here now." If I had an child whose only problems in life were picking fuzz off of the rug and eating it, I would be grateful.

Here is another account by her regarding here visualization problems. http://www.autism.org/temple/visual.html In this article she alludes that she has autistic-like features, and to overcome these she says "I describe a squeeze machine I constructed to satisfy my craving for the feeling of being held. The machine was designed so that I could control the amount and duration of the pressure. It was lined with foam rubber and applied pressure over a large area of my body."

Now, I don't know how old she was when she created this squeeze machine, but this puts her in at least a 1 in a million category here. I've known people to make machines like robots and things as adults for intellectually stimulating (again about 1 in a million here, maybe 500,000) but I seriously doubt that any females I know have built a stimulating machine (most likely a vibrator) over buying one.

I will put Temple Grandin in at least a 1 in a million category, but being that nobody of authority, including herself definitively says she has autism, and being that over 99% of those with autism cannot speak, I would say its safer to say she is not autistic.

Are you saying that the concept of 'Autism Spectrum Disorder' doesn't exist?

Of course not, the concept of walking through walls exists since there is more empty space in my body and the wall, but in my experience people don't walk through walls.

rocking back and forth in chairs

This is a symptom of a psychological problem, not a neuroligical one. Its very common for humans, especially those when psychologically hurt to rock back and forth. However, most humans grow out of that kind of behavior with socialization by the time they reach 9-10 years old, but some still do this kind of behavior when they are alone. Is there documentation of Bill Gates rocking back and forth in a chair as an adult in public? If so, then he has some pretty strong psychological problems. I've known people with mild terrets syndrome that could control their chirps and whatnot in public, but it wasn't worth their energy to do so with friends.

Oh, and what about Temple Grandin?

She is the poster child for autism, Asperger's, or something. After all, she has a PhD, and people that sell books for a living http://www.fhautism.com/ created a website for her, http://www.templegrandin.com/ so she must have it, or something right?

On her own, personal website, http://www.grandin.com/ she says she has a visual thinking problem _like_ some people that were not clinically diagnosed with autism here http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html .

Here is an interview with her where the editor and interviewer say over and over again she has autism, but the only instance where she says anything remotely that she has autistic-like features is "I can remember, after lunch, I had a rest period when I could revert to autism, and I would pick the fuzz off the rug and eat it, and dribble sand through my hands -- I can remember just getting hypnotized doing this. If I had been allowed to do that all day, I wouldn't be here now." If I had an child whose only problems in life were picking fuzz off of the rug and eating it, I would be grateful.

Here is another account by her regarding here visualization problems. http://www.autism.org/temple/visual.html In this article she alludes that she has autistic-like features, and to overcome these she says "I describe a squeeze machine I constructed to satisfy my craving for the feeling of being held. The machine was designed so that I could control the amount and duration of the pressure. It was lined with foam rubber and applied pressure over a large area of my body."

Now, I don't know how old she was when she created this squeeze machine, but this puts her in at least a 1 in a million category here. I've known people to make machines like robots and things as adults for intellectually stimulating (again about 1 in a million here, maybe 500,000) but I seriously doubt that any females I know have built a stimulating machine (most likely a vibrator) over buying one.

I will put Temple Grandin in at least a 1 in a million category, but being that nobody of authority, including herself definitively says she has autism, and being that over 99% of those with autism cannot speak, I would say its safer to say she is not autistic.

Other way round. Temple Grandin is one of the foremost experts in slaughterhouse design, the first to design a slaughterhouse from a cow's perspective. The hug box is a spin-off from the meat industry where similar devices have been used for years as an aid to cattle handling. Temple noticed the calming effect of enveloping pressure on cattle and tried it for herself. She believes that autistic people can tell us a lot about animal behaviour and vice versa - her success in the field would suggest that she's right.

Here's the original hug machine the story refers to, if you're interested.
http://grandin.com/inc/intro-squeeze.html
Of course, Dr. Grandin also designs slaughterhouses.

You can have my captive bolt stun gun when you pry it from my cold-dead fingers ... Same goes for my baby seal club

Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding.

How Animals think?

I'd be interested in how you think.

This story reminds me of a fascinating interview I heard of Temple Grandin on NPR's Fresh Air. The interview is still available to stream online.

"Temple Grandin is one of the nation's top designers of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. In her 1995 book Thinking in Pictures, she described how her inner-autistic world led her to develop an empathy for how animals cope.

Temple Grandin is currently an assistant professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Her new book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior."

Or should it be, mod this whole idea "Flamebait".

Oh, come on, I admit it is an effective flamebait... can't... resist... posting... reply... arg...

From the article:
Berger expressed reservations about remote control hunting, but noted that humans have always adopted new technologies to hunt.

Technologies like: Barbed Wire Fenced Grazing Grounds and Slaughter Houses! He as a texan should know. This web enabled Slaughter house cannot be more efficient than the real thing.

Notice I didn't mention using machine guns to hunt !

The patent counts shows that they fast track and grease the skids for big corporations and they put the individual apps through the slow track. Patents don't measure innovation for many categories of technologies, products and processes.

That autistic cattle woman made huge innovations in slaughterhouse design because of her personal understanding of livestock POV. Revolutionary, cost cutting designs that any corporation would be shouting about from never ending roadshows. But did she patent this stuff? Could she?

It can also be argued that the most innovative ideas from within corporations are suppressed or rejected because they can't tolerate recurring obsolesce of their product lines, they can only tolerate incremental evolution in most cases.

Can an individual create innovation in the fringes of an area like silicon wafer fabrication without several million dollars worth of equipment? No, probably not, but for instance, the problem of screw induced cavitation (highly and expensively studied by the US Navy) took a major leap forward because an individual came up with an innovative solution on his own.

Patent counts have no relationship to true innovation.