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Animal Welfare and Autism Advocate Temple Grandin to Speak Feb. 21

The talk will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Baldwin Auditorium

Best-selling author Temple Grandin, who changed the livestock industry by designing humane handling facilities that are now used around the world, will speak at Duke University on Monday, Feb. 21.

Grandin's talk, "My Experience with Animals," will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Baldwin Auditorium, on Duke's East Campus. The event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. They can be obtained by contacting the Duke University Box Office at (919) 684-4444 or tickets@duke.edu.

A professor in animal science at Colorado State University, Grandin is an animal behavior consultant to the livestock industry and a philosophical leader in both the animal welfare and autism advocacy movements. She is also the subject of the 2010 Emmy Award-winning HBO film "Temple Grandin," a semi-biographical account of her life as a high-functioning person with autism.

Her books include "The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's" and "Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals."

Last spring she received an honorary doctorate from Duke. She also has been named a member of The 2010 Time 100, a listing of the most influential people in the world.

Her design of a center track restrainer system is used at nearly half of all cattle-handling facilities in North America. Grandin's other designs for cattle handling are used worldwide and her writings on the principles of grazing animal behavior have helped people reduce stress on the animals during handling.

***The event is part of the Women's Studies' 2010-11 theme "Animals and the Question of Species":

"At no point in history have humans used animals the way we use them in America today. Advocating for animals has come into focus as a new social movement both inside and outside the academy. We are challenged to think about the limits of feminism when it cannot think beyond the human species while questions are raised for feminist scholarship concerning the model of rights, ethics, and survival that have previously dominated our terrain of inquiry. Throughout the year Women's Studies has engaged the emerging fields of Posthumanism and Human Animal Studies and we have put these fields in conversation with gender and feminism with a variety of events, projects and courses."