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[MUSIC PLAYING] DEBORAH AMOS: From Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News, I'm Deborah Amos. And this is an American RadioWorks special report, fast food and animal rights, McDonald's new farm.

BRUCE FRIEDRICH: A corporation, for the first time, is taking responsibility for the suffering of animals. And it's a corporation on the size and scale of McDonald's. So it is an unprecedented positive move forward for animals in the United States of America.

DEBORAH AMOS: The company that symbolizes fast food nation shakes up America's farms.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: If cattle or pigs are backing up in the chute all the time and backing up and backing up, get rid of the things that scare them. Don't get out more electric prods.

DEBORAH AMOS: In the coming hour, a special report from American RadioWorks, the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. First, this news update.

Welcome back to our special report from American RadioWorks. I'm Deborah Amos. We're going to tell you a surprising story this hour. It's about how one of the world's most popular and despised corporations has decided to help lead a movement for social change.

When critics talk about the evils of globalization, they often point to McDonald's. They say the company is peddling fat and homogenizing diets and exploiting workers. You know the arguments. So when McDonald's executives announced recently that they're going to revamp the food industry in ways that activists have been demanding for decades, they stunned their critics. And they made a lot of farmers angry. McDonald's is demanding that farms and slaughterhouses treat animals more humanely. Daniel Zwerdling reports.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Until a few months ago, the executives who run McDonald's would never have let you pass through this doorway.

ROSALIND ZILLES: Are we ready to work in?

DANIEL ZWERDLING: We're about to go into one of the hen houses that produce the eggs that McDonald's turns into breakfast. And company executives know that the typical hen house in America makes a rather disturbing sight. But McDonald's is pressuring farmers to change things now. And the company feels proud to show what they've done.

As we enter the building, it looks more like a factory at first than a farm.

HERB PURBROOK: So what we're looking at here is a conveyor with-- the eggs is coming out of all the chicken houses that are here currently. As you can see, the eggs are going overhead but this conveyor goes that way about 1,000 feet.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Herb Purbrook and his brothers run this egg business on a country road in Michigan. They've been supplying McDonald's for years and it's an incredible operation. As we walk along the conveyor belt, we pass row after row of shelves that reach from the floor to way up near the ceiling. Every row disappears into the distance. There are 400 feet long. And every shelf is stacked with wire cages filled with snow white chickens. Steve Herbeck says their cages hold 1.4 million chickens to be exact.

STEVE HERBECK: The floors that the hands set on are slightly sloped about 6 degrees. So there's a natural gravity and the eggs then roll out from under the hens onto a 4 inch belt. There are somewheres in the neighborhood of 40 miles of 4 inch belts on this site.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: You're going to have to imagine what these hens used to look like before McDonald's new policies took effect. And one of the most respected animal scientists in the country has come to this farm to explain it. Joy Mench runs the Center for Animal Welfare at the University of California.

She says, first, let's talk about the crowding. Until a few months ago, the family that runs this farm crammed at least eight hens into every single cage. And each cage is about the size of a drawer, 20 inches, wide 19 inches deep. Mench says this is standard practice. Some farmers put more hens than that.

JOY MENCH: When there are eight birds in a cage this size, the bird barely has room to stand. And even then, she's really compressed. There are a lot of birds pressing against her and turning around is really difficult. And a really important thing about this as well, probably one of the main reasons that crowded hens experience a lot of illness, is there's not enough space for all the birds to feed at the same time. And if you're a low ranking bird, low on the peck order, you tend to get pushed to the back during feeding and you can't get enough food. So quite often, the lowest ranking bird in that cage gets sick and dies.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Second, Mench says the hens you'd see on most egg farms wouldn't have any beaks. The farmers cut them off. So you'd see a hen face with a stump. The farmers do that because when chickens get crowded together, they develop abnormal behavior. They can peck each other to death. But Mench says studies show that when you cut off their beaks, the hens suffer their whole lives.

JOY MENCH: Chickens explore their environment with their beaks. They like to pick things up, and that's their main way of exploring and touching and feeling things.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So cutting off the beak is a big deal if you're a hen.

JOY MENCH: It's definitely a big deal.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And Mench says here's another big deal. Most farmers take away all the bird's food when the hens are about one-year-old. The hens literally have nothing to eat for as long as two weeks. Industry researchers developed this method in the 1950s and '60s.

The birds get all skinny and quiet and they lose their feathers. Then the farmers suddenly start feeding them again and it shocks the bird's system and they lay eggs better for a while. The industry calls the practice forced molting. Mench describes it from another perspective.

JOY MENCH: The bird is starved. Yes, the bird is starved. I don't like to see hungry animals not being given food.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Animal rights groups have said for decades that methods like these are cruel. Farmers and industry executives have said for decades that the activists are kooks. So the agriculture industry was stunned recently when McDonald's delivered its verdict. The company declared that every farm that supplies its eggs must raise the hens more humanely. And they gave farmers less than 18 months to comply.

In fact, McDonald's told farmers they had to change by January 1 this year or the company wouldn't buy their eggs anymore. And McDonald's buys more eggs than any other company in America.

The egg industry was furious. Industry leaders told McDonald's, you can't make farmers change that fast. But McDonald's wouldn't budge. The brothers who run this farm don't want to talk about the conflicts. They will say that they're doing what McDonald's wants, and it's going to cost money.

HERB PURBROOK: Well, it's-- any change is readjusting our entire system to adapt to it and understand it, to take advantage of a change if you can, and to deal with any negatives that are and restrict the negatives. So the jury is out. We're still learning. We're in a learning curve. And this has been an ongoing effort to get better.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So can you give us a rough figure how much have you had to spend so far to meet these guidelines?

HERB PURBROOK: Well, we're-- the project is still ongoing. We don't have any complete information.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So far.

HERB PURBROOK: A lot. Millions.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: A McDonald's executive is visiting the farm on this particular morning and he won't say how much the changes are costing his company either.

BOB LANGERT: That's proprietary as competitive information. So we don't release that information.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Bob Langert helps shape McDonald's animal welfare policies and put them into effect.

BOB LANGERT: In terms of a framework, this all starts with implementing the best animal welfare practices. It's doing the right thing. I think cost is a part of the whole process. It's a part that we're all still trying to figure out. And we'll figure this out. We'll figure this out in collaboration with our suppliers.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Industry sources say McDonald's will pay its suppliers more money for their eggs to cover the costs of these changes. Some estimate is going to cost McDonald's at least $10 million. In other words, the symbol of the fast food nation has decided to invest millions to make life better for hens.

SPEAKER: Can I have a Big Mac meal large.

SPEAKER: One here to go.

SPEAKER: One to go.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Bob Langert says McDonald's new animal welfare policies won't seem so surprising if you realize that the company's always been willing to listen to critics and learn from them. To make his point, Langert takes me to one of the company's 29,000 restaurants. This one's in a Chicago suburb.

BOB LANGERT: Well, let me just show you how we brought the environment to life in a restaurant. The normal customer coming here doesn't maybe realize all the things that we've done on the environment.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Remember how people used to nickname the company Mctoxics. The country was littered with their Styrofoam containers. Back in the 1980s, environmental activists approached McDonald's executives. The activists said, if you'll stop treating us like enemies, we'll help you stop polluting and your company will save money and get good publicity. Besides, Langert says the project took off.

BOB LANGERT: So if you look behind the counter here--

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Langert picks up a stack of Happy Meal bags near the cash register.

BOB LANGERT: Now, look at this bag. What do you notice that's different?

DANIEL ZWERDLING: It's an off white.

BOB LANGERT: It's an off white. It's a gray. And it's made from-- you can see we label it as made with 65% post-consumer recycled paper. Now, what that means we use the stuff that you put out on the curb, your magazines, your newspapers, that's what goes into making our Happy Meal bags. By buying it, we're encouraging more recycling.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Environmental researchers confirm that McDonald's has done more to recycle and cut waste than almost any corporation in America. And Langert says when animal rights activists approached McDonald's in the early 1990s, executives were willing to learn from them. The activists told McDonald's about those starving chickens. They said slaughterhouse workers sometimes cut up animals while they're still alive.

The activists told the company, you need to take responsibility. Force your suppliers to change now. At first, McDonald's refused. And Langert says, don't get the wrong impression. Company executives took the issue seriously. But he says a corporation can't change overnight.

BOB LANGERT: Too often, I think, outside groups are looking for a quick fix, very quick fix. And a quick fix, by definition, is quick. It's short term. It's not lasting. Because what really makes change-- and this is something I've learned over the years-- what really makes change is getting at the heart of people, getting at the heart and feelings and emotions of people we deal with.

We don't want to prescribe and dictate change. We want our suppliers, our staff, our employees, our owner operators to want to do these changes, to, feel it in their heart and their soul and their belly. And what you need to do is you need to dedicate time. Time is needed.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So company executives started studying the animal welfare issue and talking with activists about it. And talking and negotiating. More than six years went by, the company was still talking. But then, McDonald's began facing other pressures.

SPEAKER: Shut McDonald's down. Shut McDonald's down. Shut McDonald's down.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The movement against globalization was taking off. Protesters wanted McDonald's to leave their countries alone. They firebombed its restaurants in Belgium. They set off stink bombs in Poland. Meanwhile, McDonald's business started to stumble for various reasons. Competitors like Wendy's and Burger King chipped away at its market share. McDonald's profits and stock started slipping and company executives started doing some soul searching.

According to industry magazines at the time, the executives wondered, how can they rejuvenate McDonald's? How can they save the company's legacy as the most popular food business in the world? Just as company executives were mulling that over, the animal rights issue came back to bite them.

SPEAKER: Animal rights groups say that McDonald's is serving more than just hamburgers and they claim it's distasteful. The group delivered that message at the drive-through today to--

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The activists had lost their patience and they declared war.

SPEAKER: Two members of an animal rights group ordered chaos at this McDonald's drive-through window. They chained themselves to the window, blocking access for the noontime lunch crowd. The group was symbolically dressed in chicken and pig costumes.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: You wouldn't think that protesters dressed like animals could have much cloud against McDonald's. But there they were on the streets of Salt Lake City. The year was 1997. Over the next few years, activists would be chanting at hundreds of McDonald's across the country. They said the farms that supply the fast food chain abused chickens and other animals and it was time for McDonald's to make them stop.

SPEAKER: Boycott Mcmurder. There's no excuse for animal abuse. Boycott murder

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The demonstrations were organized by PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Remember them? A lot of people say, yeah, right. There that fringe group that throws blood on furs. But this time, PETA protesters were passing out brightly colored cardboard boxes to customers heading for McDonald's.

If you glanced quickly, the boxes looked like a McDonald's Happy Meal promotion, big cheerful letters, a drawing of the grinning clown. But then you look closely, it read, unhappy meal, and Ronald McDonald was swinging an ax. When you opened the box, you didn't find a hamburger. There were plastic animals painted with fake blood.

The man who runs McDonald's denounced the protests as tasteless and dishonest. But when the woman who runs PETA looks back on it today, she says McDonald's was on the ropes. Ingrid Newkirk.

INGRID NEWKIRK: Just the very idea that we had taken their trademark Happy Meal and converted it into an unhappy meal frightened them. Suddenly, they didn't want children coming near the restaurant where they would see Peter protester standing in the kiddie playgrounds with the unhappy meal in hand. That sent a chill up McDonald's spine.

DEBORAH AMOS: We'll come back to McDonald's new farm in a moment and later in the program, taking fear out of the slaughterhouse.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: If cattle or pigs are backing up in the shoot all the time and backing up and backing up, get rid of the things that scare them. Don't get out more electric prods.

DEBORAH AMOS: You're listening to a Special Report from American RadioWorks, the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. I'm Deborah Amos.

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Our program continues in just a moment from NPR, National Public Radio.

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And now, back to our special report from American RadioWorks, fast food and animal rights. I'm Deborah Amos. The activists at the group called PETA go after some of the most powerful companies in the US. They're trying to change the way the country treats animals. Some say, they've won their latest victory against a Goliath of corporate America, McDonald's. Daniel Zwerdling continues our report.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Forget the image of scruffy protesters working out of someone's apartment. PETA started that way 20 years ago but visit their headquarters today. PETA owns a sleek office building with huge windows that look out over the harbor in Norfolk, Virginia. There are muted oil paintings, charcoal gray carpets, dozens of employees working their computers. When some of the staff gathered to plan the fight against yet another corporation, they lay out the same kinds of strategies you'd use in a political campaign. They've become masters at the internet.

SPEAKER: One of the things that we can do is with our email activist or our action alerts. We have more than 1.5 million visitors a month.

SPEAKER: So that people could go to the website, they could see the poster, they could download it, and then they could just make it work in their community.

SPEAKER: It's activism made easy. Just to be able to download that--

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And the record suggests there are tactics often work. PETA went after Calvin Klein for promoting furs and he stopped. PETA attacked General Motors and Gillette for using animals in safety tests. Both corporations stopped. PETA's President, Ingrid Newkirk, says they eventually want the world to give animals the same rights as people. But in the meantime, they'll pressure companies that symbolize an industry to treat animals a little better.

INGRID NEWKIRK: It was pretty easy to settle on McDonald's because they're the giant of the fast food industry and their name is instantly recognizable all over the world. And the numbers of animals they use to go into those burgers and those egg McMuffins is just extraordinary. So we knew that if we could get McDonald's to change, which was no easy task, that the other fast food restaurants might fall like Skittles.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The way PETA saw it, McDonald's was vulnerable. Consumers over in Europe were all fired up about animal welfare. They were getting their governments to pass laws that told food companies exactly how to raise their animals. Industry officials back in this country were worried that the same thing would happen here. So PETA figured that McDonald's executives had a choice.

They could seem to drag their feet on animal welfare, PETA would keep harassing them and eventually lawmakers might order industry to change or McDonald's could lead the campaign for animal welfare and they'd impress consumers as the company that cares. Maybe they'd head off legislation.

Three years after PETA launched its protests, McDonald's became the first major food company to tell farmers, you have to treat animals more humanely. McDonald's executives like Bob Langert say PETA had nothing to do with it.

BOB LANGERT: No, I think exactly the opposite.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Bob Langert says, come on. McDonald's has been studying animal welfare issues for years. He says the company would have announced its policy even if PETA had never launched protests.

BOB LANGERT: I think those tactics are not effective towards educating the public. As a matter of fact, they're not accurate. So they tend to provide only misinformation that doesn't help the cause.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But sources in the business community say, of course, PETA helped the cause. If the cause is getting McDonald's to promote animal welfare, they say it's nonsense to say PETA was irrelevant. Industry analysts also say that both sides deserve credit. They say PETA pressured McDonald's at just the right time, and the company's executives had the vision to act. Bruce Friedrich led PETA's war on McDonald's. Now, he's praising them.

BRUCE FRIEDRICH: A corporation, for the first time, is taking responsibility for the suffering of animals. And it's a corporation on the size and scale of McDonald's. So it is an unprecedented, positive move forward for animals in the United States of America.

Up until the point of the McDonald's negotiations, nobody was really in the mainstream, no corporations were talking about animal welfare in any serious way. The government wasn't talking about animal welfare in any serious way. It changes the whole societal discussion of how animals should be treated.

ROSALIND ZILLES: And these birds you can see as we're standing here are getting a lot more interested in us. And they're starting to face us now. They're curious. They want to know what we're doing.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Back at the egg farm in Michigan, the team with McDonald's is looking back at the hens. They're checking how the farmers are complying with the new animal welfare guidelines. And this is one of the keys to the company's program. Inspectors from the food industry will visit all the operations that sell eggs to McDonald's and they'll enforce the policy.

ROSALIND ZILLES: The main thing I'm looking at is I take a long view down the middle of the aisle. So we can step to the left here.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: One of the inspectors is Rosalind Zilles.

ROSALIND ZILLES: And I'm smelling things and just getting acclimated to walking in here. And I'm looking to see, are the birds eating? Is there feed in the troughs? What's the general condition right now?

DANIEL ZWERDLING: She says conditions on this farm have always been good compared to a lot of farms around the country. But still, these farmers had to get better. McDonald's told all their suppliers to take roughly half the hens out of the cages by January 1 this year so the birds have a little room to move. That mean that every farmer has to build more hen houses and buy thousands of extra cages.

ROSALIND ZILLES: The next thing that I do is I start bird counts. So in this cage, we've got five birds in here. And we're looking to see that the care takers aren't just putting an extra bird here and there without thinking about where they're putting the birds.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And McDonald's told the farmers to stop so-called forced molting. According to the guidelines, they can't ever take food away from the hens again. One of the scientists who helped write these guidelines is Joy Mench from the University of California.

McDonald's asked Mench and other respected researchers to tell the company how to change. Mench says they persuaded McDonald's to ban another common practice. Farmers can't cut off the hen's beaks anymore. They can only snip off the tips. Mench is following Rosalind Zilles to see how the inspection is working.

JOY MENCH: What would you do if you found a certain percentage of birds with-- I mean, what would be the remedial steps if there were problems with the beak trimming?

ROSALIND ZILLES: One of the things that we really have worked on up front is making sure loud and clear that the beak trimming is a very, very important issue here. And if they had a bad beak program, that would probably be almost a disqualifier from the get go.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Joy Mench says, if you were a hen, your life would be better now. No question about that. But she says the industry has a long way to go. The farm tour is over now. The McDonald's team has gone home. And Mench processing what she's just seen. She says these birds still don't have enough room to do all kinds of things that hens like to do. They can't flap their wings or preen or even hop on a perch.

JOY MENCH: It bothers me, but I don't think that we have a good alternative.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Mench says researchers haven't figured out yet how farmers can raise hens more naturally and still make a profit, except when they do it on a small scale. And she says McDonald's is just beginning to think about how they can improve the lives of other animals and the food industry, like the chickens that you eat and cattle and hogs.

And if you think that McDonald's food has too much fat in it or they underpay their workers, then the company's campaign for animal welfare might really seem like a small step. But Joy Mench says anybody who works with farm animals will tell you that it's a crucial step.

JOY MENCH: McDonald's is moving pretty quickly considering how major the changes that have to occur. And I really think that the best approach to this is to work with animal welfare scientists and to work with the supplier producer community so that everybody works together on the change.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So when you think of all the years you've spent researching chickens-- how many years?

JOY MENCH: 20.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Can you compare the changes that have occurred in the last two years to the changes in the previous 18?

JOY MENCH: Yes, there were no changes in the previous 18. They've all taken place in the last couple of years. So it's like after a lot of years of talking about it, all of a sudden-- it really just changed almost overnight.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And now other companies in the food industry are trying to catch up, which is just what PETA was hoping.

DEBORAH AMOS: Daniel Zwerdling will take us back to McDonald's in a moment to see how the company is influencing life and death in the nation's slaughterhouses. But first, Terrie Dort joins us now to explore why the rest of the food industry is beginning to think about animal welfare. Dort is President of the National Council of Chain Restaurants, the industry trade association. She joins us from NPR studio in Washington DC. Welcome, Terrie Dort.

TERRIE DORT: Thank you.

DEBORAH AMOS: It's unusual to find that McDonald's and the animal rights activists are working together. So how did they get those other companies to take the same path as McDonald's? Was it pressure by both the company and the activists?

TERRIE DORT: I think the McDonald's action was a real catalyst for getting the other companies involved. But yes, there was pressure from the activist community in that they began sending letters to pretty much all of the other big players in the industry saying, this is what McDonald's has done. And then, of course, that was quickly also followed by Burger King.

And there was pressure then put on the other companies to state for the record what are your policies? How do you negotiate these things with your suppliers? What are you requiring of your suppliers? And that's really when the other companies decided that there should be some policies out there. And that's really what we've been working on over the past year and a half.

And we will put those out as voluntary guidelines that we are asking all of our companies to follow when they are choosing, in fact, who they're going to be using as their suppliers.

DEBORAH AMOS: When this is a voluntary program, do you expect that the animal rights activists will make sure that different companies do comply?

TERRIE DORT: Well, we intend to implement shortly thereafter an auditing program that the industry will be-- we'll be putting in place an audit program going out to the farms and making sure that these suppliers are complying. So please be assured, this is not about trying to satisfy PETA. This is really about trying to do the right thing on an issue that we feel strongly about and again, we feel that the steps that we're taking are the appropriate ones. And we're not looking at this as an endgame to try to satisfy the activists because we're not going to.

DEBORAH AMOS: I know that this is a McDonald's initiative, and that's what got the ball rolling. And they worked with animal rights activists. How much do you think, though, that public opinion, the more general public opinion, about how animals are treated in the food that we all eat, how much did that play a role in change?

TERRIE DORT: I think there was a concern. My companies report to me that customers were calling in and they weren't necessarily-- there wasn't any indication that people were going to change the way they were eating. They weren't going to become vegetarian. They weren't going to stop frequenting the stores. But they did have a concern that-- they wanted to be assured that the animals were being treated humanely.

They didn't really want to know about it. They didn't want a lot of details. But they didn't want to have to be seeing these awful pictures in the newspapers and on the billboards and on the sides of buses that, I think, most of us saw in the big cities. So there was some level of concern that they wanted this issue to go away and they wanted us to manage it. And I think that was somewhat also of an impetus to get the company's attention.

DEBORAH AMOS: Thanks a lot.

TERRIE DORT: Thank you.

DEBORAH AMOS: Terrie Dort is President of the National Council of Chain Restaurants. She's been speaking to us from Washington DC. When the executives who run McDonald's decided to transform the business of killing to make it more humane, they turned to a remarkable woman to help them.

She has a mental disorder which she says helps her understand what makes animals frightened or calm. In fact, company executives say they couldn't have launched their campaign without the woman whom some call queen of the slaughterhouse. Daniel Zwerdling continues our report.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Temple Grandin is convinced that she knows how animals feel during their final moments in the slaughterhouse. And she's harnessing that power to ease the moment when millions of animals die. In some ways, you can glimpse her connection with the animals if you join her at the end of the day after she's finished another inspection for a McDonald's.

Grandin goes home to her condo in Fort Collins, Colorado. And she's so speedy. She's so wired from working and traveling and watching all the slaughter that she walks to her cramped bedroom and she goes to her machine.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Now, this is the squeezing machine. Now, I've got to turn the compressor on to make it work. I'm just going to make a great big racket. After I use the squeeze machine, I'll have nicer dreams, get that nice feeling of being held.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Temple Grandin is autistic. Some therapy clinics use this machine, which she invented, when they treat autistic children. The machine stands about waist high right next to her single bed. There are two slabs of wood like padded tabletops propped in the shape of a long V. Grandin lies face down the entire length of the V so the slabs cradle her body. And then she works a hydraulic lever that forces the slabs to squeeze her.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: And I can control the pressure.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Now that she's an adult, Grandin is what researchers call a high functioning autistic. She's a high functioning person, period. She's written two memoirs and appeared on national TV. And she travels around the world giving speeches.

But she's struggled her whole life to achieve that. Grandin says she used to attack people and rages. She almost blinded a student who made fun of her. She bit a teacher's leg and made it bleed. Grandin said she'd freak when people touched her.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: I would just jump. It would be like touching a wild animal. You touch a wild animal, it makes that wild animal jump. People would touch me and I would just pull away. The way my nervous system reacts when I panic is just like the nervous system of a cattle or a horse when they panic.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But then animals showed her the way to soothe her demons. Grandin says when she was a teenager, she was visiting a relative's cattle ranch in Colorado. And when she walked down to the corral one day, the cowboys were herding the animals into something called a squeeze chute. It had movable wooden walls that would clamp around the cow so the cowboys could give it a vaccination. And Grandin says as she watched the strange machinery envelop the animals, she was transfixed. She suddenly realized, ah, she'd been craving intense pressure like that her whole life.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: I thought, well, I've got to try out this cattle squeeze chute because when I got into puberty started having terrible problems with constant anxiety and I was just desperate to get relief, and I noticed that some of the cattle would just sort of relaxed. So I talked my aunt into putting me into the cattle squeeze chute. And for about 45 minutes afterwards, I was a whole lot calmer.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And when Grandin got older, she built this squeeze chute for herself. So Grandin feels grateful to cattle. They showed her the way to relax when she's feeling most afraid. And now, she's devoting her life to helping relax the cattle just before they lose their lives.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Yeah. And it's starting to work, starting to really relax now.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: It's 9:00 AM on a chilly morning. Grandin has just arrived at the Excel Slaughterhouse on the plains of Colorado, right next to the tracks that carry the state's grain and coal. Excel is one of McDonald's biggest suppliers. And Grandin has come to inspect whether they're killing animals humanely. The staff is already waiting.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: What's happening?

SPEAKER: You're late.

SPEAKER: How are you?

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Yeah.

SPEAKER: Good to see.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Grandin's wearing her usual outfit. She looks like a ranch hand from a 1940s Western. Blue jeans and boots and a cowgirl shirt which she always buttons at the neck. And she wears a Western kerchief like a tie. She says she doesn't have patience for makeup or small talk.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: You want to go around this way.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Grandin strides toward the edge of the plant where she wants to begin the inspection and the manager of the plant trails behind. His name is Mike Chabot. He says when he first met Temple Grandin, he thought she was strange.

MIKE CHABOT: She is strange. She's an autistic savant too. She was a consultant for Dustin Hoffman and the Rain Man. So I mean, people around the world know that's the way she is.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Grandin still seems to live in her own world. Even when she's talking with you, she looks everywhere but in your eyes. Chabot says he met Grandin in the 1980s before she ever inspected this plant for McDonald's. He was running another slaughterhouse and Grandin was designing squeeze chutes for handling cattle.

MIKE CHABOT: She came to me and said that she'd worked on a different system, a different restrainer system, and that she truly thought it would work. Would we be willing to take the risk?

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Did you and your colleagues, did some of them say, why are we bringing in this woman to our business?

MIKE CHABOT: I don't know. She was one of those people that when you sat down and talked to her, that she was so totally committed to doing what she wanted to do that I felt you had to try it. It was just driven on somebody saying, I know this would be better. I know we can make it work. And Temple and I struck up a relationship that will last the rest of my life, I'm sure.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And now, Grandin is ready to begin her inspection. By the end of the morning, she'll know if this plant is mistreating animals or if the cattle are going to a calm and painless death.

DEBORAH AMOS: We'll join temple Grandin's inspection in a moment. Major funding for American RadioWorks comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the members of Minnesota Public Radio. To listen to this program again or to print a transcript, visit our website americanradioworks.org.

You'll find slideshows and inspection results from the egg farm and the slaughterhouse. You'll also find an archive of American RadioWorks documentaries and learn how to order a cassette copy of this program. That's americanradioworks.org.

You're listening to fast food and animal rights, McDonald's new farm. A special report from American RadioWorks, the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. I'm Deborah Amos. Our program continues in just a moment from NPR, National Public Radio.

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And now we conclude our Special Report from American RadioWorks, fast food and animal rights. I'm Deborah Amos. Temple Grandin says she can't even begin to estimate how many thousands of cattle she's watched as they die. Over the last few years, the McDonald's fast food chain has sent Grandin to slaughterhouses across the country to see if they're conducting the business of killing humanely. Daniel Zwerdling joined Grandin as she inspected the Excel Slaughterhouse on the plains of Colorado.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: From the outside, the slaughterhouse almost looks like a car factory. Semis keep pulling up to an unloading dock. There are windowless buildings and smokestacks. But there's also a greasy cloying smell in the air plus a labyrinth of fences and pens stretched from the unloading dock about 100 yards to the plant.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, let's just start looking at truck unloading. They're just unloading a bunch of cattle right now.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Grandin walks to the rear of the semi as it backs up to the edge of the pen. The driver hops out of the cab and opens the double doors. And steers pour down the ramp like black boulders. Grandin looks down at her clipboard at the first item on her inspection list. She needs to stand here for a few minutes and count the cattle that go [VOCALIZING] or as Grandin's checklist describes it, what percentage of cattle are vocalizing?

Temple Grandin invented this system for inspecting a slaughterhouse. Nobody had ever done anything like it before.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: It's got to be simple. You cannot have an audit with 50 different things to measure where it would take the McDonald's auditor a week to do the audit. That just would be impossible.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So she studied thousands of animals in slaughterhouses. And she looked for five crucial clues that reveal if they're calm or stressed. Grandin says the more she listened to cattle, the more she realized that their moos tell you how they feel.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: I just started checking off, did the animal moo? Yes or no. And then, was that moo associated with an obviously bad event? And I found that 98% of the cattle that mooed had a real good reason for doing it. And I go, boy, that's going to really work. Vocalization scoring separates a plant that's got big problems from a plant that doesn't.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And Grandin says this plant used to have problems. The drivers would shout at the cattle to shoo them off the trucks. The cattle would get scared and balk. So the drivers would shout louder and the cattle would bellow so much they'd practically drown you out.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: One of the things that's been really important on improving handling is to get rid of all the yelling and screaming and whistling because cattle have got very sensitive ears. So one of the things I've worked on is getting people to keep their mouths shut when they're moving cattle.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But decades of Western movies, that's what cowboys do. They yell. They whistle.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, we need to get rid of that yelling cause it just gets the cattle all excited. In fact, in Canada, researchers have done two studies that show that yelling and screaming at cattle is really stressful. Yelling and screaming will raise the heart rate more than just the sound of metal banging and clanging.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Grandin says the slaughterhouse has changed its ways. According to her inspection system, if only 3% of the cattle vocalize, it shows that most of them are calm. The sound of silence, except for the hooves.

Temple Grandin is the most unusual crusader in a long line of Americans who've tried to make slaughterhouses more humane. Congress passed a law that forbids cruel practices back in the 1950s. But Grandin's own studies show that a lot of slaughterhouses ignore that. She surveyed major meat plants for the US Agriculture Department only around six years ago and she reported that most of them did a brutal job of killing.

Grandin says she also discovered that a lot of industry executives don't care unless she can prod them to leave their offices and see the problems.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: I can remember the day when one of the managers saw chickens. And we had gone to chicken plant and I found a live chicken in the garbage can. And the people that were with me were really horrified. But I remember another incident I was out with some managers.

And we visited a hog farm. And there was a half dead pig laying in the alley. And he'd been there for a good long time. And the manager of the farm just walked our tour group, right over the half dead pig. You know, it's like they become totally desensitized and they don't even see it. Bad had become normal.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Which brings us to McDonald's. More than a decade ago, activists from animal rights groups went to the company's executives. And they said, look, obviously, the government's not doing its job regulating slaughterhouses. But you're the most powerful food company in the world. You could force slaughterhouses to change.

One of the McDonald's executives who dealt with the activists is a man named Bob Langert. He's flown out from company headquarters on this day to watch the inspection. And Langert acknowledges that he and his colleagues resisted the activists at first. But eventually, an activist convinced him to call Temple Grandin. And Langert says she changed everything.

BOB LANGERT: The thing I love about Temple, she cannot be dishonest. It's impossible for Temple to be dishonest. She could care less about statements and rhetoric. And everything about her is in terms of getting results.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: He says until Grandin came along, all he kept hearing was rhetoric. The activists kept telling him, slaughterhouses are cruel. They should be more humane. But Langert says McDonald's needed more than that. They needed to learn how to measure brutality so they could figure out how to fix it.

Remember, McDonald's built its empire on measurements. They know if employees do a good job or not based on how many seconds they take to make a Big Mac. And Langert says Temple Grandin's inspection system brings that same kind of science to the slaughterhouse.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: OK, now, we're just walking up now to a pen of cattle.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: By now, the latest batch of cattle has come off the truck.

HERB PURBROOK: And you'll notice the animals are watching us.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And Grandin tackles the next item on her inspection list. How often do workers shock the cattle with electric prods?

TEMPLE GRANDIN: I got to remember watching a guy take an electric prod and shove it down a cow's throat. That was absolutely horrible.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And Grandin says most slaughterhouses rely on electric prods to make the animals walk through the pens until they actually get to the plant. Her scorecard flunks a plant if more than a quarter of the cattle get shocked.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: One of the things that's been difficult to get a lot of people to understand is that you can use behavior to move your animal rather than force. If cattle or pigs are backing up in the chute all the time and backing up and backing up, get rid of the things that scare them. Don't get out more electric prods.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Temple Grandin says when animals get scared, she relates to them. That's how she experienced the world growing up autistic. A blackboard pointer made her panic. But she couldn't say what bothered her. She didn't speak a word until she was three.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, I can remember on the frustration of not being able to talk. And I was at school the speech therapist had-- and when it was time for another child's turn, she'd point the pointer, the blackboard pointer, at me. And I remember what the pointer looked like. It was one of those wooden pointers that's about 2.5 feet long with a rubber tip on it. So it looks like a bullet on the end. And then I would scream.

The school bell. The school bell going off, that hurt my ears. It was like a dentist drill going down my ears. I sometimes scream, fling myself on the floor. It's like I still have the old antipredator circuits that all of the animals have. It's like some of that old animal nervous system is more prevalent in me than it is in most other people.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But as Grandin got older, she slowly climbed out of her hell. She went to college and got good grades. She worked at a farming magazine in a stockyards. She got a PhD in animal science and started writing landmark studies on animal behavior. And Grandin began designing machinery for slaughterhouses across the country.

Then around 10 years ago, Grandin says she had a revelation and it crystallized her calling. A slaughterhouse in Alabama called her and said they urgently needed help. So she flew down to their plant.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Oh, this plant was an absolute nightmare. They would run the cattle up a single file chute and run them into a box that had a floor on about a 45 degree angle. And the poor cattle would just fall down. They'd then loop a chain around the back foot, drag the beast out across the floor, hang them up. He'd be bellowing. [VOCALIZING]

I said this is the most gruesome, the most absolutely awful thing that I saw. I started to get mad. But what I've learned, I can't just have a tantrum. But when I get mad, I get spurred into action

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Grandin ripped out the machinery and she built a new kind of squeeze chute to hold the animals gently. In fact, she modeled the controls on the one she built for her own squeeze machine back in her bedroom in Colorado. The day she tried out her new system, Grandin herself took the controls. And when the cattle stepped forward and they slit the animals throats, she realized that everything she'd been working toward her whole life really did make a difference. Grandin made a difference in those animals' lives at the final moment when it counts.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: I did not look at the controls. It was sort of like the box became an extension of my hands. It's almost like I could reach through the machine and hold the animal. And the thing that amazed me is you could take the two parts of the head restrainer and if the animal's head wasn't in the right position, I could just reach out there and-- through the machine-- and move his head around, and he just let me do it. You could keep the animal completely calm.

And it was extremely hot in Alabama. And I had no feeling of the heat. I'd get so relaxed doing this. It was like calmness, almost like what people would get when they do a meditation.

MIKE CHABOT: We need to be careful through this area because we are moving cattle through here.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Back at the Excel Slaughterhouse, Grandin has almost finished her inspection. She says this plant's improved tremendously since the first time she checked it. The Plant Manager, Mike Chabot, says Grandin has changed too.

MIKE CHABOT: She's really grown. I got to say that. When I first started working with her in 1988, she would not let a male that she didn't know very, very well within about three feet of her. Human beings scared Temple then. You look at what she does now. She travels the world. She talks to groups of hundreds and thousands of people. And she's opened up her life so much.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Now, Grandin heads up a ramp to check the most important place in the slaughterhouse. She's going to the killing platform. And the executive from McDonald's says they will not allow me to record it. He says if listeners hear cattle dying, they might get upset at McDonald's. He says I can stand with Grandin on the killing platform and just watch if I like. And it turns out that he doesn't need to worry. On this day, the cattle die without making a sound.

Grandin designed the system herself. The cows walk into the plant single file up a curved ramp. She says curves comfort cattle. It makes them think they're going back home. And then as they're moseying along, the animals ease onto a conveyor. And they don't even seem to notice a moving harness cradles their stomachs and ribs and lifts them gently off the floor. Suddenly, a man presses a machine between the next cow's eyes. There's a pop, a retractable bolt shoots into the steer's brain, and the animal slumps silently.

Grandin says when she started these audits a few years ago, the workers who shoot the bolts were missing a lot. In fact, federal inspectors cited the slaughterhouse for skinning animals that were still alive, although Excel executives disputed the charges. On this day, the slaughterhouse gets a perfect score.

As Temple Grandin drives home from the plant, we're heading straight for the Rocky Mountains. The sun is melting on the peaks and they're turning from gold to red to pink.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: You know, when an animal dies in a well-run slaughter plant, that's much more peaceful than out in nature. I mean, people forget that it's a harsh world out there. You can have animals die in a snow storm. And maybe there's a drought and they starve or getting eaten up by predators. And if I was an animal, I'd rather go to a slaughter plant than have my guts dined on while I was still alive.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And Grandin says most of the slaughterhouses she's been inspecting treat animals much better today than they did when McDonald's started the program. She says industry executives are finally realizing that killing animals humanely can be good for business. Literally, McDonald's dumped at least one supplier that flunked Grandin's inspection. The company has warned others they better improve. And studies show that if animals are calm when they're slaughtered, they produce fewer hormones so they produce better quality meat. Now, other fast food chains are hiring Grandin to inspect their slaughterhouses too.

Grandin says she's not a religious person exactly but she's come to feel that killing animals is a sacred act. She says they're not factory parts. They're living beings.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: And another reason for making sure that we don't do atrocious things at the slaughter plant, if it gets too easy to do something really atrocious to an animal and the poor animal's screaming and everything, a person that could do that could-- would probably-- wouldn't have any problems with torturing people. I can remember back on St Thomas Aquinas, I think it was-- that said that one of the reasons we got to treat animals right is so that people themselves don't get corrupted.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: When Grandin designed the ramp that takes the cattle to their deaths, she gave it a nickname. Now people all over the industry use it.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: The stairway to heaven.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: She got the name from one of her favorite songs by the rock group, Led Zeppelin. She keeps it in a bin between the seats.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: You're going to have to dig in there and find. It I can't get it out while we're driving. (SINGING) So lady all that glitters is gold. And she's buying a stairway to heaven. Ooh, ooh, ooh. And she's buying a stairway to heaven.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Temple Grandin driving home from the Excel Slaughterhouse on the plains of Colorado. I'm Daniel Zwerdling for NPR News and American RadioWorks.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: (SINGING) And she's buying the stairway to heaven. It's the end of it.

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DEBORAH AMOS: Fast food and animal rights was edited by Anne Gudenkauf at the NPR science desk, mixing by Michael Cullen, Neil Tevault, and Craig Thorson, project director, Misha Quill, coordinating producer, Sasha Aslanian. Web production by Emily Thompson and Michael Wells. The managing editor of American RadioWorks is Stephen Smith. The executive producer is Bill Buzenberg. I'm Deborah Amos.

Major funding for American RadioWorks comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the members of Minnesota Public Radio. To see photos of egg farms and Temple Grandin and her squeeze machine, visit our website americanradioworks.org American RadioWorks is the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. This is NPR, National Public Radio.