S7. E14: Barbara King Makes Us Care
“As we were driving from Jackson, Wyoming, towards the entrance of the park, I was in the passenger seat, Charlie was driving and I saw a bison and I'll never forget it. I grabbed him so hard on the arm and I screeched, “BISON!” It was the first bison I'd ever seen in the wild. We stopped the car and we were a good distance from the bison. But we could see it unimpeded with the windshield and just let it walk and do what he was doing. And I don't know, something in my heart turned over.”
– Barbara King
Barbara King is emerita professor of anthropology at William & Mary and a freelance science writer and public speaker and the author of seven books. She is an expert on animal cognition and emotion.
Barbara has been on the podcast before to talk about how animals grieve and love. If you haven’t heard that episode, take a listen.
She is back to talk about her 7th book, Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild.
There are many reasons that I love this book but mostly because Barbara delves into and shares how we can be better humans to all other animals on this planet. Her work helps us better understand and advocate for the rights of animals. The more that humans know about animals’ intelligence and emotional lives, the harder it becomes to harm them.
Barbara is a storyteller and through the stories of individual animals as well as her own personal accounts, she makes us care.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Learn More About Barbara King
Read Barbara’s Books
Watch Barbara’s TED Talk
Listen to Barbara’s First Species Unite Podcast Episode
Transcript
Elizabeth: [00:00:55] This conversation is with Barbara King. Barbara is an anthropologist, an author and an animal advocate. She's an expert on animal cognition and emotions. She has been on the podcast before to talk about animal emotions. If you haven't heard that episode, go back and listen. Today she's here to talk about her seventh book, Animals Best Friends, putting compassion to work for animals in captivity and the wild. There are many reasons that I fell in love with this book, but mostly because Barbara delves into and shares with us how we can be better humans to all other animals on this planet. Barbara, it is so good to see your face. Thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited.
Barbara: [00:02:18] Oh, thank you, Beth. I'm delighted to be back on your podcast.
Elizabeth: [00:02:21] We're here today to talk about your newest book, Animals Best Friends. Before we get into it, for people who haven't heard your last episode or haven't heard your TED Talk, will you just give a little background so they know who you are and we can get to how you've gotten where you are?
Barbara: [00:02:39] I live in southeastern Virginia and I have been a biological anthropologist for many years, to be exact twenty eight years. I taught anthropology at William Mary here in Virginia. I have an identity that I describe as the three A's, which is anthropologist, animal activist and author. I'm trying to bring those three things together and devote myself to really writing and speaking to the public and with the public about animals and ethics surrounding animals.
Elizabeth: [00:03:10] Awesome. And you've written many books. Seven, I think?
Barbara: [00:03:15] That's right, yes.
Elizabeth: [00:03:16] And the three I've read, to be fair, are: How Animals Grieve, Personalities on the Plate, and your latest is Animals Best Friends. And all three you really hit on in different ways, not only how animals think, feel, how they operate in the world and but also how we can be better as humans. One thing that really has stuck out to me with the three books is with each one, there's a little more of just what we can do or how much more attention we can pay to how we're operating in the world. And that makes me curious, is that evolution part of your own personal evolution as well? In the sense of your relationship with animals?
Barbara: [00:04:03] Yes. And first of all, I want to say that I'm just delighted that you've read all three because I do see them very much as both a package and a progression in my own thinking and writing. I think the subtitle of the recent book, Animals Best Friends, gives a hint at the answer to this question. It's putting compassion to work for animals in captivity and in the wild. And over the course of writing these three, that has become more and more my intense focus. And I feel very much that I'm inside my books and inside that question, by which I mean that I'm not trying to say, well, readers, I figured everything out. And here are the answers to how to be more compassionate for animals in the world. But rather to say that I have been challenging myself to think harder about how every day we can train ourselves to see what's happening to animals and be part of the solution. And the urgency has just ramped up over the years since I started writing those books. The urgency that I feel personally to be better and do better for animals and to also have this conversation with people, so that we can all talk about it. The final line of Animals Best Friends is ‘the time is now and the animals are waiting’ and I feel that every single day. So it's very personal to me.
Elizabeth: [00:05:26] Two of the things that you do, you do a lot of things well, Barbara. But two of the things I think you do really well in your books, is you really get us to care by teaching us and sharing how animals operate with one another and how their emotions play out and their intelligence. The more of that kind of stuff we understand as humans, the more empathy I think we just naturally have. So by telling the animal stories, you make us care. And then by telling your own stories, especially your stories where you messed up or you didn't really get it. And it took you a really long time to have empathy for a spider. So many people, I think, really think, oh, you have to be vegan or nothing, like without perfection. It doesn't really matter because I'm not going to do that. You make it a big scale and people can be on all sorts of different places on the scale. And so I think those two things really stick out.
Barbara: [00:06:26] Thank you. First of all, I'm so happy that you think so. And I can think of a time, let's say, 12 years ago I have to admit that I was still eating chickens. I wasn't at that point of eating cows or pigs, but I was still eating chickens. And I think that's not very long ago, a dozen years ago. What was I doing? What was I thinking? And as recently as five or six years ago, I was walking around the house, and if I got creeped out by a spider and out would come the tissue, whack wham, down the toilet. And so there were still at that point when I considered myself an animal attuned. I really was missing things, I wasn't connecting dots. I was not understanding about, for example, cows in the dairy industry. So one thing that I find now is when I talk to audiences ranging from omnivores to reducitarians to vegans, everybody kind of gets that we're needing to be eating less meat, both for animal cruelty reasons, for the planet, and for everything else. But how many times do I still hear? Don't take my cheese? And then that becomes an opportunity to say, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean, because as recently as X year, I was still eating cheese.’ And then I talk about how cows in the dairy industry really do have a terribly tough time. And that cow mothers are kept continuously pregnant and the milk is taken for humans so that they're separated from their offspring. So that issue, for example, with cows in the dairy industry kind of spans all three books because number one, the moms grieve when they're separated from their infants. They are distressed. They're agitated, they bellow. That counts as grief. Whether or not the infants have died, they're separated from the mom. Number two, it shows personalities on the plate. That animals think and feel. These cows are profoundly feeling. And three, it shows that there's a harm going on that we can turn into an opportunity to be an animal's best friend.
Elizabeth: [00:08:40] When you say yes, we know cows grieve and you and I know cows grieve, but I think most people want to cover their ears or their eyes.
Barbara: [00:08:52] Yes, they do.
Elizabeth: [00:08:54] But you gave this incredible TED Talk a few years ago about grief, animal grief. And you told the story of Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead infant around for 17 days. The reaction to your TED Talk was huge. It was enormous, and I think probably a lot of people who didn't think about it, I'm just guessing you can tell me who didn't really think a lot about animal grief. We're super hit by that Ted Talk, like it got people in the gut. Will you talk a little about the reaction to that? Why was that so powerful and why did it move so many people?
Barbara: [00:09:25] What I wanted to do in that talk was describe how frequent both love and grief are among other animals other than humans. And yes, I started with Tahlequah, so I opened this talk. I've got 14 minutes right and I know I'm on this big stage and that I better get this right because I have one chance. So I wanted to talk about Tahlequah’s grief swim. When she was swimming with her pod in the Salish Sea, which is in the Pacific Northwest, she gave birth to a daughter. There was just so much hope and excitement, and then within the hour, the daughter died. So what Tahlequah did over 17 days was refusing to let the body fall off of her own body. And my contention as a scientist is that this isn't just stress or some kind of random occurrence, but an expression of her deep connection to her daughter. It was grief. My definition of grief requires that the survivor acts in some way that's very different from the normal. And certainly this thousand mile, 17 day grief swim. This was outside of Tahlequah’s normal behavior. Ok, so everyone's expecting a story about animal grief, and they hear about an orca, a cetacean, a mammal with a big brain, a mammal that we all know is smart. But what I tried to do over the course of the talk was then just start to sneak in some other examples. And I snuck in an example of two ducks who lived at a farm sanctuary, and they were close friends for four years. One died and the survivor became very sad and very depressed. And there was really no doubt that this change in the duck's demeanor was related to the death of his friend. So what I want to do is then go a little further in my other work and say, when we see what a cow mother does. When she's standing there and watching the truck come for her infants, say her daughter is being taken away to another part of the farm, or a son is being taken to a veal farm to be killed. She doesn't know what's happening to them, but what she does know is that these small creatures whom she's carried in her body, she's licked all over when they're born, whom she's nuzzled with, felt a connection with, exchange what I will call love with and their gone, completely out of her control. No consent, no autonomy, no bodily sovereignty. And she bellows and she paces and she's agitated. So you're so right to say that people want the orca to be profoundly smart and intelligent, but they really don't want to know about the cow. But we have to know, and this is a big motivator to me back when I was changing my eating habits.
Elizabeth: [00:12:10] So let me give you an example from the weekend I just had, I was out of town and eight of the people I was with were carnivores and they were hardcore carnivores like to the point where it felt like I was in the 80s. You know what I mean?
Barbara: [00:12:26] I do know.
Elizabeth: [00:12:27] They are all wonderful people who I love, but I haven't been in that situation where it was so black and white completely the whole time. And then on the very last day, Species Unite put out a news story and a petition because of all the wolves that are getting shot that are stepping outside of Yellowstone.
Barbara: [00:12:41] Oh yes.
Elizabeth: [00:12:42] And all of a sudden, the whole crowd I was with got really upset about the wolves, right? And I love that because if you can get people to care about any animal, you're opening a door, right? But am I? Is it? You know what I mean? And at that level of black and white. I know this is kind of your burning question and so much of your work and you're writing is how do we get people to care? You know, animals matter and you're really good at it. But when it comes to that level, like that black and white, I still have a really hard time.
Barbara: [00:13:15] It's very hard. I find it emotionally very difficult, especially when you're around people about whom you do care. It's not as if you're dealing with strangers whose opinions don't matter to you or don't touch your life. That's another conversation, but with people that you really want to be with and you respect otherwise, it's very difficult. And I have come to the point where I do try to drop some stories into the conversation, where there are no statements, no ‘You’ statements like ‘Why are you?’ But rather just to talk in some way about an individual animal or a film or a book. There are ways to sort of introduce these topics that I think are non accusatory, but are like, Oh, it's so good that you're caring about these wolves. And I've been reading a lot of books that really inspire me to care about animals and films too. Do you have any that you have really been moved by? And then when it's your turn to speak you can share. And that is a way to keep the conversation honest, but not really attacking anyone. And I do think that these visual documentaries, in addition to hopefully the kinds of books that I write, really can reach people If you introduce them in a warm way.
Elizabeth: [00:14:43] Let's talk about your book because you do that and you take five scenarios where animals live and animals are best friends. You kind of teach us how we can do a little bit better in each one, without making us feel like we have to do massive life changes, and without making us feel bad about what we've done in the past or what we're currently doing. And some of the things are things I've never actually thought about, and I thought, I kind of thought about a lot of things. Spiders are one of the things, I don't walk around killing them per say. I've never minded spiders, but I've never thought about them. So we can talk about them and how smart they are, too, because I had no idea?
Barbara: [00:15:19 I will, I love to talk about spiders, and I will just admit that Chapter two this chapter after the introduction starts with a story about my killing spiders, and there were two wolf spiders in the bathroom in my home and I was home alone. And one day I walked into the bathroom and there they were. And as I say in this book, they were doubled. They were big. They were looking at me, or so it felt. And in a very reactive way, I took my shoe off. I beat them to death and I put them down the toilet. And I have felt so bad about that for years. But the silver lining, not for the spiders, unfortunately, but for other spiders, was that it galvanized me to take what I call a spider journey. And I realized that if I am going to consider myself an animal lover, I had better rethink what the hell just happened in that incident. So I challenged myself to watch spiders and read about spiders, and learn spider science. And it's been absolutely fascinating, Beth. So one of the stories I love to tell is about a spider. I named her Portia. This is after a science fiction book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. He has two books that write about sentient, intelligent spiders, and in one, the leader spider is called Portia. So this orb weaver spider set up shop outside my writing study in my home one August. Orb weavers come to Virginia every summer and they suddenly seem to appear. They've been growing bigger in size, in the bushes and out of sight, and then they start building their webs in a very visible way. And for weeks, I watched Portia be a predator, repair her web every night, and catch prey. And reading about her as a complement to this observation, let me understand that she was thinking with her web. The way that we might think with our technology, with our computers. She actually is so much part of her body, it comes from her body, it's her whole way of being in the world. Scientists have found that spiders have a sense of numeracy. If you experimentally manipulate the prey items on the web, they will search according to the number of prey items that they have. So they search longer for five prey items than two. They do not get confused by putting plant debris on the web. In other words, they're really, really thinking and analyzing what goes on on the web as they construct this world around them. And it just changed my whole life and my whole experience, and I now seek out spiders. I would never kill one. We have signs on our porch when the orb weavers build webs like across our porch. Don't bother the spider, addressed to delivery people, to visitors and we protect them. And what it did it made me understand human exceptionalism in a different light. I'm always talking about what human exceptionalism is. It's the idea that we tend to think our societies, our language, our tools are superior to any other animal. And it's just ingrained in our society. It's why we eat animals and use them for entertainment. They're not as good or as intricate or as complicated as we are. And I got that. I've got that for years in studying baboons in Kenya and going to Yellowstone and looking at bison, all these mammals, I got it. But then I kill spiders. And now I think the way of being a spider in the world is ultimately cool. I think about it all the time, and I just think it's amazing and I refuse to be part of the group of people who thinks, Wow, I'm better than a spider, you know?
Elizabeth: [00:18:54] That's two ways you kind of get to the human heart. I think one is when you learn about animals' emotions, right? We immediately just melt when we see these things and learn about these things. But the other is when we learn about animal intelligence, and most people, myself included, have no idea that spiders are so smart when we see a little bit of us in another creature. And I'm sure there's so much intelligence going on with so many of these animals that we don't we don't recognize because it's not what we find as intelligent right now.
Barbara: [00:19:30] That's really, really critical because people will sometimes say that to me, and I think this is a fair criticism. Barbara, when you're talking about octopus using tools and spiders thinking with webs, you're using a human standard and that's uncool because then what if an animal doesn't have intelligence? Or what if an animal doesn't express emotion? And that is valid because we don't want to care about and be compassionate only for those animals in which we can see a piece of us. But the other side of that is that I think the more we look, I think almost every animal has emotion in some way. It might be a mood, more optimistic, less optimistic, bolder, shire and intelligence. It's just that we have to break away from insisting that it look like ours. So my contention is that looking for intelligence, looking for emotion, we are going to find it if we don't insist that it looks like ours. So invertebrates are wonderful for this. And that's one reason why I talk so much about octopus and about spiders and insects because we have to get out of our own human frame.
Elizabeth: [00:20:42] And when we do, we expand and then we care. Yes, I hope so. I hope so. If someone said to you, what is one thing I can do right now to be a little kinder for animals around my home or in my home?
Barbara: [00:20:55] The idea of co residing with a spider is just very alien to many people. As it was to me, my vision of being a really good citizen with spiders was to get the cup, take them outside and rescue them. Well, here I am in Virginia on a day that is in the 20s. It's cold, it's about to snow. And if I thought I was being a good citizen to a spider by taking them outside now, that might not be the right thing. Sometimes you can just leave them. If you know we're not talking about venomous spiders here, just leave them and cohabit with them now. E.O. Wilson, the famous biologist who just recently died, wrote a book where he said If you see ants in your kitchen, offer them some sugar. Well, you know, I haven't gotten to that point yet. I'm not. I'm not there yet, but I do think that when we think of our homes we also think of our yards because I consider the yard to be sort of that border between the home and the wild, which is where we're going to next. There's so many things we can do. We cannot be obsessed with mowing the lawn. We can leave the leaves just where they fall. And these all become homes for all these spiders, insects, food for birds, food for small mammals. I am really having a totally wonderful time rethinking my yard this way. Not doing what we used to do for it and making it a little mini sanctuary.
Elizabeth: [00:22:19] I love it. Let's go to the wild. One of the things I love when I find out about somebody that I know is when they have an animal that, just like, just gets them in a different way than others. And when I found out in your book that your love for bison, it made me smile so much. Well, you talk about that.
Barbara: [00:22:40] For years, my husband, Charlie, had said, we have to go to Yellowstone National Park. You'll love it. And I said, I'm sure I will, and we'll get there. And national parks are great. And then we went. And as we were driving from Jackson Wyoming, towards the entrance of the park, I was in the passenger seat. Charlie was driving and I saw a bison and I'll never forget it. I grabbed him so hard on the arm and I screeched, you know, bison, and it was the first bison I'd ever seen in the wild. We stopped the car and we were a good distance from the bison. But we could see it unimpeded with the windshield and just let it walk and do what he was doing. And I don't know, something in my heart turned over. So the entire next five visits, we have been sitting mostly in the car for safety, sometimes standing out when we can be far enough away. And the thing about it is people ask me all the time ‘why bison?’ and I can't answer. I don't know. It's an embodied feeling of joy when I see these animals.
Elizabeth: [00:23:46] I love it. I think we do a lot in the wild that we don't even realize that it's not so great. You know, we've kind of been conditioned since birth to this is our world, right? And so can you talk about a couple of ways people can be better or do better for animals in the wild?
Barbara: [00:24:09] One thing I think that makes a difference is sometimes our absence. In other words, not being too close to wildlife, resisting this trend to take selfies with wildlife. And the reason is not only because you're putting yourself at risk, but you can put the animal at risk. I mean, we all have heard of cases of bears, for example, who may harm a human and what happens. The human hopefully will recover and the bear is shot. The bear is killed because the bear is now deemed a danger to people. So one of the things I think about a lot when I'm in national parks or indeed really anywhere locally in the wild. Is just letting the animals have right of way, have distance, and it seems like that's so easy. But you know, you go to Yellowstone and I literally watched a tourist bus pull up at an overlook and people run into a meadow towards the bison with their cameras out and my heart was in my throat for everybody. Every living being in that landscape, I didn't know what was going to happen to anyone. And I think a ranger came or something and it stopped. But people want closeness, but go about it in a way that is really, really difficult. On a larger scale I think we as a society have to think about really questioning models of lethal management of wildlife. That is a different conversation in a way because it's not something under your control or my control, except we can speak up. For example, there was a project recently in Florida where iguanas were deemed invasive and iguanas, you know, are these large reptiles and they are considered unwanted. And so the Wildlife Commission sent out scientists who were given permission to pick up individual iguanas, sling them overhead and bash their heads in on boats and cars to kill them. As a matter of lethal management. We know that often homeless cats are targeted for what's called culling, which means killing.The idea that we have to manage wildlife by killing really seriously needs reconsideration. And with a large number of colleagues, I'm in a sense working on these issues with compassionate conservation, thinking of other ways to handle things so that lethal management is not our go to strategy
Elizabeth: [00:26:51] And it's our go to strategy in so many situations also with deer. I mean we have other solutions.
Barbara: [00:26:59] Yeah. Yesterday, I gave a talk to a group of wonderful people in New York City, and in preparation for that, I started to read about wildlife in New York City. And I educated myself a lot about things that I hadn't known. In the last week white tailed deer, for example, are found in Staten Island and also in the Bronx. Two of the boroughs of New York and the city of New York started in twenty sixteen. This deer management project is not lethal management, it is sterilization of males so that at night males are actually tranquilized and victimized in the field. And the numbers are up on the city of New York's website. If you look up the deer management plan for the city of New York, of the decrease in the deer population. Now we know that there are indeed too many deer, therefore too many ticks. And so I do understand control of the population. I was blown away when I looked at these statistics, and yet there's a lot of pushback. A lot of people are saying this is too much money. It's never going to work in the long run. And I think it's great.
Elizabeth: [00:28:06] Oh my gosh, I didn't even know that
Barbara: [00:28:08] I didn't either. And so you do hear people say, ‘oh, birth control is never going to work in the long term because there's too many deer.’ But I know it's just two boroughs, but I mean, it's as far as I can tell, and I realize I have only looked into this for a week, and it's probably risky that I don't know everything about it, but it seems to me transparent. It seems to me statistically backed up that it's making a difference. And so yes, these are potentially pilot projects we have to see. But if we don't try, how are we ever going to know if they were?
Elizabeth: [00:28:39] Well, aside from the cruelty and horror of shooting all the deer, it also actually doesn't help. I mean, the populations keep getting bigger right? And we know that it's the same with street dogs in other countries. It is. And it just creates a bigger and bigger population.
Barbara: [00:28:56] I'm so glad that you raised that point. It's hard for me as a scientist to articulate to people why it's true, but it is true. Lethal management actually doesn't help. So there's a paper out of Australia, for example, that shows that lethally managing feral cats did not decrease the population. So I'm part of this group of people who are working on what is compassionate conservation. What should it be? The idea that, yes, we have to manage ecosystems in some way at some times, I'm not an idealist to the extent that I don't don't believe that, but individual lives matter as well. So that we can think of both. We can bring to the table proposals and policies that embrace these realities of what works and doesn't work.
Elizabeth: [00:29:48] I want to talk about zoos, reading your book and kind of reinvigorated me in the sense of like, I can't believe zoos still exist. Last week, Steve Wise was on to talk about Happy and that really brought zoos obviously back into the forefront of my mind. And one thing you talked about was Jo-Anne McArthur's book Captive and I had read that years ago, and I didn't remember this at all. But she says within the book. Go to a zoo and pick one animal, like a bear. Go stand there for six hours, that's what he does every day, all day, that hit me so hard.
Barbara: [00:30:31] Yes, this is a challenge. This is a zoo challenge. Go and stand. Don't walk, you know, ten minutes past an animal. I couldn't do it. I tried. I went to Disney's Animal Kingdom, which is a place that I do visit in Orlando, Florida. And I stood in front of the Barbarossa enclosure. These are pig-like animals. And what I saw was pacing. First, the male pacing around and around. Same trajectory. Invariant route around and around. A couple of hours later, I watched the female. But I couldn't. I couldn't stay there for very long. But what I did do is I filmed it and I approached a keeper and I said. I wondered if we could talk about the pacing that's going on. And she not only dismissed my concern, but she laughed and she made me very angry and she said, Oh, this is just what they do and it's breeding and you know, it's not a problem. Well, that wasn't good enough. And I ended up writing to the Disney Animal Kingdom head zoo person who was completely wonderful and wrote back and forth with me at length in talking about what could be done to help and so on. The point of this example is that what I'm saying to people is that we can choose which zoos to go to. There are better and worse zoos. We don't want to give any money, time or attention to ramshackle roadside zoos. I don't know that the answer is to avoid all zoos because we need to be eyes on in there and see what's happening and speak up when we see things that don't look right.
Elizabeth: [00:32:05] But do you think we should have zoos?
Barbara: [00:32:08] I think that we need to have a very different type of zoo if a zoo at all. I am not sure that I'm comfortable with complete and one hundred percent zoo abolition. But I think that the zoo system, as it exists, is broken and harmful. I think in many cases, what we want to think about is the degree of harm that this kind of captivity itself can cause. In other words, not how big the enclosure is or how nice the grass is, but the fact that the animals have their autonomy taken from them and they're kept captive. But I do think that there are some zoos moving in this direction, that having a place to go where animals who cannot live in the wild animals who need rescue, who are local to that environment can be kept, could be a model for the future. No more exotics. No more pandas and elephants and cetaceans and great apes and monkeys. You know, on and on and on. I don't think we need that. But if you think of, for example, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, which is big into conservation and has local animals there, you think of the Detroit Zoo, an accredited zoo that sent back its elephants. I mean, it said, we are going to be an elephant free zoo. And of course, by sending back, I don't mean to the wild, I mean to a sanctuary. They're moving towards more rescued animals, more technology to show people images. We can also think of all kinds of innovative ways for zoos to use virtual reality documentary images. All of these things, I think there can be potentially a vision for zoos that helps animals who need help and still gives people that experience but does not put human entertainment first.
Elizabeth: [00:33:59] Right. Are there zoos that are just rescue Zoo’s at this point, or are we not there yet?
Barbara: [00:34:03] I'm unaware of any that are 100 percent rescue. We have locally here in Virginia, a place called the Living Museum in Newport News that is accredited both as a museum and as a zoo. And I went there and took a tour of animal after animal. They'd say, OK, these two otters, one came from a home where she was living in a bathtub and the other came from this. And here are two wolves, and here is a bird that has a broken beak, and animal after animal. But then there were also animals people brought there. And I think that hybrid mix is, first of all, fairly forward thinking for today, and that's what we need to push. But I also want to say, I'm afraid I might be sounding a little a little optimistic because let's think about the reality, the reality where we are now and the distance between where we are now and getting to what I'm describing.
Elizabeth: [00:34:52] It's another one of those things where I find I spend a lot of time in the bubble and then I'm out with some friends who aren't paying attention to any of this. And they'll say, Oh, we took our kids to the zoo this weekend, like to share with me especially. And I'm like great. So like most people, most by far, most are pretty ok going to the zoo, right? Demand has to change before anything changes.
Barbara: [00:35:22] There are zoos we should never, ever go to. But I still think and maybe I'll be persuaded against this vision at some point that walking through the door of a zoo is not in itself a bad act. If you're there to not just say how cute and funny and all how wonderful these lives are because they're mostly not, but to be there with eyes open and to be a little bit of pressure right on the zoo. Like, I think that talking to keepers, talking to docents, writing letters, letters to the editor, when you see something that's not right, letters to the zoo asking, literally walk up and ask, ‘How many rescued animals do you have here and how many animals are off exhibit that we can't even see?’ How do we get transparency unless we're there? I know one place this conversation is going is towards laboratories. We can't do that with animal laboratories. We as citizens can't walk through their doors and see things, but we can in zoos..
Elizabeth: [00:36:26] Let's go into research next. Just because you just brought it up. Animals and research labs are what you end the book with. And I have a lot of thoughts on it. One is reactions I get when I talk about animals in research labs, because it's so hidden and it's so not discussed and it's so hard to get behind those doors. A lot of people don't really think, think we even have it anymore. And when you say, Oh yes, we're testing on seventy five thousand primates, they're stunned and a lot of people think we desperately need it. But will you give your overall thoughts on it? And we can kind of go into where it's going or where we hope it starts to go?
Barbara: [00:37:09] Yes. When I write about this in my book, one thing I say is that exactly as you've just indicated, people don't know what's going on. With the seventy five to eighty thousand monkeys in U.S. laboratories, the literally millions and globally billions of mice and rats who are uncounted because we don't have to count them. Nobody requires researchers to count the mice and the rats. The cats, the dogs, the ferrets, the hamsters, the octopus, these are just millions and millions of animals who are held in laboratories. They are invasively experimented on, but my view has become more comprehensive. It's not just the moment of experimentation that I want to think about, but the breeding in the laboratories, the transport, in some cases to the laboratories, the complete removal of what I was talking about a moment before, but in a more exacerbated way, of any consent, of any choice about what happens to you. And in addition to not understanding the numbers, people often say to me, very thoughtful people, but we have ethical oversight in place. We have committees to make sure that while these animals are being used in experiments, they're not suffering. And that is patently and completely false in federally funded universities and federally funded labs. There are committees, but the committees are not required to consider ethics in evaluating proposals to use animals in research. And when I found this out a couple of years ago, I thought, Nah, this can't be right. Ok, I'm going to ask three more people to tell me. I kept interviewing, you know, expert after expert. And of course, it's true that there are institutional use committees for animals in these federally funded places, and they have to talk about how the animals will be used. Ethics do not have to be part of the situation. So we have a situation that people are unaware of, and I am on this very passionate sort of trajectory of working with my colleagues to tell them otherwise that we have to open our eyes to what's going on. So one thing that is becoming a theme in what we're talking about is how we want to move from talking about big abstract issues like conservation or how many thousands of animals are in labs to individuals. And I've begun talking about a monkey who was held at the National Primate Research Center in Wisconsin, and his name is Cornelius. Cornelius has really touched my heart. He was born in May 2010. Several days later, he was tattooed and became known as R10333 and he did not get raised with his mother. He was raised with some peers for a while, but for the bulk of his life from 2010 to now. This minute as we talk and as you're listening, he's alone in a cage, a small cage, a sterile cage. He was used in invasive experiments and he's now used in breeding, including electro ejaculation. He has no choice about what happens to him. When I look at the undercover investigation that was done by PETA and I want to credit them. I look at the film, I look at the images and I read the documents. I realize that here is an animal whose life has been shattered. When I went to Kenya to study baboons, not the same type of monkey, but very similar in terms of social organization as Cornelius. Both baboons and his type of monkey macaques live in matrilineal groups of related females. They hang out together, the little kids grow up there. That's all taken from him, and you multiply that by seventy five thousand eighty thousand monkeys. It's an overwhelming issue. And now we get to the question of, yeah, it's not so great for them, but we need it. Well, guess what? Between ninety two and ninety six percent of drugs that are tested on animals never make it to a helpful human niche in science. Peer reviewed research just shows us. It doesn't help us. You know, mice are used as models for Alzheimer's, they don't exhibit Alzheimer's in the same way that people do. Dogs are used as models for muscular dystrophy. They don't get muscular dystrophy in the way that we do. I could go on and on. So you have a situation where the research community is trying to tell us that these animals are necessary for health. The animals are suffering and they're not helping us so much. Sometimes, yes, mostly not. The system has to change.
Elizabeth: [00:41:41] We absolutely do. And the crazy thing about the funding is billions of dollars are going into the animal testing, which ninety six percent don't work for the drug testing.
Barbara: [00:41:52] The drug testing. I want to be clear about that. But even besides the drug testing, the numbers are not good. In the past, you know it was the way to go. I understand that historically, at some certain times, it seemed to make sense to use animal models. But as an anthropologist, I want to point out that what we have in our lab system and our university system is a culture now where it's so entrenched that the funding just keeps replicating, right? People on the animal care committees tend to be other researchers, people who are benefiting from the system vets, but vets who are part of the animal research system and there's a constant process of approving and funding in this culture, these animal models that we have to break out of for everybody's sake.
Elizabeth: [00:42:39] We know four percent of the time. Let's say that there's been success like in human trials after animal trials, right? But don't we at this point kind of know, OK, well, in this little tiny instance, don’t we have computers for that. Like there are solutions out there, right?
Barbara: [00:42:57] Oh, absolutely. So yeah, so I'm getting ready to do an event with my colleagues to make an online plea for transforming medical research. The idea is to say that not only in the future, but here now are animal free methods that are transforming science, so that the big reveal here is that we have better science without animals. So of course, we don't want cruelty. But even so, if we're looking at just one health approach, the idea of applying social justice principles to help animals and help humans. Everybody wins with animal free methods to give you an example. You probably know about human organs on a chip. These really small devices are like the size of a thumb drive, and they have microfluidic chambers, a little bit of water running through them where human cells can be taken from, say, the stomach or the lung, and put in these chambers and tested. So all kinds of environmental tests can be done on these cells and they are human cells. So they're going to tell us about what happens to human stomach cells, not dog stomach cells or monkey stomach cells. And it's really revolutionizing how we can understand testing in the laboratory. There are all kinds of tissue bank types of solutions. There's imaging solutions. There's what are called low dose toxicity trials, where humans are given drugs in very, very low doses and then gradually increase. And this is not my area of expertise, but it is that of some of my colleagues. And the more that I read about alternative methods, the more exciting it is. But what we need is funding. We need places like NIH to increase their funding for so-called alternative solutions. A big way to go with this is to get Congress behind this. You know, wonderful folks like Cory Booker, who's always looking out for animals, they're pushing alternative methods. We need to get behind this.
Elizabeth: [00:45:03] We're going to wrap up with ‘Animals on the plate.’ And I find this one of the most like, I find you so compelling when you talk about this and write about this because you're not fully vegan, but you're almost fully vegan. That's right. It's been a trajectory to get you started here and have gotten here. And I think that is like the best way to be inclusive and to bring other people in instead of telling people, Hey, you shouldn't eat any of that right? And so will you talk about that a little bit?
Barbara: [00:45:36] Yeah, we definitely want to move away from a binary. I think that going vegan is an amazing choice. It's a choice that I respect and I admire a lot. What I don't think is that it's possible for everyone, and so I've really embraced this term to reduce-itarianism, which was coined by Brian Capon. And I think it's exactly where we need to be to tell people to the extent that you can, please eat less meat, seafood and dairy. And here's why. And then we hit, you know, the stuff that we know about that animal. Will suffer that the planet is suffering, that it's bad for human health. But I, for example, have gone through extensive surgery, chemotherapy and radiation for cancer with lingering side effects. This is eight years later now. There are reasons why I can't be fully vegan that are embodied reasons, and the disability community has made a very important point. Led by the wonderful Sonora Taylor and her book. Saying people can't always make the choices for their bodies that their hearts might like to take. But I have to admit that sometimes I just slip up. Sometimes it's not my health, but sometimes I just slip up. But I try very, very hard to eat non-dairy. I don't eat any animals in terms of meat at all, and it's just more that I can't always have the full complement of, say, lentils and vegetables. So I sometimes have to eat things that I otherwise wouldn’t need. And I think that in some ways, I want to move away from the guilt that I felt about this and that was sometimes thrust at me by other animal activists. In saying that, I really think we can all move the needle by joining in and doing what we can. And I'm not perfect, and I don't think I should require perfection from others. So I kind of rock it between, you know, thinking of how much I care deeply about the chickens, the pigs, the turkeys, the cows, the octopus that are caught up in these systems. And I want it to change now. And also realizing that we have to go into this with an open heart for everybody because not everyone is just going to have the ability to turn on a dime. Whether they're feeding their families is a constraint. They need protein to feed. Their families are poor, they don't have access to alternative proteins or whether it's their bodies. So I guess what I want to say is I have a lot of hope that things are changing and I want us all to push as hard as we can.
Elizabeth: [00:48:12] I think that the world needs, instead of thousands more vegans, the world needs millions more people who are just shifting and trying and reducing. And that makes a much bigger difference in a whole lot more animals, don't suffer in that way. So I agree. I agree with you, Barbara. You're awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on.
Barbara: [00:48:37] Oh, I love talking with you always and listening to your podcast. Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:48:48] To learn more about Barbara and to read her books, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram at @Species' Unite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Poky, Bethany Jones and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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