S13. E24: Cameron Meyer Shorb: Nature Was Never Eden
“So before I encountered these ideas, whenever I thought about human’s relationship to animals, I only thought about the negative parts. I thought the best we could ever achieve would be to maybe erase the impacts we cause and atone for our sins and get back to neutral and be less of a cancer on the Earth. And that was my highest hope was to be a smaller cancer.
But then the wild animal welfare perspective says, well, actually humans have made life much better for ourselves over the last couple centuries. We’ve drastically decreased child mortality and the prevalence of all sorts of diseases. And stuff actually has been getting better for us. Maybe we could make things better for some wild animals.”
Most of us who care about animals have been focused on one thing, stopping what humans are doing to them. And it makes sense. The harm is enormous and it's ours to fix. But Cameron Meyer Shorb is asking a different question, "what if even without us, wild animals were already suffering? And what if we had the capacity to actually help them?"
Cameron is the executive director of Wild Animal Initiative, a non-profit building the scientific foundations for a field that barely exists yet. Wild animal welfare. Not conservation in the traditional sense. Not just preserving species or protecting biodiversity, but asking what individual wild animals experience. Whether they're in pain, whether they're okay. We talk about why nature was never quite the Eden we imagined, what it would mean to study suffering in a fish or a grouse or a pine marten, and why Cameron believes that humans, for all the damage we've done, might actually be capable of making things better.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Learn More About Wild Animal Initiative
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