Factually! with Adam Conover - Animal Crisis with Lori Gruen and Alice Crary.

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

How can we best help animals, when it’s we humans who cause their suffering? Animal Crisis authors Alice Crary and Lori Gruen join Adam to explain how the same systems that hurt and kill animals also harm humans. They discuss the human rights abuses that happen in industrial slaughterhouses and how palm oil monocrops are devastating the world’s rainforests. They also share how we can have solidarity with animals in our daily lives. You can purchase their book at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the things they know that you don't know and that I don't know. We're going to have a great time learning some cool shit together. Now, just to remind you, I am on tour right now. I just got back from an amazing weekend in Boston. Thank you so much to everyone who came out. And up next, I'm headed to Washington, D.C., Nashville, Spokane, Washington, Tacoma, Washington, and New York City. So please, if you want to get tickets, you want to come see me, head to adamconover.net slash tour dates. That's adamconover.net slash tour dates. And of

course, if you want to support the show, please support us on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover, and you can get bonus podcast episodes live stand-up i don't post anywhere else and you can join our live patreon book club that's patreon.com slash adam conover now let's talk about animals you know we all know that animals have it pretty rough and not only because of the ceaseless brutality of life in the state of nature nature red and tooth and claw and all that kind of thing i mean mean, yeah, all that stuff is pretty bad, but we as humans have made it much worse. Through our destruction of the environment and the incredible concentration of suffering we have created through factory farming, we have made life a lot shittier for animals. That is, for the animals

that we haven't outright eradicated. Now, if you care about animals, as I do, you might think you have some power as an individual, right? You can forego eating animals if you want, or you could stop using products that lead to their death and suffering. At least, those are the methods that we are most often told about by capitalism. But you might be struck by the suspicion that outside of your, you know, laudable decision to stop eating the kind of beef that's made from abusing and constraining calves and avoiding the tuna that has extra dolphin murder

in it, well, even if you do all those things, there are still larger and deeper systems of exploitation that you can't help but participate in. You know, even if you swear off beef and stick to Beyond Burgers for the rest of your life, you're still part of a human civilization that is hurting animals on a massive scale. So if you really care about your animal brethren, what approach should you take? Well, as we discussed in a really wonderful episode with Emma Maris that we recorded a couple months back, I recommend you go back and listen to it after you've heard this one. What approach you take really needs to be driven by what your values are when it comes to animals. What exactly are you trying to improve about their lives? For instance, some people want to focus on reducing animal suffering,

just lowering the sum total of animal pain experienced, while others want to work on animal rights. You know, talking about whether animals deserve autonomy, the right to make their own decisions, to give cows some baseline guarantee that they can wander around in the woods or wherever cows like to be. I don't know a lot about cows, okay? But there's a problem with defining your values so narrowly because as our guests today compellingly argue, if you choose either one of those ethics, they can end up feeding into the very same systems that exploit I will not. are free to roam right on the packaging, which maybe might mean that they have a tiny little,

you know, 10 by 10 foot quote field to walk around in before the cows are summarily beheaded. Both of those might be actually marginal improvements. The cows might have a little bit more rights. The chickens might be in a little bit less pain, but neither of these actually transform the system that is causing so much misery to begin with. And that, by the way, is just the food side. We've just been talking about factory farming so far. Countless animals around the world are injured or killed by human industry, by deforestation, or just by, you know, us clearing habitat so that we can live on it instead. So if we really care about animals and we really care

about the natural world, what kind of approach should we actually take? Well, our guests today have a really cool answer to that question. Their answer is that the same systems that kill and hurt animals are also killing and hurting humans and leading to the destruction of the world that we all care about so much. And that if we start to think of ourselves as not set apart from, but actually in the same struggle with animals, then we can begin to map out responses that are true to the monumental challenges we face. Now, I know that sounds like a lot, but they are going to break it down in this episode. They are incredibly awesome. So please welcome Alice Crary, who's a philosophy professor

at the New School for Social Research, and Lori Gruen, a professor of philosophy and feminist gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan. Together, they wrote their recent book, Animal Crisis, and I am so excited to have them on the show today. Please welcome Alice Query and Lori Gruen. Alice and Lori, thank you so much for being on the show. It's a great pleasure. Thank you for having us. So you have this new book called Animal Crisis, and it is about how systems that destroy and hurt animals

also do the same to people, or at least that's one of the main ideas of the book. I'd love for you to just start us off there and tell us what you mean by that. Oh, sure. Backing up just a little bit, we're looking at 50 shared a conviction that the ways people were thinking about we wanted to get animal ethics out of its disciplinary isolation from critical social theories that are thinking about systems that hurt human beings, noticing that they're the same ones that hurt animals. And we also wanted to direct readers' attention to real things that are happening in the world and have the thinking that people are doing start from attention to actual circumstances where animals are being heard. Right. So people have been talking about what we owe animals and our treatment of animals, say, in the food system or in the, you know, sixth mass extinction. And one of the things that has happened is that this way of thinking has tended to sort of gendered and class-based sort of humans and animals, that there's a really important way in which those structures, those underlying structures

need to be brought to light. Yeah, that they affect both humans and people. Well, let's start by talking about animal ethics then, if that was part of your criticism. How has animal ethics worked as a field? What are the schools of thought and what are the problems with them in your view? Big question. No, no, no. There are actually some really, really prominent trends. Some of the work people are doing is really focused on reducing harms to animal, improving animal welfare. And there's another trend in animal ethics that says, hey, welfare isn't the right way to go. We should be thinking about animal rights. And we have a lot of respect for a lot of the work that gets done in these areas.

It's, you know, drawing attention to ways in which animals are harmed and trying to work on mitigating those harms or giving animals new rights that they don't have. But at the same time, a lot of the work is done in frameworks that have a tendency to obscure the larger structures that hurt animals and humans together. And so with the best intentions, animals and humans together. And so with the best intentions, people who want to make a difference can get involved in these ways and actually not engage with the systems that are hurting animals and human beings. Do you have an example of that? Yeah, I was just going to give an example of that. So there's a really exciting and important legal case that many people have heard about in New York about an elephant named Happy at the Bronx Zoo. There was a group of animal rights advocates who were trying to bring a habeas corpus writ, to raise this writ of habeas corpus that Happy the elephant is being held without due process of the law.

It's a really attention-grabbing gesture. It's a kind of legal move that's unique and somewhat exciting. It's gotten tons of press. And, of course, the case didn't go very far because animals don't have rights of that sort legally. And the idea that the organization that brought the suit had is that, well, we weren't really trying to get happy out of the zoo. We were trying to get rights for animals, right? That's one really serious example. But from our point of view, this is the way they made the arguments before the court saying, you know, happy is an elephant and elephants are really highly intelligent and happy in fact can recognize herself in a mirror and that is a really intelligent thing to do. And all of these capacities that are attributed to happy

really sort of focus in on some very, very small feature of a much larger problem, a problem of looking at certain kinds of traits or qualities that, you know what, some humans don't have, you know, certain disabled humans don't have this certain kinds of capacities. Maybe that's not the right way to be thinking about making arguments for animal rights. Let's think about things in larger context. What are elephants doing in zoos in the first place? And is it our place to put elephants in zoos? And maybe the legal system itself isn't the right way to be arguing, because as we've seen recently, the legal system isn't always interested in quote-unquote justice. So I think these are some

of the issues that we're concerned about. Yeah, we had on the show a number of months back, the wonderful science and nature writer Emma Maris, who's written a book on this topic. And she, you know, my big takeaway from the conversation with her is that we need to get more clear with ourself about what our values are when it comes to animals and what exactly is it that we're trying to do and that we can really do. We can really be counterproductive when we, you know, focus too narrowly or we focus on the wrong thing. You know, she uses an example, one that really stuck with me is like the public campaign to free the whale from Free Willy, from the movie Free Willy. At great expense, it was a huge public campaign and it was not actually good for this whale,

right? It was very narrowly focused on let's free this whale. This is a whale that grew up in captivity that was not really best served by simply being released into the ocean. And that, you know, the assumption that that is what's best is sort of based on not having thought through what exactly is it that we would like to accomplish. The public outcry of support for animals in that case and for, you know, whales in captivity is well-intentioned and a real emotional need that people have. But, you know, connecting it to the final outcome is not really clear. And so we need to get clearer about what is it that we care about, about animals? And it's a very difficult question to answer. So I really like that you put, there's an emphasis on, in some schools, the suffering of animals, that we say animals feel pain and we don't want them to feel pain. And that might incline you towards a certain set of policy prescriptions.

You might say, well, when animals are killed, it should be done very humanely and instantaneously. And we should probably cut down on the eating of meat and et cetera. Or you might say, OK, animals are thinking beings with autonomy. I care less about their moment by moment pain and I care more about their own ability to make their own choices in the world and that sort of thing. And those are two those are two different ways that might lead you towards different outcomes. I'm I'm guessing that you have perhaps a different way of thinking about what we might value thinking about animals. Yeah. I mean, one example to think about what might give you misgivings about a welfare beast approach is to think about some of the contexts in which it's mobilized. For instance, in connection with the food system, you have all kinds of campaigns that get a lot of attention for

free range chickens, for cage free circumstances, for not de-beaking creatures, for giving pigs more space to live. And on the face of it, these things look really good because you're saying we're not going to make animals suffer as badly as all of that. And on the other hand, what the effect of some of these interventions is, is they become greenwashing, in a way, strategies, corporate strategies for the meat companies themselves, who can then claim to be on the side of animal welfare and can go on expanding the system of industrial animal agriculture that's doing so much damage beyond simply its damage to the welfare of animals. It's environmental damage, it's human rights effects, it's really bad effects on public health also. So there's an example. And what we're talking

about doing then instead is inviting people to look historically and politically at the structures that sustain these systems. So in the case of industrial animal agriculture, it's not small. This is one of the things that I think helps people to look away because it's daunting. You're saying, look at the way, look at the history of our food system, look at the way in which it's integrated into global capitalism. And you start to see a system which only looks rational. It looks like a raging social pathology. It's only rational from the point of view of capital, the profits made by the meat companies themselves. It's not a particularly healthy or effective way looked at at the whole to feed populations. And it does incredible damage all at the same time. So that

would be a way of describing in a particular case, the different kind of approach that we're taking. Yeah. Sorry. No, please go ahead. I was just going to say, I mean, one of the ways, I mean, what Alex was just saying, which is so right, is that this is a big system. It's a huge system. But it's really interesting also to think there are maybe five or six international multinational corporations that are running the entire food system. And so if you look at just one, like Tyson's, they kill 155,000 cows, 461,000 pigs, and 45 million chickens per week, per week. And that's just one of these six kind of companies.

So there is a magnitude of suffering, pain, and all of the other horrible consequences for humans and the environments that come from this food system. But it's a real condensation of power and capital in the hands of what amounts to basically six multinational corporations. Yeah. I mean, when you look at the size of it, you have those extremely large numbers of the number of cows, hundreds of thousands of cows, millions of chickens a week that are killed. What boggles my mind is when I think about, when we're talking about industrial agriculture, I believe it's something like most mammals and birds alive on earth today are our food supply. When you look at, I forget if it's by biomass, like their literal weight or by the

number of them. But, you know, if you look at like all of, I wish I had the bite charts in front of me. But no, but certainly by biomass, that's right. Yes, certainly by biomass. Like if just most animals alive are chickens and cows and pigs. That's the case. Like vastly, you know, when you watch, you know, a nature documentary on television

and it's showing you all these wonderful species around the world, there's so few of them compared to the number of cows that are just standing around in stalls. And the fact that all of that, you know, massive concentration of life is controlled by such a small number of companies is enormous. And I take your point about, you know, if you're focusing too much on suffering, for instance, and you have that sort of approach of, hey, we just want to reduce some suffering as long as I've reduced some animal suffering. That's great. Well, like there's an egg company that called, I think Chino Valley Farms or something like that here in California. And I

know this because this is the only egg company that serves one of my local grocery stores, the only one that does delivery. And so I'm often trying to buy eggs from this company. And this is a company that has, they've got the regular eggs for, you know, 250 a carton. Then they've got the expensive eggs for $4 a carton. Then they've got the regular eggs for $2.50 a carton. Then they've got the expensive eggs for $4 a carton. Then they've got the really expensive eggs for $6 a carton. And the $4 and $6 cartons have escalating claims about how well the chickens are treated. You know, that this one is vegetarian feed only. And then the $6 a carton is like, oh, they get to go outside and stuff.

And you open the box and it's got a little picture of like, here's where the happy chickens go. But if you look at, I was like, let me look up this company. And, you know, according to the organizations that review the conduct of these companies, it's like this is these chickens are all coming from the same place. They've got a little the six dollar a box eggs. Those chickens have like there's a little patio that they can go on every once in a while kind of stuff. It's like a very, very marginal improvement. And if even if you say, OK, those chickens that if I buy the six dollar

chickens, I'm reducing the suffering of those chickens by five percent and that's better than zero percent. Hey, OK, well, it's a marginal improvement. It's not at all addressing the overall system that is leading to not just suffering, but also death and also environmental pollution, all these other things that you're talking about. So I get what you're saying. If you adopt that framework of like, well, hey, reducing some suffering is better than none, you end up making policy tweaks that, you know, maybe slow the amount of overall pain that is being inflicted, but don't actually do anything to solve the problem that we're concerned about. Am I somewhere in the right ballpark? Yeah, I think we would even say it's slightly stronger. You can be perpetuating the very problem that you set out to address

because you're greasing its wheels. So tell me more about the approach that you take towards animal ethics. So one thing that's really important, so we just talked about welfare, but we haven't talked about rights. And some rights approaches are really interesting. And they're, you know, people talking. So traditional animal ethics focused on negative rights, rights not to be killed, not to be caused pain. But there is some interesting work in animal politics recently, which is on things like really thinking about what it would be to have a community, an interspecies community in which animals had an appropriate complement of rights. But sometimes the description of those rights runs afoul of a kind of similar problem,

again, as well-intentioned as it is, where you might be talking about, say, well, a working animal, say a dog who's been a guide dog should have various rights in retirement, or a horse that's done some work should have rights in retirement. These are discussions that animal ethicists have. And sometimes those discussions of rights, again, are in a sense carving out spheres of inviolability within a much larger system in which animals and humans are in hierarchical structures with each other, and those structures aren't being addressed. So you might have, you might do some good locally, but you haven't addressed the way in which capitalist structures, I'm going to use the language of capitalism, because we have structures where the pursuit of profit and the emphasis on production over reproduction makes it almost inevitable that certain human beings will be exploited and that it will, that animals and

the rest of nature will be treated as free resources. So you still have a sort of structure that aligns vulnerable human beings and animals. And we're going for the structures, we want to talk about the structures that non-accidentally keep these forms of suffering together. extent self-defeating is that, as I was suggesting with HAPI and the legal system and legal rights, which are different than the kinds of moral rights or political rights that we're talking about now, but the idea is that there's these frameworks that are in place that have led us to this problem. These frameworks aren't neutral to start with, and somehow we've just got the wrong people or the wrong beings with rights. So it's not that you can extend rights that already exist in these frameworks to animals, which is part of what the political move is, that the very formation of these rights

systems have already excluded Indigenous people, racialized people, certain genders. I mean, I think that this is an important criticism that we raise, that the system itself isn't broken. It's not that it needs to be extended. The system is working the way it was designed to work. And so what we need to do is interrogate the system and start thinking in alternative terms, for example, solidarity and other forms of sort of resistance to these systems. if you don't mind my saying so. So could we get concrete? I'd love to talk about some examples of, you know, structures that, as you say, are, you know, inflicting suffering or imposing hierarchies on animals, but are doing the same to people as well.

Sure. I think we want to talk, we're going to talk about some concrete cases. So I'll get, I'll introduce another one. I'm going to flag the fact that we've already talked about one and go back to it. But, and eventually I think we should also talk about something that may sound abstract, but that helps explain what we're talking about, which is forms of dehumanization that yoke humans and animals together. So in talking about the food system, we're talking about one case. So we haven't talked very much about harms to human beings in, say, industrial slaughterhouses. But there's incredible documentation from groups like Human Rights Watch about human rights abuses that happen in industrial slaughterhouses, working conditions that are incredibly dangerous, attempts to tamp down efforts at unionization, and also an attempt to hire or find economic pressures in going on they think the public should know about are in a disadvantaged position to be listened to.

So the slaughterhouse and the industrial agricultural food system really is a concrete case of the kind of thing we're talking about. Another kind of case of what we're talking about are places in which industries like the palm oil industry are engaged in wide- have palm oil plantations that are devastating orangutan populations. And they're also incredibly harmful. They have long, they're long colonial and industrial histories to these problems, but they're devastating to local populations, too. And some of that is health effects of the burning of the original forest to create palm oil plantations. But there are other forms of violence too, like the threatening, the, you know, the violent threatening of journalists who are reporting on what's happening and pressure on local populations to allow companies access and things like that. So there's another really concrete case where you have violence and devastation of animal populations alongside real harms to human beings. Yeah, I mean, just to go back to industrialized food production for a second.

First of all, on my most recent Netflix show, The G Word, we visited a Cargill beef processing plant. I'm not sure if you saw this episode. We were one of the first camera crews to go there in their many decades. And it's a shocking workplace to visit. It's extremely loud. You can see the potential for accident is everywhere. We were there to see how the USDA does their work. But we were very aware while we were there that during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when these places were classified as essential essential workplaces, there was incredible spread of COVID-19 in these locations. And, you know, they're they're closed to media crews for a reason. We were the first camera crew to go in one of these places for decades for a reason. We were the first camera crew to go to one of these places for decades for a reason.

And, you know, you also have the sense that, you know, this is a plant that's in the middle of nowhere almost. These are, you know, everyone who works there is very dependent on the plant. Many, many immigrants, many undocumented immigrants, folks like that. It's like clearly a vulnerable workforce. And there's, you know, the Smithfield pork union drive was like one of the longest, most difficult union drives in recent American history. So all those points are taken really well. But you write, I would love to talk more about Borneo and Sumatra. Oh, I'm sorry, did you have something? I do. I mean, I want to talk about Borneo and Sumatra too, because palm oil is something I'm obsessed with. But before we do that, I think there's a really important

point that you just made about out of sight. And this is a very important point for our work as well. So, these factories are out of sight, much like prisons are out of sight in very, this isn't an accident. This is what we're getting at. This is part of the structure that these are places that we want to hide from, make sure we don't have in our minds. And so, I think part of the work that we're doing is trying to bring in these, not just these sites, but also the ways in which hiding these things is central to the working of the system. If you don't see it, you can't protest. If you don't see what's happening, you can't really take responsibility. And so, if these things are occluded and they're not available to us to see, to some extent, it's really hard to know what to resist. And so, part of what I was saying earlier, which is a little abstract,

as you said, is that there's these ideologies and these ideologies are ideologies to obscure, hide, or prevent from view these very, very damaging structures or violent structures for both humans and for other animals. I want you guys to talk about Borneo and Tamaji. I want you to talk about Pamela too, but I was just going to say, we can make the idea of ideology really concrete. I mean, just the fact that you have buildings that are somewhat nondescript that are hidden away, that's a kind of a physical practice to keep you from noticing things. These laws to keep activists from going, filming, what's going on. That's a legal strategy to keep people from seeing things. The fact that we talk about meat as meat instead of as animal body parts,

we talk about pork and hamburger and bacon instead of what it is that's actually there in front of us. That's a linguistic way and there are material ways and the way animals get packaged out and coming out of these things. So you can go to your grocery store and do your meat shopping and not really notice what it is that you're buying, even though at some level, you know, at another level, you can distance yourself from it. And the things we're talking about, about the kinds of economically vulnerable human populations who are brought into work here, that's another level of, you know, you get people who are going to have a harder time making the public know what's going on. That's a kind of social

strategy for making things invisible. There's great work on all these topics. Yeah. I mean, when you buy, when you, when you're shopping in the grocery store, uh, there's no, there's no label. Yeah. There's a nutrition label on your food. There's an ingredient label on your food. There's no label that shows you what it's like in the places where, where these things were made. Um, there's no, we have no connection to that. And it's something that's almost, that was why we were so excited to cover it on our show, because it's something that we so rarely have any glimpse into. We talk about, and we almost never see. So, well, let's talk about, you know, I look at the back of my food all the time. I see palm oil listed as an ingredient. And I've heard that palm oil is bad.

It wasn't until I was reading the beginning of your book that I really started to accept the gravity of the problem that, you know, Borneo and Sumatra are these places that are islands that have species that are not found anywhere else, endangered species, endangered great ape species. And these habitats are being replaced with what? Palm oil fields, monocrops and at great, great destructive expense. Tell me more about how that came about. Well, part of it is, I mean, ironically, part of the palm oil industry was to create so-called sort of a biofuel, but it ended up being much more environmentally destructive than was imagined. And essentially what ended up happening in the way that many monocrops happen is that the multinational corporations decided to cut down these beautiful, rich, biodiverse and importantly in the workings of capital,

that the corporations themselves made it so that it was needed in every product. It does keep for a long time on the shelf. So that's one of the features of palm oil that makes it exciting. But just like some of the dairy products, you might have read or know that there's a sort of a glut of dairy. And so now there's way in most every product just to get rid of the product. It's not that this ingredient is necessary. It's that, well, we have something to sell, let's sell it. So this is part of the system. But what happened in Borneo and Sumatra, and it's a very complicated story, I'm not going to tell all the details, but part of what happened is that there was a recognition that there was a disempowered group of Indigenous folks who didn't really have

formalized land claim structures. So, it was easy for the corporations to go in and make somewhat shady deals so that the Native inhabitants didn't really get the profits that they were promised or imagined. And this is a practice that's very, very familiar. Unfortunately, one of the things that's happening, and as you say, Borneo and Sumatra are islands. They have beautiful and amazing and unique wildlife that is being destroyed as the forests are being destroyed. Orangutans, the great apes, are one endangered species or group of species that are being threatened. But there are others, there are forest elephants and snow leopards, other creatures that are being threatened. And one of the things that worries me about the great demand and production of palm oil is now

that they've pretty much covered Borneo and Sumatra. I think, um, one of the statistics that we discovered is that it's something like, um, they provide at the moment, 86% of the world's supply of, um, palm oil. And that's like 20 pounds of palm oil per person. So it's 72 million tons. It's a ton of tons. Per person a year? Yeah. Wow.

And part of what's happening is that the demand and the supply concerns are getting greater that they're now moving palm oil plantations to equatorial Africa. Now, again, equatorial Africa is an area that the other great apes live, gorillas and chimpanzees and bonobos. And the deforestation in those areas has already been quite elaborate. But the introduction of palm oil plantations into that part of the world will be devastating for the wildlife. And importantly, I think people in those countries imagine that they're going to profit and also benefit from these corporations. And usually it's not how this works. It does not trickle down from the people who are making the arrangements with the corporations to the native populations. And so this is bad for people and it's bad for animals and it's bad for the

planet. It's bad for the climate. And so that means it's bad for not just the people in those areas, but it's bad for all of us. There might be a few people in that country who are going to make some money, who make the deals for the government or et cetera, who are able to profit off of it, the people who actually are able to sign the land away or whatever. But the population in general, the people who actually live there are not going to. And you say demand, the demand for palm oil, but it's not as though I'm sitting here in Los Angeles saying, get me my palm oil. I got to have palm oil. I'm fine with canola oil. I mean, maybe I don't know the conditions under

which canola oil is made. I believe it's just farmed in Canada. Probably less great apes die as a result of canola oil being produced. So I can stir fry my tofu, but you know, I'm not, I'm not demanding this. This is not a, This is not a necessity for anyone on Earth that says, I got to have this palm oil. They could put something else in the Cheez-Its and I would be just fine with it. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. But I think the other thing to keep in mind about demand is it's not usually consumer demand. It's corporate demand, right? So this is the demand is coming from, let's say, Ritz crackers.

And they want their products to have a longer shelf life. That's financially beneficial to the corporation. They're demanding palm oil. The breakfast cereals, the margarines, all of these. And it's not just food stuff. It's also in shampoo. And it's also in, I mean, it's everywhere. If you look, it's everywhere. So I think it's not just foodstuff. It's also in shampoo, and it's also in – I mean, it's everywhere. If you look, it's everywhere.

So I think it's not us demanding it. We don't actually – sometimes it's on packages, and you don't even know what it is. So it's not individual consumers at all. It's corporate producers that need this ingredient in their products. So that's where the demand is. But I'm glad you clarified that. I think it's important to clarify that. But when you say that, you know, this is,

the deforestation in that example is very clearly affecting both animals and humans that are, you know, both have lived in these areas for untold amounts of time and are now being forced out of them and affected by these farming practices. Well, look, we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Laurie Gruen and Alice Crary.

I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, we're back with Laurie Gruen and Alice Crary. So we've talked about how, we've talked about different frameworks for animal ethics and about how a more effective way to think about it might be to think about how the systems that are in place affect both humans and animals and contribute to destruction that affects all of our species. What should we do with this understanding? What is the next step once we've started to analyze animal issues in this way? Well, I think, I mean, one of the things that I think is really important, and we mentioned it briefly, but I think it's important to get into is this idea of the

structure, as Alice put it, and I'll turn it over to her, but the structures of dehumanization. It's important to first understand the structures of dehumanization in order to sort of resist them. So maybe Alice could tell us. Do you want to, Alice? Sure. I'd be happy to. I mean, I do think we should get to the issue of sort of concrete solutions, but I think it is, Laurie's absolutely right. This was my reason do think we should get to the issue of sort of concrete solutions, but I think it is, Laurie's absolutely right. This was my reason for thinking we should talk about dehumanization. So one of the things to bear in mind, and this is incredible, I found it incredibly illuminating when I first started to work on these issues, is that we often dehumanize, not just often, we systematically

over centuries dehumanize human beings through what is sometimes called animalization. That is, we use comparisons to animals to demean human beings. And this is central to the dehumanizing oppression of human outgroups. And it's even deeper than that. I think there's incredible historical genealogical work about the construction of categories of, say, race, gender, and disability, which show that we've created these categories through animalization. We need, you know, there is a kind of political, social, as it were, need for people who are less empowered, and we create those categories. And so when you put that together with society-wide practices of denigrating non-human animals and treating them as disposable objects, animalization can lead to terrible harms to human

beings. Now, one of the things that we're interested in in the book is the fact that this carves out a political logic, the fact of animalization at such a systematic and wide scale. It carves out a political logic that makes it seem as though what we're talking about in our work together is the wrong way to go. Because it makes it seem like oppressed human groups achieve liberation by showing, hey, we're human, so we're above animals, because that's what the pressure of animalization does. I don't want that to happen to me. So one of the things we're doing in the work we're doing together is telling a story that makes it possible to see both that that logic is totally understandable, while also seeing that there's a sense in which it's deeply, deeply counterproductive. So just to give a sort of

sense of this, I mean, there is great work in social psychology on causal relationships between thought and conduct that place animals below humans and the dehumanizing treatment of human outgroups. That's just empirical. If you are placing, you know, sort of subjecting animals, then the chances are much higher that you're going to be treating human beings badly. But more centrally, what we're doing is resisting the devaluation of animal life that makes animals seem to be available as disposable objects, as points of comparison in this large political system. And that puts us in a position to talk about really significant bonds of solidarity between humans and animals. So in a sense, the thing we've been talking about through this whole conversation isn't something we can take for granted. We're saying, hey, huge,

huge wrongs to humans and animals from the same structures. Well, the way a lot of people think about animals, those aren't really wrongs to animals. So we need to recover the value of animal life in order to be able to talk about a structure in which, hey, resubjecting animals isn't the way to go. The way to go is to see that we're all being wronged. We're all being harmed. And solidarity and alliances is the way forward. So anyway. Oh my gosh. There's so much I want to pull apart there. That's wonderful. I'm sorry. You- No, no. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, it's really fascinating to me because I do think about when I think about animals,

right? I do. I've thought a lot about how I make judgments about how I think about animals in relation to myself, you know, just just from a sort of a, you know, undergraduate philosophy degree sort of level. Like, how do I think about animal consciousness? You know, this is something that I always end up talking about when I talk with Emma Maris or anyone else in this, in this field. But, you know, there's this sort of instinctive thing that you do where you say, okay, well, this animal, you know, my dog has, has many traits that

I recognize in myself. My dog has dreams. That's a pretty good piece of evidence that my dog is conscious. Right. And I value my dog's life. And, you know, I, I, I'm sure I could find the same things in a cow. Right. I find less than a lobster and, uh, you know, with a, uh, you know, uh, a lobster, I then think, or an arthropod of any kind, right. I go, okay. I, I, I end up going over. I do think that this is less human. This is less of a conscious thing and that therefore I have a little bit less of an ethical obligation to it, perhaps. That's something that I've thought about a lot. And I, I, I don't know, I've never, never really held firm to it. But I do think it influences my thinking. But I wonder if there's a difference between recognizing the difference between myself and an animal and putting a value judgment on it, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So I think, I mean, there's a lot of things I wanted to respond to. And I know we also probably want to put octopus on the table, not on the table, but on our conversational table. Octopus are a great example that people often use here. I'd love to hear you talk about that. We have done that. So anyway, but I did want to just say one thing about the kind of sameness difference approach

that you were just discussing. And so one of the very central theories that we find important is ecofeminist theory. It's a very structural part of what we're thinking about and doing. And there's many different kinds of ecofeminist theory. But one of the central insights, again, from 50 years ago, even, if you think about it, from the 1970s, is this idea that there's somehow the way that we value things is in virtue of how similar the thing is to us. But what eco-feminists have argued importantly is that politically and in terms of relations or taxonomies of power, there's actually a way in which, as Alice was saying a

moment ago, we create differences purposely so to exclude. We exclude, right? You're not enough like us, so we're going to put you over there. You don't share our skin color, so we're going to colonize you. So, there's a way in which these similarities and differences aren't, they're constructed to create these hierarchies that we're talking about. And so, one of theies that we're talking about. And so, one of the things that we're doing in our work is showing the ways in which difference needs to be valued itself. That we shouldn't elevate beings because they're the same as us because that creates these power problems that have affected humans and animals, our relationships with other humans and animals. And so that's one of the things I wanted to add there. But I know, I think Alice might want to talk about octopus, don't you? I see you wanting to talk about octopus.

Actually, no, I thought this was a really, like, I'd love to talk about octopuses. But in a sense, I want to talk about insects. Because I think people, when they get, I mean, octopuses are so, there's something like, you know, our, our closest evolutionary ancestor goes back hundreds of millions of years. And so that's true. And so, so hundreds of millions, yes. And, and, and so they are sort of marvelously strange to us, but they're also wildly intelligent once you take the time to spend time with them. I think it's worth talking here about insects and explaining why it is we talk in our book about insects, because nobody's going to sit with a tick or a mosquito and say, oh, I'm going to respect you because you're kind of like me. Or maybe you will. I mean, I actually, I can get in the mindset where I have like glorious creature on earth with only one mortal life. But look, the idea of talking

about insects for us is to get out of the mindset where if you're doing ethical and political intervention, what you're doing is creating a new hierarchy. Because almost you start to talk about welfare, and even people who are talking about rights are often saying, here's who has, you know, welfare needs, here's who has rights needs. So you know, you have your algorithm ahead of time, you know who matters more. And no matter who you are, insects come out towards the bottom. And one thing that's problematic from our point of view is that you've simply maybe softened and made slightly less noxious the same kind of human-animal hierarchies that have done so much damage over centuries. But another thing that we're interested in is really changing the conversation and saying, actually, that's always a way of just submitting to prejudice. You think, oh, somehow some theory is going to handle the task of judgment for me.

No, we need to look at the complexity of our ecological relationships in particular cases. And we can't stave that off to theory. No theory is going to answer it for us. So we talk about insects partly to say, hey, this is a case we need to look at. We have really conflictual relationships with some insects. If we don't think about the ecological values in play, we wind up responding to those conflicts with things like toxic insecticides that kill all sorts of creatures, many more than the insects we regard as pests and wind up being sometimes fatal, but at least harmful to human populations as well.

So insects are a part of our story too. And that's not a case where you're going to be tempted to say, like my dog, you dream, so I'm going to pay attention to you. Right. And I want to say, you're really helpfully complicating for me that way that I've thought about, which is, by the way, it's not a way, the similarity difference model is not something that I've ever felt is correct. It's just been like, how else do I think about it? And what you're saying connects it with another thought that I've had, which is that using that model really leads you down a bad path in other ways, because just for instance, taking someone who speaks a different language than you,

someone who is disabled in a way that makes them different from you. If you're like, well, this person is very different from me. This person doesn't have language that I can understand. This person doesn't do X, Y, Z that I do. You, therefore they're different from me. Therefore they are less conscious. Therefore they are less something that I have, therefore they're different from me, therefore they are less conscious, therefore they are less something that I have less of an ethical obligation to, or any of these things that you might, I suppose, file under dehumanization. I know that's a dangerous road to go down with humans. And so that makes sense to me that it's also a dangerous road to go down with animals. And it helps me connect what you're saying that like the same

systems that we use to dehumanize other people are the same ones that we might use to dehumanize animals. The same system that puts people who, you know, don't speak English, who are not white people, who don't have the same legal protections into a horrible meat factory to work in, you know, out of view of everybody else is the same system that put the animals there. Is that, am I starting to get it? Yeah, that's it. Okay, great. And it goes the other direction as well, right? So this is important. So it's, and I just want to add one quick thing about the insects and tie this together is that part of what we should do is stop thinking of ourselves sort of as either individuals or representatives of a group that's somehow homogenous, that we recognize these interconnections and these complicated relations that we're in. And sometimes we're not aware of all of the implications of what it is we're doing, like what Alice was saying. The idea that somehow I'm not going to try to get rid of mosquitoes,

which are apex predators, have killed more human beings than any other thing in our history. Of course, we're not saying, oh, well, no, just make friends with the mosquitoes and maybe they won't harm you. That's not what we're saying. This is going to be my question, yeah. I'm not friends with mosquitoes. No, not friends with mosquitoes. But the idea then is we need to recognize that the mosquito is part of an ecological network, as Alice said, and that somehow we need to be very specific in figuring out the kind of interconnections between us. And I think part of the problem we have with other humans, what Alice was calling human outgroups, and I think that's the right way to think about it, but also all other animals, is that we somehow aren't recognizing that we're already interconnected.

And in this global crisis, in this animal crisis, these connections are really important to bring into view. And they're particular kinds of connections. They're not going to be connections that are going to exist in every context. But focusing in on the larger connected relations that we're in is one way we need to start addressing these crises. Yeah. It sounds like there's also, I keep hearing you say the word hierarchy, that, you know, reducing the amount of hierarchical relationships that we consider ourselves to be in with animals would seem to be important, that we, less placing ourselves above, right, and more placing ourselves in a network with. But I'm

curious what that looks like, you know, in terms of policies that we might enact or our day-to-day interactions with animals. I mean, again, just take the case of my dog and it's a very specific case, right? But like, you know, dogs literally just evolved to eat human trash, right? We have humans throwing out trash, you know, canines start getting close, they start eating the garbage, you know, and now they just sort of live around human civilizations as a, you know, sort of client species of human cities, right? That, that to me seems to be a relationship that is to some extent inherently hierarchical. But I'm not sure if that actually, I'm not sure how you think about like how you fit it into your framework or what like, you know know how we might reconceive of

that relationship or the relationship with any animal in a non-hierarchical way well i think there's two things that um come to mind immediately and one of the things is that um recognizing the dog and i think you'd probably do this with your dog i certainly do with my dog they have different interests different likes different. One is a little bit too barky. The other one gets barky in response to the other one being barky. The other one doesn't like either of the barky. So you know what I mean? So there's very specific values that the animals themselves are showing us. And we need to see them. We need to see them as the individuals that they are. And the relationships that we're in with them can highlight those expressions of their own way multi-species living. So sanctuaries are a good example of this, animal sanctuaries, where individuals are able to live free of harm or as free of harm as one can be. captive nonetheless, but they have a great amount of freedom. They're able to express their personalities. They're able to live with their offspring. They're able to make friends with

members of other species. And we learn a lot about sort of multi-species living by attending to those actual existing spaces. That's really beautiful. They're beautiful places, too. They're really quite inspiring. And the ways in which they also serve as sites of rescue for animals that have been in different kinds of contexts. But getting to watch, you know, so emus that are in petting zoos, and then the petting zoo closes because the economy was bad. And where are these emus going to go? Emus don't live in the United States. They've been

hunted in Australia for ages. But I think this sort of being around these sort of gigantic birds, some of whom actually like hanging out with goats, it's wild. It's a wild thing. And it opens up all sorts of imaginative possibilities. Well, and this is everyone's favorite form of TikTok content is animals that have learned to be friends, animals that were, people, people love this stuff. Well, so I'd love to go back to mosquitoes actually for a second. Like, is there a, if we're talking about, you know, this is a species that we have a really fraught relationship with, as you said, and, you know, trying to prevent deaths from malaria is like an important human goal. that differently if we are trying to, you know, take the broader view that you suggest, like, rather than, would we, for instance, you know, in some areas, they're trying to reduce or eliminate mosquito populations by releasing sterilized mosquitoes that, like, overwhelm the breeding population. There's that sort of genetic intervention. Is that the kind of intervention

that you're like, we're not a fan of that, We propose X, Y, Z, or is that not, do you not have a specific policy prescription? I'm just sort of curious. We weren't, we are not proposing a specific policy prescription with regard to the managing of mosquito populations. We are, we are, we are, we are drawing attention to various ways in which the problem with the problem, there are a bunch

of things we're doing, but one is drawing attention to the ways in which the systems and structures we're talking about are affecting the problems human beings have with mosquitoes. So one of the things we're drawing attention to is how anthropogenic climate change has actually made worse. Certain kinds of migration patterns of mosquitoes has brought different diseases to different places, to populations who haven't been exposed to them and are more vulnerable in the face of them. And so we're looking at ways,

we're talking about ways in which human activity has been insensitive to the ecological values that we need to pay attention to in order to intervene. So we are talking about the history of the development of things like insecticides and how they've been used in ways that simply don't respect the conditions even for us of life on earth. And at the same time saying, and this is really important, second point next to that is that there is no life on earth without conflicts among species. So we have a lot to say about how a kind of non-exploitative, what we would call politically vegan existence that simply, in some sense, perfectly abstains from consuming, using animal products is a kind of fantasy in today's global world. It's just that animal products are so pervasive. Laurie was listing before foods and products in which they show up. So that's not impossible.

But I think sometimes people start to imagine their own personal forms of ecotopia where an interspecies community where you have a kind of even in a, you know, a separate community, you have sort of like the perfect democratic human and animal set of relationships, even in those cases. We don't have forms of agriculture, ways of farming that don't kill some animals. It is a condition of life on earth, again again going back hundreds of millions of years. And so it is something to be taken into account that the values that we're talking about need to reflect the real conditions of what life on this planet is for us. Yeah, and I understand that we don't expect or imagine that there's going to just be this sort of ecotopia, as I'll put it, or, you know, sort of this harmonious sort of, we're all living happily ever after. And that's a little

bit fantastic. But I also think that what has happened instead is we think, well, we have to kill things to exist. So that's, it's not worth thinking about it anymore it's justified and i want to think i want i want to think about no we have to do certain things that are really um devastating to others and we should we should own that devastation we should pay attention to that disvalue we're creating we should not pretend we did not do those things. And so it's not a choice between perfect ecotopian harmony. And it's OK. Humans can do whatever they want. We don't have to think about it.

There's a really messy place in between that we need to work on and bring into focus. I love that. And you're actually helping me connect this to a whole emotional journey I went through a number of years ago when I was really learning about climate change and, you know, the sixth extinction and all of these ideas. You know, the idea that, God, every action I take as a human being on earth is, you know, resulting in, you know, species collapse and, you know, is affecting the natural world and that, you know, it's impossible for me to live without affecting the natural world.

And I was sort of paralyzed by that. And by talking to a lot of different, you know, environmental philosophers, a wonderful man named Dale Jamison, a bunch of other people, Emma Maris is another person, came to realize that, you know, trying to focus so much on like abstention and on myself as an individual causing no impact is a fantasy. And that the more important thing to do is to realize, oh, I do have an impact. And that gives me control over the situation. That gives me the ability to say, to decide what kind of impact I'm going to have in a more sort of fully visioned way. And what you're saying actually really helps me connect that to the idea of say,

hey, I'm never going to kill another animal. I'm not going to eat meat. I'm going to avoid all those things individually is equally a fantasy. I mean, it's not wrong to try to, you know, affect one's diet to kill less things or whatever, but that having the idea that we're going to have that impact no matter what we do is like an important first step, because then we can start talking about what kind of impact do we want to have rather than trying

rather than trying to get it to zero try to affect the direction of it instead is that an okay dumb dumb version of what you said it's it's really really good and but i think the most important thing that you said is get it off the individual which doesn't mean that we as individuals don't have responsibility but it responsibility, but it's a politically convenient myth for corporations, governments, political systems, that all we need is a virtuous populace in which individuals are going to do the right thing. On the contrary, we are all, from the most oppressed of us to the very richest, we are caught up in a larger system, which has its wheels turning and is devastating the earth at the moment, humans and animals

alike. And we need to think about the kind of change we want in terms of world system. And solidarity. Okay, great. That is what I wanted to end on, because you had mentioned solidarity a few times. In my work as a labor activist, I talk about solidarity quite a lot. And I want to talk about what solidarity means

on a day-to-day level between humans and animals. It doesn't just have to be day-to-day, but since we're at the end of the show or getting there, I'd love to talk about how we can have solidarity with animals in our daily lives or how we can move towards it. What does solidarity with animals mean to you? I'll say one thing, which is slightly on the abstract level, and I'll let Lori handle concretes. But one thing is, in the language that we use in our work is recognizing animal dignity. And that's actually a really radical thing to do. Unsurprisingly, given European modern histories of animalizing human beings,

it's kind of unsurprising for those of us who read philosophy to discover that in the modern period, dignity has mostly been thought of as something human beings achieve by being positioned over animal life. And so the way our intellectual traditions come down to us, the very idea of animal dignity seems like an oxymoron. So one of the things we're trying to do is reclaim it. That's the, when I was saying earlier, that's the kind of shift in the way we value things that would allow us to talk about structures actually harming human beings and animals alike, because animals have to be the kind of creatures who can be, they have the kind of dignity that allow them to be harmed by systems that commodify them and dispose of them. So that's the abstract point. Go ahead for the concretes. I'm going to try and do this. Be very specific. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, I just want to say I finally got something that you said earlier, which I like finally understood it because you're saying that so often,

this connects to something you were saying before, that so often when we try to make the claim that a human group is worthy of respect, we're saying, no, no, this is a human. This is not an animal. We previously classified this sort of disabled person or this sort of ethnic group as being sort of animalistic. And now in our more enlightened phase, we say, okay, no, these are humans. These are people. we say, okay, no, these are humans, these are people. And when, you know, in many cases, we've made the claim for animal rights, we're saying, no, no, they're a lot like humans. They can see themselves in a mirror. That's right.

And that is the mistake. We should be saying, no, animals themselves are worthy of dignity. That's exactly right. It wouldn't be an insult to say, you're kind of like an animal, even if it were the case, because while animals themselves should have dignity and value and all those things, et cetera.

That's not necessary. It's not a bad thing to be unlike a human, to be an animal. So I just finally like it got it got all the way through into the middle of me. And I wanted to flag that. So I'm sorry. Please, please go on, Laurie. OK, so I just wanted to make some a concrete sort of case for solidarity that recognizes cases of humans that are denied dignity and animals that are denied dignity.

I just mentioned briefly the students that I work with who are incarcerated. And when I teach about animals in the prison context, I'm always just so overwhelmed by the immediacy with which incarcerated people that I'm teaching recognize solidarity with other animals and because of the conditions of a lack of dignity or denial of dignity that they experience in prisons. And so there's ways in which, and I think this is also something that happens in all sorts of communities of those humans who have been quote unquote othered, that's a sort of more abstract way of thinking about it, but outgroups, what Alice was calling outgroups. I think that recognizing that that structure

of making outgroups relies on us not connecting ourselves with animals, not recognizing their dignity, is a really clear way of bringing us together in solidarity with one another. And I think that that's a really important notion, and it's happening all over the place. It's happening in sort of Black vegan SoulFest community conferences. It's happening in, as I was mentioning, in sanctuaries. So there's ways in which, and it's happening with a group of incarcerated folks who are trying to get better foods in the prisons. So I think that there's all sorts of political space,

and that's part of the work that we're doing for recognizing and being in solidarity with other animals as well as other humans who are struggling with various forms of prejudice and indignity. I really love your message. I mean, I've often felt that, look, I've been a vegetarian at times throughout my life and I have a lot of respect for that. And I have a lot of respect for that. But I've always been a little disheartened that that is for so many of us, the end all be all of our conversation about animal welfare rights, you name it, has been, hey, do you eat meat or not? Or do you eat meat or dairy or not? And the end. Right. And that's how it's presented to the public. I know that many vegetarians and vegans have more complex analyses than that. But I love, for me, what you're saying

really helps me connect that to everything else I try to do in my life, which is, hey, I'm not going to worry so much about plastic bags, how many plastic bags I take home from the store. I'm going to try to avoid it, but really I'm going to work on trying to dismantle the systems that, you know, result in such incredible amounts of pollution and climate change, et cetera. And the same framework can be applied to animal issues that we can, the real issue is dismantling these systems and also seeing how those systems are connected to the other systems that I'm worried about.

And you connected it to incarceration and criminal justice, which is another system that I am incredibly concerned about. Obviously, the connection is there. So I really love talking to you. This has been really enlightening and fascinating to me. And thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about it. Thank you so much for having us. It was a great conversation.

Thanks, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Alice Crary and Lori Gruen for coming on the show. Their book, Animal Crisis, is available at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roundman, and our engineer, Ryan Connor. And of course, everyone who is supporting this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. who is supporting this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. That's WhiskeyNerd88, Tyler Derak, Susan E. Fisher, Spencer Campbell, Shannon Grimmett,

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