Factually! with Adam Conover - What Do We Owe Wild Animals? with Emma Marris

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

What are our moral obligations to nature, and the wild animals that live in it? Should we vaccinate them? Should we feed them when they're starving? Should we kill so called "invasive" species? Emma Marris is back this week to discuss her new book Wild Souls and the complex ethical dilemmas surrounding our relationship with wild animals. You can check out her book at 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.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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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 everyone, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. So wonderful to have you listening to the show once again to an incredible interview with an incredible expert who knows some incredible things that you probably don't know. Let's get into it. You know, part of our fascination with the natural world, with nature, is that it operates according to different laws than we have in our human civilization. In fact, the laws of nature often run counter to the laws of human society. For instance, in our society, we don't really

love it when someone gets murdered. We think that that's bad and we think that we should prevent such a thing happening at all costs. But when a creature in nature murders another creature and eats it, well, we don't send the nature cops out there to bust them and send them to forest jail. No, we say, wow, look at majestic nature, red in tooth and claw. Why, that's just the law of the jungle or whatnot. In fact, we're often awestruck thinking about the violent ballet in the struggle of nature. It's one of the things that we love about it. But at the same time, this idea that the natural world exists on a different plane of

morality from our own, well, that makes our interactions with it confusing. For instance, think about a species out in nature that might be going extinct because of human effects on their habitat. How do we deal with that? Should we engage in a complex breeding or genetic engineering program to save that species? Or should we geoengineer a river to save a single species that lives in that river? Should we kill large numbers of, quote, invasive animals like they do in Australia or New Zealand? If doing so, we'll save a single endangered marsupial that we adore?

Now, hey, maybe you heard some of those questions and said, I think they have an easy answer. But if you start to dig into why you think the answer is what it is, you might run into a couple internal contradictions. Here's another one for you. Consider this common argument that some philosophers advance for why we shouldn't eat meat.

They argue that animals can suffer, so farming and killing them is de facto inhumane. this common argument that some philosophers advance for why we shouldn't eat meat. They argue that animals can suffer, so farming and killing them is de facto inhumane. Well, if that's true, then why shouldn't we go out into the woods and save the lives of herbivores who are being eaten by carnivores? I mean, seriously, why? It's a harder question to answer than you might think. And that's because they require us to figure out what our values actually are in relation to the natural world and what moral principles apply. I mean, seriously, these are harder questions to answer than you might think. And that's because they require us to figure out exactly what our values, our moral principles are in relation to the natural world. And that's a difficult but very worthwhile task

because we are not getting a new world anytime soon. So we better start figuring out how exactly we relate to the one we currently live in. Well, to help us think through these issues, we have as our guest today, one of the smartest and most thought-provoking environmental writers out there. We've had her on the show before.

We had an incredible conversation then. And the conversation that we recorded for this episode was absolutely fascinating. It blew my mind and made me consider things I had not considered over and over again. And I very much hope and think it'll do the same for you. Her name is Emma Maris, and she has a new book out called Wild Souls, Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World. Please welcome to the show once again, Emma Maris. Emma Maris, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Thank you for having me. I loved our conversation. It was about two years ago, after your appearance in Adam Ruins Everything, about how we might reimagine our relationship with the natural world. You have a new book out. Tell me what are the new insights contained therein? Well, the new book is about animals, wild animals in particular, and whether or not they really still are wild in a very human, human changed world.

And also about what we might owe to them ethically. human changed world and also about what we might owe to them ethically. What are our responsibilities towards these other creatures that we share the planet with? Yeah, that's such an interesting, confusing question. Can I start with an anecdote? Please. I read an article years ago. It was like a guest article in Vox. It wasn't even like a Vox writer. It was like somebody who was like writing their first piece in Vox. And the premise of the article was that the most ethical thing to do would be because there are so many animals who die in the wild of diseases, we should go into the wild and start vaccinating animals against not not against human diseases like we should vaccinate like koalas against

koala diseases in order to reduce the amount of animal suffering. And I could see what the chain of logic was here. This is someone who would say, hey, one of my ethical commitments is to reduce suffering among animals. I think animals are sentient to the degree that they suffer. And so I don't want to eat meat or I want to reduce, you know, the number of animals that are killed. And then they kept thinking, well, what else does that require me to do? I think I should go vaccinate animals. And I was like, but me hearing that for the first time,

I was like, this seems like an almost absurd conclusion, but I'm not sure how I felt about it. It was one of those arguments where you, it provoked me in this way that was really destabilizing. And I was like, wait, I've never thought about my ethical commitment to wild animals. And I have no I still have no idea where I stand on that issue, whether I think it's rational or whether I think it's a crazy thing to think. Yeah. The problem of wild animal suffering as it is referred to in philosophical circles is definitely one of the things we cover. You know, should we be vaccinating them against diseases?

What about the fact that some animals eat other animals? Should the predators all be slowly eased out of ecosystems, given birth control pills, so there'll be no more lions so that then the gazelles won't get eaten this is a real a real proposal yes yes wow because it sort of depends what as you said your the ethical commitments you start with if you start with the notion that all suffering is bad and you have an obligation to try to reduce all suffering in the world then all of a sudden the the very structure of ecosystems is a problem the fact that things eat other things becomes a bug not a feature um so it really does open open up some very big very

confusing questions very quickly well and you know so this topic you know the the difference between human and nature in our relation is a recurring topic on this show i was just talking to jacqueline gill a couple weeks ago about how in many ways we need to break down that dichotomy between thinking of the human world, the natural world is different. You and I have talked about that as well. But on that issue where, you know, I think the the the defense against thinking you have to go vaccinate all the animals is to think, well, hold on a second. There's human morality and we should not apply that to the natural world. The natural world has its own rules in the human sphere. Yes, I want to reduce all suffering, but when it comes to nature, well, nature has its own thing going on and I don't

want to mess with it too much. And in that sense, the dichotomy makes more sense. So we're immediately into some extremely weighty issues. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I talk a lot about in the book about the autonomy of, you know, non-humans and how, how respecting their autonomy is something that we should really consider. And that's a really strong argument to not start wading into ecosystems and, you know, giving birth control to all the lions and vaccinating all the koalas and, and fiddling around like that because it's, it's, it's putting our value system onto these other communities that don't live by our

rules. So I think that, yeah, there's arguments pro and con and the autonomy that you bring up, the sort of freedom of non-humans is a strong one. Yeah. And there's also a degree into which by imposing human values, we're making those places less wild and to the extent that wildness is a value that we might also want to treasure in addition to reducing suffering then i i don't know it gets very complex very fast but let's bring it back down to earth okay let's not like fly up into the air in a balloon like right from the beginning i like to do that as we go through um uh tell me about some of the examples that you have in your book. What are the specific case that you think is really illustrative of these issues? So there's two that

I think are helpful to think about. And the first one is a helping case. The case is humans cause climate change. Climate change means there's less sea ice. That means polar bears can't hunt seals. That means polar bears are starving. Many of your listeners may have heard of this basic idea that polar bears are in trouble because of climate change. So then the question is, should we feed the polar bears? Should we be up there with big vats of polar bear chow giving them lunch? So that's one question that philosophers have been looking into and actual conservationists have proposed. I like the idea of philosophers looking into something. I don't know.

We've got to convene a philosophical task force. Congress is going to make sure that the philosophers are on the case. If only, if only this were the case, I think that we'd be in better shape. And the other case study is killing for conservation. So this happens a lot on island systems where you've got these, or Australia, which is kind of like the world's biggest island, where you've got new predators introduced to the system,

like cats or rats or foxes, and they're eating all the native species. And so in order to fix things, quote unquote, the sort of dominant strategy has been to go in and do these massive kills of cats, rats, foxes, mice, et cetera. So I had a couple of chapters looking at that, like, is it really okay to kill so many animals in order to save species when species aren't really sentient, don't really have goals, don't really have a brain, but individual animals do? have goals don't really have a brain but individual animals do yeah you know the cases where yeah we're killing many many individuals in order to uh save like a broader ecosystem that's like a very these are really difficult moral questions for us to wrestle with do you come to any sort of

conclusion about any of them in any of these cases like What I do, I wish that I could have come with sort of a perfect algorithm that you could just feed a moral conundrum through. Like you just take out the dilemma machine and you put the problem in the top and the solution comes out the other end. But unfortunately, I don't think that that's possible because every case is slightly different. So instead, what I come up with in the end of the book is a list of things that I think are actually valuable in the non-human world. Things like the autonomy of non-humans, things like diversity of life. And then I have another list of things that I actually think are kind of BS that aren't really valuable. Things like, you know, the purity of a certain species genome or naturalness in the sense of something being totally separate from humans.

And then I come up with a kind of a, so once I've got my two lists, I have a little process for kind of churning through some of these ethical dilemmas. So I have like a five-step plan of how to tackle these. I don't give you the answers, but I give you the framework for working through it on your own, I guess. Well, so let's say we want to puzzle through one of these difficult ones. Let's do the polar bear one because that's cuter and it doesn't include killing stuff yet, hopefully. So if we were to think about, OK, I'm worried the polar bear is on the ice flow. The ice flow is getting smaller and smaller. The polar bear is getting less food. I love polar bears. They're so cute. Do I want to start feeding the polar bears? Well, my initial reaction is, well, that's unnatural for me to do that. Then

they're like pigeons, which is, you know, uh, I like birdwatching. I don't like pigeons as much as the other birds that get their own, you know, it's like less fun. It's less wild. It's less interesting. I like that they're getting their own food. But if I don't do that, the polar bear might die out. So how does how would I puzzle through this? Right. So I think like, you know, I think your intuitions are pretty broadly shared there. Right. We don't like the idea of this sort of pedification of a wild animal where over time they become dependent on us. And I think that if you're looking at that in terms of this sort of notion of like sort of wild wildness defined as the lack of human influence that that's a bit of a red herring because obviously they are being massively influenced by humans so they wouldn't be starving in the first place right like they are living in our world in the conditions we've created so set

that aside but then take a look at the sort of freedom of the individual bears if we're feeding them does that make their lives less good less free do they become just sort of freedom of the individual bears. If we're feeding them, does that make their lives less good, less free? Do they become just sort of like, I don't know, custodians of the human world? And then you sort of do this kind of imaginative exercise of what would they want if they could puzzle through it themselves? And they probably, on an individual basis, rather not die of starvation they'd probably take the deal you know um yeah so i and of course

there's of course many more complications that you have to puzzle through you have to think about what do the indigenous people who typically hunt polar bears think is the right move and and what's there you know because they should have a big piece of of they should have a huge amount of say in what happens here um yeah and then also what are you going to feed them right like they normally eat seals so you're going to go out and kill a bunch of seals and feed them to the polar bears so that opens up a whole bunch of other questions now you've got a seal killing operation in order to save the polar bears right exactly so so let's imagine that that you have some sort of perfect vegan polar bear chow. I don't think this exists. OK, well, let's say it did.

I think that you could make an ethical case for supplementing the diet of polar bears through this sort of bottleneck period when it's hot and and they don't have enough sea ice to hunt all winter, um, provided that you're also doing something about climate change so that a few generations from now, you can wean them off the vegan polar bear chow and back on, back onto the ice. Um, I think you could kind of conceptualize it as a sort of a couple of

generations long stop gap project to keep them going through the hottest time. And then you could get them back out more independent. So that's probably right now, obviously, then there's other, of course, do how much are we going to spend on this? And where is the money going to come from? And are we taking money away from, you know, the school lunch program to feed polar bears? I'm not so sure about that, you know.

So, you know, the pragmatics of it can get messy pretty quickly, but in a kind of a pure abstract philosophical world, I think you can make the case for a temporary, you know, no more than a century long supplemental feeding program. You are really talking more like a philosopher than the last time we spoke. You're like, well, presume there is a perfect vegan polar bear chow. That's right. Yeah. Very much a thought experiment. Yeah. Well, well, presume there is a perfect vegan polar bear chow. That's right. Yeah. Very much a thought experiment. Yeah.

Well, you know, if my last book was really sort of pop side, this is pop fill, right? Which is now, and now a thing, thanks to like the good place, people are willing to

enter into these conversations about philosophical ideas and hypotheticals and pushing people onto trolley tracks and stuff like that. And I think it's great that we're talking more about sort of, you know, these sort of ethical ideas more abstractly, because it's really helpful to have some of these frameworks to understand, like, well, do I care more about the consequences of my action,

or do I care more about, like, whether a good person would do this action? Like, those are two big schools of ethical philosophy. And it's really helpful to like have the tools to think through this stuff. And do you find comfort in that? Because sometimes, you know, I feel that, look, I have a bachelor's in philosophy. That's not much of a degree,

but you know, I did spend some time studying it. And like, when I start to think philosophically about issues like this, I often feel like I'm sort of wading into the muck, like I'm leaving the clean shore of, you know, understanding what I think. And I'm moving into a gray zone where I start to say, well, depending on how you value different outcomes, we need to come up with a framework for this. And then that's sort of where you land, because you never get around to defining what your values actually are in a way that everyone can agree on. Except I do. You define the problem very well. I have a list of like the good values and the bad values like i really do i really do come down on saying some of these values like look here's the list well i'm

things that are not valuable right like i i have on page 254 i have a list of five things that are not valuable and i have another list of things that are valuable on the next page. So I do try to actually make, come to some conclusions, but I can't come to universally applicable conclusions about every case because the particulars of every case are going to, in fact, I think the muddiness comes from the real world,

you know, situations in which this stuff is embedded. I think that you, if you have a hypothetical case where it's like, this is an island and this species will 100% go extinct if you don't kill the foxes. And there are exactly 100 foxes

and there are exactly 100 endangered birds. You can create a hypothetical that's tidy and you can use your philosophy on that. I think that that's helpful. And then when you get to the real messy world with all of the stakeholders and the permitting processes and the federal agencies and everything, you can still use the insights from your more hypothetical exploration. But it's much more complicated and tangled.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly. Like, can we talk about another example that I think about constantly? I don't know if you cover this in the book or not, but the the problem of when humans start maintaining the population of a feral animal that that we have brought into an area that is not native to the area. The example that I've talked about on my own show is feral cat populations, which, you know, humans brought to this continent, I believe, to North America, the continent that we are both currently in. And, you know, our pets escaped. They are, you know, they have large feral populations. Those feral populations are killing birds

on a huge scale. And also the animals themselves are clearly very unhappy. It's like dangerous. It's a bad place for the animals to be. You see a feral cat in a feral cat colony. You're not like, wow, what a happy cat. You're like, oh, right. And so my my position is as not a cat lover, particularly as I'm like, we just got to we just got to get rid of all these cats. You know, I mean, if I've got 100 feral cats in my city, I'm sorry. Let's just humanely put down 100 cats. I'm very sorry. Maybe people are going to be very upset with me for saying this, but I think that's the, I think that's the best way to reduce the suffering because like everyone says trap, neuter, release programs. My understanding of those is that those are where they trap the cats, they neuter them and they release them. Those have not been shown to be incredibly effective, you know? And so we do a lot better

just to like, Hey, let's nip this problem in the bud. We'll save a lot of birds lives. We'll save a lot of cats lives in the long run because we won't be creating all these new cats that are dying. Right. However, there's a lot of people in the real world who they just fucking love cats. You know, they're like, well, no, these are these are cute little kitty cats. And I don't care that they're not native. I don't care that they're killing many more animals. I want to I care mostly about maximizing the livelihood of these particular cats right here. And then that's a you know, that no matter what my philosophical conclusion is, I'm I got to wrestle with the fact that a lot of people in my community who I respect and I don't want to denigrate because, you know, because this is their value system. They just love the cats. And that's that makes the problem a lot thornier.

Yeah, for sure. How do you look at that situation? Well, I do talk about cats quite a bit in an Australian context because here in North America, they eat a lot of birds, but they haven't driven any birds extinct yet. Whereas in Australia, they are sort of responsible for some documented extinctions of small native mammals and so their their conservation community is is really active in trying to kill kill cats they they had like a national goal of killing oh i'm gonna have to look it up 400 million cats a million cats a billion cats i don't know they were going to kill a lot of cats and what troubled me about that program was that it wasn't what you kind of laid out in a more urban context it wasn't trying to eradicate the population they were just trying to like

knock it back um and to me that's ethically problematic because then they just reproduce and then you you kill come and kill them again and it's this now you've got a program of killing cats forever you're just yes always you got people out there who just got a gas cats for the rest that's awful yes yeah so i think we can agree that that that sort of perpetual cycle of of of killing cats is is not good we don't like that we don't like that then the question is well so if there is a the technology exists to fully eradicate them should that be done or should they be even the the sort of right to live there because you know maybe they're not native but they might have been born in that empty lot in los angeles so that's their home um and and i do and i have like a whole whole chapter is

devoted to each side of this question um Um, and I think, you know, I don't know if there is a right answer to this. I think it really does depend on your, your baseline value propositions. And some philosophers think that, you know, if you have a relationship with an animal, it changes what you owe to them. So kind of oddly enough,

the minute you start feeding a feral cat colony, it might potentially sort of change what you now owe to this colony ethically, because you have kind of an ongoing relationship with them. We can't fully divorce our emotions from our sort of ethical decision making. We can't be sort of like little logic, rational, ethic robots. You know, maybe Peter Singer can just, you know, figure out what the consequences are and then maximize everybody's happiness and then proceed. But I think most of us do make our decisions with a combination of sort of logic and emotion. And I think it would be foolhardy for us to pretend that we don't do it that way. Well, and it would be foolish to try to like eliminate

emotion and do the, you know, well, now we're now we're back with Mr. Spock. Right. But that's part of human life and human decision making and what it means to be a human and to try to, you know, do the, you know, the logic lord thing. It doesn't make sense. And that's why, by the way, if someone were to come to me and say, hey, the thing I said about let's just let's just, you know, get rid of that cat colony. Here's here's reason ABC why that's an unethical position. I'd immediately go. Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. Like, I get why it's more complex. That's my initial response to the problem. Right. But as soon as like I other people's emotions are valid and I can see how I would very easily have that emotion myself, you know, and the argument of like, hey, this is this cat didn't ask to be born here. Like,

you know, is like it really makes it much more complex. These are hard questions, Emma. Yeah, yes, they are. Yeah, I keep, you know, people keep saying, well, what are your conclusions or what's your take home? And I'm like, it's a process. The take home is a process. You know, it is about sort of doing the work of figuring out what you think is really valuable, but examining those, like, for example, with the cat case, I think that killing a cat because it quote unquote doesn't belong or isn't native is bullshit. Like that's a bad reason to kill a cat. Um, uh, because you can't put everybody back where they belong. That just doesn't make any sense. You know, nature is a moving target.

Things are moving around constantly. I think the kind of notion that nativeness gives you a right to exist and that if you're not native you deserve to be killed is really problematic. So that pairs down some of the, you know, some of the but I do think that the fact that a population of cats is driving a native animal towards extinction is a potentially possible reason to do something about the cats.

So, you know, you just got to really examine why you feel the way you feel, but then don't discount your feelings either because they're part of that process. Don't discount your feelings either because they're part of that process. Yeah. So I want to let's let's dwell for a second on what you said about nativeness, because I think this is like the most not controversial, the most like different thing that you say from what, you know, so many conservationists and people along those lines. I mean, if you go to, you know, go out on a nature walk with someone from your local botanic society or Audubon society, and they'll be like, oh, native plant, native bird, non-native plant, non-native bird. I hate that house sparrow or whatever. I think house sparrows are non-native, you know, like all these common, you know, terrible. And that makes sense to me on a lot of level. I mean, as an as my first viewpoint, like a lot of non-native species are invasive and push out species that, you know, are are native. A lot of non-native species have, you know, if we're talking about plants, say here in California, they have, you know, like watering requirements that are, you know, not not commensurate with the area, all these sorts of things. And it does seem to violate also like when you're a nature lover, you love nature.

You love the thing that was already there apart from humanity to a certain extent. So like I don't talk. Talk to me about that piece of it a little bit. So like, I don't know, talk to me about that piece of it a little bit. Yeah. So I just think that, you know, first of all, this kind of notion that every place has a suite of native species and that those are the only species that are sort of allowed to be there only goes back to sort of the mid 20th century. I love where you're going. Keep going. Give me more of this. So, I mean, you know, things move around. And before the sort of 1950s, the idea that a plant from Europe might naturalize, that was kind of the terminology that was used back then in the United States, wasn't necessarily considered a bad thing.

People were moving plants and animals around on purpose all the time, sometimes with no big deal effects and sometimes with terrible effects. But then in the 50s, Charles Elton, this famous ecologist, wrote some books about comparing introduced species to sort of bombs and war and using all these sort of militaristic metaphors to talk about how species could be like. And then in the years that came after, people started talking about them as sort of pollution, as if they're sort of the way that they infiltrated an ecosystem was like

kind of impure. So the rhetoric around it I think is like really loaded and not super duper detached and scientific. And it can lead to some really weird outcomes. So for example, many people are willing to

kill non-native animals in ways that are considered inhumane if you were to use them on sort of pets or native animals, you know, drowning them in a bucket or giving them poison that takes a week to kill them, that kind of thing. to this question of nativeness, it starts to fall apart scientifically because species do move around over time. And there's nothing super different scientifically between the ones that are moved by humans and the ones that are moved by getting on a raft of branches and crossing the ocean or crossing a land bridge when North and South America come together. And in fact, there's lots of famous cases where scientists didn't know whether humans moved it or whether it moved itself. And so they weren't sure whether to kill it or to let it be. And they had to do all this investigation to figure out whether it was a bad guy or a good guy. And so the whole framework only really works if you think that humans are not a part of nature

at all. And I just reject that framework. I think humans are a part of nature. Now, having said all of that, there are certain situations, especially on islands, where introduced species do cause such extreme changes that they can drive species extinct. And in those cases where introduced species are really causing problems,

causing situations we don't like, I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to fix those problems or trying to address those situations absolutely but it's because of the consequences not because of the non-nativeness exactly right so so it should not be enough to say you don't have the right passport i'm going to kill you now it should be okay here are our goals for this place and and this species that's here is making it difficult for us to achieve these goals and so we're going to try to figure out how to solve that problem but it should be about what they're doing in the ecosystem not about where they came from yeah i think what makes it complicated is that like the the native species

like a lot of non-native species are invasive is probably a completely another differently loaded. I hate that word. I don't use it because it sounds like an intentional. It sounds like they're like, all right, men, we're going to North America. Get on the boat. Yeah. Well, so many species that are introduced by humans did, in fact, proliferate to a degree that pushed out other species that we might have preferred to protect. Like that is a thing that has happened. It is true. And that's a thing that people in the past

did not know about. Like a story that has stuck with me is I don't know if it's apocryphal or not because it sounds too good to be true, but that the European starling is all over North America because it was released by Shakespeare buffs who wanted to they were like, let's have every bird mentioned in Shakespeare exist in North America. And they started with the starling and they released it. And now there's starlings literally everywhere you go in North America. There's starlings all over the place. And we can look back at those people and say, well, that was, you know, we prefer people to not do that. But not because it's not native in your view, but because it could have bad consequences that we cannot predict.

Yes. Yeah. No, I definitely, I'm definitely opposed to willy nilly moving things around because as you say, it's very difficult to predict what's going to happen. So yeah, don't, don't listeners at home, please don't take large breeding populations of species and move them across continents. I advise against it strongly. But I mean, the starling is an interesting example, right? Like, so obviously it causes a lot of problems in agricultural context,

like a big flock will descend on your crop and start eating it. But I don't think you can find an example of a species that the starling has driven extinct. I've looked into this pretty closely and it is islands that this goes down. It is on islands where introduced species cause actual extinctions in north america i have not been able to find examples of non-native species causing actual extinctions because there's enough room for things to respond evolve develop the ecosystem shifts around you know there's remnants i'm not saying that they are always ideal, but I don't think that they've caused a ton of extinctions on continents. Wow. But what about I mean, I've read about cases.

Look, I believe that you've you've gone into it, but, you know, there's cases I'm trying to remember. What is it? There's like a what's the fish that's moving up a river and devouring the snakehead? Yeah, I have it right. It's just like we're like, ah, there's too many snakeheads and they're eating a lot of crap. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, obviously it might have unwanted effects on recreational fishery. And those are, and that's just, you know, that's a real thing. You know, if I am a manager of this lake and it's filled with snakeheads and I want it to be filled with trout or whatever, bass or whatever, then maybe I take out the snakeheads.

um a bass or whatever then then then then maybe i take out the snake heads you know that's but it depends on what they're doing what my goal is not because snake heads are snake heads are inherently evil creatures yeah so it's that that over focus on this like very simple thing of native or not yeah i mean that that can lead us to make poor decisions when we are trying to manage the, or not even manage, interact with the, with the natural world. And it can lead us to do weird things. Yeah. If we focus on that too much. Yeah. I mean, you know, one example is I often talk to people who've been trying to restore a property or, or they work for a parks department and they're trying to restore, and they realize that they've been spending years and years and years and dumping tons and tons and tons of herbicide to try to, you know, get rid of non-native plants. And they're not really totally

sure why, except that they're not native. And it's a huge amount of effort and money that they could have spent on making trails or buying more property, putting in swing sets. I don't know, you know, depending on the context, it seems like a wasted effort. And I already mentioned the cases in which non-native animals are treated differently. They have a different sort of standard of humaneness than native animals. And that I find to be very ethically tricky. After the break, I want to ask you more about our ethical obligations towards animals, because I think this is really a really interesting thing at the heart of your argument.

But let's take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Emma Maris. OK, we're back, Emma. So what do you feel? I mean, the fundamental question of what our ethical obligations to animals are is a very difficult one. Do you have any personal you have any personal feeling on this? I don't want to say I don't even know if it's possible to make a claim about what our obligations are that will apply to everyone. But like, what is your personal feeling on the matter? Yeah, I appreciate how you phrased that question, actually, because I think you're right. I think that this, I don't think I can make a claim to a universal answer to this. But I think for me, I do think that biodiversity is valuable.

So I do think that in some situations it is ethically acceptable to, to hurt or kill individual animals to protect species. Um, I don't love it. Uh, I don't think I don't relish it, but I do think that it is sometimes ethically justifiable. Um, but I think that's one of the sort of relatively short list of situations where it's okay to go and just kill non, you know, non-human animals. I think that if where we can, where it's possible, I think letting them be autonomous and free is the ideal, right? Um, you, you talked about wildness earlier and I don't like defining wildness as a lack of human influence because as we've noted, I don't really believe that humans aren't part of nature,

but I do think that wildness can, uh, kind of point towards this other value, which is the value of freedom for sentient creatures, letting them do their thing. So I think where we can let them do their thing, let them make their own choices about what to have for breakfast and where to go. I think that's good. So like I have a chapter about zoos where I'm like, eh, I don't love zoos because then they can't make their own choices about what to do and where to go. So I think trying to let wild animals be as autonomous as possible

while balancing that with trying to stop species from going extinct is sort of where I land. Oh, so this starts to almost mirror like a conversation we might have about other humans. Like what do we take steps to prevent other humans from killing themselves accidentally, right, or from doing unsafe things? Or do we allow them more autonomy? That's like a discussion that we might have about like, you know, are we going to ban

smoking cigarettes or something along those lines? And that's a very complex, different discussion, but it's something that, oh, I can sort of see how there's a comparison between that and saying, well, if you're talking to someone who's saying, should we, we know out the predator population because it's causing suffering in animals, like, well, we should also allow, like, yes, we want to reduce suffering in animals. Like, well, we should also allow, like, yes, we want to reduce suffering in animals where we can, especially say factory farming.

We absolutely want to reduce suffering. But when it comes to animals that are literally out in the forest, we also want to take into account their autonomy. And part of their autonomy is allowing them to just fucking live out there and maybe get eaten by a hawk. Yeah, I think that's right.

There is this book that I talk about in my book that that uses the kind of analogy of nation states to talk about animal populations. So like the polar bears and the seals and all of the other animals that interact in that food web would be like a different nation that we wouldn't necessarily have the right to go interfere in their affairs and tell them how to lead their lives. But if they were suffering through a disaster, you know, then feeding the polar bears would be like a kind of foreign aid where we show up and we help them out. So it gives you a sort of a sense of, you know, where the boundaries might be between

intervening for their own good, quote unquote, and letting them sort it out on their own. Maybe they're like other countries, other nations, these other animals, these other species. That's really, that's a really fascinating way to look at it. But okay,

I think I figured out what is weirdest to me about this whole conversation. And this is where it starts to really break down in my mind and I get really confused. Because I agree with breaking down the dichotomy between the human world, the natural world, and we're all part of the same world. And, you know, the problems with everything you're saying about nativeness and wildness

specifically as like free from human intervention. But the big difference between, you know, our ethical obligations to each other and our ethical obligations to animals is that animals, I don't believe, maybe you'll disagree, but I don't know how you could. Animals do not have a moral sense of their own. Like if there were not humans, there wouldn't be anyone having this conversation in the first place. Right. Animals would just be eating each other. There wouldn't be anyone having this conversation in the first place. Right. Animals would just be eating each other. Animals also would be moving from place to place and invading other ecosystems. And that and no, no one, no other animals be sitting around going, oh, it sure is too bad that, you know, the dodo died out because, you know, some is a sense in which like wildness is separate from humanness to me, because if humans aren't around, well, it's like, you know, it's like the famous clip of Werner Herzog out in the jungle going like nature is corrupt and debased and they're screaming and

blood and like, yeah, that's what nature is like. It's just like horror and death and life and joy and all these things happening. and no one is putting any values on it we as humans are the only ones who do that and so i do end up feeling at root the more i think about this stuff well it to the extent that we're doing that at all that's a human thing that is not an animal thing to do is to is to even be having these conversations and so to that extent the entire project still seems a little bit weird to me at root i don't know what do you think well is to even be having these conversations. And so to that extent, the entire project still seems a little bit weird to me at root. I don't know.

What do you think? Well, I agree with you that, I mean, certainly I talk a little bit in the book about the sort of glimmerings of sort of morality in non-humans. Like chimps get mad at unfairness. Like if you give one chimp a good treat and the other chimp a bad treat,

they'll be pissed off. So there, um, and certainly many animals, social animals are kind to each other, like help each other out, take care of each other, watch each other's backs. Um,

so there are sort of like little, little hints there, but yeah, broadly speaking, I agree with you that, that humans are the only animal that, that has this sort of ethical obligation. Um,

you know, the lion does not have an obligation not to eat the gazelle um because it just doesn't apply to it i agree with that um and i also agree that there's a lot of just horror and mayhem and death and suffering and stuff in the natural world i talk about that near the end of the book about how puzzled i am that i have that I love so much these food webs that are all about one thing eating another thing and things dying and babies, you know,

eggs getting sucked out of the shells by snakes. And I mean, it's intense out there, you know? It's not sunshine and rainbows out in the ecosystems. So I agree with both of those. And I feel like there is a sense in which human ethical systems just don't map well onto non-human food webs. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of one of the things that we like about them, you know, like, like again, I've, I've started actually since the first, since last time we spoke, I've started avidly birdwatching. I've been birdwatching during quarantine. I've been waiting to tell you this.

In fact, the first, when we were on set for Adam ruins everything, I, I, I had like written in, in the, in the show that like, you see a bufflehead off camera and then you like looked up, Oh, actually at the park that we're shooting this, like a bufflehead was camera and then you like looked up oh actually at the park that we're shooting this like a bufflehead was seen like a little while ago and like so that and i was like oh cool and that sort of was part of what got me started thinking oh maybe i should like understand what fucking bird is what and so i've had a great time fantastic and and so you start to as you bird watch you start to love the birds you're like oh i like this. I like that bird. And you like to see a hawk. Right. Even though the hawk is killing the other birds, you also like you're not like, oh, my God, I hate the fucking red tailed hawk. It eats the other animals. It eats the other birds that I love so much.

You're like, no, I'm observing something that's apart from me that I don't put my own morality onto. They're doing their thing. They're eating each other. And that's kind of what I enjoy about it. You don't look at an animal and say, oh, what an asshole. It ate another animal. I got to stop it. So there's a sense in which we want to preserve the fact that these spaces have a morality that is not our own, isn't there? Yeah. Although hearing you tell that story, it makes me think about, you know, I don't think everyone feels that apart from those interactions, right? So I have a chapter where I talk about hunting

where I'm in the Peruvian Amazon, I'm going monkey hunting with the Machiganga who live there, an indigenous group. And they don't feel that sense of separation because they eat the monkeys and the tapirs. And then sometimes the jaguars try to eat them. And so they're in the food web. They are part of this drama, this ongoing drama

that normally we tend to look at in the West, like through binoculars or whatever, but they're like in it. And when I was there, we were on this hunt, we had a kind of an encounter with a jaguar. And just for like a few seconds i kind of got that feeling of what it was like to actually be an animal in a food web potential prey item myself and it really changes the way you think about all of this stuff uh because suddenly

it's not so abstract suddenly it really is like uh you know uh this sort of this this web that you're part of um And there's a philosopher named Val Plumwood, who I talk about a lot in the book, who almost got eaten by a crocodile in Australia. And it changed her philosophy forever because now she saw herself as food in this way that she never saw herself before. And it really changed her mind about this idea that we shouldn't ever touch other species. We shouldn't ever eat them. We shouldn't ever be part of their food webs. She's like, no, no, whether we like it or not, you know, we will eventually get eaten

by worms and we are part of their food webs. So, you know, this gets towards the end of the book, I get into this idea of we are still embedded in ecosystems, whether we like it or not, even if we eat very carefully and shop very carefully, there's no way to not be ecological on this planet. That's true. That's very true. And that's a good point that like, I'm, I'm in a privileged position of looking at those birds and thinking like, oh, I'm separate from them. That's like a little bit of a false construction. But then on the other hand, you know, when, you know, if I go out in the countryside here in California, you know, I drive up into the mountains and there's someone just shooting every

animal they see because they're like, it's me or them. I'm part of nature, too. And I could get eaten. Right. I'd say, well, hold on a second. You're discounting how much disproportionate power you have in the ecosystem versus anything else. Like you're not really, you know, you sometimes come across people in America who like act as though, you know, a lion's going to come eat him at any moment. And it's like, no, no, no, we are the, we are the dominant creature in every respect. And so we have more responsibility. Like we have created a separate space for ourselves and we can't like pretend like we haven't done that. Yeah, I think your analysis of it in terms of power relations is right on. Right. So when I

was in the jungle there, the guys I was with had bows and arrows and we were like three miles, you know, three days away from the closest hospital. So if a jaguar had leapt out of the bushes, it really could have fucked us up. Yeah. But most of the time, that's not the situation we're in in, in, in Los Angeles County. So I think- And a lot of times, a lot of times, American hunters will go out and they'll sort of, hey, they'll feel that way, right? Like an American who goes out to Africa and tries to go bag a lion, they want to put themselves in a position where like, well, I could get killed, but they've done that to themselves and they've

come out with high powered rifles. And, you know, it's a little bit of an odd situation. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's different types of hunting, right? There's people who are legitimately hunting to feed their families and that's how they eat. And then there's on the other side of the spectrum, there's guys who spent like $100,000 to fly to Africa and shoot a lion or something.

And then there's lots of gradations in between um so you know i think having a having like a an opinion on hunting is impossible again it's going to be very case by case here who's doing the hunting what are they hunting are they eating it is this part of a cultural tradition in which they've been born like what are the economics of this what What are the power relations? What are the ecological impact of this? You know, how quickly does the animal die and how much does it suffer? There are a lot of questions you have to ask before you pass judgment on an act of hunting. Okay. Well, I read years ago, and I'm just constantly dropping pop sign names on you, a book that had profound influence on me was Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. And he poses this idea that basically these different plants have taken

advantage of humanity in order to propagate themselves. And, you know, when you look at it from the gene's eye view, from the evolutionary unit's eye view, well, they've done it very successfully. You know, the tulip or the potato has evolved in such a way to take advantage of what we need. And now these are extremely successful organisms that there's many, many more of them than there would be otherwise. Or marijuana is another one of his examples where like he marijuana has tricked us into growing it in this weird situation where, you know, we are like pumping it with light in order to get as much marijuana as possible, whereas it used to just be a little, you know, thing in,

you know, a little bush in the woods, right? Yeah, my brother grows marijuana commercially, and I can tell you, like, he is like a slave to that plant. Like, he, you know, like wakes up at weird times. He has an alarm on his phone if the humidity is wrong. Like, those plants have him right where they want him. Yeah, and so to the extent that, you know, that is the morality of evolution, right? Like like if humans didn't exist, that's the only reason anything exists is because a gene figured out a

way, you know, through trial and through natural selection to propagate itself. And to the extent that it has goals at all, which is even a human way of talking about it, that is its goal to propagate itself. I thought that was a fascinating argument. I've thought about it ever since. Where it starts to get confusing to me is when I apply it to animals, right? Because when you look at our livestock, our animal food population, well, these are now the most, by a large measure, the most populous animals on earth. There's more, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, there's more chickens, there's more biomass of human raised chickens

than there are of all other birds combined. There's certainly, and you know, if you add cows to that, it's like, I saw a chart once of like, here's all other animals compared to human livestock. It's like most animals on earth are animals we eat at this point. So like, from a dispassionate evolutionary perspective.

Wow. Cows sure did a great job into tricking us to helping them breed on a massive scale. Right. Except that factory farming is also an abomination of suffering. And and so those are like two different frameworks that are colliding in a way that I have no idea how to resolve. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on it. a very small sliver of animal life on the planet. But I mean, I do think that, you know, it's interesting what you said about evolution and the morality or the lack of morality there, because that's exactly what Kevin Esvelt says. He's a geneticist who invented this thing

called a gene drive, which is a way to propagate a genetic modification through a free-ranging wild population of organisms. Yeah, I've heard of this. This is like you, this is like you sort of tinker with the genetics of like one animal and then you release it. And then the gene will propagate itself

through the whole population as that animal breathes with others. Do I have it right? Yeah, you got it right. Exactly. And the way that it works is that it kind of, you get a hundred percent of the offspring of those animals, you know,

theoretically we'll have the change, not even 50, like you would get with the, just like a random gene, but a hundred percent of the offspring of those animals, you know, theoretically we'll have the change, not even 50, like you would get with the, just like a random gene, but a hundred percent. So, um, he is an incredibly great guy in terms of realizing the scariness of this

technology. And, and, and immediately after inventing it, spending like a decade telling people not to use it or like, uh, not to use it in like, uh, not to use it in a, in a,

in a foolish way or not to use it without super careful consultation with everybody who might, you know, be, be, be, be have an interest in this case. Um,

so he's actually a kind of a model of a responsible scientist, I think in that regard, but he is interested in theoretically someday using it to tackle some problems. He's particularly interested in using it to maybe deal with feral cat populations because he hates the idea of feral cats suffering. And a gene drive could be used to make it so that they just can't reproduce. They just can't have kittens. And that would be a way to sort of do what Trap knew to release people want to do, but to have it actually work. So you would release like one or two cats that have this

special gene in them into the established population. And then they would breed with the other cats and those cats would, the new kittens would be born with some new gene that prevents them from further reproducing. And then naturally the population winnows and dies out without ever having to snap the neck of a little kitty. Exactly. That would be the idea. And that's important to him because he hates the idea of these kittens suffering. He has a cat himself that he loves who used to be a wild feral cat who he adopted. And so he always says that evolution does not have a moral compass.

And to him, that creates obligations to fix things. But to do so in a very careful, slow, measured, deliberative way where you kind of run everything by everyone. But I'm not sure I necessarily agree, but I'm not sure I necessarily disagree either. You know, if we could use genetic technologies to stop some horrible disease that afflicts koalas, why would we not do that?

Yeah. Well, now you're back to vaccinating koalas again. Yes, exactly. I'm tempted by these kinds of interventions because, you know, the thing is, is that there's never going to be a perfect case where there's no other impacts of your action, right? If you had a perfect case where you could just sort of surgically intervene and remove a lot of suffering from a wild system and then pull back and there would be no other ecological cascade

effects, then it'd be very tempting to do that. But that's not really how the world actually works. You know, if you save a bunch of koalas from dying, maybe they eat all the eucalyptus leaves and then maybe other butterflies that need to lay their eggs on eucalyptus leaves are now going to die out because they don't have a place to put their eggs. I just made that completely up. That's not like a real thing, but we've all seen Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. We understand the, you know, this is like the Godzilla movie version of like, do not tamper with the natural world because, you know, do not play God with the universe. Yes, yeah. But I do think, on the other hand, that we're doing that all the time anyway. We, you know, as you pointed out with the domestic animals, we have like radically genetically altered a huge suite of animals.

And now they eat most of the photosynthesis on earth. And if that's not playing God, I don't know what it is. So, uh, you know, the idea that like, we should not in the future play God always makes me chuckle.

Cause like that horse is so far out of the barn. Um, right. So, I mean, all of this is so, I, it's, it's also complicated and delicious to think about.

Like every single one of these questions is just fun to roll around in your head to to play with. Like it really makes you figure out exactly what it is that you that you believe about these things. what it is that you, that you believe about these things. Like, I don't think I, I do not actually believe that, you know, it's, Hey, factory farming is great because the evolutionary morality is to propagate itself and there's a whole lot of cows. So therefore that's good. I think it's weird for me to come to that conclusion, but it's instructive for me to figure out, to follow the chain of reasoning and at the end go, okay, wait, what was the mistake I made along the way? And try to puzzle out exactly what the error was and then apply it to something else.

I think the error in that case, right, is that evolution seeks the good or tends towards good, which is just not the case. Like evolution just produces things that reproduce. It doesn't produce goodness. Right. So the fact that like evolution, yeah, like the fact that there's this tendency for species and genes to propagate themselves and that is what creates more of things.

That doesn't mean that that's something that we should seek out, that that is like a good thing. That's just like something that happens. like a good thing that's just like something that happens um well this gets back to my my my eternal struggle with my love of of the non-human world and with like the forest and with these ecosystems is that they were produced by evolution evolution is amoral and if if if some sort of kind god had made them they wouldn't have made like parasites and predator prey and like wolves eating elk alive and you know the all of these things that are baked into these ecosystems are not good. They're not bad, but,

but they're not good. Yeah. Well, and that's that again, that comes back to what we love about them and the eternal human fascination with them. Like I, that clip again,

a Werner Herzog, which if you have not seen it, go look it up. I forget what it's from. It went viral like 10 years ago, almost. It's from the documentary about the making of um the movie about the guy who oh hauls the boat over the mountain and interestingly enough the watershed that i was in monkey hunting is where that happened in real life it's like oh really that's a real thing that happened there was really a

crazy guy who hauled a boat over a mountain. Oh, there was? Yeah. Oh, wow. He drowned eventually. And then Werner Herzog made a movie in which people literally had to haul a boat over a mountain. Yes. And some of the people that I met down there in the Peruvian Amazon had been extras in that film.

Oh, wow. Well, I think the reason we love that clip is that he's basically just standing in the jungle going like, you know, the jungle is horrible. Like it's, he's like disgusted by it on this deep level. And that is like, he's just vocalizing like the constant human reaction to like the natural world. Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo is the name of the movie. Thank you. And it's from the making of the Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo is the name of the movie. Thank you.

And it's from the making of the Fitzcarraldo documentary. Got it. Well, this is like that reaction that he's having of like nature is beautiful and horrible and non-human and things are just happening out here. There's death all around me. There's like, you know,

sopping, oozing guts and slime and there's no order. And all around me. There's like, you know, sopping, oozing guts and slime and there's no order. And it's deeply unsettling is like, this is it's unhumanness is something that is like motivated humans throughout like history to make art and to, and, you know, philosophy. And it's like a deep, it's like one of the deeper narratives of our entire existence is our relationship with this thing that we are a part of yet seems so different from us. And so it's just like, God, you could spend your life thinking about this stuff and dwelling in that dichotomy or lack of dichotomy, couldn't you? You can, and I do.

dichotomy, couldn't you? You can. And I do. But yeah, you're basically right. I mean, the non-human world is is both terrifying and exhilarating and and amoral. But at the same time, it sort of deeply draws you in. Sometimes you want to to to run away from it or build a fence around it and stay far away. And sometimes you want to just get swallowed up by it. Yeah. You just want to lose yourself in the, in like the lack of lack of order, the lack of humanness, the lack of,

I don't know. There's an order to it, but there's just not a human order to it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, stuff is just like happening, you know,

like, like there, there's no shoulds. I think that's one of the things that's so freeing about a human life is based on shoulds. I should do this. I should do that. Shit out in the jungle just fucking occurs. That's right. No one's no one's sitting around going. It should or shouldn't happen. It's just they're just doing it. But if you live in the jungle full time, you are part of an order of shoulds, you know, like, oh, I would like to go out and hunt this species. So I should ask the protector spirit of the forest whether I'm allowed to do that. And I should offer something in return. And we should. And there's a lot of deals. There's a lot of transactions between humans and nonhumans that kind of make things go and i think that many of us feel i we're not part of those transactional relationships anymore we we're we're alienated from those or at least we feel alienated from them because it happens a couple removes away from us well now you've made me sad

because that because what a profoundly like interesting and rich uh way of thinking about the world that and being in the world that so few of us have access to now. Like that's a very beautiful thing that you've described that I would, you know, is, you know, because you were there and you had that experience and, you know, you had a little bit of direct partaking, you know, I'm envious of that because I'm like, oh, this sounds like a very rich way to experience the world that is like, well, that wasn't the world I was born into. I was born into a world that separated me from that experience to to. And so is, you know, I think most of the billions of people on the planet. So that's I don't know.

That's a very odd change. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely I mean, I think that it's, you know, a cultural shift that's pretty massive and maybe like the cultural shift that's happened in the last 500 years or something. But I think that there are ways to approach it. You know, I mean, I think taking up birding and learning the names of the species that surround you on a daily basis is like the first baby step towards having a relationship with those other species. Right. those other species, right? You got to at least recognize them and be able to call them by their names and kind of talk to them before you can have some sort of back and forth relationship.

And I see the project of environmentalism more broadly as, as, as one of fixing our relationship with other species. And that involves getting back into relationship or understanding what kind of relationships we have and then trying to work on making those better rather than just managing the shit that's out there past the last you know road rather than just trying to preserve wild spaces or whatever those sorts of things are it's about changing us and our spiritual, psychic, philosophical relationship with those spaces as much as anything.

Yeah. But also our practical relationships, you know? Yeah. How much of this are we going to take out? How much are we going to plant? How much are we going to do, you know, how does what are the transactions that we're making between us and other species? And how can we make those sort of more mutually beneficial rather than just like a one way

extractive process? Yeah, I think something I think about all the time since the first time we spoke is about how we can create. And you said this on our episode, but it was so brief, you know, that how we can create more spaces that are both human and natural simultaneously. more spaces that are both human and natural simultaneously. Like since I started birdwatching, one of my favorite things to do is go down to the LA river, which is this sort of manmade channel that, you know, it seems,

you know, people in LA are like, ah, that's just a piece of shit, like concrete gutter. Basically. If you go down there though, it's left alone enough that there's like trees growing in the middle of it.

There's reeds and things. And there are so many fucking birds in this place. Like seriously, I have like, if I look at my whole list, that's where I've seen the most different species from, you know, big giant herons to, um, you know, uh, ducks and like, but also, you know, things like small, it's incredible. Right. Um, and, uh, it's a couple miles from my house. I got, it takes me a little while to get there. Um, and I've started to develop as a result, more of an eye for, Oh, here's a spot where I might see some more, like, here's a spot where there might be some more species hanging out because there's a couple more trees in this area. There's a little water running through. It's not quite so manicured.

There's like enough space for some shit to happen. And I can go see some see some nature there. And I've started thinking about it more as like, oh, I wish there were more places like that spot in the L.A. River closer to my house and closer to other people's houses so that everyone was within like a half a mile of a place where they could see something like that. Is that the sort of thing you're talking about? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in my dream utopia,

not only are there sort of little bits of the non-human world kind of threaded through cities, but there's also an understanding that they aren't necessarily just for looking at that. Like maybe at a certain time of year, you can, you can get nuts from the trees or mushrooms, or maybe you can replant something and, and, and kind of have that relationship, you can get nuts from the trees or mushrooms, or maybe you can replant something and, and, and kind of have that relationship. Um, you know, sort of urban, urban foragers,

I think are sort of, um, headed in the right direction on this. Um, so that the idea is, is that it's not that these are, uh, uh, picturesque amenities to look at that they're, that they're just part, part of the community. Yeah. I would love to just hear before we wrap up, like any other stories of a particular animal from your book that is like particularly fascinating and a nice note to end on. OK, well, I guess I'll give you the story of the wolf and the dog that tried to form a pack together up in Washington state. This is a real story, not a fairy tale. Well, as you'll hear, because unfortunately, it's a bit of a sad ending. This is a sheep guarding dog.

It runs away from the ranch after these two wolves come and kind of coax it out over the fence. And it runs off and the three of them form this pack. And the Washington wildlife, you know, the state of Washington decides that this is not acceptable because wolves are wild and dogs are not. And so they go out in a helicopter and they find out that the wolf is pregnant by the dog and they give her an abortion. What? What the fuck? That didn't end the way I expected at all.

Right. I didn't even know. You stunned me so many times in one short sentence. I was like, wait, the dog and the wolf could have a baby? I was about to be like, what was the baby like? And you're like, no, there was an abortion. What? They gave the wolf an abortion?

Yes, because, and to me, this story shows that the way that we sometimes think about wildness is much more about the purity of the genetics and about the lack of the touch of humanity than it is about letting the goddamn animals figure out what they want to do. Yeah. That dog and that wolf wanted to make a baby. Right. And we were like, no. It's not going to happen. That's not right.

I want to see the sheepdog wolf baby. I'm sure it'd be very cute. And what's the harm letting it run around a little bit? Well, you know, bureaucratically, it would have been a nightmare because wolves at the time were an endangered species. Dogs that were unsecured and running through the woods were essentially strays that the dog catcher should come and deal with so if you have a hybrid wolf dog running around the woods

or in this case kind of more of a prairie type uh uh ecosystem what do you do with it do you protect it as an endangered species or do you take it to the pound like it would have been it doesn't fit our dichotomy it It does not fit our dichotomy. So it has to go. And that's not, that is the essence of an unhealthy way to look at nature is to reify that dichotomy so much that anything that doesn't fall into it has to be done away with.

I think so. And instead we should what? I think that what we should try to do is we should try to be in relationship with other species, but not dominating them. I think that's a wonderful message. Emma, thank you so much for coming on the show again. It's always incredible to talk to you. It's always one of my favorite conversations. We'll have to have you back the next time you write a book. Yes, I'll be the first three time guest. Thank you so much, Emma. All right. Thank you.

Well, thank you once again to Emma Maris for coming on the show. If you want to check out her book, just a reminder, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And when you buy a book there, you will be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore because our bookshop is set up through bookshop.org. That is it for us this week on Factually. I've been Adam Conover. I want to thank our producers,

Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, Andrew Carson, our engineer, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the beautiful custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at AdamConover.net or at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media.

That's it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week on Factually. that was a hate gum podcast