Freakonomics Radio - 164. Which Came First, the Chicken or the Avocado?

Episode Date: April 24, 2014

When it comes to exercising outrage, people tend to be very selective. Could it be that humans are our least favorite animal?

One, two, three. signed book plate offer, which means you can turn a regular old copy of Think Like a Freak into a snazzy autographed copy. You just fill in your information at Freakonomics.com and we will mail you free a hand-signed autographed book plate to stick in your book or on your forehead or whatever floats your boat. Thanks. Oh, you know I love animals and I particularly love giraffes. That's Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's a giraffe-loving economist at the University of Chicago. One of the high points of my life was when a giraffe stuck his three-foot-long tongue out and licked me all over the face.

Really? Where did that happen? Was that in a private setting or in a zoo? In Wisconsin Dells of all places. You can do anything in Wisconsin Dells. And what was your response to that? Did you just fall in love with him? It was crazy. I mean, the tongue was amazing. Any idea why he chose you? Because I had a bunch of food, which I had purchased in order to get him to do that. So you already loved giraffes by the time that happened? Absolutely.

So how would you have felt then if five minutes after that incredibly intense, intimate bonding moment, the zookeeper had come up and taken this giraffe and put a bullet in his head in front of your eyes and your kids' eyes? I would have felt outraged. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Okay, so as you may know, this scenario that I just described to Steve Leavitt, the sudden and very public death of a zoo giraffe, wasn't imaginary. It actually happened at the sudden and very public death of a zoo giraffe wasn't imaginary. It actually happened at the Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark. The giraffe was named Marius. Marius, a dewy-eyed, perfectly

healthy 18-month-old giraffe, has been wandering in and out of his stall, blissfully unaware of his impending fate. Here, speaking through an interpreter, is the veterinarian who did the deed. The giraffe walked out here at quarter past nine and was led out into its yard over there. Then there was a zookeeper with some rye bread. He really likes rye bread. And he said, here you go, Marius, here's some rye bread. I stood behind with a rifle, and when he put his head forward and ate the rye bread, I shot him straight through the brain.

It sounds violent, but it means that Marius... Then the vet butchered Marius's corpse in front of a crowd, including lots of kids. The giraffe meat would be fed to the zoo's lions and tigers and polar bears. The zoo made clear that it killed Marius out of kindness to some degree. Marius was two years old, healthy and happy. But not allowed to breed, genetically too similar to the other giraffes. Copenhagen Zoo said Marius would break European rules on inbreeding. Their view was that castrating Marius and not allowing him to be a father would be cruel.

It was kinder to kill him. Much of the world did not see it that way. Marius, baby giraffe. Marius, a male giraffe in a healthy state of health, was suffocated. I think it's wrong. You don't put down a young and healthy animal. I know life is a cycle and lions don't eat porridge. I know that. So outrage has escalated to death threats. That's right. Death threats against some of the staff at the Copenhagen Zoo. It's not hard to understand why so many people were so upset by the public assassination of a zoo giraffe.

Steve Levitt, who gets outraged at almost nothing, admits that even he would have felt outraged. So you'd think that if we can exhibit so much emotion and empathy over the fate of one animal, like Marius, we'd surely exhibit even more emotion and empathy over the fate of hundreds of thousands of the human animal. Wouldn't you? Okay. Ami? Yeah, hi, Steve. How are you? I'm great. How are you? I'm really good. Thanks.

Amil Hirsch is senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City. He's a friend of mine. The Stephen Wise Congregation has a long tradition of being on the right side of history when it comes to human rights and civil rights. We are speaking today because of a sermon I heard you give about, I believe it was called Obligations and Deeds, but really the passage in particular that really struck me was the passage about the giraffe. So I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind just reading or paraphrasing that brief part of the sermon for me. Sure. It struck me because if you recall that week, there was saturation coverage of a Danish zoo that killed a giraffe in front of dozens of schoolchildren and fed it to the lions. And it struck me that that received so much attention and so much publicity. Not that I'm in favor of killing giraffes in general or killing any animals, let alone in front of children.

But it was at the time when there was such savagery around the world, in particular hundreds of people on that week were butchered in Syria. And there was such little coverage about that event and so much coverage about the killing of one giraffe that it simply struck me that that probably says something about how we think and about the nature of our society. So what does it say about us, whether the us is modern humans or just humans throughout time, that we can get so upset over things with such relatively low stakes? I mean, look, a giraffe, I feel bad for the giraffe too, but it's one giraffe in Copenhagen. So we can get upset over something like that, but we don't get very upset, I think

most of us would agree, over a lot of real human suffering. The example you cite, the Syrian Civil War, what does that say? It says we still have a lot of work to do. Now, we do that work by laws and by expectations and by obligations, by enormous education from the very beginning. We tap into something that on its face is good in the human character, which is compassion for animals. By the way, I would add parenthetically that Judaism has an enormous school of thought and enormous teachings about the importance of being kind and compassionate to animals. But we also need to teach ourselves and our children priorities. You know, we need to establish priorities.

That's something that religion, too, is quite preoccupied with. That is, how do you decide what to do? Not that there is a black and white, good and evil that is completely clear, which is self-evident, but when there are competing goods or competing aims, how do you rank the good of not killing a giraffe in front of several dozen schoolchildren with not killing several dozen schoolchildren in some war-torn country. That's really where we need to put our emphasis. And that's hard. That's hard thinking. That's hard decision making. That's hard teaching.

And it requires us to make decisions on competing values. I wonder, as I hear you say that, I wonder if somehow we might choose to exercise outrage over something like, you know, a giraffe being killed in front of children more than children themselves being killed in Syria in the Syrian civil war. I think something like nearly 8,000 children are among the victims in that war.

I wonder if partly we get outraged over the giraffe more because the human suffering is just too difficult for us, that it's too existentially painful. That might be. That might be. First of all, we are able to sympathize and empathize with people and with creatures who are in front of us. I walk across Central Park every day and on the way to work, and there are, of course, dozens and dozens of dog owners walking their dogs. And I noticed that people treat their pets with enormous sensitivity. Very often, I see cases in the park where they treat animals with much greater sensitivity and compassion that they treat human beings. So, there are a number of ways to look at this, right?

It may be, as I suggested to Rabbi Hirsch, that human suffering is just too painful for us to deal with. But we should also acknowledge that showing such widespread compassion for animals is a positive step in the course of human development. Here's how Steve Levitt thinks about this from an economist's perspective. I think being nice to animals is a luxury good. I remember when I first went to China 14 years ago to adopt my daughter, and we went to an open-air market, and the animals they had to eat and the circumstances of these animals was just, to a Westerner, was outrageous.

I mean, just they would eat anything seemingly, and the, you know, things were skinned and cats were in cages. I mean, it was crazy. And then when I went back about five years later to the same open-air market, what just amazed me is that suddenly they had a big section of the open-air market that was devoted to fish tanks. And people had gone, in just five years, that China had boomed in wealth

from literally eating anything they could find to deciding it was fun to have animals for pets. And it really hit home to me, the idea that when you're hungry and you're poor, the only thing you want out of an animal is to serve your needs. And then once you get rich and not so hungry, then you want animals to serve your needs. And then once you get rich and not so hungry, then you want animals to play with. And that's what's happening, I think, with the U.S. and the idea of organic and

happy meat and stuff like that. Did you just call it happy meat? Yeah, what are they called? Yeah, happy meat. That's what they're called. Now, Levitt, how do you feel about guacamole? I love guacamole. Do you feel any moral qualms about eating guacamole, let's say? I have never had one moral qualm about eating guacamole. Can I give you a reason to perhaps consider having a moral qualm about guacamole? Sure. It will only make me worse off, but go ahead and do it.

If you'd rather me not spoil it for you, I don't have to. I think I'm willing to take the hit so our listeners can get the pleasure of watching me suffer.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, if you are going to feel bad about animals being killed, whether for food or because of their genetic makeup, then you may want to reexamine your feelings about avocados. There are no crowns like free avocados.

And could it just be that humans are our least favorite animal? I mean, my kids would gladly trade a human for a polar bear any day of the week. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Hi, Jose. Yeah, hi. How are you? Hey, good. This is Stephen Dubner. Nice to meet you. Hey, Stephen. Same here. I recently had a conversation with a fellow named Jose de Cordoba.

I'm a reporter for the Wall Street Journal based in Mexico. I not only cover Mexico, but large areas in Latin America, depending where the news is coming from. A few months back, de Cordoba wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal that, for whatever reason, did not provoke the kind of outrage that accompanied the killing of Marius the giraffe. But after hearing his story, you may wonder why it didn't. It was totally random. I wasn't looking to do a story about avocados at all. I was going to do a profile. The man he wanted to profile was a vigilante leader

who was trying to get other people to join him in fighting a crime and drug cartel known as the Knights Templar. It used to be called La Familia and now it's known as the Knights Templars. They're basically a huge extortion operation. They extort everybody and everything in Michoacán. Everything that moves is extorted. So de Cordoba was in the state of Michoacan, which is on Mexico's Pacific coast, and he was following this vigilante leader around.

We ended up in this little town, Tancintaro, up in the mountains, which is the setting for the story. He had no idea how big the avocado industry is in this area. We entered the town through avocado groves. Then we passed this little statue of an avocado right in front of the town and took note of that. As it turns out, 80 percent of the avocados sold in the U.S. are grown in Michoacan, about 500,000 tons of avocados a year. More than 150,000 tons come from this one town, Tansitero.

But it wasn't just the avocado statue that caught de Cordoba's eye when he drove into town. There are two burnt out giant export packing houses, big, you know, big, big businesses for the area. And they were burnt down on the same night. So what happened? As best as he could tell, these avocado packing houses got torched because their owners didn't pay the local criminal gang, the Knights Templar, the protection money they were supposed to. I was able to talk to a small packer and he gave me the details about what he was paying. Growers who know the big packers say they're paying from anything from like $15,000 a month to $20,000 a month. And it's not just getting a cut from sales of, you know, the avocados themselves and the packing and the trucking, right?

That there's a cut of, let's say, fertilizer sales and so on, yes? Yeah, all up the production chain, people have to pay off the Templars or we're paying off the Templars, you know, the guys who provide the fertilizers, the guys who provide the insecticide, the people who provide the workers to go out and harvest the avocados, the trucks that transport the avocados to the packing houses, and so on. Okay. And what happens if I'm a trucker or a packing firm or a farm and I decide to not pay you? Well, you've got big problems. If you're a grower, and this may happen anyway, but you might have a family member kidnapped and held for ransom. That is exactly what happened to one local avocado grower.

What happened was that the daughter of a local Jehovah's Witnesses preacher, a person who was much esteemed in the area, Maria Irene Villanueva, was kidnapped back in November. And she was kidnapped by the local Templar head, a guy named El Seco, the dry one. And he demanded an eight million peso ransom for her, which was something like $600,000. The father, who owned a small avocado grove, basically couldn't come up with the money. So what he was going to do was going to give the Templars his avocado grove in payment for his daughter.

In the middle of all this, for some reason, she was killed. She was murdered. She was shot. This murder, de Cordoba says, swung the local momentum in favor of the vigilantes. And in some places, the Knights Templars seem to be in retreat, but it's a tenuous retreat at best. They are a powerful and profitable organization. Last year, they made an estimated $150 million. They're named after the Knights Templars, a medieval order of warrior monks, but they are

enormously violent. And what has happened is that their main source of income was trafficking marijuana, meth, and cocaine. But they have branched out. And now I think that that by far they get much more income from all their different extortion rackets which go from extorting avocados to extorting iron ore mines to extorting forest products but they extort also everybody so like if you are from a national pharmacy chain and you want to open up a pharmacy in some town in Michoacan, you're going to have to pay a payment there. The tortilla makers pay extortion to these guys. Everybody does. When's the last time you had an avocado? I eat them most days. I love avocados. Has this changed your consumption at all or no?

No. I love eating avocados. As a matter of fact, I think I'm eating more since I went up there. You don't try to seek out kind of conflict-free avocados? There are no conflict-free avocados. No. So if you live in the U.S. and you eat avocados or mangoes or limes or other produce that comes from Mexico, there's a pretty good chance that some of the money you paid supports a violent criminal gang. So that guacamole you're eating? Made from blood avocados.

Where is the outrage over that? If we're going to shed a tear over Marius the giraffe, how about we do the same for Maria Arena Villanueva, the preacher's daughter, who was allegedly murdered by the Mexican gang because her father didn't pay his avocado protection money? The animal rights movement has gained a lot of strength in recent years. Most of us would agree that's a good thing. Some people have given up eating animals entirely to honor that movement. But the closer you look at what we eat and what we consume more generally, the more confusing the moral calculus becomes.

So should we stop eating avocados and mangoes and limes too? Jose de Cordoba, the Wall Street Journal reporter in Mexico, he doesn't think so. If you do that, you're going to be, como se llama, throwing a hell of a lot of people out of business in Mexico. And they, you know, that's about the only business that in that area that is you know the one and only business i really do think it's a mexican problem i don't think the u.s consumer should have to carry the weight of mexico's blood avocados on their shoulders or whatever you know i mean mexico has to get its act together in terms of of justice in terms of being a state of law, you know? You can't allow these guys to run around and do this extortion. I really think of the market

as somehow getting me out of any moral obligation. That's Steve Levitt again. I mean, when I go to the store, if the grocery store wants to sell me meat at some price, then the world's too complicated, I think, for me to try to figure out every transaction along the way and whether it was fair and whether it was fair to the people or the animals. And so I just figure that's the problem. Someone else has got to work out the government or the producers or the ethicists. They figure out what's right and wrong. And then

I feel like if I'm doing a market transaction, I don't really need necessarily to feel any guilt about it. All right. So let me ask you this. Person A, not you, not me, person A walks into a restaurant and has a choice between eating, let's say, some chicken that has been raised and slaughtered in a traditional manner, meaning it's not happy meat, right? It hasn't had the most wonderful chicken life ever. Have a choice between eating the chicken that may have suffered or the guacamole made from the avocados, which have an extortion tax built in, some of which money went to criminals who may have tortured, killed, kidnapped, raped the people associated with growing avocados. What's a person to do?

Well, my basic answer, which is a horrible answer, which people will hate, is that any individual person can't really do anything. And if you love guacamole— It's not what Gandhi said. I mean, it's tough. I mean, obviously there is a pull and there's maybe a warmth and a goodness that comes from saying, having learned this, I will never eat avocados again. Having learned about the way chickens are raised, I will not eat chickens. But there's a pragmatism that comes with trying to live your life. And is it really true that anything will change in the avocado region if I stop eating guacamole? Well, no. So it's one of those things where you can take an

action because it matters, because it actually affects outcomes and other people's lives and prices and how many avocados are made. Or you can make an action because it's the right thing to do and because it feels good to do the right thing and because it's important to do the right thing. But I think it helps to be able to separate those two in your mind. I think people who do the right thing a lot, they get confused and they think that by doing the right thing, like not eating avocados, people get the idea that somehow they're making the world a better place. But they're really not. To the first order, what they're doing is they're making themselves feel good and they're not affecting what I would call, say, the equilibrium.

But that's great. That's fine. But I think it's important when you make sacrifices to understand what your sacrifice actually accomplishes and what it fails to accomplish. That's a good way of putting it. So it strikes me that we humans are pretty good at selective outrage. We get really distraught about one type of offense. Maybe it's a moral offense. Whereas another one that may be very similar and maybe even be much larger and more egregious,

we don't get upset about just because of the nature of what that offense is. So as a friend pointed out, when this giraffe was murdered in cold blood in this Copenhagen zoo, the world was aghast. And yet at the very same time in Syria and many other places, there was horrible violence against humans happening that the world didn't care about at all. So is this just a function of the way we filter information and get a little bit and act on what we hear and that's just the way it is? Or does it say something about our kind of appetite to get upset about things where the stakes kind of are lower. I mean, really, you know, one dead giraffe in a zoo really doesn't affect any of us, whereas tens or hundreds of thousands of people in some country being tormented, the stakes are very high, and yet we don't seem to be able to do anything about that either. Yeah, I think what it really tells us is about the power of a good story.

And Marius is an amazing story. It's got all the elements that make stories exciting and good and moral and telling. And Syria isn't. Syria is a mess. Who knows what's going on in Syria? And indeed, I think a story about a single Syrian person is a thousand times more powerful than a story about a thousand Syrian people dying. And that to me, ultimately, I mean, it's one of the things we talk a lot about in our new book is the power of storytelling. And, you know, both for good and for evil. And I think that's what's going on is Marius is like the greatest story ever. Maybe that's all it is.

Maybe Marius caught the world's attention just because it was a particularly gripping story. It could also be that as much as we humans talk the talk about caring for our fellow humans, when it's time to walk the walk, we actually prefer non-human animals. The kind of animal that doesn't talk and so can't say something we might disagree with. The kind of animal that hasn't made some sort of stupid or malicious decision that we morally object to. The kind of animal that we learn to love so much that not only do we never want to eat it, but we do anything we can to save its life. You know, it's funny, and I learned this from my kids, but really people, unless you press them, their natural reaction is to like animals better than other people. And you can see it with polar bears, right?

The most effective thing that the climate change people have ever done is to show polar bears floating on little ice blocks in the Arctic Ocean. I mean, my kids would gladly trade a human for a polar bear any day of the week. A listener named Rebecca Pierce wrote in with a scenario. Okay, it's a question. You have to answer it. You're standing alone in the Arctic with a gun, which sounds like a place I could imagine Levitt being.

Suddenly, you're attacked by a polar bear, the absolute last one left on Earth. Do you kill it or yourself? Who sent us this question? Her name is Rebecca Pierce. She's a university student in London.

Okay, Rebecca, let me just say this. If there's only one polar bear left, that means there aren't going to be any polar bears in the future. And whether I kill that polar bear now or it dies on its own in a few years doesn't matter. So I definitely do everything I can to kill the polar bear. Not the answer I was expecting. So kind of on a technicality you're going to, right? If there were two polar bears, a girl bear and a boy bear, then it would be a much harder choice. A whole other story there.

And Levitt, yeah. But I was imagining that you were just going to try to line yourself and the bear up with one bullet. That's the answer that I was envisioning. Hey, podcast listeners, on the next Freakonomics Radio, if I wanted to commit the perfect murder, not get punished at all, how would I do it? Yeah, it'd probably be a pretty good way to do it, I suppose, without getting caught. In some places, you can hit a pedestrian with your car and get away scot-free. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Greta Cohn, Beret Lam, Shruti Pinamaneni, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.