Hidden Brain - Our Animal Instincts

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

Does living with animals really make us healthier? Why do we eat some animals and keep others as pets? This week on Hidden Brain, we talk with psychology professor Hal Herzog about the contradictions embedded in our relationships with animals.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Many of us share our homes with animals, Fari, Feathered, or Skeely. What is it, bad day? Yeah. We are definitely like my family members, headpets, and me. Yes, my right hand man. I got no kids, so that's my son.

You know, he's my baby. Yet as much as we love our pets, our behavior toward animals can be paradoxical. Don't you think it's kind of weird that we're eating or cats me and we, you know, have strong beliefs and not eating me at this point? I think the more you love animals, the more you might consider being a vegetarian. It's the English bulldog was made by science. You know what I'm saying? Like, I think lizards and reptiles belong with mother nature. I don't think English bulldog is a part of other nature. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the contradictions and of our relationships with animals. When Hal Herzog's son Adam was young, he had a pet mouse named Willy. One day Willy died.

So Hal used this as a teaching moment. We thought it would be a good lesson for the kids in terms of understanding death To have a funeral for him after all, you know, he was a pet the kids really Really liked them and they were very upset when he died until we had a funeral We we got a little cardboard box and made a little casket We took him into the backyard. We buried him and we actually Had a little headstone for him. We got some we got some rocks and and actually had a little headstone farm. We got some rocks

and made a little headstone farm. A couple of days later, Hal's wife found some mouse droppings in the kitchen and asked him to do something about it. Well my wife said, need Nick, in the idea that we would be sharing our house with little creatures scampering around that were mice, was not something that she could live with, so she asked me to kill the mouse. And I did. I went out and I bought a mouse trap. I put a little dab of peanut butter on it

and put it under the kitchen in the next morning. I got up and the mouse was dead. And of course you did what you always do with dead mice, which is you put it in a cardboard box and took it out in the back and gave it a funeral, right? No, I threw it in a cardboard box and took it out in the back and gave it a funeral, right? No. I threw it in the bushes. Two dead mice, two very different responses.

They were in different psychological categories. One was a pet, which a lot of people, including us, sort of considered William Family member, he had a name, and the other was a pest. He was free-learning by stealing our cheese and generally being what mice do, that is to say a pest. So there is a completely different psychological relationship between Willie or Pat and the pest. Hal Herzog is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University. He's been studying human animal interactions for more than 30 years. He writes about the contradictions in our attitudes towards mice and other creatures.

In his book, some we love, some we hate, some we eat. Why it's so hard to think straight about animals. I asked him how the labels we place on animals, good mouse, bad mouse, pet or pest. Change how we interact with them. Certainly one of the deepest and most important reasons that we treat animals differently is related to the categories that we put in. That's absolutely true.

So here's a second story that also lays out a slightly related but different contradiction. Your family once also owned a pet snake and a nasty rumor spread about what you were feeding the snake. What was the rumor and what is that reveal in some ways about the relationship we have with animals? I got a call one day from a friend of mine who's an animal rights activist

and she said that she had gotten a call from one of her friends saying that I was going to our local animal shelter and getting kittens and taking him home and feeding him to our bulk instructor who was like Willie a pet and had a name. Sam, what is this reveal about some of the contradictions we have about animals? You talk a little bit in the book about both the aborance with which we receive this idea that anyone would dream of feeding kittens to snakes. But of course, in your mind, there's also produced something of a thought experiment and some questions about cats and snakes. It did, and actually, for the next couple of days, there was something that kept nagging

me about that. I was thinking like, okay, what Sam ate, he was a carnivore like cats, and what he ate was mice. I would go basically to the pet shop and buy mice to feed to the snake. Live mice, and I would kill the mice and give them to the snake. I thought, well, wait a minute. There's cats being euthanized at the animal shelter that are unwanted. Wouldn't it be more ethical for me to actually go to the animal shelter and get the bodies of dead kittens, as opposed to using buying live mice? Wouldn't that be morally permissible? Wouldn't it be morally better to actually feed kittens to

boa constrictors than to feed mice to boa constrictors? And of course, then, that means you went out to the animal shelter and did what the rumor was saying that you were doing. Of course I did not. We were out of pet cat at the time. We still have a pet cat. We live with cats. I love cats. I would never feed a cat to a boa constrictor.

So this was a classic example of head versus heart. And I realized that moral consistency often times leads us to stray in our interactions with animals. And that really haunted me ever since. Like, how could I live in a world in which it was okay to feed kittens and devolk constrictors? An interesting, Shack, or the original title of my book was feeding kittens to devolk constrictors.

But the editor of my agent immediately made me change it because they said nobody would buy a book with that title. It sounds like the start of a bad-core and brothers movie. It does, and it snagged me a literary agent, but they wouldn't, they wouldn't, they wouldn't take the next step. Tell me about another story that you described in the book. This guy, Jim Thompson, he's a doctoral student you met, and he owned this very beautiful bird.

And he started thinking about that bird, and then he did something unusual with this bird. Walk me through what he did. Yeah. He was a graduate student, and he was a very logical, rational, rational person. And he had a pet bird as he cockatilla, as I recall, that he really loved. And his mother had given him a copy of an animal rights magazine.

I think it was animal as a gender at the time. And he read the magazine. It changed his life. So he became an animal rights activist. Hardcore became a vegan, quit wearing leather, made his girlfriend start doing all that stuff as well. And then one day he looked at the bird who lived in a cage, and he came to the conclusion, the intellectual conclusion, that it was unethical to live with a bird in a cage. And so he took the bird outside and he freed it. And the bird flew out of the cage and he said it was an amazing sight to see that bird took off. And then he told me, he looked at me and said cheaply, you know, I know she probably died. I know that I was doing it more for me

than I was for the bird. And he recognized that about himself and yet he chose to go ahead and do it. So how do you explain that contradiction? It's the sort of contradiction that we see all the time in our relationships with animals. And that's why the field of anthosoology, the new science of human animal interactions, is so both intellectually and also psychologically fascinating because we all have to live with these contradictions. For example, he was addicted to horse racing. He was a statistician and he was addicted to horse racing.

When you came in animal rights activists, he said he was going to quit going to the track anymore. But every month he would feel this urge and he would go to the track. And then he told me that he would feel bad about it for weeks. You know, it made me think about all the ways in which we sort of relate to animals in some ways as if there was sort of fellow creatures. In other words, if we kept a fellow human being in a cage, it would seem absolutely unjust, immoral, and wrong, and releasing that person from the cage would seem like the only right

thing to do. And in some ways, we extend that logic when we talk about the bird. That's what he was doing. And as I was reading the story, it reminded me of another story you have in the book. This was a different story, but in some ways it has the same subtext. Cookie was a 12-foot-long Nile crocodile at the Miami Serpentarium. A six-year-old boy once fell into cookies and closure, and the croc did what crocodiles do, he grabbed the child, pulled him underwater,

what did the owner of the Serpentarium do next? Well, immediately the owner of the Serpentarium jumped into, he heard the people watching, gasping horror, and he knew something was going on. He jumped into the cage and tried to save the kid, little David, and failed. And that night, Haas woke up in the middle of the night. I'm assuming he didn't get my sleep.

He had a revolver, a luger in his bedroom. He put the shells in it, and he went into Cookie's cage, and he put nine bullets in his brain. And by the way, he had had Cookie for many, many years, and cookie was a favorite of his, and it was an animal that he loved in a way that probably only herpetologists, somebody like me, you know, who studies real tiles and likes them, you know, you know, can understand. I argue that in some ways it's the operation of a phenomena that cognitive psychologist called heuristics.

Heuristic is sort of a mental shortcut and it sometimes leads to good, you know, logical, correct answers, but sometimes it doesn't. In this case, it seems to be the operation of a type of heuristic called the moral heuristic. And the moral heuristic is revenge. And at one point, the New York Times actually wrote an editorial about that event. And the editorial writer I think got it right and the editorial writer wrote, killing Cookie made no sense intellectually, but it felt right emotionally. And the reason it didn't make sense intellectually, of course, is the idea that a crocodile

would do what a crocodile does is hardly surprising. That's what crocodiles do. The brain is smaller than a walnut. He is a creature largely of instinct, particularly when it comes to food. And he was doing what crocodiles do. He was not a moral agent, which I would argue is one of the biggest differences between humans and other species. We are moral agents. So the interesting thing is that has the owner in some ways related to cookie as if cookie

was a person, that cookie was a moral agent. And in some ways that's a variation of what Jim Thompson was doing with the bird, wasn't it, which is you're assuming that the animal has agency and behaves or things or has it? Which is, you're assuming that the animal has agency and behaves or things or has human-like qualities and that you're therefore obliged or required to treat this other creature as if in some ways it had human-like qualities. I'm sure that if you interviewed Haas,

he clearly would know the difference at an intellectual level between a crocodile and a person. But you're quite right. He's basically treated him the same way that we would a person. This similarly played out in a bizarre incident that happened in Tennessee, where an elephant named Mary killed its groom while in a circus parade in 1916. And they hung the elephant to death. And to me, that was the ultimate example of where we've anthropomorphized animals that we give it capital punishment in a sense, for something that it was clearly not morally

culpable. So people listening to these stories would say, wow, those are really crazy stories. But as you point out in the book, this tendency we have to anthropomorphize animals is actually really ubiquitous. You draw contrast between the way we relate to the giant panda and the giant salamander. Tell me what the giant salamander is, what it looks like, and how our attitudes to what these different animals are shaped by the ways in some ways that we anthropomorphize them. Yeah, so the animals in some way are similar, the giant panda and the giant Chinese salamander, and that they're both endangered and they both live in China,

and they're both really special, although in quite different ways. The giant Chinese salamander is basically a six-foot-long bag of brown slime with beady eyes. And to me, they're like, they're striking. I wouldn't say that they're beautiful, but they're stunning just in their size and they're, I don't know, to me, they're charismatic, but I don't think most people would agree with that. But you're not gonna see the world wildlife fun,

putting a picture of the giant Chinese salamander on their logo instead They use the panda and the panda you know in some ways looks a little bit like a human But it's basically a faker and the sense that it has these Giant circles around its eyes Which ethylogic is called baby releases so we look at that panda and it basically Logs on to that jams into that that maternal instinct that we have when we see creatures with that panda and it basically logs on to that, jams into that maternal instinct that we have when we see creatures with big eyes and it impose on them that in some ways

it reminds us of a human infant. So for example, research has shown that one of the biggest predictors of whether or not people will give money to save animals is the size of the animal's eyes and pandas certainly have it when it comes to eye size. When we come back, do our pets actually improve our lives? Pet owners, we're better off in terms of their psychological and physical health and non-pet owners, but so are people with Mercedes-Benzis. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. When we think about pets in the United States, we often picture cats, dogs, maybe a hamster. But how Herzog says our relationship with animals, especially those we consider pets, is largely dictated by our communities and culture. So, for example, I've got a friend that's an anthropologist who was born and raised in Kenya. And in the village where he was raised, they kept dogs. The dogs were allowed to roam freely in the village.

They really liked dogs that we would consider mean dogs because they scared away animals and they scared away strangers. But they were considered pets. In fact, in his language, they don't even have a word for pet. And I went to ask him, I said, Naga, would you let a dog in your house living in Africa? And he said, no. I said, would you let a dog eat at the table? And you know, feed them some table scraps.

He said, no. I said, Naga, would you let a dog eat at the table, you know, and you know, feed them some tables, perhaps? He said, no, I said, no, go, do you really let a dog sleep in your bed? And then look at the horror on his face. It was like, if I said, hey, I got this really cool rat. I just caught down it. It's the river. You want to sleep with it tonight? And in fact, I recently got some new data on this. So it turns out that in the United States States we have amongst the highest rate of dog ownership

in the world. And there are enormous differences between countries in dog ownership. So there's about 250 dogs per thousand people in the United States. In Egypt there's about five dogs per thousand people. So these cultural variations and what people, you know, what's except the walls of pet and what's not is just huge. I want to spend a moment talking about the relationships that we have with pets in North America. I know that people spend a lot of money on pets, but as I read your book, I was just shocked at how high that number is. How much do we spend on our pets every year, how?

It's pushing about $80 billion a year right now. It's an enormous amount of money. I mean, that's a fleet of aircraft carriers. Yeah, yeah, it is. And if you, even adjusted for inflation, the amount of money that we spend on pets each year in the United States has more than doubled in the last 30 years per capita. The real increase in spending has been at the high end.

Gourmet pet food for dogs. You can buy food that you would eat. In fact, I tease my wife and I say, what we're going to do is we get ready for the giant decline. We're going to stack up on dog food and when the hurricane comes. But it's also things like, you know, pet daycares, pet spas. There's a hotel that has a zin room. You can get your pets a massage and I don't know what else pets do in a zin room.

We're talking about dog parks. We're talking about jewel columns. We're talking about pet fashion weeks. We're talking about all these things and the pet food industry You know calls this the humanization of pets and it really has taken off in the last 30 years And what do you think is happening psychologically here? Well, you know people in some ways are perhaps investing more in their pets than they're investing in their fellow human beings Maybe even their fellow family members. Yeah, it's interesting

I've thought about that a lot and I think it's partially due to demographic trends. One of the things that we know is that there's a paradox, many paradoxes in our relationships with animals, one of them is who's most in love with their pets. So it turns out that people living alone tend to be most attached to their pets. However, they also have, they're less likely to have a pet. And so people that are least attached to their pets tend to be adults with children in their family. But they're most likely to be living with the pet because they get pets for the kids. Once the kids leave, they get rid of the pets. So what happens is people living alone are more attached to their pets.

And what we know is that there's now more people living alone. People are getting married later, if they're getting married at all. They're living longer after the kids leave. And there's a number of trends. And so there's more people living alone. And these people tend to be more attached to their pets. Another factor is advertising and publicity by the pet products industry

that push the idea that pets are good for people, that if you get a pet, you will be a happier and healthier person. Is this actually true that owning a pet is good for your health and your longevity? We have overwhelming evidence now that for a lot of people interacting with their pet does have short-term effects on their physiology, lowers their stress,

makes them feel better. The question you ask, however, was different. That was our pets really good for our health and make us live longer. And here my answer is that we don't have particularly good evidence for the long-term impact of pets on human health. I have a stack of reprints in my office, which people have found that people with pets, they sleep better, that they go to the doctor less, that they have better well-being, that they're less lonely, etc., etc., etc. But I have another stack of reprints in my office that says just the opposite, that people with pets are more lonely, that they're more likely to go to the doctor, that they're more likely to drink a lot, that they're more likely to have ulcers.

But you never hear about those studies in the news, they don't make the news. There's very little evidence that pets make people live longer. And one of the problems we have is which direction the causal arrow points. For example, recent study by the RAND Corporation found that pet owners, in fact, were better off in terms of their psychological and physical health and non-pet owners. But as they pointed out, so are people with Mercedes-Benzis. People with pets tend to be wealthier, they tend to be younger, they tend to live in nicer places. In other words, the socioeconomic factors may be that it's not that pets are making people

happier and healthier. It's that happier, healthier people are more likely to have pets. We have very little data to test those two different hypotheses. You present some really striking studies in the book, which talk in some ways of the downside of having pets you say that some eighty five thousand americans are injured each year according to the cdc because they trip over their pets or otherwise are injured by them and i understand your neighbor and is one of those uh... victims my neighbor and is one of those victims uh...

she's a classic case she was walking her dog and leash wrapped around her leg and she fell over and she broke her collarbone um I recently went on Facebook and I put a call out. I said, if any of you have ever been injured by a pet by walking your dog, let's say, please write me a note. And I could not believe the response. 80 people responded to me. Many of them were professionals in the field. Some of them even sent me their X-rays, which I, and I was, and some of these incidents were not trivial. Some of these incidents were life changing. So there are downsides to pet ownership.

So there's a new frontier in pet ownership now, and I want to play you a clip. This is from the company Sony, and they presented this account of a dog at a tag conference. Let's start with design. First, the obvious. Ibo is adorable. He wags his tail, wiggles his ears, blinks his eyes, and he even does that doggy smile. You know, that smile that dogs do when you scratch it just right and they kind of tilt their head and have close their eyes and they open their mouth

a little and smile. Yeah, that's fine. So of course, how IBO is in a real dog, IBO is a robot, and it really looks like humans are completely indiscriminate when it comes to who we will consider and what we will consider to be pets. Yeah, the thing about IBO, IBO has got an interesting history. Sony originally developed IBO and IBO is a robotic dog and it does all kind of things. It'll fetch, it'll signal you its emotions, it'll respond when you call its name. The problem with IBO is that it's metal and shiny,

so it doesn't have fur. So while Ibo had some real, it was expensive, it originally cost about 2000 bucks, it didn't catch on initially, but Ibo was recently resurrected by Sony. And I've looked at the new promotional videos of Ibo, and I'm ready, I'm about ready to get one. It looks pretty good. Oh, and there have been studies where they've taken IBO and some other types of robotic pets into things like nursing homes. And to see if they have the same impact on people living in nursing homes in terms of morale and well-being as they do a real dog. And the results have been sort of mixed.

But some of the cases IBO has actually done better in some cases than an actual animal. And some of this I'm guessing might have to do with the fact that Ibo doesn't have some of the downsides that owning a real dog might have. Ibo is not going to bark uncontrollably at night or bark at your friends when they come over for a party. I mean dogs and cats and pets can sometimes induce stress within families and emotional and psychological problems within households. Absolutely, they can. The other thing that IBO doesn't do is raise the pesky ethical questions

that come with pet ownership. You don't have to worry about the ethics of the private IBO of a sex life by castrating them. You don't have to worry about the ethics of leaving IBO alone for long periods of time while you're at your office during the day. You don't have to worry about the ethics of leaving IBO alone for long periods of time while you're You're at your office during the day. You don't have to take IBO for a walk three times a day and then pick up poop as you Walk it walk it down the road. So I think I've got some real advantages There's been an explosion of research into pet ownership and in fact one of them actually looks at how Humans come to choose different pets the researchers Michael Roy and Nicholas Christianfeld took pictures of owners and dogs in dog parks to examine the important question of whether dogs and their owners tended to

look alike. Walk me through the experiment, Helen. What did it find? Yeah, what they did was they took pictures of dogs and others in dog parks and then they showed these pictures to People that did not know the owners of the dogs and they asked them to match them up And they presented in sort of a 50-50 choice and they asked people which dog belongs to this owner which are these two dogs and If people did not look like their dogs you'd expect a 50-50 hit rate that simply random chance But they didn't find that.

They found those between, as I recall, 65 and 70 percent of people correctly matched what people looked like, knowing nothing about the person with their dogs. Now, Shaker, I read that study and I'm just shaking my head, thinking, no way that this is true. However, there's now been at least three studies that have replicated this in different countries under different circumstances. So I've reluctantly become a believer.

There is some tendency for people to look like their dogs. So besides the many animals that you own that we've already talked about, you also own a cat whose name is Tilly, and you have what other cat owners might think is a rather idiosyncratic way of expressing your affection for Tilly. In the book you write, don't feel bad, Tilly. I love you, even if you are a socially constructed parasite.

Really? Yeah, the these questions, she a parasite. And this is the view that pets are basically a form of evolutionarily, what's called nests parasitism, which we see in birds. So for example, let's take the cow bird. What a cow bird does is it lays its eggs and another bird's nest.

Let's say a rins nest. And it then flies away and leaves its eggs for this rind to hatch. The rind then sits on the egg until it hatches and so that the rind winds up raising the bird, the baby of another species. And that's what happened, that's how we got to Lee. What happened is, you know,

this little kitten showed up one day on our doorstep. I was away. I came home and my wife had this strange grin on her face. And I thought, you know, I've never quite seen that look. What is that? She had this grin. And she says, come here, come here, come here. And she shows me this lovely little cat. And she says, come here, come here, come here. And she shows me this lovely little cat. And we were hooked. We were hooked. So what do we do? We've been raising Tilly ever since.

We've basically been consed by Tilly's mom to take care of her nestlings. We don't share any genes with Tilly, but yet the average pet owner over the life of the pet will invest roughly $10,000 in their pet. So we have a $10,000 worth and that's parasite living with this. We get our monies worth out of it. Well you think you get your monies worth because of course it's the parasite that's having the last lap.

Absolutely. When we come back, how the contradictions and the ways we think about animals lead to paradoxes in how we treat them. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Hal Herzog is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University. He's the author of the book, some we love, some we hate, some we eat. Why it's so hard to think straight about animals.

Hal the contradictions in the way we think about animals lead to paradoxes and moral dilemmas in how we treat them. Let's look at the very, very simplest case, millions of Americans like yourself own a cat. They care for their pet, they say they love animals. But you simultaneously say that loving your cat means subjecting other animals to suffering. How so? My cat's a serial killer.

She's an indoor outdoor cat. And so when she wants to go outside I let her outside. And what she does some of the time is kill small animals, sometimes birds, more often it's small mice, voles, creatures like that. I am actually more conflicted by being a cat owner than I am over any other aspect of my relationship with animals. And of course, the cat is doing what comes naturally to the cat. The cat is a predator.

You can't expect the cat to be behaving any different, but the fact that millions of Americans own cats mean that in some ways they're at least indirectly sanctioning this mass murder of, for example, you know, songbirds. Yeah, and mass murder of, for example, you know, songbirds. Yeah, and mass murder it is, depending on the statistics, somewhere between 1 billion and 5 billion birds each year are killed by our pet cats. Furthermore, cats are obligate carnivores. They have to eat meat. And so I've got lots of friends that are vegetarians and vegans and they're morally opposed to eating meat, but yet they keep cats, and they have to buy animal flesh to keep their cats

happy and healthy. It's a big moral problem for some people. You ran sort of the calculations on this, and you describe them in the book. Mathematically, a cat consumes about two ounces of meat a day. That's about 50 pounds of meat a year. By contrast, snakes only consume maybe five pounds of meat a year. So the impact of having a cat, the moral impact, if you will, is 10 times greater than the moral impact of owning a snake.

And yet, of course, most animal lovers will be horrified if you would suggest replacing kittens with snakes. Or maybe even as we discussed, feeding kittens to walk a snake. Yeah, I actually developed the scale one time I was interested in this issue. And I developed the scale, which I called the feeding kittens to boa constrictor scale. I was actually trying to make fun of psychological skills, but it turned out to produce some very interesting things. So, for example, most of my students that I gave the scale to said that it was okay to feed

mice to boa constrictors, but it was not okay to feed mice to bulk instructors, but it was not okay to feed mice to cats, which was interesting. And often when I ask them, well, why is it okay to feed mice to a bulk instructor, but not a cat? One of my students put it perfectly. She said, if my cat ate mice, she wouldn't be like me. And that, to me, I can't say this whole thing about what we project onto the animals that we live with.

If my cat ate mice, she wouldn't be like me. Well, she's not like you, girl, you know? But in some ways, bringing sort of cat food home, just like you bring your own groceries home, allows that student in some ways to preserve that illusion, doesn't it? Absolutely. She's preserving the illusion. She's preserving the illusion. Now, if I were a better

Person perhaps I would keep my cat indoors, which is a lot of my friends tell me is I should make her an indoor cat well, I resist doing that and My reasoning is probably equally Fulacious is that if I were a cat I would rather be an indoor outdoor cat than a cat that lives in a big cage and spends its day looking outside through the window with the birds flitting around. Now I know that by letting my cat go outdoors, I subject her to the tough things in the wild. In other words, she could get eaten by a coyote. She can't get hit by a car because we live on a road that doesn't have any cars to go down it. But the life of an indoor outdoor cat tends to be shorter, even though she's had a long and good life.

But I can't completely justify doing that because of the toll she takes on the small animal life. But I live with it. So the more we think of animals as sort of members of our family, the more we think of them as being like us, in some ways this raises a profound moral paradox, does it not, which is that if we actually think of these animals as being like us, how in the world can we, you know, in any good conscience, can find them to our homes, can find them to

cages, treat them as if they were our captives to do with us, we please. Well, I think that's a great point. It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. And I've really quite seriously been thinking about, is it ethical to keep animals as pets? If we really think of them as autonomous beings, what right do we have to take away all their autonomy by controlling every aspect of their life? What they eat, where they go, when they go, and increasing work, taking control of their genes, which created its own problems. And so I'm thinking increasingly that I'm wondering

about the ethics of keeping animals as pets. To me, the logic of pet keeping is not that different than the logic of meat eating. I eat meat, and I know the arguments against it are good and they're better than my argument for eating meat, which is basically I like the way it tastes. Well, I feel the same way about my cat. I love my cat. But she carries with her a moral burden. And it's my moral burden. It's not her moral burden. I'm the moral agent. I'm the adult in the room, and I'm the one that has to deal with thinking about this stuff. Although most people conveniently repress it and don't think about it.

You say in the book that you live in what one philosopher calls the troubled middle, and that's what you're talking about here, that you're in some ways you're trying to navigate these contradictions, and it's really impossible to do so with consistency. Yes. One of the things that I've concluded in 30 years of studying human animal relationships as one of my colleagues said, the only consistency about human animal relationships is inconsistency. And I think that I've come to think that this is the human condition. As a psychologist, I study human atom interactions because I think they reveal a lot about the human condition. And so the real subtext of my work in some ways is how do you get out of bed in the morning and get through the day and be a good person.

I'm wondering how in some ways as you're pointing out, these contradictions are unresolvable. Given the contradictions that you've laid out in the paradoxes of being a pet owner, some of the moral costs that come with being a pet owner, if your current animals were you would have lose them, if they were to die, would you get replacements for them today? Boy, that's a great question. That is such a tough question. I've thought about it. I definitely would not get a dog. I miss having a dog, actually.

My wife and I are both dog people, but we haven't had a dog for 10 years. And it's because our lifestyle doesn't lend itself. I don't think a dog would be happy living in our house because we're away too much during the day. I can't stand the idea of leaving them in a kennel. Our cat's happy to live by herself. And I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is that I would get another cat. The moral dilemmas of pet ownership pale in comparison to the moral dilemmas posed by

our use of animals in sport and as food. Hal explores some of the deepest contradictions we have toward animals by looking at the sport of cock fighting. First of all, cock fighting is a moral legal now than it was when I was doing that work, but it's just as brutal now. So basically in a cock fight, what you have two chickens, then you have two handlers and you have a referee and a pit, which is roughly 15 feet in diameter. The referee says, pit them, the handlers let them go, and the two roosters try and kill

each other. One rooster almost invariably dies because they have gaffes which are basically knives attached to their legs and it's basically about gambling. There's money changing hands. And so I entered this clandestine world and lived in that clandestine world for a couple of years. Now anyone who hears what you've just described would say, all right, this is morally unconscionable. We cannot allow this to happen. We need to ban this sport, and it has been banned in all parts of the country and many parts of the world.

But tell me a little bit more about what happens when you look more closely at the life of one of these roosters that's raised for cockfighting. And you contrast this in some ways with the life of one of these roosters that's raised for cockfighting. And you contrast this in some ways with the life of your average broiler chicken. Yeah, well, first I want to say that I do not justify cockfighting. Everything you said about it is correct. It is brutal. It is unjustified. It's now banned throughout the United States. And it should be banned throughout the United States. So I'm not trying to justify. For me, as I started studying cockfighters and how they thought I became really interested

in their moral worlds, and I also began to ask myself some difficult questions. And one of the difficult questions was, if I were a chicken, if I come back in the next world as a chicken, would I rather be at East Tennessee Gamecock or would I rather be a muck nugget? In other words, a chicken raised in a broiler house to become a muck nugget. And to me, there is no doubt in my mind. I would much rather be a gamecock than a chicken destined to be served at McDonald's. Can you describe to me how you reached that conclusion?

What is the life of that gamecock and what is the life of that chicken that ends up as a McNugget? Okay, first let's take a gamecock. They live long lives and they live lives that are generally compared to a broiler chicken pretty darn amazing. They live on average two years or not usually fought till they're two years old.

For a chunk of their life, they're not usually fought till they're two years old. For a chunk of their life, they live in free range or they have way more room than a broiler chicken. They're fed incredibly well, a very diet, they get plenty of exercise. If they win a couple fights, they will use them as a stud rooster and what they'll do is they'll spend their life chasing the hands around. Not a bad deal. On the other hand, the life of a broiler chicken is absolutely horrendous. Their life only lasts between six and seven weeks. They're

basically meat machines, which means that they put on weight so fast that their legs can't really hold up their bodies. And so they have chronic leg pain has been called the world's largest animal welfare problem. They're jammed into giant broiler houses with 30,000 chicks in a broiler house where they'll never see the sun. They'll never get to play on the grass. They'll never get to peck it bugs. Their lungs will be burned with ammonia. It's an absolutely horrendous existence. And they will die at pretty lousy death. They'll be crammed into a series of cages. They'll be hauled for miles and an open truck jammed into small little cages with their feathers

flying down the interstate where they will be hang upside down by their legs, dipped into an electrified water bath to stun them and then they'll go through a carotid artery set of blades that will hopefully kill them quickly although oftentimes it does not. So the life of a gamecock oddly is vastly better than the life of the nine billion chickens that Americans eat each year. I mean that is a billion with a B. You write in the book, while Americans will sleep easy at night

knowing cock fighting is banned in all 50 states, 35 million chickens will be stuffed into wire crates on their way to processing plants tomorrow. Yeah, that's in one day. That makes you think, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely does. When I began doing my research on the comparative cruelty of cock fighting versus mcnuggets, I was stunned.

I mean, I was absolutely stunned and I realized, cock fighting should be illegal, but the casual chicken eater is committing a bigger sin in their own way than is the rooster fighter. And by the way rooster fires love their animals. That was one of the things I had to hard time wrapping my head around. It was like, this guy's really love chickens. The comedian Chris Rock once went on David Letterman and talked about some of the contradictions and the way we think about animals. He contrasted the football player Michael Vick who went to prison for promoting dog fighting with the former governor of Alaska

and hunting enthusiast Sarah Pillin. She's shooting mooses and she got the moose. Holdin' a dead blooded moose. Michael Vic's like, why am I in jail? LAUGHTER Oh, no! Can that a white lady shoot a moose? Yeah. Black man want to kill a dog.

That's a crime. It does sound like a double standard, how? Yeah. It does sound like a double standard. We see the same thing in lots of areas of human animal interact. And so, for example, take cock fighting. Cock fighting is a sport of, you know, lower socio- socioeconomic status whites and Hispanics. And on the other hand, compared that with the sport of kings, horse racing.

Horse racing is finally coming under the gun. In the last couple of months, as you probably know, I think almost 30 animals were killed at the Santa Anita race track in California. And this has been going on for years and years and years. The number of thoroughbred horses that died. The number is in the thousands and thousands each year. But yet very few people get bent out of shape about horse racing compared to conquiting. So it is a class thing in some ways, isn't it? Very much so.

Very much so, it's a class thing. We started this conversation, Hal, by talking about some stories and paradoxes and contradictions from your own life. And I want to end the conversation in the same way When you were in grad school you were once asked to put a number of different creatures into boiling water Why were you asked to do this and walk me through what happened? Yeah, I was working in a chemically collogy lab and we were

interested in the chemical perceptions of in in this case, it was reptile snakes, baby snakes, and we basically were interested in whether or not these animals are born with an instinctive preference for certain types of foods. And of course, they eat live animals. So, in this case, there was another researcher in Utah that was interested in doing some more research for his dissertation. And he said, our lab, basically a menagerie, it came in a big box, which basically said this side up, live animals. And the box contained an array of animals, it contained worms, crickets, it contained some scorpions,

it contained a lizard, it contained another snake, it contained, and then a mouse. And so all of the lowest ranking member of the lab, so they assigned me to basically convert these animals to solution. That could be dabbed on a swab and exposed to these snakes. And so the procedure involved dropping these animals into water that was not quite boiling. And I thought, okay, I'll do it. And I dropped the first one in that I think was a cricket and it just died instantly.

And then I did the scorpion, which was a bigger animal and it didn't die so quickly. And then I had to do the, as I recall, it was a lizard. And I like lizards, I like reptiles. And it was not good. It took a much longer time for the lizard to die in the water. And I was getting upset. And then I was working my way up the file as you had a scale. And then there was the mouse.

It was a cute little mouse. It wasn't a lab mouse. It was one of these cute little wittlin' mice. And I took a look at the mouse. And as I recall, I actually picked it up, was getting ready to drop it in the water, and I just couldn't do it. And I just put the mouse back in his cage,

and I went and told the lab manager, I can't do this, somebody else was gonna have to do it. That just haunted me for a very long time. And it really was the event that got me on this journey that I've been on for more than 30 years now about trying to understand why it was so easy to do the cricket and harder to do the lizard and I couldn't do the mouse. And I've never come to grips with it,

but I've been chasing that down. It really is the thing that got me thinking about the psychology of human animal interactions and why we treat some animals different than others. So one way that people justify eating meat and treating animals the way they do is that they believe there's a status hierarchy between animals and it's along the lines of what happened in your lab. So worms are lower on the scale than scorpions. Scorpions are lower on the scale than mice.

You once watched the Steven Spielberg movie ET with your daughter and you came up with a thought experiment that probably ruined the movie for her. I actually was my twin daughters. They were both there and probably most listeners are aware of what happens at the end of the movie. So ET and Elliot are running around California, their buddies for, you know, the previous two hours. And at the end, ET's mom comes back to get them and they're flying saucer and ET did that great big head and big eyes. Alex is Elliot and he says he croaks, he goes, come, you know, come with me, we'll go back to Zork and we'll have a great time, you know. And Elliot says, now I can't do anything.

I guess stay here and ET takes off. And it goes back to Zork and it's all good. And I, my daughter's on the one hand saying, I said, hey, girls, what if ET wanted, Elliot to go back to Zork with them? And so he grabs Elliot and he drags them screaming into the flying saucer because they want to use Elliot in a research experiment.

They want to use him in an experiment because it's just like this AIDS-like virus and being the people of Zorke. And the Zorkeans are much smarter than Americans. They're much smarter than Elliot. Would it be okay for ET to kidnap Elliot and take him and use them in biomedical research experiment? And my kids are horrified. No, dad, no, no.

And I thought the same thing, no, that would not be a good idea. But on the other hand, what I realized was that our use of animals in biomedical research is based on the same premise. You know, we're smarter than other creatures. We're way smarter than mice. We're way smarter than dogs. We're somewhat smarter than chimpanzees in our own ways. And that's our justification for using animals than mice were way smarter than dogs, were somewhat smarter than chimpanzees in our own ways.

And that's our justification for using animals in biomedical research. And I was fortunate to conclude that, look, we're going to use animals in research. We got let ET take Elliot back to Zork and use them in a cage. Obviously it's the same sort of thought experiment that I did when I concluded we out of feed kittens to bokeh and stricters, you know. But I still can't wrap my head around that. My heart's telling me one thing, even though logic is telling me something else. And that's just of a lot of our inconsistencies with our interactions with animals.

Hal Herzog is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University. He is the author of the book, some we love, some we hate, some we eat. Why it's so hard to think straight about animals. Hal, thanks for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Oh, thanks for having me, Animals and Us, from Psychology Today. This week's show was produced by Thomas Liu. It was edited by Tara Boyle and Raina Cohen. Our team includes Parth Shah, Laura Quarrell and Jenny Schmidt.

For more hidden brain, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. If you like today's show, please remember to share it with one friend. We're always looking for new people to discover Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vidantam, see you next week. Thank you.