Stuff You Should Know - Do Animals Have Natural Rights?

Episode Date: September 8, 2016

Animals have had legal protection from unnecessary harm since the 19th century. Yet what harm is necessary is open to interpretation and animals continue to suffer and die for science and commerce. Should they have the right to freedom from humans? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry,

and this is Stuff You Should Know. Part two, about animals. A rare sweet. Yeah. Good one. And you wrote this for your buddies at Primer. Yeah, yeah. Let's give a little shout out to Primer Stories.

So Primer Stories are basically doing for the interactive medium, the same thing that podcasted for radio, and TED Talks did for speaking engagements. Wow. And I wrote an essay for them for season four, and you can check it out at PrimerStories.com slash S-Y-S-K. Go check it out.

It's pretty neat, but it ties into animal rights and humans. But you did put this together, correct? Right. I put together this episode, and then I wrote a separate essay based on my research that is different. Nice. I'm Josh Clark, and I did my book report on Moby Dick. Yeah.

Luckily, the Primer dudes, Joe and Tim, kept it from devolving into that. Well, this was fantastic. I just want to say that. Well done. Thanks, man, I appreciate it. So I guess we don't need to set anything up. If you haven't listened to the one on animal testing,

Yeah, stop right here. Yeah, just go do that. And then welcome to part two. Yeah, how awkward was that? I thought it was pretty succinct. Oh, OK. Not awkward. So tell me a little bit about your buddy, Aristotle.

So Aristotle, we mentioned him in the last episode. We're going to say that a lot. But Aristotle was one of the first dudes to experiment on animals. I think I called him a big dummy. You did. As a joke. Yeah.

And yeah, he's fine. He was a smart dude. He was. But one of the things that he did, not only experimenting on animals, he also came up with a hierarchy of animals. Based on the souls he anticipated each possessed. He said, kitty cat, pretty good. Dog, much better.

What is that? Is it Czechoslovakia? I have no idea. Or no, I guess it'd just be Czech now. Yeah, I don't know what that was. Well, let's see from like the 50s. It was not Greco Roman. OK.

Maybe Albanian. Sure. OK. So Aristotle, the Albanian comes up with this hierarchy. And at the top of the hierarchy, guess who? Humans. Yeah, of course. And humans have all three kinds of souls.

The vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul. Yes. We possess all three of those souls. Therefore, we're at the top of the hierarchy of all the organisms on planet Earth. Yeah. Below us are animals.

And they've got the first two. They've got the vegetative soul and the sensitive soul. Which means that they like to lay around and read romance novels. That's right. And then you've got plants. And plants obviously have the vegetative soul. So what he's describing are the different, I guess, life forces that he expected organisms to have.

And because of that, there was a hierarchy that was established. And because of that hierarchy that Aristotle came up with, we still view animals in a certain way today. Like we still basically follow that same hierarchy that he made 2,500 years ago or so. Yeah, and the whole point of this episode is based on that, whether or not animals have a soul and where they rank or maybe should rank.

And I'd sort of going down the rabbit hole myself of what a soul is, and a human even. Well, you're not the first to do that, of course. What'd you come up with? What'd you come up with? Everyone wants to hear, including me and Jerry. No, I don't know. I'm still struggling with what I believe,

even at my advanced age. And I think I will till the day I die. Probably. And become worm dirt. Right. So that's one indication of what I believe. Your last words are, oh, no. But that idea whether or not animals do have a soul

is nothing new. You point out very astutely that Judeo-Christian wise, they do not think that animals have souls. No, and even humans. They don't have long held kind of a brutal attitude toward animals, like forget animals. Just kick them in the face. I don't care.

That's a little harsh. But the idea that humans have dominion over animals is very much a part of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Yeah, and should have dominion. Yeah. And that animals don't have souls. And that's one reason why humans have dominion. That's right.

It turns out the Mormons, actually, are one of the few groups in the West, religiously speaking, that do believe that animals survive into the afterlife. Really? Mormons. And then Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, big time Hindus, and Jains, Jainists. They believe that the best way to save your soul

is to protect other souls. So you'll see a Jainist with a little, they have little brooms. And they'll wipe down, or they'll brush off a seat before they sit on it, because they don't want to accidentally sit on any bug and take its life. Boy, that's nice. That's protection of other souls, for sure.

Not like the cockroach. Right. They'll still kill a kukarache. Oh, man. I had a funny cockroach incident last night. Like, I laughed, Belly laughed for 10 minutes. What did the cockroach laugh? Well, there was a cockroach in the room at some point

that got away. And later on that night, Emily and I were in bed, and I was on my computer, and she was reading or something. And she looked up, and on the ceiling, it was right above her. And she went, oh, there's that cockroach, which I was shocked that she was that laissez-faire about it. I went, why are you not freaking out?

I was like, that thing's about to fall on you. And right when I said you, he moved and fell right on her. And it's so funny. Like, she shrieked like a small child and jumped off the bed quicker than I've ever seen her move, scared my dogs. I jumped and ran, but I didn't shriek, which I just thought was very interesting dichotomy.

And I killed it, and it was just very, very funny that she was just like, oh, there's that cockroach. Like, who are you? You're not the Emily I know. Right, exactly. Like, why aren't you running? Was she super tired or something? She was, but yeah, it's just very strange.

I think she learned her lesson that a cockroach on the ceiling is not on the ceiling for long. That means you roll out a bet immediately. So anyway, that's my cockroach story. That's a good one. Judaism, they believe that, well, it's a lot of debate in the Jewish community. Some scholars say that they do have souls.

Yeah, lately they've been saying that. But only here while they're alive, and they don't carry into the afterlife. Big work around. Yeah. It is. Sure. Pope John Paul II said, yeah, you probably

are going to see your little dog in the afterlife, maybe. It's possible. I'm Pope John Paul. Everybody loves me. Would you like my autograph? Right. Me, Gourby, and Ronald Reagan rule the world. During the Enlightenment, things changed a little bit

from the religious aspects to more of a science-based or philosophical. And our old buddy Descartes said, animals have no internal experience, which is a very cold way of putting it. Yeah, he called them automatons, kind of famously, actually. And he said that they are capable of responding to pain. But because they don't have any internal experience,

they can't actually experience the pain. Therefore, when you are cutting open a live dog and you're seeing it squirm and writhe in agony, strictly responding to a stimulus. Right. It's not actually going on. Like when Luke is testing out his new hand and he's poking the different nerves

or the artificial nerves or whatever, making the fingers move. Yeah, he's getting poked on the finger. But he doesn't feel that. It's just a response to a stimuli. Yeah, I guess very much like that. It's the same thing as with robots, too. Yeah. I mean, that's how essentially Descartes

decreed that animals were. And that's something that stuck out to me, like throughout researching this whole thing. Humans have long just decreed that things are a certain way. Right. And that those decrees tend to fit whatever the human wants to do to an animal at that time. Of course.

Right? Yeah. That idea of sort of the basis was and still kind of is for scientists who experiment on animals. They're trained to detach themselves emotionally and just say, no, this is just a stimuli reaction. This is not an animal that's actually feeling pain. Right.

Dogs don't have internal experience or internal life. So you can't really feel pain or suffering. Yes, which is not true. Jeremy Bentham was a philosopher in England, correct? Yeah, a big one. And actually, he's still around. They bring his mummified body out for dinners of the guys who run the college every once a year.

And he sits at the head of the table. And his head has actually been separated from his body. And they bring that out too. It's in a case. It's pretty cool. Holy cow. Yeah, as far as philosophers go, it's pretty neat. So he had a pretty neat idea, which was, you know what?

It's not just about whether you can reason with an animal, but can they suffer? He's the one that kind of brought about this idea of animals suffering in the same way that a human might. Which is a huge change. Sure. It was a big sea change in the way that we saw animals. Because up to that point, the idea

was that animals couldn't suffer. And even if they could suffer, nobody was taking that into account. But they couldn't suffer because they couldn't talk or they couldn't rationalize. Right. And he said, no, I think they can suffer. And he used his philosophic calculus, which

takes into account all of the suffering and all of the happiness or pleasure produced by an event. And you weigh it against one another. And it's really involved, actually. But if you carry out Bentham's calculations, you can take any event, any action, and determine whether it's ethically morally correct or morally repugnant.

And he came to the conclusion that experimenting on animals was morally repugnant because animal suffering wasn't taken into account. And he took it into account. And it wasn't just a one-off where he wrote an essay about it. Like, this is a well he went back to a lot. And was kind of an agitator for animal welfare early on. Well, there's a lot of money in it.

Right. So moving on to, and I think you make a very good point here, that the protectionism for animals really starts around the time where we made the transition in farming and how we raised in eight animals. Yeah, because you used to be like, I feel like some beef for dinner. I'm going to go kill old Bessie our cow.

Yeah, and you love Bessie. And your little boy or little girl might cry about Bessie. But then the parents would explain that we raised Bessie and we loved and cared for Bessie, treated Bessie very nicely. And the reason Bessie is here is so Bessie can eventually feed us. And we should honor that in every way possible

by using as much of this animal as we can and honor the life that she led. Or if you had a bad parent, they just kind of wheeled that cleaver in your direction and you shut up just as fast. Yeah, this could be you. But that was a huge sea change when things started to change. And industrialization took off. And people were no longer connected to the animal

on their farm that they ate. It was a sea change. And how people, I mean it directly coincided with how people felt about animals when you could buy something in the store that looked nothing like that animal. Yeah, it's not even called pig, it's called pork or bacon or ham.

Yeah. And then not only that, Chuck, something I left out here that came across later, this is the same time when people move from the farm to the factory, from rural interactions with animals to urban settings without animals. This is when people started to keep pets. Yeah, I never realized what you just said there

about pork and beef that never really dawned on me. It's never called pig. That if it said ground cow, instead of ground beef, people would be like, ugh. Or veal. Yeah, some baby cow. Ground baby cow. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes total sense and such a dummy that that never occurred to me. It's OK, man. Like, is that where that came from, calling them different names? I don't know. I'm going to have to look at that. I would guess veal is probably Latin for baby calf

or something. I don't think it was a purposeful obfuscation. I don't know. Could be, though. Would not surprise me. This is before the advent of PR, so I think people were much more innocent and naive back then. Chicken is sure.

But who cares about chicken? I was saying that this is also the time when people began keeping pets around the house. So animals were removed from food production. Yes. And we're starting to see animals not as commodities, but as sweet little things that we want to care for and protect and give food to and let sleep in the bed with us.

And it developed this dichotomy of how we view animals today, which is animals are to be protected by humans. But we can also eat them. It's totally cool. And if you step back and look at it, it's so easy to take for granted because that's how almost everybody, except for vegans, view animals. It's really easy to take it for granted.

But if you step back and look at it, it's a very bizarre, contradictory paradigm. Yeah, it's sort of a deal people have made with themselves emotionally, I think. And society is made with itself, too. All right. Well, we're going to take a break. And we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the fact

that, as of yet, there were still no laws on the books about protecting animals. And it's like the gosh, the love of the shark. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point.

But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. Before we left, I teased about the laws of the land. And while things were changing, maybe,

attitudinally, in England, you point out, in the mid 19th century, it was still legal to beat your horse to death, if he was tired, or to kill your cow, if it didn't produce milk. There were no laws in place. Or, like, if your dog did something you didn't like, you could kick it to death. Like, it's just, some people did that.

I think some people are still like that today, but are restrained by laws that developed out of this era, out of the 19th century. And before, there weren't any laws. So if you were in impulsive pots, you could kick a dog to death, you know? I can't even go there with those stories that happened today. But that happened even more then.

Oh, yeah, of course. That's a very important point, though, is, like, society as a whole wasn't just beating horses and dogs to death. No. For the most part, right. I think it was sociopath back then. And I think it still is now, you know?

For the most part, people did not do that. And people didn't even like, they didn't necessarily even turn a blind eye to it. I think they did more, because there wasn't a lot you could do. But it's probably along the lines of where, if you don't agree with spanking your kid, and you see somebody in the store, like, grab their kid and spank them, you might want to say something.

But at the same time, you probably won't, because you don't know if that's a crazy person, or whatever. You don't get involved. For the most part, most people don't. I think that was probably very much the same line. It's like, where you might see something like that happening, but you weren't going to say anything. I think that was the social status quo at the time.

I think you're right. But that said, if the circumstances were right, and the act was particularly egregious, someone might say something. There was a guy in 1834 who, in the middle of Washington DC, beat his cow to death. And he was arrested and charged with not beating the cow to death, because again, there was no law protecting that cow,

but with creating a public nuisance, because he subjected all the passers-by to the sight of his cow being beaten to death, and people objected to it. So even at the time when there wasn't any legal protection for animals, there was still, there was a line that was drawn. People weren't cool with it. Interesting. So legislatively speaking, it was

about the turn of the 19th century in England when Lord's, Erskine, and Martin got together, and they, a bunch of times, to try and actually amend the code, the legal code. And one of the first things they tried to outlaw was something called bull-baiting. And I imagine bear-baiting, which was also a thing. And we'll get to this in a second.

It's like Roman gladiator stuff. Yeah, it's when they put a bull or a bear, and they chain them to a stake in a pit, yeah, and put dogs in there to fight and kill. Yeah, and bulldogs used to be way, way more vicious and aggressive than they are today. They actually had that stuff bred out of them, and they looked a lot different, too.

But that's where they got their name from, bulldogs. Bear-baiting is still going on in Pakistan. Oh, yeah? Yeah, it's disgusting. It's, there's a big push to stop it now. There's a group called World Animal Protection International, and that's one of their big causes is to stop bear-baiting in Pakistan.

But I would encourage you not to look that up and look at pictures and stuff. Unless you want your heart broken. But it's amazing that in 2016, that's still going on in the world at all. But it is. And then Martin and Erskine, the great comedy duo.

Yes, and I was going to say, too. What is it? Is it because of Roan and Martin? Is that where I'm thinking? I think so, I think so. In 1822, they actually were enabled to get the first law passed in the West that made it a criminal act to abuse animals called Martin's Act after Martin.

And it was, the technical name was an act to prevent the cruel and improper treatment of cattle. And it was specifically for livestock, and it was a 10 shilling fine, three months in the pokey, if you didn't pay the fine. But what it did was it set a precedent for the future. It was very important. Yeah, it did.

Finally, there was a law. Right, there was a law on the books protecting animals. And again, like you said, it was pretty specific. And technically, there had been a law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans had a law in their body of liberties, but apparently it wasn't ever enforced. But this is the first real law.

And the fact that Parliament was responding to this kind of aroused the public. We talked about in the animal testing episode, the last one, how I think in 1876, there was a law that passed, that was passed like protecting animals during experimentation, thanks to Charles Darwin. That came 50 years after the first animal protection laws

in the UK, so there had been niche people, groups who had been agitating for this, got actually the Parliament involved, and then the public became involved, which is usually the opposite. Usually it's like these groups get the public involved, and then the public get government to do something. This actually kind of went out of order a little bit.

But the people who were agitating these niche people were usually very interesting people, like Henry Berg is a really good example. Boy, I love this guy. He talked about an agitator. He created the ASPCA, and he was a little rich kid, and he basically said, you know what? I'm gonna kind of dedicate my life to walking the streets,

because one of the things in 1866, when the ASPCA was founded was in New York, they said, you know what? You have the power to go out and police these things. We're not really enforcing it, but you can do so, and you're like, great, I'll do it. Yeah, oh, he was a true believer for sure. I think the first instance as the legend goes,

he was a Russian diplomat, or a diplomat to Russia, an American diplomat in Russia, during the reign of the Tsar still. He saw a Russian peasant beating his horse, and he threatened to beat the man. Nice. The guy responded very, in a way that Henry Berg was like, oh, I'm gonna do this all the time now.

He said, yeah. He was like, I'm so sorry. Apparently the guy started crying. He was being talked down to by someone of a higher station. Then when Henry Berg got back to America and tried it, he found that people of the middle or lower classes beneath him socially did not respond the way the Russian peasantry did.

They said, this is New York. So he had to, kind of, yeah. So he would sometimes actually follow through on his threats and beat people. He saw beating their horses. I have no problem with that. Yeah. I think most people didn't.

But he would also, he'd go and break up like underground bull fights or underground bull baiting and stuff like that. Underground bull fights, it's up. Two bulls just going at it. And he is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. If you want to go buy and lay some flowers at his grave and pay your respects,

I think I might do that next time in New York. Yeah. I mean, even if you're not into animal rights, he was also a huge children's crusader. And he very wisely never allowed the children's organizations that he funded and supported to merge with the animal organizations, because he knew full well that the little children

would take the wheel and they would very quickly overwhelm the sentiments and the efforts on behalf of the animals. Yeah, it was pretty smart to keep it separate. You gotta keep them separated. You point out in this article very astutely that abusing an animal could be an indicator of violence toward humans. And I know that a lot of serial killers started out

like killing animals first is their first try. That is, from what I can tell, most likely a pop psychology urban legend. What, that they did that? Mm-hmm. Well, no, I mean, there's that Jeffrey Dahmer did for sure. There's, okay, yes, but the idea that it's a predictor of future serial killing.

Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not what I meant. The triad of evil. Yeah. Which is bedwetting, harming animals and setting fires. If you have your kid doing those three things, allegedly under this triad of evil, you can bet that there's a pretty good chance

they're gonna grow up to harm humans. I wet the bed. I didn't set harmful fires, but I did play with fire a little bit. I think this is more like you're intentionally setting fires to harm people or burn down the woods. No, I didn't do that. And then, you know, my dog died

and I sat in his dog house for two days and cried. So I was- That's not harming animals. Clearly not. I was on the other side of the coin from early on when Huggy Bear died. But whether or not that's true, that's been used, the Huggy Bear?

Yeah, that was my German shepherd. That's a great name for a dog. Yeah, that was like the first dog that I really bonded with. That was the dude from the street-wise- Starsky and Hutch. Guy from Starsky and Hutch, right? Yeah.

Huggy Bear. That's great. Yeah, he was awesome. I get a little sad thinking about him today. Which one? Huggy Bear. Not the TV show guy. Okay.

I just remember my mom literally came home from work and I was in the dog house crying, like laying down and crying. That is sweet. Yeah, I'm sorry to say that. I was such a little wuss. How long was Huggy Bear around? You know, I don't remember.

Like your whole life, was he alive when you were born? Not when I was born. His mom, Daisy, was. And then Daisy died when I was really young. So it didn't have a super big impact. But then Huggy Bear was one of the puppies we kept. How old were you when he died? I wanna say I was like eight or nine, maybe.

Oh yeah, that's right there. Tough, sure. Yeah, first big loss. Man. You know. RIP, Huggy Bear. Yeah, I appreciate that. I'll drink one in your honor tonight, HB.

But anyway, yeah, you're right. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny all the time. But if you're torturing and killing animals, it's not a good sign. No, and the people who have agitated for animal rights have long used this. Whether it's true or not, people think it's true. So the whole premise for a lot of people has been

if a human harms an animal, there's a good chance they're gonna harm a human. So if you protect animals and prevent people from harming animals, you're preventing somebody from possibly harming a human down the road. I'm fine with that line of thought. Or you're also, by drawing a line before animals,

you're rooting out people who might harm humans down the road by having them expose themselves as harmers of animals. That one's a little morally trickier if harming animals doesn't lead to harming humans. If you assume that it doesn't treat the person like that. Like, oh, you're a serial killer because you just set a fire, peed your pants,

and ate a bit the head off a chipmunk. Actually, you'd probably be right if you found a kid. Especially if you did all three at once. At the very least, I wouldn't leave them alone with your child. So a lot of progress is being made. And by 1907, all the states in the United States had some kind of anti-cruelty law going on.

And it started to become just sort of the mindset. Yeah. That was kind of the tradition, like the states oversaw protection of animals until the mid-60s when the federal government got involved and created the Animal Welfare Act. And the Animal Welfare Act, again, this kind of follows that thing

where some people agitate for changes to the law, changes to our way of thinking, and get the public aroused, and then the public say Congress or government do something. Same thing happened here. Sports Illustrated and Life magazine both came out with articles about how people's family pets are being stolen

and used as what are called random-sourced animals that are sold to laps. Yes, and that really would get the public going. Right, because the idea that Huggy Bear could be stolen from your yard. Yes. Sold to Johns Hopkins University's Head Trauma Center. Unbelievable.

And then have his head beaten open with a bat to see what happens. I'm sorry I used Huggy Bear now that I'm making this far through the analogy. It's like 40 years later, that still cuts deep. Sorry. So Snoopy, Snoopy's stolen from your yard and experimented on the idea that this could happen,

just scared and outraged America. Sure. And it created very quickly the Animal Welfare Act. Yeah, and that originally just protected lab use, but then over the following decades, it really expanded. And today, it protects all warm-blooded animals in lab experience, except three birds, sadly.

The ratus genus rats and the mus genus mice. Right. And not coincidentally, those three make up 95% of research animals in the US. Along with the other cold-blooded animals that are used like fish and reptiles. Sure. So the 95% of the animals used in lab experiments

are not covered by the Animal Welfare Act. Yeah. But that's not to say that other animals can't be used in animal experiments. It just means that if you do experiment on a guinea pig or a macaque monkey or something like that, you have to follow these guidelines. Right.

But even then, the guidelines are pretty slouchy, actually. They're huge loopholes. And basically, they amount to you, especially originally, in like 1966, you just have to reduce unnecessary suffering. Right. Who's to say what's necessary or unnecessary? Certainly, the law didn't. And they left it up to the researchers

to decide what was necessary or unnecessary. Right. What's crazy, Chuck, is it has been expanded and amended. It's also been narrowed. There was an amendment made, I think, in the 70s that extended the protections, which again, are loose and almost toothless, to all animals, warm and cold-blooded.

And then in 2002, they dialed it back to what it is now and what it was originally, which were just warm-blooded animals, except rats and mice and the cold-blooded animals. And the birds. And the birds and the bees and the sycamore trees. All right. Well, let's take a break here.

And we're going to come back and talk about the two categories for animal protection, animal welfare, and animal rightists. That's what I call them. All right, right after this. And it's like the Joshua and Chuck. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

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OK, we're back, Chuck, and you teased the different types of approaches to protecting animals, right? That's right. There is like a whole contingent of people, and I think most people on the street, if you stopped them, said, do animals deserve protection from harm or suffering? I would guess most people would say yes. And I'm sure there's surveys out there.

I didn't find one. Sure. But if you drill a little deeper into it to adopt a little corporate buzz speak. Low-hanging fruit? Yeah. You would find that there's really kind of two threads to this, like, and they're based on just how far you

feel that protection should go. Right. So the first is animal welfare. So that's the current accepted paradigm of how we approach treating animals, protecting animals. Yeah, and they generally think, and these are generalizations, but if you're going to fit people into two groups, you've got to do that.

They generally think that what we're doing now works pretty well, but we need to enforce it more. We agree with John Locke and Emanuel Kant that you should protect animals from cruelty, but not because they have a moral standing necessarily, but because that is a sign of a bad person that makes us look bad, which that's valid. But they balance that out with we treat animals humanely,

but we can still use them for food and labor. Right. So animals deserve protection from humans harming them. Yes. But they're also our property. We can do what we want with them so long as there isn't any unjustified suffering. Right, and not suffer needlessly,

which you pointed out earlier, but more so here, that that's a needlessly, what does that mean? Right. It's very open to interpretation. Yeah, because if you look at what happens to animals in animal experiments, I mean, it runs the gamut. And everything from withholding food and water to burning

skin with blow torches. Yeah, or to making a monkey obese on purpose and making sure they don't exercise so you can study what lap band surgery does. Right. I mean, damaging their brains, maiming them, blinding them, just doing invasive surgical procedures for practice, like just the idea of what is justified

is extremely subjective. But as a society, we've all generally agreed that, hey, as long as science is being advanced, as long as humanity is being in some way advanced or developed or protected, then it's justified. Or with food. Right. Like, those animals don't die of old age.

Is it a needless death to eat a cow and kill the cow before it's time? Yeah. And so most people, I think, who believe in the hierarchy of humans at the top of all organisms here on Earth would say, well, yeah, that's a useful use of an animal, feeding a human. Right.

So that's the idea of animal welfare. Protect them from harm, but yeah, we can eat them. And a good example is making sure a cow has a good life while it's alive. It's not suffering while alive. It's not scared when it dies. And then you can eat it. Totally fine.

That's the animal welfare view, and that's the generally accepted view in the West. Right. Animal rights or rightists, they think generally that the system we have is flawed and that animals have these rights, or they should have rights, kind of along the same lines that humans do.

They should have legal protections, just like we do under the law. And we are a long way from where we need to be when it comes to protecting animals from humans. Right. The idea of the animal rightists is that animals have an inherent moral value. Right.

And the idea behind that is if they have an inherent moral value like humans do, then they deserve legal protections that humans enjoy, which is a radically different approach to protecting animals. Yeah, for sure. And the idea is that, well, it all kind of came from this guy named Peter Singer.

And he wrote a book in 1975 called Animal Liberation. And he basically started off the modern animal rights movement, especially the radical version of it. Yeah. He said in it that if you use Bentham's philosophic calculus, but include animals right to happiness, not just their suffering. Yeah, he added a little cherry on top.

Right, you just blow the concept of using animals for human means out of the water. Like it's just not justifiable. Is an animal a moral agent? And a moral agent is a being that is capable of making decisions based on right or wrong. And moral behavior comes in all sorts of forms. We think of it as helping a little lady across the street

or not stealing, even though you totally could and get away with it. But it's even broader than that. And some people say animals do demonstrate moral behavior like loyalty or showing concern for a person that's injured or something like that. And so therefore, an animal can be a moral agent. Other people say no.

An animal can't rationalize. It can't think about the future. It can't want to keep living. Therefore, it couldn't possibly be a moral agent. And Peter Singer really made a lot of waves when he said, well then, if you're going to experiment on animals because they're not moral agents, you might as well go ahead and experiment on people

in vegetative states and infants because they're not moral agents under that definition either. Yeah, he says, you know what else can't rationalize? Your baby. Yeah, so go ahead and do some horrible experiments on your baby. Yeah, and I'm sure the other side of the argument was probably like, oh, he got us.

And he dropped that mic and everything so rubbing in our faces. 1983, another guy came along named Tom Reagan. And he wrote a book called The Case for Animal Rights. He argued favorably that animals do have moral rights. And he had a little thing that he liked to call subjects of a life. He said humans and animals are both subjects of a life, which means animals have that inner experience that

is called having a life like we do. Right, so some of them, ones that have higher moral, higher faculties. Oh, did he divide it up? Yeah, yeah, it's not all animals in his view. It was ones that are capable of reasoning. Because some people say humans are the only rational beings on the planet.

And therefore, everything else is open season. These guys like Tom Reagan said, no, there are certain animals out there that can reason and therefore can be moral agents. Yeah, I mean, when you see behavior of some of these animals, elephants. Well, then people would be like, that's anthropomorphizing. Anthropomorphizing, burn him.

Yeah, you try and burn me. He can't be proven. So therefore, Descartes' ghost exists. Right. And then Tom Reagan also made waves, Chuck, by saying if an animal is a subject of a life, meaning it can think about its own life and want to live. Therefore, I sound like Miss South Carolina.

Therefore, that animal deserves at least one basic freedom, which is the freedom from being property, which in and of itself would radically alter our relationship, humans' relationship with animals. Yeah. So these guys are like kind of putting these ideas out there. And as we'll see, they got some response, but it was typically among hardcore animal rights people

rather than the general public up to this point. And then the final dude in the trifecta. The triad of evil. Of evil, of good. I know, I'm just teasing you. Gary Francioni, he was the guy that came along and said, you know what, we need to abolish our domination over animals period outright.

It is slavery, and we should treat it as such. Right. We should get rid of it. Yeah, and he said, we didn't get rid of slavery by making slavery more humane. We got rid of slavery by getting rid of slavery. Right. That's what you do, and he's saying it's the same thing here.

Yeah. Pretty radical ideas at the time. Yeah, and radical is a pretty good word, because these ideas really caught the attention of some people who did become, I guess, radicalized by them. Like the animal rights movement has long had a militant arm to it, for sure. Yes.

It started actually before even Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation, from 1975. As far back as 1962, there was a group in the UK called the Hunt Saboteurs Association. This is the most polite saboteurs organization name you can come up with. Probably so. They sort of laid the groundwork for the Animal Liberation

Front, who got a lot of press. And then another group called the Band of Mercy. The Band of Mercy was named for the Victorian-era British SPCA. They're children's wing. Yeah. That's what, isn't that cute? Yeah, totally cute.

The Band of Mercy. And they were the first people to liberate animals when they broke into a laboratory that used a farm that sold guinea pigs to labs and freed six guinea pigs. Yeah, they made off of six. But I mean, there were six guinea pigs lives that otherwise would have been subject to experimentation. So it was a big success.

Sure. And they ended up eating the guinea pigs to celebrate. No, they didn't. And actually, the lady who ran the farm, though, she was really shaken up. And she actually shut down her guinea pig selling business. Yeah, because of that. Because she was, I mean, some people

had broken into her house at night. She thought twice. Yeah, she was like, I don't want this to happen again. And I mean, this is, depending on your viewpoint, this is deeply uncool of these people. They used intimidation. They would make death threats. They would make bomb threats.

They would threaten people's family. Yeah, they would set fires. People who were running legitimate labs were threatened. People who were legitimately supplying the labs were threatened. Yeah, they would set fires. And then there were other ones where you're just like, yeah, I'm kind of, I can kind of get behind that.

The point to a lot of these wasn't just to get people to cease their activities or to actually liberate animals. They were done also to generate publicity. This is a huge aspect of it. These guys were PR masters. They realized that the bigger and the bolder, the more likely it was to get headlines.

So guys like the groups like the Animal Liberation Front or the Band of Mercy would agitate, go out and do these acts. And then PETA, like more moderate groups that weren't actually doing this, would publicize it and write up press releases and send it out to the press and maybe set up interviews and stuff like that and try to get the word out as much as possible about these.

One thing PETA did was they would basically turn people, well, sometimes they would send people in undercover to get jobs at these labs so they could make videotapes. And sometimes they would just get in touch with someone there who worked there, turn them as a, but basically as a double agent and say, you will be our person on the inside

and you can do these videos for us. And they got- Must kill the queen. They got a 60 hours worth of audio and video from a lab, cut it down to about a half an hour documentary called Unnecessary Bus in 1984 and released it and it was a big deal. Basically experimentation and inhumane treatment

on tape for the masses to see. Beyond, like it was about as ugly as you could get. It was at the UPenn Head Trauma Center Research Lab. That's probably all you need to say, pretty much. Baboons were involved and they were researching head trauma. So when this came out, it really got the public going. And just like in the 60s with those two articles about people's pets being stolen

and used in lab experiments, this led to an amendment to the Animal Welfare Act, directly led to it. And the amendment said that there needed to be committees that oversaw each lab that was carrying out animal experiments. There needed to be the use of pain relievers and anesthesia in experiments and there needed to be post-operative care

in lab experiments, right? Yeah, and that you couldn't take a single animal and just keep operating on that animal. Okay, again, all of these things had a very important caveat. Right. That caveat is unless necessary. So there was a huge loophole there.

If you're testing like pain threshold on a macaque monkey, well, you can't give it pain relievers, you can't give it anesthesia, you need to inflict pain. And well, it's part of the experiment so it's medically necessary. Or we have to see how one macaque monkey responds to multiple surgeries because we're trying to induce PTSD

in that monkey so we can study PTSD drugs. Well, that's medically necessary. And this whole loophole, that huge loophole, with the idea that advancing science and human understanding and human welfare, as long as it's necessary, then you can justify anything you do to an animal. That's still around and it's been around for a very long time.

Yeah. So this is all culminated in more recent years with a guy, an attorney named Stephen Wise, who depending on who you are, you might say this guy is crazy or you might say he's amazing. A hero. A hero.

So he's an animal rights attorney, essentially. He wrote a book in 2000 called Rattling the Cage colon toward legal rights for animals. And he basically put forth a very radical idea, which is that some animals, like the elephant or the great ape or the great parrot, an African great parrot, they actually deserve personhood.

They deserve legal protection under the law just as a human being does. Right. And let me, while he founded in 2007, a group called the Non-Human Rights Project, Big N, Little H, Big R, Big P. And it's a legal defense group that basically said, let's find a sympathetic judge somewhere

where we can bring up a case and maybe get something, some precedent set, get something on the books. Yeah, all they have to do is get one case heard, get it denied, and that sets in motion the appeals process where you can work through the higher courts, right? That's right. And hopefully get some sort of legal ruling, right?

So this guy is sharp. And part of the problem that he's facing right now is as far as law in the United States goes, animals are property. They're strictly property. They're special property, right? Like for example, if you're beating up your microwave and the neighbors aren't gonna call the cops

and the cops aren't gonna come, but if you're beating up your dog, the neighbors are probably gonna call the cops and the cops are probably going to come, right? Yes. The thing is, is that animal is still property. And as far as the law goes, property cannot possibly have standing in a court.

And if it doesn't have standing, then that means that the animal can't sue on its own behalf. You being the neighbor, you can't sue on the dog's behalf because you're just the neighbor. You have no standing in this dog's welfare either. So these animals, any animal is in legal limbo as far as American courts are concerned

and why is it trying to figure out a way around that? Yeah, he attempted some lawsuits and his organization did. In New York, on behalf of four chimpanzees, and he said, you know what, I'm gonna sue on these chimps behalf. I'm gonna try and gain their freedom. He lost all the cases, got a lot of press, but he did have one heard.

And in one of the cases, he even got a judge, or not got a judge, but the judge actually issued a writ of habeas corpus, first time ever for an animal, even though the judge reversed that order that same day. It caused- Like nothing? Yeah. What did I just do?

It was a very big deal in the media. I mean, I remember hearing about this guy on the news and when you wrote this article, it's like, oh, I totally know that guy. Yeah, there's a really great Boston Globe profile on him and what he's doing from a year, couple of years ago, that's worth checking out. Yeah, there's a documentary to release this year

called Unlocking the Cage by the legendary D.A. Pennebaker and his wife and partner, Chris. I'm not sure you pronounce her name. Hedgetus, perhaps? He's the one that Dylan's don't look back in 1965 or something. He's very legendary. The War Room, I don't know if you ever saw that. No, the political one.

What else? Because I know the name. He's a documentary legend. Documentary? Documentarian legend? Documentary legend. Whatever. But he's made this movie about Stephen Wise

and his group called Unlocking the Cage. I haven't seen it yet, but it's on the list. Yeah, he's a pretty interesting guy. Something that struck me that I found in my research was he and PETA don't really see eye to eye. They're not working in conjunction. In a few years back, PETA brought a case against SeaWorld on behalf of the Orcas and said that it was a violation

of the 13th Amendment against slavery. And Stephen Wise was like, what are you doing? He saw that they had very, very clearly opened the door for the judge to be like, the Constitution doesn't apply to animals because animals aren't people. And once that precedent is set like that, because it's not actually written in law.

And know what, there hasn't been that precedent. That really opened the door for it. Luckily, the judge was just like, no, but didn't rule any further. Right. So what Wise is trying to do is to get somebody to set a different precedent, which is, yeah, that actually makes kind of sense.

So let's go ahead and run this trial through. Yeah, and it's something that could be possible one day. Like, you know, there have been courts that have ruled where this animal was an heir to an estate and the court made the animal a temporary ward of the court and endowed this animal with the inheritance. Give it a nice lunch. Yeah, and they had to kind of work through that.

So he's kind of, he's got a little bit of a leg to stand on and kind of pointing some of these things out. Right, and plus corporations are artificial people under the law. Yeah, we did a whole show on that, right? Right. So I mean, it's not like this is just totally wacky as far as the law goes.

I think the problem is this, the big challenge he's facing is, okay, let's say you're successful and all of a sudden animals have the same rights under the law that humans do. What's that gonna do to the world? And that's a huge question that's raised. I mean, you can just, you come up with a lot of stuff

that would happen automatically. Obviously, medical testing is gone. Yeah, no more zoos, no more circuses. For at least circuses with animals. Right. Yeah, it's just flea circuses, maybe. Just clowns. The creepiest circus of all.

Obviously, there would be no hunting. Veganism would probably just be, that's just what we eat now. Ted Nugent would just drown himself. Yeah, he really would. Yeah. Ted Nugent would not like a world where animals had the same rights, now that I think about it.

He would not. And like pets, would there be pets any longer? Yeah. There's actually been changes. I think somewhere in Colorado and definitely in somewhere in Rhode Island, if not Rhode Island, the state, they amended the law to include guardian instead of owner

or in addition to owner. Oh, interesting. Yeah. That's a different thing. It totally is. Like when you're the legal guardian of your younger brother, you're not their owner. No.

I mean, you might treat them that way, but sure. And then lastly, so we talked about animals being moral agents, right? Yeah. So if you're a moral agent, you also have moral responsibilities in addition to moral protection. That's another can of worms.

Yeah, right. So like if an animal kills another animal, are you going to try it and execute it? Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, that kind of happens today. You can, animals are often put down when they attack other animals. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, they'd be more of the same.

Yeah. What's weird is apparently back in the Renaissance and the medieval era, they used to have trials for animals that did something. Can't you record? Uh-huh. It wasn't, I mean, like we do it today. Like remember Travis the Chimp, who ripped the woman's

face off? Oh, yes. He was summarily executed by police. Yeah. And I think had he even been captured, they would have put him down. There wouldn't have been a trial. But they used to actually have the trial.

And it wasn't because they wanted to give the animal a fair trial. It was for healing the community. Right. You know, to make the humans feel better. Yeah. They could draw this out and make this like an actual issue that was resolved in the execution of the animal.

Interesting. It's, yeah, it's pretty weird. Boy, good one, dude. Yeah. Nice job. Yeah, thanks. You too, buddy. If you want to know more about animal rights,

you can type that into the search bar of your favorite search engine. And since I said search engine, that means it's time for Listener Mail. Yes, this is the famous part two from earlier this week with Yvonne. And I promised a list of band names and a list of puns from Josh.

Because Josh says that he hates puns despite his somewhat regular use of them. Yeah, I, again, I take issue with this. If you accidentally make a pun, you're not a punny person. All right, well, let's just go to this list. Poison Ivy episode, Josh. Let's stop beating around the bush. Accident.

Blood types, Josh. I'm sure I take a B blood. I'm positive of it. Accident. Hula hoops, discussing pushing a hula hoop with a stick. Hang in there and stick with it. Accident. Police dogs, discussing the current popularity

of arson dogs. They're so hot right now. I think that was on purpose. It's possible. I think I remember that one. Chili peppers, Josh, it's ripe for it. Total accident. I don't even think you can include that one.

Can you sweat colors? There's this boiling point, I guess, talking about how hot it's been in Atlanta. That's a reach. Yeah, I agree. Strike that one from the record. Spam, talking about the trouble the maker of spam had when trying to sell spam.

He was hamstrung by the name Hormel Spice Meat. Again, an accident. Hand writing analysis, the writings on the wall. I don't even remember that one. I'm not punny though. I'm not copping to any of these being purposeful. I've got a few more. Casinos, it paid off in aces.

Nope, accident. White collar crime. This is something that has woven into history of white collar crime? Total accident. Disgusting a wool transporter, keeping wool for his own use. Again, accident.

I'm just gonna do one more. Pick the best of them, Chuck. This is like a letterman talk. Taste and how it works. After saying it makes you wonder how things we can taste. He said chew on that one. Accident. All right, and now the band names.

I'm just gonna read through these very quickly. And looking at this list, these are great. So if you're out there looking for a band name. Listen up. Listen up. Toe thumb. Oh, that's good. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection.

Maybe like a Prague band. Maggot therapy. That's a metal band. The static crush, that's total chew gaze. Oh yeah, or emo. Disruptive technology. I don't even know. Myotonic goats.

That's a good one. The Tennessee stiff legs. Love it. That's a bluegrass band. A fistful of neurons. Metal. Okay. Force multiplier.

Total metal. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Nazis on meth. Oh, it's metal. Oh yeah, punk. That can be good too. Masters of plastic. Nerdcore.

Colloidal quantum dots. Definite nerdcore. Supercritical fluid. That's probably a nerdcore too, actually. I guess so, or a boy band. The brownie-wise massacre. That's indie, that's good. Brownie-wise overdrive, boy, there were two.

Yeah. Snake detection theory, I love that one. He's really cracking me up. Extraordinary rendition. That's like a guy, just like these two guys in Maine that's singing a coffee shop. They do all the classics. Yeah.

Standard. We're extraordinary rendition. Controlled burn. Not bad. That's a new metal. Poor Fred Noonan. That's a band that's destined to break up. Poop fusion.

Same. Cooperative eye hypothesis. I don't know if that's a good name after all. I might retract that one. Flesh on the chunks. That's a good one. Or that could be the first album from Poop Fusion. They're like a Zappa-esque band.

The horny skin folds. I can see that being like a party rot kind of thing. All right. Is that freedom rot? Yeah, man. Turn it up. Professional mermaid culture. That's not bad.

That's very indie though. Yeah. They go to Columbia University or something. You're right. And then finally two more. Supercritical CO2. Not bad. Okay.

That's too supercritical, so. Yeah. And then finally, Frozen Poop Knife. Isn't there, who did you tell to change their name to Frozen Poop Knife? Oh, I don't know. Oh, Diarrhea Planet. Yeah, and they tweeted back and said thanks for the idea.

Never. Did they really? Yeah. No way. Yeah. I didn't tell you. I didn't tell you. No, that's great.

Oh, yeah. All right, that's it. That's it, everybody. Thank you, Yvonne, for keeping track of that, man. That's a great list. Yeah, and thank you to the dudes at Primer Stories for posting the essay I wrote. Go check it out at primerstories.com slash S-Y-S-K.

And if you wanna hang out with us, you can hang out with us on Twitter at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.