S8. E15: Lori Gruen and Alice Crary: Animal Crisis
“We have to look at those structures. If we don't look at those structures, if we don't look at the economic structures and we don't look at the instrumentalization of animals, the use of animals, the devaluation, the lack of dignity that's given to animals, we're just going to perpetuate our sort of grotesque use of these creatures.” – Lori Gruen
Philosophers, Alice Crary and Lori Gruen co-wrote the recently released book, Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory. The book is a deep dive into the many systems that are failing both animals and humans and makes the case that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation.
“What we're doing is bringing out the possibility, making it possible to recognize that some of the structures that harm human beings also harm animals… and to show that that these ties aren't accidental.” – Alice Crary
Alice Crary is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School, where she's a co-founder and steering committee member of the Collaborative for Climate Futures.
Lori Gruen is the William Griffin professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, where she coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Lori has been on the podcast before, and I am very happy and honored to have her back.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Purchase their book on Amazon
learn more about Lori Gruen
learn more about alice crary
Transcript:
Lori: [00:00:15] We have to look at those structures. If we don't look at those structures, if we don't look at the economic structures and we don't look at the instrumentalization of animals, the use of animals, the devaluation, the lack of dignity that's given to animals. We're just going to perpetuate our sort of grotesque use of these creatures.
Elizabeth: [00:00:45] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Alice Crary and Lori Gruen. Alice is a university distinguished professor of philosophy at the New School, where she's a co-founder and steering committee member of the Collaborative for Climate Futures. Lori is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, where she coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Alice and Lori co-wrote the recently released book Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory. It interrogates systems that fail both animals and humans and asks us to reevaluate our relations with animals. Hi, Lori . Hi, Alice. I'm really excited to have both of you on the show today.
Alice: [00:02:09] We're excited to be here.
Elizabeth: [00:02:11] If each of you could just give a little intro about who you are and your path to animal ethics.
Lori: [00:02:19] So I'll start. This is Lori, and I actually have been involved in thinking about animal ethics for decades, a very long time. It was important to me and I became turned on to it as an undergraduate and actually went into philosophy because I was interested in animals. Now I teach philosophy and I teach about animals and I write about animal ethics. It's very much a part of my general thinking.
Alice: [00:02:53] My route is similar to Loris, although in some ways our paths are really different and intertwined, at least in my case, law as a part of my development. But my interest in animals goes back 30 years and to the beginning of my life as a philosopher, I've been interested in animal philosophers who are suggesting that the way in philosophy, but also in society at large, animals are valued, is wrong, and trying to rethink the value of animal life.
Elizabeth: [00:03:28] This is so much of both of your lives and work, but just the knowledge that there are different ways of thinking about these issues because I think we get so stuck and like, Oh, this is how you think about welfare and this is how you think about rights, that you think that that's actually the only way to think about welfare or rights. When your book just opens that back up again. Of course, there's other ways of thinking about them. Animal ethics has been around for, what, 50 years? Will you talk about that a little bit and just like what it has been and why to both of you, it feels like there really needs to be kind of a revolution within it.
Lori: [00:04:07] That's a great question. I think that one of the things that's really important to us about the project is there are these older traditions, there are these historical traditions, and there's also simultaneous traditions like eco feminism, for example, that's also about 50 years old that have had these different ways of approaching human relationships with other animals. The traditional ethical theories, the ideas, as you put it so well about welfare and about rights, have become very dominant in sort of the public imagination about our relationships. But there have been these other important traditions. One of the things that we're trying to do in our work is to show how these other traditions are really important in understanding the crisis that we're now in. That's part of why the subtitle of the book is called New Critical Theory. But it's to bring animals into these old critical theoretical traditions that animal ethics has sort of developed completely ignoring.
Elizabeth: [00:05:15] Will you just give a kind of a brief, like background for people who don't even know that animal ethics is a thing like what the past 50 years of animal ethics has looked like.
Alice: [00:05:24] Sure, contemporary animal ethics started about 50 years ago and is very centered on this philosophical doctrine and utilitarianism and that's a big word. The thing to take away from it is that the emphasis is on animal welfare. So you're trying to intervene. It is important. It sounds important. You're trying to change the way humans treat animals so that there isn't as much pain and suffering. That's the idea. Minimize pain and so forth. There's always been within mainstream animal ethics since the late seventies, since 50 years ago, there's been an ongoing conversation between intellectuals who are talking about welfare and those who are talking about rights, saying, actually, the right thing for us to be focusing on is that animals have certain inviolable rights. They shouldn't be treated in certain ways. One of the things that we're doing that is so different is starting with an insight, which is something like this, that there are systematic harms to animals that are structurally connected to ways in which human beings are oppressed. So that sounds really abstract every time we say it. So you're going to have to ask us about concrete cases, things like what's happening in industrial slaughter, animals being hurt. Human beings are often exploited and injured and harmed and really in significant ways or in various sites of deforestation animals are being hurt and local populations are. So there are going to be lots of examples. But here's the idea. You have structural connections. So animal ethics has to, if you're going to want to do something meaningful about animals, you're going to have to think about these traditions in social thought that are interested in the oppression of human beings. So we don't want to have animal ethics just intervene in welfare or even talk about rights in ways that run the risk of by not addressing the structures that cause these harms, run the risk of actually strengthening them. So here's a really simple example. Say you're a welfare based animal ethicist and you're worried about the horrors of things that are done to animals and factory farms. So you get involved in things like campaigns to increase the size of cages and so forth. Well, companies can then say, hey, we're on board, we're doing animal welfare, and they use that as then campaigning to say, look at you, you can make an ethical choice, buy our products and you perpetuate the system. So you strengthen it. I mean, that's a really simple example, but that's the idea is there is where traditional animal ethics was and here's how we're trying to do something different.
Elizabeth: [00:08:22] So what confuses me, I think, is when you say that about increasing the cages, right? You're not saying don't increase the cages.
Lori: [00:08:30] So the problem, I think, as Alice just was pointing out, is that obviously concern about animal suffering is really important and it was a terrific achievement of utilitarian animal ethics to have done that right, to get us to pay attention to the suffering of animals. But here's the problem that just sort of builds on what Alice said. We now are developing, we meaning animal rights and animal liberation organizations, animal protection organizations, animal welfare organizations are doing these campaigns to get rid of, let's say, battery cages or other make cages a little bit bigger? Well, that is helping to minimize, in a very small way, the suffering of animals. When you take the millions of animals that are being used, the billions of animals that are being used globally, you make their cages a little bigger. Then you end up with a lot of suffering that's minimized. You might feel good about that, but you now have more and more animals that are being used for food. That is one of the things that I found really kind of heartbreaking, was to learn that the cages that they're no longer using in the United States, in factory farms, are getting kind of exported to countries that didn't have factory farms but now have factory farms, so that those cages are being used in places that are just starting the process of the mass exploitation and slaughter of millions and billions of animals. So part of what we're saying actually is, no, don't focus on this cage free project, because even though it does cause a minimization of suffering, it also strengthens the global system of animal exploitation. We have to look at those structures. If we don't look at those structures, if we don't look at the economic structures and we don't look at the instrumentalization of animals, the use of animals, the devaluation, the lack of dignity that's given to animals, we're just going to perpetuate our sort of grotesque use of these creatures. The idea is that what we need to look at is these structures and these are structures that disempower workers in those systems. They disempower people of color who are maybe migrants that are working in these systems. So these corporate systems are such that they really are interested in their bottom line, always, their bottom line. They're not interested in animals. They'll say, like Alice said, Oh, we're really interested in animal welfare, but they're only interested in animal welfare because it makes a profit for them to say so. So these are the kinds of questions that we think are really important to ask. So I would say we are absolutely against animal suffering, but there are certain kinds of strategies that have been used like cage free strategies that we do not support.
Elizabeth: [00:11:45] I guess if you look at this from a really big broad picture. Animals aren't really any better off right now. They're actually a lot worse off in terms of numbers than they were 50 years ago. So it's not working.
Lori: [00:11:57] That's right and that's part of what that's part of what our motivation for writing the book is that really these are big problems and they're not getting better by these older systems of thinking about what our ethical obligations to others might be, what are the values that are built into the structures that exist? You can't really make a difference in a system that has these robust values by sort of picking at the edges and both the utilitarian view and the rights based views that we're familiar with, that's what they're doing. They're not really digging deep. They're kind of at the edges. We have a crisis, which is why we have written a book called Animal Crisis that requires a really radical rethinking of how we can structure our lives if we're going to carry on. I think that's really the motivation. The traditional ethical theories haven't helped animals. They're not helping disenfranchised humans either. So we really need to think much more deeply about what will work for both animals and for human beings. I just want to say one other thing about the right space theory, which is a little less abstract and more concrete, it's also about legal rights instead of moral rights. But I think it's really illustrative. That is, I think it gives us a good picture. That's this case of Happy, the elephant at the Bronx Zoo. That became a really important and interesting publicity case. Right. I mean, everybody, I think in New York and the country has read articles about Happy The Elephant, who's not so happy at the Bronx Zoo and the legal fight to try to get her released to sanctuary based on her rights, her rights as an autonomous person. That's what the whole strategy was that Happy the elephant is a person and if she's a person, she should have certain kinds of rights to due process if she's held captive, for example. But of course, this is a cool idea and it's raised the kind of visibility, if you will, of Happy the elephant and other animals in captivity. But of course, it's not going to work in court. It didn't work in court. It's never going to work in court because the rights based system is designed to exclude animals. It's not that it's like, oh, we can maybe ask for animals, really special animals, really smart animals, really cool animals. Maybe they could be included in the system. No, the system is designed to exclude animals, so it's never going to work to do that kind of rights based argument. I think to some extent the same is true of moral rights. Moral rights are designed to protect not even all human beings, but just some human beings. That was the process. Maybe there's been some changes now that women have some rights, although, look, those rights go away. Right? So I think this is a really interesting kind of issue.
Alice: [00:15:08] Even if we imagine the case of Happy the elephant working, it's a case that would would protect a creature and an elephant, maybe other elephants, maybe some other sophisticated mammals and other animals on the basis of similarities of cognitive capacities, emotional capacities that are similar to humans, which means in effect, it would reaffirm the exclusion of a wide range of other animals. So that's another reason for saying that's a really particular case, but that's a rights based strategy. There's something really problematic about the way it's being argued with and that has nothing to do with thinking. We both would love to see Happy in a Sanctuary.
Elizabeth: [00:15:59] Of course, but it's the entire system, all of these systems that need to change, not bit by bit. You start the book talking about Borneo and Sumatra and orangutans and how interconnected every single one of these atrocities is.
Alice: [00:16:14] So many orangutans are being forced out of their original habitats by the growth of palm plantations and so are forced to forage and survive and to increase contact with human beings. At the same time that human beings are also groups of human beings who are local to indigenous to Sumatra and Borneo, are being pushed out of their own lands and often with complex colonial histories that in various ways are reproduced in the relationship between major international corporations. Their governments are themselves impoverished by developments, and you have increasing interactions between orangutans and human beings with orangutans needing to forage. Then at the same time you have people impoverished enough that the exotic animal trade is a life changing proposition for them. So among other things, if they could capture a baby orangutan and sell it on the market, they could probably make as much money as they could make in a year of their life. So this is the kind of story we're telling about the historical and political situation in which both human populations and animal populations are being devastatingly harmed. In which it's not a binary logic. You can't say, oh, you care too much about orangutans. You're not caring about local populations, or the people you should care about are the human beings. Forget the animals. Either side in focus is going to take you off what the big picture is, because what you're seeing is harms to human beings and harms to animals that are happening being reproduced by the same commercial logic.
Lori: [00:18:14] I mean, it's really bad because A, it's islands, right? Island habitats are much more fragile and precarious than other kinds of habitats, even though those habitats are getting destroyed by the palm industry itself. Also moving to Equatorial Africa and parts of Central and South America, they're much more liable to collapse. It's not just orangutans. It's all of these incredible, rich biodiversity that was existing on these islands as these rainforests have been decimated for palm oil plantations and the palm trees themselves, this mono crop just kind of takes over and nothing can really live in the space of these mono crops and these palm trees. So orangutans can actually get into the trees and take the palm fruit. But other animals can't live there because it becomes quite desolate in terms of the biodiversity. So it's a really devastating industry. The thing about palm oil is that it's in so many products, it's everywhere. It has a really long shelf life and it's really, really cheap. This is why it becomes so useful to these corporations to use this particular oil, and it requires really cheap labor as well. So some of the people who are working, the native peoples who are working in the plantations are getting paid very, very little as well to do somewhat dangerous work, you have to climb these trees to get the fruits. So it's not easy work either. The basic structure that Alice laid out so well is that it was discovered that there's this cheap oil that can be used and has a long shelf life and it can be used in everything, foodstuff, but also machinery and production and biofuel. It's just used in all of these different areas. So what ends up happening is people suffer and so many animals get pushed to the brink because of this mass system, abuse of this. Well, it's so interesting. When I first started being concerned about this issue, there was very little research on the implications of palm oil. Now, thankfully, there's a lot of work being done and more and more people are aware of it. I think that is, again, because individuals can't do a lot. We can't, you could try not to buy palm oil, and I do try not to buy palm oil, but I don't think that in my individual boycott of palm oil, I'm going to make a difference in this mass system. It's just something I want to not participate in. So it's a different kind of sort of ethical orientation. But if more and more people become aware of this problem and that's happening, then there's a possibility of a certain kind of organized political protest that can occur.
Elizabeth: [00:21:26] I have two questions about that. One, I feel like people have known that Palm Oil is horrible for a long time. It's not new, that it's bad. I feel like it kind of goes and peaks and it peaks like people are really angry about palm oil and then you don't hear about it for a while and then you hear about it again and you don't hear about it for a while. It's not getting better. Right? My other question is, I mean, because it has 1000 names and it's really hard to know if you're buying something with it in it. It's really corporations that have to stop using it more than individuals. Is there any demand at all that corporations stop using it and isn't it going to be too late pretty quickly?
Alice: [00:22:05] I mean, one thing not to underestimate is the extent to which the corporations that are most heavily involved in palm oil plantations have engaged in greenwashing. It's not just a matter of public attention span somehow not being sustained. There's a determined onslaught to persuade you that there is such a thing as sustainable palm oil, which there is not a lot of the kind of thing we see with, you know, net zero pledges to. So we're going to be developing this technology for carbon capture, now that will be in 2040. So now we just keep going because we're going to be net zero then. It's a kind of fantasy and something similar has happened with palm oil. So I wouldn't blame consumers and for the other reason you mentioned, too, is that it's also really, really difficult to know. Palm oil goes under different names and it's also in things like your electronics, your transportation systems, you're implicated in the system. So the idea of making ourselves pure isn't really the answer. On the other hand, I think when we're writing this book, we're writing a book saying, look, devastating harms to humans and animals on the planet are happening, not they're going to happen. They are happening. I don't think it's a case of waning attention. I think we have really strong ideological forces pushing back. I can't predict what the future is, but we want to galvanize people to bring into perspective the scope and the awfulness of what's happening so that the possibility of joining with social movements, for instance, youth climate strikes of various kinds seems really important.
Lori: [00:23:57] I wanted to say something back about the idea of palm oil, and I do think that there's a sense in which and what happened, I'm going to not name the sanctuary, but many decades ago I was at a sanctuary for formerly farmed animals visiting and I opened the refrigerator and there was a particular product. There was a case of these containers, of this margarine that was a palm oil margarine. I'm not naming any names here. For me, it was sort of a huge disconnect. I saw dead orangutans when I opened the refrigerator. This was a way in which and this gets back to what Alice was saying, this gets back to this idea that these are not single. If you're caring for formerly farmed cows or pigs or other animals in a sanctuary and we talk about cows and pigs in the book as well, this isn't distinct from the suffering that's happening in Borneo and Sumatra. These are interconnected structures that end up supporting each other. Even though individuals, we do not have any fantasy that either individuals can make a difference themselves or sort of that we're going to have some non conflictual situations where everybody is going to be able to sort of hold hands and we find a path forward that's not going to lead to some sort of injury to somebody. So I'm not suggesting purity in any way, shape or form, but there was a really clear connection that could have been made about and was made. I made, of course, the connection. So I think that was something that needed to be done. I think this is part of what our project is about too.
Elizabeth: [00:25:33] But we can certainly do a lot better than we're doing right now.
Alice: [00:25:36] I want to clarify what Lori is saying, because it's not that an individual can't make a huge difference, but they make a huge difference often by starting a movement. So the idea is it's not my consumer choices as an individual. It's not my, as it were, my behavior. We're all like little little pods going to go out and change the world by shopping better. You've got to think systematically and structurally and ultimately the idea has to be to reshape the way people think about systems so that you could have a group movement, a mass movement.
Elizabeth: [00:26:12] I want to talk about our food system because I think that's one of the biggest examples in your book of not only how the whole system is, you know, hurting animals. It's hurting people. It's hurting the planet, really, and it's hurting the people who eat it as well. There's really no upside. I was at a dinner last weekend and I had not read your book yet, which was unfortunate. At this dinner, the whole thing was about our food system. There was some talk about cruelty and animals in the food system, but a lot was about environmental racism and about what our food systems are doing to people and slaughterhouse workers. It was a small dinner, and after this kind of two hour discussion, someone said, you know, it's really a privilege to talk about animal rights. So I responded with, look, how we treat animals is how we treat humans and because I think I spend so much of my time, I spent all of my time pretty much talking to people like you, talking to people in the food system, people fighting every kind of oppression against animals. You just know that when you're around it constantly, like anywhere you go around the globe, you see it. But I didn't really have the language from your book to be very eloquent with my response. Then like two days later I read your book and I was like, Oh, come on. It's all stuff I knew. But to read it and the examples and the connections just made it so solid. So in this chapter about pigs and our food system and where you talk about, you know, what happens to slaughterhouse workers and the whole spiral, will you talk about that?
Lori: [00:27:52] I want to just say a little bit about the privilege response, because I think that there's a way in which that response is itself fairly privileged. I want to just suggest that there's two important, I think, deeply important things to pay attention to, that the system, the food system and the workers are themselves often trying to make change, but because they're so disempowered in general, they're not able to do it. I think that if there was another way of engaging, another way they could make a living. Another way that they could make ends meet. They wouldn't be wanting to be a part of that system at all. They suffer terribly. Workers suffer. It's hard, difficult, dirty, dangerous work. Nobody wants to do that. For those of us who are in a position to bring their conditions to light, there's nothing. I mean, there is, I guess, a sense of privilege for us to do that. But the idea is that we're recognizing that vast suffering and injustice, that food, that workers in the system. It's not simply the workers on the slaughterhouse line, although it's definitely them, but farmers themselves are. This is also something we bring out in the chapter on pigs. Farmers themselves are all often also horribly exploited by these big multinational corporations that put them in debt, which make them take on risk for having to pay for animals that die or any disease that happens. The farmers have that the big corporations, Tyson and Smithfield, don't absorb the losses that the farmers experience. So even farmers are in a position of servitude to a certain extent to these multinational corporations. So that's a really important part of the system to recognize. The other part, just a small part, is that globally, people of color are not consuming massive amounts of animal products. But what we do in the book is really in the chapter on pigs and certainly in the chapter where we talk about cows, we really think it's important to bring the individual animals, their lives and their experiences also into the story. Oftentimes, even in animal ethics, people talk about quote unquote pigs and they don't talk about specific pigs. One of the things that we try to do is talk about the value, the lives, the personality of individual animals.
Alice: [00:25:36] I was just thinking that it might be helpful to say that the pig case that we talk about which started in the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic. One thing we're trying to do with the case of slaughterhouse workers during the early days of the pandemic is to bring out how economic considerations took priority over considerations for their health. They were put not just at risk, but at risk of severe illness and death. You're probably going to remember debates about whether this is critical infrastructure and whether we could have various kinds of overrides of health based considerations for slowing down what's happening, for closing down slaughterhouses and any sound public health steps that were taken early in the pandemic were basically reversed. So most of the slaughterhouses ran fully without adequate PPE, sort of protective gear for workers through those early months of the pandemic and the rates of COVID were incredibly high at a time when, of course, nobody was vaccinated. So that was one thing I would also just think it is so important to to go back to these conversations we have about caring about animals, being privileged because we hear it all the time. I think, you know, and when you're talking about animals and food, people think someone is pushing towards vegetarian or veganism. The image is often like someone who's a lead and kind of like probably white, probably able bodied, who's living in a fancy part of an urban center who can afford all kinds of fresh fruits and vegetables and can get, you know, plant based substitute, industrial, processed products. So that's the image of this person caring about animals. The complaint is then you're somehow supposed, if you care about animals and you're supposed to be ignoring economically marginalized populations in urban centers who do not have adequate food, healthy food access you're supposed to be wrongly ignoring, obviously, indigenous populations, indigenous groups that depend on subsistence hunting. The truth is, that what we're doing in our intervention into the food system is talking about systems that produce those very problems so that to call it a lead is to disempower those who would engage. There are lots of people engaging at a much more fundamental level who are seeing that these systems are connected and that we need to work on them together.
Elizabeth: [00:33:38] One thing you talk about a lot and Lori, actually, we talked about this last time you were on the podcast, but I think it's really important and really important in this book, is when you talk about dehumanizing people by comparing them to animals. Can we talk about that a little bit?
Lori: [00:33:58] Well, I think, didn't I say something like, why do we treat animals like animals? I think that one of the really important strands of thought that's been really important for both of us is to think about, again, what we call is kind of an ideology, but what that means is it's a system of thinking that also obscures itself. It sort of keeps itself hidden. So what is happening is animals are just presumed to be a lower category, a category of dis valued beings in this great hierarchy and at the top of the hierarchy are generally thought to be, at least in this country and in parts of Europe, I mean, Anglo European, there's white cisgendered men who are able bodied and probably pretty wealthy and fit. Then everybody is kind of wrong, if you think about it, below them in terms of humans who don't fit that model. But then there's the animals and they're below all supposedly humans. Of course, not all humans counted as humans historically, but we'll leave that for a moment. So what you do when you dehumanize a person, a human, is you compare them to animals. One of the things that is really important to understand, given that structure that I just described, is that if you want to matter, you say I'm not an animal, right? If you want to matter and you buy into that structure, you're going to obviously say, wait, I'm not, don't compare me to animals. So if you're incarcerated, this is something that you hear from prisoners. ‘Oh, we're treated like animals’, and that's the complaint. It's a perfectly legitimate complaint within the structure that puts humans above all animals. So the role that animals play, if you think about it in this ideology, if the role they play in systems of thought is as less valuable beings, and then they're available to dehumanize people, right? That structure is one that really needs to be both uncovered, made visible, as it were, and then fought against.
Alice: [00:36:27] There's a deep narrative of our book. It's not, in some sense the up front and center explicit narrative, but it develops as we talk through these things that and Lori said it really nicely that we, on the one hand, are trying to express that it is utterly understandable for members of oppressed groups to say things like we aren't animals and even to organize around that idea, while also showing that in a fundamental sense it can be counterproductive in revaluing animal life, bringing out that animals have a dignity that speak against their commodification. What we're doing is bringing out the possibility, making it possible to recognize that some of the structures that harm human beings also harm animals, and to show that these ties aren't accidental. So that meaningful political intervention is going to be from a position of solidarity, I mean, isn't that part of what the title of your podcast means is Species Unite. I think when people hear that, they think, you know, like, how's the squirrel in my garden going to join forces with me and being a political movement. It can be perplexing, but there's nothing perplexing about it at all. Human and animal life is devastated by the same structures. The idea is to say we do need complex genealogies that trace the extent to which dehumanization through animalization has actually created our categories of race, gender, ability and so forth. To see how deep the political logic that we're inveighing against runs. But once you start to see that, you start to see new possibilities for understanding the way that animals and human beings are often pitted against each other and new ways of seeing how solidarity is possible. That's the end point that we're aiming at.
Elizabeth: [00:38:23] You give some examples in the book about animals when like situations where like the baboons that were being tested on and tortured but when they were being made fun of on top of that, is that where dignity is just totally off the table?
Lori: [00:38:40] I think that there's two points that are really important here. The first point Alice just mentioned is that and this is why we are treating animals like animals. That sounds like a weird sentence, but that's the idea. If dignity just means we're above animals, how can we say animals have dignity? That means animals are above animals. It's the same kind of thing. That's exactly what we're interested in thinking about, wait a minute, this is just a made up. Somebody just made it up. A bunch of people made it up. We can challenge this idea. This doesn't come to us from nature, from God, from anything. We make these things up. So that's partly, I think, the really important part of understanding why we think it's really useful to think about animal dignity. But the point that you raise, the example of the University of Pennsylvania head injury lab, the Moscow Circus example of a bear walking around the circus with a baby pushing a baby carriage. Part of what's so important there is that not only is there something fundamentally wrong with treating animals as tools or instruments, either for entertainment purposes, harming them and training them in the context of zoos and circuses, perhaps using them as research tools in the laboratory, at the head injury laboratory. That's horrible. That's horrible. But there's something else that's also wrong, and that is this failure to see them as dignified beings. Now, when we say when we're talking about animal dignity, we're not saying that animals themselves have to be aware of the fact that their dignity is being violated. I'd like to use this, we've talked about this before, we’ve used this example before. If somebody puts a little sticker on your back and says, you know, I'm a jerk or I'm a dork or whatever, something undignified, and you don't know it's there. It's still a violation of your dignity. Right? So what we're saying is that even if the animals may not themselves be aware that their dignity is being violated, we humans who are interacting with them in particular contexts like laughing at them when they're head injured, when they have brain damage, that itself is a failure to recognize their dignity. It doesn't matter that the animal themselves doesn't know about it.
Elizabeth: [00:41:08] But not only do the systems need to change, but this whole narrative needs to change, like how we think about and talk about animals.
Lori: [00:41:14] That's right.
Elizabeth: [00:41:15] How do we do that?
Lori: [00:41:18] I think that we really do need a paradigm shift and what are we going to do about these problems? Well, part of the work that we do in the book is to try to sort of reorient the problems in a way that helps them become more visible. But I think the other thing that is absolutely essential to understand, and this is why this is called what we're calling it A Critical Animal Theory in part is that there are ways that, for example, within feminist work for decades, it was some feminists think it's impossible to actually figure out what we want until we get out of a system of patriarchy. In anti-Black racism, there's often a view that because the structure is predicated on anti-blackness, we can't talk of what it would mean to live in black freedom unless we get rid of that system. So to a large extent, we're not able to provide a blueprint like this idea that we're going to bring you down a path because the system is limiting our imagination. So one of the things we need to do is see what the system is, make it visible. Another thing we need to do is act in ways that energize our imagination. One way that can happen and we do this in the book, is through references to literature and art and film. Our imaginations provide us with new ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and sort of if you want to think about just a different way of being in relation to the world, that's one thing that's pretty abstract. Another thing I think, and we talk about this at the end of the book, is to think in terms of the young people's movements. Movements that allow us to be together in mutual aid, in solidarity with really deep care for one another. Once we take those values and lift them up, those sort of instrumental corporate capitalist exchange, transactional values start to look really not very helpful for us. So I think that it's really important that we're in a large tradition of thinking that we're not going to provide you with an answer. It's a large part of improv, right? We have to do it together. Once we come to see the problems more clearly.
Elizabeth: [00:43:54] Awesome. Thank you. That was great. I want to thank you both for today. I want to thank you for putting this book in the world and I want to thank you for giving me some new language. I want to thank you for making me think about all this stuff.
Lori: [00:44:08] Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for your really thoughtful engagement with the book. That was wonderful.
Elizabeth: [00:44:23] To learn more about Alice, to learn about Lori, and to read Animal Crisis, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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