Understanding the Emotional Lives of Animals
In this episode, we talk with animal behavior expert Dr. Marc Bekoff about the emotional lives of animals and the urgent need for a shift in how we treat them. A pioneer in the field of cognitive ethology, Dr. Bekoff shares his insights on animal emotions, the interconnectedness of animal rights and environmental sustainability, and how we can better understand and care for the incredible beings with whom we share the planet. Highlights include:
How cognitive ethology helps us understand the minds and emotions of animals, and why this understanding is essential for improving their wellbeing;
What is wrong with the traditional animal welfare approach and why Dr. Bekoff advocates for a science of animal well-being that values each individual animal’s life;
Why human overpopulation exacerbates habitat destruction and the suffering of animals, stressing the need to reduce human impact on ecosystems;
Why the language we use to describe animals, such as referring to them as “who” instead of “it,” plays a crucial role in shaping our perceptions and treatment of them.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Marc Bekoff 0:00
If you look across the board at the broad spectrum of animals who have been studied, they feel the same things we do. I just can't think of any example of any emotion that's uniquely if you will, dog, coyote, goldfish, or human for that matter. And do we know as much about some nonhumans as humans? No, we don't. But there's no doubt they all feel pain, discomfort and respond negatively to aversive or painful stimuli. They suffer. It's their suffering, and we're not the ones who should decide if they're suffering or how badly they're suffering.
Alan Ware 0:39
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we speak with Dr Marc Bekoff, a leading researcher in the fields of animal behavior and emotions and compassionate conservation. Marc shares insights into the rich emotional lives of animals and the ethical imperative that we treat animals with the empathy and compassion they deserve.
Nandita Bajaj 1:09
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint, so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:32
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's guest. Marc Bekoff is Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published 31 books, won many awards for his research on animal behavior, animal emotions, cognitive ethology, compassionate conservation and animal protection; has worked closely with Jane Goodall; is co-chair of the ethics committee of the Jane Goodall Institute, and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He also works closely with inmates at the Boulder County Jail. His latest books are Dogs Demystified: An A to Z Guide to All Things Canine, the second edition of The Emotional Lives of Animals, and Jane Goodall at 90: Celebrating an Astonishing Lifetime of Science Advocacy, Humanitarianism, Hope, and Peace. Marc also publishes regularly for Psychology Today. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 1:32
Hello, Marc. It is such an honor to have you on the podcast.
Marc Bekoff 1:35
Well, thank you for having me.
Nandita Bajaj 2:21
And you're a leading researcher in the study of animal behavior, and you're a powerfully passionate advocate for the rights of animals to lead full and rich lives. And today, we're really excited to dive into your insights on the emotional lives of animals, the ethical considerations of animal rights, and how your research intersects with broader issues like overpopulation and environmental sustainability.
Marc Bekoff 3:34
Yeah, I'm glad to see that connection. A lot of people don't make that connection, actually. When people talk about the environment, they don't talk about animals. I try to explain to them that animals help shape ecosystems. There's probably none where there are no animals, if you consider invertebrates and other little, small beings. But it's amazing how many people say, Well, I'm an environmentalist, and I'll go, Okay, tell me more. So I actually don't see that ecocentrism, and if you will, the study of animal minds, you know, sentience, consciousness, emotions, are mutually exclusive. I mean, they're not. They overlap totally.
Nandita Bajaj 4:14
That's the grounds on which so much of our vision at Population Balance is founded on is these are all completely interrelated. You've been a pioneer in the field of cognitive ethology. It's something you discuss quite a bit in your newly revised 2024 edition of your influential 2007 book, The Emotional Lives of Animals. Could you describe what cognitive ethology is and what do people within the field study?
Marc Bekoff 4:48
Yeah. I mean, it's basically the study of animal minds - what's in them, how do they work? It's not a question if animals have minds or if they have emotional lives, or if they're sentient, or if they're conscious, or if they have feelings. As an evolutionary biologist and a field biologist, the question is, Why have they evolved? So how do they help individuals adapt to their environment, social and non-social, fluctuating environments. And the basic question for saying, Why have they evolved is, What are they good for? I mean, that's the way non-scientists would cash it out. I mean, scientists like to always muddle the field with jargon, but that's really what it means to ask why they're important, yeah, and why have they evolved? And it's, what are they good for?
Nandita Bajaj 5:39
And you've talked about how there's this evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals, the reasons why they've evolved very similar to the reasons why we've evolved being a subset of the animal kingdom. As a scientist, ecologist, biologist, how would you describe emotions and what evolutionary purpose do they serve?
Marc Bekoff 6:02
Well, the word emotion means to emote, to move. So I mean looking at it that way, they get us to do something. They basically get us to take certain actions that you hope would have survival value in a particular situation. People conflate feelings and emotions. For me, they're all the same. I mean, you know, technically, the feeling would be the result of having an emotion, and the emotions are internal. That's the way some people cash it out I explained in my book. So, you know, the hormonal influences, or the neural influences, would be the emoting factors. They produce feelings. And then whatever feelings we have, we try to do the right thing, or, you know, all animals try to do the right thing, the best thing they can do in a given situation. And they're very important in guiding us. You can have feelings of fear or love, and you might express them differently depending on context, where it's happening, who's there? Have you had a bad day? You know, how you feel about it all. And so to me, there's just no way that we could see the complex behaviors we see in a wide variety of nonhumans without having emotions and feelings. And I used to write about what I called the 'as if' disclaimer. They're only behaving 'as if' they feel embarrassed or jealous or grieving or happy or sad or mourning, and that's just ridiculous. From a biological point of view, it would be impossible to have all these emotions or feelings hardwired so that people, you know, behave robotically. And things are changing. I'm pleased to say that, as when I was revising the original version of The Emotional Lives of Animals, because it came out in 2007, I would make lists of whether any new discoveries countered taking better care of animals. You know, did we learn that they don't feel something or think something? No, never. I mean, the bottom line is, they should make us more aware of how little we are actually doing, although it's growing. Given what we know and what we knew maybe 50 or 70 years ago was enough to do better than we are doing now. And talk about the Five Freedoms, which was put forth in 1965 in the UK for farmed animals. I mean, when you look at them, they're they're laughable. You know that an animal should have enough water and food and be able to move around and express species-typical behavior. But back then, they were new. They were formalized. So, you know, I think the bottom line is that we're learning more and more, and it's even more compelling to recognize that we're not doing all we can right now to help individual animal wellbeing.
Alan Ware 8:55
Yeah, and as you mentioned in the book, the field of cognitive ethology often uses anecdotes, analogy, and anthropomorphism - or the attributing of human characteristics to animals - to reach its conclusions. And a lot of these approaches to understanding have historically been considered unscientific in western science, but as you've described in the book very well, there are many advantages to humanizing animals and using those human analogies. So what do you think are the advantages of that humanizing, and where do you think the limits of that are?
Marc Bekoff 9:30
One advantage is it makes it more understandable and comprehensible to us. So if you talk about a mad human, you could begin to visualize what a mad dog would feel like, or a grieving chimpanzee and a grieving human, or a happy human and a happy mouse, or whatever other animal you're talking about. So it actually brings it together. And there was a study done some years ago by a group at Colorado State that showed that being anthropomorphic really helps foster coexistence and attachment, and that's because it just accentuates the similarities between humans and nonhumans. But it doesn't mean we're identical. It doesn't mean that human emotion should be the template for the emotional lives of nonhumans. It just means there's similarity, and one of the things that I studied over the years are like individual personalities and how grief in one dog may be different from grief in another dog, and grief in dogs is different from grief in chimpanzees. So it doesn't mean because it's different, I have it, you don't, or a dog has it, or chimpanzees don't. It just means there's differences. So I don't even talk about anthropomorphism anymore, because it's a sideshow. It takes attention away from the work that needs to be done, because a lot of people use it as a way to stop the conversation. Oh, you're just being anthropomorphic. Well, you can call it whatever you want. I'm being dog morphic. I wrote a paper about dog, dogomorphism, or chimpomorphism, because we know they all have the same basic set of emotions, and a similar argument could be made for like anecdotes. I mean, anecdotes are data. We say the plural of anecdote is data. You know, if you have 100 stories about dogs doing something, you've got something real. It's unlikely that 100 people living in maybe 90 different locations have conspired to tell the same story. And science is stories. So you could say science is based on data, but it's stories, and that's what people really want to hear. So when people say anecdotes are useless or they demean them, you know they lessen their value. I agree that one story might not necessarily change a paradigm or how we think about certain things, but when you have a ton of them, you really need to pay attention. And the analogy argument is that you see similarities - an angry wolf or an angry dog or an angry elk or maybe an angry robin or bird or fish or invertebrate. You're seeing certain behavior patterns, and you can correctly guess that they're being expressed because an animal is upset, the animal's protecting themselves, or they're protecting their family and their children, or they're happy and they're playing. So the analogy argument works, but it doesn't work when humans make themselves the center of everything, which a lot of humans try to do, and some unbelievably believe that we're the center of the universe.
Alan Ware 12:43
You've spent countless hours observing dogs, coyotes, wolves, playing, and at the dog park, as you've mentioned. And you've written about the strong connection between animal play and morality. Could you explain some of the this connection with examples from all of your decades of study?
Marc Bekoff 13:01
Yeah, I mean, over the years of studying play, we collected a lot of data. We basically filmed animals. And I used to ask students in my class whether they would like to, you know, get some extra credit or work study job looking at animals playing. And they always wanted to, until they realized they were going to be locked in a dark room looking at film frame by frame. But then, of course, we made visits to dog parks. And it's an interesting story, scientifically, in the sense of how the ideas developed over years, because we had all the data. And then slowly but surely, you know, I started thinking about the evolution of fairness, just behavior, moral behavior. Then we went back and looked at some old data. I mean, the nice thing is, when you've got films and you've got good notes, you can go back and look at them. In a lot of areas of science, what you collect in the morning is old hat at night. You do an experiment and you publish a paper an hour later, and then you do another experiment. But I really mean that, because I I love going back, and I've been doing it not too long ago, looking at data that could be 25,30,40 years old. So you save them. So yeah, I noticed that it was with dogs, but wild coyotes, wolves, and there were people studying playing, a lot of nonhuman primates as well. So I came up and wrote about what I called the 'golden rules of play'. And they were simply ask first, and communicate clearly I want to play with you. So dogs and other animals use what's called a play bow. They crouch on their forelimbs, and they put their butts up in the air, and they wag their tail, and sometimes they bark. So I want to play with you. And then another rule, one of the golden rules - mind your manners. Don't swat at another animal so hard that you could harm them, or don't jump on them or hip slam them to the point where you could injure them. So we notice that animals self-handicap - a large animal may not run into or slam into a smaller animal as hard as they would to another large animal. Or role reversal, where a high- ranking or dominant individual would allow a lower-ranking animal, say in their group, to lay on top of them or chase them, if you will, admit you're wrong. And what we discovered was that, especially in the canids, when play got really rough, so it was really, you know, we call it play fighting, which I didn't like. I sort of like the phrase rough and tumble play better, because fighting, then you begin to think of it as a fight with some outcome that could affect dominance. Stop, assess the situation. And what we discovered among some of the canids was that they would then do a play bow. So if I'm playing with you and I bite you too hard, or I slam into you, or you back off, I would do a play bow or another signal to say, Oh, I was only kidding. That's play, just basically being honest from the start. Just be honest and state your intentions very clearly. And so I had all these data for years, and I never really thought about them that way. And then I wrote a book called Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. And I brought on my friend Jessica Pierce, because she's a philosopher, and I was just having a lot of trouble getting through all the dense philosophical literature on ethics and the evolution of morality. But then all of a sudden, I started thinking we saw that in coyotes. So I looked at old data, and I have to say that it was just the luck of the draw, if you will, that I learned by looking at the old data that even in wild coyotes, when there was an individual who would cheat and play, they might invite another coyote to play and then they try to beat him up, for example. So they were either avoided by other coyotes or their play invitations were ignored, and they were more likely to leave their group. So as an evolutionary biologist, we try to deal with what we call the fitness consequences of a behavior. So leaving the group, it doesn't have to be a bad thing, but we discovered, and it's a very small data set, but people like it, and I do too. It's so hard to get the data over years. In the field of identified individuals was the cheaters who left the group suffered much higher mortality than the animals who stayed in the group. That's kind of the capstone. So there would be an evolutionary story too, if you will, the negative consequences of cheating in play and not being a fair player. So other people have observed that in animals other than canids, for example.
Alan Ware 17:54
And there's that evolutionary continuity with humans, right with the book, Survival of the Friendliest, and that we may have self domesticated ourselves, partly by exiling the most aggressive members or murdering them, possibly.
Marc Bekoff 18:07
Yeah, I mean a guy named Peter Gray, and I forget whether Peter's at Boston University or Boston College, but after I published this essay in Psych Today called The Golden Rules of Play in Dogs, he basically followed it up, applying those rules to the play of humans, and not surprisingly found the same thing. I mean, we're mammals. We're different from other mammals, but we're not necessarily smarter or more adaptable than other animals. In fact, we're not particularly adaptable at all. Other animals don't wear clothes and have to buy ice scrapers and shovels. To me, it's really exciting. And, you know, some people will say, Well, what about predators? You know, we're not talking about that. You know, predators do nasty things, but that's how they evolved, and that's how they have to live. They can't go to the grocery store. But in social interactions, more and more people are seeing these examples of fairness, social morality, just behavior among a lot of different species. An animal will give care to another animal in need. And there's a great story Rick McIntyre, who's a wonderful wolf biologist who's written five books now on the wolves of Yellowstone, saw a very high ranking alpha wolf, if you will, go console a young, young wolf. I'm not sure of the details, and I'm not sure Rick knew all the details, but consoling a young animal, not beating them up. So that gets back to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation, that if you don't allow animals the full benefit of expressing their dogness or wolfness or goldfishness or snakeness or whatever you want to call it, you just shouldn't be saying they don't do this thing, or they can't do those things. And once again, you know, I see it with dogs, because I spend so much time watching free running dogs at dog parks, or free running dogs out in nature, or, on occasion, feral dogs. Well, they do do these things. Maybe they don't do them often. There's a big difference to saying they don't do that, or they can't do it, and being so firm about it, because maybe they do do it, and can do it when they're free to express themselves.
Alan Ware 20:22
And that kind of reminds me, too of human human children need unstructured play without adults setting all the rules for them all the time.
Marc Bekoff 20:30
That's come up a number of times, because when I wrote a book called Animals at Play: Rules of the Game, and it was kids book, and once it appeared, I was getting emails from school psychologists, for example. And I know a lot of teachers around Boulder, and I would bring them films of dogs playing. We'd do kids events and things like that, and you're absolutely right. And the bottom line there was that you've got to give dogs and other animals the room to negotiate their own social relationships and resolve conflicts. So you know, if you step in all the time to do it, and you're not there, I mean I'm not a child psychologist, but I'll bet you it would be more adaptable to let a kid, within reason, you know, resolve their conflicts with their friends or foes and move on. Same with dogs or other animals. When you do field work, you see pretty nasty stuff. You'll see predation if you're studying carnivorous animals. You'll see fights where an animal gets bitten and gets injured. I'm still of the belief, and a guy named Robert Sussman, who recently passed away sadly, studying primates saw that huge percentage of their behaviors were what they call affiliative or prosocial, positive. That doesn't mean they don't fight and harm one another. It just means that it would be wrong when you read the newspaper and you see some horrific human violence and they'll go, well, they were behaving just like animals. No, no, no, they weren't. Nonhumans can behave that way, but it's not their average behavior, if you will. But you're definitely right that I think one thing that comes out of a lot of my studies and others is animals and individuals have to learn to resolve their own conflicts, and they do. They don't want to fight. I mean, if you're a high- ranking wolf or coyote or chimpanzee, and you get in a fight and you get injured, and you say, can't walk, or you get, you know, an infection, you may win the battle, but you might lose the war because you may not be able to reproduce. And, you know, a good Darwinian would say, well, the bottom line is, are you passing on your genes? So even if you're a high ranking animal, and that's why you see among different species, the evolution of threat behaviors and submissive behaviors and appeasement behaviors, because they, quote, don't want to fight if they don't have to.
Alan Ware 22:57
So in your book, you also mentioned you've seen quite a shift towards greater acceptance of animal subjective experience in animal research. So what has that been like from the beginning of your career to now?
Marc Bekoff 23:10
I mean, it's been great. I've been around for a while. And when Don Griffin, who people call the father of cognitive ethology, and when he started putting his ideas out about emotions and consciousness. People at the meeting thought he was losing his mind. They really did - not giving any attention to the fact that Don is the person who just discovered echolocation in bats when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, by stringing guitar strings across his dorm room, and the bats would avoid them. But I was at meetings where they just thought he was nuts, of course, ignoring the fact that he's a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well. And in his writings, you can see he wrote a book called On Consciousness, and then he wrote a book called Animal Thinking. And then the revision of that in 1992 was called Animal Minds. So you've seen he went from the question of animal awareness to animal thinking to animal minds. And you know, Jane Goodall, when she came out of the field early on in her research at Gombe in Tanzania, and she went back to Cambridge, you know, they basically said, well, we don't number and name animals and talk about personalities. And although she's a good friend, I don't know exactly what her quote was, but it would have gone along the lines, Well I do. And I've been in the field, and I've watched these animals while all the people sitting on their butts back in the university not having seen the animals or just watching captive animals, shouldn't be making these pronouncements. Jane's work back then, you know, before she was became the icon who she is now, was really influential on me. And you know, the discussion about the research in animal emotions and the change in heart among most, but perhaps not everyone, is also based on field work. You know, I work on dogs, and I've studied free ranging and feral dogs, had a student studying feral dogs in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico area. And people say, well, dogs don't do that. And I'm going, my God, I was just at the dog park, and I saw it a hundred times. And the reason I say that is because, once again, dogs live really varied lives and homed dogs are basically captive animals, and some might have really good lives, but they don't have the opportunity to express their natural or full behavioral repertoire. And I think that that's really important. So Jane really revolutionized the field by going out and living with the chimpanzees, and she was subject to the same criticisms that others and I were when we started doing our work. But when I did my field project outside of Jackson Wyoming in the Grand Teton National Park on coyotes, I mean, we had like, 5000 hours of observation, and we were still seeing things that were relatively new. I mean, your learning curve and your curve of original observations goes vertical, and then it asymptotes, but we still were, you know, and so people would say, well, we've never seen coyotes do that. Well, maybe because you're watching coyotes in cages. I mean, I studied captive coyotes, and it's not that the data aren't good and important. It's just they're not the whole story about who wild animals are. It gets back to the study of animal minds, how they have to deal with different situations and show immediate flexibility of behavior to adapt to a given situation. And that was the basis of Don Griffin's arguments about consciousness using flexible behavior. You know, he would look at how animals showed behavioral plasticity in different situations. Maybe they modified an action, or they chose another action to deal with a particular circumstance.
Alan Ware 27:00
Yeah, I think you mentioned coyotes will live singly or paired or family based on scarcity or surplus of resources.
Marc Bekoff 27:10
Precisely, yeah, the availability of winter food. I mean, not surprising, you know, having lived with a bunch of guys in college. When there wasn't enough food around, things got tough. On shopping days when we had a wealth of food, things were better, but that's what's happening out there. If there's not enough food or space, sleeping spots, safe spots, then the animals have to solve the conflicts they have, not necessarily by fighting, but there's just not enough to go around.
Nandita Bajaj 27:41
And you've been discussing a lot about the emotional lives of animals and the plasticity of the brains and the flexibility that they have to show in their adaptive behavior. And we, mainly through work of people like you, have been seeing increasingly, the prevalence and intensity of emotions in nonhuman animals. I mean, it's all around us. You don't have to look too far to understand how similar their lives are in the ways that matter, in terms of you know, how they express emotions, right?
Marc Bekoff 28:16
I mean, if you look across the board at the broad spectrum of animals who've been studied, they feel the same things we do, but not necessarily in the same way. And once again, I would say that my grief might not be the same as your grief, or my joy might not be the same as your joy, but we both have it. There's individual differences, even among litter mates, probably in terms of what they're feeling and how they express it. But I just can't think of any example of any emotion that's uniquely if you will, dog, coyote, goldfish, or human for that matter. And do we know as much about some nonhumans as humans? No, we don't. But I think down the line, we are going to learn more as we just collect more data. But there's no doubt they all feel pain, discomfort, and respond negatively to what we call aversive or painful stimuli. They suffer. It's their suffering, and we're not the ones who should decide if they're suffering or how badly they're suffering. We're not learning dogs don't suffer. We're not learning that fishes don't suffer. We're not learning that reptiles don't have emotions. It's just going to take time, because it's challenging a very anthropocentric and perverse zeitgeist, if you will.
Nandita Bajaj 29:37
On the other hand, you see the hypocrisy of scientific experiments that are conducted on animals for animal research and science. The scientists who are doing that obviously have come to some level of acceptance that animal minds and emotions are quite similar to us, because they're trying to observe how they respond to certain things and how they respond to stress, etc, because they're trying to address human afflictions, let's say. And yet the same scientists will completely deny the beingness or the emotional lives of animals. So not only the fact that what you said - the data is not really accurate. It's quite spurious, because the animals are not behaving in ways that are natural or normal within such stressful captive situations, but also the complete cognitive dissonance of when do their lives matter.
Marc Bekoff 30:38
One obvious thing is that in a small cage animals can't get away from one another. And in the field, if I have a fight from a coyote or a wolf, or if I have an altercation with another individual, we could get away from one another. And you can't do that in a small cage. It's as simple as that. And then you have these people who say, animals don't feel pain, and then you can go pick up any journal on pain research, and you'll see they're using animals. I never quite got that. And also, to me, proof in the pudding, if you will, is that although they're not good enough, there's constant revisions of regulations and laws. So my bottom line is the people know that they're doing harmful research. They know they're hurting other animals. They know the animals are suffering, and they want to reduce the suffering. I believe that, and I think there's a lot of good people out there who do horrific research, but when people say, we have to do that, because I've had people say, well, I had no choice. We had to sacrifice is the word they use or euthanize when it's not these animals and I'll say, Well, you don't have to. I mean, well, yes, I do. It's my job. Well, I understand it's hard to find a job, but at least maybe within the arena of what you're doing, you can come up with nonlethal, humane methods. I think the combination of the generation of questionable data, and people getting tired of harming animals is and will have more of an effect in the future. I really do. I think there's been some researchers who have closed down their labs in the last couple of years, and they've got families, you know, they have to live and they just said, can't do this anymore. Very brave people.
Nandita Bajaj 32:21
What you just said, the answer to the question is like, why are you doing it? Well, I have to do it. Part of that have to or the obligation, it kind of starts very early on. I never really liked biology because of the dissection aspect of it. And interestingly, people like me, who were sensitive, we were just written off as people who were a little wimpy or who just didn't have it in them to conduct real science. And you see how early on that connection is severed.
Marc Bekoff 32:53
Definitely. When I was in grade school, I mean, I never was a particularly good student, and I really would rather have been outside, but I didn't dissect earthworms or pith frogs. In retrospect, I really feel it was because I could actually feel their emotions. You know, at the time, it was just, I'd rather just be outside than cutting animals up. But I think you're right. It's like paradigm teaching and paradigm science. This is what we did. It's also coercive. Teachers will get on you if you don't do it. In this book that I'm writing for a young adult or a teenage audience on animal emotions, I've been writing about some of my own experiences from the time I was young. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I would talk to the animals, and I would talk to the goldfish we had living in a aquarium on our kitchen counter, but I could feel their emotions, and I wrote a book called Minding Animals back, it came out in 2002, and the phrase minding animals meant I was minding them by taking care of them, but also minding them by attributing minds to them. And my parents, they didn't often quite understand what I was doing, but they didn't stop me from doing it. And I would tell them, Look, I feel their emotions. And no one ridiculed me. But I do know adults or you know among friends, you feel their emotions, you know you're a sissy or something like that.
Nandita Bajaj 34:20
Yes, yes, totally. We've talked quite a bit about the capacity for animals to suffer, and how you've written about this knowledge has not really translated into action to significantly reducing animal suffering. In fact, you've critiqued the current animal welfare approach and argued for replacing the science of welfare with the science of what you were saying, you know, the dogness, the frogness, the science of being, or wellbeing. So what are some of the current practices of animal welfare that you'd like to see changed? And what would a science of animal wellbeing look like?
Marc Bekoff 35:01
Jessica Pierce and I wrote a book called The Animal's Agenda, and the purpose of that was to replace the science of animal welfare with the science of animal wellbeing. And very simply, the science of animal wellbeing deals with individuals. So the life of every individual matters because each individual counts, whether they're sentient or not, because of their inherent or intrinsic value. So you can't play the numbers game and say, well, there's 10 million brown rats, so it's okay to kill a thousand for example, or there's 5 billion laboratory rodents, so it's okay to use them as disposable objects, because each and every life matters. Although I don't believe in coincidences, what was really interesting in the timing was as we were thinking about it, years ago, the field of compassionate conservation was developing and rapidly emerging. And one of the tenets of compassionate conservation is that the life of every individual matters, and once again, traditional conservationists play what I call the numbers game once again. So we've got a million of these animals, so it doesn't matter if we kill a few, or they'll trade off the lives of members of the same species, or they'll trade off the lives of one species to save the members of another species. And that's just not acceptable in compassionate conservation, because it gets back to your question that it's the life of every individual matters. I mean, that was really what motivated the book, just the science of animal welfare really fails countless animals. So for example, people don't know this, but the federal Animal Welfare Act in the United States, there's a clause in it that says we've redefined the word animal to exclude mice and rats and birds and fishes and insects, and it still is now. And I know that there's some scientists who have tried to change it, but when I've been at meetings, I'll say, how do you let this go? And some of them will say, Well, you know, and I go, No, I don't know. I mean, even putting ethics aside, rats and mice are animals, by the way. You know, I've had six year olds say, well, they're not trees. They're not flowers. They're not grasses. They're animals. But you know, when people hear that, they're incredulous, as I was when I read about it years ago. So even though there's been successive revisions of the United States federal Animal Welfare Act, that phrase is still in there that we've redefined the word animals to exclude certain animals. To me, that's reprehensible. To me, that's something that you could admit that they're animals and then still do what you're doing. I wish you wouldn't, but to say they're not animals is just absurd. And when I've asked some of my colleagues here years ago and elsewhere, that's when they look at their shoes because they can't look you in the eye because they know it. To me, that's just a perfect example of how much further we need to go.
Alan Ware 38:06
And this gets to some of the language that we know is very human-centered, very anthropomorphic, and how it frames our beliefs, our actions, perceptions. And you've emphasized the importance of the words we use referring to nonhuman animals, arguing that's what language changes perception and how we treat them. Could you elaborate on why you believe language so crucial? Some examples of how you think we are using language and how we could change that?
Marc Bekoff 38:32
To me it's pretty simple - that animals aren't 'that, it, which'. They could be 'he, she, they, them, who, whom', because language and thought are so intertwined. But when you say, Oh, look at that goat who's doing that, sometimes there's a pause. Oh, who? Why are you calling them who? Because they're an individual, and their lives matter, because 'it' and 'which' and 'that' really refer to disposable objects.
Alan Ware 39:02
Right. Yeah, we talked with Christopher Ketcham, a journalist who looked at the US Fish and Wildlife and how they kill so many animals, and the words that we use there, like 'game' and 'harvestable surplus', 'harvesting' animals, all these ways of distancing ourselves from the killing, right?
Marc Bekoff 39:22
I've been writing a lot about the misuse of the word euthanasia. You know they euthanized bears in Boulder. You know they euthanized these animals at zoos. So I coined the word 'zoothanasia' to refer to what's happening in zoos. They didn't euthanize these supposedly excessive surplus animals who couldn't contribute to a breeding program. They murdered them. They slaughtered them. They killed them. They didn't euthanize them. You euthanize a dog or a companion animal who's in interminable pain or interminably ill. But that's another word. And people get upset with me, because I've done that at wildlife meetings, you know, and talk wildlife commissioners to say you didn't euthanize the bear or the mountain lion in Boulder. You killed them. They were not suffering. Other than having to live with us, they weren't suffering, you know. And 'game', 'livestock', I call it dead stock, which isn't funny, but live stock. It's stock. You own them like you own a stock certificate. You own a cow.
Nandita Bajaj 40:29
Totally. One of the things at Population Balance we advocate for is addressing human overpopulation as a crucial step toward reducing human dominance over our planet and allowing for much greater wellbeing of the millions of nonhuman species we share the planet with and we're increasingly decimating. And we appreciate that you've both written and spoken about the fact that we humans are overpopulating the planet. What do you wish more animal lovers understood about the impacts of human overpopulation on animals?
Marc Bekoff 41:07
It's just impossible to believe that even the number of people we have now and natural mortality, that if we didn't add another person to the planet, it's hard to imagine that we're not going to run out of resources. Well, with a couple of billion more mouths to feed, it's going to be a tough go. A lot of people don't realize that the resources on our planet are finite. You just have to go to any indigenous group of people or people living on the land, and you know, they know that. But it's not radical to think that we can't continue on the way we're living, and more mouths to feed, more individuals to pollute the planet, to rob the resources. You know, if you have a pound of food and each gets an ounce, you get 16 ounces. But if you've got a thousand individuals vying for that one pound of food, they get nothing. There's finite resources. And as we trespass into the homes of other animals, I mean, we read about the charismatic megafauna, wolves and bears and ungulates, but a lot of the damage we're doing is to the soil where insects live. And one of the big things that's happening in cognitive ethology is there's a lot more research on insect emotions and sentience. It's great work, and when you start applying the criteria you might use for mammals, say, or vertebrates, you see that they apply to the insects. But people use different words because some of them, they just can't believe that these insects have emotions or feelings, which, of course, research is showing they do. So I don't know where to go with it. You know, I like to believe that each individual has the right to make one more of themselves. You know, Bill McKibben wrote this book years ago, Maybe One, but I've never had kids. Do I regret it? No, I don't. I love kids, and there was a conscious decision. But I also think that so many people live so far out of the real world of nature. People are so frenetically busy, they just don't stop, if you will, to smell the roses or the lack thereof. And you know, I've always found Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, to be really riveting, not only because it's a beautifully written book, but it was the absence of the bird songs that made people realize about pesticides. So I listen carefully. So I'm a field biologist, and when I lived in the mountains, there were more coyotes than there were when I moved down. Well, there's a reason. We have a very wounded planet. We really, really do. And people will say, Oh, that's so negative. Well, it's a fact. I mean, just look around at the way in which we're intruding into not only the homes of where animals live, but just into forests. We're destroying the planet. And I think most people are well meaning, but there's a lot of well meaning people who just don't understand the enormity of what's going on out there. And they'll go, well, it's beyond my control. Well, yeah, there are a lot of things that are beyond your control, but your own personal choices, you know, the old 'act locally, think globally' type of thing, and getting kids involved. I do a lot of work with Jane Goodall's Roots and Shoots programs, and I'm thrilled that she and I are writing a young kids book. But really getting to the kids, it's their world. Jane so aptly said, you know, we're just stealing their futures when we won't be around. And it's hard to imagine a very productive, pretty planet in the next 50 or 100 years, and it's hard to imagine that ecosystems are going to continue to evolve in positive ways. It's going to take time.
Nandita Bajaj 44:54
And that seems like a great place to also wrap the conversation up. Thank you so much for sharing such valuable insights with us today. Your own career has evolved from being seen as more radical to now being seen as just more normal and obvious, which I'm sure in your own lifetime, seeing that transformation has been validating. But your own work in cognitive ethology has, like greatly deepened our understanding and so many people's understanding of animal emotions and behavior. It's really an inspiration.
Alan Ware 45:32
Yeah, thank you.
Marc Bekoff 45:33
Thank you. You know, sometimes you just sit back and you go, Oh, man, this is not working, but it is. It really is, you know, that radical becomes the norm. I was writing something along those lines a couple of days ago. I mean, it's not quite where I would like it to be, but it's true. It's going to take time. So anyway, well, thank you for having me.
Alan Ware 45:53
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you, and hope that you'll consider a one-time or a recurring donation
Nandita Bajaj 46:24
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
