Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the free range podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the program on law, communities, and the environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Emma Maris, an award winning environmental writer and author of the recent book, “Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Nonhuman World”. Hi, Emma, thanks for joining me today.
Emma Marris 0:32
Great to be here.
Michael Livermore 0:34
So your book “Wild Souls” is really wonderful. It’s packed full of really fascinating, interesting ideas and arguments and you dig into many of the most complicated and difficult questions in applied environmental ethics today. It seems to me that there’s really two fundamental motivating ideas for much of the book. So, first is that the concept of nature–quote, unquote– nature is confused, and often harmful when thinking about conservation or other policies. And then second, that we ought to take seriously the lives of non-human animals, whether domesticated or not. You explore this first idea, right, the problem with our understanding of nature in your earlier book, “Rambunctious Garden”, so maybe we could start there. What’s the issue? How has the concept of nature or how we use it, or how we think about nature, how has that led us astray?
Emma Marris 1:27
So the way we define nature and the way we value nature is, as you say, very complicated. And it’s never been just one thing or just one way. But one really sort of prominent strain, especially in North American nature, ethics, and conservation ethics has been to really focus on nature as a thing apart from humans, and even to define it that way that what is nature, nature is something that’s not influenced by people. And I think that kind of negative framing of nature as that which is not human, has been really damaging, for a number of reasons. The first is that it’s just not really based in reality, it’s not really correct, there isn’t really, a lot of or, in fact, any quote unquote, nature that isn’t, hasn’t been at some point, influenced by humanity, whether that’s, you know, millennia ago, when large mastodons went extinct, possibly with human help, or whether that’s five minutes ago, because of climate change. We live in a world where humans have influenced all systems. But focusing too on the nature that only the nature that hasn’t been, or that doesn’t seem to have been touched by humans has been really problematic when it comes to indigenous rights and indigenous land management. You know, for centuries, colonialist powers just sort of said, indigenous people didn’t change nature, they didn’t influence it at all, they just have lived within it. And that is just really incorrect. And, you know, we’re learning more all the time, when I say we, I mean, sort of really dominant Western culture is learning more all the time about the very complicated and interesting ways in which indigenous people did manage their landscapes. So denying all of that was sort of at the root of this, this kind of colonialist wilderness ethic. And it also helps people deny rights and sovereignty rights to indigenous communities to this day, all around the world. So that’s a real problem there. But I think, you know, ultimately, one of the reasons why I’m so particularly interested in breaking down this nature, human duality is that it if we insist on a nature, without humans, then we are shutting off tons of really interesting and wonderful relationships that we could have with other species, that could be good. You know, there are ways in which humans and nonhumans can interact, which are not polluting or bad or toxic. And I really want people to be able to see those and be able to work towards those. But if your conceptual framework only defines nature as that which is untouched by humans, then there’s no room for that in your sort of toolbox or in your approach to fixing things.
Michael Livermore 4:19
So yeah, so nature comes with all of this, the concept of nature comes with all this unattractive and harmful baggage. But in “Wild Souls”, one of the points you make that is one of the many points you make that struck me as interesting is, you make a distinction between this notion of nature and natural and then the notion of wild and you kind of argue that maybe this concept of wild could be salvaged. So what’s the difference between, you know, the notion of nature which I guess is often defined in this negative way, as you say, just without human influence or natural and the concept of wild that you think, might be able to do some important normative work?
Emma Marris 4:57
Right, so and I’m glad you say “might” because I’m still not completely convinced it can be rehabilitated, I think it’s an open question. But yeah, so if nature or natural is sort of, you know, everything without humans, I think we need to retire that as a category, I just don’t think it’s helpful. But wildness, sometimes used in a pretty overlapping way. But it can also contain ideas about the autonomy of the individual organisms that are not human. Like, we talk about wild animals, we’re talking about individual animals here. And there is a sense in which other organisms can have less or more autonomy from human control. And I think that that autonomy, you know, the autonomy of a fox that wakes up in the morning and decides where to go, and what to do all day, is something of value, because it contributes to the flourishing of that fox. So I think it’s wildness there, if we, if we define it as its individual autonomy, is something that I think we can assign some kind of normative value to, maybe.
Michael Livermore 6:04
Yeah, interesting. Well, I think we can probably return to that, because that’s a super interesting, interesting concept, but just to, you know, maybe just keep laying the groundwork here is part of, you know, the, I mean, the book is a lot focused on questions of wildlife management, but in particular kind of wild animal suffering. And generally how human beings operate with non-domesticated animals. And, and that’s an important emphasis. And it’s different from a lot of the literature historically, in the animal welfare movement, which has been on domesticated animals, factory farms, the problems in factory farms, animal testing. Those are the kinds of canonical emphasis on anti-animal animal welfare, animal rights contributions. So why do you think that is? Why do you think we’ve focused in that way on the kind of domestic sphere, and then set aside these questions, even within the environmental community concerning wild animals, non domesticated animals?
Emma Marris 7:09
Yeah, so I think it makes a lot of sense for, for those who are concerned with the welfare that or the rights of animals to focus on those situations like agriculture, or pets, or other situations where animals are sort of living in day to day, you know, under our control on a day to day basis under human control, because those seem obviously to be the cases where we are already deciding the conditions of their existence. And so, kind of opera, you know, making operational changes to those conditions seems doable and straightforward. So, and there’s also a lot of them, right? Like, if you look at just the pure numbers of animals in the world, domestic animals are– depends on if you’re looking at just vertebrates, or mammals, or what sort of subgroups, but there are, there are very many, many domesticated farm animals in this world. So I think it absolutely makes sense for people to have focused on them. You know, the reason that I focused on wild animals or sort of free ranging animals is because I am essentially an environmental writer, and I came to this question, sort of sideways through questions about conservation and saving species and what we were doing to do that. So, you know, as part of my interest in what counts as nature and what our goals should be and are in conservation, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the question of non native species. The sort of traditional way to look at non native species and conservation has been very negative, that they don’t belong, and they need to go and to really focus on negative impacts. And then there’s this whole rhetorical framing of invasive species, that kind of casts them as malevolent actors. And I’ve been critical of that for a long time, partially because it, you know, it, this whole notion that every species has a place where it belongs and once it leaves that box, it’s no longer good is based on this sort of static understanding of nature, the idea that there’s some kind of primeval state that came before human influence that it’s possible to return to. And I don’t think that’s the case, I think ecosystems are incredibly dynamic with or without human influence. And there is no one eugenic state for every ecosystem that you can go back to. And since there isn’t, the notion that there’s a correct or incorrect place for every species of animal and plant also seems very suspect. But, in covering and reporting about the ways in which conservationists have dealt with non native species, I noticed this real sort of turn towards dealing so it is true that introduced animals in particular, especially on islands can be quite ecologically disruptive and can, in some cases, seem to threaten or actually cause extinctions. Right? I’m much more critical, I think of the claims about non native plants on continents. But that’s a side issue, which I won’t get into here. But these introduced animals on islands can really be threats to rare species. So in order to deal with that, there’s been this emphasis in conservation on killing those introduced species. So I became interested in that. And one thing that I noticed in reporting that is that sometimes the way in which these controls are, you know, these lethal control actions–a lot of euphemisms in this world–were being undertaken, were pretty brutal, you know, being goats being shot from helicopters, poison, that causes a lot of pain and suffering to kill rodents, or cats or foxes, traps, all sorts of methods that honestly, if you were to use them on a pet animal, you might get in legal trouble. And so that is what kind of took me into being interested in looking into the ethical ramifications of this. And I think one of the reasons that we haven’t done as much work on this is that it’s somewhat new. The scale of conservation, killing has definitely been ramping up in recent decades, especially in places like Australia, New Zealand, and smaller islands. And I think that, you know, there are many, many, many ways in which we intervene, where we shape the lives of wild animals. But I think until quite recently, we tended to gloss over those, or to deny them. And we tended to hold on to this fantasy that wild animals were living at a largely independent existence that we were not involved with, and that we could therefore just basically draw a line and say, they’re on one side, we’re on the other side, and our only ethical duty is non interference. You know, let nature take its course. And so I think we just kind of relied on this whole “let nature take its course” rubric for our ethical dealings with quote, unquote, wild animals for generations. And it’s only recently I think that we’ve begun to really realize that, first of all, all of these animals are living in a world that’s been created by human activity. Some of them are suffering in a world that’s been created by human activity. And some of them we’re going out and shooting individually in the head. So we need to start thinking about our ethical interactions with all of these many different wild animals, and we can’t just let them be a separate category.
Michael Livermore 12:46
Yeah, yeah, that makes I mean, right. So that all, you know, is super interesting. I point out this conflict in my environmental law class. I teach, you know, the Endangered Species Act, and so on. And, you know, our law is not about it’s kind of unconcerned at some ways, at least our conservation law with individual animals it’s concerned with populations and conservation, and that term conservation killing, I’m sure, folks in the conservation community aren’t thrilled with it with that, because it’s for the reasons that you say: there are euphemisms. And they’re deployed for reasons because, you know, we want to take the emphasis off of some of the more brutal realities of what we’re engaged in. Now you explore with some folks in the book, kind of an alternative approach, which I think has the label “compassionate conserve conservation”. So what is the idea there? Is that a viable approach? What are the.. what’s attractive? What’s complicated about it?
Emma Marris 13:45
I think it’s an interesting beginning. I don’t think it’s as fully fleshed out as I would like it to be in terms of it being able to give us kind of guidelines for particular tricky situations, but as a sort of an invitation to consider the ethical ramifications of all of this conservation, killing, I think it was, it’s definitely well timed. This is a sort of a movement, a group of people, conservation biologists who were kind of unhappy with the scale of conservation killing, and maybe even more so with the normalization of it, right. But with this sort of way, it was just treated as no big deal inside the field. And the kind of, any kind of welfare ramifications were minimized culturally inside the field. So it sort of began with a set of papers and kind of invitations for people to think about whether they had done their homework in terms of thinking of alternatives to death as a tool. And they have they come up with in some of these early papers, they come up with some sort of intriguing examples, you know, of creative fencing. Instead of killing an elephant that’s coming into a community, why not put up some fencing that integrates bee hives which elephants don’t like. And, and the work that I cover in the book of Ariane Wallach is interesting because what she focuses on is essentially, rather than trying to take Australian ecosystems that have a whole bunch of introduced animals in them back down to their native assemblage through large scale killing, she’s interested in sort of seeing how these new assemblages shake out. And whether the food webs that have developed there that might develop there in the absence of killing could actually be compatible with the long term persistence of some of these small native animals that are sort of notoriously vulnerable, to introduced predators. Where I think where I think it does, it’s maybe somewhat incomplete is that, you know, if there are some cases where it does seem like you do have to choose, between killing and losing a rare species or a rare subspecies, and then in those cases, you know, they don’t say, “well, here’s the magic algorithm that can allow you to determine whether”, and I think that they they differ amongst themselves about whether it’s ever justified to kill, in the name of conservation, I think some of them say that it’s not, and some of them say that it might be if all other alternatives have been ruled out. But actually, you know, now that I’m saying that, I’m presenting this as though this is a weakness in their approach. But if it’s a weakness in their approach, it’s a weakness in my approach too because I don’t come up with any tidy answers in my book, either. I don’t have an algorithm for ethical reasoning that you can just put your conundrum in and get a tidy answer at the other end. I think that when you’re…ultimately I think that when you’re trying to balance animals, the individual, individual animal welfare or rights against the loss of biodiversity, you are not comparing apples to apples, these are different things. And so there’s not really a “mathy” way to figure it out. At some level, it’s going to have to be a value call.
Michael Livermore 17:16
No, I mean, no question about that. And in some ways, I think I think this is one of the hardest questions and environmental ethics and environmental morality and one that, you know, we just haven’t figured out yet. I mean, maybe we’ll never figure it out. But it’s a really tough question. And kind of as you know, part of the reason I think we can be hopeful, in a sense about maybe progress on this, is that these are new questions, right? Humanity has not been grappling with these questions for 1000s of years like we have many other moral questions. The whole notion of, you know, conservation for its own sake, and species preservation and this question of populations versus individual animals, all these are really incredibly new to ethical thinking. So in a sense, I don’t think it’s surprising that we would be kind of groping our way around in the dark to some extent, we just haven’t had time to, to think these issues through for very long.
Emma Marris 18:15
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Thanks for making me feel better about not having definitive answers. You’re right, that, you know, there may have been 1000s of years of discussion about how to be a good person or what we owe each other as humans, but discussions about why it’s bad for a species to go extinct, or, you know, whether a crustacean has a right to life, these questions are far more recent.
Michael Livermore 18:41
Yeah. So, so in the book, you actually said this kind of these general, you know, framing issues and getting us broadly thinking about this conflict between wild animal suffering and autonomy and conservation. And then, you know, one of the useful really interesting things that you do as well is you kind of march us through some specific conflicts, specific issues where these, you know, these questions are salient, relevant. So you talk about wild animals as pets, zoos, hunting, conservation-reliant species and several others. So maybe we could talk about some of those just to get a sense of how you kind of approach these issues. So one of the chapters I thoroughly enjoyed was the chapter on zoos, really interesting set of issues there. And, you know, maybe the we could think of the motivating question is, should zoos exist? Are these good things to have? Or are they not good things to have? You know, how do we balance the various considerations? So what did you end up landing on that question? Should we have zoos or are zoos kind of–all things considered–not a good thing to have in society?
Emma Marris 19:50
So I kind of organized these chapters, in some ways in order from cases where I felt more confidence in my sort of final judgments, and then as the book proceeds, we get into sort of deeper waters where I think these, these sort of ultimate answers are harder to come by. But the zoos are closer to the beginning of the book, because I feel pretty confident that zoos as they currently exist are not a good thing, and should not exist. And this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, by the way, when I started the research, you know, I’m a mother, I have some kids, I’ve taken them to the zoo, and I hadn’t necessarily pre formed an opinion on this. But, you know, zoos have very much positioned themselves as conservation organizations in the last, you know, 50 years. And, and I think, so I sort of took them up on this invitation to consider them as conservation organizations that are making the world better for animals. And I wanted to see if, is the good that they do for wild animals worth whatever suffering their occupants might experience. So there’s sort of two ways that they might help wild animals in general. One is through actual conservation, like running breeding programs for endangered species on site. And the other is by making people care about wild animals, which is one that they lean into pretty heavily, this sort of notion that when you come to the zoo, you become transformed, and you become someone who cares about nature or cares about wild animals. And then on the other side there is, you know, how much do zoo animals suffer for being in the zoo? So I researched all of these questions and, you know, I called the American Zoological Association, and I said, “Give me your best evidence that the zoo, you know that your members, zoos make the world better for wild animals”. And I read every paper they suggested to me on both the sort of direct conservation and the sort of indirect creating conservation focused people. And the evidence was just really weak. You know, there are like 6,000 different species held in ECA zoos. And there’s like 30 different programs to breed and rerelease wild animals, or endangered species. So that means that there’s like 5000+ species that are being kept in zoos and bred in zoos that will never get out. Like, I don’t think we necessarily really think about this that hard when we’re at the zoo. But like, those animals that are in there, most of them that–we’re not doing as much wild captures as we used to–most of the animals you’re seeing were bred by the zoo to live their entire lives in those cages. And then they’re being bred again, and their kids will live their entire lives in those cages and their grandkids will live their entire lives in those cages, like those guys aren’t getting out, right? Those elephants aren’t getting out, those Tigers aren’t getting out, you cannot reintroduce animals like that with big, complicated social lives, and sort of high skills hunting stuff that you have to learn as in childhood, you can’t let them out as adults, and they’ll do fine. They don’t get out. So, and they aren’t happy in the cages. There’s lots of research about the behavioral effects of being in those small enclosures. You know, they pace, they rock, they pull out their own hair. A lot of them are, you know, zoos use quite a bit of drugs, they use sort of antidepressants and other drugs to kind of sedate their animals, and to stop them from doing these repetitive behaviors. Elephants in particular, die young, because they’re cooped up in there, and they’re on hard surfaces, and it’s not a good life for them. And there certainly are some animals that probably are fine in the zoo. Probably enjoy their life just fine. You know, a smaller turtle perhaps or some amphibians, but those are not the animals that people really want to go see. And if you only kept animals in zoos that really thrive in the zoo, I don’t think you would really have any blockbuster animals left, there’s almost a linear relationship between how much they suffer and how much they bring the people in.
Michael Livermore 24:01
And that itself is interesting, actually. I mean, in some ways, why? Why is it because I mean, I don’t know if obviously, but one hopes it’s not because the animals are suffering, right? That’s not the reason and the fact that we use drugs and other tools to try to kind of hide, I think that zoo managers know that people don’t want the people? The audience doesn’t want to think the animals are suffering, right, right. But there’s but there’s a relationship there, right, which is probably that what people are most interested in is the animals who are more complex have, you know, more dynamic, something, something that’s
Emma Marris 24:39
interesting, a couple of things. One is mammals, like mammals and mammals are just more sort of cognitively complex, or it looks more cognitively like us and more interested in moving around and social interactions and the other one is just pure size. You know, people like big animals and big animals don’t have enough room. The bigger the animal, the more squished they are at the zoo and the elephants are the classic example. I wrote a lot about elephants in that zoo chapter and it was heartbreaking stuff.
Michael Livermore 25:06
Yeah, I’m sure just to do Yeah, doing the research. So one of the questions that kind of came up, and this is a little bit more of a meta question, because as you know, you know, there’s just a lot of, you know, if we’re talking about suffering, straightforwardly, that’s bad, right? So there would certainly at the very least need to be counterbalanced with substantial amount of benefit to justify it. So
Emma Marris 25:26
to be utilitarian about it, then yes.
Michael Livermore 25:28
Right. At the very least, if that, then it would be, you know, just there wouldn’t be a moral framework in which it would be okay. Right. So then, but but one of the questions that came up is like, Okay, if we were to say, in principle, the zoos were a lot bigger, they were more, you know, almost like, kind of free range situations, or the very large animals, just like elephants, or lions, or whatever, they just need big ranges, and so on, weren’t there. But there were smaller animals, small animals with smaller ranges. And in a sense, we could abstract away from the suffering components. So they weren’t displaying this repetitive behavior, they were kept on surfaces that were appropriate for their bodies, you know, all that kind of stuff, which is just, it’s worth noting, right, very different from the current situation. So we’re talking about something that is not the existing practice. Although some zoo managers might argue, who knows, but let’s just kind of take this as a hypothetical. One of the points that you argue in the book is that strikes me as quite interesting is even then you would have this autonomy question. So it kind of raises this issue of what should we be concerned with, with respect to these animals? should we be concerned with respect to just you know, their suffering their moment to moment pleasures and pains? Or should we also kind of have this, you know, this different kind of concern, this separate concern for their autonomy, and I take your view in the book to be that we should have that separate concern with autonomy. And that was a kind of a point of conflict with one of the zoo managers that you interviewed was the view, you know, on their part was, that’s an illusion, right. Like, once you’ve accounted for their pains and pleasures, that’s all there is to it. And there really isn’t any additional kind of moral, you know, moral factors in the calculus.
Emma Marris 27:26
Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that talking about whether animals value their freedom or their autonomy separately from their pleasure, pain, differential, you know, I do think we were on somewhat unsteady ground in terms of the science here, you know, we can’t just just ask them, we can’t just interview a fox, or, or squirrel and say, “Do you like being free? Does it bother you?” Like, we can’t say, “Hey, would you prefer to live in the zoo protected from predators and being assured of a meal every single day, but you can never leave again, and your children can never leave? Or you can choose to roam free and decide what to do all day. But you might get eaten by a predator and you might go hungry, right, probably starve to death”. Right? Yeah. Right. We cannot ask them, which is, which is extremely frustrating. And I don’t know if they would all give us the same answer. I think it might be very species specific. And in some it, some of them might even be individually specific. Right? I think that if you asked humans this question, you might get different answers. So, but in the absence of being able to ask them, I sort of tend to think that we, that for at least for the sort of more cognitively similar animals to us like primates, and large mammals, bears, elephants, whales, the ones that have large ranges in their sort of regular day to day lives outside of the zoo, ones that have social complex social lives, I think they probably are not happy if they cannot make their own decisions. And I think one piece of evidence that we do have for this is their attempts to escape, right? So I talk about escapes, relying heavily on this great book called “Fear of the Animal Planet” by Jason Flyball, who, which he just did an amazing job of rounding up dozens and dozens and dozens of accounts of zoo escapes, which was difficult work, because zoos tend to go into sort of PR overdrive and try to squelch these stories from getting out or, and they always say that it’s an unusual event, even though it’s constantly happening. Right.
Michael Livermore 29:29
Right. And we have cages for a reason. Right? Like, yeah, they’re kept in there. Right? Yeah.
Emma Marris 29:35
So you know, so certainly with gorillas, and orangutans, some of them and you know, those species will try to escape. If, and that, to me, seems like pretty obvious in, you know, evidence that they don’t want to be there.
Michael Livermore 29:52
Yeah, I mean, at least prima facie evidence. I mean, I can imagine the counter arguments and, you know, this is just, you know, it’s not like they’ve made a deliberate choice. Right? Where they understand what’s going on and they know what would happen and, you know, that I can imagine the arguments that this is not a reflective decision or that they essentially lack the capacity to even imagine these kinds of different scenarios and what the, what they’re gaining what they’re not. But I, you know, I think that the point is so powerful that from a prima facie perspective, at the very least, they seem to have a revealed preference to want to get out. And that you know, that, at the very least, provides some evidence that would need to be counterbalanced with some other stronger argument. Yeah. Yeah. That’s very interesting. So, again, there’s lots of different possible directions, we could kind of go from here. But I think, you know, you have another chapter, where you, I think, arrive at a different kind of response in a way that I think is interesting and curious to hear more about. So this is the chapter on hunting, right. So on the one hand, we have zoos, keeping animals for display, they, you know, they make arguments about the value for conservation that they undergo, but there’s obviously animal suffering and potentially autonomy interests on the other side. And then, you know, there’s almost a similar, there’s almost a similar kind of dynamic with respect to hunting where folks who are positively disposed to hunting as a practice, they frequently make conservation related arguments. This is good for conservation, it raises money, it raises awareness, it keeps people engaged with nature, and so on. And, you know, in fairness, the traditionally, the environmental movement, certainly in this earlier years included a big contention of the folks who, you know, were hunters and fishers, and the like, yeah, that’s become more polarized over time, but certainly in the early days, that was that was the case. And, and then on the other side, you obviously are, you know, shooting an animal and killing it. And, in some sense, you know, killing something seems like a very, I mean, that’s a canonical example of violating someone’s interest, right? For certainly in the human context, there’s nothing worse you could do to somebody than kill them. And so you might imagine that you kind of end up in a similar place. You think zoos are bad for the reasons that you articulated in the book, and just now, but hunting, you come up with a, I take you to be in a different position. So what are the different dynamics that you see in these different contexts? And yeah, what, where do you come down on questions related to hunting?
Emma Marris 32:38
Well, I’d take a step back and say that, you know, I think that in both of these categories in sort of the captivity, for display category are the captivity, you know, category and the hunting category, that there are, that it’s going to be very case by case in both of these categories, right? So to talk to, to move back to zoos for a moment, you know, I think that that I, at the end of that chapter, I sort of sketch out ways in which zoos could transform into something that would be much less ethically problematic. And principally, just by the simple move of giving up the breeding, which would sort of immediately overnight, transform them into something much more like refuges, where animals just sort of live out–animals that cannot be re released into the wild live out the rest of their lives in ease and comfort. And, you know, I kind of can imagine a world where zoos only breed animals that they think they can let out someday, so only sort of conservation relevant breeding programs. And then other than that, they’re essentially refuges. And then here, a lot of the ethical problems I have with zoos sort of evaporate. And yet, you still might have something that from the point of view of your five year old, who you’ve taken out on a day, is somewhat similar, you know, they get to see animals, they get to interact with other species, they get to have a hotdog or vegan hot dog, whatever. And, and so, so there’s, so it’s not all or nothing, right? Like there are shades, there’s ethical shades within the category of zoos. And I think this is even more so the case within the category of hunting, there’s no one, you know, answer for is hunting, okay, because there’s so many different types of hunting, who is doing the hunting? What are they hunting? Are they hunting to feed themselves? Are they going to eat it? Are they not going to eat it? Are they eating it because they don’t have alternative ways to get protein? Or are there lots of ways for them to get protein and in fact, it’s more expensive and difficult for them to hunt than it is to go to the grocery store? Do, you know, do they have some kind of spiritual practice that goes along with the hunting? Or do they themselves see it as something where they are winning over the other species? And, are they hunting a rare animal or common animal? Are they hunting a, an animal that has a lot of capacity for pleasure and pain or an animal that has less capacity for pleasure or pain? Are they doing a sort of a beautifully, clean and crisp shot to the heart or head that instantly fills the animal so it barely registers any pain? Or is it a horrible messy affair where they’re tracking it through the woods for hours, while it slowly bleeds to death? So there are so many different factors to consider when it comes to hunting. But I don’t think that all hunting is wrong.
Michael Livermore 35:24
It is possible for there to be ethical hunting. Yeah,
Emma Marris 35:26
that’s right. And I mean, and you know, it’s interesting, you said that, you know, from in the human context, the sort of worst thing you could do to someone who’s killed them. But like, actually, I think some people would say that holding someone captive for their entire lives might be worse than killing them. You know, so. And even Peter Singer himself in his original book, “Animal Liberation” was not as worried about killing animals as about them suffering, because from his perspective, animals that couldn’t make complicated future plans, if you killed them instantly and painlessly, and you weren’t cheating them out of you know that one last trip to Europe that they wanted to make after they retired, that was actually a lot less ethically troublesome than causing them ongoing pain as you kept them in captivity for agricultural purposes. So I think there’s a lot to consider here. I also, you know, there’s a lot of sort of political and social elements, to people judging each other’s hunting. Different communities. And there are a lot of, there are a lot of old ancient practices of hunting, that have an interesting emphasis on reciprocity between the parties. Now whether you can, whether you believe that there’s true reciprocity or not between a hunter and a prey, you know, an animal that they hunt that they feel that in some sense has either given them permission, or that some sort of spiritual realm has given them permission to take, you know, that’s going to depend on your own sort of spiritual slash religious outlook. But certainly from the point of view of some of those hunters, there is an ethical exchange going on that this is happening within an ethical system.
Michael Livermore 37:20
Yes, so this is interesting, I find this interesting, in particular. So this was a part of the book that I–and I did this is, something over the years, I grew up in a hunting community, I grew up in upstate New York, all my family members, my male family members, actually, although I think that’s changed somewhat, hunted. The attitude of the hunter towards the, towards the prey, I think, is a very interesting question and like the moral significance of that. So I can imagine kind of two arguments. So one is very clearly about the animal suffering, whether it’s common or not, and the like, right? So, and there’s a lot of…the hunters I grew up with, and the folks that I know, take all of that very seriously, right? You know, having the skills necessary to, you know, to aim accurately and kill the thing that you’re trying to kill quickly. Right? And, you know, hunting within the rules, right? Hunting, you know, you get your permits, you pay your fees, and all of that, right?
Emma Marris 38:20
The rules of fair chase, and all that kind of… exactly,
Michael Livermore 38:23
all these kind of ethical guidelines. And then, and so then we can kind of separate that out. I think this is the hypo in some ways, right? To separate out that person who has an internal attitude of like, disregard, not, like ethical disregard, like they’ll follow the rules, like, they recognize that these are the rules, and they’re kind of like a rule abiding, law abiding person, but they recognize these rules like visa vie human society, let’s just say, right? These are the rules of their society, and they’re gonna follow them because that’s the deal that one lives in, in society. And then there’s another person who has a different ethical system where it’s more reciprocal with the broader world, right? Like, I’m gonna die someday, and something’s going to eat me. So this is okay. It’s all the big circle of life kind of thing. And, and maybe there’s some implicit permission, although I think that’s very weird. I mean, I will admit, I think that that’s very tricky. That can be very tricky, because implicit permission being a tricky thing, to, to deal with. I mean, yeah, right. Human beings visa vie each other, if I run around thinking, Oh, well, you know, people have implicitly given me the right to do this or that to them. You know, we wouldn’t accept that. Right? So. So yeah, so I wonder, yeah, if we could just unpack this a little bit. So we’ve had the two different folks, we have the one who’s really, doesn’t feel a lot of ethical obligations or reciprocity with the wild animals but still follows all the rules because he or she feels bound to do so. And then the person who has this different ethical framework of implicit permission in the circle of life. Do you see those as, and I guess the–sorry, this is a long lead up–but I guess what strikes me as the most kind of curious element of this is the animal is not going to know the difference between these two people. And so why is it important? If it’s important, it strikes–I think that’s the question we need to answer is, why does it matter if it’s the animal who’s the kind of the, who we’re worried about here, in some sense, is never going to perceive this difference?
Emma Marris 40:24
Well, I mean, it depends on what kind of ethical framework you subscribe to. But I think that there’s certainly parallels in our human interactions with one another. I mean, if I am just walking down the street, and all of a sudden, I feel somebody push me and I fall down off a bridge and die, whether the person accidentally pushed me or pushed me with malice aforethought is not germane to the fact that I am dead. But as a society, we judge that person very differently, whether, you know, based on whether it was intentional or unintentional, whether they, even whether they did it in the heat of the moment, or whether they planned it five days in advance where we judge them more harshly for the latter. So we do take intentions into account when judging the sort of “blameworthiness” or sort of the responsibility even for certain actions. So I think that there’s precedent for that idea.
Michael Livermore 41:15
Yes. Yes, I mean, there’s precedent for taking into account…so of course, I’m at a law school. So I want to be a pain about all this stuff, is, so mens rea, right? Intentionality in the context of crimes is, in some sense is a little peculiar because it doesn’t, as you know, it’s like if you’re, you’re dead either way, what do you care, right? Right. But what we’re, what we normally, when we’re talking about there is we’re talking about the intentionality of the act, but whether you intend to do it or not. Right. So like, if you hit someone with your car while you’re driving, and it’s not your fault at all, let’s say there’s a freak tornado that deposits a person in front of your car, right? While you’re driving. That’s not intentional. It’s not, you’re not even being negligent, so we just kind of let you off the hook for that. And then if you’re driving negligently, we hold you somewhat more responsible. But these are grades of like, kind of intentionality. And in the hunting hypo that I’m setting up, they’re both fully intentional acts. So they’re both at that level, it’s just the, in some sense that what’s different is the attitude of the hunter like, so like, so murdering, so let’s imagine you kill someone fully intentionally. All right? Yeah, let’s say a person. But you do it under, you know, like, a religious view that it’s appropriate to do that in that situation. You’re like, it’s like a human sacrifice or something. And then, as opposed to someone who does it because they don’t like their face. Right. And, you know, the law would treat those people exactly the same.
Emma Marris 42:50
Yeah, I mean, well, you might, if you’re going to set up a hypothetical, I suppose one that might be germane would be a euthanasia case where somebody was…thought they had the person’s permission to kill them, thought in fact that the person was all for it, and had asked them, but it was a miscommunication and in fact, that person did not agree to be euthanized. So if you’re working in a spiritual framework, where you feel that the prey has, or the preys, kind of spiritual owner or counterpart has given you permission, and if you yourself as somebody in a Western framework, who doesn’t buy into that, sees that as a miscommunication or misunderstanding, then I still think that there’s some different level. But
Michael Livermore 43:33
But yeah, it’s interesting. It’s a tough decision, this is tough stuff to think through. Leaving
Emma Marris 43:36
all of that aside too, I mean, I think one reason that–I was really influenced by the work of Val Plumwood here who was an Australian philosopher who, who talked a lot about what you just called the sort of “circle of life” rather than eating and being eaten stuff. Right. And so she pushed back against what she sort of called, like, the “vegan case” for sort of never, for being very purist and never hurting or eating animals. And there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of attempt to, you know, fully do no harm to any sentient creature is doomed and it’s an end kind of a denial of our ecological existence. So, for example, if you are fully vegan, you’re still eating food that was grown on land that was cleared for agricultural purposes and all of the plants and animals that lived there before it was developed were displaced. And on an ongoing basis, presumably the, any kind of pests, what we call pests, any animals that would eat that food–mice, birds, those are all have to be either scared off or killed in order for the green and other produce to be grown. You know, there’s certainly rodent control and food store houses and the grocery stores, they’re killing mice and rats that might want to eat this non animal food. So all along the production of food involves, you can’t, you cannot, you cannot exist without eating and you cannot eat without eating life, either that has been grown on land that somebody else could have lived on, or that could have fed something else. Somebody gets the sunlight, the energy from the sunlight that comes to the ground. And if it’s and and you cannot exist without being an ecological being. Without influencing other parts of the food web. And I think that the, you know, certainly I’ve gotten no truck with people who are vegans or who seek to do as little harm as possible in their ecological existence. But the idea that you can sort of fully opt out, I think, is a little bit of a fantasy.
Michael Livermore 45:43
Yeah, well, certainly it is. And I wonder if, you know, what the–just kind of channeling my vegan friends–what their response would be. I think it’d be something along the lines that you said is that, oh of course, that’s true. But the goal is just to minimize, right? Is, and so, so then, so what’s the takeaway then, from that? So there’s the fantasy element, which we can say, you know, sensibly, one shouldn’t hold on to a stew of fiction that you could somehow live abstracted. Npw, does that take us all the way to…where does that buy us other than just a recognition of the fact that we live in the world and that we will cause some suffering? And then the vegan would come back and say, “yeah, yeah”. So there you–you should do as little as possible. And then I think the argument though isn’t, it’s something more than that. It’s something that okay, once you recognize this role that you play, and this kind of this, there’s some reciprocal element to it, that you’re not under a strict obligation to minimize suffering, necessarily, that you can engage in activities like hunting that aren’t, you know, again, strictly suffering, minimizing. Yeah,
Emma Marris 46:53
I mean, now we sort of, we’ve, we’ve gotten to kind of where I end up near the end of the book, which is, which is grappling with this difficult terrain. Which is that, this question of why is it okay for us to eat other creatures? Or, are we okay with the fact that someday other creatures will eat us? How do we, how do we cope with the fact that we are ecological beings? This takes us back to a question that shows up at the beginning of the book which is, why do we care about biodiversity in the first place? Why do we care about nature, whatever we, you know, quote, unquote, nature? If, especially if we give up on this notion that nature is the stuff, is anything that humans don’t touch, that it’s the absence of humanity? Why do we care about other species and, and these ecosystems, and it comes down to sort of the same thing, which is the way that sort of energy and matter flow through these systems, the way that they’re all interrelated. The way that these food webs are all connected from the sunlight, to the plants, to the animals, to the parasites, to the maggots that eat you after you die, and the fungus that grows in the dirt after the maggots have died, it’s all something, it adds up to something that we value a lot, that many of us value very, very deeply. And it almost, let’s be honest here, in almost a religious way. But we find it very difficult to talk about exactly what it is that we’re valuing here, how to measure it, how to, how to put our fingers on it. But for me, recognizing that there is something good or valuable in that flow of energy, means that being part of that flow of energy isn’t necessarily always about ourselves, if that makes sense. But I think that this is, we get on thin ice here, I get out on…this is the part of the book that is harder for me to talk about. Because it isn’t, it isn’t something you can talk about very easily within the sort of Western scientific frameworks that I am more used to.
Michael Livermore 48:54
Yeah. Also, I think, it’s an earlier point, we were talking through this, this is just new stuff. This is just new ways of, of talking maybe within the Western tradition, but I’d offer that, you know, these questions, just given humanity’s scope of influence and powers and so on, these are just these are just different than the tasks…than the moral tasks that we faced in the in the past, so it’s not that difficult, or that surprising that we’d have a hard time talking about it. One of the things I think–this is related to–this is kind of fun. You know, I think this is the fun stuff, in some ways. The thinnest ice is always the funnest part is you know, if we look to that flow of energy and all that kind of stuff, the circle of life, the putting aside the notion of nature, right, which is the the non human, you know, the idea that there’s this cordoned off non human thing, but rather just broadly, the life that humans are entangled with, but that has existed far before, long before humans were around and will likely exist long after humans and certainly exists on the planet outside of the sphere of directly, you know, human beings themselves. There’s lots of other life forms. You know, if that’s something we value, suffering is a huge part of that. Right? Right. So suffering has always been part of life. Life, you know, since life hasn’t been around, certainly, since conscious–subjective experience of any kind has been around, there’s been pain. Pain just exists alongside pleasure. And so that’s kind of on the one hand, on the other hand, we think of suffering as the most, you know, within human morality anyway, as the most basic negative thing, we’re going to say, what are the what are the atoms of moral reasoning? You know, one argument might be well, you know, at least you know, pain and pleasure is, even within a rights framework, we care about suffering, it’s very peculiar to say “I’m indifferent to other people’s suffering, but yet I’m very moral”, it would be seems like a contradiction. So. So how do we–I mean, of course, how do we even–to ask the question, “how you reconcile that” is very ridiculous. But how do we even start to think about reconciling these two seemingly very contradictory things to value? One is life writ large, and the other hand is to say, oh, suffering is bad? How do we square that? Those two principles with each other?
Emma Marris 51:21
Yeah. So you know, earlier you asked, Well, why don’t why haven’t we asked all these questions about wild animals? And there are ethics there? And I think that another reason is that, it leads us to this question, and it’s a scary question, and we don’t want to think about it. So, if you start thinking about the sort of whole question of “wild animal suffering”, which is the phrase that you tend to see people use, it opens up this exact conundrum, which is, yes, the world is filled with suffering. And if you were to try to reduce or eliminate the suffering in the nonhuman world, that would mean destroying all ecosystems. Because ecosystems are built on food chains, food webs, and food webs involve one organism eating another organism. And in a lot of cases, arguably, even in the cases of plants, depending on how you define suffering, that involves suffering. So, you know, the first time that you realize this is, I think it’s a memorable moment, or at least it was for me, I was sort of reading along about this sort of, I remember this very clearly, I was reading along some kind of internet philosopher proposing that all, you know, all predators, be given contraceptives so that no more predators could ever exist so that we would no longer have any prey animals be harmed by lions and tigers and wolves. And, you know, you’re–and my response was, of course, like, well, that’s absurd. I mean, that would that would get rid of the thing that I’ve spent my life caring about, which is, which is sort of, you know, ecosystems and nature and, and others and the autonomy of all of these other ways of being a living creature, and, and then you just suddenly realize that, that all of these ecosystems are just drenched in blood. And you’re just standing on this huge pile of skulls going back thousands and millions of years. And it’s just absolutely overwhelming. How could we love this thing that is woven out of suffering and pain and death? So, yes, I think figuring out how to reconcile this is probably one of the biggest questions that–in my life, and I think it’s an important one for all of us to consider. It’s ironic that so many people that identify as nature lovers also identify as animal lovers. And yet, at some fundamental level, the two things are at odds. So, again, I find a lot of you know, Val Plumwood doesn’t offer final answers. But I do think that there are some glimmerings in her writings that help me with the idea, and I think that one of the things that she says–and I don’t have a quote in front of me, so this is a total paraphrase here–but basically, that we have to accept the internal paradox and not try to resolve it. That the resolution of this is not ultimately possible, but that there are ways of existing while holding to a reconcilable value in your heart at the same time, and that ultimately, that is the only way to go forward. I give myself vertigo writing this book. By the end of it I thought holy crap, like you know, and the other, the other real moment for me was watching my kids eat dinner one night and realizing how deeply satisfying I found it to watch them eat. And that, watching that, my beloved children eat, meant the end of all those other organisms, you know, I forget what they were eating. I don’t know if it was scrambled eggs, I don’t know if it was chicken, you know, they’re not vegetarian. I don’t know what they’re eating, but I was into it because as somebody who loves them, I want all of the photons in the world to go into their mouths, you know, I want all the energy to go to them, but hoarding all the energy in the, the individuals that we love is not compatible with it flowing around in this crazy network and keeping everything alive and vibrant and diverse. So yeah, it’s, it’s very difficult to wrap your brain around.
Michael Livermore 55:35
Yeah, it really is. I mean, these are, these, of course, really fascinating, fascinating questions. I, I don’t want to end us on a sour note. But Schopenhauer has, you know, basically talks about this, right? So he says, “If you want to know whether the world is good or bad, just think about predator and prey and the pleasure of the predator and the pain of the prey”. But on the other hand, right, you could take that dim view of the world, and that–but then that forces you into this, this take that is just very non life affirming, right? It’s very, it seems to undermine the whole enterprise of morality to then just say that the world is bad. That does seem like a very strange place to end up. But if you, but otherwise, you are stuck with seemingly these two contradictory ideas.
Emma Marris 56:22
Yeah, I mean, you can choose to build like a completely internally consistent position, which ends up with the world being–and it is very much the case that evolution is a completely amoral process. It was not designed to create goodness, by anyone or anything, right. It’s just, it just happened. So, but, I don’t think that it’s really possible psychologically for anyone to live on planet Earth if they really think that it’s wrong, you know, that it’s just bad to the core and our–our sort of individual experiences of being in the nonhuman world or maybe sometimes in the human world and having experiences of sort of awe and joy and beauty and reverence. These are all to me hints that there is something good out there.
Michael Livermore 57:11
Yeah. Well, I, you–these are all super fascinating issues. It’s been a really fun conversation. It’s a wonderful book. I appreciate all the work and the craft that went into that, encourage folks to read it. And it’s been wonderful chatting with you. Um, I appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, thank you so much. And listeners. If you enjoy this episode, let us know. You can give us a like a rating, subscribe to the podcast and follow us on social media. It’d be great to hear from you. Till next time.
Free Range Podcast 