Animal Ethics Interview

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Hi and welcome.

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Today, great icon talks with animal ethics dot org. And if you’re new here and to this podcast, the purpose and why we do this is to explain what great organizations do in a way that is easy to understand. And today I am here with Animal Ethics dot org, a organization that was formed to provide information and promote promote discussion and debate about issues in animal ethics and to provide resources for animal advocates. And I am here today with Cindy Rooke. Cindy. How are you today?

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Very well, thank you.

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All right. So.

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How would you explain what your organization do to someone that might not be familiar with your costs and the challenges that you’re facing?

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Ok. Animal Ethics is a non-profit organization whose aim is to achieve a better world for all sentient beings. All right. That’s it in a nutshell. I can talk about a little bit a bit about what makes us different. And that’s our work on speciesism and the plight of wild animals.

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And by speciesism, you mean that we perceive our race to be more superior to other species.

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Right. Right. Speciesism is is, as I say, one of the biggest challenges we face when it comes to helping non-human animals and its arbitrary discrimination against animals who belong to a particular species.

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What do you think they would do that? Is it because we can see ourselves in a bird or a bug, or where do you think species and commerce comes from?

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Let’s dive right into philosophy, right.

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And you know, well, I think it’s possibly because humans tend to think of themselves first as the most important beings in the in the universe. Mm hmm. Essentially.

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And do you want to change that to a world where every animal is equally valued? What is your end goal for your organization?

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We want we want to change the world so that every sentient beings we is given moral consideration and moral consideration is just basically taking someone’s interest into account. When we when we give moral consideration, what we’re doing is is considering how they’ll be affected by our decisions, our emissions, even our our attitudes and our actions. So we want equal consideration of interests.

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All right. And what is your approach for doing this? Is it mostly research or providing information to other people that do it? What is your approach?

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We do a lot of research and we promote research. But we also do outreach. We we do outreach to academia. We do outreach to the general public. We have various ways of doing that. Giving talks. We have a Web site that’s has text in eight languages. We’re also very active on social media.

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Ok. And.

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I guess there must be some kind of frustration for you wishing that everybody was interested or got access to the information about how we can think morally around how we take care of animals. What are the challenges you’re facing to get this important information out into the world?

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Well, seriously, I think I speciesism is the biggest challenge that we face re what we do is we we actually try to change people’s attitudes were different from other organizations in that way because we we don’t work to change behaviors, we work to change attitudes.

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And that’s really the only way that we can that we believe that we can make a better world for animals in the long run.

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So what is the difference between change in someone’s attitude toward change and their behavior? Is the behavior a consequence of a change in attitude?

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I think you could say that, yes, a lot of other organizations ask you to make changes in your behaviors, but they don’t talk about speciesism.

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They don’t talk about discrimination against non, you know, non-human animals. And so in order for us to reach people where we want to. Which is really, you know, as it concerns animals in the wild, we have to change attitudes. There are people who who whose behaviors may have changed in that they don’t exploit animals, but they they have not reached the point where they consider animals in the wild as an important or is an important case an important issue to to be concerned about.

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So what do you think the average maybe European or American citizen is not a very. When it comes to animal rights and species, some that you would really like for them to understand?

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I think natural harms, the natural harms are. Is that is the thing that we that we have the hardest time explaining to people, for instance, in the past when I’ve been tabling or leafleting. That’s particularly troubling because you you had an opportunity to speak to people. I say we saw what tabling means forward at festivals or markets

or even street activism. Yeah. Essentially, you’re standing behind a table or sitting behind a table with your leaflets and your factsheets. People come up to you and say, I don’t know who you are. I’ve never heard of you. What do you do? So when we tell them, you know, we’re an international anti species list organization and we have a particular niche which is wild animal suffering. They say, oh, you mean like like hunting or like, you know, like climate change, like pollution?

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Mm hmm. And they may even be, you know, may even be vegans.

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And you say, no, we are more mostly interested in natural harms. And they they really don’t understand what that is so difficult.

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How would you define natural home? Because I would my brain would go to wildlife for climate change as well. Are we talking like worms or the whole biome?

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Yeah, we will be talking about hunger and thirst and disease and parasitism injuries, weather, natural disasters. It’s true that many of these things that we’re talking about, particularly, I think natural disasters going forward, they’re partly anthropogenic and partly natural harms caused by we’re in a position where we have to deal with those things as well.

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Ok, so.

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Your research then you’re trying to figure out and so provide information on what what is happening to nature. When we humans run our societies the way that we do? Partially, yes. Mistrust challenge to reach out with a message, because I can imagine that if you’re leafletting to someone that they would feel a bit out of control in this, do you have a sense that this is a problem that is too big to tackle?

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I think people believe it’s it’s it’s too big of a problem to tackle. Many people will say it’s nature. We need to leave it alone. Or we can’t control nature. The fact is, though, intervening in nature for decades. Not only have we been intervening in negative ways against animals, but we’ve also been intervening in ways that help animals, they may they may be interventions that initially were were designed to help humans or or help domesticated animals, but they also help wild animals.

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So if.

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What would you say would be a very good thing that could happen moving forward? Well, would you like to change the way they are flipped right now?

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Would you repeat the last part of that? Yes.

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So do you have an example of something really good that could happen for your organizations in the way that we treat animals?

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Well, we need to well, where we are actually a developing field of study called wellfor biology and that deals with the the welfare of animals in their environment. And that’s where we work with academics. Some of those academics are already and other biologists, they work in natural science sciences. Sometimes they’re environmentalists even. But that’s the thing that we’re working towards. We’re working towards being able to work. Being able to promote research in institutional settings. Because if we’re able to do that, then we’ll reach more people. We can do more research. So that’s something that we want to happen very badly.

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And so get an image in my head, the kind of animals you want to give support to. Is it everything from a lion to a bug? Or do you have a specific focus?

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No. I mean, we’re an anti species, this organization. So we’re not going to discriminate against against any species of animal. But the truth is, most of the animals and in the wild are very small animals.

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Most animals get to be bugs and stuff. So I was left riding, sneezing.

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Should I get it out? Should I keep it in?

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Oh, you’re absolutely right. Most of the animals in the wild are very small. I mean, they’re invertebrates. You know.

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There are also animals that that reproduce by laying huge clutches of eggs. So those are the animals that make up that fat proportion of animals where we say most of the suffering in the world is happening in the wild.

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I was just gonna ask, which spaces do you see are the ones that are suffering the most?

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The way the planet Kretzmann The way the climate looks right now, that the way the world looks, the way the world is right now. Oh, I don’t know. That’s very hard.

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It depends on. Well, that depends on a lot of things. If you look at I mean, invertebrates, certainly. Because if you look at vertebrates, it would be fishes.

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Because they’re not. And that’s partly because of because of human exploitation of fishes.

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And to clarify that as a species that has a spine. Bergens. Yes. Right. So with the species that have a spine, you think fishes are. Suffering the most. So what would you say to someone they think, well, as a fish can’t really feel pain or that they have no empathy towards a fish.

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Well, I think I would point them in the direction of some science that would that would show that actually they you know, they they are sentiment. There’s relatively new science. You know, just in the last decade, there’s been a lot of new science about fishes particularly. It is it is true that many people don’t don’t have the empathy with fishes because they just because of the way they look.

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That’s kind of a discrimination in itself.

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How do you think humans are going to look back at this era in history in 200 years time? Do you think it’s going to be similar to the way we look at slavery now or what do you think?

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That’s my hope. That would absolutely be my hope because speciesism is, you know, is analogous to racism and sexism. You know, and that’s one of the ways that we presented a lot of the time. And that helps people to understand what speciesism is. It’s just as a relevant species is just as irrelevant as, you know, skin color or or sex is.

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So that would be my hope.

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That would be my hope, too, to the recent my personal heart question is in animal welfare is that I would like to spend my time reduced as much suffering as possible. If animals can suffer, yes, a tiny percentage of what human does. I think it’s well worth spending a lot of time and effort in trying to improving their conditions. So could you give an example of a project that you had been running previously that you’re especially proud of?

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Well, we have a we have a project right now that’s that we’re in the final stages of that we’re really proud of. And that’s an online course for wild animal suffering advocacy.

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You know, so.

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Ok. So if somebody wants to become an advocate and speak on behalf of animals rights, then this course is for them to educate on how they can spread their message in a way that I guess is science based. To have an opportunity to influence.

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Right. Absolutely. It is. It is a it’s a. The course is basically begins with our updating our all of our wild animal suffering texts on our Web site.

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That’s like twenty nine texts. So they’re already on the website under the Wild Animal Suffering section. All new all new videos. Really extraordinarily good text. I’m so proud of those. And then we have video course that’s attached to that. Twenty eight videos. And there the first section is basically what wild animal suffering is. We talk about different ways animals suffer in the wild. There’s twelve videos there. And then we have an ethics section and then we have how to promote academic work and to help wild animals. That would be the last section that’s basically talking about what welfare biology, as I mentioned earlier.

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Wow. Super interesting. And I really appreciate that. It’s both text and videos, depending on what kind of learning or learner someone might be.

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Exactly. It’s also audio. All of the texts that I mentioned that have been updated on on the video would also be available in all in audio, in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

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Wow. All right.

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So.

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Ok. Someone imagine that someone is listening to this conversation. They say, of course. I love animals first. I wanted to help elephants. Then it was farm animals. But now I’m starting to lean towards maybe animal wild life are the animals that are suffering the most. They feel excited to help. They want to spread this message. What can someone do to help out with your calls?

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Well, that depends. We have a you have kind of a five step, you know, thing. It’s kind of this quick thing. What do we do? I want to help wild animals. What do I do? The first thing we want to do is promote the idea that we can help animals in the wild, because that’s a challenge for us. An animal ethics has been doing this for several years. So that’s a challenge. We want to challenge speciesism. We you know, we would want anyone to learn about what speciesism is, really take it into heart and challenge it at every opportunity. We want to promote research. You know, in the ways that that non-humans can be held to nature, we also want to just, you know, clearly distinguish the difference between anti speciesism and environmentalism, because there’s some overlap there.

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And then there’s some places where they you know, they they diverge. The other thing we really need to do and we do find this is a big challenge. And I speak to a lot of vegans, honestly, and I find this a challenge even with them is that we need to stop contributing to the idea that nature is a great place for animals. That’s, you know, all of those. All of those five things are crucial. But we we we definitely need to get across that. You know, we can we can appreciate the beauty of nature, but we need to remember that there there’s a lot of suffering there.

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I haven’t thought about it that way. I think.

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A assumption I always made is that nature is natural and that the suffering there is Kanna.

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It should be that way somehow. I never thought of it in another way.

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Cindy, I need to go reflect on that statement. I would love to end it there. And if you’re listening. Is the suffering that is happening in nature.

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Is that natural? I would reflect on that.

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Thank you so much for being part of our podcast. Highly appreciate your time and for how clearly you explain these topics that I presume can be quite tricky to communicate. So thank you very much.

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Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

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Hmm. Okay. Bye bye.