(piano notes) - [Female Voiceover] Thank you for joining us for Animals and Us with Michelle Nijhuis and Peter Singer, moderated by Hannah Weinberger.

Before we begin, thank to our science and the environment track sponsor, UBS.

We'd also like to thank our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

- Hello and welcome back to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Hannah Weinberger, Crosscut science and environment staff reporter and I'm excited you're joining us for the session Animals and Us.

I'm grateful to be joined today by author Peter Singer whose books and essays about animal welfare including the recently published reconception of the Roman novel The Golden Ass have influenced decades of thought and action on animal treatment and journalist Michelle Nijhuis, project editor for The Atlantic and author of the new book Beloved Beasts, a sweeping review of the conservation movement and the people who've guided its priorities.

Today, we're digging into the ways we relate to, use, and protect animals in a climate changing world.

Our lifestyles' impacts on other living creatures have never been so substantial from the ways we develop and damage animal habitats.

Today's species extinction rates, some estimates show, could be a thousand times greater than the baseline rate, with many times more animal populations also suffering and we're realizing just how vulnerable people are to the same threats animals face.

So today, we're going to chat about the changing nature of our relationships with other living things and how we can improve those relationships.

Thank you so much, Peter and Michelle, for being here.

- My pleasure to be here.

- Let's dive right in.

Humans have had various types of relationships with animals for millennia, as companions, as food, as enemies.

You've both done a lot of work tracing the evolution of those relationships.

Is welfare something that we've always considered when we think about animals' experiences of the world or with us?

Like is this a new concept and if not, how has it evolved?

You know, Peter, you actually recently put out a book that really touched on this.

- I certainly did, yes.

I brought out a new edition of The Golden Ass by Apuleius.

This is a novel that was written in the second century of our era so it's 1,800 years old and what first commended to me and is remarkable about it I think is that it's a story about a man who dabbles in magic and things go a bit wrong and he gets turned into a donkey.

And then he lives as a donkey for quite some time and goes through many of the experiences that donkeys went through in the Roman times so he was forced to carry heavy loads up steep hills, he was beaten with sticks if he didn't.

Sometimes sadistic boys played tricks on him and particularly interesting is an episode where he was sold to a miller and had to all day long walk in circles, turning the millstone.

Effectively, he was a slave and there were human slaves there who were beating him if he didn't turn the millstone.

So we get this picture of the donkey's life in Roman times and it is an empathetic picture.

We imagine, we describe what it's like for the donkey and I found it remarkable for that reason but it is unusual, I have to say.

I'm not saying that typically Romans did have this concern for the welfare of animals.

Obviously, we know about the Roman games and the Colosseum.

We know that Christians were thrown to the lions but also they scoured the Roman Empire for exotic beasts and brought them in to fight and kill each other.

This is an unusual work in that sense.

There were some other writers, not unique, but it's unusual for the empathy that it has with animals and it does raise that question.

Well you know, how are we compared to the Romans or compared to the life of the donkey?

Have we improved?

Have we made progress?

And if so, in what ways?

- You know Michelle, this is something that you have looked into, too, in terms of how people driving the conservation movement have felt about animals and the degree to which that influenced their activities.

- Yes and I was beginning to write that history, I revisited Aesop's Fables who was writing several centuries before Apuleius but there are a lot of commonalities I think in their work, if not in structure, certainly in theme and in tone.

There's a similar kind of racy humor, there's a similar sometimes shocking violence but also a sense of empathy between humans and animals.

Often, the animals are stand-ins for humans but they're also often the animals or at least partly animals and we get a sense from Aesop's stories that just of the many different roles that individual animals and types of animals played in human lives all those many centuries ago and perhaps we have made progress in some ways but that complexity certainly remains.

- Absolutely.

You know, when it comes to that complexity, what do you think about, Peter?

- So as I've said, I'm particularly interested in the episode where the donkey is a slave turning the millstone because in a sense, the miller was not cruel.

The miller was using the most efficient ways of grinding the corn to produce flour but obviously completely neglecting the interest of the donkey.

The donkey was just a tool and had it not been for chance episodes for the donkey to get away, the donkey wouldn't have lasted very long, would have been worked to death.

Now something similar I think happens today in our factory farms.

The hens in the factory farms are basically tools for producing eggs.

The cows are tools for producing milk and the other animals converting low priced grain into high priced flesh.

So I think there's the same attitude going on here.

It's not that people are necessarily deliberately cruel to these animals, although of course, undercover videos do show that sometimes the farm workers who have a pretty tough life anyway do take out their frustrations on the animals.

But just the system itself is basically geared for efficiency, for producing a product that can compete in the marketplace where there aren't too many rules about how you have to treat the animals and the result is a terribly life for the animals and because today that's on a vastly greater scale than the donkeys turning millstones and other kinds of industrial cruelty in the Roman era, I think it's hard to say that we've made progress.

There are certainly far more animals suffering in the world today than there were in Roman times.

- Right, and you know since those times, we've learned a lot about animals, about our relationships with them, both biologically and emotionally.

How do assumptions about human superiority affect our treatment of animals?

You know, you've both pointed to how there's been some surprising violence and even today, there are still examples of real brutality.

- Yeah, I mean I think that human superiority is a significant part of this and of course, that's reinforced by various ideas that we have the idea that we were made in the image of God but animals were not, that we have immortal souls, that animals don't, that God gave us dominion over the animals, certainly in Western Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Some of those things are important and we still maintain them in various ways even though we've known since Darwin that we are related to animals.

We're not a separate creation and that there are many similarities between us and animals in terms of our ability to feel pain, to suffer, emotional connections with others when we're talking about social animals or with mothers and their young, particularly.

We should know better now I think but in practical terms, we're still living with the systems of treating animals that developed from a previous age when we did think of ourselves as entitled to treat animals as we wish.

- Yes, I think Darwin also was the source of a pivotal moment in the conservation movement, not only because he informed us that we were part of nature and that our species could change along with every other species on earth and that we were related to it but also quietly informed Victorian society that humans could cause extinctions which was not widely acknowledged at the time.

Perhaps there were extinctions on distant islands caused by explorers and colonists but as far as human ability to cause a species to go globally extinct, that wasn't widely understood until Darwin acknowledged it and then Lewis Carroll turned himself into a dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

That was another important step in that I think cultural understanding but that understanding really did jumpstart the conservation movement.

And I think that was a recognition of humans' negative power over, you know, we had been told we, as members of industrialized Christian societies have been told oh, we had a responsibility, we had dominion over these other creatures, we had a responsibility to steward them and suddenly, we were told we were both less powerful and that we were part of nature so to speak but yet we were powerful to drive these species extinct.

- Right, you both really emphasized in your work the value of intellectual humility, recognizing the power that we wield and being a little tempered in how we wield it based on the limitations of what we know which I've really appreciated.

That actually flows into a conversation we could have about the role of technology in changing our relationships with animals and the planet and being better stewards.

How significant is it that we can bioengineer meat-like plant proteins or calorie-boosting GMO crops or nearly bioengineer endangered species in labs?

Can we Impossible Burger our way out of our unhealthy relationship with meat and large farming or artificially create enough animals to replenish the populations we have, in many ways, used technology to eliminate?

- Take that, Michelle.

- I know Peter has written extensively about artificial meat.

I'll leave that to him.

What I wrote about at my end of history of conservation as I looked into the future was our increasing ability to use assisted reproduction techniques to help very endangered species continue as species and there's some important work being done and some of it very well may be valuable.

What I worry about is that it will be interpreted by the public as being what conservation is about when really, those kinds of technologies are trying to make the best of a very bad situation, that conservation should really be starting when animals are abundant.

We should be trying to keep populations healthy, not trying to keep the last two or three animals of their species on the planet from going extinct and the line that sticks in my mind was I spent quite a bit of time with marine biologists who were working on artificial reproduction of coral in the Caribbean and one of them said yeah, you know, when we have an advance in our work, we often will tell people about it and they'll say well that's great.

Well now the Great Barrier Reef is fine.

I said in my response is always like what are you eff-ing talking about and so people who use these technologies are very aware of their limitations.

They're very aware of how difficult they are to develop and they're very aware that they are an insurance policy at best but I do worry about the public's interpretation of oh, we could just make more animals so things will be fine.

- Yes, I totally agree with that.

I think there's no substitute for preserving the habitat in which the animals can thrive and we're not doing that very well in many parts of the world.

But to come to the alternatives to meat, I do think that this can be important because we have a growing demand for meat unfortunately, particularly in those countries that are becoming more prosperous and people are demanding more meat.

China's the most obvious example but there are others and if we were to continue to make it through animal production, not only would that greatly increase the number of animals suffering in factory farms but it would also make it pretty much impossible to meet the climate change goals that we have of not exceeding 1.5 or two degrees Celsius.

So we really need these alternatives.

They can be plant-based alternatives and we already have some very good plant-based alternatives out there.

You mentioned Impossible Burgers but there's a lot of different products and people are working on cellular animal products.

That is things that really are meat, dairy products, but never saw a whole animal, were grown at the cellular level.

And it has been shown that that can be done very efficiently in terms of very limited amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, there's no organism suffering and we reduce the risk of pandemics, too, because we have had pandemics coming out of factory farms, particularly the Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009.

So I think this could be really important if it works and there is actually one product already on sale, cultured fish has been sold and Singapore has licensed its use and it's available from a restaurant in Singapore.

It's not yet competitive in price with fish pieces bought at your supermarket but I'm hopeful that the prices will come down and we will have some real alternatives to reduce the amount of suffering and the impact on climate that the livestock industry is generating at present.

- And it of course has the potential to protect habitat as well.

- Yes, that's right.

We don't have the clear the forests for beef anymore if we can produce it that way.

- Yes, and with all the climate benefits that entails, too.

- Absolutely.

You know, speaking of habitats, our ideas have changed over time about how we and animals should occupy space.

Who belongs in natural areas, how we should manage them, whether they should be free of humans and there's even a discussion within the Biden administration right now about conserving 30% of the country in some fashion by 2030.

What are some of the most, to you, significant changes about how we think where animals and people belong in order to create healthy, natural spaces and how does that affect where we conserve or raise them?

Peter, you're smiling.

- No, I think this is for Michelle really to start off at least.

I may chime in.

- Well the evolution in the conservation movement that I have seen and of course, this is speaking very broadly.

The conservation movement, even if you limit the conservation movement to the mainstream modern conservation movement, it's still a very complicated ball of yarn so to speak but there is a general arc of progression from people protecting iconic, large often beautiful or species that were very attractive to hunt moving to protecting species that people didn't necessarily like or even found obnoxious and then realizing that oh, it's also important not just to protect species from being shot with abandon by humans but to protect their habitat as well so they can survive in the long term and so conservation really grew up along with the science of ecology which has definitely informed its strategies over the last 150 years or so.

I think what the conservation movement is coming to now is realizing that it has to expand its toolbox beyond parks and reserves which of course have served conservation well in many ways and we need more of them considering the damage we've done to habitat around the world but what the conservation movement has not been very good at is supporting people in living sustainably alongside other species, especially species that they're dependent on still for food or shelter or other necessities and I see the 30 by '30 proposal as very encouraging as long as it includes that piece, as long as it includes land tenure for rural communities and indigenous communities which are recovering or expanding their traditional methods of land management which is not to generalize at all about indigenous people but there are many effective practices that have been expanded in recent years and we know from research and experience that those can be very successful.

I think as long as those are a major ingredient in 30 by '30, as long as we're not talking about drawing park boundaries around 30% of the planet, it can be a very exciting advance for conservation and for human benefit as well.

- Yeah, I mean 30 by '30 is certainly good compared to where we are now and we should support that.

E. O. Wilson famously said in his book, half the earth, that they wanted 50% of it set aside.

Would be great if we could get there but maybe that's idealistic and we have to aim for more modest targets at present.

The other issue that I do think is worth mentioning, although it's sometimes a bit of a taboo, is human population growth which is not so much an issue in the United States.

We've just seen figures slowing down and there are other affluent countries where it's falling but if we look at Sub-Saharan Africa where a lot of the animals we want to preserve are, it's still growing quite rapidly in several of those countries.

According to the United Nations' predictions, some countries are going to triple their population by the end of the century, one or two even more than that and given that there is still a lot of poverty there and people have to worry about what they're going to eat, it can be extremely difficult to preserve significant amounts of those countries for animals as well so I think this is something that we ought to be talking about a little bit more, what is an ethical response to concerns about rapid population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Obviously, we've had unethical responses in the past and I'm not suggesting we repeat some of those mistakes but I do think it's something that we can't avoid if we're talking about conservation of animals and plants into the end of this century.

- The conservation movement, as I'm sure a lot of people listening know, has had a very interesting would be the appropriate word perhaps encounter with the issue of population growth.

Famously Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb back in 1968.

Back before people understood how effective it would be to increase the options for women's health and reproductive decisions, it was assumed back then that oh well, if people have the option, they want large families, especially people in developing countries.

This is what The Population Bomb said at the time and we've learned since that given access to reproductive choices, given access to improved health services, reproductive rates go down and I think yes, there are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where population is still growing very quickly and that does have an enormous effect on resources, both for humans and other species and I hope the environmental movement is learning to approach it as we know what works.

We know it works and what works is giving women more choice and more resources for their own health.

- Absolutely, Michelle, and you know this conversation really is close linked to a lot of other conversations about the role of prejudice within conservation, within environmentalism.

Peter, you've written about subconscious prejudices impact the way we decide what types of life have value and Michelle, you've written both about how racist prejudices have influenced who's allowed power in making decisions about what to do with animals and that different communities don't equally bear the burden of conservation and climate adaptions because of their lack of power.

Does social justice get us closer to liberating animals?

How are changing demographics within power dynamics in conservation and animal welfare spaces and who we look to for guidance about how we should treat the planet affecting our ability to tackle conservation or animal welfare?

- I want to say that I agree with Michelle entirely that giving women more power over their reproduction is a win-win for women and for the environment and for the development of those countries.

That's certainly true.

It's not always an easy thing to do.

The more years of school a girl gets, the more likelihood she is going to be able to choose to have a family that she wants which may not be a very large one but there is still prejudices in some countries against girls getting the same level of education as boys and there are also, obviously, situations in which men are still dominant and if men want large families, it's very difficult for women to resist that so there are those kinds of prejudices and yes, we do have prejudice against taking animals seriously, taking their interests seriously, and as Michelle said, we're more likely to want to save the charismatic megafauna than we are a lot of other animals who are equally important in terms of the lives they're living and we tend not to really give the same consideration to the animals who we eat.

The chickens, the pigs, the cows.

We put them in a different category and we don't really take them seriously as individuals.

Although, anybody who takes these animals, who lives with chickens for example, with a small little flock at home or with pigs and cows, too, will know that they are individuals, that they have their own personalities, that they are different and they have lives that are worth living for them and that we ought to do what we can to make sure that those lives go as well as they possibly can.

- I'm thinking fondly of the chickens in my neighborhood that serve as my alarm these days.

- Great.

They're like you where if they're not in a shared lot with 10,000 or 20,000 other chickens, then they're among the very fortunate few in terms of chickens in the US and in the world, generally.

- Absolutely.

And you know, Michelle, I really want to hear more about and you lay this out so well in your book, the changing demographics of people within conservation and how you transfer power in a way that actually influences how we treat the planet and the different ways that we treat people relating to the different ways that we treat animals.

- Yeah and I mean I would just, to Peter or to echo what Peter said in that in conservation, too, I think there has been an expanding circle of moral concern as you might put it for other species as I was saying earlier, starting with iconic species and then expanding out to species that we know we share an ecological web with but we may not even like when we encounter them in everyday life.

But yeah, I mean the conservation movement did begin as a very elite movement in North America and Europe when it became an international movement, it mostly moved along colonial paths, worked with colonial governments to establish parks and reserves so for many years, it was a predominantly white, predominantly elite, predominantly male movement and then in some ways still is but since the '80s, there has been a countercurrent in the conservation movement, sparked really by the understanding that parks and reserves in Africa had displaced people who in some cases, in many cases, had a very workable system of small-scale management of wildlife in their neighborhoods and it had disrupted those systems and it also disrupted people's relationships, local people's relationships with wildlife in that they had come to think of wildlife broadly as something that was protected for foreign visitors and not something that they had a responsibility and power to manage as previously generations had and so community-led conservation, I think, is really bringing, I think there is really an opportunity to broaden the conservation movement beyond what it's always been which is a special interest in many ways and it shouldn't be a special interest.

It should be something that everybody practices and community-led conservation which is trying to restore some of that authority over wildlife to the local level in Africa and now in many other places in the world is one way in which the burdens of conservation are being shared more equitably.

The short-term costs, there almost always are short-term costs, and then the benefits are also being shared a little more equitably and there's some very, well they're no longer experiments, there's some very long-term, fairly wide, fairly large scale projects that have had very tangible results in terms of creating or restoring healthy populations of rhinos, elephants, all sorts of species that are usually of great concern because of this restoration of local authority and reestablishing that local authority in relationship with other levels of authority over wildlife and landscapes.

- Absolutely.

How do you convince people outside of these community conservation programs to make sacrifices that help animals but don't seem to improve their own lives immediately, whether that be seeding habitat or radically changing your lifestyle in terms of what you eat or whether you drive, whether you impact the climate.

How do you get people to make that shift?

- So I can address the lifestyle questions because I have been involved since I published Animal Liberation 45 years ago, really, and trying to persuade people to eat differently and in other respects as well, to live differently.

I think you can make some progress but I must admit, it hasn't been as rapid as I would have liked so we have seen in the last decade or so, an emergence of plant-based eating which is gratifying to see this out there and to see the wide range of foods and greater acceptability of it and every restaurant really making available vegetarian and vegan products.

So I think things can catch on and I'm hoping that if you get a critical mass of people as we're starting to get with the plant-based eating that things will spread more rapidly.

As I've said before, this is really mostly still in Western countries.

I am actually speaking shortly of the launch of China Vegan Society which I find a very promising step but it's very small of course at this stage and there's a long way to go in changing lifestyle and eating habits in China.

So I think you have to try and as we were saying earlier, perhaps technology can help but I don't know of any immediate shortcuts that is going to produce the changes we need in the coming decade or so which is really when we need them to be happening on a large scale.

- Well I can speak to the conservation and habitat protection side of the problem.

- I'd love to hear it.

- Of the persuasion problem and I think, I mean, those of you who are listening in from the Western US know that we have extremely entrenched problems over endangered species.

Many places and then the recent rise in right-wing extremism and some of that is playing out on the stage of the public lands and has its roots in some of these arguments over endangered species so I think there are cases where persuasion is a long way off but I think we also have a lot to learn from recent experiments in recent decades with community-based conservation because what those projects have found is that even when people on the surface are, you know, extremely angry at the government for their management of elephant populations which are trampling their crops or even harming their family, if those as I was saying earlier, if those burdens, those very direct, very sometimes extremely costly burdens can be reduced.

They don't have to be eliminated.

Conservation doesn't have to pay off immediately but if they can be reduced, then what is revealed not universally but what is often revealed is a care for other species.

I think most people, were you able to sit them down and give them a truth serum, do you really want this neighborhood species that you're complaining about to go extinct?

They would say no.

I don't want to have a hand in it disappearing forever.

I'm just mad at the government for doing what it's doing or I just want to be able to feed my family and protect my crops.

As I've said, I think we can learn quite a bit from that in North America by figuring out how to reduce this burden so we don't get into these endangered species arguments where either it's this species' life or this species' survival or your job and sometimes those conflicts are exaggerated by the media but sometimes there are very real trade-offs that we don't effectively address and by not addressing them, we don't support people in protecting species that I do think there is a base level of care for.

- Right, a lot of this is systemic.

So this is just a reminder that we will be asking some of your questions soon, viewers.

If you have any questions, make sure to add them to the chat now and you know, Peter, when I hear you talking about trade-offs or changes or the pace that we are at when we are making changes, something that struck me about your work is you mentioned that when you're trying to convince people to eat less meat, one of the things you can tell them is not necessarily that it will improve their life but they will be no less healthy than if they were also eating meat.

Are there other places in our lifestyles where that kind of argument, just looking at things a little differently can help?

- Oh I think so and in particular, I suppose, the consumer lifestyle which is responsible for such ecological damage and I think there's good psychological evidence now from studies that show it's not really a lasting source of happiness when people buy some new expensive consumer item, they're happy with it in the short term but very soon, that just becomes part of the background, they've adjusted to it and they need something new to maintain that level so that they're on a treadmill, they need to keep earning more in order to buy more new things and even so, it doesn't really get them to a lasting satisfaction whereas people who have purposes and values that extend beyond themselves and this can extend to helping non-human animals but it can also extend to for example helping to reduce extreme poverty in the world and there are many effective organizations that do that.

I've founded a charity called the Life You Can Save which recommends about 20 organizations that are being independently validated as being highly effective in assisting people in extreme poverty and people who are involved in those sorts of causes, supporting those organizations, very often have a level of fulfillment and satisfaction with their lives that more than compensates for the fact that because they're donating, they're slightly less well off financially.

That doesn't really have much impact on their wellbeing and satisfaction with life as compared to the purposefulness of what they're living for once they get involved in these issues.

- Right.

So I am yielding the floor to our viewers now who are asking some great questions.

So here's one that actually gets into Peter's flexible vegan approach.

The question is Peter, I understand you do eat oysters and eggs.

Can you explain why you make those allowances?

- Sure.

So firstly, let me say the eggs that I eat have to come from hens who are ranging outside, not just cage free.

I don't think that's enough but there are producers you can find who have hens who are ranging out on pasture when they wish to go outside and I think they have reasonable lives, I think that's compatible with them having good lives.

They don't seem to mind their eggs being taken.

So occasionally, I will eat one of these free range eggs and I don't think it's a huge deal.

With oysters and clams and mussels, to me it seems that the evidence is that they don't have a nervous system that means that they feel pain.

It's a very simple nervous system that they have and after all, they can't run away from pain or move away from it like many other animals who have evolved a capacity for pain so maybe it wouldn't have been a part of their evolutionary process to develop that.

So you know, for me, it's not that I eat a lot of oysters or mussels or anything.

They're not a significant part of my diet really but I don't object to eating them and environmentally, they can be very good.

They play a role in cleansing the waters.

Chesapeake Bay, for example, in the east.

They clean, filter the water of those areas.

You do need to check where they're coming from because sometimes some of them might be coming from trollers that are scraping the bottom of the oceans and causing a lot of damage to coral reefs but generally, the oysters and mussels and clams that we're growing, that we're eating, are sustainable.

For me, it's not a matter of being particularly pure about this.

It's a matter of not buying things where my dollars are supporting either cruelty and suffering or significant damage to our planet.

- Next time you are out in the Pacific Northwest, Michelle, Peter, you and I can go and check out some oysters and clams and other seafood which our region is very fond of.

Another listener question.

I think we can assume that climate change is happening and that human migration change is coming.

So are we going to have to accept that many species that live in zones that won't be habitable are just doomed?

I hope not.

- I hope not.

Some species can migrate but certainly not all.

There's been a debate in the conservation community for many years now about what's referred to as assisted migration.

Do we want to physically move or found other populations, found new populations of species in climates that are more friendly to their long-term survival?

I think we can do that with some species practically.

We certainly can't do it with all species.

There's some evidence that species can evolve to adapt to new conditions.

I don't want to hold out false hope with that.

We'll be lucky if that happens.

Very few species kind of evolve at the speed at which our climate is changing.

It has been shown to happen, to be happening in some cases.

But there's no doubt that climate change is going to lead to more extinctions.

My hope in my book, I didn't want to write a history of conservation that was full of false hope.

I hoped it was full of a sense of possibility at least.

My thought about climate change and extinctions is that just because we can't save everything, just because we're going to have many losses, doesn't mean that we don't have opportunities to extend the survival or preserve the survival or many species that we still have healthy populations of.

- Right, there's a through line in both of your work that reducing suffering is a more actionable goal than, you know, trying to save the planet.

There's a big spectrum between that.

You know, another question, okay.

So how do you feel about the use of monkeys in biomedical research that may help animals including humans?

This is probably for Peter and pretty relevant given that I think all three of us are or will soon be benefiting from a vaccine.

- Right, so again, as with these other issues, I think it's very hard to have absolute lines.

I think there's a huge amount of experiments on animals that are not essential, that either could be replaced with non-animal methods or simply we don't really have to do because they're not doing things like developing vaccines that can save tens of thousands of lives.

So I think that's really what I focus on in terms of trying to reduce that suffering as you were saying, Hannah.

And I think it's fruitless to say that we must never use an animal no matter what the benefits that come from it.

Obviously, we should use those animals as humanely as possible and try to minimize their suffering and I think there has been some progress say in the United States and Europe anyway and maybe even more globally in setting standards for animal experiments but there's still a lot of very nasty things that are happening and that's what I want to focus on, rather than try and say look, even to develop a vaccine against the pandemic, you can't use a monkey.

- Do you have any thoughts on that, Michelle?

- The only thing I would add is that some of the conservation work in reproductive technologies that's being done, I think and this is certainly not as large a scale as medical research on captive animals but I think there's a growing awareness that welfare needs to be a consideration when conservationists, reproductive biologists, are developing these technologies, these heroic measures.

I mean, the argument is always well, this one animal perhaps could save the life of his or her species or save the existence of his or her species but it's a hard job to be playing that role, to be the proverbial guinea pig for some of these technologies.

And I think that there's a growing understanding that welfare needs to be a consideration when deciding are we going to pursue these last ditch, very long shot, very costly measures or is there a point at which we need to say if we were going to save the species, we should have done something a long time ago.

- I have one more question.

How has COVID changed our relationship with animals or highlighted it in meaningful ways?

- So I think that what it's highlighted is the fact that COVID almost certainly came to humans from animals.

One prominent theory is that it came through eating wild animals, bats and pangolins, perhaps from the wet market in Wuhan so there have been widespread calls for closing those wet markets.

They're dangerous places.

They're also very cruel places because you take wild animals, you capture them, you put them alive in cages in the markets with other species with humans around.

They're obviously terrified.

Their feces around, urine, and then they get killed.

A customer says I'll have that one and they get hauled out and have their throats cut and so there's blood around as well.

So I think there's a movement to try to stop that which is good but as I've said earlier, factory farms are also an ideal place for developing new viruses because you have so many animals crowded together, they're stressed, so their immune systems may be weakened by that and we have had both avian flu and swine flu coming out of factory farms.

I hope this will lead us to rethink that.

It adds a further reason as well as animal suffering and climate change and health as many people would argue.

It adds a further reason to doing something about factory farming.

- Absolutely.

I regret to say that we are unfortunately running out of time but I would love to hear if you have something good to say, Michelle.

- Just one thought.

The conservation movement and the climate movement I think have struggled over the years to really, both within their own ranks and with the publics they're addressing to get across the idea that we are all in this together.

You know, our fate is tied to the fate of other forms of life.

I think that COVID-19 pandemic makes that horrifyingly clear and my hope is that it will lead to a greater sense of solidarity within our own species to ward all the other species that we share the planet with and share the climate with.

- Thank you so much for joining me today.

I have learned a lot.

I hope our viewers have, too.

So we are unfortunately out of time but I hope to speak with both of you soon.

- Thank you so much, Hannah.

- Thanks very much, Hannah.

Good to talk to you as well, Michelle.

- And thank you all for joining us.

I hope you'll get a chance to see some of our other festival sessions.

Thanks again and enjoy the rest of the festival.

(upbeat techno music)