- Humanity is capable of great dualities.

Today's guest explores that in the way we both venerate animals, even while we exploit them.

She's Elizabeth MeLampy this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Elizabeth MeLampy, an experienced animal and environmental lawyer whose new book is, "Forget the Camel: The Madcap World of Animal Festivals and What They Say about Being Human" Elizabeth, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you so much for having me.

I'm glad to be here.

- Well, and congratulations on the book.

It is a fascinating read.

We were chatting a little bit about it before.

For folks who haven't had a chance to read it yet though, why don't you give us a quick overview?

- Absolutely.

So the book is about animal festivals around the country.

I use eight events to sort of ground the narrative and I use these events as sort of microcosms of our relationship with animals more generally.

So, you know, I do some travel writing, I have tell some good stories, but I'm also weaving this larger narrative about how we relate to animals.

- How did your interest in animals come to be in the first place?

- It's a little bit of a family legacy.

I grew up loving animals having, you know, pets and my grandmother, who I'll speak about a little more in a minute, but she loved animals.

She was a veterinarian.

And so it was kind of in my blood, but it wasn't until I went to law school that I really started understanding how much our world impacts animals, that my generalized care kind of became something more urgent.

I realized that how we treat animals really matters and it's often not how we all wish it would be.

Animals really suffer in our world.

And once I sort of opened my eyes to that, I realized this is what I wanna spend my life doing.

- So did you have pets growing up?

- I did, yeah, many.

- A lot of pets.

What did you have dogs?

Dogs, cats, or?

- We had dogs and cats.

You know, we had the miscellaneous hamster here or there, but lots of dogs and cats and I now have a dog and two cats.

- Oh, great, great.

So let's get into the book in some detail.

You open with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which many people have heard about, but some people may not have.

Just can you tell us what it is, where it's held, just a little bit about the race?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

So the Iditarod is a dog sled race of about 1000 miles that starts near Anchorage, Alaska and works its way across the historic Iditarod trail to Nome, Alaska, which is an off the grid town.

And this race is done continuously, so the same team of dogs that starts it, ends it.

It's not a relay or anything like that.

And this race is a really huge part of Alaskan culture.

It's a big kind of money maker for Anchorage.

People from all over the country visit to watch the race or listen to media coverage about the race.

And it's, yeah, it's a really kind of important event to Alaska and to the history of dog sledding more generally.

There's a lot of criticism of the event, which I talk about in the book, about being cruel to dogs.

So dogs do die on the course.

Last year, I think three dogs died, this year there was a dog who was found out to be pregnant, who died in the course.

And it raises a lot of really critical questions that I want to answer in this book, which is why I started with it.

It really asks us to balance that this fun benefit that humans get of community building and identity building and money raising and all of that with harm, real harm to animals and sort of, you know, you have those two things and you have to figure out what to do with that.

So it's a good place to start the book.

- If we think about it though, I mean that's a lot of the public spectacle with animals.

If we think about the Kentucky Derby, if we think about, you know, horse racing in general, there's cruelty to animals that passes off as sport that we all sort of celebrate, that a lot of Americans celebrate.

A lot of the world celebrates.

How do we reconcile the complexity of that?

We look at these animals, they're beautiful, they're lovable, people adore them, but we're still abusing them, aren't we?

- Yeah, I mean, I would say so.

And I think that it's a really complicated set of questions and I think, you know, my book tries to engage with those from a place of compassion, both for the humans and the animals involved.

Because I think a lot of these festivals are really rooted in local identity and local culture.

A lot of the, you know, people who end up mushing the dogs and the Iditarod or from mushing families or sort of, you know, it's part of who they are and that, you know, that's really something we have to take seriously.

This is, it's real people who are involved and who get a lot of benefit out of this.

But at the same time, you know, these industries and these sports have evolved to be really hurtful to animals.

And so that's kind of the one of the core tensions.

- So you were present at these festivals, is that correct?

- Yes, I went to all of them, - Including the Iditarod.

It must've been cold.

- I went to the start of the Iditarod.

(all laughing) - Okay, you didn't go.

- I went to the start, yes.

The race takes over a week, so.

- Alright, let's get into another one.

The Rattlesnake Roundup.

Tell us about that.

And again, you were there.

- Yes, I was there.

So I'll back up for one second and say that the book is structured in three parts.

Which I think is critical to sort of how we.

- [Wayne] Yeah.

- Are gonna walk through these festivals.

So the book is structured in three parts to try to mirror or explain how humans relate to animals.

So it puts these festivals in buckets that I think are categories that we all relate to animals in every single day.

So the first is dominance, the second is humor, and the third is reverence.

And so some animals we relate to through paradigms of dominance.

You know, we wanna kill the spider that's on our floor or eat a chicken because, you know, we're hungry.

Like those types of relationships.

And then there's humor, which I think is kind of the most complicated category.

But I think humor really, you know, there's lots of funny animal videos online.

There's lots of, you know, I mean, humor's a strange category, but it has a real distancing function.

And then reverence is I think what we probably put our dogs and cats in that category.

You know, we really have some animals that we care about so much.

And so those three categories are how I structured this book to try to think about, you know, how do animals move between these categories?

Are they static?

And I think they're not static is, you know, one of my takeaways of the book.

And so I start the dominant section with the most obvious example that I could find of a dominance based festival, which was the Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas.

It's the world's largest rattlesnake roundup, that's what they call it.

And it's an event where basically organizers bring in rattlesnakes from the surrounding environment.

So hunters go out and hunt rattlesnakes, bring them in alive into a central pit.

And then over the course of the roundup weekend, they behead these snakes in public.

They skin them, and they deep fry and sell the meat.

They sell the skins.

It's a very kind of visceral festival where this killing and skinning of the rattlesnakes is front and center.

And the skinning pit is part of what draws people to Sweetwater.

And this, it brings tens of thousands of people in every single year from all across the country to witness this and to partake in it themselves.

- So one of the things that I learned in reading your book is that there is something called animal law.

You're an attorney.

We should mention that.

What is animal law and are there essential tenants that we're living every day and we just aren't aware of?

- Yes.

(Jim laughing) I'm so glad you asked.

(all laughing) Animal law, I always say it's just the law as applied to animals.

It's very broad.

It's sort of as broad as you can imagine.

So everything from administrative law to environmental law to, you know, civil litigation, it all could relate to animals depending on, you know, how the animals sort of engaging with the legal system.

So when I was in law school, I went to Harvard Law and I studied in their animal law and policy program and their clinic there.

And I learned a lot about these legal regimes and paradigms that basically structure how humans interact with animals on a daily basis.

So everything from the food you eat, you know, there's, I mean, the dairy you consume in your coffee in the morning, all of that has legal paradigms that support it, that protect it, that regulate it.

And then all of that really affects actual animals' lives.

So, you know, you might think about a labeling law that the, you know, some agency puts out about what kind of claims could be on a package of your eggs that actually really impacts the chickens that are laying those eggs.

You know, that's a real piece of law that affects animals.

So I learned a lot about animal law and I think it's a really broad category.

- The Maine Lobster Festival is the other chapter in dominance.

Tell us about that.

- Yeah, so the Maine Lobster Festival is an event where basically people go to buy a Maine lobster dinner or a lunch.

It's a big kind of summertime festival on the coast of Maine.

And I use it in the dominance section as kind of a thought exercise.

I was sort of curious about where it should fit in the book, if it should fit in the book at all, when I went and, my sort of takeaway from thinking about this was I realized that it's not actually all that different from the Rattlesnake Roundup.

And that was sort of a surprise to me, 'cause when I tell people at the Rattlesnake Roundup, a lot of people are horrified.

You know, people are like, "Oh, I can't believe we, you know, kill snakes in public and people, you know, make hand prints with the blood."

It's a very kind of gory festival and people are shocked.

And then I think the thought exercise of trying to connect that to something that to many people is more palatable was a really important part of why I put it in dominance.

So I'll give a couple examples, at both festivals, you know, these animals are hunted from the wild and they're brought in alive to a central facility.

At both festivals, the animals are killed en masse in public, you know, on full display of the gathering crowds.

At both festivals, people eat the flesh and buy souvenirs with the rest of the body, you know, claw ornaments at the main lobster festival or snake skin belts or whatever at the roundup.

And then, you know, both festivals really kind of use the death of these animals as the central, you know, draw to why people are coming in to see this and I think that's a really interesting exercise for a lot of, I grew up eating lobster for a lot of people, we wouldn't think twice about that.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- [Wayne] Yeah.

- But, you know, it's not that different.

- But there's an inherent conflict though in lobstering.

It supports an industry of people.

Most of small businesses, you know, lobstering is not for the most part, you know, a giant company working, it's families, it's men and women that go out on lobster boats.

How do you reconcile that?

I mean, this is their livelihood.

- Absolutely.

And it's a really hard set of questions that I grapple with in the book and struggle with quite openly.

And I think that it's, I don't have the answers.

I think if anyone had a perfect answer, you know, we'd already have the solution out there.

- Right.

- But I do think that, you know, just because we've done things a certain way doesn't mean that that is a good enough reason to keep doing them, is sort of what I keep coming back to.

And I think that doesn't mean that my answer's perfect.

I say in the book, you know, my response to these, to the Maine Lobster Festival might be different than yours.

And that's okay.

But you know, I think it's important to try to bring the animals who are bearing the brunt of that industry kind of into the equation.

- Yeah.

So you mentioned, you know, you've got a section that's devoted to humor and the title of the book, "Forget the Camel", comes from that account of the International Camel and Ostrich Races.

I didn't know such a thing existed before I read your book.

- [Wayne] Neither did I.

- What are they and what's going on there?

- Yeah, so I, this book was so fun to write because some festivals everyone's heard of and then others like this, people are, you know, surprised.

- Have you heard of this before you started writing the book?

- No.

(all laughing) - All right, we're all in good company here.

- Yeah, so the camel and ostrich races take place in Virginia City, Nevada, which is just outside of Reno.

And I went, it's this sort of kind of slapstick event where people ride camels and ostriches on their backs and around a track and just try to hold on.

The camels and ostriches both for different reasons, don't want humans on their back.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- They're trying to get these humans off of their back.

And so, you know, people are falling left and right.

You know, the crowd is laughing at this.

It's a very kind of like slapstick is the word.

It's kind of that violent humor.

- [Wayne] Yeah, yeah.

- And when I was there and I was watching this event, the mc of the event was narrating one of the races and a human fell off and, you know, smashed into the ground and all of the kind of handlers raced to control the camel.

They raced to sort of get the camel back under control and the mc said, "Forget the camel", check on Charlie or whoever had fallen.

(all laughing) And that to me was just such a microcosm of every festival in this book where we bring animals in and we use them for our entertainment, but we don't actually care about them.

We can't, if we cared about them, we couldn't do the festival in any real way.

And so it was just a perfect kind of summation of how we center these animals, while we also demand that we don't actually pay any attention to them.

- They're almost like a prop.

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

- Jumping Frog Jubilee.

(Elizabeth laughing) - The next festival in the humor section is The Jumping Frog Jubilee, which is based on a Mark Twain story.

- [Wayne] Yeah.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County".

- Yes.

The story that made him famous.

It was one of his very first - Yeah, it was published in 1865.

I looked it up.

I didn't know it was that long ago.

- Yeah, it was very early in his career.

And he spent a handful of, I think, months in the town and he heard the story and then he wrote it and it sort of helped launch his career.

As a thank you to Mark Twain for that, the town now puts on, you know, this massive jumping frog event every year as part of their county fair and the Jumping Frog Jubilee, they basically, you know, try to get frogs to jump as far as they can.

They get three jumps and they measure it.

And the frog who jumps the farthest wins.

- Well I'm curious, how far can a really, really good frog jump?

- The world record is over 21 feet, so with three jumps.

- With three.

- That's pretty good.

- Yeah.

- That's more than I can do.

Yeah.

(Wayne laughing) But so you know, the, you know, all of these cases were, it's really talking though about, you know, the indifference that humanity has for animals.

I have a dear friend who is obsessed with the "Planet of the Apes" movies because it pivots that right?

Where no longer are they animals subservient, but humans are fighting for their existence.

Is there a way to imagine, is there any literature that gives us a glimpse of a future in which there is a more I don't know, respectful relationship between humans and animals?

Is there something that we can point to and say there's a better way?

- I think there's a lot of possibilities for what that future looks like, I think, and which is why my book ends with a section on reverence.

I think I try to answer that exactly where you are headed is sort of, what do we do about all of this rather than dismissing animals rather than killing them for fun?

Like what's the alternative?

What could this look like?

And the very last chapter in the book, or the last substantive chapter is about a butterfly parade in Pacific Grove, California.

It's very quaint.

You know, these kindergartners dress up as monarch butterflies to welcome the migrating monarchs back.

And so it's animal festival in its truest sense because it's about an animal and they're bringing the town together.

But it's really different than the rest because it's built on this sort of kind of aspect of respecting animals.

It doesn't bring animals from the wild and put them here for as props or for our entertainment.

But it talks, it relates to animals in a really different way.

- It's not exploiting the animals.

- Exactly.

- It's not a mass butterfly barbecue at the end.

- Exactly.

- Right.

- Exactly.

- First chapter in reverence is Groundhog Day.

- Yeah.

(all laughing) Groundhog Day was one of the funnest.

(all laughing) - And of course the Bill Murray movie.

- Yes.

- Which was made many, many years ago remains quite popular.

But anyway, talk about that.

- Yeah, I mean.

- I've always thought that was one of the more bizarre things.

- It's very bizarre and watching.

- It was on TV every year and there's a (indistinct) for it and.

- Yeah.

- And I have to admit, I watched it this year.

- It's good.

I got to watch it this year too as research, which is great.

(all laughing) But yeah, Groundhog Day it's a massive event that takes place every year in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which is a really small town.

And it's basically this giant pre-dawn party.

I mean, there's thousands of people starting at like 3:00 AM kind of with live music and fireworks and dancing.

And it's the whole kind of event all morning, all for this, you know, prognostication of this groundhog.

They pull out of the stump and then everything just kind of, you know, goes back to normal.

Like it's a very fun party.

But it's a little, it's strange.

It's an odd one.

- Yeah.

In talking about the reverence that we have for animals, a lot of people love animals, but they still participate in exploitive sports or enjoy a good hamburger.

What do you say to folks who sort of grapple struggle?

They wanna be good, they wanna be kind to animals, but our culture sort of favors a lot of practices that if you stop and you think about it for a moment, are not.

- Yeah.

- Really respectful of animals in their lives.

How do you reconcile those things?

- Absolutely.

I believe that the first and most important step is to start thinking about it.

So I think that sounds so obvious because we're here talking about this book, but a lot of people, myself included it before, you know, five or six years ago, I hadn't really investigated what my relationship with animals is.

When do I use them?

How do I use them?

Do I investigate, you know what all of the animal care that goes into a hamburger that I was eating or a TV show I was watching that had a dog, like how was I really sort of living up to my own morals and my own beliefs about how animals should be treated?

And it was for me was a real kind of education process, which as the first step of sort of getting my hands around the complexities of it kind of, for in my own head and in my own heart.

And the, oh.

- I was gonna say, was there something, what happened five years ago that triggered that sort of self-reflection for you?

- I was in law school and I was taking a class on animal law and I started really understanding more of, basically how unregulated a lot of how we treat animals is.

And I read slaughter reports, you know, I had an internship where I was doing animal welfare issues and I was reading slaughter reports and they turned my stomach and I was like, how can I keep eating, you know, chicken or hamburgers when this is not the exception, this is the norm.

And once that sort of opened my eyes and I had a real chance to start acting on those beliefs when COVID hit because I was suddenly alone.

I didn't have the social pressure of going out to get coffee with a friend and having everyone else order something and me be the, you know, the lame vegan who was like, no, thank you.

I will, you know, I'll eat when I get home.

All of that social pressure and noise went away.

And so I got to really focus on, what my values were and how I wanted to eat and for me that eating is a decision that we all make many times a day that felt, you know, out of step with how I believed animals should be treated in my thinking brain.

You know, I wanted to turn my actions into alignment with that.

- So slaughter makes you think of course of factory farms, which are gruesome, I guess at best.

Talk about those, and again here we have a bit of a conundrum because they support a lot of incomes of people, you know, marginalized people in a lot of places as well.

Talk about factory farms, what we should make of that.

- I mean, I believe factory farms are one of the biggest blights on humanity.

I think.

I hope and pray that in the future we look back and say, that was the wrong thing.

We did the wrong thing.

And they do support incomes.

But I also think it's really important to remember that factory farms do a lot of harm not just to animals, but to communities.

I mean, there's massive environmental racism.

- [Wayne] Yeah.

- In impact or communities that are impacted by factory farms are disproportionately marginalized communities.

and I think they, there's all sorts of exposes about factory farms who are engaged in kind of unlawful labor practices, whether it's children or undocumented people or what have you.

So, it's not like the Maine lobster industry where I think you have that kind of blue collar people.

People need that income.

- [Jim] Right.

- It's a little different.

- You know, we were talking about this in the green room before we started taping, but as a child, I can remember going to a local zoo and seeing an elephant with a large manacle around his foot.

And he was chained a wall.

And that animal stood there.

And I talked to people who were from that part of the country who would go to that same zoo.

And remember that elephant too.

It always struck me, even as a child, as not the way an elephant should be living.

What do you think about zoos and the, you know, the competition between caging an animal, like even if it's in a, some sort of habitat versus the educational value that supposedly they provide, - I think captivity of animals is always gonna be really ethically fraught.

I think it will never be, you know, as natural as nature would be for these animals.

And I think that it does a lot of harm.

And there's a lot of different opinions about sort of like what those animals are entitled to, how they should be treated.

And I think the interesting thing about that story that speaks to me is that children often know in their moral heart what is right and wrong for animals and we learn through growing up, through being told, don't ask that question, through being told, don't ask where, you know, meat comes from whatever.

You learn to be kind of to treat societal violence to animals as totally normal.

And I think what's hard as adults, we, this feels so entrenched, but those moral instincts that we all had as kids, I think are what we should be listening to.

- Scopes Trial Play and Festival.

First just recap the Scopes Trial and then tell us about this festival.

- Absolutely.

So I end the book on a little more of like a philosophical, you know.

- Yeah.

- So the very last festival is called the Scopes Trial Play and Festival.

It is about, or it reenacts the original Scopes Trial, which was in 1925.

John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a courtroom or in a classroom, excuse me, in Tennessee.

And this trial became a national media sensation.

It pitted religion against science.

It became this sort of, kind of referendum on what the role of evolution would be in society at that time.

And the Play and Festival now takes place in Dayton, Tennessee in the same courtroom where that trial originally happened and just sort of retells the story every year as part of their local culture.

- In the same courtroom?

- The same courtroom, yeah.

They've turned it into kind of a playhouse.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Wow.

How do animals fare in popular culture, television, films?

I mean, if you watch a movie, you get to the end, no animals were hurt in the making of this film.

But you know, how are animals portrayed in popular culture and how do they feed into our respect and reverence for them more generally?

- Yeah, I think animals are portrayed in popular culture, I would say into the three categories that I put in my book.

I think some, you know, I mean, like, I tried to watch that TV show "Yellowstone" and the first scene was a horse getting shot, so I turned it off.

- That was the end.

That's as far as we got too.

- Exactly.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And so that, like, there's dominance baked in.

I think there's humor totally baked into how we treat animal, how animals are in pop culture.

People are always, you know, doing goofy things with animals or kind of bringing up quirky animal things and media, you know, air bud might be in that category.

- [Jim] Right.

- Like, what are we doing with this golden retriever or whatever.

And then reverence, I mean, we all, again, there's some animals that get so much adoration in our media and in our kind of pop culture discourse.

And so I think these three categories are helpful.

They're not perfect.

I will say, these categories, they certainly aren't, you know, I think authoritative or in any way kind of the end of how we should think about animals.

But I think they're helpful to start because many animals can shift between categories.

And I think that that kind of shows that these are constructs.

These are things we're making up, we're deciding about these animals and we can decide something else.

We could decide that we should put them all in the reverence category if we wanted to.

- So you have a list of other festivals around the world in the US and you call it an inexhaustive list.

And it was amazing.

It has whales, mules, swallows, lambs, blue crabs, salmon, bald eagles and more.

How many of these festivals are there?

I mean.

- So many, I can't tell you.

- I mean.

- (indistinct) wits crazy.

- This was one of the most intriguing parts of my research.

And actually one of the reasons that kept me compelled to continue working on this book was that every time I told someone I was writing a book about animal festivals and I kind of explained the general gist, they would say, "Oh, there's one in my town.

Like, have you ever heard of, you know, this hummingbird festival or this, you know, swallow festival," or whatever the new one was.

- [Wayne] Yeah.

- And just the other day I did a book event and someone came up to me afterwards and said, "Have you heard of this?"

And it was a one I had never heard of.

And I think that goes to show how broad of a phenomenon it is to use animals as part of our celebrations as humans.

And it's not, you know, it's not just one community here and one community there.

When you start making a list and you zoom out, you realize this is actually a pretty kind of maybe even human nature based phenomenon where we are looking around trying to figure out who we are as humans and animals are right there and we can use them to figure out who we are.

- We've got 30 seconds left.

And that's the question that I wanted to end on.

What does this tell us about us as human beings, animals, ourselves?

- I think it tells us that we are, yeah, exactly what you just said.

That we are animals ourselves and that we use animals always in these festivals.

And just more broadly in culture, I think we use animals to say something about ourselves, to help figure out who we are as people, to help understand our place on this planet as embodied creatures.

I think it helps us navigate that when we have animals to use in that way.

- Elizabeth MeLampy, you've got a big heart in the book is "Forget the Camel".

- [Wayne] And a great book.

- Thank you much for coming to us.

- And a great book.

- Thank you both so much.

- That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about storing the public square, you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for more story in "The Public Square".

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