Redefining Human and Animal Relations

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Eligible students get a year of Microsoft three hundred and sixty five premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows dot com slash student offer. Law supplies last ends june thirtieth turns at aka dot mslash college pc. Ah, the lovely trial of the Lion Bird . The name of this Australian avian suggests an instrument and indeed, the lyre is the shape of this animal's fan tail , but this bird also loves to make music . The lyre bird has not just a broad tail, but also a broad repertoire. In a BBC Earth documentary, that includes imitating another Australian bird, a cookabor . The Lyrebird can mimic other visitors to its forest home, for example, the auto advanced shutter of a thirty five MM camera . A car alarm The chainsaws of lumberjacks working nearby . We know that animals have extraordinary abilities and that our lives have intruded upon theirs, sometimes with calamitous results, yet, on the whole, we see animals as so separate from us that we're not always nice to them. Now why is that? We share four billion years of evolution ary history. Why is our relationship with our animal relatives so fraught? And can we find a way back into the animal kingdom? This is Big Picture Science, and I'm Seth Shostak. I'm Molly Bentley in this episod e. A scientist takes on the notion of animals described in children's books, a bittersweet tribute to the species that rocketed into space , and why humans stubbornly resist identifying as animals even though we are . Can we do better? This episode Make Space for Animals Yesterday I saw a video of an orangutan driving a golf cart. Did you see that Molly? Yes, yes, I saw that. It was incredible. He was driving it, I think with one hand. Yeah, it with full confidence too. I mean, he didn't seem to least bit tentative about it. He was steering it around. He looked like a better driver than a lot of my friends. I'll tell you that. Yeah , it looked like he was surveying the grounds. So he had that kind of nonchalance looking around as though he had been doing this every day. Yeah, well, exactly. When that's what I thought, I thought, you know, people are worried about robots taking over their j obs. What about the orangutans? I mean, this guy was good. No accident. He got to the tree he wanted to get to. Everybody got out, they were all safe and sound. You know, we wonder about the veracity of the videos that we see on social media . So I did check it out on Snopes one of the Go to websites to find out what is real and what's not. And the reply from them was true . Really? That this video shows an orangutan driving a golf cart. Well, driving a golf cart's one thing, but playing golf, you know, that requires a certain mindset . Okay, so it turns out that is an animal story that really happened, and we know that animals can do extraordinary things but what about how they're portrayed in other stories? Like the one about the crow raising the level of drinking water in a pitcher, with stones , or the lion resting its paw on a man's lap. If these stories sound plausible, even sensible, it's because many of us grew up with these tales of tailed and feathered creatures. Although it was written two and a half thousand years ago, Esop's fables are still read to children today. The animals in these stories have qualities we recognize as human. Even grasshoppers have emotions in Esop's world, where the animals give us moral instruct ion. Here's a familiar tale . Okay, so this has to be the best known of Esop's fables, the fable of the tortoise and the hair, where famously of course the tortoise bets that it can beat a hare in a race and the hare thinks well of course I'll take this bet because I'm much faster than a tortoise . The fox sets a course, gets them off to a start and the tortoise just plods away continuously . The hare being very arrogant and believing that it's going to win thinks that I can go and have a nap and I'll still have plenty of time to win and of course the hare falls asleep and wakes up in time to see the tortoise plodding its way over the line . The moral of the story is that slow and steady wins the race. In her book ASIPs Animals The Science Behind the Fables, Dr. Wynne Penny assesses whether these moralizing stories you heard growing up ring true from a modern scientific perspective . And to what extent have they typecast his animal protagonists even today, whether it's the sly fox, the selfish dog, or the clever crow. And did he anticipate modern science and actually get some of his animal descriptions right ? Let's get an introduction out of the way, Joe. Who was ASO? Now the popular view is that he was a slave. He lived in Greece in the region of six hundred BCE , and he won his freedom through his incredible wit and ability to tell stories to the people who are, you know, maybe higher up in society . And you know, famous people like Aristotle and Herodotus referred to Aesop and to his fables in their works, so suggesting they very much thought he also was a real person . But modern scholars today point out that there are quite a few inconsistencies in these depictions of his life and it has been suggested that he might well be a fictional character that was created about the same time as the fables started to be recorded . So A sub may or may not have been a real character, but certain is his fables are real and they've had incredible longevity. So Joan, let's begin with one of the animals close to your heart because you studied them, and that is crows. And could you describe how one crow behaves in the tale of the crow and the pitcher. Yes. So this is again quite a well known fable, I think . You've got a crow, it's parched, it can't find any water desperately thirsty and it comes across a p itcher which is half full of water and the crow tries really tries to stretch its head into the pitcher and to reach the water but it can't. So what it does is it goes and it picks up st ones and it starts to drop them into the pitch. And each time it drops a stone it causes the water level to rise a little bit and bit by bit the water level rises enough for the crow to actually drink the. And moral of that is that necessity is the mother of invention. This may be the one fable in which ASIP strongly anticipated our scientific understanding of crows . You shared the research that was done in two thousand eight where this almost is very scenario played out in a lab in Cambridge. What happened? Absolutely. This fable is based in fact . So we're in Cambridge. We're with researchers Nathan Emory and Chris Byrd and are studying Rooks . And what Nathan and Chris wanted to do was really to test Esop's fable. Would the rooks behave as Esop's crow had done and dropped stones into the water? And they found that several of their birds did do this with the exception that they hadn't been deprived of water . So what they had instead was a very juicy little worm which was tacked to a piece of cork and floated at the surface of the water. So they dropped stones in order to reach their tasty worm. We know that crows are quite intelligent. There have been many studies that have demonstrated that in different ways. But really then the question is what is intelligence? And maybe one way to answer that is to talk about the role of tool use demonstrating intelligence. Would that apply to crows? And what would that say about their intelligence? Yes. So pretty much the most famous bird tool user is a species of crow. It's the new Caledonian cr ow. What do they use for their tools? Not just rocks, right? No, so not rocks. So they're using stick tools, which could either be little twigs or sometimes they snip out little bits of leaf edge and they will use them to probe for larvae and grubs and other things from dead wood. They hold it in their beak and then they poke the they poke the stick into a hole in a tree, something like that. Yeah, exactly. So there's some evidence that they try to not try to. They do actually craft the end of the stick tools into little hooks and the leaf edges that they snip out have little barbs on the edge of them and they hold them so that the barbs are pointing backwards. So when they poke them into a piece of rotting bark, if there's a grub inside, it often gets snagged on the tools so that they are better able to pull it in and retrie ve it. So they're kind of like chimpanzee fishing for termites using sticks . Which of the ASIP's fables that you write about shows the greatest mismatch of fact and fable when it comes to biology and behaviors . I think it's got to be the wolf in sheep's clothing. The wolf is trying to kill sheep, obviously, as it does in lots of fables to eat them. And he can't get very close to the flock of sheep . What he does is actually disguise himself as a sheep by putting on a sheep skin and pretending to be part of the flock and in this way gets shut in with the sheep overnight and is able to basically feast on as many as he wants. That doesn't sound so inaccurate, that the wolf operates at night, that it can be stealthy , that it's a predator. Probably it would not wear a sheep's clothing , but the rest of it sounds accurate. What troubles you about this fable? The thing that troubles me about the fable is that in order to disguise itself , that wolf must be capable of something called tactical deception. What scientists talk about as a theory of mind, being aware that other individuals have their own thoughts and beliefs and feelings and manipulating them in order to deceive them. And there is no evidence that wolves possess that in any form. Now we know that ASIP fables do an entertaining job of providing moral instruction and certainly there's a stickiness to their instruction because those who were read Aesop's fables as children, they remember morals . But I'm wondering if you think that some of these fables have done harm to our long term perception of animals . And if we come back to the story of the wolf and sheep's clothing, you write that it is the darkest form of anthropomorphism . Wow , so say a little bit about maybe some of the harm that these fables have done. My problem, I think, is that the world has changed so much since Esop's time . That means that we're still treating these animals according to characterizations that were created two and a half thousand years ago potentially . Any sop couldn't ever begin to imagine how much the world has changed and how much animals actually need our help. We're facing a global ecological catastrophe at the moment with climate change and biodiversity loss. And I think it's kind of incredible that we might still be influenced these stories from a long bygone era. Well, certainly with wolves, I think that some of the characterization of wolf leads to maybe an outsized fear of them and, that may feed into the way that we try to control some of the populations . If you were to write a fable, a new fable with a wolf in it , how would you characterize that wolf and what might that moral be? I know I'm putting you on the spot here to create a new fable, but what might it be ? So wolves are not deceptive animals. The most that they do is steal food from each other . They live in packs which are strongly family focused . They're very, very loyal within those packs and playful. So they're straightforward, they're loyal to their family. They're playful . That's a very different story. That would be a very different story. Very different. Yeah. So they're showing a lot of the traits that we really value in our own societies. Well, I'm going to start using the phrase as loyal and playful as a wolf beginning now. Yeah, I like it . If I may, I will try to summarize the tale of the dog and his shadow. This is another fable that you include. So a dog is carrying a piece of meat home and he goes over a bridge. He looks over the bridge down into the water. He sees his reflection and in thinking it's another dog with a piece of meat and wanting that meat too, he snaps at the other dog thereby losing his meat he was carrying in his mouth and in the end he has none because Joe, dogs are greedy. That's the moral , right? Don't be greedy like a dog . I was just going to say, I think most dogs would probably go for the meat. If they saw another dog with meat, I think they'd probably go for it. Okay, there I was trying to give more credit to dogs . But one of the things you highlight in this section is the role of the mirror test in assessing an animal's intelligence. And what do we understand about how dogs do perform with a mirror test . When they see their reflection in a mirror, do they recognize do they recognize themselves or do they think it's another dog? The mirror test to give a very brief background is the gold standard test within behavioral biology for assessing self awareness, whether or not animals recognize themselves in their reflection that they know that that is actually me and it was developed in the late nineteen sixties by Golden Gallup and he carried it out with chimpanzees. In the test he put a little mark on the eyebrow and on one of the ears of the chimpanzees he gave them various types of exposure to a mirror and he found that when he the chimpanzees woke up and he put them in front of the mirror were exploring their faces and their ears because they could see the reflected image and they could see that there was something different . Well, I should say firstly, dogs fail it. They just didn't really show that they got it at all . So controversial thing is whether there's one single test, the mirror test , which tells us whether or not animals are self aware . You know, in the case of dogs, they primarily use their noses when it comes to meeting other individuals and gleaning information about those other individuals. You know, they have a good sniff and they get a lot of information from that. So is an experiment that is based on their visual ability? Is that really the most relevant way to evaluate self awareness in those animals? It's an excellent point. And to the point of dogs being super sniffers, which is certainly what they are , they have abilities with their noses that we do not have . And so maybe an updated story f,able about the dog would be Be curious about your environment, collect as much information as possible and also be loving and kind because another animal, which is just so loving. Well, we'll finally then , Joe, I wonder whether you think we should continue to read ASIP's fables. And if so, if maybe we should also have a modern book about animal behavior on the bedside table as well. Yes. I think the answer is we should continue to read them. I like the idea of having a book on animal behavior on the side. Maybe I could recommend one . Is it called Aceps Animals by any chance? I think yeah, I think there's this book called ASOPs Animals, which might well work. Well, Joe Wimpenny, thank you so much for joining us for this discussion of ASIP's fables. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure . Joe Whimpenny is a zoologist and is the author of Esop's Animals The Science Behind the Fables . Did the tortoise win the race? With ease. Oh, I see what you mean by slow and steady wins the race, pop. There's also another moral son, one that applies to the hair. That I know what it is, what? Haste makes waste Our moral instruction may be at least partially tethered to Yesop's fables, but that hasn't persuaded us to somehow include animals in our moral code. That's for later in the show. But first , if Esop had written a fable about a dog going into space , what might the moral be? So she went upon Sputnik and she was the first creature to orbit Earth. The mission was designed to never come back . So her fate was already written, essentially. Isop may have anthropomorphized his creatures, but real animals have achieved when only a very few humans have managed, crossing the final frontier into space . The story of these involuntary pioneers next. This episode of Big Picture Science is Make Space for Animals . Hey gang, it's Seth. Check out our new podcast called The Persistence Lab, a show from ABV that tells the stories of the patients, scientists and clinicians who are committed to driving real change in medicine and healthcare, and the resilience that pushes them forward. These aren't headlines, they're deeply human moments that show how progress happens one step at a time . You can find the persistence lab now on your favorite podcast platform . The fable about the tortoise and the hare has staying power, it's been told for two dozen centuries that the tortoise and the hare have been immortalized in another way. They are among the non human animals that have gone into space, an achievement that only a relatively small number of humans have matched. Five , four , three , two , one , zero . Lip dog, we have a lip dog. Tortoises and rabbits, which are cousins of the hare, join the cated s, frogs, ants, fruit flies, dogs, monkeys, and chimpanzees that have boldly gone where others have not so that humans could follow. But let me walk back boldly because they had no say in the matter , and some of the animals were undoubtedly terrified. A recent feature in National Geographic Magazine gave tribute to these multiple species of astronaut and cosmonaut , some of whom began rocketing into space that is up and down as early as nineteen forty seven. But in nineteen fifty seven the Soviets launched Sputnik two with the first living creature who would orbit Earth, a dog named Laika. This is the cabin for Laika . It has been comfortably outfitted for her flight. During the training period , Laika was familiarized and became well accustomed to her cabin. The national geographic feature is bittersweet because of course the animals did not choose their missions and many perished along the way . But graphically beautiful with a compelling summary of the history of these lesser known space exploits , the feature animals in space made a strong impression on us. Its creators, Taylor Magacomo and Alexander Stegmeier, join us . In the most basic form , they were trying to figure out what would happen to humans. I mean beyond a certain elevation, we just weren't even sure . So I think that there's a history of humans using other animals for that scientific research and that study , the first time, I mean, I think in researching this story, a really fascinating one was about in the eighteenth century , a duck, a rooster, and sheep, I think. Sheep. You're right. Okay, you know what I'm talking about. A Ducker Rooster and a sheep were sent in a hot air balloon and a demonstration in France. And I think just to figure out what would happen to them . So, you know, the first the rockets that we used send things into space went at such incredible speeds we didn't even know if an animal or a creature could survive going that speed . Never mind, once it reached space, what would happen to it? Well, by the time titled that we get to the first chimp in space, that was nineteen fifty one. This was still the US, Ham was his name, and I think that was part of an acronym for some space hardware company, but he was taught to press buttons, manipulate levers and so forth. What were his tasks on board, you know? Mostly just like mind puzzle games, like if a light came on hitting the butt on according to that light, things like that, making sure that Ham is conscious and following directions and still able just perform normally under those excruciating circumstances ? You know, the questions we were trying to answer initially are can a human survive or can a creature survive the force to get to space? Could they survive in space ? But then finally, like, did you have any cognitive function? You know? Like you could maybe live and you would be breathing , but maybe you would be incapacitated somehow. Taylor, I presume that the illustration of the dog in space at the top of your story is the canine cosmonaut, Laika. Tell us her story how she ended up going into space and her mission . Well, the main illustration at the front of the story that is, unfortunately, not Laika. That is an unidentified space dog But like her story is fascinating and extremely sad. She became a space hero . So she went up on Sputnik and she was the first creature to orbit Earth. The mission was designed to never come back . So her fate was already written essentially. She was just going to quietly fall asleep in space and then die up there . But unfortunately, that was not the truth . Something went wrong and she overheated hours into the mission. And that truth came out years later . Like where did the dog come from? Do you know? I mean, it was a space agency have a canine cattle out back or something. She was just a stray. Russia liked to collect strays off the street and just kind of test them to see which ones could fare the best under these conditions. And she was one of the, I guess, strongest ones. You drew an illustration of the capsule, didn't you? I did. It's sort of like a high tech bread box. Yeah , there's a at the bottom of the capsule there's the cabin where her and all of her sensors work . And then at the top there's the satellite transmitter that looks like a big old sphere globe thing. And then the top of that is a radiation sensor. But didn't this set up an ethical debate even without knowing that LIKA's fate was not a good one? What was the public outcry? Do you have any idea? Yeah , we have some sense of it. You know, I think there's all it wasn't as widespread as you might think, but you know, they had only ever planned a one way mission . So I think that sort of touched the nerve for a lot of people. I think especi,ally some parts of the world where there was a burgeoning conversation about animal rights. And initially after Laika took off, at least to the research that Taylor had done , the Soviets hid that she had died so early on in her flight to the extent that the New York Times even reported that there might be a mission that would recover her , which was of course never the case to begin with. Taylor, one thing about the graphics is they give a face and they give an individual identity to these critters. You know, they have personality. You know, did you feel that yourself that you know there was no longer just a name in a book? Yeah, so one of my main ideas for this was to put a face to all of these critters and put their face. I wanted to show the individuals that sacrificed their lives essentially for this . So I used historical photos for all of the larger charismatic species like the dogs and the primates and even some of the smaller rats and mice that were named and had photos of and that also adds where you can see the sheer number of animals. On this spread I have three hundred and thirteen portraits of animals on this piece. There's some repeating fruit flies , didn't hear it from me , but everyone is unique and its own critter because they are unique. Some of the monkeys that you drew Taylor, these hats, I mean, you weren't trying to make them stylish. What was the point of the hats? No, unfortunately, these were not just aesthetics. These hats were to cover electrodes that were implanted into their skulls. A lot of these primates in these joint missions with Russia and the U. S. and even France's Fellisette Cat , they had electrodes that were implanted in the skull for sensors to make sure that their brains were still working correctly during the missions . So yeah, the hats were just kind of to cover the sight of those electrodes. Alex, you include a diagram to represent the countries whose space programs use or used in any case animals. No surprise that the vast majority of the missions have been the United States and the USSR. What other countries though have used animal subjects? Many and surprising ones to be honest. In the early years , France, like with Philissette, was participating in the space race, and China was early on as well . But most other countries weren't at that time. But later on, Japan started sending animals in the nineties . And then more recently, Israel, Iran and China again has reignited its program . And then most recently actually, India is looking to build their own space program , but they're trying to, you know, jump the line, maybe I'll say and go right to sending humans into space. So they're not even going to use animals as test subjects in their space research. Did any of that change in that direction, that is fewer animals after Yuri Garin went into space in nineteen sixty one? Because if you could successfully send humans, you know, well, you don't need to send dogs or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. Once we achieved sending humans into space, it totally shifted the concentration of the space program because at that point it was more about getting humans to the moon and that next level or that next frontier of space . And so you see a drastic drop off in what animals were sensed because again, initially those animals were just helping us understand the real basics of space, you know, and what it would be like to get there and how survive do you ? And what are the environmental conditions that you need to send a human there? How long can a human last there? And then what happens is after that, animal research starts to be sort of like they're like stowways, not exactly obviously, they're very, very intentional. And I think I should also be clear that all animals sent to space, especially today are with very clear guidelines, research, intentions and it',s a very well thought out process . But in terms of how that information was cataloged, it sort of stopped being shared on a public level, you know ? It was just sort of small mentions of these other things that were sent up there. And it wasn't until later in the sixties and the seventies , really the seventies and eighties, I should say, where we start sending animals for other purposes, you know, to test other additional things that we want to learn or understand about space , about microgravity, about radiation, about biology , that then these animals have sort of other purposes besides just their general survival. It was sort of a bring them back alive goal, I guess for certainly in the early years. Teddy, tell us what was the biggest and smallest thing that went in the space that you illustrated So the biggest thing was definitely the chimps to either ham or Enos . The smallest thing is the tardigrade as they're microscopic . Many people that I have talked to that aren't in the science field didn't even know tardigrades existed . So that was a lot of fun and they're really small and are hardy and somehow immortal. Yeah, well that's the thing about tardigrades. To begin with they really are microscopic. I suppose if you know there's a tardigrade on a sheet of paper in front of you, you might be able to see the dot, right? But you mentioned they're very, very tough. And I'm probably mistaken here, but I think that some tardigrades actually by accident crash into the moon. My guess is that they're probably still alive, but those tardigrades are so tough, you can do all sorts of stuff with them. So finally, Taylor and Alex , you're sitting next to someone on a bus and they ask you what was the worth of all of it? I mean, was it worth sending animals into space? Was it worth the lives of the animals that didn't make it? What would you say? I would say it was worth it . The beginning was definitely more touch and go regarding survivability , but in general we, have learned so much from these creatures. You know, it is any kind of animal research. It's always a delicate topic, especially in modern times of a conversation, but I think it was absolutely worth it. I think there's so many things that we benefit from on Earth that we don't even realize we've learned from our research in space. And then of course there's always the adventurous and fantastical thinking of well, what happens if we have to live in space one day , you know? And so we're constantly we're still learning about those things. There's still so many unanswered questions about space, you know, can humans procreate in space? Can anything procreate in space? You know, so there's a lot of biological research that's happening with living animals, with animal specimens and other biological specimens that I think is incredibly important to science. Well, Alex Stekmeier, I'd like to thank you so much very for elucidating the adventures of the first space astronauts. Thank you. It's great to be with you today. Taylor Magakimo, thanks very much to you for such an intriguing piece of work. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad everyone enjoyed it. Taylor Magakimo is an associate graphic editor at National Geographic, and Alexander Stegmeier is a freelance graphic editor at the magazine. A link to their feature providing, a visual timeline of every animal that has gone into space is on our website bigpictures dot org dot Well, we made room for them in our rockets, so why don't we make room for them in our ethical treatment of one another? One of the things that's difficult is trying to take the moral codes and values and norms that relate to us as a species and try and extend them out . Coming up why humans have trouble admitting and accepting that we are animals and why it's time to share the planet more equitably with our furry, feathered, and fined relatives. This episode of Big Picture Science is Make Space for Animals When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit at ind ot com slash podcast. That's ind ot com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply . Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. In the mid eighteenth century, Johann Christian Bach composed his symphony in G minor Opus six No six Dramatic stuff. It's compelling harmonies, the complex orchestral depth, the dramatic swagger. Well, that thrilled listeners of that era with stirring and drying. That is to say storm and stress . Similarly, those who stroll through a New York forest at dawn are thrilled by the symphonies offered there, which you might call fader and schnobel, feather and beak . Different kinds of music, to be sure, but each spectacular in its own way. And sure the violin is a difficult instrument to play , but consider what's required for a songbird to make music. Songbirds can do amazing vocal tricks with their voice boxes. They can independently control the branches of an organ called a cryinx. These birds can produce two unrelated pitches at once, even making one rise and the other fall at the same time . I'm lucky if I can whistle a single note. And these animals' ability to make music is frequently cited as evidence of their intelligence, even their special status . Yep, one of these animals because humans are animals too, or have we forgotten that? We have forgotten that. According to Melanie Challenger, a researcher philosopher and the author of How to Be Animal, a new history of what it means to be human. She's familiar with what voice boxes are capable of doing. She is also an opera singer. She makes the case for embracing our animals selves. After all, although it ends up winding through the primates, the human evolutionary lineage is animal all the way back to the sea squirt. We share the overwhelming majority of our genetic material with animals . Yet the frequent practice in Western science and philosophy has been to separate ourselves from the barking, brain, squeaking, snorting creatures whose company we keep. And exceptionalism as it is at the moment , across really most of the world sees a sharp moral divide between humans on the one hand and all of the rest of nature. So it doesn't matter if you're a gorilla or you're a Tukan or what kind of creature you are, what kind of capability you have . If you're not a human , you have almost no real intrinsic val ue, so almost no true moral value on your own terms, whereas human beings are perceived as having full possession of moral status. We have been talking in the show about how we rely on an imals for companionship, food, labor, and as subjects for science research. We use animal characters to provide moral instruction, so why do we have trouble extending our ethical codes to them . Okay , but still I ask you, Melanie, humans are animals, sure, but they do have some exceptional abilities that set them apart, don't they? Yeah, that's true. So I like to say humans are exceptional, but exceptional doesn't mean superior . So all animals to a certain extent are exceptional. They are the product of their evolutionary imperatives and their conditions. And it's remarkable if you can echolocate, for instance . All species have something exceptional about them. We make symphonies and we have a cognitive niche. We can all kinds of remarkable things in our hypersociality, with our cultures and with our minds, for sure. That makes us exceptional. But making a moral leap from that is much more complicated and defining what it is that would make humans only the possessors of any kind of moral value, that's even harder still. I'm not here to defend the homo sapiens, but maybe I will because I don't think I don't think that many people would contest the idea that physiologically we are animals That's pretty clear. And even more that our desires or our competitive natures or whatever you care to point out, a whole lot of our behavior can be found in other species . But you point out this moral difference, I guess, because animals, I mean, if they're predators, you know, they kill other animals. But for them, it's not a moral question, it's survival . So we could assure ourselves that we have this moral superiority. You've already mentioned that . And since animals don't really have morals, isn't it? Isn't that true? I think just because we are moral agents , so as in have the ability to think in moral terms or to develop abstract moral ideas, just because we are moral agents doesn't limit the number of moral subjects that there are. So that's the first thing that I would say. And to look at orangutans as an example. Now orangutans are incredibly similar to us in one particular way, they have a similar kind of gestation period for their offspring and the baby stay with their mother and continue to learn with their mother and contin tou haveed relationships with her mother throughout their lifetimes. If there's something like love, human love in the animal kingdom, it's likely with the orangutan . And yet, we still paradoxically live in a time where Oangrutans are desperately endangered at our hands. We kill them, we take their lands , we destroy their whole evolutionary future because we are absolutely convinced that only we possess moral status. And yet, if we look at that creature, it's really difficult to turn around and say, Well, you can't ride a piano sonata, so that's why I can treat you as though you have absolutely no moral status. You know, funnily enough, I work in classical music, I work alongside one of our finest composers in the UK, Mark Simpson. So I actually work with someone who does write symphonies and it always amuses me when I hear back that kind of thing about human exceptionalism because I always want to ask the questioner you know what can you write a symphony ? Because my suspicion is that that sort of incredible ability that we raise so high among humans is actually very rare across the population. And I certainly wouldn't want to decide that the individual who can't do that has a lesser moral status than the individual who can , it's not a good foundation for our moral behavior, and we shouldn't apply it across the species boundary either. I think that bad as it may be, you know, the people on the planet today are more sympathetic confreres, if you will, to all the other DNA based life, which is to say all life than predecessors might have been. How do you feel about things like giving, well, the orangutans, for example , rights that they could defend in a court. I mean, should they have not just environmental regulations that control what you can do with their land and all that sort of stuff, but I mean that they actually have rights . Yeah, so I think we are moving to an era where the moral circle expanding. You could argue that there was a time and probably in different worldviews , that moral circle did not contract as much as it has done in modern industrial societies . So I worked with inuit hunters for instance in the earlier stage of my career and with the kind of some innovate points of view , you have to treat other organisms with respect that you don't treat them. You treat them as interrelated and you treat them as having been possessors of value and right s on their own terms . Obviously in the history of Western legal thinking, we're really far away from that, but you have things like the Non Human Rights Project led by Stephen Wise and other projects like that that are showing and you know, we've had the rights of nature wild laws sort of on the horizon that and recently the idea of eco side , we're definitely seeing both a moral and as a consequence a legal shift and that will inevitably continue . What I think is important is that we recognise that organisms can communicate on their own terms. Now we're not going to drag them into a court of law. They don't want to be there. It would be distressing for them were they to be there , but we can listen to them and we can respond to what they either vocalize or behaviorally us about their interests. I do believe that many other organisms are capable communicating their own interests to us , but we will only respond to those when we regard them as having a value on their own terms. Well, what's the path toward that? I mean, we have modern biology. Of course, everybody, I think now knows that they are an animal, at least in the physiological sense, in the biological sense . And personally, I'm willing to be an animal. I mean, the dog here has a pretty good life and just eating and sleeping, chasing those curls. But how do I do it? You seem to suggest that if I'm willing to admit that I'm just another watery bag at a basic level, the same as a lot of other watery bags , and you know, maybe I'll be more sympathetic to the other creatures here. Is that the idea? Should I stop eating animals or stop taking their habitat? What should I do? Well, I think fellowship is the key to Armor ality. I think it's really important to understand what it is that inspires our moral action and our moral agency . And usually it turns on compassion . And I mean that in the literal sense, so compassio to suffer with others . So to have empathy for them, to recognise that they and key to this is also recognising that their life matters , that their form of suffering matters. It might not be translatable quite to our form, for instance . We're looking at totally different body plans, totally different body forms out there, different needs, different desires , but I do believe it's only fellowship and only inspiring fellowship that is likely to properly motivate us in a moral shift. But personally, yes, I'm very determined and hopeful that that shift is coming. Finally, so if we extend a moral code that we develop to not just our next in line smartest critters on the planet like those orangutans, you know, what would that look like? I mean, do the bacteria on the floor here, do they get rites of some sort? Yeah, so that's always the concern that people have when we started to trespass into the moral lives of other organisms or moral status . So the way that I try to see this that moral duties should be determined by the organism in its own beautiful singularity . One of the things that's difficult trying to take the moral codes and values and norms that relate to us as a species and try and extend them out because it seems to make sense and in fact we already do it to a certain extent with other mammals because a lot of the things that we've encoded . So for instance, the kinds of suffering that we've encoded, the kind of cognitive traits that we have, so our sense of subjectivity, for instance, we've encoded into law and into our moral values , and it feels relatively easy to extend that out to say chimpanzees, to the great oaks broadly, to even potentially to dolphins. These are another very social mammal. But once you start looking at a shark, for instance, it starts to get a little bit more problematic. Once you're talking about a hummingbird , you're in the realms of it being completely bizarre. And so our best bet really is to look at moral subjecthood, so to recognise that life is a good starting point for assuming there is some sort of intrinsic value there , that there is agency in all life, and therefore there is an intention, even if that intention is only to persist, for instance , in all life, and that is some kind of moral status that we can recognise . But your duties are going to be determined by the differences in those organisms and your duties and the sorts of ways that you might behave towards a hummingbird, for instance, and the s orts of needs that a humming bird might have to flourish or a single cell organism or a sponge on the ocean floor are going to be wildly different to the needs and the duties that would follow when we consider a dolphin or a primate or a fellow human . Melanie Challenger, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you. A pleasure . Really enjoyed it. Melanie Challen ger is a writer philosopher, and she is the author of How to Be Animal, a new history of what it means to be human. Well, Seth, we're at that point where we asked what the big picture is here. And what do you see as the big picture? Well, for me, the big picture was that we have changed our attitudes, our relationships to animals, right? I mean, we heard about all those space critters that that entered the final frontier in Silver and Sun. That's extremely interesting actually . But for me, you know, exploiting animals , nobody ever thought of it in that way. Nobody thought that it was a bad thing. And we've been exploiting animals for three hundred thousand years. Well, I'm thankful that our attitude toward animals have shifted. I think there's still a great deal further to go on the ethical front . But it also seems interesting to me that we need to evaluate animals in terms of their intelligence and establish their intelligence as a marker of their value and whether or not we should accord them ethical consideration . I don't know if it matters whether or not an anal is intelligent. I think what's important is that animals can suffer and animals have complex emotional lives . And these should be guides as to how we treat our fellow animals on this planet. And as we stated in the show, we are we are also animals. Humans are animals and these are our companions and you know they deser,ve they deserve respect . Well, I mean, that extends a certain way back in evolutionary development. I don't know how you'd feel about, you know, according all these attributes, if you will , are behaviors to things like cockroaches, right? They deserve all respect. Yeah, at a certain level they do, but you know, it's not the same as a horse, for example, or a cat or a dog or any of the, if you will, other vertebrates that are so close to us. Melanie Challenger said they don't need to be the same, and I would agree with her on that. But how do we define the border? Well, that's complicated , so I guess we'll have to apply ourselves. I mean, what you say about a cockroach is, yes, I don't know that I would try to advocate for in a court of law for the rights of a cockroach, but I also wouldn't torture a cockroach because I know a cockroach and some scientists argue that cockroaches have consciousness , a cockroach can feel pain . Tell the story your walk through the forest of Borneo and what happened because I understand that it made a big impression on you. What it did, we got to this nature reserve. It's actually a national park in southern Borneo. It was surrounded by jungle and just this small boat going up this narrow river. Anyhow, eventually we got to this nature preserve and there were the orangutans . And you know, they saw us. You know, every day they would see humans, so it wasn't so special for them. It was special for me though . But you know, they would come down for the food and all that sort of thing. But at some point a young orangutan descended from the tree and took my hand and walked alongside me for a while. It was completely natural as a child would do it . And that made an impression. What did his hand feel like? It felt like a human hand, it wasn't any different. A little smaller, maybe. Because it was a young aerangutan. That is so sweet . But, you know, it was me morable This show is made possible thanks to the animal instincts of senior producer Gary Niderhoff and Assistant producers Brian Edwards and Shannon Rose Guary. I exec'utmive producers of big picture science, Molly Bentley. I'm CED Institute Astronomer Seth Shostak. Also a big thanks to our listeners and our Patreon supporters. Original Music in the show by Dewey Delay and June Miyaki and, a special thanks to Laika and Ham and the other animals named and unnamed, who contributed to this space program , and whose memory inspired this episode, and to all the species who contribute to the stunning diversity of life on this planet. This episode of Big Picture Science exploring our relationship to them is called Make Space for Animals . You may be listening to our radio show, but if you want pipeside to better conform to your gust of grabbing lifestyle, why not subscribe to the By Pi Side podcast? That way you'll never miss an episode. You'll find links on our website to the platforms that carry us. Looking to get the most out of your money, your time, and generally give your life an upgrade? Well, I'm sure you do, and that's why I want to tell you about a podcast that I really love. 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