Bonus: Critical Animal Theory with Lori Gruen and Alice Crary

In this bonus episode Claudia talks to Alice Crary and Lori Gruen about their recent book “Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory.” They touch on what inspired the book and spend most of the conversation focused on what “Critical Animal Theory” means. It is a timely and theoretically dense conversation.

Date Recorded: 1 August 2022

Alice Crary is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School, where she is a co-founder and steering committee member of the Collaborative for Climate Futures. She was previously Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research (2014-2017) and Founding Co-Director of the Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies (2014-2017). As a moral and social philosopher, Crary has written widely on issues in metaethics, moral psychology and normative ethics, philosophy and literature, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical environmental studies, critical disability studies, and Critical Theory. Alice is also the author of Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought as well as Beyond Moral Judgment. You can find out more about Crary and her work at www.alicecrary.com. 

Lori Gruen has been involved in animal issues as a writer, teacher, and activist for over 30 years. She is currently the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University.  She is also a professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Science in Society, and founder and coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies.  She is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Entangled Empathy ; Critical Terms for Animal Studies ; and Animaladies: Gender, Animals and Madness, to name a few. Gruen’s work lies at the intersection of ethical and political theory and practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked in philosophical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, incarcerated people, non-human animals.  Find out more about Lori on her website (www.lorigruen.com) or connect with her on Twitter (@last1000chimps) 
 

Featured: 

Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory by Alice Crary and Lori Gruen; Animal Liberation by Peter Singer; Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson;

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is another I Roll podcast.

SPEAKER_03: 0:04

We have a really specific story, which is true about how we came to write this book together, but I think that we decided to write this book and that it has this shape, has in the background our shared conviction about the urgency of our circumstances, and so that what would be relevant to do together, which is what we try to do in animal crisis, is demonstrate the possibility of doing animal ethics in a way that's genuinely oriented to and meaningfully addresses the desperate nature of the circumstances that we're in.

SPEAKER_01: 0:45

Welcome back to The Animal Turn. This is a first for the Animal Turn. In this episode, we're going to be doing a book review and kind of a book review. We're going to be talking to Alice Crowry and Lori Gruen about their latest book, Animal Crisis. And um I've never really had a book or a text as the main center of an episode, and I'm trying something out now in this bonus episode. Because what often tends to happen is I have these cool seasons that are very concentrated on specific concept, and I get contacted sometimes by publishers or by people that are doing cool side projects, and I find myself often saying no to really cool people who are doing really important work because it doesn't quite fit within the season. So I'm trying something out here where there's potentially space for different kinds of conversations, and this is one of them, where we're doing something of a book review, but we're still keeping our conceptual focus of the podcast in mind. So in this episode, I speak to Alice and Lori about their most recent book, and we focus in on the main thrust of their work, which is critical animal theory. And you'll hear throughout this episode that I'm really trying to grapple with critical animal theory. What is it? How does it differ from critical animal studies broadly? What are we talking about here? What are some of the main tenets of it? And it is quite theoretically dense. But towards the end of the episode, we try to bring some more examples in and to just kind of ground the conversation a bit. If you haven't checked out Alice and Lori's book, definitely go have a look. It's it's really put together well, it's accessible. The examples in the book are, I think they're really doing a lot of great work to kind of ground these theoretical and abstract conversations in the actual lives of animals, to make the reality of kind of the environmental disasters, but also threats to biosecurity, concerns about health, um, you know, ideas about which animals are considered disgusting or not and what that does to their dignity. All of these sorts of, I think, fundamental questions that animal study scholars have been grappling with come up in this book. So if you haven't seen it, go check out Animal Crisis, a new critical theory. And that's kind of the focus of the conversation today. I think many of you have probably heard of Alice Crowy and Lori Grün before, but if you haven't, I'm going to give you a quick synopsis of who they are. Alice Crowy is a university distinguished professor of philosophy at the New School, where she is a co-founder and steering committee member of the Collaborative for Climate Futures. She was previously Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the founding co-director of the Graduate Certificates in Gender and Sexuality Studies. As a moral and social philosopher, Alice has written widely on issues of meta ethics, moral psychology, and normative ethics, as well as philosophy and literature, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical environmental studies, critical disability studies, and now also critical theory. So she definitely knows her critical stuff. Alice is also the author of Inside Ethics on the Demands of Moral Thought, as well as Beyond Moral Judgment. If you want to learn more about Alice and her work, go check out her website, AliceCrowry.com. Now, Laurie Grun has been involved with animal issues as a writer, teacher, and activist for over 30 years. She is currently the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Westland University. She's also a professor of feminist gender and sexuality studies, science and society, and the founder and coordinator of Westland Animal Studies. She's the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Entangled Empathy, Critical Terms for Animal Studies, and Animalities, Gender, Animals, and Madness. And that's just to name a few. Groon's work lies at the intersection of ethical and political theory and practice, and she has a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked in philosophical investigations, such as women, people of colour, incarcerated people, as well as non-human animals. Find out more about Laurie and her work on her website, www.laurygroon.com, or connect with her on Twitter at last1000chips. All of these details are, of course, in the show notes, as always. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a review or share it. And I promise that more is to come. I am busy recording the episodes for the upcoming season on Biosecurity, which is going to be really interesting. And I hope you'll enjoy that. But for now, let's enjoy some bonus content and learn about a new book together. So it's lovely to have you on the show with me today, Alice and Lori. And how I start every episode is kind of finding out a little bit about you and how you came to animal studies. So before we get into looking at the concept and talking about your book, perhaps each of you could give me a little bit of a sense of how you came to be interested in animals and doing animal studies.

SPEAKER_02: 5:56

Well, I I this is Lori, and I actually got interested in animals, like most of us, at a very young age. But when I got into animal studies, it really was before there was animal studies. It was when quite a long time ago, in as an undergraduate, I took philosophy classes, and I was lucky to have a class that had animals as a topic in an animal ethics context. And I actually became very fond of utilitarianism, both because I was an activist and the animal movement was primarily informed, at least held up by some version of utilitarianism. And it was also something that I was learning about in philosophy classes, of course. It took me a while to realize that that was really not the way I wanted to go. But I suffered through the scorn of my friends and colleagues before I finally decided that yeah, uh this isn't going to be uh a good sort of theoretical ground for me.

SPEAKER_01: 6:59

And you you started, you have a background in gender studies as well, right? Gender, gender studies or exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 7:05

But I also so interestingly, my my work in animals even predates that. Um so I started, I mean, I became vegan almost 40 years ago. So before there was anything out there to eat, and I'd have to make my own um the world was like a massive smorgasbord for you now.

SPEAKER_01: 7:24

You're like going down the street, got all these vegan options. What?

SPEAKER_02: 7:28

Exactly. And it was, I remember I went to England really early on, and I couldn't believe they had soya milk there that was all around. Like I thought, what? I make this at home, and you can't find it in any stores. Um, so yeah, my interest in animal ethics in particular and animal activism sort of predates my interest in, you know, gender studies and other kinds of sort of social justice issues. They started to blend together in my activism in the sort of early 90s. And um and then when I went back to graduate school, so I was I went to graduate school for a little while, then I decided to do activism full-time, and that activism involved both gender, race, and animals. And then I went back to graduate school, and feminism and feminist philosophy was much more available to me then.

SPEAKER_01: 8:20

And what what compelled you to go vegan all those all those years ago? What was like the yes, this is what I need to do?

SPEAKER_02: 8:27

Um well, so I read Animal Liberation, the first edition, and pretty quickly realized that it didn't make sense to use female animals in the ways that we do for what Carol J. Adams calls feminized protein, um, eggs and milk. And so I decided even far it wasn't Peter Singer's Animal Liberation wasn't a vegan book, it was a vegetarian book. Um, but I decided that it didn't make sense to exclude the female animals from the equation, as it were.

SPEAKER_01: 9:00

Fascinating. Uh how about you, Alice? How did you come to be interested in animals and animal studies?

SPEAKER_03: 9:05

I think my path is in some ways similar to Lori's and in some ways really different. So as Lori said, so many of us have uh connections with relationships to animals when we're young, and and then we draw on those. One story I'll remember from my childhood, I don't know how significant it was, but it sticks with me is I my maternal grandfather would not eat chicken because he had been to a chicken slaughter facility. And I can remember my mother always, you know, making a soup and trying to hide from him the fact that she'd used chicken stock or something like that. And so the idea that you could be traumatized by seeing what happened to animals was there for me. I mean, I lived in a very um disorderly household in which we rescued lots of dogs and cats in a sort of disorderly way. And that was all there in the background for me when I started to study philosophy. I did not have an activist background as an animal advocate, although I did come into philosophy as someone with serious feminist commitments and someone who had I had traveled to Latin America studying liberation theology. It's not that I didn't have an activist orientation, it just wasn't centered on animals. And interesting, as I was listening to Lori talk, I'm gonna say something in public I don't think I've ever said before. I think I taught an animal ethics class before I'd ever taken one. So I was interested, I early on, by the time I'd finished my undergraduate studies in philosophy at which was at Harvard, I had come into contact with, although not met face to face, the philosopher Cora Diamond. And I was taken by animal questions in ethics, and taken by her approach to them. And so when I went to graduate school in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, I wanted to teach an animal ethics class and I figured out how to do it. Um yeah, so I'm much more a second generation person than Lori is, but still the animal ethics wasn't as common. And and uh Lori is one of the people who radicalized me. Um I I not that I wasn't radical, I'm in some sense a radical person, but um um I I had the question of animals as a kind of provocative centerpiece for work in ethics. I think that's a way of describing what was happening in my work. I was thinking, how can you trust or or or I was using dissatisfaction with the way moral philosophers talk about animals as a kind of clue to reorienting ethics and and the critical issues about animals were part of what I was doing. But I met Lori, I forget what year it is, at an event at Yale, the bio Yale Bioethics Group, and and I was talking about things that she and I now work on together, but she said to me something like, Why aren't you more out there? Why aren't you? And I was like, I don't I don't know how do I do that? I don't um so anyway, we have a we have a history somewhere, it's something like 10 years ago. Maybe, yeah. More than that, more like 15. Yeah, more like 15 years ago. I I mean I was already a vegan and and things like that. It's not that my life didn't reflect my values, but I just didn't know as many people.

unknown: 12:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 12:34

And I think it can be a relatively hard line to sometimes, you know, you're vegan and then there's the academy, and you can sometimes create a separation, right? Like animals can be interesting, or your research subject can be interesting, uh, in scare quotes, whatever that means. But then you can have your veganism and your own personal, this idea that somehow it's a personal commitment, veganism. Um and I think a lot of people struggle to see the ways in which they can bring those kinds of ethical commitments and political ideas into their research. I think particularly as a young, uh, as a young or emerging scholar, you're like, how do I how do I even do that? Um yeah, so I don't know. And I think it's fascinating that you taught a course on animal ethics. Did you find, um, like Lori, that your initial introduction or leanings were also utilitarian in nature? No, no.

SPEAKER_03: 13:21

I mean, we we we bring different things to the work we do together in a way that I think is incredibly helpful, at least I'm gonna speak for myself and satisfying for both of us. And and Lori's activist background and lots of her political engagements have been really important to me. Going to her um Wesleyan-based uh summer institute on animals and race was a really important thing for me uh several years ago. Um, and I've always been an oppositional philosopher. And and so, and and that I think also provides some provocation in the work that we do together.

SPEAKER_01: 13:59

Could you maybe tell us what a what an oppositional philosopher is?

SPEAKER_03: 14:04

Certainly not a really easy thing to do, but we're gonna be talking today with you about what it means to be doing critical animal theory, as we call it in our book, Animal Crisis. And they're one of the one, I mean, I'm not about to give you a full description of what we're doing, but um, but we're challenging, to put it really abstractly, just for a moment, we are challenging deeply in culturally and philosophically ingrained views about what it is to get aspects of the world, in this case the lives of animals, into view. And part of what critical animal theory means is thinking, I may need engagement. I do need engagement, I need political and historical perspectives in order to see what I need to see. And what comes with that is that a normative orientation is already built into the exercise of understanding animals. That's a really difficult thought to express within most philosophical institutions in the Anglophone world right now, and many non-anglophone ones, uh, you know, European ones, um, and and and farther afield in the world. Um, and there are political and historical reasons for that, but that's that would be the kind of thing we had you have this image of the world as requiring moral and political effort to get into view. That's one of the oppositional thoughts.

SPEAKER_02: 15:28

And if I can just add, going back to what Alice said about our encounter way back when, and I know we have very different ways of remembering it and thinking about it, but it is, I think, Alice's oppositional theoretical stance that made me excited about getting her out more in the world because it is really a fundamentally different orientation to both ethics and I would say animal studies more broadly. It's a deeply radical perspective. And I've learned so much from Alice because of this kind of her way of approaching ethical and political issues. So I think that's something I also wanted to add about that. It the oppositional nature is it's it's a much it's radical in the true sense of radical. That is, it it's going deeper and looking at the bottom of how these formations emerge and what they can do for you and what they can't do for you. So um, in that way, Alice's sensibility is has been just super instructive and important for me. And I think um it's really a central part of the book that we wrote.

SPEAKER_01: 16:38

Well, maybe now we can switch a bit to to talking a bit about the book. Uh, and and I love that you guys have collaborated with one another for, you know, 15 years and chatted with each other and and found kind of a generative space to talk through these ideas and and build on. It's it's great. It's inspiring. So it's really wonderful to hear. But talking about the book now, perhaps we could start with just a really broad general question about uh what is the book about and what inspired you to write the book?

SPEAKER_03: 17:08

Um I'm gonna talk just about writing the book together because it's something that I think neither of us has said quite yet, but is important for both of us, which is, and I think for a lot of scholars working on animals, the environment, there's this moment where you you recognize maybe in a way that you haven't before, not merely intellectually, how desperately urgent the circumstances of our the world we live in at this moment. That we're in the midst of, in terms of human-animal relations, an unfolding catastrophe. And and one of the ways we tend to put it is something like the human devastation of animals and their habitats is something that now in our lifetimes already, it's already happening, has existential implications for all of life on earth, human beings, for animals, and for all other organisms. And so, in a sense, if you if you say what it is that we have a really specific story which is true about how we came to write this book together, but I think that we decided to write this book and that it has this shape, has in the background our shared conviction about the urgency of our circumstances and so that that what would be relevant to do together, which is what we try to do in animal crisis, is demonstrate the possibility of doing animal ethics in a way that's genuinely oriented to and meaningfully addresses the desperate nature of the circumstances that we're in. It's a very general answer, but I do think that gives a sense of what the book is about. Um and I'm gonna stop talking for a moment and see if Lori wants to say anything more specific about how we came to write the book, because there are real specifics too.

SPEAKER_02: 18:54

Right, and we talk a little bit more general. We talk a little bit about them in the be at the beginning of the book and and sort of why we why we came to do it. But I think the other thing that's really important about why we wrote the book and why we wrote the book the way we did is that as Alice just said, we're in a catastrophic moment. And you know, animal ethics and to some extent less at less longevity animal studies has kind of been grappling with a set of issues, but none of them have actually touched in a very deep way the crisis. And so what we're thinking about is a way of sort of looking at structures that uh are harmful to both humans and non-humans and trying to unpack those structures so that we can get a better vision of what it is that's at stake before it's too late.

SPEAKER_01: 19:52

And it's it's interesting that you guys use the word so you use crisis and catastrophe, and and Alice, when you were speaking there, you said a human-animal relationship crisis or relation crisis. And for me, that's kind of interesting in how you're using language because oftentimes we kind of use climate change as a shorthand or environmental disaster as a shorthand, which is certainly an important way of talking about this. But I've often struggled with how sometimes a focus on climate change can abstract some of the very specific specific ways in which we relate to animals. Animals kind of get usurped in the idea of what nature is or environment is.

SPEAKER_02: 21:10

But on the one hand, it is a commonly used notion or word for the urgency of the matter, right? That there's an urgent problem that needs to be sort of attended to. But I think also in the context of thinking about crisis, um one is called upon to act in the face of crisis. Whereas if you have a problem, then you need to find a solution. Um, and that's also true. We're not suggesting you just act randomly. But I do think that the notion of a crisis sort of elevates the motivation to do something and to do something quickly. Um, there's also a really important temporal element, and we talk a little bit about this at the end of the, at the end of the book. And as I said a moment ago, I mean we don't, we just can't sit around pontificating for too much longer. Too many animals and are dying, too many humans are being sort of grievously injured and excluded, and the planet's you know on the brink. So it's not a it's not something that sort of we could see as a scholarly matter that we could spend, you know, a couple of decades trying to figure out what the issues are. And animal ethics has been around for 50 years, and unfortunately, more animals are used in industrial food systems than than when animal ethics began by a large number. So we really need we really also think we need a change in orientation, a gestalt change, as it were, a perspective change.

SPEAKER_01: 22:40

Yeah, a different way of thinking. And I you gave an egg a a stat, um, a stat um that just blew my mind in the book. At one point you were speaking about pigs and uh industrial slaughter. And what did you say? You said if if humans were killed at the same rate at which animals are killed, the human species would be extinct in 17 days, which is just it's it's kind of I know it's a it's a quick blurb, it's a quick snapshot of something, but it's really something that's stuck in my head. 17 days and the whole human species would be gone if we if we um you know did that to our own, which is just uh yeah, it's a huge, huge uh number. Sometimes we kind of get lost in the numbers. When we speak about animals, you you speak in the millions and billions, and you kind of forget the the details and that this is life and death in the truest sense of the word. Alice, I think you had something to say there.

SPEAKER_03: 23:30

Oh, I was gonna pick up on the notion of crisis, which is the the lead that you had in asking Lori this last question. Uh, I just thought it was important to add to the really fantastic things Lori just said, that uh we're both talking about things that could be called individual crises. You just referred to one, um, sort of the deliberate slaughter of animals and industrial animal agriculture on land and on sea. We talk about other crises having to do with industry-driven deforestation, for instance, for the palm oil industry. We talk about the trade in exotic animals, we talk about human insect conflicts and um how humans have responded in ways threatening to all lives. So you could sort of list crises. But one of the one of the reasons the book has the title, it does, this is something Lori and I have talked about, is that we want we want to bring out this is the way the narrative of the book works, ways in which these crises are are related to each other, so that in a sense we are talking about one crisis. And so the idea of the animal crisis is one that we want to be developing and are developing.

SPEAKER_01: 24:44

And I think it really came through in your writing um the complexity of you know a crisis or multiple kind of crises that are enmeshed with one another and related to one another. Because I think I don't and I'm assuming this was intentional, but the way every chapter kind of ended alluded to the next one and kind of showing that they do bleed into and blend into one another, these these different uh crises. Okay, so we've got a kind of general understanding now of the book, the book title Animal Crisis, and that it was a response to um to, well, one, the kind of urgency to do something and do something now, and two, a kind of uh criticism or critique of animal ethics to some extent uh in terms of how it's been thinking about animals up to up to date. So that's a really good kind of baseline for us to start talking about your main contribution in the book, which was critical animal theory. Uh so before I get into maybe more specific questions about that, maybe you could just give us a synopsis of what is critical animal theory. I know you wrote a whole book about it, but uh if you could just tell me in too quick, no, I'm joking. Um, Alice, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03: 25:46

Um, yeah, I'm gonna do this really quickly, and I know Lori will want to follow up and flesh out, but I think you're right. It's probably helpful to just outline it really quickly. So I'm gonna do it in, I think, say three movements. The first is uh presupposition, which is something we've been talking about already. So there's the presupposition that there are important structural ties between the devastation and killing of animals and the oppression of marginalized groups of human beings. So that presupposition of what we're doing gives us the idea that meaningful interventions on behalf of animals need to address such structures. And then I want to mention two further features and of critical animal theory, and they they really go so closely together it's hard to pull them apart. One is simply that the structures that we want to talk about get ideologically obscured so that ideology critique, which is often not seen as part of animal ethics, becomes part of the endeavor. And the other is that this critique, sometimes it's conceived so that what needs to happen is you're, as it were, we're clearing away, obscuring obstacles to a neutral space, as if you could get back to some perfect place for discourse and vision. And it's part of our image, um, and it's important part of the strands of critical social thought that we're inheriting on behalf of our project, that actually the kind of thought that we need in order to see both structures that harm and also animals themselves is going to be informed by historical and political perspectives. And that really is where you get the link to things, other things people have called critical theory. Theory here isn't coming up with a set of principles and then applying them to the cases of animals, like a kind of applied ethics. It's rather doing the work to bring engagements, relationships with animals historically and politically into view, and getting your normative orientation from that. And two really important points of reference for both Lori and me are radical feminist traditions that do this, and also um early contributions to the Frankfurt School, where you have the idea of critical theory as attention to the suffering of oppressed humans were expanding that and talking about attention to the lives of animals also as a source of normal normative orientation.

SPEAKER_02: 28:15

Yeah, I mean, I think another thing we we uh we should just sort of note by way of comparison, at least in the United States, is that there's been a re sort of birth of critical race theory and a whole set of politics around critical race theory. Um, and one of the things, I mean, it's a it's a rich theory and the controversy minimizes and kind of mischaracterizes what critical race theory actually contributes to our understanding. But at its core, I think what it contributes is an understanding that the structures that have emerged are exclusionary by nature, on purpose. And the sort of historical and material conditions that Alice alluded to are very central to understanding how it is that racism operates so that it isn't an individual response to, you know, um race, so I'm not a racist, is not going to help us understand the structures that perpetuate sort of racial exclusion and racial violence. And similarly, and we'll talk about this, I hope, a little bit, you know, even though our personal decisions about what we eat, as we were talking about and being vegans and whatnot, are an important part of what we're doing in terms of our relationships with animals, that's not going to get at the problems that we are addressing in animal crisis. And so critical animal theory is a really important idea that suggests that we really do need to look at these structures.

SPEAKER_01: 29:48

So if I understand correctly, uh at its core critical animal theory is a way in which you do ethics. Um, and you are trying to do ethics in a way that is more To the actual relationships and how they've been shaped both historically and at present, and how this has created structures that shape those relationships. That it's not, it's not just individual choices, but these relationships are shaped by much broader, much more complicated structures. And as ethicists or as animal study scholars, we need to pay attention to how those structures operate and not necessarily give formulas for those responses.

SPEAKER_02: 30:30

It's exactly right. And the really important, I mean, I think one of the really important ideas here is that it is, as Alice alluded to, and I'll just reiterate, the ethical theories that we were familiar with in animal ethics really are completely distinct from larger and um deeper traditions of social thought, right? So in some sense, they're they operate kind of by pushing aside historical, social psychological, material, um, and other kinds of forces that are operating in shaping our very ideas, right? So this is, I think, um part of what we're getting at in the book.

SPEAKER_01: 31:14

So what are some of those? And and again, you spoke there, I think a bit about feminism, critical race theory. These are branches of thought that do this really well, this kind of embedded thinking about how we relate to one another and and how both the personal, you know, the personal and the political kind of function in and through one another. Um, but what are some of these traditional um ethical frameworks for thinking about animals that that you are critiquing here?

SPEAKER_03: 31:43

Well, I think uh your listeners will probably be familiar with some of them, but we're we we um we're talking about on the one hand, roughly utilitarian-influenced traditions in in animal ethics that focus on suffering, the suffering of animals, um, on how to lessen suffering or how to um um increase um enjoyment and pleasure in in animals. And that's on the one hand. And on the other hand, uh the way animal ethics is often taught, you have also in conversation with utilitarian-influenced or welfareist approaches in animal ethics, rights-based approaches, which are often focused on um sometimes focused on on different sources of their accounts of the moral standing of animals, and then on suggesting that animals have inviolable rights either not to be treated in certain ways or to be accorded certain forms of respect. And I think I'm speaking for both of us and saying that for both of us, these traditions have done important things. It's this isn't a complete dismissal of the traditions by any means. And one thing that work in both strands of animal ethics has done is drawn attention in ways that that many members of the public's attention hasn't been on the plight of animals. But the kind of critique that we're talking about here, I can give an illustration of it with regard to welfareist or utilitarian-oriented approaches, is that suppose you know you're a utilitarian, you're looking at the horrors of industrial animal agriculture, and you're thinking, how do I make a difference so that there isn't as much suffering? And some of the kinds of interventions that have been widely pursued among pro-animal utilitarians are things like, hey, let's get larger cages so animals aren't packed and crammed together as they are, or let's eliminate cages entirely. And those things in isolation seem really good. What could be wrong with minimum, you know, make lessening the suffering of animals? We don't think there's anything wrong. That's of course really important. But when you don't take a look at the larger systems, social systems, historical structures into which industrial animal agriculture is integrated, there's a danger that by working with industry and doing things like going cage-free or making cages bigger, that what you're doing, in effect, despite your best intentions, is perpetuating a set of systems and institutions that regularly reproduce horrible suffering and death of animals. And and so so that the criticism turns out for us to be very, very important that you have to be looking at these systems, the larger systems, otherwise you're in danger. And there's no question of questioning, there's no question of attacking the motivations of our colleagues who favor these approaches. They they are they are trying to make a difference. But the idea is that despite their best intentions, they can actually be contributing to the perpetuation of these systems.

SPEAKER_01: 35:10

I mean, this this speaks a little bit to what you were talking about earlier when we were speaking a bit about your your backgrounds uh and also this idea of shifting the way in which you think, the basis of which, you know, what is it that gets animals into cages in the first place? Um and and how do we start to just reshape that? Uh I know you use vision as a metaphor or as a as a tool as well throughout throughout your book. How do we literally and in yeah, literally start to see and relate differently? Um, how do we imagine animals as something other than something or someone who could be in a cage? And and I think that that's a very different question to responding to the existing pain. And it is, it's a radical and it's a hard, it's a hard thought to have, I think, when your whole life you've kind of been told animals are things that are specific animals in particular, right? Chickens are things in scare quotes that go in cages. And trying to think differently that no animals are creatures who are really sophisticated thinking beings who speak in a variety of different ways and have social relationships. Um, why would we want to put them in a cage is a very different starting point.

SPEAKER_02: 36:22

And I just want to add that, I mean, I think that's another part of this, it's really important to think about it as a way of criticizing the traditional theories. And as Alice says, we're not completely criticizing in the sense that it was really an emote an important achievement to get people to pay attention to the suffering of animals and not think of them as insensitive or insentient things. So that was a really important achievement. But at the core, and this is something that's really important for our work, is that there are these hierarchies in place, these ums of value that are in place. And usually it's very specific individuals with very specific capacities that are thought to be at the top of these hierarchies. Or you could think about it also as in a circle, an extended circle. And at the center of the circle are these individuals that are the most valuable from for these different theoretical frameworks, utilitarianism and most rights-based theories. And what you need to do, these theories suggest, is bring others into that center. So notice what it is that you have, what capacities are important for those at the center, and see who else has the capacities. And in doing that, you think you're bringing about something like equality or something like, you know, ethical engagement or fairness. But what we're suggesting is that that very structure, putting some individuals at the top or at the center, is part of a problem. And we need to really unpack that problem because you can't just let a few in to your center and think you've done the ethical thing or the right thing or the good thing, but rather what you're ending up doing is creating a different kind of division of inclusion and exclusion. And so thinking hard about those ways of allowing some in at the same time, recognizing that you're going to, in doing that, exclude others is a really important part of the work we're trying to do. And we get this, I think, in the example of just to go with rights theory, of the recent work that the non-human rights project has done about Happy the Elephant, trying to get saying how smart and engaging and socially remarkable this particular individual is. And given that we have, you know, rights to not be imprisoned without due process as humans who have these capacities, we should extend that to others that have those capacities. Well, what'll that what'll that mean about you know those individuals, human and non-human, who don't share those capacities? And what about the remarkable differences that are so wondrous and sort of mind expanding that we see? What are we supposed to think of those? And so part of our work is to try to sort of reframe how it is that that almost implicit set of assumptions that has permeated animal ethics needs to be made both explicit and challenged.

SPEAKER_01: 39:38

And and one of the key ways in which you, I think, challenge us in the book is to bring specific animals to the fore throughout your writing. Each chapter focuses uh let me uh each chapter focuses on a different set of animal. So you've got orangutans when you're looking at crisis, pigs, um, ethics. And as you said, these are not kind of mutually exclusive. They they they lend to one another. Suffering and cows, mines and octopuses, dignity and rats, seeing and parrots and weights. I know that there's a third one, it's ticks and politics. Um third one, seventh one. Um and and I think what you're doing kind of in in splitting these, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is part of that work of thinking differently, of being specific with animals and of also not abstracting them. Because I think sometimes, even just now when I'm speaking about chickens, we have a tendency of saying, oh, chickens, as though all chickens around the world are exactly the same and share the same culture. Or and you start to speak to people about elephants or about whales or about chimpanzees and cows and et cetera, and you start to realize, oh no, wait, it's not just at the species level that uh we have similarities. We would not accept that for humans, right? We appreciate that we have different cultures, we have different languages, we have different different social relationships depending on our own environments, our own histories, our own um settings. So it is kind of curious that we not only flatten it with animals and at the species level, but that we also have this tendency of expecting the wide variety of everything that is in the category of animal to somehow be the same as us. It's just, it's um, it's yeah, it's kind of bizarre when you when you think about it.

SPEAKER_03: 41:19

It is.

SPEAKER_01: 41:21

So with those chapters in mind, um, you've touched on several of those themes now. Um could you maybe give us some examples from here? So you spoke about crisis and orangutans and palm oil, and I think we we touched a little bit on that in terms of you know the environmental devastation. But you kind of go why the strategy of using a specific kind of species and a specific concept to build those ideas?

SPEAKER_03: 41:47

Well, one thing that we're aiming at, you've already alluded to, which is early on in in writing this book together, we had certain commitments. And one was not to treat animals as abstraction. So so really early on, we had the idea that anything we wanted to write about themes that we thought were important needed to be centered, and so the opposite of applied ethics, not let's not theorize first and then look at animals and see how things apply to them. That's not the way we're going. We're trying to show that um a wisdom, a practical wisdom comes from attention to the lives of animals themselves. So that that's the basic the way we got started. And then um I have to think, and Lori may correct me because as she pointed out earlier, my memory isn't always perfect of how we got to where we are. But but um but then the actual animals we chose to focus on in the actual cases was part of an ongoing discussion as we wrote the book. And there was at least one case in which we really importantly wanted to talk about a particular animal and felt like we could bring out some of the tensions and provocative questions uh in addressing the theme we were going to address by placing that and a discussion of that animal somewhere else. Um, it was also, I'm gonna, you asked for examples, so I'm gonna talk about one that sort of flows naturally from things you were just asking about. It it's really important to the book that we talk about insects. So the last chapter, as you noted, that ticks is the featured animal, and we write quite a bit about mosquitoes also. And one thing your listeners won't know is that before we all started today, we were also talking about flies. We don't write about flies. Um but um but the things Lori is saying are really important, and I think I can bring together a couple of threads from our conversation by turning to some of the things we say about ticks. So so we are talking about the importance, we're not trying to deny that human beings and insects are can be in various cases desperately in conflict with each other. This is extreme. It's extreme in the case of both mosquitoes and ticks, but certainly with mosquitoes which are estimated through the transmission of blood-borne diseases to have been killed more human beings than any other animal on the planet. And so it's not about denying that we're in conflict with some animals or that human-animal conflict could in any way be overcome, but that the kind of attention to individual animals and our ecological relationships with them is really important, even in the case of these creatures with whom we're in such desperate conflict. And there, the idea that we're really pushing back, this is what Lori was talking about, that's so important in the case of insects. We're pushing back against ethical theories that force us to find a ground for moral standing outside our efforts to bring animals into focus, because when whenever you have an approach like that, you wind up with a, I mean, there are different hierarchies, some seem not noxious, some seem okay, but you wind up with a hierarchy and insects are always towards the bottom. And so you'd wind up with an approach to human insect relations that seem to suggest that, well, whatever this is, this is the last priority we could possibly have. And and in fact, what we're suggesting is that with insects, as with anything else, we need to actually just pay attention to what our our lives and their lives and our lives together are like. And and and this is really crucial when you start to pay attention to things like the history of human use of insecticides and and how many other animals have been killed, and how many human lives have uh well, how many human beings have been killed, but also human lives have been um grievously injured through these technologies which which are in some sense in denial about the rich ecological webs which we ourselves depend on for life on Earth. So that's a way in which the case of insects, the case of mosquitoes and ticks is really important for telling the story of our book.

SPEAKER_01: 46:10

And I think the focus on insects right now is important for a number of reasons. There seems to be a scaling up also of uh insects in in animal industrial complexes, you know, as there is a pull away from from um, you know, people think about cows and pigs, etc., and using, and there is a growing, I think, awareness that maybe this is not, you know, not ethically correct, which is great that there's this awareness. But as you say, you're seeing a simultaneous pivot towards looking at some other alternatives and somehow insects come up as this easy alternative. I was quite surprised. Um, not too long ago, I was at a conference and someone was doing research on insects in the Arctic. And I was the only, like I was sitting there and they were collecting and they collect the insects and they kill the insects. And I sat there and they were very proud that they were one of the first people to be doing research on insects in the Arctic. Important work to understand how these ecological systems function. But I asked a question about, you know, but what about the fact that you're killing these animals? If you're one of the first to go there, you're killing them in relatively large numbers. What's the significance of that? And I think he was a bit caught off guard. He didn't quite know what to do with that. It seemed like a completely unfathomable question, you know, why are we talking about killing insects? Um, and then his response was one you might expect, where he said, Well, there's just so many of them. And then I thought, wait, hang on. To come back to your structural idea, if you're just one person and you're killing thousands, let's say 10 more researchers go and you're killing other animals, foods, and it's it's a whole thing. You're not, you're part of something bigger. And this for me is really an important reason for why I think philosophers, ethicists, uh critical animal studies scholars need to be working together with physical geographers and physical scientists that are doing this type of work. Um, anyway, just a little reflection there, because it does point to those structures and what what is allowed to pass through ethical reviews at universities and what's not, etc. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 48:02

It's also really important here just to mention just that there's growing attention to what's even called, I believe, the insect apocalypse. That the insects are actually, as Alice was so poignantly putting it, I mean, we're ecologically so interconnected that if insects perish, we perish with them. And so um, this is a very strange thought that somehow, oh well, we're just gonna kill a few, um, because the the insects are dying in in really frightening, alarming proportions. And that has very profound implications for life on Earth. And um, so it's that it's a little bit shocking. And given how fragile the ecosystems of the Arctic are, it just seems, again, a kind of hubris that needs to be, I think, as you rightly point out, really needs to be challenged. Um it's it's remarkable um that that somehow, well, it's just me killing thousands of insects, so no biggie, right?

SPEAKER_01: 49:08

Wow. But I think it speaks to exactly what some of the work you guys are doing here in terms of challenging how we think, that the very fact that the starting point is that this is uh an acceptable form of doing research, you know, to shine the light on ourselves as researchers as well, and how we're part of these processes is super important. Um and this makes me think then earlier on your rose, you spoke a bit about feminism and critical race studies, and now obviously I'm thinking also now about critical animal studies. Where does critical animal theory sit in relation to critical animal studies? Uh what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_02: 49:41

Yeah, so I mean, I think it's a really interesting question. It is a quite distinct notion. So just to back up a little bit, um, there was a moment in the development of animal studies. Um, sometimes people called it human animal studies. Um, and in that moment, um, there was this idea that you could just actually study animals, um, not study them by catching them and killing them, as you were just discussing, um, but by looking at the role they might play in literature, the role they might play in history, or the role they play in economic systems, and not really the idea was not really have an ethical or political stance that you wanted to articulate. And um as Claire Jean Kim puts it, I think, I mean, everything is political. So to not see this as political is itself political. And um, I think that part of what Critical Animal Studies was doing when it um sort of coined or named itself Critical Animal Studies, was to say, yes, this is a political project, that we're here for the animals, just like in the early days of women's studies, now usually called women gender and sexuality studies or feminist gender and sexuality studies, that it's not just a study about how it is that um women and other genders make their way in the world. It's actually about elevating the status, recognizing discrimination, recognizing exploitation, and challenging it. Um, so critical animal studies is sort of suggesting that it's probably not a good idea to not take a stance on the terrible devastation that we're causing to other animals. I think that's how I would describe critical animal studies. And as we've been talking about, our view is tying critical, the critical in our in our title or a subtitle, it bring is bringing it back to various traditions of critical social thought, eco-feminist, um, other forms of um sort of more deeper look at structural systems of anti-black racism and anti-black violence against um black and black people and other um racial minorities, and just also the the workings of capitalism, right? So the idea that somehow there are in our current framework and in all forms of capitalist organization, there's a way in which we extract free resources that's necessary prior to the transaction of markets. And so all of that is part of the critical engagement that we're doing in thinking about critical animal theory. Um, and so that's a little bit different than critical animal studies, as you can see, but it's not different in its sense that there is a very clear commitment to doing something. It's not, it's not simply that we're including animals now in our so supposedly apolitical investigations, which of course are themselves, as I said, political.

SPEAKER_01: 52:52

Okay, no, that's great. So critical animal studies is I sorry I'm just trying to make sure I understand. So critical animal studies is a much, I think, bigger kind of set. You can have a variety of people doing a variety of things in critical animal studies. They're just committed to putting animals at the forefront of their thoughts and focusing on the ways in which relationships may or may not be exploitative. Critical animal theory, uh, which you're developing here, is perhaps a bit more specific in that you are advocating for a not only a focus on the animals, but a focus on the structures that continue to allow for these relationships to continue. And part of that is focusing on things like the ways in which animals are abstracted, the ways in which our discussions about them are made neutral. But it's how we do that research needs to actually focus on structure, and we need to make sure that we're focusing on that.

SPEAKER_02: 53:47

Yeah, I mean, another way of putting this, and I think that's exactly right, is and I'm just gonna bring in another topic that Alice and I work on. So there's critical animals studies folks that are working in what gets called effective altruist movement, right? They're actually trying to make changes for animals. But as Alice was saying earlier, that happens usually by not analyzing these structures, by making cages bigger or going cage-free. That is a critical animal studies project of one sort. It's certainly not something that we would endorse as critical animal theorists, right? Because it is seeming to suggest that the institutions that exist right now that harm humans and other animals, like industrial animal agriculture, factory farms, slaughterhouses, that that these institutions are just they're they're institutions that need to be fixed. They need to be made better. Um, and from our point of view, these are institutions that are working precisely the way they're supposed to work, to harm others. That's their point. That's one of their points, I should say, to make money, and that to make money is ultimately to use others as fodder. And so, I mean, they are part and parcel of uh a corporate capital system that has a very specific purpose. And we see this in the in the very real fact that there are maybe six multinational corporations that control most of the food stuff that we eat. So, sort of it is the case that you're actively doing something, you're not just pondering in the way that that division between animal studies and critical animal studies somehow is represented. Animal studies folks are scholars that are sort of pondering these things, whereas critical animal studies folks are trying to do something to make the world better. And what we're saying is, yeah, you can't just keep the institutions and structures that exist and think you're going to make the world better, because those structures and institutions that fall out of those structures are designed to operate in these violent, exploitative, harmful ways.

SPEAKER_01: 56:10

And they're incredibly adaptable as well. They have ways and means of uh, you know, greenwashing, like all of a sudden, dove is selling women's products, being like, you can be beautiful, yay, feminism, and you're like, wait, hang on. Isn't that there there are, you know, so capitalism and these structures are incredibly adaptable. And I think that this is where philosophy and philosophers such as you uh are really important because how we think matters. Um, it really does matter in terms of how you relate to the world, the ways in which you look at the products you pick up, the decisions you make as individuals, but also the decisions you're able to make, able to make, what laws and policies and structures uh actually allow for any decisions to be made. Um I think that this is really powerful and important work. So thank you so much. Um I I do want to get to the quotes in a little while, but before I do, just I guess two quick questions, because this is related to uh animal studies. One, so we've got a view now, I think a really good view of critical animal theory, uh what motivated it, some of the core tenants that you that you're working with, particularly methodologically, and some of how it's different from other animal studies um kind of categories. Who is this book for, I guess? Is this like a popular media book, or is this a book for animal studies scholars? And do you think that it could be used in the the classroom?

SPEAKER_02: 57:31

And if so, how yeah, I think this, I think we I mean, we wrote the book for everyone. Um, I think that was the idea that we wanted to make the book an intervention that would be accessible. And so the general public who might be, you know, interested in these topics, certainly activists are people that we're hoping might benefit from or enjoy reading the book. But it's also, I think, going to be really useful in classes. I'm gonna teach it in the fall, and so I um I think it'll be really helpful in both animal ethics classes and other kinds of animal studies classes. Um, so I think that's a short answer to who the book is for. It's um we're hoping that there's something for many different people in the book, and that there's something, as you were really, really I mean, what you just said about the book was was just so right on. And I think what we're hoping is that it is a prompt for rethinking these really profound and difficult crises that we face.

SPEAKER_01: 58:37

I think it's going to be great in classrooms. And again, I think how you've broken up the chapters, like octopus and minds. There is a big debate and discussion happening now about octopuses and minds, and then rats and dignity. I think, you know, you speak to a lot of the conversations that are happening in a lot of the literature. So even just as someone entering in animal studies, I think it's a it's a good book to kind of, I mean, why not? As you're if you want to think about the structures, why not start with a book that kind of gives you a good overview of a lot of the literature and um and some of the key debates that it that's in it? So thank you so much. I don't know if you have anything to add here, Alice, before we go to quotes.

SPEAKER_03: 59:12

Oh, I thought Lori did a great job. I I do think, I think it's important to emphasize both that it's written to, yes, to be accessible to anyone who's interested, and it also doesn't shy away from giving readers an overview of some of the theoretical debates once you get past the stories. So you can you can glide into the stories, which really any reader can take in cases of particular animals and human animal conflict. Anyone can follow them. But then if you are taking animal ethics classes or interested in what's going on in the field, we will, you know, back you into a tour of that. And so that's there for the person who's interested too, but I hope not in an off putting way.

SPEAKER_01: 59:58

And then, of course, there are now podcast episodes. That can complement the book and act as a useful resource in your classrooms. Shameless plug. No, it's it's great. Thank you so much. And and just quickly about the stories, because I've been thinking a lot about stories in my own thesis as well. And I really do appreciate how you kind of jump between focusing on individual stories, then speaking about the broader kind of structure or economies, and then slipping back into the individual. Like you could see that you were doing thoughtful work there in terms of those the scales, the multiple scales that are involved in these stories and these problems. Okay, so quotes. At the end of every episode, we give folks an opportunity to read a quote. It can be a quote from their own work or someone else who's inspired them. And that's just to, yeah, it's just fun. We like it. So uh Lori, go ahead. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:47

One of the things, one of the quotes that I wanted to use is both from our work, but also it speaks to the work of another really wonderful writer. Um, and I just wanted to say this about our book too, is that we think it's really crucial in thinking otherwise, being able to think about these issues in ways that maybe other theories don't allow you to do, is to draw on literature and to draw on art and to draw on film and to draw on ways, other ways in which we animals can come into view. And so with that in mind, I just want to read a little bit about how that happens in Danny Silla Mayer's 2021 book, Summertime, Reflections on a Vanishing Future. And it was written in response to the devastating Australian bushfires of 2019-2020. And it provides a powerful account of the experiences of pigs and other animals that she lives with that helps us shift our perspectives, telling us that she cannot grasp, quote, the enormity of the devastation, and quote, that the fires brought, quote, not only to humans but to other wild and domesticated animals. She sets out to capture the tragedy, not by counting the billions of animal lives lost, but by evoking the toll that the death of one uncountable pig, Katie, took on her companion Jimmy. Katie and Jimmy were survivors of industrial animal agriculture, having been discarded as wastage at three years, three weeks old. Activists scooped them up, tiny and starving, from the factory farm floor where they've been left to die. And the two of them were then cared for, protected, and loved by a woman that Silmayer calls M. Before moving, at four years old, now huge yet timid, to the sanctuary that Silmayer runs with her partner, Katie and Jimmy retained the closest of companionship. In late December 2019, as the fires were threatening their sanctuary, Silmayer and her partner arranged to have Katie and Jimmy return temporarily to Em. That's when disaster hit. Although the sanctuary remained untouched, a ferocious fire that enveloped Em's place descended upon them from three sides, raising their home, turning the fields to ash, and killing Katie. With Jimmy somehow surviving. She writes about the morning after Jimmy came home. He began to look for Katie everywhere, in their house, down in their woods, up under the tree where they had once taken shade from the afternoon sun. He would turn and look and stand very still, listening for her, perhaps smelling the remnants of her presence. And then he stopped.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:37

Oh man. And what a powerful story. And for anyone who's interested in hearing more or listening more about that, I know uh Shivano Sullivan did an excellent ad uh advert did an excellent uh interview uh about these fires. And it's just yeah, it is personal and it is real for the animals who are involved. And I think she does such great work kind of bringing that to the fore.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:59

We were happy to incorporate that into our chapter on pigs.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:04

I was gonna ask whether it'd be possible to read a very brief, very different kind of passage from the book. Also, I wanted to read a passage in which we talk about animal dignity, which is a central concept for the book. And I'm not gonna try and explain why, but um but it's the idea of moral standing revealed by attention to animals, in virtue of which animals are vulnerable to wrongs beyond harms that they themselves can register. Um, and and this notion of dignity plays an important role in our book, and I think we both believe that some of the cases that we mention are really great provocations for thinking about animals. And this is a really short passage, it comes up on page 83 of our book, but but I thought I would read it. It gives some some real um, I think, um, impetus to thinking about how we think about animals. Not every wrong we do to animals is acknowledged by the animals themselves. Human beings sometimes treat animals wrongly in doing things to them that don't obstruct the exercise of any of the animals' capacities and don't interfere with any of their activities. This was true of staff members at the Moscow circus who dressed a bear in a frilly pastel apron and made her walk around on her hind legs pushing a baby carriage. Making the bear an object of mockery was a form of disrespect over and above the wrong done by holding her captive and making her perform, however, unaware the bear herself was of the mockery. Similarly reprehensible was the conduct of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Head Injury Laboratory, who ridiculed baboons on whom they had inflicted grievous head trauma, as seen in a video the researchers themselves filmed. Subjecting the baboons to ridicule represented an additional type of disrespect beyond the great physical harms they were made to suffer, a further wrong not diminished or qualified by the fact that the baboons weren't aware that they were being mocked. Now I'm interrupting my reading to say that we the passage I just read is one that follows a discussion of rats in our book, and we close this passage by returning to rats in the following way. While in some circumstances we may be justified in removing rats from human spaces, we additionally wrong them when we depict them as disgusting beings whose alleged foulness licenses their extermination.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:51

Wow, that's so important. And those two back to back, I think, are really important. The fact that animals can grieve, the fact that they have dignity, they are complex emotional beings, and how do we respect them and their processes of grief and dignity? As we close up now, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about what you're working on now and if folks would like to get in touch with you how they might be able to do so.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:16

So I'm working on many things, um, but one of the things I'm working on is an extension of some of my earlier work on entangled empathy in the context of prisons and zoos. So I do work in both those spaces, and I'm writing about how we can think about these uh captive spaces differently, the connections and disconnections between them and the underlying structures that keep those institutions of captivity in place.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:50

I'm looking forward to that and reading more. Alice, how about you?

SPEAKER_03: 1:07:55

Well, I'm gonna mention one book that I'm working on together with Lori. It's an edited collection. Since Lori brought up work we were doing criticizing effective altruism, I'll just say that we have a book coming out next year with Oxford University Press, which has fabulous activist voices in it called The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does, Critical Essays on Effective Altruism. And we've co-edited this together with Carol Adams. Um, and we're hoping to start a conversation about those things. And for my own part, like Lori, I'm very busy and also doing other things together with Lori, but I'm writing a book called Radical Animal, which visits some of the topics of animal crisis, but from a different direction. I'm trying to make the case that so human-oriented social justice movements need the animal issue. And um a helpful way to think about what the narrative of that project looks like is to say it starts with really um horrible and awful um genealogies of the animalization of human beings, um, racialized human beings, but also uh women and the disabled. And it's an attempt to um understand how issues that really need to be addressed together come to look like they're in conflict with each other.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:19

Awesome. That sounds both of those sound really timely and important. So I look forward to reading them. Uh, if people want to find up, find uh find you or reach out to you, um, do they just Google you and you'll pop up? Or do you have a particular email address you'd like them to reach out to you at?

SPEAKER_03: 1:09:35

With regard to emails, yes, use anyone you find. I have different institutions. I have I have three institutional emails and a private one, and I answer all of them. Um and I I know Lori's gonna say something similar, but I also have a personal website, which is a good place to find out what I'm doing, and that's AliceQurry.com.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:53

Right. And um Alice is much, much more sort of organized. I can't really figure out how to have more emails than my one email at Wesleyan University, but I also do have a website, lauriegruin.com, that you can um find and you can find me at Wesleyan and um I will answer my emails from that email.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:14

Excellent. Yeah, um, yeah, too many emails. I also think I've got like five or six. I don't know how it happens, like, but luckily it's all on one, it's on one app. So I can see all my emails in one place. So um, but it's disgusting. I don't know how it happens.

SPEAKER_03: 1:10:29

Yeah, Laura, you're in good shape. This is not something you want. Um thank you so much for having us, Claudia. This has been really fun.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:37

No, thank you so much for joining me. Uh it's been it's been a fantastic conversation, and uh I hope you both have a great day. Thanks so much. All right, that's it. That's done. It's uh the first book review of the animal turn. Uh I hope you enjoyed that. If you've got any feedback, I'm always open to hearing it. Uh, as always, I really enjoy the reviews on Podchaser, but you can also find the podcast on Twitter and Instagram. I'm slowly working on getting those better and up to speed. Um, turns out doing your PhD and running a podcast is kind of a lot of work, but I love it and I enjoy being here with you and I hope that you enjoyed this extra content. Uh much to uh Alice and Lori for being fantastic guests and giving me so much of their time. Thank you to Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast. If you haven't headed over to Apple's website, make sure you do so. There's some really cool content on the website. There are links to the podcast, and there's also some links to additional stuff I've been doing with the group, such as creating archival documents. So uh, you know, helping students to find animals in the archive. So that's kind of a my side research and project. Uh they're also doing tons of kind of reading groups and seminars, and there's just a lot going on. It's a great, wonderful group of people here in Ontario. So head over to that website too to check that out. Uh, and thank you to you as well, listeners, for tuning in and for dealing with my relatively long absence. And uh, I look forward to engaging with you more for the rest of the year. This is The Animal Turn with me, Claudia Hurtenfelder.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:34

For more great iRoll podcasts, visit irallpod.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.