All Creatures

Episode 60 - All Creatures

Official transcript: https://www.cheynemusic.com/transcripts

We lay the groundwork for a discussion of the ethical treatment of animals, including their use in the food chain, in entertainment, in research, in product testing, in zoos and wildlife parks, and in hunting, including our own experiences and changing points of view as we have been Making Our Way.

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Transcript

JIM: I don’t know if you remember the ranger walk with a photographer, and he was talking about the sad story of the last ram in Rocky Mountain National Park, how it was just so forlorn and thought it would just take its own life because it was standing there up on the precipice and a convertible drove by and on the radio they were playing the song “There’ll Never Be Another You.”

JAN: Oh my gosh.

DEE: Goodness.

JAN: That’s just awful.

[Laughter]

JIM (voice-over): Immanuel Kant once said, “We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” Let’s update that18th century language this way. “We can judge the hearts of people by how they treat animals.” In our last episode, called “Companions,” we talked about the animals that have lived in our homes over the years. That episode ran about 27 minutes, but the conversation ran on a few hours more. Today, I’ve culled together a few bits from that conversation that can serve as a starter ethic for how we treat, or how we ought to treat, animals.

Immanuel Kant also did not think animals had a moral status, but since then we’ve developed the field of ethology, or animal behavior, and we’ve learned to ask some important questions. In our dealings with nonhuman animals, which practices are acceptable? Which are repugnant? Should we use them for food? For entertainment? What about zoos? Or wildlife parks? What about medical research? Or product testing?

[Music begins]

Before I promise too much and introduce an episode we haven’t even recorded yet, let’s pause that very large topic, and listen in to some of what we’ve discussed so far. We join the conversation already in progress.

[Music ends]

JIM: I always like to imagine a primitive time when humans are in a group. Wolves are in a group. and there is one human or one wolf that reaches out and realizes the advantage. There’s a fire there, there’s food there, a wolf might break out of its pack-only idea. “I can be a part of this pack over here,” and a human that realizes, “This is an animal that can guard us, that can bring companionship, but it can bring safety, it can alert us to others that are out there,” and so a relationship starts and then selective breeding starts. I mean, you look at this teacup Yorkie, and it’s about as far away from a wolf as you can get without being a cat, but it’s just been slowly bred for certain qualities.

I do want to talk about the ethics of it. I can imagine a day when sitting here talking about how we own animals would be atrocious. I mean, these things are negotiated right by us individuals and in the community that we live in. Can you imagine a day that owning pets would be viewed as barbarian?

JAN: The thing I think about with that is dogs have a long history of companionship with people, and while the relationship has, I think, changed some, it goes back pretty far and they’re domesticated. It isn’t as if they would survive running free. So I think when you have a domesticated animal like that as part of your family, it’s a different ethical situation than if you bring in something from the wild into your house, and - or into your control and try to shape it out of its natural state.

DEE: They imprint on you too. Like, there’s something in the dog like they imprint and I mean you hear stories about dogs that will get loose and then they will travel long distances to find their home, to come back to their owner. We’re part of their pack.

JAN: I think there’s something to what you’re saying, Jim, about the relationship, though, with ethics and other non-human life, and we’ve seen changes in that as we learn more about the awareness of animals, the feeling of pain, all of those things hopefully impact our treatment of animals.

JIM: There seems to be a whole spectrum of things here. We could talk about, you know, domesticating animals and how much we should selectively breed them towards certain traits. That has a certain ethical edge to it. We can talk about how we decide we want to see animals. You guys went on safari in Tanzania, and it was mostly animals in their natural environment, and they were free to attack you if they wanted to...

ROB: If they wanted.

JIM:  …and, as the lion running underneath your tent area there. But then there are zoos. Are zoos still a possibility? Or if you’re going to Busch Gardens or Animal Kingdom with Disney and that, is that an ethical way of working with it? Because it brings them to us so we can see them and it seems to be all about us, and we can give them great environments. But I’ve seen some zoos that I would not say are great environments. I think you were the first to tell us how great San Diego was in their zoo, in the way they presented animals. More of a natural habitat type of thing rather than cage, cage, cage.

DEE: That’s like Animal Kingdom. It’s very natural isn’t it?

JIM: Right, and then…

ROB: More, yeah.

JIM: …you’ve got to think about research with animals. You can understand the greater good, but it’s hard to explain to a rhesus monkey, “Oh we’re talking about greater good here,” and you have to deal with how you’re treating animals for medical research. You’ve got to think about how you’re treating with animals when you’re a hunter, and when you’re eating. And all of these things have different places where all of us go to a certain comfort, and maybe wish we could go a little farther. But we all have our own areas of, “Well this is fine.” And it has to with our culture, it has to with our upbringing and our inherited relationship with animals I think. Do you have any thoughts about that, anyone?

JAN: This is a slight tangent, but it’ll bring us back I think. Talking about zoos or places where animals are corralled in some way. One of the great things about - we just did our series on national parks - and one of the great things about going to a national park and encountering the life that lives there is you’re seeing it, whatever life you experience, under their terms. And when we were in Africa we had pictures of giraffes, and Brian thought it would be hilarious to send us a picture of the giraffe he saw in the zoo that cost him a lot less money to see than the giraffe we saw in the safari. But that experience is very different. When you can encounter an animal under their terms, you have to earn it, you know, and you’re not, if you’re ethical, you’re not imposing on them in any way, in fact you’re giving them - so it’s a discovery of something, I’m gonna say, magical. We were in Zion with Lance and Kem, and we came across big horn sheep - ewes and their young - and we just stopped along the road, and we got to watch them. We didn’t do anything. We just watched them. It was this delightful time. You know, they were aware of us. They were okay with us being where we were. Lance tried to talk to them in their own language. He failed. But, you know. So when you encounter animals in those places, it’s hard to describe the difference between doing that and seeing something in captivity.

ROB: It’s a huge difference. My dream always was to see the animals that I remember at the zoo what they would be like in the wild. To be able to see a bear in the wild. To be able to see a lion in the wild. I never thought that would ever happen, but we’ve been able to do that, and it’s a - like you say - it’s a completely different experience, because, like you said, you’re there on their terms. That’s where they live. You’re the visitor.

JAN: That experience has informed me a lot in my approach to animals. A lot of our journeys in our life have been about seeing wildlife, and we’ve had some great opportunities. We went to the Galapagos to see tortoises, to see birds, to see penguins, to be in their place. It’s a privilege to do that. Not everybody gets to do that. When you can sleep out at night, and you know that those giant tortoises are right down below you, those Galapagos tortoises are right there walking around eating, you don’t go and eat turtle soup after doing that, you know, it affects - well some people do, but I get emotional talking about this anyway. [nervous laugh] One of the things you realize when you’re encountering animals like that, on their terms, is you’re not in a sanitized situation where you’re naturally safe. So when we were kayaking down in Fort De Soto, we happened to be in a place where there were manatees, and the manatees were very aware of us, and at one point they came up underneath our kayak, and, and affected it…

ROB: Lifted it.

JAN: …you know, and it’s like, “Okay, we’re kind of at their mercy right here,” you know, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and it ended up fine, but you always have to know when you’re in an environment like that, when you’re hiking in the Tetons, you can come across a bear. You should be aware of that, and you need to act accordingly. So it puts us back in that place of not being able to be in control or manage it, and I love the exhilaration of that. It’s a different relationship than we typically have. Um, okay, sorry, went off there.

ROB: Sheer terror…

JAN: Terror.

ROB: …for Jan, sometimes. [Laughs]

JAN: I have terror when it comes to bears. I don’t - I give them a wide berth I don’t need to encounter them up close and personal.

JIM: Oh, and in, um, 

DEE: I was just going to -

JIM: …Labrador, the Torngat…

DEE: Oh, yeah, the Torngat mountains.

JIM: …National Park in Labrador, you’re not allowed to go to that - well, first of all, you can get there only by plane.

DEE: Torngat Mountains was just recently - it’s the newest national park. It’s a world heritage site. It is the raw bones, like, it’s as primitive as it gets.

JIM: Right. There’s just no roads anywhere. It’s very wild, but you’re not allowed by law to go there without a bear guide, someone who is armed, because the polar bears that are there.

DEE: Yeah that’s a native - because first nation people have lived there for thousands of years, and you have a guide from one of those tribes, that take you up to protect you from the polar bears basically.

ROB: I think the relationship between First Nation, aboriginal people with wildlife is interesting, too. The respect…

DEE: Yes.

ROB: …that they have, that they had for it, you know, when you take a life, you’re thankful to the animal for giving its life for you. That’s a little different than is the way we mass…

DEE: Yeah there’s a…

ROB: farm, you know, animals.

DEE: Right it’s like there’s a sense of there’s value to this creature…

ROB: Right.

DEE: …and you don’t just, it isn’t just something…

ROB: And they use it all…

DEE: …for sport.

ROB: …they use everything.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: You know, they don’t waste things like like we tend -

JAN: Yeah.

DEE: Whenever Jim puts on one of these wildlife programs, I’m like, I can’t, because there’ll be like, “This bear just came out of hibernation, and has to feed her young, and she’s coming up on this other animal,” and I’m like, “No, but that other animal needs to live, but that poor bear is starving to death,” and I’m just so torn. I’m like, “I can’t watch this.”

ROB: I have less problem with that in nature than I would with humans and hunting animals.

JAN: Oh, always, yeah.

ROB: Yeah. That’s a natural thing, but then again humans since the beginning of time have been killing animals for food so…

JAN: We - 

ROB: It’s different today.

JAN: Well, and the ethics of killi,ng animals has changed, too, and how it’s done. We have very good friends who hunt. Bev and Kent hunt, and they live off of the food they hunt, and they’re ethical in their approach to it. They’re not raising cattle in a feedlot and then taking them to a slaughterhouse. It’s a very different - I mean, I personally, I’m thankful at this point in my life to not eat meat but I respect Bev and Kent’s approach to hunting.

ROB: When we were in the Pribilof Islands, we saw the seal hunt. That was hard, I mean that was very hard, but the native people have been doing that for years. It’s very regulated. There’s a veterinarian on hand. They watch the whole process. They can only harvest so many, and certain kinds of animals, of the fur seals. You know, it’s hard to watch, but it’s their culture. It’s part of - and they don’t waste anything. They use it all, and - but in our culture it’s hard to get your head around it, and, no, is this okay? Is it not okay? I don’t have an answer all the time.

JIM: Well, with Bev and Kent, it’s a matter of they’re doing it themselves. They’re not hiring someone else to do the killing for them. When you were going by the feedlots this summer, and you see how the animals actually have to live and what they have to go through, and plus the enormous amount of methane that is being poured into the atmosphere because of the way we we manage animals - for instance the leaf blower that we’re listening to right now. He with his boys will go hunting. They don’t need it to sustain anything. They’re learning a skill, and this is fine, and they probably have a closer relationship with those animals than I ever would, who would only, you know, hire someone to go and do that for me so that I could eat. So, who is the ethical one there? The one who does it themselves or the one who hires someone else to do it for them? So the ethics are not a simple, “Oh let’s go with all the nice fluffy things and then blame everyone else who goes hunting.” There’s trophy hunting. There’s sustenance hunting. There’s hunting that is uh the skill that you have to have.

There’s a book called “A Quiet Place of Violence; Ethics and Hunting in the Missouri River Breaks” I think is the way it’s called, and the author is Alan Morris Jones - someone check me on that. And it has to do with addressing ethics in terms of the inequity in the hunter and prey. If there is a great inequity, like we’re using technology to just slaughter, there’s something unethical about that. If we are meeting the animal on their own terms, that’s a better ethic in hunting. That doesn’t mean you go out and say, “Okay, I’m going to have a wrestling match with a bear,” but it does mean I’m not going to go out there completely not vulnerable and just use all of my technology to hunt it down. There’s something wrong about that. There’s something wrong about tossing a stick of dynamite in a pond in order to get the fish, and I don’t know if we can actually define why it’s wrong, or where it is wrong in the whole spectrum of things, but it just seems like that doesn’t seem right for some reason. Hunting Cecil the lion just because you want a trophy doesn’t seem right in some way.

ROB: Trophy hunting, yeah, I’ve…

JIM: …and yet, who’s our great protective president? Teddy Roosevelt was a trophy hunter. And so you walk into some of these clubs and you see all these heads mounted on the wall and you think, “What is that?” Well, I don’t know what’s in their head. I can’t say, “They are unethical because if I did that it would be unethical for me to do that.” It’s got to be more than just an individual thing. It’s got to be, “What’s the culture? What’s the community?” The seal hunt that goes on in Newfoundland, is it still go on?

DEE: Yes, but nothing like how it used to be.

JIM: But this was basic sustenance for the people that lived there…

DEE: Right. It was…

JIM: …right?

DEE: …it was a necessity. To a certain degree because there was a competition among the - because there was fur trade involved, and that was among the large department store owners who owned the fleets that would go out. But every part of the animal was used, and for fishermen it was finally the winter was over, and people were down to their bare minimums, and they needed the hunt to bring in staple items and food and…

JIM: So in the spring they’re out on the ice risking their lives…

DEE: Yeah, very dangerous…

JIM: …to go on the hunt.

DEE: My grandfather did it.

JIM: In the summer, they’re fishing, risking their lives…

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: …to do that.

DEE: Out on the North Atlantic.

JIM: It’s not these great trawlers that are just taking everything off the Grand Banks until the…

DEE: Moratorium.

JIM: …the moratorium came in. [to Jan & Rob] When we were there in ‘85, there was rumor of this moratorium coming. Do you remember that? When we were up in Newfoundland? And they were talking about the possibility of what happens if they close down all the fisheries.

ROB: Okay.

JIM: And it did happen because you have…

DEE: Like a 1990, I think.

JIM: The Grand Banks are in international waters, but the populations on which Newfoundland depends are part of the waters that also include…

DEE: And trawlers would cross over the boundary line and come in and basically rape the Grand Banks, which was Newfoundland’s fishing ground.

JIM: And then the winter comes along, you’re lucky to get a moose, you know.

DEE: Yeah. That would be done…

JIM: …to sustain…

DEE: …in the fall me being a city girl, a St. john’s girl, I didn’t see that aspect of it because we went to the grocery store. When my mom was living, we call it, “out around the bay,” I mean, her neighbor across the street, they lived off of what they grew in the summer and they would store, and then they would hunt…

JIM: Was that Mark? Lived right across the street?

DEE: Yeah, Mark and Joan.

JIM: Joan, yeah.

DEE: A lot of people still who live outside of major areas - but i mean it’s nothing like before 1949, I mean, people literally will be just trying to survive through the winter.

ROB: And these days, hunting has become almost necessary in some - human hunting - in some places,  because what we’ve done to predators…

JIM: Just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

ROB: We’ve wiped out…

JAN: You need to reframe that. “Human hunting.”

DEE: Oh.[Laughs] I didn’t even…

ROB: Oh, is that what I said? “Human hunting”?

DEE: I didn’t even…

ROB: Hunting by humans…

JAN: There you go. Thank you.

ROB: …has has become necessary in some places because we’ve just totally decimated the population of predators.

DEE: Right.

ROB: The major predators, which we have always thought of as evil because they killed the poor, you know, they killed Bambi and her friends, but then they run rampant. They repopulate - overpopulate - and then they destroy the environment around them because they over eat, they over graze…

DEE: Is that why they reintroduce the wolf - was it - in Yellowstone?

ROB: Yeah, Yellowstone, and the relationship between moose and wolves has been studied for a long time on Isle Royale national park. The moose traveled across on the ice one really bad winter, and they just decimated the island, and then they got sick because they wasn’t there wasn’t a lot of food, and nothing to get the weaker out of the population. Then the wolves came over, and after that…

DEE: There was a balance.

ROB: …there was a good balance that was established.

JAN: A lot of times, the problem with introducing wolves - reintroducing wolves - is caused by the inconvenience it causes to ranchers. When Bev did her study for her masters, she worked on the idea of reintroducing wolves to Rocky Mountain [National Park], and really it came down to ranchers not wanting that, not because the wolves are seeing as bad because of eating Bambi, but because the wolves were going to take from their…

ROB: Their cattle.

JAN: …cattle. 

ROB: Right. Money, money.

DEE: Yeah.

ROB: Yeah.

JAN: I think it’s interesting, in the ethics thing, to look through the eyes of children. Kids don’t always know where their meat comes from, because we’ve renamed it. We’ve called cows “beef”…

[Rob starts laughing]

ROB: [Laughing] I’m thinking of Matt…

JIM: I’m sorry…

ROB:  …Bargates [sic].

JIM: I’m - Nate Bargatze.

DEE: Oh.

JIM: “Washington’t Dream.”

JAN: Okay.

JIM: I’m sorry you just…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: “Hamburgers not ham…”

JAN: I was on a really good point.

JIM: Yeah.

ROB: That’s right. “Buffalo wings…

JIM: “Are chicken.”

ROB: “…are chicken.” Sorry.

JIM: “What’s in a hot dog?” “Nobody knows.”

ROB: “Nobody knows.” Sorry, Jan. I was thinking the same…

JAN: I’m just picturing this happening to anyone else at this table. Pigs are pork, chicken - anyway, my point is kids sometimes become appalled when they realize that what they’re eating isn’t just some foreign substance; it came from that animal that they’re looking at, and I think that’s a kind of a wake up for all of us. You know you’re eating something that was a sentient being.

JIM: I think each of us - four different people around the table would each have a threshold, ethical threshold that they would say, “I can’t cross this line, I can’t cross that one,” and then it’s a matter of: Do we hold other people to account for the way we think ethically about anything in our lives? It’s always come from: If i were to do that, I would be right or wrong based on my own things; therefore, if that person is doing that, I can impose on them my own ethical standard and say they are right or wrong, or they’re just wrong to do it that way, not just with animals, but with everything we - we see in life, with every comment someone makes, with anything that comes along and we say, “Why am I reacting to this person this way?” Perhaps in their point of view, in their world, this is a perfectly valid idea.

JIM (voice-over): And with that we’ve set the stage for a future, detailed discussion about ethics, and how our ethical points of view have changed as we’ve been Making Our Way. We’ll see if we can get the band back together to get that discussion into an episode not too far in the future.

To conclude today, we lost a friend recently, one of our guests this season on Making Our Way. He was a member of the church Jan & Rob attend, and I thought they would like to offer these closing thoughts.

ROB: This last week we lost a very dear friend from our church. He was a World War II veteran. His name was Neil Ducharme. And he was what our friends, and we agree, was just a very genuine person.

JAN: Every time we would walk into church, we would greet Neil. He sat in the back pew, because he was not a person to be up in front. That’s just who he was. And he always greeted us in this genuine, like, “I couldn’t be more happy than I am right now to see you.” His mind was so sharp. At 100 years old, he always knew everybody that was in the room. He could name them all.

ROB: He knew details about what happened in the war 60 years ago. And he was part of the Japanese theater. And I remember asking him, after the war, he was part of the occupation force in Japan, and I wondered if he had any negative feelings about the Japanese people. And he said, “No.” He loved the Japanese people. They were beautiful people. And that’s the kind of guy that Neil was. He thought people were wonderful. He loved to meet people, and he loved to greet them.

JAN: One of the things Rob and I are doing right now is we’re learning to play Cribbage. And Cribbage was O’Neill’s favorite game. And we’re sad, first of all, at having lost him last week, but also because we never got the chance to sit down and play Cribbage with him. Because, I’ll tell you, he would have cheated to help me. And that just makes me smile.

If you’re interested in the podcast we did where we interviewed Neil, I would highly recommend going back and listening. You will be inspired. There were two on November 13th and November 20th. “And they were heroes” and “Honor Flight.” I know you’ll be proud of the service that somebody like Neil Ducharme gave for his country.

[Music starts]

ROB: We’re going to miss you, Neil. You were very much a part of the greatest generation.

FROM “Honor Flight” (Season 2 Episode 11)

JAN: Master Sergeant O’Neil Ducharme.

NEIL: I wish he was just calling me Neil.

JAN: I want to thank you.

NEIL: Why?

JAN: For your service and your sacrifice.

NEIL: It’s like I told him before. Don’t take me too serious. You’re not only beautiful, you’re precious.

JAN: [Laughing] Well, then, thank you for that. Thank you for your friendship…

NEIL: Okay.

JAN: …and taking the time to do this with us today.

ROB: And welcome home.

NEIL: Thank you.

[Music ends]