Mane Events: How Horses Shaped Human Culture

Embark on a historical gallop with Joy of Zoognosis with Joy and Mimbres School, as she guides us through the monumental impact of horses on the formation of our societies. From the plains of ancient empires to the controversies of modern statues, our episode reveals the deep imprints left by these noble creatures. Expect to uncover how their roles extended beyond agriculture and warfare, touching on darker chapters of human history like the slave trade, and how their symbolism has evolved in today's competitive sports arenas and contentious public memorials. 

Tune in for a riveting discussion on the cultural nuances of our dietary choices, especially the polarizing topic of horse meat consumption. Joy unveils the historical roots of food taboos, dissecting how past practices, such as those during shackle slavery, still ripple into present-day biases. We don't shy away from the ethical dilemmas surrounding the treatment of animals as sentient beings, challenging deeply ingrained anthropocentric views. We'll also scrutinize the effectiveness of breed-specific dog legislation, questioning the supposed link between breed and aggression, and consider how our kinship bonds with animals reflect and inform human behavior.

Our journey doesn't end there; we'll also contemplate the vast environmental footprint of industrial farming and the intricate dynamics of our domestication endeavors. From the ethics of animal rights movements to the crucial role of biodiversity, our conversation with Joy is a thought-provoking examination of the threads connecting us to the animal kingdom. We'll even touch upon our relationship with Neanderthals, and consider how our perception of human evolution informs our interactions with animals today. Prepare to reevaluate your stance on our fly, finned, and four-legged friends, and how they fit into the complex tapestry of modern society.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Horses in Human History

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello , welcome to Farm Blog . Today I am with Joy of Zoonosis , with Joy and member school fame . Joy is a DVM with interest in society , animals and health and the intersection thereof . Today we are talking about animals , persons and the development of humanity . I use persons deliberately ambiguously here . I do not necessarily just mean homo sapiens . We're going to get into why through the course of this discussion .

C. Derick Varn 1:30

There are a couple of animals that I find very fascinating in their development with us , weird monkeys Well , apes , we don't have tails , so we're not technically monkeys . But before my weird Linnaean fans get me in the comments and that is dogs , cats , interesting Domestic food animals , including ones that I don't think we should eat , like pigs and because they're too smart although really my bias against eating smart things is probably ableism and horses , and I think horses are an interesting way into this discussion about human society , human evolution I'm going to put that in quotation marks and whatnot , because a whole lot of human development happens around horses . And right after you did a class on this very topic for member school , I remember there was a joke in the Barbie movie that I thought was unintentionally hilarious about patriarchy not being about horses , and I was like , oh , but , ken , it really is about horses , so we'll kind of start with horses , we won't stay there . But why is understanding humans' relationship to the horse so illuminating to what people ?

Joy 3:15

are ? I think that's a great question . Horses are really important kind of pitiful animal in the human animal bond and with horses they are an animal . That is the power . But they're going to also be used for a lot of different things and they give a lot of options and it's the optionality of the horse that allows it to have so many roles and adopt so many different pathways in societies . So speaking vaguely there , but more specifically , if you think about horses , what do they do ? Horses are large animals so they can be . You know they're able to convert low energy plant matter of grass into muscle and that conversion is done through hindgut fermentation . With that fermentation it allows them to build quite a bit of bulk and a lot of society's beaten horses as meat . They have used horses for their milk . A lot of the societies of course milk . Quite frequently they use the horses to hide that kind of thing . Those are kind of our . You know we think about primary products , so you have to kill an animal for Secondary products . For the horse really make it one of the most versatile animals , one of the keystone animals for understanding power and power dynamics . Basically the horse . I mean .

Joy 4:36

People have been riding horses probably for at least 5,000 years , if not longer , and horse allows an unparalleled degree of mobility . So with a horse what you can do is you can actually tack a group of people or launch attacks and then get away quickly . In fact , getting away quickly , that's a challenge , right ? So you know , if you're on foot you're only as fast as you can run . Basically Load it up with gear and whatever stuff booty you stole . Basically With the horse you can get in , get out and strike quickly and take what you want and leave basically . And it's that mobility that allows people to project power over distance and cover distance probably fastest . That was possible before the invention of the steam locomotive . With that horse power people built enormous empires . They spanned continents . They were able to deliver messages and keep empires running . We think about the you know , imperial China , for instance , had a quite a large mail system where they had posted offices all along the roads of the empire and horses would travel along these roads with , you know , messages and goods and it allowed for the functioning of that empire .

Joy 5:56

The other aspect with horses and power dynamics is horse slavery . Horses are one of the main animals that enable human slavery and enable the continuance of that . Basically Horses are . You know , people mounted on horses have been used to capture and monitor slaves for thousands of years . We have evidence of that . Getting back to the Assyrians , we have evidence of that with the you know the , you know the Yamnaya and the Indo-Europeans . One of the major slave trade routes in Sahara was a horse slave trade . So people from West Africa were traded for horses from the Maghreb and there was a bilateral flow that went between West Africa and the Maghreb for about 400 years or so , and horses , of course , were used in New World slavery . A lot of the horses that were used in Mecca and Guyana came from places like Rhode Island , where we get a lot of those ambling horse breeds .

Joy 6:59

So that , you know , use of horse power for maintaining human slavery is also another way we think about it . And , moving into the industrial era and into even modern times , horses have been used for their power , for traction . We think of , you know , tractor today as being the major way that we plow our fields , but until very recently , horses were the main animal for doing so , and the use of horses to maintain this allowed for the building up of European horses . Basically , they had all these cloud fields that would need horses and needed strong , like-ed horses for doing that , and a process of selective breeding over hundreds and hundreds of years developed larger and larger breeds of horses for that very specific function .

Joy 7:45

Now it wasn't only until very recently that horses , you know , lost their military and agricultural and industrial roles . They still maintain quite a lot of power symbolically . You know , horses top millions of dollars at some of the high-end competitions and horses , horse breeding , is still a focal point for a lot of human relations today and a whole tremendous symbolic value . And that symbolic value is nothing to shake a stick at either . I mean we think about when standing on horseback and you know the statues that have been taken down in the American South and other parts of America with the white man on the horse being used as a symbol of racial terror . So horses have a very important role of projecting power for maintaining a lot of these relationships in the imperial court .

C. Derick Varn 8:43

The horses tied to human slave-raiding is something that has both subconsciously crossed mind-to-mind but until I started engaging with your work over at member school it never consciously crossed my mind . It was like , oh okay , there's something different there about the relationship with the horse , the ability to raid and capture and separate peoples from other peoples who would retaliate and or protect them very quickly . I mean , that's the key thing here . If you capture an entire community and there's a nearby related kinship bond community nearby , they're going to counter raid if you're on foot because you are effectively equal in distance . But a horse , more than most other human transport pack animals , increases the speed of movement to the point where you can put enough distance between you and another group that can go and liberate those slaves . Well , you know , you have human slavery Before that . The conditions of it being widespread enough to be an industry and not a kind of byproduct of a tribal warfare is sort of unique to horse periodivators and that makes stuff like , yeah , early Indo-Europeans and their horse cult all of a sudden starts to make sense . Right , it's , but you know it's also interesting what you mentioned about horses and domestication in general , because one thing that has occurred to me is like , horse milk was probably at least contiguous with development of human juice , bovine or other milk . Maybe probably before it . Because if you look at where the development of the human ability to like , process lactose comes from , it does seem to come from horse areas more than , say , cow areas , and for those of you don't know what I mean if , like you know , cows are all over the place . But lactose intolerance is pretty common in North Africa , where there's still a bunch of cows , whereas , like it does seem like Indo-Europeans and other Asian step peoples develop the ability to process milk fairly early , and by that I don't just mean been like , literally biologically developed the ability to process milk fairly early .

C. Derick Varn 11:21

Although it is interesting to think about horses as food , not because that doesn't make sense , they can bulk up and they're fairly lean meat , but it is interesting today that there I think there are two animals that when I talk about eating , people freak out about , and I kind of get it , because we're usually most people who are in societies where these animals are common or have been bonded to them , but it's dogs and horses . People have had friends of mine freak out about horse meat and I'm just like but horses are , I mean , they're not that different from cows , like just putting it out there . So , and dogs aren't that different from pigs . So do you think that has to do with power associations or long histories of domestication ? Why is there been ? There's not the people , there's not . There's plenty of cultures still at horse meat , but it does seem to be , in Western culture , kind of frowned upon in ways that aren't entirely just rational .

Joy 12:28

I think that's a good question . You touched on a number of things there , with the milk end , with its association with the Indo-Europeans and also with the . You know the taboos surrounding eating from animals . The horse meat taboos are a relatively recent one and not one that's universally shared . You think about horse meat being a dirty meat . I think a lot of that is associated with . It goes back to ancient Rome , right . The horse meat slaughtered differently and it was done by different people . Basically Butchers would butcher cattle and pigs and other animals that were considered meat animals , and in ancient Rome the meat napper was the person who usually did it and is usually considered one of the lowest kind of rungs on the socioeconomic ladder . The person who napped the meat was basically just processing carcasses on the side of the road so that he could make a quick buck with the old stringy horses and that association with low class and that sort of thing also gets tied in with race .

Cultural Taboos and Animal Relations

Joy 13:32

There's quite a bit there's an emerging literature on the subject that suggests that eating horse meat is associated with , you know , shackle slavery . In the new world , the , you know , if you think about horses , were used for these safe plantations , so sugar plantations , and for the cotton plantations . They were often worked with death . One of the papers was reading put the average expandable horse on one of these plantations as something like three years or so . You know the mortality rates were absolutely high . Part of the reason is that these horses were just simply worked with death and when they dropped and when they died , their meat became food for the slaves working on these plantations and so it obtained quite a negative bias and associated with race . That way , that association stuck around in the Angola world , I mean , is still present up to this day . And of course you know part of what reinforces that is because of the special relationship people have with horses , very individual , personalized relations , and that human horse bond is , you know , it's a very personal bond . We consider animals as our kin , as members of our family . Horses , especially horses and humans have this very elaborate reciprocal bond . Not so with other food animals , the food animals . We usually think of them as things that are standing out in the field , you know , like corn or wheat , that kind of thing . But with horses they're like members of our family . They are , you know , our dogs and our cats , they are companion animals .

Joy 15:12

In France the association with horse meat was overturned , the negative associations , I should say , by social performers in the 19th century . They were very adamant that getting people to eat horse meat was one of the cares for , you know , to make people look , you know , stop looking down on the poor and that sort of thing . And today I mean one of the biggest , some of the biggest consumers of horse meat in the world are , you know , in France and Switzerland and in Italy , but not in the United States , which is one of the major exporters of horses intended for slaughter . America actually has a de facto ban on horse meat slaughter , so one of the things is that it's illegal to actually inspect meat for horses basically . So there's no funding , federal funding , for observing the slaughter plant that process horses in the United States . So what do they do ? They export them all . You know all the unwanted horses , horses that are surplus foals , that kind of thing from a lot of farms , and they actually get exported to Mexico and to Canada . Canada has one of the largest industries of , you know , horse meat , feed plots and horses are fed , you know , meat and slaughter . Some of them are actually flown , live across seas to places like Japan , that sort of thing , and they're eaten back , you know , over there as well . So I mean , it's by no means a universal and I think a lot of it has this historical contingency to it .

Joy 16:48

With horse milk too , kind of coming back to that , horse milk is very interesting because it seems to be secondary to people who are already quite familiar with the milking of other animals . And horse milk has very unique properties compared to other kinds of milk . It's very high in lactose and low in the curd you know the curd milk , fat milk , that sort of thing . So it's really good at fermenting , and fermented horse milk is a delicacy throughout Central Asia and that's one of the best ways to preserve it that way , and to this day , I mean , it's pretty much the only place in the world to get fermented horse milk . It's not exactly a product you could buy over the shelf , you know , on the shelf around here People would be horrified by something like that .

Joy 17:34

It's very strange because , you know , the ancestors of the Indo-European probably drank milk from the horses from time to time . It probably wasn't a huge part of their diet . But you know , you know over a billion people speak in Indo-European language and very few of them , you know , consider a horse a food animal . I mean what happened there . So there's definitely a lot going on there in terms of you know what animals we consider food and why I mean we think about food animals . Taboos and a lot of different cultures have them right . Of course . We know the same prohibition against eating pork in Judaism and Islam , the prohibitions against eating beef in the sub-Indian continent . I mean , you know , horses have a very different . You know it's a similar but different thing with horses because there seems to have that , you know , emphasis on class and there's also the historical contingency of , you know , the Anglesphere perpetuating a lot of those historical biases up to the present day .

C. Derick Varn 18:41

Well , yeah , I think about , for example , some of the panaceous effects of that in regards to pork versus dog , dog meat and the Republic of Korea . South Korea is effectively like horse meat here it's not , there's no regulations for its slaughter . Now there that doesn't mean they export it . What it means that there's a gray market in dog meat . You can buy it and eat it . That's totally legal , and actually it leads to the slaughter being probably crueler than it would be if it was regulated and sold on the market . And so it's a kind of irony that , in trying to placate a Western cultural bias about dog meat , the conditions for dogs raised for meat is actually probably worse than it would otherwise be . But you know , as a person who didn't used to have any problem eating almost any meat , barring human , and now I don't eat meat , hardly like at all the I have found some of the cultural narratives about meat quite interesting and also the extent in which it goes .

C. Derick Varn 20:05

I mean , one of the interesting things about the Indian subcontinent ban around cows is cows are still really important agricultural animals for South India .

C. Derick Varn 20:14

It's just they don't eat them . But milk , even dung , not as food but as a fuel source , is actually super important for 19th century Indian economy , so much so that some people have speculated that part of that taboo is practical . I'm always a little skeptical on taboos being ultimately practical , just like with pork and trichonosis , but I'm like there's other stuff that's totally kosher to eat , that are bet that can totally make you sick guys like it's not just pork . But I also think about your thing , about you mentioned human cultivation of like animals that we see as persons and animals that we don't , and then other societies where that's a little thinner . So you know , the example for us would be obviously horses and dogs and cats . To to some degree we consider them companion animals and or work work only animals . We do not consider them food animals , whereas a pig and pigs can be gross or not gross , depending on your condition , which you keep them in so that this is .

C. Derick Varn 21:39

But if you spend time with trained pigs , you realize they're smarter than dogs , are most dogs , and that we have to actively cultivate kind of an ignorance of their intelligence level and their sociability . And also when people like , oh , you know , humans don't need a lot of predatory animals . And I'm like have you dealt with bored ? Do you know what they're like ? They'll eat you . So that's an active cultivation in Western core , European , post-European culture . But then I think about so you think , okay , well , that's what it takes .

C. Derick Varn 22:24

But then I think about societies I know about , like the Amazon River Racine , that see food animals as persons and they will like , for example , they'll eat small monkeys , but they will also cultivate those monkeys , up to and including nursing them . And the relationship there is not that you dehumanize or depersonify the animal to eat it , it's just an understanding that , like these are members of our communities but they're members of communities that we also eventually eat , which I think I would like to know , like you know , as a person who studies human relationship to animals , how common is that kind of relationship to animals ? When I've been reading recently on like indigenous concepts of relation relationality to not just people but also animals . It comes up that certain hunter-gatherer bands in the Americas treat their prey animals as persons with whom they have a fairly reciprocal relationship , and some of the metaphors about hunting are sexual in a positive way , not in a rapey way . And that is a completely farmed way of thinking , for , like the average post-European core bro today , or really anybody .

C. Derick Varn 23:56

Like how common are those relationships in your studies of human animal development ?

Joy 24:02

I think it's fairly common . I think that you know , when we look at , you know if you look at , you know , inter-culturally with Europeans , the weird way of thinking is the weird way of thinking when it comes to animals and relatedness , right , and I think there's definitely a trajectory there that can be explained partly by the way that Europeans view the mind and view animal minds in particular . And it kind of goes back to , you know , this Cartesian idea , right ? You know Descartes , in Sources on the Method , is looking at talking about how blood is circulating in the body and he says , well , okay , blood circulates in the body because the heart bumps it around and it goes in and out , like this hides , kind of mystified by the whole process . He doesn't really understand it , but it kind of freaks him out to a point where he says , well , wait a minute , this is all just like like plot and gear work , basically , where's the soul ? You know , and this whole thing , you know , you look at the way the animals move . He says , well , they probably , you know they don't have a soul , like , so they don't really ink , they don't have a thinking mind , basically , and there's a , of course , a large reaction to this in a lot of the European intellectual thought comes to .

Joy 25:23

Well , maybe animals do have a thinking mind , maybe they do have a soul . This is what Thomas Huxley asks when he's looking at a dead frog and adapting it with electricity . And he says well , wait a minute , does the frog have a soul ? And by the end of the 19th century you get people like Ernst Hegel . His whole idea was that , yeah , no , animals do have souls . Souls are the mind and the you know the processes of the cells , and they're mortal . They get , they're born , they live , they die . They have a life cycle and , you know , consciousness is a form , it's , you know , a process of the soul

Ethical Treatment of Animals

Joy 25:57

, basically .

Joy 25:58

And so this idea of the soul and the animal , I think , is part of the reason why people are so uncomfortable in the Western world with the eating of animals , because we view the mind as a , you know , sacred thing , and the way that thinking is done by animals is functionally no different than how we do it , and the discoveries that Darwin made and subsequent scientists confirmed that . You know animals by and large . I mean , they're all related to humanity , they all share a distinct kinship with us , and that idea of distinct kinship and the fact that all of our neurology is homologous . All of these different things the brain , the sensory organ they all share a common homology with the other animals basically . So the way that animals think and feel , the ability to sense it , comfort and displeasure it is very similar to ours . And that raises some very uncomfortable questions and thoughts . Right , you know the idea of can they feel pain ? And you know the universal answer is yeah , they can totally feel pain , and then this becomes , you know where , things like . You know Peter Stinger and all those they spin out from there , basically .

Joy 27:10

But other people are very different ways of thinking about this problem . Right , you mentioned South America , you know , and the Amazon . Right , there's this book . What's it ? Consuming grief . They talk about the Uwari and the funerary cannibalism . They eat the bodies of their ancestors and people who pass away and their idea is that the soul goes to the afterlife and becomes the pigs that they eat . You know , from day in and day out , and the act of the funerary cannibalism is kind of a symbolic representation that they are entering food system again . They're entering the food chain and their bodies have returned to the earth , basically , and returned to the people and they're feeding them that way .

Joy 27:59

The idea that people , you know when , the idea that we're uncomfortable with animals , we have to keep it in the veil of ignorance so that we can protect ourselves from the very horrific reality of , you know , the fact that these are thinking and feeling beings that we're eating and killing and breeding in large numbers for various purposes . You know , laboratory stuff and studies . That sort of thing is very uncomfortable . The other way that you deal with that is you basically say , yeah , they're our family and yeah , I do feed on them because that's how we survive . This is the given trade , the trade-off . Basically , I'm not saying it's good or bad , but that's just the way it is for a lot of people . Right , like the way that people you know they're horses , there's a very you know , there's a deep kinship there and there is that kind of , you know , pragmatic relationship . You know the horse will serve us . Then , when its time has come , you know the horse will then be dinner . Basically , you know , eventually there's going to have to be some , you know , coming back from that . Basically , so , yeah , I know , I think there is quite a bit of divergence in the way that Western people think about meat and the way they think about animals .

Joy 29:09

And I think it comes back to this idea of mind and consciousness . And you know , one thing I like to do is if I'm reading a book and they're talking about consciousness , you can just kind of , you know , control that for a place with soul and you know , see how much is different there , see if it actually changes the meaning of what's being said in the text . I find that often people use the word consciousness in this very loosey-goosey sense when they're really just talking about souls and they're talking about who has a soul and who doesn't , and animals . It's kind of an open question because again , now that we know we're all related to the animals in the world , that's become a big theological problem for pretty much everyone living in the Western world .

C. Derick Varn 29:48

Yeah , yeah , that's an interesting point .

C. Derick Varn 29:52

I've recently gotten somewhat frustrated with some equal socialists , believe it or not , because they kept repeating stuff from Marx on humans being unique because of our division of labor that we're the only animals to do that , which is , if you don't have a clear like , if you can't rely on like in soul consciousness anymore , the cart , you have to come up with another way of maintaining the distinction . Even if you're an eco-socialist and I just kept saying when I was reading this you're just accepting that because Marx and he will say it , because there's no anyone who's ever looked at primate studies knows that primates have division of labor . I don't know what you're on . You even see division of labor amongst , like , social birds . I mean like it's not well , yeah . And social biology . I mean like the social biologists maybe take the wrong lesson from this , but yes , like you definitely see it in bees and ants and any social insects and it's just , it's sort of like that's not what makes us human . And then you know , when you start really getting into what's the distinction between a human and like , say , most other great apes are prior hominid species , you get into some real messiness when you look at it other than anything other . Well , we're human because we are have a nice day by , we are a particular line of a genetic strain of apes . But even that like the world's shattering event when people realize , oh yeah , well , okay , modern homo sapiens can interbreed with the anaphyls crap , and probably Davosians too . Well it's . You know , it's just like that whole concept starts to get muddled about what is a human . And then when you expand that to persons and you think about the way humans have thought about personhood in the past , I mean the Peter Singer move . And the Peter Singer move is weird because in some ways he accords , you know , more personhood to animals than he does to disabled people , but depending on his mood that day , how edge lordy he wants to be .

C. Derick Varn 32:20

But the consciousness problem is interesting . It's interesting to me for a variety of issues . But with animals it seems clear that once you get to the complicatedness of a fish , you have something like consciousness and that is obvious to you . Can't even say it's like you know civilized or uncivilized people , because dharmic religions also like well , of course animals have consciousness and also solves the way we do . They're just dumber and they'll talk about how animals are dumber than us , but that's like you know which humans have found a way to self-flatter . But it's still basically assumed that . No , there's not anything essentially different about you know a cow from a person and in fact you know there's this exercise in Buddhist and Hindu culture where you meditate on the fact that the cow has most likely been your mother at some point , like you know . So some people think , oh , this is only like primitive peoples and I'm going to put that in quotation mark because I think that's a ridiculous concept . I mean , almost all modern hunter-gatherers are am atomically modern humans in every way that matters .

C. Derick Varn 33:39

It seems to me that , like it's literally just Europeans coming out of a Christian tradition that have this particular problem , well , we can expand it to the other Abrahamic religions . So I will say that like animals and the accordance and relationality to animals is actually a huge deal in Judaism and Islam that is underplayed , for whatever reason , in Christianity , and it's specifically Western Christianity where it's the most underplayed because you would like Eastern church fathers they also talk about relations to animals as being important and some of them even venture that animals have souls like people , although it's theologically sketchy area for them to go into , and I find that very interesting to think about when you think about okay , well , why ? How could we have this factory farming system ?

C. Derick Varn 34:38

One of the things I always talk about when I think about meat is , while I do have a certain Buddhist bias against killing things that we're not killing in self-defense , I also do think like well , I also know that , for example , if I know what I'm doing as a hunter , that animal is going to usually have a cleaner death than if I'm just running through a bolt gun in a factory , and not always , and when it's botched it's horrible , but you know , I've hardly met that many hunters who enjoy a botched kill , like no one really likes it .

C. Derick Varn 35:20

Well , I'm not saying no one , they're our say just in the world , but most people really don't like it .

C. Derick Varn 35:26

So I think about that and I'm like , oh well , you know part , you know , I think you're right that this creates a theological problem . That's a very real like and it's a theological problem that's been secularized but it's still there . It also points out to the change in our particular scale of relations to animals , because it's every now and then . You'll meet , you know , some , some I like to call them Wendell Berry types who like talk about like the old way of handling animals and an animal , having to hug and dream , giving the animals a good death , and even from the you know , from the Western perspective , they kind of have a point that like you could monitor this better and do a better job and you had a relation to the animal that you were slaughtering in a way that modern Americans and Europeans just tend to not have . They have no idea of , you know , animal slaughtering processes or field dressing an animal or having to get up into the guts of an animal or anything like that I mean they even .

C. Derick Varn 36:34

you know , I've even had people who eat meat freak out . When I talked about , like when I used to carry a golf club in my car because I lived in the whitetail deer capital of the planet and people were hitting them all the time and leaving them leaving on the side of the road , I'm like , yeah , we would go out and we would take , you know , a big one out of Jim Filly , killing them out of mercy , and people were horrified by that . And I'm like , but do you just want them to , like , struggle and bleed out for hours on the side of the road ? That seems pretty horrible . I wouldn't want to go that way and that relationship seems interesting to me .

C. Derick Varn 37:11

The reason why I brought it up in terms of the eco socialists is I do think it has effects on how you think about solutions to ecological problems , like , how much are you considering animal life and for what reason ? And you know what do you think is going on . You know how do you think that should be addressed when we handle things like climate change really will change your answers to certain problems . So I wanted to talk to you a little bit , like , in what ways do you feel like even animal rights discourse takes away . He doesn't deal with these animals as persons , concepts or our relationality to animals .

Joy 37:54

Great question . I mean it's a very tricky one too , because when we think about this I mean you talked a bit about the fact that a lot of people are very insulated from the realities of what it means to actually kill an animal and , having done so myself , it's not a pleasant thing and I don't think anyone would say it was if they were extreme status .

Environmental Impact of Industrialized Farming

Joy 38:21

It's very hard to think , to do , basically , and the aspect of industrialized farming is really something that has a lot of gravity to it . I mean not just like ethically or spiritually or whatever , but the fact of how much carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus is going through these systems , is being produced to raise these animals from the time that they're first born to getting them to marketable size . It produces a huge amount of pollution . It concentrates life in very big areas that become these suonotic factories where disease is getting created between the humans and between the animals , and it becomes these hotspots where things you know you can have , these big pandemics , emerge , and I mean we saw recently , just as recently as 2019 and 2020 , with the COVID-19 pandemic and the way that that kind of went literally viral the idea that we could do this more humanely and we do it on a scale . I think that there's something to that maybe there should be . There's also been quite a bit of , I guess , greenwashing by a lot of the beef and dairy lobbies , who are some of the most powerful lobbies and special interests in the world . They control quite a lot of the politics and that sort of thing around climate change and around , you know , policies around agriculture . They , you know , will lobby aggressively for maintaining subsidies and for getting special protections and loose regulations , and that really changes the face of how things are done .

Joy 40:09

It's a model that grew up out of the colonization of the American West , largely in the Canadian West as well . The areas that were neutered of bison and were , you know , settled , colonized by peoples arriving that were taken from indigenous peoples were , you know , quickly turned into cattle pasture . They were enclosed with large amounts of barbed wire and all of those fields were either tilled for producing feed for these animals or grazed for the animals before they finished . And this system of intense farming of cattle , you know , would produce these feed lots where they get to a marketable size , and then they would go to the slaughterhouse . I mean the first original big slaughterhouse center in North America . With Chicago we had all these cattle and all these large animals being shipped towards Chicago where they would be slaughtered in large numbers . So the point where they some of the rivers in and streams in Chicago you could walk across with the amount of animal tallow and byproducts that were floating around in it . Refrigeration allowed that meat to be shipped off to the you know four corners of the American empire and even overseas . The leather , of course , went to baking for factory machines and for other consumer goods that sort of thing quite readily .

Joy 41:31

So that concentration of you know it . Basically , when you think about it , what it's doing is you're basically taking all of the sunshine that cultivates the you know the grass and the wheat and the soy that goes towards feeding these animals . You're concentrating that and you're taking it from the soil and from the sun and you're used to feed these animals . But you're going to other places and are being . You know they're all that carbon and all that nitrogen and all that phosphorus is going somewhere else and it's being going downstream and it ends up in the ocean .

Joy 42:08

So you get all this like fertilizer waste . It's a massive extraction , a massive move of macronutrients across the food web in ways that have never been seen before in nature , and it has escalated to the point where it's threatening the stability of life on planet earth , I mean along with the burning of fossil fuels , part of which is done to produce fertilizer for these food crops or for moving the tractor or for taking care of the animals themselves . So I think a lot of that concentration , a lot of that movement , you know it's quite alarming and it does require that you know , pre-acceleration and insulation for this to go on . You know people have to be ignorant because otherwise it wouldn't exist really .

C. Derick Varn 42:54

But this is this leads to . I talk about , for example , semi-relocalizing food production , a lot not in like the the odds way of the micropollin , just like going and you know , buying from your local farmer .

C. Derick Varn 43:08

Because a lot of times that doesn't end up being boutique and inefficient and it's really it's making an ethical consumption of luxury good . I get it , I understand those critiques and they're accurate , but I do mean in the sense of like . There's this obsession with Eucing microcrime and it's to like mass produce certain foods , both in terms of plant life and in terms of animal life , that I'm always like . Well , look at the cost of this . Even if it is superficially efficient in some ways , kind of Almost , always that efficiency comes in downstream effects that you don't see . You mentioned , you know this the amount of waste that goes into these large scale animal farming . We should think about in the Midwest and the West , these huge cow production facilities in particular .

C. Derick Varn 44:01

But I've also lived near the great chicken slaughter prints of the world which are disgusting , and as a person who's lived near chickens , chickens are not the most clean animals on the planet , but they're nothing . It's nothing like being near a Tyson plant , but one of the . There's other , you know . The obvious is the methane going at scale , going in to do something that would never happen in a natural ecosystem . There would never be enough cows in one place to risk global warming from methane . But there's other things about it that people don't see . So one of the things I always look to talk about is like look all this , the way we're using nitrogen fertilizer mostly to grow feed , not for people but for animals . This is going into like feedlot corn , not even the human consumption sweet corn or anything like that for meat production which you're creating . Massive algae blooms which you know certain kinds of squid and jellyfish do find in , but other kinds of fish just get wiped out by these red algae blooms in like off the coast , and I just don't even hear it talked about . When you talk about like centralization of this is like this is related to animal consumption . And another example that I think is disturbing I lived in Northern Mexico for several years and there I lived in a place in the desert called La Laguna . Now that means the lagoon . People thought that this was ironic because it's a pretty deserty place and there's not a lot of water in the water there . It's gross , but it's not . It's not . Originally it was a very luxurious lagoon , even though it was in this connection of three deserts . It was a very healthy microbiome . But it has no water now and people think , oh , it's people doing this and yes , but not in the way you think . People are not drinking the water enough to consume the water away from the aquifers . The aquifers are going down to where they're kind of now poisoned with natural arsenic , and this is not from pollution . This is just because you drink the aquifers in a desert area too well . But where is that water gone ? Not into humans . It's gone into beef , almost exclusively into beef actually . So both into water for the beef cows and into feed to growing feed , some of which is still imported from the United States .

C. Derick Varn 47:00

But this is offset costs in the system . So when people talk about centralizing food systems and how it's more efficient , I'm like it's only because there's a whole lot of offset costs in terms of the way we're handling animal life that you aren't seeing and you're not factoring into your claims of efficiency at all . And that is beyond climate change . That is not even assuming the CO2 problem , which , of course , is massive and the biggest thing we have to deal with . But even if that wasn't there , even if you've had some sort of carbon capture technology or whatever , this is still a major problem and it's just hidden from you . And it's also to bring it up in terms of what it means these this is where discussion of environmental justice has legitimacy , because most of the areas , both within the Imperial Corps and just outside of it , in Perthory , where this happens , this is off-sided on the poor communities , so they're the ones that have to deal with it . Even if it's just the effects of , say , water usage , like where I lived in Torreón , poor people had splotchy skin .

C. Derick Varn 48:13

Why do they have splotchy skin Because they couldn't afford to import in water . All right , the water is not poisonous immediately to you , but it is so arsenic contaminated again because the aquifer has been drunk down so low that if you consume it on a regular basis , you're gonna start having low levels of arsenic poison , which is not gonna kill you , but it is gonna cause you to have splotchy skin . It's gonna cause other health complications , it's gonna cause kidney stones and this is outsourced to various poor communities and it's invisible to most people here and every now and then , on the glory that as they enter , as people will show half-assed consciousness about this because about something like bananas . But this is true across the board and it doesn't have to be that way . I've talked about like yeah , we'd have to die back , like some amount of agricultural production needs to die back , but you could still probably sustain fairly large human populations off of traditional agricultural methods with some technological augmentation .

C. Derick Varn 49:26

But we're not doing that and I think it's interesting that part of what hides that to bring this back to the animal point is the relation to animals . If you see these animal concentrations and how we've done this this way , you start realizing that we have made this horrible for the animals , we've also kind of made it horrible for other parts of ourselves because we're hiding large parts of this process to us and we're hiding what it entails to maintain a food system like this . To critique that does not mean that we're gonna pretend that we can all just go back and be hunter-gatherers Like I don't think anyone who's serious actually thinks that . But it is something we have to deal with and I think this is interesting and a lot of ways . You mentioned zoonotic disease . I've been playing with the idea recently , even though I do think there was some racist stuff in the way zoonotic disease was portrayed about the wet markets in China , and I do think there is a small possibility that gain of function research played into development of COVID .

C. Derick Varn 50:39

I do not discount that as a possibility , but I don't think it's particularly likely . I do think , like most prior COVID and flu that have developed , they come from usually an animal that's relatively closely contagious to humans , like I don't know pigs you know how many I mean . Spanish flu , even though we blame it on Spain , probably came from the Midwest in the United States initially and was a pig-borne disease in its early instantiation . So I play with the idea sometimes that the reason why a lot of people really wanna believe and gain of function research leading to this is because that's easier to deal with than the idea that , like , our meat consumption habits are actually dangerous to us in a real way , because we are falling down in our relation to animals and I don't mean this in a like facile pica , we can all become vegans tomorrow away .

C. Derick Varn 51:46

Because I don't think that , like , even though I choose not to eat meat , I don't think it would be very hard to ethically run a meat-free or , excuse me , meat-free maybe , but like an animal product-free world would be very difficult to do without other costs to animals in the long run , I think . I do think we had like vinyl shoes versus leather shoes , that's , and it's cost to animals is actually not an easy question at all . So I mean I bring this all I guess is a way of kind of tying this in to your points about studying our relationship to animals really does tell you a lot about how we live ourselves and right now we do seem particularly disjointed about it . One of my big things I point out to vegan activists and stuff and this is not a gotcha to them .

C. Derick Varn 52:46

I'm more or less kind of on their side , but it's just like . Well , veganism's increased dramatically , but it's been increasing dramatically directly in correlation to an increase in meat consumption worldwide , like . So I don't know , maybe more traditional ways of handling meat would lead to a sharper decline in meat consumption than trying to convince everyone to be vegan . So good luck on that .

The Banning of Dangerous Dog Breeds

C. Derick Varn 53:17

I wanted to ask you , though I wanna talk a little bit about dogs , maybe as another way of getting into our strange relationship to animals . You have weighed in on one of the weirdly perpetually super hot button topics that I would never expect to be a hot button topic , and that is the banning of quote dangerous dog breeds . You actually talk about this being , in general , a terrible policy . Can you go into that and maybe the politics of that a little bit , because I think we have to think about this in a larger context .

Joy 53:58

Oh , it's an interesting topic . I mean , yeah , there's a lot of this . I mean one of the more recent cases and the UK's had a number of laws on the books for years about this . But the XL Bullies , which isn't a real breed , it's just kind of a thing that people made up , but XL Bullies ban basically in the UK after a number of dog attacks . Basically , dog attacks happen . People live with dogs and very rarely do people train their dogs to the extent where they are completely bulletproof and then there's no such thing as a bulletproof dog . Any dog can get scared and snap and bite and that sort of thing . But you know , get a large dog , they can definitely cause a lot of damage .

Joy 54:41

A lot of these breed-related bans , of course , getting into the actual nitty gritty of do they work . The fact is that no , they don't really , because they don't reduce the frequency of dog attacks or the severity . Necessarily , when you target a specific breed , you're only eliminating one sort of confirmation , which may not be an actual genetic subset of aggression or anything from all the different possible dogs that can bite a person . Basically , there's a lot of this pseudo eugenic stuff going on when it comes to dogs and the way that people associate certain shapes of dog skulls with certain behaviors . They've actually done studies about fear aggression in pit bulls and other dog breeds . A dangerous ban dog breeds inherited golden retrievers , which are famous for being friendly and affable , and they found that there was no significant difference between any of the breeds . Basically , golden retrievers are just as likely as any other type of dog breed to have fear-based aggression and to bite people out of fear . Golden retrievers are not small dogs . They're quite large dogs and they can do quite a bit of damage , you know . So it's something that you know . When a dog does bite , it can cause significant damage . A lot of this stuff too . I mean , you look at the actual numbers that you know . The most common dog breeds are the ones that are most likely to cause injuries to people and the most likely to actually lead to fail injuries . So there's a lot of this . Just basically , people live in post-proximity to dogs and dogs can do things out of fear that they wouldn't normally do and people get injured , specifically children and specifically people who are disabled and elderly people as well . When we look into the history of the breed-related bands , it actually ties back to the increase in police presence in primarily black communities in the United States .

Joy 56:41

There's been some arguments put forward and I think they're fairly convincing that the increased , you know specific dog breed bands were very specific to kinds of dogs that you know black Americans would own , hippals being one of them . Hippals are , you know you live in a poor neighborhood where the police aren't gonna come when you call them . You know where there's a lot of crime . You get a big dog . You get a big dog to protect your house basically , and so these dogs were , you know , trained to be attack dogs or guard dogs and you know people get bitten and injured , that sort of thing , and this created kind of a moral panic about the you know the inner city and you know fear of crime and that sort of thing . There's been an argument too that banning of fast specific breeds is kind of a de facto housing ban basically as well , for you know racial segregated housing , because as soon as those laws started getting lifted in the United States you get these breed related ban coming in . So the person across from you you know you're about how goes , you know across the street that house goes up for sale if they own a specific dog breed and the community rules that they can't own it , then they can't move into that house . So there's a way that the animals being used to enforce racial segregation so not necessarily canine racism , but it's racism being used through canines .

Joy 58:01

Basically , and when we look at dog attacks , the most severe dog attacks , the ones that cause the most likely to cause injury , are from trained dogs like police use . Police dog attacks can be quite severe . There's not like any database of this sort of thing because of course you know , most police departments work independently of each other . They don't exactly want to post statistics about the number of dog injuries that are caused by them , but a lot of the police dogs that they use are these German shepherds that are trained , go specifically for the limbs , the apprehend criminals and they hold their mouth in place , basically until the police arrest them and they can cause quite severe injuries . Basically , that way , most dog bites that people get from their dog at home are going to be on their hands or on the fingers . Very rarely is like a dog who's going to unprovoke bites the body .

Joy 58:54

Basically , I like to say that anything with a mouth capable of biting and I treat that with respect because you know even a dog that's wagging its tail , that may be showing signs that it's friendly . There's always an outside chance that you know you could do something that spook them or they could get scared and they could do something that they wouldn't normally do .

Dog Breeding and Behavior Complexity

Joy 59:13

I work with a number of dogs that are , you know , dangerous or you don't have a potential to kind of have these moments of fear . Aggression basically , when we think of aggression , we you know , commonly think of , you know mean or evil or negative qualities , but aggression is really just fear . When the dog is growling and its ears are back and its hackles are raised and it tries to bite , it's doing something to stop that , out of fear basically . And so there's this negative connotation with aggression and with bites , that necessarily that this means that the dog is bad and not properly trained . But maybe the dog's just afraid and you know it's not from or something like that . And there is a quite a bit of evidence to suggest that dogs can get , you know , post-traumatic stress disorder or they can't have an equivalent of it , basically One of the model organisms of people for that sort of thing , because animals learn associations and when they form negative associations it can trigger these stress related sort of things . So I think that the you know these breed related bands . Not only are they , of course you know , bad policy in terms of do they actually prevent dog bites , but they're motivated by a lot of these underlying factors .

Joy 1:00:21

And I think you know I did mention eugenics . The breeding of it actually is related to eugenics . So people who started dog breeds in the late 19th , early 20th centuries were eugenics , eugenicists . They were working with eugenics societies in America and in Europe and in Canada as well . They were informing these people , they were sitting on their councils and they were discussing how do we breed better people using technology that we developed for breeding dogs and breeding dogs for an ideal confirmation ? The founders of the German Shepherd dog breed they were all German nationalists . They were trying to make the vultures wolf-like dog . Basically , that would be the tendony of German values and of course , we know who was a big fan of the German Shepherd was the Nazis , right , and Adolf Hitler . So this emphasis on dog breeding and breeding for a confirmation is in this idea that confirmation equals behavior and there's a lot of pseudoscience around it and it's a long ugly history of you know . There's a long history of racism faked in there , I think as well .

C. Derick Varn 1:01:37

Yeah , I mean , yes , I also love . I mean finally this has come out to the general public . But I remember , like over 15 years ago , realizing that all that alpha male talk and gender relations was based on like fundamentally misunderstanding wolves , based off of studies done on wolves and captivity , and I was like , well , this is gonna sound terrible , but as a person who used to work in a prison , I don't think people are that different in prisons and I would never , ever link prison behavior to the way people act , even in lump and ice circles when they are free , because that's not what people do , they don't like . That's a zero sum situation as artificially engineered and breaks down certain social bonds . I mean , if I was to also go to prison , I would assume racial solidarity was impossible , because that is almost designed into prison maintenance to encourage racial clumping , which is beyond the scope . But one of the things that I learned getting out of that world and is really seeing that that wasn't just something that develops under stress although race as proxy for kinship bonds is something that happened under stress , that it was active and kind of deliberately maintained in the middle of the 20th century and while all that stuff has been theoretically removed . Most of those prison designs and whatnot are very much actively still there . Do I think that people naturally sort that way ? Absolutely not , actually . I got plenty of evidence to the contrary .

C. Derick Varn 1:03:33

So I think it's interesting that we did that with dogs and it reflects more about us than our frankly fucked up views of the world , although I do think dog breeding is a very good counter response to human inventions and eugenics , because I'm always like , well , just wanna talk about what we did to the most dog breeds by trying to hold them to a standard , because we shortened their life , we made them dumber . I mean , yes , some of the dog breeds have superpowers kind of for dogs , but also usually would weigh more cost to everything else than it's worth and we all kind of want I mean , you know one of the ironies of , like the bully XL movement . You're right , it's not a real breed . Well , a lot of these are like people realizing , hey , we really screwed up these dogs with these breeding programs . Let's like get a little bit looser and form our own slightly less eugenic kettle associations to save these animals and like not basically deliberately introduced genetic pathologies in them to the point of extinction .

C. Derick Varn 1:04:50

So yeah , I've always found dog breeding be one of those cases where I'm like , well , this is actually a good argument against eugenics . I just want to show you what we've done to animals with this program and it's not great so , but it is interesting and I think it's vital to note that we can't separate our ideas about animals from our ideas about people in a lot of ways , like it is very important that , like the kennel club of the world , do come out of the same time when we are beginning to become obsessed with scientific racism in a way that has no scientific validity , although terrifyingly , one of the things I recently discovered was I looked at the anthropology they teach forensic cop and I was shocked that it was like mostly 19th century or race science that almost even the most biologically reductionist anthropologist no longer think is valid .

C. Derick Varn 1:05:58

I remember looking at this chart of hair and like black , white or admixture , and I was like , oh my gosh , they're still doing that Cause . I also , just out of morbid curiosity , modeled my own hair and I'm like , well , I'm an admixture , whatever the hell that means . So yeah , you still see this stuff and a lot of times we assume it's gone away and sometimes I mean I hate to say it , sometimes it's just like hey , a lot of these agencies are really cheap and they just haven't updated their materials since like 1965 . But some of it is . A lot of these agencies have stuff that's been long since discredited and still maintained . And I also think it's a good point about police dogs .

C. Derick Varn 1:06:52

Cause German shepherds . When I was a kid , if I was afraid of a breed and I don't want to breed demonize I've known plenty of lovely German shepherds in my life , but if I was going to be afraid of a dog it wasn't a pit bull , it was a German shepherd or a shepherd dog in general . Because they tend to like . If you keep them as a pet and you don't give them proper socialization and exercise , they get anxious and if that combined would fear their bite , and German shepherds , if you mistrain them , are trained bitey in a way that's dangerous to people . They're trained to be dangerous people . You have to be very careful with them In the shift to . Oh my God , the pit bulls are going to eat your baby , which I'm sure has happened once . I'm not going to say like it's never happened I have actually haven't seen it confirmed but I'm sure that if I really looked I could find a story .

C. Derick Varn 1:07:49

Animals do weird stuff . I mean , every now and then a deer eat meat . They'll really confuse you . That's another thing about . But people assume that animal behavior is like always static and they don't have any weird deviations or any choices . And I'm like , have you spent a lot of time with animals that do weird stuff and it's not all just instinctual . Every now and then you'll see , like I said , you'll see a deer like eat a bird and you're just like that's not supposed to happen . You know our , you know hippos have just decided to kill you because apparently in nature , every now and then , a vegetarian animal is a real asshole .

C. Derick Varn 1:08:41

I actually do kind of , I do kind of laugh from , like you know , the animals that kill humans the most tend to actually not be predators Hippos . A lot of people die by cow Because cows are big , a big ass animal . It's cows are big , a big ass animal that can both gore and or kick you to death . And you know , part of me is like you can't blame them . We eat enough of them , like it's kind of fair .

C. Derick Varn 1:09:16

So it is interesting to think about that when we think about the , what we can learn about human politics . It really is important to study animal relations in this regard , and I also think it tells us a lot about what people are , you know , in our semiotic relationship with animals . This is like my like . Now I'm gonna switch to my argument against PETA , because there I was like well , you can't , humans shouldn't , exploit animals , and I'm just like I don't know whether human animal , even if we were all vegetarians , would do if we didn't live in concert in ways that you would recognize as exploiting animals , which is not a moral argument . I'm not making an atrialistic fallacy here , but it just seems to me like a weird demand , particularly when it gets to stuff like like , for example , dairy Dairy in the United States is a horrible industry , and I have to really reevaluate my morality every time I eat cheese , even though I love it .

C. Derick Varn 1:10:16

At the same time , there is a way where it's like it doesn't have to be a horrible industry . We don't . It does not actually have to be this way . We have chosen for it to be God awful in the way that it is and we've done it basically for commodity production reasons . Like it , like you don't have to treat and most family cows were not treated this way in the past . But now we have evidence of like burying trauma because we're constantly keeping , you know , milk cows constantly pregnant and depriving them of their children and that's horrible . But I don't know that , like every like , like we would have to run cheese farms that way , like I always think about , like goat dairy or bring up the aforementioned horse dairy , which I think is you know , you were right that probably part of why that it's not safe for popular worldwide is it's not cheeseable and fermented , vaguely alcoholic milk is something it's a big self to , not just Westerners but a whole lot of the world . Having said that , I've actually had fermented horse milk and it's pretty good . It's weird , but you know . But it's weird because I'm a weird white guy from the United States who , like , has not experienced a lot of that sort of thing .

C. Derick Varn 1:11:59

I think it's something we have to think about when we talk about both .

C. Derick Varn 1:12:01

How we're gonna handle the climate crisis . It will involve a change in relationship with animals . I highly doubt you're gonna actually convince the world to totally give up any use of animal products and , like I said , when I think about like vinyl shoes , I'm not even sure that it would be good to do so in all cases , like even you know , maybe it's not wise at every single instantiation , but I do think one of the things I really think about is like how can we inculcate people to think of not just the animals that are obvious , like , let's say , great apes , horses and dogs , maybe a few other animals , elephants and dolphins , things that people know are smart and are mammalian and thus look what's us , but think about relationship to animals in general , because human survival is largely predicated on the survival of most of these animal species , and when we talk about this in radical politics , I feel like this is often just left out or it's given the PETA version of the world . Just , I don't think is going to happen , which you're supposed to have .

Joy 1:13:16

Yeah , yeah , so that's a really good point .

Animal Morality and Human Relationships

Joy 1:13:19

What's the other thing , the PETA thing in the vegan movement and the vegetarian movement I mean think about , like Peter Singer with his book Animal Liberation ? Of course the basis of it is this idea of utilitarianism , or this idea that we should minimize the amount of pain and suffering in the world , sure , and maximize the amount of pleasure , not sort of thing . The other move that he makes is that we should have equal consideration for every single living thing , basically every single animal that's capable of feeling pleasure and pain and every single person that has pleasure and pain . And I mean that's a noble idea , of course , but I don't necessarily feel that way about everyone in the world , let alone every single animal .

Joy 1:14:06

When you think about , our morality is necessarily egocentric , like we think about who's related to us versus someone who's distantly related to us . Who am I gonna pull off the train tracks first ? You know , my sister or someone I've just met from who lived halfway across the world . There's this idea that a lot of our morality is kinship-centric or egocentric , and our relationships and our kinship with animals really tracks with that when we see things that are really hard to anthropomorphize , even things that are , you know , intelligent animals or animals that have the ability to do remarkable things , that have very complex behaviors and now he just simply do not recognize . I mean , octopus is probably one of the you know kind of the most common example , that's I did right . So cephalopods they have this very large nervous system , they have very complex behaviors , they can learn , they can do all these . We could use tools , all these different things right , but people don't treat them like they treat . You know cats , you know like they treat them , like you would an oyster or a clam you know Like they've got . You know people eat them live . People , you know , will boil them , they will kill them , that sort of thing . People don't recognize the fact that you know animals have these abilities . If we did have the sort of kinship or connection ship with the outside world , with the animal world , maybe things would be a bit different . But of course you can't have equal kinship with everything because instead it would be nothing right . So we did have this ability to recognize that , yes , the natural world is part of our own and we live in it . We can't ignore the reality of living in the world , otherwise we're going to run to a point where , you know , there's no more world left where we don't have any sort of biological diversity and they , you know , carbon cycle and then nitrogen cycle , are falling apart and the world becomes unlivable . So there's gotta be a point where we come to recognize the animals that are around us , that have the mental abilities you know , but also have biodiversity and try to uphold biodiversity .

Joy 1:16:28

Process of domestication and the bringing of animals into human relationships is very selective . One right it only selects for animals that are already at a point where they are , you know , amendable to that kind of interaction , that want that kind of interaction . If you had to pick between a wolf and a dog , the real difference is that dogs want to be with people . They like this , you know , they have an ability to socialize with people . Wolves don't . Wolves , you know , are afraid of people . For large part , they will actually avoid people . They will seek areas where there are very few people around and they will , you know , hunt and be

Relationship With Animals in Modern Society

Joy 1:17:10

sufficient . Versus dogs , dogs will actively seek out people and they will seek out human foods and they will try to form human bonds with you know , with that basically , and this domestication , this drive , is a filter , it's a biodiversity filter , basically , when we you know , now that human civilization has gone to basically every single point on the planet , it's drawing all the animals in that can be domesticated , which is a very few number I mean , only a few dozen animals have ever been domesticated successfully and everything else is just kind of pushed to the sidelines in very , very increasingly small pockets of wilderness where we have , you know , wildlife parks and you know national parks , that kind of thing , these increasingly fragmented , landlocked , little patches of wilderness areas basically , and that leads to a huge loss of biodiversity . It also leads to a alienation with the world around us and at least you know it's causing a world where we're no longer able to , you know , capture the amount of , you know , after carbon and cycle nitrogen properly and that's leading to all sorts of different things . You know also , when we have all these , you know we start breaking down the frontier and we go into the areas where these wild animals are . That exposes , of course , our domestic animal and us to these zoonotic diseases . I've brought it up before .

Joy 1:18:43

But you think about , you know we mentioned earlier with the influenza , and chickens , I think , are a great example because you get something like , you know , migratory birds . They interact with the domestic chicken . They can just pass through the bars of most commercial chicken farms and it spreads through a chicken flock like wildfire . From chickens it can usually . Sometimes we'll go to an intermediate species like pigs , where you know you get several strains and they'll recombinate and they form a new strain that becomes even more deadly and more infectious . And that's how you get these really virulent strains of influenza and those are becoming more and more frequent and becoming more and more severe each time we do it . There was a big scare because there was the you know , massive die-offs of birds from influenza and not a real potential and it probably still does of launching us into another major influenza epidemic , if not pandemic . So I think that there is .

Joy 1:19:41

I mean , obviously we have a , you know , egocentric , anthropomorphic bias towards animals that are easy to relate to , that look human , that are intelligent , that we're able to form these domesticated relationships with , and it's for detriment .

Joy 1:19:58

Obviously , not everything can be as charismatic as a you know , a lion or as intelligent as a chimpanzee Can't even be necessarily living in a place as beautiful or scenic as the Amazon rainforest .

Joy 1:20:15

A lot of the animals , most of the biodiversity on the planet , is insects , and insects are , you know , famous for being . You know , people are disgusted by them . They are repulsed by the idea of these things that are crawling around and sharing the world with them and their homes with them . Most insects are completely harmless , if not beneficial , and become a huge problem because we've moved on to a agricultural system where we spray everything with pesticides . They recently came out with a paper that showed that pesticides and fungicides actually blocked the ability for bees to smell . It doesn't sound like a huge thing . It's like , well , maybe they don't have time to flower , but really that means that bees can't have any social communication , because everything they do is based on smell . All the pheromonal communication is done through smell , and so our ability to you know the way that we interact with our agricultural systems , with the insect world , is completely upside down , because we need to find different ways of relating to the natural world .

C. Derick Varn 1:21:20

Yeah , I'm with you on that . I mean one thing I always tell people there are two things that I would assume the universe was . If I was an alien coming to the planet , I would assume the dominant species on the planet were beetles and bacteria Like that's what I would assume . And then maybe crabs , because crabs keep on re-engineering themselves , like you know . If you want to talk about , like , apparently , the platonic form of animals , a fucking crab . But because they keep on showing back up and they have completely different genetic strains . We're just somehow meant to be pincher thingies with hard shells , but it is .

C. Derick Varn 1:22:06

I do think about it a lot because on one hand , when we talk about you know , the penis , they talk about this bias towards things that are like you as irrational . I don't think it is irrational . I actually have a kinship bias , I don't . On the other hand , I'm with you that at this point , with our level of development , that ain't gonna be good enough , because you know how we can . It barely keeps us from eating things that are cute , like pigs are domesticated . They're cute and they're smart . You think we would feel a little bit better about what we do with them . But there's a whole lot of species out there that you know . I really worry about amphibians . It's hard to feel cuddly about a frog . I've tried . It don't work .

Joy 1:22:58

Has a frog , a cell .

C. Derick Varn 1:23:03

Yeah , it's a , a frog , a cell is not something I think I'm gonna easily become . I've also tried to keep lizards and feel the joy of lizardness , and I don't . They are they're . Basically I have the same relationship to most lizards , even when I respect their intelligence , that that Werner Herzog has to chickens , and yet I realize that they're really important parts of the environment , you know . And cephalopods hell , if we continue doing what we can do in the ocean , they're gonna be overlords anyway , since they don't think it's gonna be able to survive it . So maybe we should think about that now .

C. Derick Varn 1:23:48

But you're absolutely right . I mean , I've been through , you know , I have been at the seat in a place in East Asia where you're served a live octopus , and I've also tried not to be a total ethnic chauvinist about it . But it's also like , well , I don't know , I don't feel good about eating something that is actively still fighting me feels a little weird . So I do think we really have to rethink about this and I think it's something that , as we go forward in politics , I do think maybe thinking about this as relations with things that we need to have around , even though they're ugly , like you write Beatles , I mean , you know , people freak out about large cockroaches , for example , and I try not to , because I realize that , like , yes , german cockroaches are bad news for people , but most cockroaches aren't and they're not gonna go away , they're not gonna usually infest anyway . There are things that we have to worry about , like , say , rats , but even those I mean , a rat is actually a remarkably smart animal , like and they do seek people out because we're a good source of free food and shelter . Actually , beyond that , the history of humanities plugs is the history of zoonotic diseases , and so we do have to take that somewhat seriously and we do have to think about what that means , about our relationship to animals . And one of the things I think a lot about and I know people are gonna think this is weird but like , as we design cities into the future so how can we make cities more animal friendly ? Because we need them and we also need fairly high density , you know , maybe not as high as we have them in some places , but fairly high density housing . So how do you combine those two things together , like an awareness of the natural world and high density housing ? And I think it's perfectly possible to do . We just aren't doing it and these are the kinds of things that these are the weirder parts of foreign politics that I think a lot about .

C. Derick Varn 1:26:12

That it's related to changing the way we think about animals and I guess , to bring it back to something we said very early on about you know , the way we think about animals in relation to power , but also the way other cultures have thought about animals . Practicing thinking about animals the way other cultures do , even if you can't maintain it often , is very useful for breaking up your assumptions about what we're currently doing or like even like how we're designing agriculture . Do we have to do even large-scale farming this way , like you know , and stuff like that ? Like , yeah , I don't want everyone to have to be a farmer . I don't think it'd be efficient , but like , the current way we're doing farming to me is unviable . One of the ways to think about that is to change your way of thinking about our relations with animals and you'll start thinking about these other knock-on effects and if you're gonna have large-scale farming , how do you deal with that ?

C. Derick Varn 1:27:11

I do think it's a matter of orientation and I think , weirdly , the places where you see it the most is in primate studies and people who work in animal medicine , because you guys deal with animals all the time and thus realize that a lot of us are fooling ourselves about how different they are from us , and cultural anthropologists , because they end up doing a whole lot of like .

C. Derick Varn 1:27:40

Well , why do other people think about animals in this phenomenally different way ? And then you realize , you know , one of my big realizations , as I was reading a Marshall Sarlan's book and he just pointed out , you know , westerners think that like that's a shock , that we are like animals and like that civilization is holding our animality back . And he's like well , most cultures don't see that big of a difference between people and animals . But also , it's not that , you know , cultures hold in the animal back . It's like culture is what makes us human . But also the assumption is that animals are persons just like we are . Not just like we are , but on a spectrum of relationality to us . And it does seem to me that that attitude may help us get past certain problems that we're currently having right now , that where we're just doing crazy things about being real animal-wise in ways that that's detrimental to ourselves .

Joy 1:28:44

Yeah , I mean yeah , like it's funny that you mentioned lizards . I actually have lizards . I'm a reptile keeper . I guess I've got a ball python and a leopard gecko . I've had my leopard gecko for 15 years now probably going on the next team , I think and my ball python for a number of years too .

Joy 1:29:06

It's one of those things where you know , like having you know , we , you know , thinking about the way that we interact with animals , or the thinking , the way that you know , helps us to really understand how we , you know , interact with each other as well . I mean we , you know , understanding that surface appearances aren't everything and that you know you have to kind of get through your initial what . You get over the initial biases , maybe you can get to a place where you can understand things a little bit better that way .

Reimagining Neanderthals and Animal Relations

Joy 1:29:39

I think you mentioned earlier too , half an hour or so ago , about the Neanderthals and the way that our understanding of relationships and them really changed the way we thought about Neanderthals quite a bit . I remember when the news came out that we had quite a bit of Neanderthal DNA came to fruition in the public consciousness , public perception changed quite a lot .

Joy 1:30:03

It used to be that , you know , neanderthals are the sluggish , slow , stupid . They were the evolutionary losers . They didn't have culture , they didn't have anything . And then we found out , oh wait a minute , those are our ancestors , at least a little bit . And we said , well , oh then maybe they weren't so bad . You know , like maybe there's something else going on there . You know there's a little bit of , you know , chauvinism there . I mean , you know this understanding that you know , maybe , if we're related to them , maybe they're not so bad , you know . And when it comes to that , I mean , yeah , we should have some different ways of thinking about things and relating to things that necessarily aren't related to those relationships .

C. Derick Varn 1:30:49

When the Neanderthals . I think that glow-up is even doubly pernicious because not only did it , it's also the case that , like , oh , it's Europeans and Asians that are related to Neanderthals and not , and not , sub-saharan Africans . So yeah , now they're super human and awesome and like I mean , you know , it's doubly pernicious Devosions have not yet gotten the same glow-up , even though they're probably a fairly significant part of our DNA . So it's , you know , that is absolutely true . So I would say like there's a double gross diss of that one . But you're absolutely right .

C. Derick Varn 1:31:37

We tend to like we talk about ancient huh and we just tend to assume the ones that aren't in our direct line must have been just stupid . I mean , even when we talk about there's a huge focus on chimpanzee and bonobo intelligence and like , look , they are very intelligent animals . I don't know how much you can deduce about human behavior from them . You can do Salat and nothing simultaneously . Also , because there are two comparison species bonobos and chimps act wildly differently and they went wildly differently to us too . But it is interesting to me how , like well , you know , why are we focusing the great eights ? Because they're like us . I mean , they basically are us . You know , there's the chimps , who are super smart but mean . There's bonobos who are super smart but horny and horny .

C. Derick Varn 1:32:38

And we kind of talk about gorillas , but they're vegetarians , we don't know so much about them . And orangs are cool but I guess they look weird . So you know . But there are . You know there's a natural obsession with them because you know if you ever dealt with a , with an orang or a chimp or whatever there , they are awfully close to human , although my , my , my response to them is be careful , because the chimp is awfully close to human but it will also rip off your face and eat it . So you know whereas gorillas are like . If you're not a threat to them , they probably won't . They can and every now and then they'll remind you .

C. Derick Varn 1:33:29

But but it is interesting to think about , to think about our relations to animals , and I think , if there's anything that that I really enjoy about the work you've done over at member school and I am now going to be exploring your Zoonosis YouTube channel you have an interesting video on the animal Zoonosis YouTube channel . You have an interesting video on the Danish mink calling in its relation to COVID that I didn't even know about . I'm going to be plumbing those gaps , but it is interesting to to think about how much that relation to animals tells us about human beings . And and I do think if we're bracketing that out of our political discussions , we are leaving out a crucial thing about being a threat to , about being human and about our relationship to animals . Because I , I , I , you know , I don't think we survive long in a world without biodiversity . Personally , I mean that might be wrong about that , but I also don't want to find out so , and we're awfully close to being that world .

Joy 1:34:41

Yeah , it's interesting .

Human-Animal Relationships and Kinship

Joy 1:34:43

You brought up the nobos right , like in the great ice . I mean , it wasn't until the , you know , the 1950s and 50s , when the leaky started , you know digging up hospital epithecines in Africa , that it confirmed Darwin's suspicion that humans came from Africa , that we came from these chimpanzees and and , and you know the nobos are closer related to those . The alternative explanation was that we came from Southeast Asia or you know some lost continent of Lemuria that was . You know , like Wallace and Hague were both into that because it evolved . You know it's at the problem of hey , maybe we're from Africa . This I do .

C. Derick Varn 1:35:23

Yeah , let's say , engels picked up on Lemuria too , because Hague believed in that . But anyway , back to the . Yeah , we can back this drop in our discussions of that .

Joy 1:35:33

The thing that makes that's very different from humans and the other great age is our relationships with other animals . Right , we don't see these going around , domesticated dogs or wolves . We see them , you know , going into , you know sharpening sticks with their teeth and shouting bush babies with them . That's their relationship with other animals . Or you know , fishing , that kind of thing . But humans , humans are a kind of animal that will actively seek out relationships with other animals and I think that's other species of animal and I think that's a very interesting phenomenon . Right Like even before agriculture , even before plant agriculture . The first investigation was with humans and dogs , right Like this , and one of the first videos I posted on my channel was about this , right , the . I like to bring it up often because it's actually a very interesting example . It's the , the bone , so the site is bone .

Joy 1:36:32

Overcastle is in Germany and one of the very first domesticated dogs was found there . It was a puppy , about eight months old , and it had evidence of a very serious disease called canine distemper . This temper comes from canine distemper virus , which is a morgola virus , and what it does is it basically causes neurological signs , respiratory issues , it causes problems with development of teeth and this fossil shows evidence of like . The mammal was not properly developed . It has really severe periodontal disease , has evidence of arthritis and multiple joints . This was an eight-month-old dog and it had probably lived with this disease for several weeks , months , before it died , in which time it probably was having frequent seizures . It probably wasn't able to feed itself and needed to be cleaned , and so that would have required intensive human care . So this kind of domestication and this dog , it wasn't a useful utilitarian relationship . It was more than that . It was more of a kind of a , you know , symbolic or emotional connection that these people have with this animal , and you see quite a lot of these examples . Of course , in the human record , in the archaeological record , there is a .

Joy 1:37:54

I discussed this in the horse course , but there was a find in Greece from the I believe it was from the Iron Age , and it was a horse that had evidence of a leg fracture in one of its metatarsals . Now you think about a horse breaking its leg . I mean your thought goes that humane euthanasia is usually indicated , if not surgery . You know , in some cases this horse had a completely shattered like metatarsal where there's a huge amount of weight on the back leg , but seems . What happened here was that the people , the person who owned this horse , was probably well off enough to afford this you know a physician to come out and look at his horse and tell him , you know , this horse probably needs to be put down . And they said , no , you know , take care of this horse . They put you know the cast of the horse and it shows evidence of healing . So this horse was able to bear weight on its leg .

Joy 1:38:49

It wasn't able to do any work throughout the rest of its life , no doubt because it would have been , you know , like lame at a walk , and it has that . There's also evidence of that . This horse was also fed like fish oil . The reason fish oil is like a supplement , presumably , which is kind of similar to how we treat arthritis today and a lot of our animals . But the point is basically that you would form these relationships with animals and they're not always utilitarian , and a lot you know a lot of the ancient record shows that people were formed , people were forming relationships with animals that were emotional , like Hinshita , and this is really different than what the other great apes are doing . You look at the Fendiz and Pinobos that are not doing these kind of , and certainly not the orangutans either . So that's something that really does make us human , ironically enough .

C. Derick Varn 1:39:44

But this is interesting . You know , one of the theories I have about this and this is me on , I'm taking off my scientifically responsible and left . Us have been putting on my crack , barely trained in anthropology at Um . But it does seem to me that there's a similar relationship there between human kinship extension . So , for example , a female chimpanzee is very unlikely to let anyone else hold that baby because while there is adoption behavior in chimpanzees , they don't want to make it something . They will take care of it . All great apes will take care of other great apes kids but there's a much higher likelihood that a chimp adult just eats that baby for lipids .

C. Derick Varn 1:40:33

Now , I'm not saying humans don't occasionally eat other human babies , because there's evidence that we do , but it is very rare for humans to eat people in their own tribal or kinship band , even if the distance is pretty high away . Now people go ? Well , of course it's not , but I'm like , well , that just tells you how strong that taboo is that you do not think about eating , because babies are helpless , little sources of lip-lick man . I mean like there's a reason why they probably look delicious , but there's also we have evolved , and I always put evolved in quotation marks . I believe in evolution , people , but I get a little weary when we start over attributing stuff to direct genetics to not do that . And there are certain biological things that are triggered in humans from pheromones that tamp down on our predation and behavior . But I find it interesting because this also seems to extend somewhat to our relationship to animals , because I also , I really can't . Yes , chimpanzees have division of labor , chimpanzees have tool use , but they aren't domesticated and shit Like they're probably going to eat it . Or you know gorillas , they're probably going to avoid it .

C. Derick Varn 1:42:01

You know that impulse to domesticate other animals , inform bonds with them that are not purely utilitarian , does seem to be unique to us and , for whatever reason , to me , my suspicion is and I have no idea how you'd improve this , but it's tied into the same thing that makes us willing to raise other people's kids just because they're kind of tangentially related to us , that there's something there . And you know , whatever I like , whatever I think about human beings , I think , one , we're genocidal monsters , but two , we're also not . I mean , this is one of these things where , like traditional societies , even Christian traditional societies probably have better views of people than modern people do , because there's all like people , they're all good or people are bad . No , we are totally like . If we think you're kinship and by that I don't mean like we think you're blood related to us , because kinship in humans is not purely about blood relation I think people really need to understand that a lot of human behavior doesn't make sense .

C. Derick Varn 1:43:08

But if we think you're Ken and we can figure out Ken , we're probably going to be super cool to you and we're going to try to figure out how you're Ken , probably . Like that's our natural inclination is like okay , like you're married to so and so who's like had a dog once that something like that was new , a dog that I knew that thus you're like my aunt , so fun . You know that that is a kind of bizarro human reasoning that we have , but but it is this kind of symbolic extension of kinship that we try to do , that when we don't do it we tend to get a little bit extermination . But that , you know , and I think that really shows up relationship to animals , because if we think in animals can we will be irrational about it , and so the ability it is clear that our ability to accord symbolic kinship value to things that are clearly not the same as we are is pretty high , and it's also pretty clear the consequences if we don't do that . So you know , I do think it's just something to think about .

C. Derick Varn 1:44:17

When we think about how we talk about our relation to animals . They've always thought like maybe rights isn't in the white radar , to frame it , to convince people not to be total jerks to animals . Maybe we do have to talk about relationality to different beings and they're like relative kinship to us or something , because you know , I don't know that rights does the cut at all , like I don't , it doesn't seem to have that much effect ultimately . Also , you know there's some kind of like animals aren't going to respect your rights , so you know , but they might respect your relationality to them , because I mean , clearly , even while the animals will like if you have a certain , if you are seen as part of their natural flora and fauna , a lot of wild animals will treat you differently than if you're seen as some kind of outside force .

C. Derick Varn 1:45:06

I mean , I realize that talking about that is anthropomorphic , but , like if you've ever dealt with like deer populations that are used to you versus deer populations that aren't , there's a very different way in which deers that are used to you are to people who are not a threat to them act versus ones that are used to you know , dealing with hunters or whatever , and so it's something I do think it's something we have to think about . We've been talking for about two hours , so I'm going to wrap this up , joy , thank you so much for coming in . Where can people find your work ?

Joy 1:45:43

You can find it in a couple of places . So I have my YouTube channel that's Zoonosis with Joy and it's pretty cool . I try to upload every couple of weeks or so . I've been to stick for a couple of weeks but hasn't been updated , but I talk a lot about some of the things that I talk about here . So I talk about humans , animals , talk about diseases and really what's striking my fancy that week . Basically , I also am at the member school . I have a course on the archive there which is available to subscribers , and that one is about horses , so you can learn about the history of horses and how humans have interacted with them . I am doing breeding groups through them as well , so I've got a couple of breeding groups on the go currently . So the next one in January will be about , I think it's Wonderful Life by Steven J Gould , so definitely check that one out , and then I will have some upcoming courses with them in 2025 . So we'll have to stay tuned for that .

C. Derick Varn 1:46:48

Wow , that's exciting . I won't ask you to spoil what courses that you're going to be offering in 2025 . But , hopefully , people who are interested to check out your discussion with Steven J Gould . I am glad that ultimately , steven J Gould is winning the battle against Richard Dawkins Because for a long time it looked like he wasn't going to being dead .

C. Derick Varn 1:47:13

But if I was going to have people read Evolutionary Biologists , I was always like and it's not because I agree with everything Gould said , but it was always like , please read Gould versus Dawkins , Like Dawkins is .

Joy 1:47:25

We are going to read Dawkins at some point this year too , but probably a lot less charitably . I haven't read him myself , but I'm withholding judgment until I actually read it . But he speaks to me as an old British man , so I don't think he's going to go well .

C. Derick Varn 1:47:42

Well , I won't try to bias you too much , but I have always said that Dawkins is proof that not believing in God doesn't make you not an .

C. Derick Varn 1:47:49

Anglican prick . So it's an interesting scenario . I have read , unfortunately , a lot of Dawkins . I've also read a lot of Gould and there was a little while where Gould had really fell out of favor . In the arts in particular . It seems to have been somewhat reversed . But you're reading a good book by Gould . I would tell everyone , if you're not even going to go to the reading group , go read some Stephen J Gould . He has the distinct advantage that it's rare of being an actually accomplished scientist who can write an essay , which you know . It's a rare combination , sadly , so people should check him out . Thank you so much and I'll put a link to your YouTube channel and to member school and the show notes so people can find it . Have a great day .

Joy 1:48:55

Thank you .