Signature Block Animal Shelter Cage Card Made Easy

Signature block animal shelter cage card

johnathan Balcom was born in England raised in New Zealand and Canada and has lived in the United States since 1987 he has three biology degrees including a PhD in ethology the study of animal behavior from the University of Tennessee where he studied communication and bats he has published over 50 scientific papers on animal behavior and animal protection formerly a formerly department chair for animal studies with the Humane Society University and senior research scientist with a Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine jonathan is currently director of animal sentience with the Humane Society Institute for science and policy in Washington DC baltham has written several books including second nature pleasurable Kingdom and his latest title the New York Times bestselling what a fish knows and he's actually going to be taught doing a talk entitled what a fish knows tomorrow in the pear room at 3:30 p.m. so you can also catch that or if you have friends who missed out today they can catch him there so without further ado I'm going to give you Johnathan Beckham give you the introduction okay great and thanks to northwest veg for inviting me back I've spoken at this event at least twice before but never this venue and I think they've had it at this venue for several years so to their discredit they haven't invited me in several years and I'm delighted they invited me this year but what a great venue for this and it says a lot about the growth of this movement interested in vegetarianism and veganism I've never eaten as many good samples free samples I almost didn't need my free lunch ticket it's just because I'm a hungry vegan all the time that I used it anyway the roots of our relationship to animals go back at least 23 centuries to our modern relationship animals go back at least 23 centuries to the time of Aristotle who came up with this pyramid scheme the Scala naturai or the natural scale that placed humans above all the other animals on earth although below God and the Angels 20 centuries later rainy-day car did nothing to raise the status of when he argued that they were meaning non-human animals were thoughtless automatons mindless soulless creatures and therefore they had no feelings and therefore they were of no moral consequence to this day these ideas are influential with animals pretty much universally around the world being classified legally as the property of humans these ideas are still influential in the fact that we still kill we kill with sixty odd million terrestrial vertebrates a year and an unknown number but as possibly as over two trillion fishes according to some estimates we kill most of them to eat them hence the relevance of a but we also kill hundreds of millions for things like fashion to satisfy our scientific curiosity for sport and recreation and we might kind of characterize this type of relationship with other animals as a might makes right relationship a way of thinking that has a pretty rich history in human behavior including the colonialism era the African slave trade the subjugation of women's rights and the denial of civil rights we've relegated those particular social ills largely to the history books and Steven Pinker psychologists at Harvard University in his book the better angels of our nature why violence has declined comes up with a number of possible explanations for that he calls them civilizing principles I'm sorry civilizing processes I'll just go through a few of them here that I think are significant and relevant here the rise of state hoods that is to say elected officials anyone who's been watching the debates may have mixed feelings about the electoral process nevertheless I think it's a step forward on st. monarchies and oligarchies in those sorts of situations that we've that were typical in the past the rise of empowerment of women feminization I think is a very great powerful force for the good it has been shown empirically scientifically that women tend to be the more nurturing gender that's often borne out by the demographics of events like this international commerce where other countries instead of being a source of human labor through slavery today in the current era would be more viewed more likely to be viewed as valuable trade partners the rise of literacy an incredible rise tens and tens of percentages in the last century the rise of literacy from just 15 in the teens to the low 20s a century ago up to the 70s to 80 percent literacy rates around the world today that's an incredible change in just one century the rise of cosmopolitanism or we're more of a global community with it with a very quick communication thanks to the internet for instance and finally the rise of Reason this is a bizarre thing some data that Pinker described in his book but average IQ scores have gone up about 3% per decade in the last century and this is not knowledge-based this is raw IQ why that is I'm not sure but it's a it's an interesting change in any event it may feed into the fact that we are possibly more reasonable than we were historically and maybe more moral and I just want to add that along with these important social changes we're seeing an unprecedented rise particularly in the very current era we're living in in a rise in interest and concern for other species and that's where I'm gonna be focused today why is this happening now well perhaps we just a reason has risen to the point that we we have philosophers like Peter Singer who's a 1975 book Animal Liberation is considered by many to them to be the manifesto of the modern animal rights movement and then the ideas of Tom Regan these two philosophers are still living an American philosopher who a deontologist the idea of rights philosophy and animals have any interests very influential and then we have biologists who have been part of this change as well the Charles Darwin unquestionably the most important biologist of all time the idea of evolution by natural selection a sort of an idea or which is now kind of considered scientific fact among scientists a law of nature that unites humans with other species literally in flesh ancestry very influential and I think bringing us to where we are now we were really reflecting seriously on the moral implications of our relationships to animals more recently Donald Griffin and American biologist who in the 1970s began thinking about what do animals think and how do they feel he wrote several books and they're really ushered in an era which makes it very exciting now to be an ecologist my field an era where we're thinking and scientists are asking questions that were considered taboo for much of the 20th century questions about how animals think and how they may feel then of course there are biologists who don't really need any introduction such as their fame so as I said it's a very exciting time to be an ecologist so in the remainder of my three and a half hour lecture I just wanted to share some highlights with you about our relationship with animals and what we're discovering now about them things like metacognition and rats this is a studies that show that rats not only can think but they're aware of what they know and what they don't know they know when they're confident in an answer and they can tell you when they're not confident in an answer and really part of the challenge of the science of cognitive ethology in this case is coming up with clever experimental designs that allow you to ask questions like that and to probe into the mind of an animal who's not just ready and willing to tell you what they're thinking or how they think how they think tool use in fishes fishes who will use water as a tool to uncover a mollusk and then carry that Mouse to a particular Rock and use that rock as an anvil to open the mouth with a series of well-timed head flicks and releases this tusk fish here is doing tool use in reptiles a group of animals cold blooded you know reptiles just instinct driven it's just not true you can read a wonderful book by a colleague of mine called dragon songs in which he toured the world studying twenty six that all twenty six species of crocodilians and discovered things like tree climbing orgies cooperative hunting and tool use in this case it's been known from subscribed in two populations of different crocodiles around the world in which they carry sticks float them on their heads and then they go to heron and then they submerge themselves and allow the sticks to float just over their heads herons built their nests out of sticks do the math there's a real premium on sticks herons fly down to grab those sticks and that may be the last thing they do that day so it's a very clever bit of tool use that requires particular timing in particular location because herons do not just nest anywhere and they don't nest year-round you need to pick the right time to do this and they don't bother doing this when the herons aren't nesting that shows a level of awareness wherewithal in a group of animals that we've really dismissed it's pretty simple minded that we wouldn't have believed existed until somebody look closely at this advances in technology are allowing us to explore aspects of animals lives that we couldn't really probe before camera traps allow us to see things like this a small kind of African cat these are photos taken by cameras that are tied up to trees or left somewhere in an area where animals walk at night and the camera does the rest of the work it takes pictures when it's triggered by motion and so you can discover things like hitchhiking essentially using large mammals in this case I think of white rhino and an African Buffalo as a taxi service to get from A to B convenient you're up high you have a better view of the surroundings you can jump off easily or jump back on they probably don't mind too much it's pretty insignificant amount of weight and it's probably safer the only drawback is you kind of have to go where the animals are going but our big plus probably is that little tree shrews are not tree shoes but those shrews and other small mammals which might be part of the diet of a Genet are often gonna be running away to not be stepped on by these creatures so you also have a sort of a an animal who's stirring up the action give you a better opportunity to find food and then discoveries like naming in dolphins we know dolphins are a big brain and smart but they actually have labels for each other they don't literally call each other Nancy and Kyle but they do have what we call signature whistles sounds that they make that are distinctive to individuals and they can say their own whistle and they could say the whistle of somebody else so they're referring to someone else perhaps to get their attention and in concert with these changes in these discoveries publications in scientific literature is taking and interesting questions that it really wasn't asking before I've written a couple of books about animal pleasure and I'm gonna spend some time talking about animal pleasure in this talk because so often we talk about pain and suffering very important not to be neglected subjects but I think it's very important to talk about the other side of the coin of experience and that is the the joys of life the ways that we can enjoy life and to to wit this Current Biology a great journal publishes a lot of interesting research that I keep an eye on I had an issue on the biology of fun with a couple of dozen papers just a couple of years ago focused on animals capacity to feel good that was really neglected which disturbed me to write my book pleasurable Kingdom which came out ten years ago was that this was a really a neglected subject and now scientists are showing much more interest in this area I also want to just put out a word for one of the newest journals on the block's I happen to be one of the founding editors of this journal it's called animal sentience it's the first journal of animal feeling we are completely open access no subscription fees available online and we publish because we're not my journal we don't have to wait until we have enough articles to fill a print edition we publish papers as they're readied not always papers we agree and agree with such as the first target article we had why fish do not feel pain we don't agree with that position but one of the great things we do is that we invite commentaries and responses and we've had about 50 responses to that particular one most of which are scientific rebuttals so but it's very very important that we have scientific discourse and discussion of these important timely questions otherwise they're just sort of swept under the rug and we don't have any moral progress and and knowledge fuels change and so it's important that we have these discussions alright hands up anyone who does or has done lived with cats or dogs in the past or the present as well just a little story about animal emotions if you live with cats you know they're they're pretty aversive to change they don't like changes they don't going to following this cat Micah went on a 40-hour hunger strike he hid out under the bed upstairs he wasn't even the one who'd been to the vet it was his sister here Meghan who came home with that sow chemical smell of a vet and cats just do not like that smell and she was more freaked out later when he went to the vet it's interesting it's sort of the the sense of knowing that there was a vet 'no svet presence that seems to freak out cats more than actually going to the vet but that's an anecdote of course anecdotes are very important they they are often to the origin of ideas for scientific studies but I visited the clever dog lab at Vienna University in Austria a couple of years ago and saw an apparatus like this where you have willing people's pets companion animals who are willing participants they can say they've had enough anytime this is not what I would call the dissection these animals are willing participants it's non invasive research and a dog can be trained to stick his head in a little cradle so that the head is still and then you can have a camera mounted so that if it tracks his tracks eye movements and you can see how the dog's eyes change and move in response to different visual stimuli presented to that to the dog and then of course you give the dogs treats that's how you train them to be good and keep their head head in that cushion and you can test them with things like different faces and how to respond how their eyes react did their pupils dilate do they show more or less interest to their heart rates increased is their blood pressure change I mean all these measures we can do to probe into again into the mind and heart of an animal who's not just gonna say I feel like this they could be lying if they said that but physiological measure measures don't tend to lie and you find that when they look at a negative face of a human or a dog they have reactions but they do not glance to the left when they look at a dog face be aggressive neutral or happy they do glance to the left whatever face they're looking at if it's a human because our faces actually are bilaterally by laterally conveying different information about how we feel the left side of our face tends to convey more information due to the nature of our brain signaling and so through time through the evolutionary time during the 15,000 or so years the dogs have been manipular they've learned - they've learned to recognize our faces and to respond to them in that sort of a way so they glance left lo and behold so do we we glance left when we look at a human face are you aware of it probably not but it's a it's a useful thing you're getting more information about the emotions and feelings of that individual right then and there that's very useful to get a quick read because you want to maybe respond in a way that maybe won't antagonize them I'm like the guy I try to give a t-shirt a shirt a card to half an hour ago he didn't seem to be into that I read the left side of his face subconsciously they also present a control stimulus a shoe which has no bilateral meaning whatsoever and sure enough they don't glance left when they look at a shoe and then you can mount a camera over the dog and see which way the tag well this tag whales the whale tail wags little brain gymnastics for you low and behold it turns out that a dog who is a little bit apprehensive such as in a situation like this perhaps now the tails up there the tails are up that shows confidence but if these dogs are little apprehensive their tail are gonna wet it tells gonna wag a little more to the left or from where you're sitting more this way it's gonna be sort of that way if they're neutral it's kind of equal but if they're kind of happy and confident the tail is wagging a little bit more to the right these things unless you train dogs to sit there well you could discover at other ways but it's nice to measure things science scientists like to measure things and then there's scientists like this guy whose name escapes me right now Greg Byrne that's it he's putting training dogs to sit still in fMRI machines these are brain scanning machines that can scan live activity we can be told to sit still and we can do it pretty well they don't know that so you train them through rewards and treats and then put them so they can hear machines and they can stay still for 25-30 seconds long enough to get a really interesting reading on how they respond to for instance they don't know you can see and you could end again these are people's companion animals and they're happily happily engaged dogs are very very focused on us as you probably know that they love to please us they left it being involved in this stuff but at the minute they want to quit they can do that and that's part of the study design so it's nice to see that scientists are being more some scientists are being more animal friendly in their techniques scientists have done studies showing that when kept for a few days in a very small unstimulating enclosure a small cage where they can't fly they don't get any interesting food they don't have social company starlings will become pessimistic in their view of things they will be less likely to try something with an uncertain outcome than will starlings who have been kept in a in a flight cage with social stimulation and a lot of interest in their lives so animals not only have fleeting emotions I think it's very telling and poignant not just how they're feeling at that moment but a sort of moods how they're feeling in general an ambient emotional state and pessimism and optimism are ambient emotional states that says something about the inner lives of a bird that we we're not appreciating back in de cartes time then nevermind Aristotle's and there's a similar study design has been used to show that goats who had a history or suggests the goats who had a history of abuse are more pessimistic after living at a sanctuary for you use it several new sanctuaries who are have tables out here if you haven't been to those and by the way I've volunteered on a sanctuary for many years and goats are really fun to interact with they're really interesting they definitely pleasure seekers like humans are and particularly females seem to have more it was a small sample size in this study but female goats were the history of you seem to be more happy than the other goats regardless of their history when they're in a sanctuary for at least two years under the subject of pleasure I mentioned I've written a couple of books about pleasure these are them just a little bit of background on pleasure weight one way to put it sort of an evolutionary sense is that is the pain it's Nature's Way of punishing maladaptive behaviors behaviors that risk removing yourself from the gene pool through death or injury in potentially injurious behaviors so the flip side is pleasure rewards adaptive behaviors behaviors that promote survival food for instance comfort getting a way out of the cold if it's if it's cold and getting warm and and also sexual pleasure is a way to promote reproduction which is not critical to survival but for genetic survival and reproduction procreation selfish gene type stuff it's it's absolutely indispensable an animals show the behavioral hallmarks of feeling pleasure when you die so not surprising nature endowed us with a great deal of desire to eat food and fruit and plants have exploited that desire for many many many generations fruit is very expensive for plants to produce why they spending all that energy to produce this sweet nice smelling brightly colored very tasty and very nutritionally packed product what we call fruit well it's to get those seats moved around plants can't move their seeds by themselves because their cell organisms there in one place right some plants use the wind to blow their seeds around some plants have evolved seeds to stick to animals fur or our clothes that we pluck off later and drop down somewhere else perfect that's exactly what the plant wanted us to do we've moved the seed somewhere else and then fruit is another very successful strategy for moving seeds away from the parent plant where they don't have to compete for water and light and nutrients in the soil and so papaya papaya trees and blackberry plants and such do that they use fruit as a vehicle to use a mobile organism a fruit loving pleasure-seeking animal to get those seats or else I wonder who took that photograph is somebody in the audience who I think that no he didn't take that photograph well anyway Beth redwood up here has really helped me with a lot of my presentations and she's taken them from very nice pictures of wild raccoons feeding on fruit in her yard so that's a stand in this one wasn't taken by Beth it was taken by me a biologist who takes closeup pictures of animal feces to illustrate that animals it works by animals eating the seeds moving somewhere else crapping them out somewhere else in a convenient package of fertilizer where they're more likely to grow we usually recognize play when we see animals playing we think of play as sort of a frivolous thing it's actually not frivolous it's really very useful and adaptive play evolved probably to develop physical strength to learn the ropes of social behavior to important survival behaviors fleeing an enemy or catching prey and chasing play is a very common play behavior wrestling and ruffled tongue rough-and-tumble play very commonly found in both predator and prey animals because it's very important for survival the animals thinking of survival when they play I would suspect not they're probably simply enjoying the behavior in the present it's a very proximate emotional experience and we find it manifested in different species in various ways this dog is not looking at the filthy tennis ball that he is about to chase he's looking at the one who's gonna throw it and like all optimistic dogs he's off and running before the ball gets there brings it back for another round he's a lot younger than her so she would get tired before he would even though he was doing most of the work but animals love to play and we love to play it's rewarding it feels great and it is adaptive we are sort of in a way being manipulated by our genes when we play but hey it feels great we're winners we're winning in that game scientists did something that I'm proud to say I actually suggested in my book pleasurable Kingdom I said wouldn't it be nice if instead of putting rat traps out we put running wheels outside outside and see if animals in wild animals would use them well perhaps by coincidence I can't take credit for it but a research team from the Netherlands about three years ago published a paper in which they did just that they put running wheels in little cages that small animals could move into into and out of it will into the wild and put night-vision cameras on them and documented these you can't see it here this actually I don't think this is a video no there is I have a video file of this and you can find it online they found that mice might wild mites would come in and run these wheels is actually one running it in here that's why this is blurry this wheel is in motion sometimes for 30 seconds to a minute in fact maybe several minutes I could get the exact numbers but dozens or hundreds of mice use these wheels and explore them briefly instead of a waste of energy but they're curious and that's part of a good survival skill is to be curious and try things even though there may be some danger one may be curious frogs also got in there toads even a slug very slow-moving wheel but a slug I think that about a quarter revolution in there and then probably got tired and bored and got off there so maybe even slugs like to play I don't actually know how the slug got up under that wheel but that's like what's recorded you can actually watch videotape with this like moving very slowly I think it's important to talk about touch is a very physical way of conveying and communicating but also a very important source of pleasure we know touch is very can be pleasurable for us since we go to massage therapists and we use touch as a way to communicate with their loved ones and say that we accept them and it feels nice and it's a very physical way of sharing affection and if you petted cats you know they'd have to be scratched under the chin or on their head in certain spots that they like and don't like so much and sheep also and the sheep will tell you when they want more if they're trusting in their or they don't mind being around you these a couple of sheep that I was petting with my with my daughter we were warming our hands it was actually quite a cold day and our hands were cold so digging their hands into the backs of these sanctuary these sheep happy sheep on a sanctuary in Maryland where where I was living at the time near Washington DC and I stopped a gesture about something and I suddenly felt scraping on my boot look down and hickory was spying me to continue well that was how I read it I'm pretty sure that's what she meant and it's happened since when you when you give them a nice back rub they they tell you they like it and they can convey to you that they want more they know you are an autonomous being who can make a decision to do more of what you were just doing some atoms like goats have built-in back scratchers so they can relieve themselves but they also loved to be rubbed and scratched and they would often walk up to me and just lean against me gently and stop it's essentially an invitation for a back rub or a neck rub or whatever and other wild animals do this they exchange touch they use touch to convey acceptance social acceptance to be to remind somebody they're part of the group these individuals know each other these three little finches they look the same to us but they're all individuals and they all have unique characteristics they probably recognize each other my voice possibly even by smell birds can smell but also by vision birds are very visual and this one receiving this preening this is so-called ello preening preening another these preening from these other two will remember those did that favor and it's much more of a scientist studies of vampire bats for instance I don't know if it's been studied in these particular birds show that individuals who've received a good deed from another such as a massage are more likely to do that to them in future not necessary just a massage it could be providing food in the case of the vampire bat study it was actually a blood meal that was exchanged by among individuals it was the first empirical demonstration of a theory called reciprocal altruism the idea that individuals genetically related or not this is not kin selection will return a favor later for the simple reason that somebody gave them a favor earlier and animals like macaque macaws will engage in these ella preening interactions here's a bizarre manifestation of the same phenomenon a predator-prey interaction but there's no predator predator preying on the prey this is a warthog who's wandered in and flopped down in an invitation gesture where near where he or she knows that there's a colony upended mongooses the mongooses come scurrying out and swarm all over the delighted warthog who's receiving a spa treatment a parasite removal sir in exchange for a little tidbits of food and tidbits for the for the mongooses so everybody benefits it's a plus plus symbiotic relationship another example hippos and fishes was a nice article in National Geographic magazine some years ago showing this photo among others and I knew I wanted to get it for one of my books and these hippos forage on land at night and then they wander into the water of these sort of Springs in Kenya where this studied and they built an underwater cage they take these remarkable photos and the hippos then get in the water and then they wait for the fishes to arrive various species of fishes know they're there they come swimming over and they pluck vegetation from their teeth bits of plaque and what-have-you parasites from their skin the hippos spread their legs and splay their toes to allow full access to these fishes that give them this cleaning spa treatment service in exchange for food and then we have another example here feral dogs okay thank you feral dogs in parts of probably centuries if not millennia being there hanging out with wild langur monkeys and that langur monkeys groomed the dogs so the dogs also get a parasite removal service monkeys love to groom anyway but they probably also nibble up some of these things that they remove as a bit of nutrition but there's probably other ways that this is beneficial the dog is a predator with sharp teeth and might worn away another troop of monkeys and they bring to put monkeys or some other threat and also there's cooperative vigilance here where the extra pellets arif set of eyes and noses ears might warn a danger a little bit sooner than if the two parties were not they're cooperative cooperating and we can experience this ourselves with you know when we pet animals I met I met this some tame warthog I just want to point out the the tame animal is on the right and the wild one is on the left and touch is a great way to communicate acceptance through pleasure now I want to talk a little bit about fishes I'm gonna talk in more detail about them tomorrow but I wanted to just give a few examples now sort of whet your appetites speak and I've spent about four years delving into the scientific literature about these misunderstood creatures who have so much more going on in their lives than we've been good at giving them credit for and one example of this back to the subject of touch is cleaner client relations cleaning stations on reefs and some other habitats fishes like these blue striped cleaner wrasses make a living as a pair of them actually working here because even one right at the top make a living by servicing clients clients so-called client fishes this is what we call them this is a map puffer fish who will have waited in line in a queue on a reef and then swam up to this cleaning station where these two cleaners then pluck over removing algae parasites very similar to what we saw earlier with the warthog and the hippo with their cleaners cleaners giving them services so once again it's a mutualism these guys get food they make a living from this they may serve as hundreds even over a thousand clients a day and these guys get a spa treatment and they'll come back sometimes dozens of times a day to the same to the same station almost greedy for for more of this treatment I don't think it's all parasite removal I think they're also coming as they like it in support of that notion client cleaners will take breaks from cleaning and then just just swim and and flutter their pectoral fins over the skin of these clients giving them an extra caress probably currying favor essentially saying hey you know come to me us again will may be a really good treatment that's not insignificant because it's a competitive world out there this is a living for these fishes and clients can go to other cleaners so clients cleaners want to welcome clients back that's probably why cleaners don't do as good a job they tend to be a bit more shoddy if there aren't many clients watching them that's called an audience effect and clients for their part are watching these interactions and if it's shoddy treatment from the cleaners they're more likely to go elsewhere it gets more Machiavellian than that but I'll describe it more in my in my talk tomorrow and because fishes presumably enjoy the touch of these administration's from these cleaners we find extensions of this behavior where krish's like this this Nassau grouper known to locals as Larry will swim up to trusted divers to get caressed there's no parasite removal service going on here it's simply a back rub and they appear to love it they go up there right I spoke at a vet school early this actually I don't have that slide we'll save that for tomorrow I have more examples of that phenomenon we may ask is it really therapeutic we can ask that question we can do scientific studies and measure the physiology of these creatures and see how they respond and lo and behold we find that it appears to be therapeutic monkeys do a lot of grooming some species such as baboon spend a fifth of their waking time grooming each other it's a therapeutic well how do you measure that it used to be to measure their hormone changes in a monkey you had to dart the animal and then draw blood well that's pretty stressful that's a pretty big confound that's gonna change the biochemistry of that adam will be cooler you even get the blood now we can just simply analyze their poop so you can just note desiccated to get to get the feces analyze that and a very non-invasive way of getting a read on their on their hormone changes turns out that mother baboons who've lost an infant to predation or disease or what have you they show a change in glucocorticoids stress hormone for about a month which is about the same pattern that we see in humans and women who lose an infant we know it's a terrible grievous loss we don't know what kind of emotions are feeling but the fact that their hormone changes to reflect ours suggests that they may be having somewhat related similar feelings for a similar length of time turns out that mother baboons who are grieving the loss of an infant spend a lot more time doing this grooming others and being groomed by others presumably because it's therapeutic because it's a distressing and indeed their glucocorticoid hormones go down faster for that reason their closest associates family members relatives in the group also show these changes although to a lesser degree because it's not their own infant that they lost we can see a similar pattern in fishes we're surgeonfish is for instance given the opportunity to receive strokes you put them in a tank with a moving model that can stroke their body these guys have been stressed by the scientists before they before they're given this opportunity they swim up and receive these caresses repeatedly and they're in the cordon cortisol stress hormone levels go down much quicker than fishes who put in the tank with us where the model stationary it's not delivering they ignore those they can't get any strokes they can't get any caresses from that so that's a study that showed the same kind of phenomenon as we saw in the baboons in fishes who I'm happy to say who were - were returned by the scientists to the same area the Great Barrier Reef that they caught them that's actually not typical you don't see that in published scientific studies and now we're seeing that more and more which is encouraging similarly sharks are stroked by certain divers caressed into a state of semi based openness I guess you could say how's that for a scientific bit of jargon and they get hyper relaxed the jargon actually is tonic immobility they become almost catatonic where they're just not moving presume they're just hyper relaxed in a very spaced out state and in that state scientists and do-gooders can remove large fishing hooks from their mouths there's one account I had recently from a diver I'll show a slide of this blue shark tomorrow that's a big hug huge hook in the mouth from a fishing boat that was probably just cut free because they didn't want to deal with the business end of this blue shark and that sharks swimming around for weeks months possibly years with a huge hook buried in the mouth probably not very fun and so they take bolt cutters down there and they can stroke these sharks into a state of relaxation where they're much more amenable to having these these hooks removed from their mouths this particular blue shark swam around the divers for some time thereafter presumably more possibly showing gratitude for the good deed that was done there's other ways that animals get pleasure there's there's anecdotal evidence for humor and jokes in in great apes for instance and you can watch videos of animals in situations where they seem to be it seems to be almost mirth and humor a series of studies published in scientific journals by American neuroscientist named Jacques panksepp showed that rats love to be tickled on the belly this is behavior they do to each other when they're young and they rats expecting to be tickled will chase the hand to be tickled and they'll make these lots of these ultrasonic chirps in the 50 kilohertz range kilohertz range which are associated with positive effect this can all be measured scientists like to measure things and it helps to convince us that there's something really going on there I wouldn't do to mention and I'm a pleasure without mentioning sex I don't know if there's any young people in the audience but anyway hide your eyes if you if you're a little bit offended by animals engaging in sexual intercourse often it's seasonal but they're very motivated when that season rolls around presumably it's rewarding for them to some animals will invest greatly to try and get sex with the opposite sex the elaborate structures on a male peacock for instance really the product of choosy females who four generations of being picking males with more impressive tail trains and therefore driving the evolution of these elaborate costly adornments and another example from the oceans among fishes they also many species engage in courtship here's one of the more elaborate examples a small pufferfish about 4 inches long spends hours or days making these beautiful Mandela li-like structures about 6 feet across perfect circle's they look like a giant reached down and pushed his thumb into the into the and this is a tiny little fish you can see the fish gives an idea of scale so we talking aesthetic pleasure here I mean I think P hens must have some sense of aesthetic pleasure they must get some because their thrill out of an impressive peacock display and I would say that a female pufferfish in this particular species which was only described for the first time about two years ago probably also get a get a kick out of seeing fishes do like bling when you give them an opportunity to adorn their nests with with bits of tinfoil they will take those tinfoil and adorn their nests with it so there is appears to be evidence of artistic appreciation among fishes pure coincidence that a vegan cheesecake that I made for staff holiday parties some years ago looked a lot like this you won't typically find the word love in the index of most biology textbooks but we should expect love emotions like love to evolved in species who for instance need to work together to raise their young successfully mothers and fathers parents as in giraffes here and that those genes for love will be inherited by the offspring who is more likely to survive thanks to the close cooperation of the parents so emotions are just as subject to evolution by natural selection as our physical traits here we have a couple of rainbow lorikeets an australian parrot kissing each other and is this behavior is called building or kissing and it's a probably a way of cementing bonds and relationships they may also exchange food which is another way of sowing I really appreciate you being around another former pleasure I mentioned comfort earlier comforts really important actually again we think of it it's a little bit frivolous but if you're cold and if you stay cold or you get colder you're on the way to death if you're warm-blooded creatures so it's important to stay warm and it feels nice our bodies reward us for doing the right thing stepping in a sauna when you've just been out in the say Texas sunshine we won't talk about Portland for sunshine so much but stepping into a sauna does not feel good if you're really hot but if you're really chilly it feels great so the same stimulus can feel good or bad depending on what your internal needs are and what your internal state is we're always seeking homeostasis just to bring ourselves back to a stable state and ring-tailed lemurs know that they probably don't know that they may not know they had to have studied the biology textbooks but it sure feels nice to feel that Sun on their bellies in the morning after a cold night no explanation needed on that slide maybe a little explanation here these are chickens at the sanctuary have volunteered at opened the barn doors in the morning in the fall it's a little chilly and that's the ray of Sun comes in and they sprawl on their sides and spread their wings in a classic bird sunbathing behavior to maximize their body surface receiving the sun's rays the nice warm rays something we often don't talk about in terms of the quality of animals lives its freedom quality that's so important fundamentally important it's so important that animals probably don't think about it unless of course they lose their freedom in which case it's a terrible bad thing to happen to them and we recognize that but we need to be aware that having freedom is a big plus for animals and they deserve to have that so bringing it together then continuing on the theme of animal pleasure if an animal can feel good things not merely be a pain avoider but be a pleasure seeker then the animal has intrinsic value that life is intrinsically valuable it's valuable beyond any utilitarian value to to someone else such as us the animal has can feel pleasure can have joy can experience emotions and therefore it's a life worth living which is you could say a quality life of life life worth living an important corollary to that is that death is harmful its life's worth living losing life is losing opportunities to enjoy so animals seek to minimize pain they seek to maximize pleasure and they seek to avoid death and sentience is a word we don't hear a lot but we should hear more it's an important word it's the capacity to feel and sentience I like to say the ethics the foundation of moral systems the reason we have a sense of good and bad is that other individuals can feel things they can have good days and bad days they can have good things happen to them or bad things happen to them and humans tend to be very adept at categorizing more good a carton where we cut compartmentalize the animal on the left in our culture is generally regarded as a source of food and the animal right as a beloved family pet companion even though in some other parts of the world the animal on the left is regarded as a sacred creature to be protected and the one on the right can be treated horribly as a source of food biologically they're comparable creatures they're both mammals yes the one on the left will grow to be much bigger but they have similar capacity similar emotional profiles similar similar physical needs and it's time we thought about their needs as something on them as part of the moral landscape and because this is a vegetarian vegan conference I want to put it in that context that we all have a choice in what we eat and most of this audience here is probably already thinking about that the fact that you're here but if you are then you're ambassadors for spreading this message that we need to be including animals in our circle of moral concern I love what Anne Frank said to me this speaks about the word empowerment it's really empowering to know that we don't have to wait a single moment before we make a difference in the world because we can make it immediately and every day by the choices we make it's great if we can influence others to make more compassionate choices but we can at least be completely 100% in control of the choices we make in our society and so I sometimes encourage audiences to if you're not if you're not vegetarian go vegetarian if you're if you're already vegetarian go vegan and if you're not sure about it give it 30 days 30 days is short enough that it's not that daunting and/or terrifying but it's long enough that you may feel the effects and get into a rhythm that you find that you might like to keep keep doing as you move forward and there's various benefits I'm showcasing a couple of those cartoons here health is certainly part of the benefit the environment feeling good but also doing a good deed for these animals that have these emotions and as this book by my colleague Michael Greger show is a best-selling book which is a sign of the times how not to die it is definitely in your own own interest to eat lower on the food chain if you're eating high on the food chain and more and more Americans are thinking about this trends over the last decades show that Americans are reducing their meat consumption this may be more omnivores choosing vegetarian options because they're more available or the uptake of more vegetarians probably a combination of the two but we're definitely seeing some changes so in closing we definitely need to work towards a better relationship to animals and I just loved the concept of Karma that what's good for them is also good for us so being animal conscious and animal friendly and our eating habits is not just animal friendly it's human friendly because it makes for a more compassionate world which is better for us as well and if you care to be in touch with me I have Facebook and Twitter accounts and Instagram and also do a newsletter once a month on fishes because that's my latest book so just email me about that address at the bottom and I'll be happy to send you a newsletter once a month and I think I have time for a few questions I sadly I don't have any books because of a miscommunication we don't have any books today or tomorrow my books to sell but you can always order them anywhere online you like there is some literature up here you can come and get including an excerpt from the book that appears in Scientific American some bookmarks do help yourself I don't want to take them home in my suitcase so I'd be happy to take a few questions if we have time I believe we do thank you very much [Applause] yes sir yes so I noticed in your talk you made a lot of references to animal studies where we were observing animal behavior and then using that to you know learn like get into the mind of the animal I'm wondering what is the line between animal experimentation and research that informs us about animals and animal research that is possible this for example I don't know just familiar with the new animal lab that's being built at the University of Washington and there's there's currently attempting to gets back I'm just wondering like what your take on that where is that line and how can we do research and learn about animals without it's any more unfortunate thanks for raising and thanks for being thoughtful to speak loudly you didn't have a mic I think most people heard the question do I need to repeat it for anyone basically the question is you know how do I feel or what do we do about the question of some of the studies that are most revealing about animals in our lives may not be animal friendly and definitely vivisection is something I want to see go out the window the vivisection is I would define it as harming animals in research that harms animals as I showed from some examples research can be done that doesn't harm animals nevertheless some of the studies I do cite and I do cite in my books such as the one with the surgeon fishes which I was happy to say were released back into the Great Barrier Reef nevertheless those fishes were caught taking from their homes in the wild that's stressful enough then they were put in a bucket of water just enough to cover their bodies for 30 minutes that's really stressful which was the way they designed to stress them so that their cortisol levels would go up and then you could see how they responded to being caressed and then they did the right thing at the end took him back to the wild of course after you let him go you know what's their fate i disrupted the lives of bats in my in my doctoral research I lost sleep over it I hated it I didn't kill them your an impact so we have to grapple with this issue scientists are incredibly innovative and creative we can come up with better ways and scientists are doing that with these fMRI studies I mentioned with the dog clever dog lab studies dogs they're becoming the darlings of ethology research they're they're so great because we can understand them better than they understand our our communication is better so it's good to see more dog research being done on happy dogs or people's companions so as to studies that are harmful to animals if the studies being done I don't have any influence on whether it was done or not I if I feel like I citing the study I can help to advance the animals cause so that maybe ultimately fewer those studies will be done maybe that's a utilitarian approach nevertheless I will cite those studies but I do try to present a voice that says let's not be harming animals in research yes yeah yeah I mean just back to your first point in telecenter ism is a term i've used for we tend to be intelligence focused as a really character that determines whether animals worthy of our concern or not how how convenient for us when we tend to hold ourselves in a very high esteem when it comes to intelligence I'll give an example tomorrow of a fish who does something we can't do cognitively chimpanzees have been shown to do some things we can't do cognitively animals are good at what's useful to them so they have their own kinds of intelligences and yeah we oughta get off that Intelli centrism track and not be just considering that the only important thing to me it's a little bit Bentham Bentham asked Jeremy Bentham the question is not can they talk or can they reason but can they feel or can they suffer he said it suffer being more in the realm of sentience feeling that's where it's at that that's the important criterion in my view of moral consideration if animals can feel if they can suffer if they can feel good then we need to include them in our circle the moral concern we need to give them due respect for years of studying fishes has convinced me that fishes are every bit of deserving as moral considerations we currently grant that other mammals so as to the specifics of your last part of your question what kind of intelligence do I think is the most the most telling perhaps I don't really have a strong opinion about that I think we can see that animals certain animals we may argue where the draw the line between sentence and non sentence draw it in pencil because new scientific evidence causes us to change our view but definitely all the vertebrates are clearly sentient they ought to be all considered given our moral consideration we need to be taking them into consideration and not just running roughshod over them and their living spaces as we've been doing right here yeah thanks for raising that that's an important one too I have two responses to plant sentience one is the sort of the scientific well they don't have nervous systems and they can't move away from bad things so there was never any real evolutionary basis for the meeting to feel pain version 2 things does that new popular book the secret lives of trees I think it's called I had yet to read it there's the water plant nose published by my father for a few years ago the the guy who studied who did that books makes it clear that he's not arguing that fishes have a cognitive life but they're responsive to changes in their environment and they're very responsive to to stimuli it doesn't mean anything that's the one kind of answer you can get where it gets a little bit dense and you're sort of arguing science the moral answer is that let's just say let's just say plants are sentient plants were sentient and the vegan diet is the best way to live the eating plants directly because if you eat animals you're eating animals who had to eat plants had to consume plants far more plants to build their muscle than if you eat plants directly so the most the most animal-friendly died is veganism for sure the most planet friendly diet for sure is veganism so that can skirt the issue because often the undercurrent of the question is you know well the plants suffer you're just eating more plants by being vegan and so I think it's important to point out that the veganism plant-based diets somewhat paradoxically the sound of it are the most friendly diets yeah okay III regard and I think most would agree with me that that consciousness is a prerequisite for sentience there's some debate about that I think you have to be able to experience something to feel pain or pleasure those are experiences and so there has to be some kind of conscious awareness some kind of experience of the world so I think consciousness is a prerequisite and a requirement of sentience there was a meeting at Cambridge University a few years ago where they they come up with this declaration of consciousness which essentially it was quite inclusive pretty pretty much tacitly if not if not explicitly inclusive of all vertebrates and now there's science on some cephalopod mollusks octopuses and squids and some crustaceans that are showing that they appear to also be sentient so that's why I say draw that line in pencil Tom Reagan was the one who suggested that because we knew science makes us question what all the time yes so am i what's the matter with you guys I don't I don't deal with the mykos go straight to the lay public my writing and my speaking is mainly to lay audiences I mean there's scientists here I'm sure but mostly non scientists similarly my books are written for non scientists scientists you know love the navel gaze which is fine it's great it's important we have philosophy and it's important we have science but we also need to look at the bigger picture and make some big decisions about how it ought to be and I like the principle of giving the benefit of the doubt you know the party who's got the most to lose the one who's gonna be most injured if we if we were if we air and we're wrong let's give them the doubt the benefit of that doubt so but thanks for mentioning that it is important to engage scientists and philosophers in this and to listen to what they're saying also encourage laypeople to make important decisions regardless of what philosophers are saying okay at the very back yes yeah I don't know of any such studies the the question boils down to the quality of life I think which is the better quality of life and having lived with mostly cats you know it's it's a challenging one I mean there's so many costs and benefits either way Humane Society Institute for science and policy for which I work before I joined them I had a conference on indoor versus outdoor cats which is a big debate some years ago I haven't read all up his eating's at a conference they are available online I'm an animal studies repository that we do so if you type into animal studies repository it'll take you to there and you can check that out it's a great resource for finding stuff that's otherwise not easily available online but you know for just the things that come to my mind you know indoor cat we just we just adopted it well we just got a feral off the streets we were seeing this feral for weeks this poor little scrawny little cat you know scrounging I'm not probably not a great quality of life for that particular cat even though in a very affluent area of southern Florida a lot of hazards to life this cat has seemed to really embrace from about 24 hours after we trapped the cat and brought the cat into the house the cat of course was terrified of us at first but it seems to since embraced the relatively domestic life where you're fed on a schedule you get warm surfaces and Safa clothes to sleep on you have the company of an adoring 14 year old female so a pretty good life but you know then again some cats I've seen in Britain Britain the tradition is you know horror the idea we keep cats indoors but the flipside is these cats are out catching a little bit not millions not even hundreds of millions but billions of birds at least in North America so there's huge ecological implications it's a big big debate big fuss and now there's the new book about cats in the wild and whether recommending that they should be killed under it by any means necessary is the notorious quote that the authors have recommended that books getting a lot of attention not all positive very controversial issue yes question is do I think that cats and dogs for instance take on a more compassionate attitude the longer they live with us in most cases I would say not because I don't think we're always usually setting a very compassionate example I think the people in this room Babs may be working at a higher level of compassion because you're at a conference like this but in by and large I kind of a lot of the time hope they don't follow our example animals do what they need to do they they don't I think you know to use the psychological term sorry philosophical terminology we think of ourselves as moral agents where we can make moral decisions and we can reflect on right and wrong there is some emerging evidence that some animals may be able to do that too but by and large we do not think the lion is wrong for killing to eat that's a lion's way and a lion maybe doesn't have any choice in that we're the ones that have the choice of easily this pig in the cafe so whether or not animals can pick up being more moral because of us interesting question I don't know if there's been much study of that maybe one more do we have time for one more we're right at the time I think we'll have to cut it there please come and get some literature thanks again for coming today you