To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Animals and Us

From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge on Jim Fleming. Americans think of themselves as animal lovers, we spend close to 50 billion dollars a year on the care and feeding of our pets, but we're going to roughly 300 billion dollars on killing animals. Let's face it, the way we think about animals is awfully complicated. When they're pets, we don't on them. When they're not, we eat them. And despite all those vegetarian options in restaurants, America's meat consumption is higher than ever. Today, we'll explore the intense and often contradictory feelings we have about animals, from the new frontier of dog cloning to the ethics of killing some animals to protect others. Also, virtual reality pioneer, Geron Leneer, on the marvels of the octopus. Why aren't cephalopods running the planet? Because they are just amazingly smart. They're this whole other evolutionary line that generated big brains. Essentially, what I want to do with virtuality is turn people into cephalopods. But first, psychologist Hellhurtzog has written a fascinating book called, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Why, it's so hard to think straight about animals. He told

Anne Strange Shams that he spent years trying to sort out his own feelings about our fird, thinned, and feathered cousins. I've got to admit, I have made my piece, my personal piece with eating animals, and I'm not a vegetarian, I eat meat, although not as much as I used to. But I have not made my piece with being a cat owner, and our cat Tilly, although she's a sweetheart to me and my wife, she's a stone -cold killer when she goes outside. So she delights in killing small animals and then sometimes bringing them home. And you could say, well, keep her in the house all the time. But when I've tried that, and she just hates it. So I'm really very conflicted about being a cat owner. Well, that's actually a fascinating issue because by loving your cat, loving one animal, you are contributing to the deaths of other animals. That's absolutely true. And one of the things that I've done, which I hate this, is I quit feeding birds. I've always been a bird feeder. And we keep

bird feeders around the house, and I love to look at them and things like that. But I saw her one time knock a hummingbird out of the sky, and on the one hand, I was amazed by the sheer athleticism of it. On the other hand, that was the straw that brought the camel's back. So part of you wants to say, oh, clever kitty, the other part wants to say bad girl. So I don't feed birds anymore. You also tell a story about how some of these moral questions about how we treat animals came into your own life. There's a story you tell about when your family got a baby boa constrictor. Yeah, we basically wound up with this small newborn boa constrictor in eight mice. You know, we fed it mice, you know, small mice, it wasn't any problem. Then I got this call one day from a friend of mine that's an animal activist, and she had heard a rumor that I was feeding, I was going to the local animal shelter and picking up kittens to feed to my boa constrictor, which was, you know, the first thing I did was just laugh. I mean, that was crazy. I mean, number one is that Sam the boa could never eat a kitten. He was only about a foot long. The other thing is I wouldn't do it. I was just horrified the idea of feeding a cat to a boa constrictor. But then I started thinking, it just

sort of nagged me. I started thinking about, well, what would be wrong, actually, with that? You know, after all, I'm feeding the mice now, and these mice have to be raised for a snake food essentially. In the United States, we kill something like 3 million cats a year because they're unwanted. What exactly would be wrong with getting a kitten from the animal shelter and feeding to my boa constrictor? But everything in my body said, no, no, that's not true. And that's when I really began to think about the role of logic and emotion in our relationships with other creatures. So it sounds like what you're saying is we compartmentalize. We create certain compartments in our minds that are labeled pets, and those animals were allowed to think are cute and adorable, and we would be horrified to feed them to anything or to eat them. And the other category, we label as fair game. That's exactly correct. And the work compartmentalization, I think, is just a terrific word. And then when we find out that not everybody agrees with our categories, we get upset. For example, when I've mentioned to people, oh, yeah, that puppy that's so cute

over here would be cute in Korea or China, but it would be seen as cute because it might make a nice tasty snack for lunch, as opposed to something to love. And there's a huge cultural element here. For example, I've got a friend that's from Kenya. He's an anthropologist, but he was born in a village in Kenya, and they have dogs in his village. But they never let the dogs in the house, and they're basically guard dogs. People don't pet their dogs. They don't play with their dogs. They keep them around to scare away strangers. And I said, you know, Nyaga, would you ever allow your dog to sleep in your bed? And his reaction would be like, if you ask me if I would let her rat sleep in my bed? He was just absolutely horrified. It wasn't like, no, it was no. It was, oh, my God. You're like, his eyes bumped up and, no. But my cat sleeps in my bed, you know? Well, one area that often makes people feel very uncomfortable, all the questions around eating animals. And it's interesting to see that over the last 30 years, concerns about animal rights and animal welfare have really emerged as very mainstream issues. And yet, I'm wondering whether more

people really have become vegetarian? Well, my answer to that is simple, and the answer is no. There's been relatively little change over the last 10, even the last 30 years in the number of people that are vegetarians. The fact is that 97 to 99 % of Americans sometimes eat meat. Furthermore, when Peter Singer wrote his magnificent book, Animal Liberation, in 1975, which was really the kickstart of the modern animal rights movement, the average American ate about 170 pounds of meat a year. Now we're up to about 232, 140 pounds of meat a year. So we're eating more meat now than we did when the vegetarianism was just emerging as a movement? Yes, absolutely more meat. Furthermore, we're killing vastly more animals. When he wrote that book, we killed about 3 billion animals a year for our dining pleasure. And now we're up to 10 billion animals a year. This is one of the great shocks that I learned in writing the book. It turns out that most vegetarians eat meat. What? Uh -huh. I

explain that. I hear a stunning silence. I'm thinking of the grief my vegetarian friends are going to give me after they hear this. Oh, I know. I get this all the time from my vegetarian friends, too. There have been now several studies. And the best one was a large study by the US Department of Agriculture where they called something like 30 ,000 Americans to the telephone survey. And they asked them about their diet. And a chunk of them said that they were vegetarians. Well, then a couple of weeks later they called these people back up and they said, all right, tell me what you've eaten in the last 24 hours. Now this isn't the last month or the last year, it's the last 24 hours. And they found that over 60 % of the quote vegetarians, unquote, had eaten animal flesh within the last 24 hours. So do you think they thought of that as falling off the wagon? No. They do it by not considering some animals' animals, particularly fish and chicken. Aren't there categories of vegetarianism? Let me don't some vegetarian simply say up front, I'm a vegetarian, but I eat fish and chicken. Well, if you were to say that, you would call

me a vegetarian. But I'm a vegetarian because I eat vegetables. I also happen to eat fish and I also happen to eat chicken and I also have meat pork and I also happen to eat beef. Come on. It's getting back to that thing about compartmentalization. You know, there's something maybe that seems worse about eating the animals that have four feet. Yes. And sometimes you'll hear never eat an animal. You know, that somebody will tell me, well, they don't eat an animal with a face. Well, they don't consider the fish or chicken as a face. These are human foibles. I don't want to thought that I'm sort of making fun of vegetarians. I'm not. What I'm arguing is that this is the human condition and I have these same things in my life and everybody does. Well, I mean, we're talking about the logical inconsistencies of, you know, and the ways in which various people attempt to be vegetarian and we're laughing about it. But if we just think about it in a purely ethical, moral sense, what do you think about eating meat? Is it wrong? Yes. And you just told me you eat meat, right? Yes. I consider

vegetarians sort of moral heroes. I'm convinced and I did a lot of reading on this, you know, various arguments about the question whether or not humans are natural meat eaters. And I concluded that we are, that we have an inherited proclivity. Most people do, not everybody, but most humans have an inherited evolved proclivity for a taste for animal flesh. The thing that's interesting about vegetarians and things that I admire about them is that they're able to disavow the whisperings of the body. And I think that if you look at the arguments against eating meat, both from a health perspective and ethical perspective and an ecological perspective, the arguments are profound. The interesting thing is, why the animal rights activists failed to moralize meat? Why are we eating more of it than ever? Why aren't most of us vegetarians? Why are 98 % of us not vegetarians? Why are you not a vegetarian if you think it's wrong to eat meat? Because I've learned to live with inconsistency in my own, you know, as moral failings go, I consider that a smaller one than others. If you're making in some ways a kind of higher

point, which is it's worth accepting our inconsistencies, that that's part of what it means to be human. I think that's exactly the point. I think you've got it. And I think it's inevitable. One of the things that I learned in writing this book is that the drive for consistency, moral consistency, can make you crazy. I've studied a lot of animal people over the years. This book was really the culmination of 30 years. I've been studying how human animal interactions. I've interviewed a lot of animal activists and a lot of my friends are animal activists. And in some ways, they have an admirable lifestyle. But in some ways, their lives can be pretty tough, giving up leather, giving up meat. Sometimes giving up friends in some moral consistency can be really tough. And it's not always a healthy thing, I think. We should talk a bit about the way in which we treat animals, especially the animals we adopt as pets. Well, there are often stories about people who are very cruel to animals, to dogs and to cats,

especially. And one of the things, it's a piece of folk wisdom. I've also heard lots of moms say it about usually other children, but is that children who are cruel to animals grow up to become violent people or even serial killers. And I've read that all serial killers have a history of being cruel to animals. Is this true? I think it's not true. I don't have the majority opinion on this. But the United States Department, I think it was the Department of Justice, did a study of serial killers, and they concluded that most serial killers did not abuse animal. Animals, interestingly enough, there's sort of two schools of thought on this. One school thought that animal abuse in children is a strong predictor of sociopathology that can be lifelong and lead people to become violent adults. The other school is that, like it or not, an awful lot of people, especially male children, abuse animals. And it can be even a ritual part of growing up like cursing or shoplifting or something like that, that a lot of kids do.

Really, is that true? Yeah, there's studies, for example, there's a lot of studies now of college students where if you ask college students, do you abuse an animal when you're a kid? Most studies have found about 30 % of college students' males admit to that. One study found 60 % of college student males admitted to that. And most of them did not become serial killers or even bad people. It was simply an isolated event or an isolated stage that they went through in their lives. Now, I think we should be concerned about animal cruelty in children. But not just because it might lead to adult violence, it's because cruelty is bad in anyone. What's interesting this issue of what's cruel to animals? So if on the one hand, we're horrified at the idea that children are cruel to animals, then at the other end, we have this ongoing debate about how we treat lab animals. For instance, you have an entire chapter on the moral status of mice. What are the moral questions in how we treat mice? I think there's a host of them. Even in labs, you have different categories of

mice. For example, I point out in a lab that I worked at, you know, the animals were covered by animal, federal animal care regulations. Let's say you wanted to do an experiment where you were going to glue a live mouse to a piece of cardboard and leave it overnight to measure stress. They would never allow you to do that. But that's exactly how in that facility, they handled the pest mice. They use glue boards, which is a horrible death. But yet, that was perfectly acceptable for the pest mice, but not for the subject mice. And the funny thing was that the pest mice in that lab were virtually all subject mice, mice that had been researched subjects that had escaped. An animal in one second is a good mouse. You know, he's giving his life for our benefit. And in the next second, once he hits the floor, he's now a bad mouse and we can trap him and kill him by gluing him to a piece of cardboard overnight. What about the question of whether mice feel pain? You sometimes hear the claim that most scientists don't believe that animals feel pain. And I don't think that's true. I think that was true at one time, a long time ago. But I don't think that's

true anymore. More and more scientists, especially line animal care technicians are increasingly aware of the moral problems caused by our use of animals in research. I'm a believer in animal research. But on the other hand, I'm troubled by it. I put it this way. I think the case for using animals in research is much better than the case of using animals to eat because they taste good. That's Hal Herzog, a psychologist at Western Carolina University. His book is called Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, why it's so hard to think straight about animals. He spoke with Anne Strange Hems. Well, I heard the boys of the park top say, come on to me and rest. You can talk about chewing beans, but I know what's the best. You can talk about chicken, ham, and eggs, turkey, stuffed, and rest. But I heard the boys of the park top say, come on to me and rest. Yes, I heard the boys of the park top say, come on to me and rest. So what do you think? Do we need

clearer moral standards for how we treat animals? You can share your thoughts by sending an email to our website at ttbook .org. Now, suppose you adore your dog so much, you can't bear the thought of living without her. What do you do when she dies? Well, thanks to modern science today, you can clone her. But is a genetic copy of Fido really the same as Fido herself? That's one of the questions journalist John Westendick explores in a book called Dog Inc. It's a portrait of the strange new world of dog cloning. Westendick told Steve Paulson the bizarre tale of Vernon McKinney, the first person to get a commercially cloned dog. She had been driving down the road in North Carolina and came across a straight pit bull. She decided she would take it home. She lived on a house on a farm. It was a pit bull and she was afraid if she took it to a shelter, it would end up getting euthanized as a lot of pit bulls do. At home, she also had another dog, a big gigantic dog named Tough

Guy who was a mastiff and her father had gotten her that dog for security purposes and it was actually a trained guard dog. And one day, the trained guard dog, a tractor. She was being sort of mauled by this big dog and her dog, Bogor, even though being like a fourth of the size, came to her aid and attacked the big dog and gave her enough time to get out of there and get into her car and eventually get taken to a hospital and have a series of surgeries on her arms. So she obviously felt greatly in debt to this dog. She did. And then even more so afterwards, as she recuperated, and Bogor recuperated too. He was hurt in the fight, but not too seriously. As she recuperates, she was in a wheelchair for a while. She couldn't use her hands. She couldn't turn door knobs and things like that. She was staying at her parents' home, which was nearby. But Bogor sort of began assisting her in all these various ways with these household chores that she could no longer do, like turning door knobs and getting close out of the dryer, and going to the

refrigerator and getting drinks and things like that. Wait, he was the one? The dog was the one doing all this, getting drinks out of the refrigerator? Well, you know, like the old beer commercial. I thought that happened in commercials not in real life. I mean, he would actually grab things and bring them to her. But even more so than the practical stuff, I think emotionally, he helped her a great deal and sort of gave her renewed confidence. And so he was very dear to her. And when he died, she was one of thousands of people that signed up even before dogs were cloned to bank her dogs, jeans, sales, with one of several companies that were offering that service. But then eventually, somehow, she ended up going to South Korea a number of times. In fact, and those are the scientists who ended up actually cloning her dog. Right, right. Texas A &M didn't succeed. They did get some pregnancies or one viable pregnancy, but it didn't come to term. South Korea, meanwhile, got into the picture and beat

them to the punch. So South Korea became kind of a hotbed for cloning. Right. At that time, Seoul National University was working very closely with a company called R &L Bio. They succeeded in cloning Booger, who was really the first commercially cloned dog. Now, there are all kinds of strange twists and turns. And the story, one has to do with these Korean scientists who cloned her dog. Weren't they actually involved in the scandal that we read about some years back about cloning the first line of human embryos? I turned out that that was fraudulent, that they hadn't actually done that, and it led to a trial and all kinds of problems for them. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what happened. Dr. Huang, he sort of looked at it over there as the father of dog cloning. And the trial stretched on forever, but he was eventually convicted. He was fired once the investigation started at the university, but then went on to form his own laboratory. So

it sounds like the actual science of cloning a dog is actually pretty difficult. Yeah, dogs were the 18th species clone, and they were the hardest yet. The head of genetic savings and clone later bioarts had said several times, you know, it would probably be easier to clone a human than it is to clone a dog. They have to harvest egg cells from other dogs to do this, and dogs only go into he wants maybe twice a year, and also their eggs are opaque, and so they're a little harder for scientists to work with and manipulate, because they can't see through the cells. So, Bernan, this woman with a dog bugger who did get her dog cloned, she ended up having what five cloned puppies as a result. Yeah, and then went over to South Korea shortly after they were born to meet them for the first time, and then on a later trip to pick them up, but that didn't go too smoothly. Why was that? Well, she had agreed with the company, initially they were going to charge her $150 ,000 for the cloning. Wow. And

she, unlike most cloning customers, was not a wealthy woman. The company offered her a discount of $100 ,000 if she would agree to do publicity, and sort of go public with it all, because most of the people who have gotten their dogs cloned have stayed in the shadows, and when she did publicity about it, her scandalous past came out. The scandal had been that back in the 1970s, she had actually abducted someone who she thought was her true love. Right. She had fallen in love with a young man while she was in school in Utah, a Mormon man, and his parents had him sent overseas to England to do missionary work, primarily to keep him away from her. She ended up hiring a private detective and tracking him down, and going overseas, and was actually accused of abducting him and taking him to a cottage, and then having her way with him. Wow. I mean, this is quite a story here. Against his will, he said in court. Yeah. So she had this scandal in her past, and

I mean, it does perhaps shed some light into why she was so attached to his dog. It sounds like a woman who may have had some trouble forming human relationships, and so her dog was that much more important to her. And to me, there was also quite a parallel between the two stories, the sort of going to any lengths in the name of love. She, you know, broke the rules and lied when she had to, and went overseas, and didn't take no for an answer ever, and just was very persistent, and did it up with the bookers anyway. And so what did she think of her five clone dogs? I mean, was she happy with the result? It varied kind of each time I talked with her, and I was talking with her by phone all along the way. When she first got them, she was just ecstatic. She came back to the US and then had trouble raising even the $50 ,000 and boring most of it from her father, and then went back to get the clones. She was in a motel with all five dogs. At that point, even then, she was saying, you know, they don't all look exactly alike. Some of them

have their white spots, it's mostly a black dog. Some of them had their white spots in different places, and there was one that was kind of a run, and didn't seem too healthy. And then she had a whole lot of trouble getting them back to the US, because she refused to let them travel in the cargo area of the plane. So she came up with this plan to get people to pretend they were handicapped, and then that these were actually service dogs, even there were, you know, just several months old by then. She was going to find four more people each to carry a dog on the plane in the cabin. And so she ended up going to the airport every day and trying to find these people, and then going back to the hotel, and back and forth, back and forth to after day, eventually made the decision, money had run out to put four of the dogs in the kennel and soul, take one to San Francisco, put him in the kennel, fly back to soul, get another one, and so on and so on, until she got all five of them over here. So today, I think she's pretty pleased with everything. What about in terms of the

personality of the dogs? Do they resemble Boger, the original dog she loves so much? I think they're all a little different. They don't clone personality or more sports or behavior or temperament or those things. So it's basically a twin, and a lot of us know how different twins can be. Well, it sounds like in virtually all of these cases, what these people want is not just the dog resurrected, the original beloved dog, but they want to recreate the bond with that dog. Yeah, I think that's really the key thing is they want that feeling back, and then I can relate to that, and even though I think it's all kind of folly, folly because you can never recreate that bond. Right, even if you try to raise it the same way, each one is unique, and each one is its own special light. I don't think you get a duplicate in all senses of the word anyway. John Westendick is a Pulitzer

Prize -winning investigative reporter. His book about dog cloning is called Dog Inc. He talked with Steve Paulson. I later this hour, how the history of religion reflects our co -evolution with animals. I'm Jim Flaming. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. I hope you enjoyed this documentary. Wisconsin

System E -Campus, providing access to online degree programs and certificates offered by the 26 campuses of the UW System. Information is at e -Campus .wisconsin .edu. Jerren Leneer is the computer scientist who popularized the concept of virtual reality back in the 80s. He founded the first company to sell virtual reality products, and with his recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, he's become one of the go -to thinkers about computers and society. And Strainchamps discovered that Leneer also has a secret passion. He loves cephalopods, you know, squishy animals, like the squid and the octopus. Long ago when I was working on virtual reality, I was really interested in this notion that if people had really great virtual reality capabilities in the future, if instead of using words, you could just make up reality directly, that there might be a whole new level of intimacy and meaning possible between people. And I find that to be one of the most interesting things to think about, because there could be a future in which communication between people becomes incredibly more rich and

intense than what we've known so far. Now, as it happens, evolution on Earth is awfully creative, and she's come up with a creature that can do some of that. So some of the cephalopods, some of the cuddlefish and octopus, can morph. They can just at will, project images on their bodies and change their shape and turn into different things. It's just the wildest thing, and they do great stuff with it. For instance, there's a cuddlefish that hunts for armored crabs, and it's just a little soft thing. They're kind of like people, and that they're these soft creatures that have to live by their wits instead of by their brawn. And the way they hunt is with psychedelic art. They turn into these weird morphing displays that just totally stun the crab so that they can swoop in for the kill. It's just an amazing thing to watch. And essentially, what I want to do with virtuality is turn people into cephalopods. And there's one other little piece to this, which is why aren't cephalopods running the

planet? Because they are just amazingly smart. They're this whole other evolutionary line that generated big brains. And the one secret weapon we have that gives us this planetary rule function for better or for worse is that we have childhood. We can accumulate knowledge and wisdom across generations. And the cephalopods don't. Each generation just emerges from the egg and has to learn all over again. If they had childhood, they would definitely rule the planet. So the way I think of it is a person with really good virtuality would be similar to a cephalopod with childhood. Do they have actual cognitive abilities that we don't have? Yeah, they're better at three -dimensional thinking in some ways than we are. And they have an incredible somatic mind, meaning that what they can do with their bodies is just astonishing. They practically have a brain that's distributed across all those tentacles. And tentacle -eye coordination might be a more impressive thing than hand -eye coordination. Wouldn't you say they think in three dimensions? What is that like? Well, I haven't ever actually been one,

although I've tried to imagine what it would be like. People's cognition is basically not quite three -dimensional. It's sort of two and a half feet. But they really do exist in a fully three -dimensional world where they can move around on jet power and go in any direction at any time and are aware of the entirety of their surroundings, whereas we're mostly just looking ahead. And most people encounter them primarily on restaurant menus. Do you eat them? No. One of the things I've always struggled with is this question of the circle of empathy. What things do you empathize with enough not to eat? So I don't empathize with computers. They're just pure tools. And if there was an edible computer, I would eat it. Similarly, I've decided having raised chickens that, to me, they're not... Well, I think in the book I call them servo -controlled feathery devices or something. So I will eat chickens. But see, the thing is, this is very personal. I have a buddy who loves chickens so much that he actually designed this tele -cuddling suit where he can, from a distance, work cuddle his pet chickens and they can feel it and he can feel them. So he will not eat chicken. And we have

to just accept that each other have different takes on some of these issues of exactly where the edge of the circle of empathy should be. But at least in my case, having experienced several pod intelligence, I just really can't eat them, even the little tiny ones that are in menus. And I'm not going to claim that that's rational or that anyone else should do it. It's just me. Virtual reality pioneer, Geron Lanier talking within strange chimps. I like to be under the sea in an octopuses garden in the shade. Novel as TC Boyle has always had a knack for finding loaded subjects for his fiction. He's written about identity theft, illegal immigration and the Kinsey sex studies. His latest novel, when the killing's done, is no exception. It pits an animal rights activist who wants to save all animals. Against a biologist who's out to protect native animals from invading species. And the animal rights activist, Avela Joy, is quite a grumpy character.

No less depressing people drooling like builds down the plate glass window at the cactus cafe, where he eats breakfast five days a week and they still can't figure out what over easy means. His dried out toast is cold. The coffee tastes like aluminum foil and it's cold too or lukewarm at best. And the newspaper has one stingy little article about what went down at the museum last night, tucked away in the community events round up for Tuesday, November 20, 2001. The date in Boulder typed in the headline is if to indicate that everything included beneath it would be just as mind numbing and inconsequential as it had been the day before and the day before that. Under the headline, protest at museum lecture. There's a scant two

paragraphs that don't begin to get at the issue. And worse, don't even mention him or FPA by name. Let alone set out the counter arguments, he'd thrown right in the face of that condescending little bitch from the park service who was fooling nobody where the gray eyed squint that are all black outfit as if you were going to a funeral or a goth club or something and all their tricked up images of the cute little animals that just have to be saved in the face of this sudden onslaught by all these other ugly little animals made uglier by somebody's Photoshop manipulations. As if the birds wouldn't last another week when 150 years had gone by and complete harmony and natural balance with all the other birds and plants and the rats too, something Alma Boyd Takasui PhD didn't bother to mention. TC Boyle reading from his novel When the Killings Done. The book is set on the Channel Islands, the Wild Islands 22 miles off the coast of California. These islands are so fascinating in that people like the idea of being insular of getting away from everyone else so that Santa Cruz Island was owned by just a couple of individuals prior to when the park service took over and the nature

conservancy. As recently as the late 80s, a man by the name of Carrie Stanton owned 90 % of the island, he had one house on it and a couple of far -flung ranches and he was king of his own domain just 22 miles off shore. So it's something that I think we all want particularly in an overcrowded world, our own space, our own country, our own islands separated from the mainland. These islands do appear to be utopias. It's the search for utopia that you've talked about so many times in the books that you've written and this one too and there is no utopia there, but people keep going for it. I'm fascinated by the two characters who are the main characters in this book, Alma Boyd Takasui and Dave LaJoy. They're extraordinary people. People you really, really, really want to try to find a way to like. One of them you do and one of them, Boyd, there's no way that you can... Well, I don't know. It was fascinating for me to look at some of the reactions from

reviewers and it's fairly equitable. People are taking sides, but surprisingly some very much behind Dave LaJoy, the animal rights activist, and to set this up quickly for those who haven't read the book, Dave LaJoy is a very angry animal rights activist. He wants to prevent the killing of any creature, hence the title, when the killing's done. Alma Boyd Takasui is very much like him. She is a biologist. She loves animals. She loves nature. They're both vegetarians. They don't want to harm anything. They only want to sustain them. But from her practical side, she understands that certain invasive species, like the rats on Anacapa Island, must be eliminated because they're destroying the birds that we've just heard about. And so the two come into collision and they're both completely intransigent. They're not as different from each other as they would like to think. And in fact, at one point, they thought they were going to be closer than they end up being. But when you first introduce Dave LaJoy, there's not much question that he's not a very likable guy. This is the trick.

This is the trick of trying to create such a character. He is a bully. He's very angry. He is impatient. He's domineering, etc. Kind of a jerk, really. But on the other hand, what he wants is that animals should be free and not killed and not dominated by us. Well, let's talk a little bit about the situation on Anacapa. It's the first one of the conflicts that we go through with them. And it's the one that introduces both of these characters. There are rats there, not because of the island itself, which was more or less pristine. But because of man's interference, there was what a shipwreck, a steamer that went down, a paddle wheel. And in 1853, that is how the rats got to Anacapa. This was the wreck of the Windfield Scott, a paddle wheel steamer, 1853, coming down from San Francisco to Panama prior to the canal so that people could hike across and get on a boat and go to New York. And a lot of them, curiously and interestingly, were 49ers. And there was a lot of gold. They brought gold dust with them. They'd been out in the wilderness,

a panning gold. And now they were wrecked on this this island. No gold was lost. Everybody was saved. But when the ship went down, the rats came ashore and infested all three of these eyelets. And were there until 2001. When the park service decided, they must be eliminated because of course they're praying on the ground nesting, rare ground nesting birds there, eating their eggs and chicks. And so they devised a plan. This happened. I'm just dramatizing the events by which they would bomb the island with brodofe cum rat poison. And it seems reasonable. I mean, if you don't look at it too closely, but of course you do look at it pretty closely. It seems reasonable because the native species were being driven out by the rats. The rats were eating the eggs of the birds and things were changed. So the park service decided to get rid of the rats and allow the native species to come back. That seems reasonable until you realize how. Yes, of course. I mean, they they this is regretful. You know, I mean,

it's regrettable and they regret it. They don't want to kill animals. But as the biologists will say, rats are a species that is not in any trouble or danger of extinction and are living healthily throughout the world as are the pigs and sheep and so on that were on some of the other islands. And so they were willing to sacrifice one animal to preserve a much rarer animal and of course, this is writ large on Santa Cruz Island when they had to eliminate the pigs and so on. And I'm illuminating actual events. There was a tremendous war over this between people like the pitofaction, for instance, animal rights activists and the biologists. The biologists are are using a kind of real politic here. They they they feel that okay, certain things must be sacrificed in order to preserve this environment. The larger question of course is, who has the right to decide? And what's your baseline? I mean, where do you go back to before any human beings were here before the two mashing Indians were there? As Dave says in one of his rages, why not restore it's like Jurassic Park? Why not restore it to when there were dinosaurs? You know,

and I suppose you could take this whole thing and start applying it to other questions about, you know, who owns what country and who has the right to drive any other person out, but we don't like to think about the relationship that might be parallel to these stories going on. Yeah, our our society is so terrifying. We are so lucky to be in a democracy and to be sitting here talking freely and writing books and doing what we like because it seems that the real way of the world from the beginning and a large part of it today is just a bully boy's society gangs take over a country and run it for their own benefit. And the way we view nature is this sort of the same thing. Of course, you know, if we didn't have these things, you wouldn't be having any fun. Yeah, it would be tough to live in paradise as Bernard Shaw pointed out to us because it's a lot more fun to live in a world full of dislocation and evil and so on, I suppose. But one of the reasons I think that I'm so obsessed lately with working

over problems of invasive species and extinctions and our animal beings as opposed to our spiritual or intellectual beings is because it's comes close to dealing with what are the final questions, the questions that nothing can answer, not religion or science either, which is why? We're raised and educated to save money, the brush our teeth, you know, and get educated and have reasons for being alive, but really there is no reason. At root, we are simply as bereft as the other animals. That's TC Boyle, talking about his latest novel, When the Killings Done. Coming up, how animals help shape human religious beliefs. I'm Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International.

Barbara King is an anthropologist who spent decades studying the behavior of monkeys and apes. She loves animals, not just those in the wild, but also the many pets she and her husband live with at home. She told Steve Paulson that human and animal history is so intertwined, it's hard to imagine one species without the other. You might say we co -evolved. In her book Being With Animals, King makes the case that the history of religion is also bound up with our long history with animals. For example, she points to the ancient cave paintings in France and Spain. Chevette Cave is a bear cave, there's something like

2 ,500 bear bones in it. The walls are absolutely covered with paintings and images and what's the subject of those images, animals. We see lion and horse, rhino and mammoth, but what's even more interesting is a hybrid buffalo woman image. On the walls of Chevette, there's a creature that has legs, hips, and a pelvic area of a woman, but the head and chest of a buffalo. What's so amazing about it to me is that it's clearly symbolic. Here's a creature that our ancestors could not have seen in the world. What does it mean? We don't know, but it's some kind of a transformation, a human animal mix, and this indicates that our ancestors were thinking in very imaginative ways about animals. Well, and it sounds like they had some sort of religious significance to our ancestors. That's a very fraught question. Anthropologists disagree very strongly on that question. Some people wish to draw an analogy with present -day shamanism, and we know that in present -day cultures,

shamans do feel that they transform into other animals. So there may or there may not be a way to read these images as some kind of insipient religious technique. I'm a little bit skeptical of doing that because I fear that it allows us too readily to project what we know of the present back into the past, and that's always a very risky game. Well, isn't there also evidence, burial evidence, that animals were somehow part of the burial ceremony, and this again goes back tens of thousands of years? The animal burials that I'm familiar with are not necessarily quite that old, unless you're counting something like nanotall burials. I mean, in this case, you don't have the animal buried with the nanotall, but rather bones taken from animal skeletons buried as grave goods with nanotalls. So for example, a 60 ,000 years ago, there's a very striking grave site in which bare bones are buried with individual nanotalls. Much later, perhaps eight to 10 ,000

years ago, there is burial of people with whole animals. A very striking example comes from Chetelhoyuk in Turkey, and this happened about 8 ,000 years ago. By this time, people were no longer living as hunter -gatherers off the land, but were living in villages and settled down. Archaeologists found a man buried, buried together with a lamb in a very interesting location under a house floor where human ancestors were traditionally buried. So the man's skull had been crushed. He was buried with a bird bone, a flint object, and an entire lamb. To the archaeologists, and to me as well, this hints at probably something spiritual, certainly something emotional. There is the suggestion, not proven, but the suggestion that somehow animals are involved in our thinking about transcendence. Certainly when you talk about life after death questions, the belief that some piece of us lives on somehow animals figure into that as

well. They do, and we know, at least we infer at this time, that the human brain is very much engaged with thinking about the mysteries of life and death. Well, and in your book, you make the case that the history of religion is in fact intertwined with the history of animal human relationships. What is so striking to me is that animals, too, you know, experience birth and being adolescence and growing old and facing death. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that we're assuming animals have a concept of death, but we know that they do feel when other partners and their companions die, they feel sad, they feel grief. Well, and there actually is some fascinating anecdotal evidence that at least a few animals might have some concept of death. Maybe that's too strongly putter, certainly an understanding of death. I mean, there are some stories about elephants, for instance, that when they come across the bones of other elephants, they seem to have a very strong visceral reaction. They do have a strong visceral reaction.

As a scientist, I do want to be a little bit conservative. I don't know if there's a concept of death, but let me describe a little bit what we have seen. I was lucky enough to do my doctoral research in Ambicelli National Park in Kenya. In the same national park, there was then and is now a long -term elephant research project. And one of the best animal behaviorists I know is Cynthia Moss, someone who spent a lot of time watching elephants in the fields, so she's a very keen observer and a reliable scientist. She has seen that if elephants are walking across the plane and they notice clusters of bones that are old from dead elephants, they will divert their party as they're traveling along and come up and caress certain sets of bones. They'd caress bones that Cynthia knows are bones of relatives of the individuals who are walking across the plane. So here you have matriarchs and their daughters and aunts and grandmothers and some males of family of elephants who come upon bones

and recognize them, who meant something to them, whom they loved, and they do not do this with just any random set of bones, elephant or otherwise. It is very shocking, really, to scientists to think that elephants feel that they want to behave in such a way as to honor the bones. One more observation of Cynthia's is quite relevant. At one point she noticed a family that was beginning to pick up and put over top of a recently deceased elephant material, you know, grass and leaves and a little bit of dirt covering up the body. In the middle of this incident, there was a low -flying plane that came over and disrupted the elephant so that they left. They were frightened and they left. She asks if they were actually having some sort of a death ritual in covering up this body and we don't know the answer. Wow, that's really evocative and it's always dangerous to put human responses onto the world of animals, but one can't help but speculate that maybe there are some proto

-religious behaviors going on here. I feel comfortable saying that elephants feel grief. I feel comfortable saying that there may be proto -rituals going on. I feel less comfortable with importing the word religion. I don't know how we would know that and I think it's astonishing enough to suggest that there's some kind of organized ritual going on, so that wows me quite a bit. Well, let me put you on the spot here. Maybe this requires you to take off your scientist cap for a moment and respond as an animal lover, which I know you are. Do you think animals have souls? I have no idea if animals have souls because what I'm interested in most is understanding that they have deep emotional connections to each other, deep ability to feel pain and to feel joy and it's an interesting theological question whether they have souls. In fact, Pope John Paul says they do think not Han, the Buddhist thinker

thinks they do, and I read them and I'm interested in their views, but I'm really working at the level of animal emotion. Well, it seems to me that the larger question that we're getting at is whether there is something sacred about nature. Not just that the natural world is beautiful or wonderful, but that perhaps there's some spark of divinity in nature, however you want to define that. Is this meaningful to you, this line of thinking? It is meaningful to me to think about nature in a framework of spirituality as opposed to a framework of religion and you earlier used the phrase transcendence and I'm often asked if I have a sense of spirituality when I'm with animals. It might help to point out that I have studied monkeys and apes for many decades and also that my husband and I are very involved with cat rescue for the last four or five years. Don't you have a lot of animals that live with you? Oh, a lot would recover it. Yeah. We

live with seven cats indoors. We have two that live in our yard. Eleven more live in a very spacious pen that my husband built in our backyard with trees and shelters and places for them to hide and play and we daily feed seven more at a nearby feral colony. So if my math is right, that's what 28. So yeah, and you know, I sort of joke about this because do I feel a sense of spirituality? Well, you know, we're cleaning litter boxes and stay neutering and running around and making sure everybody's getting along and not fighting. And so on a day to day level, it's a lot of work. It's not exactly as if I'm going around in a state of heightened grace, but yes, there is at times an incredibly powerful feeling of connection that I get with animals that does spill over into grace and self -transcendence. I find it almost challenging to describe in words. What would you see as the dream scientific experiments that would perhaps resolve some of these questions that we're talking about, whether it's animal emotions, maybe even animal spiritual

lives? All right, if I were to dream Steve and if only the MacArthur Foundation were listening, I would say that I would travel to multiple continents in the wild and film multiple species. I'd have to be there for a long time and be very patient, but so that I could see animal communities response to death and building up a data bank of what animals are doing. We know the hints from the grief that chimpanzees express, the grief that elephants express, both in captivity in the wild and by the way, birds as well. There's something very, very interesting going on here, but it's such a rare event to be around when an animal dies and the other animals are responding. I think this has a very deep potential for opening us up in the questions that you raised. Barbara King talking with Steve Paulson. King is an anthropologist at

the College of William and Mary, her book is called Being with Animals. It's to the best of our knowledge and Jim Fleming. If you'd like to comment on what you've heard, send us an email through our website at ttbook .org or visit us on our Facebook fan page. You can buy a CD of the show by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444, ask for animals and us number three six B. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio. This hour was put together by Steve Paulson with help from NStrainChamps, Charles Monroe Kane, Veronica Record and Doug Gordon. Our technical director is Kareel Owen. You can stream to the best of our knowledge on our website at ttbook .org where you will also find a link to the weekly podcast.