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Richard Twine is Reader in Sociology at Edge Hill University in the UK, working at the nexus of critical animal studies, environmental sociology, the sociology of climate change and gender studies. He is co-director of The Centre for Human Animal Studies, an interdisciplinary forum for research and activities that engage with the complex material, ethical and symbolic relationships between humans, other animals, and their environments. Richard is the author of many articles, papers and books for both academic audiences and the wider public, including “The Climate Crisis and Other Animals“.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips!

00:43 Welcome

02:34 Richard’s Intro

– Philosophy, psychology, history, natural sciences, bio-technology and sociology

– Ecofeminism (Carol Adams, Val Plumwood), Regan, Singer, then Critical Animal Studies

– The “flawed awakenings” of climate change awareness and non-human animal ethics

05:28 What’s Real?

– Non-religious, implicitly atheist, socialist parents and household

– Attending Sunday School with a Christian friend “It didn’t have any effect – it was just another space to play”

– A religious teacher who “made us recite the Lord’s Prayer at the start of every day… that was odd… that kind of drove me away from religion”

– Asking for an exemption from religious education at secondary school “Probably sociologically limited because it’s actually good to learn about religion… but I already knew that wasn’t something that I wanted to spend my time doing”

– A materialist outlook “when we die, we die… decompose and feed the rest of nature… a kind of beautiful thing… I don’t believe in an afterlife”

– Avoiding dogmatism about materialism. Interested in near-death experiences

– “I’m on board with that aspect of Sentientism – reason and evidence… but I would also add that my atheism isn’t simplistically rationalistic… elements of romanticism in it… Shelley… beauty and wonder of nature giving us some kind of meaningfulness in our lives… that’s enough.”

– “There’s a poor track record with religiosity and conservative ideology… distanced me from it… used to justify patriarchy, anthropocentrism, colonialism, capitalism etc.”

– A hobbyist interest in UFOs and UAPs “stems from my childhood… subscribed to a magazine called ‘The Unexplained’… I’ve always had that interest but ultimately – give me some evidence.”

– Conspiracy theories and cover-ups “I’m sceptical but I’m fascinated”

– Richard’s “‘Alien’ Disclosure and Critical Animal Studies” blog post https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/cfhas/blog-post-january-2024/

– Spritualistic ecofeminism “I didn’t like it… turns a politics into a personal identity project… egocentric.”

– “Spirituality is a great way in which capitalism commodifies people’s belief systems… it’s a big business – spirituality”

– “There’s enough spirituality just in appreciating a walk in a forest or jumping into a waterfall… or having a great empathic experience with something that has a face”

– The @Conspiritualitypodcast 

– The problems of #humanism and Richard’s “I’ll be ticking no religion but obviously not a humanist” tweet

– “When I was a lot younger I would have identified with humanism but part of my journey has been distancing myself from humanism… for me humanism has been too much too tied to the anthropocentric ideology”

– “I’ve become more interested in post-humanism as a whole… tools to decentre the human”

– “The need for humanism keeps being recycled… we keep having atrocities…”

– “I don’t think we’ve learned the lessons from the second world war yet… difference and otherness… we’re still doing that – we’re still otherising… muslims or women… 80 years later we’ve not really learned… we’re kind of stuck”

– JW: “A post-humanist approach or a sentientist approach gives us a better chance of addressing the intra-human challenges as well.”

– JW: “If they [humanists] can’t fix that then they’ve become another dogma… If they gets stuck with anthropocentrism then they’re betraying their own humanism”

– Critical animal studies and ecofeminism: “The question of the animal is central to the question of racism… classism… sexism… Those dogmatic humanists would learn a lot from engaging with that body of work.”

– “The animalisation of the human is an integral part of understanding the oppression of intra-human relations”

– “anthropocentrism and its practitioners are very good at resisting these arguments because if you take on those arguments then they have to fundamentally revisit our ethical treatment of other animals.”

– “I see this in the academy… I am surrounded by presumably intelligent people… but their understanding of intersectionality stops at the human/animal boundary.”

26:48 What Matters?

– An early interest in ethics. A cat in the family as a child. Aged 15-16 developing environmental awareness “Chernobyl happened when I was 12”

– “I was into some typical gendered things… but I wasn’t really relating to… normative masculinity… that’s followed me through into adulthood”

– “It was a bit of anger at injustice… I was quite a young anti-racist… finding out about the civil rights movement”

– “Sensing the kind of paralogical discriminating on appearance”

– “Informed by anti-racism but other things as well” – an undergraduate dissertation on body image and body esteem

– We have a kind of formal morality in society which says racism is wrong… sexism is wrong… but our popular culture still very much promotes the view that it’s acceptable to discriminate people on the grounds of their appearance… that was something that really energised me.” Lookism

– Investigating the pseudo-sciences of phrenology and physiognomy… this belief that you could judge somebody’s character through their facial expressions…”

– “People would carry these little pocket guides… illustrations of people’s faces” so people could judge the character of strangers as life became more urbanised

– Val Plumwood’s book “Feminism and the Mastery of Nature”… “an important encounter for me.

32:59 Who Matters?

– Going vegetarian in 1992 as a first year undergrad “That was it… veganism wasn’t really socially intelligible back then”

– Reading Carol J. Adams’ “The Sexual Politics of Meat”

– “My animal ethics were always environmental at the same time so when I then discovered within environmental philosophy that there was this big schism between animal ethics and environmental ethics it was quite odd to me… a strange separation.”

– “…people who self-define as ‘vegans for the animals’ and use that to separate themselves off from ‘environmental vegans’ – I just find that a wholly incoherent viewpoint”

– Reading ecofeminist animal ethics before Singer and Regan “so I was already reading their critiques of overly rationalistic animal ethics… care ethics”

– Not finding care ethics 100% satisfying either “but I thought it was important to say that emotions which have starkly been feminised… care… empathy… compassion – it’s so important to redress that because one of the reasons we don’t see a vegan society is that masculinity is understood in terms of disavowing emotions such as empathy and compassion… sentimentalism”

– “Silly arguments for ordering… ‘how can you think about animal ethics when we have to address the human issues first’”

– “Animal ethics based on ideas of similarity… or based on ideas of difference… utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, care ethics… all really fascinating to me”

– Meeting Tom Regan, asking Peter Singer difficult questions about capitalism “he was pushing back against an anti-capitalist view”

– The Peter Singer Sentientism episode

– Meeting Carol J. Adams and Greta Gaard “quite a profound experience to meet those people that I had been reading”

– “understand how different ethical theories might be reproducing certain relations of power without intending to”

– Tom Regan “he was very keen to understand the criticisms that ecofeminists had been making of his work… he was quite upset by them… I don’t think he accepted that his framework was overly rationalistic.”

– “Animal rights…. I’m more sympathetic to Regan than I am to Singer… there’s more of a closeness between ecofeminist approaches and Regan than there is between ecofeminist approaches and Singer”

– “As a sociologist… partly rejecting even the importance of philosophical ethical frameworks… ultimately… these don’t matter to people… it’s a mistake in over-rationalising the human to think that they would”

– “Most people’s… human-animal relationships form… are very habitual… being socialised into various social norms and conforming…”

– “Within the academic questioning of human-animal relations philosophy has historically been seen as the most important dominant discipline… I’ve wanted to push back on that” and make space for sociology

– Criticising the field of bio-ethics for its anthropocentrism “It was quite an easy criticism to make but really nobody had been making that criticism back in 2003-4”

– “The ways in which different ethical theories are problematic… ignore animals… or include animals but do it a way which might be re-instigating problematic assumptions around what the human is… over rationalising the human and not giving due space to emotional aspects of human-animal relations or sociological aspects”

– Matthew Calarco: “Indistinction” as an alternative to similarity and difference approaches

– Focusing on sentience purely as a similarity to humans is anthropocentric. So considering difference arguments as well “the capacities that other animals have that we don’t have… a nice exercise in decentring the human… echolocation…”

– Calarco: “Why do we start the similarity argument with human capacities and try to extend that out to other species… what if we went in the other direction… properties of other species and work our way back to humans in some way”

– “It’s a nice point to say that sentience preceded the human… a valuable thing to acknowledge”

– Mark Solms and Walter Veit episodes on the evolution of sentience

– “Post-humanism… problematises the idea that humans or indeed other animals are a discreet entity… better seen as… walking assemblages of multi-species… all the things that are living on us and all the things that are living in us”

– A suspicion of the individualism of some utilitarian ethics “idea that there’s a discreet human… there isn’t a discreet human… our bodies are ecologies and we live in relationship with many other species both literally and in how we conceive of ourselves… it’s part of the mythology of humanism”

– JW: “If we give up on the idea of the individual… is there a risk that there therefore is no moral patient… no being that can be the subject of a harm… an ethical flattening where you’ve lost the subjects of injustice in our ontology”

– Wild animal suffering and anti-predation views “that sometimes overlaps with transhumanism – the idea that we should engineer nature so it no longer has predation… classic utilitarian individualism… trying to use human power to bring about an ethical fantasy of a zero suffering world… I don’t think you can get rid of all suffering.”

– “Suffering is part of life… but I’m not saying that to justify everything… ‘suffering is part of life so slaughterhouses are just amazing’… I’m obviously not saying that”

– “Anybody who has lost a parent or a relative… will understand that suffering is itself a measure of our emotional relationships in our life”

– The David Pearce Sentientism episode “I’ve long not supported his view… some non-human animal species have as part of their nature the need to predate on other species… that is something that has to be recognised. We are fortunate in that we don’t have to do that but we often use that model of predation to construct a falsely anthropocentric and hierarchical view of the human… naturalising meat-eating through the predation of other species.”

– Can we recognise the moral salience of the need for the predator to predate but also the suffering and stress and trauma of their prey? “I think so”

– The Kyle Johannsen and Aditya SK Sentientism episodes on wild animal ethics

– Are wild-animal rights and suffering a blind-spot for veganism which focuses on human-caused harms?

– Chapter 3 of “The Climate Crisis and Other Animals” focuses on the impacts of climate change on wild animals

– JW: If we’re drawn to help human victims of natural disasters but not to help non-human animal victims of “nature” isn’t that speciesist?

– “The topic of wild animal suffering will become so much bigger soon because of climate change… I applaud the way in which work on wild animal suffering has come into quite a lot of prominence recently”

– “It’s the transhumanist side that I have an objection to… it’s anti-ecological”

– Elitist “a type of hyper-humanism” Elon Musk transhumanism vs. universally compassionate versions of transhumanism (David Pearce)

– Seeing a cat chasing a mouse… “I have intervened in that situation… but that’s a domesticated companion animal trying to predate upon a wild animal… that companion animal has food… and therefore I feel like that attempt… to save the mouse is somehow justified”

58:29 A Better World?

– JW: An anthropocentric approach to the climate crisis: 1) underestimates the impacts, 2) misunderstands the causes, 3) missing important solutions

– “There’s a overlap between the misunderstanding and the inadequacy of climate policy”

– Ecosocialism: “The climate crisis is in part a crisis of capitalism – an inability of capitalism to understand that it’s undermining it’s own conditions of possibility by degrading ecology… That’s already a long way away from governments and policy makers who don’t want to even acknowledge that… it would be to acknowledge that their faith in economic growth and neo-liberalism are heavily misplaced.”

– Are capitalist and non-capitalist industrialisation both problems? “Anthropocentrism as an ideology preceded capitalism – that’s for sure… but… there’s an inherent tendency within capitalism to accumulate capital – that is its rationale… a juggernaut which will devour ecologies, devour non-human animals…”

– “We’ve never really seen a communist society… there are aspects of capitalism which are uniquely damaging… consumerism”

– “It’s not just a crisis of capitalism… it’s also a crisis of the very idea and ideology of anthropocentrism… of colonialism, of global north power… of patriarchy as well… ideas of masculinity feed into this over-consumption and feed into this disavowal of care for other animals and ecologies.”

– “There’s been a very productive relationship between masculinity, colonialism and capitalism… but also anthropocentrism”

– JW: The rich links between these ideas that resonate today: colonial land-hunger, the masculinity of ranching, “bullets, bible, beef” identity, the normalisation of violence and othering…

– “Capitalism essentially super-charged anthropocentric ideology – it found it incredibly useful”

– “The land that is used for animal agriculture now is the equivalent of all the Americas… that just tells you about the transformation”

– “The animal-industrial complex – that is a really important dimension of capitalism and mainstream sociological theorists of capitalism don’t even acknowledge that”

– “I’m firing criticisms in all directions in the book… following properly post-humanist intersectional understanding of the climate crisis…”

– “I’m also criticising the climate justice movement for being anthropocentric”

– Criticisms of plant-based capitalism

– “We need an intersectional understanding of veganism… it has so much more critical purchase on… the real causes of the climate and biodiversity crises”

– A utopian position towards the end of the book: “The animal advocacy movement… shouldn’t just be making a case for the decommodification of non-human animals… also… the decommodification of food… Food shouldn’t be something that is on the market – it shouldn’t be something that we should pay for.”

– “Even though that’s highly utopian it makes really important links between the animal rights movement and social class movements and food justice movements”

– “It’s a basic socialist idea that those things that we need… housing and food and education should be outside of the market… shared and commonly owned”

– “It sounds utopian – I also outline the way we already have practices which do decommodify food… growing your own… food banks… you could take the idea of a food bank and turn it into something progressive and accessible”

– “The problem with the market is it doesn’t curtail consumerism… a bad environmental impact where profit is before human health, human-animal relations, environmental health…”

– “…we should abolish capitalism… it’s only recently that you’ve been allowed to say that again… it shouldn’t be a taboo… why should we limit our imaginary of what the future could look like… it’s clearly not working. It’s productive of inequality and it’s productive of undermining the conditions of existence for humans and other animals.”

– The information / decision making and authoritarianism challenges of socialism/communism

– “Capitalism constructs its own needs for people”

– “No country has ever really explored democratic forms of socialism or communism… there has to be some kind of collective decision-making”

– “Democracy, which we don’t have… we make the assumption that we live in a democracy but there are lot of ways in which we don’t… a democracy is predicated on a really strong, robust education system – unfortunately we don’t have that”

– “We don’t really have informed citizens – we have citizens… many of whom are apathetic… disenfranchised and disillusioned about the so-called democratic process… the media that control the political system in certain respects… lots of different ways in which we don’t live in a very good democracy… voting system… lobbying…”

– Final book chapter: “We need to understand the political nature of the economy and how it shuts down transition away from meat-cultures”

– “To have that alternative system we would need to have a much more robust education system… you could argue that it’s purposively under-funded”

– A lack of a critical thinking focus in education systems

– “We don’t have very good climate education in our schools”

– Critical Animal Pedagogy “There are education academics arguing that we need to bring critical thinking around human-animal relations into schools and universities… connected to environmental and climate education”

– The Vegan Society’s work on education and the Laura Chepner and Zoe Weil Sentientism episodes

– “A vision for social change… completely re-doing the social fabric… taking apart the fabric of meat cultures… create new practices and create new social networks and social relationships… a long, drawn out process”

– “…Vegan practice is gradually becoming embedded within the social fabric of society”

– Sociological theories of change “nobody has really come up with something that works yet”

– “Society would be incredibly different even if just 10% of people were vegan… perhaps a domino effect… we tend to be quite loud and audible… I don’t think passive veganism is ever going to be helpful in terms of achieving change”

– “Everybody has a belief in animal rights… there’s just that huge social barrier between extending it from companion animals to other social constructs of animals”

– “When governments and institutions try to label animal rights as some kind of extremist belief – that’s really easy to undermine… the slaughterhouse – that is the reality of extremism”

– “Shine the mirror back on the majority of people… is this not some sort of strange, sadistic behaviour given all these vegans are demonstrating in their daily lives that they are flourishing…?”

– “Things are really bad – we need to deal with the fact that they are really bad… on the other hand there are also avenues into optimism”

– “Being part of networks of people who are doing positive work… building those networks… making community… strengthening the links between different social actors… that is where people can get their optimism from… there’s also optimism if we can bring other social movements into veganism… make ourselves relevant to all those other key movements for peace… non-violence… pro-feminist… against social inequality… against racism… it really needs to be part of a broader vision”

– “I also end the book with a critical nudge towards the left for not including human-animal relations within their vision”

– “We also need to keep pushing at our fellow vegans who are against thinking about gender and race and class – they are equally problematic”

– “Turn it into the cause of your life… it gives somebody meaning… to be involved in something like this.”

01:21:12 Follow Richard

– RichardTwine.com
– @RichardTwine
– The Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University
– @CfHAS

– The Climate Crisis and Other Animals

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Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.