Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism podcast here.

⁠Bill Wasik⁠ is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine. ⁠Monica Murphy⁠ is a veterinarian and a writer. Their previous book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, was a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Their latest book, “Our Kindred Creatures” makes a case for seeing the fight against animal cruelty as a crucial thread in America’s history. Readers are introduced to the activists, scientists, andmoguls who helped create our modern views on animals, with our intense compassion for certain species and ignorant disregard for others.

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!

01:09 Welcome

– “Our Kindred Creatures” as an example of Sentientist History?

03:30 Monica and Bill’s Intros

– Writing two books together: Rabid and Our Kindred Creatures

– “…Monica’s interest in animals [as a veterinarian] that I think got me interested”

– Telling the story of how the animal welfare movement came to the USA in the decades after the civil war

– The emergence of the modern way of thinking about animals “some of them are like members of the family… others of them in huge numbers are excluded…”

– “Everyday people in cities… were living among all kinds of animals in a way that feels very foreign to us today”

07:18 What’s Real?

– Meeting in a church youth group, Bill’s family more devout than Monica’s

– “It was not a creationist church… there was a sense that we weren’t going to doubt what science was telling us just because we were part of a religious tradition that had a different story”

– “‘In a world in which there’s no god why should we care at all about human suffering?’… runs implicitly through the book – many of the people we write about are religious”

– Links between religion, the abolition of slavery and animal ethics “though of course the slavers themselves had various bible verses that they waved around”

– “Today we’re Unitarian Universalists… go to church on Sundays and Bill sings in the choir”

– “Our Unitarian church is a very humanist church… animals don’t’ come up much… some other Unitarian churches have animal affinity groups”

– “There are also a lot of atheistic Unitarians… our church leans atheistic… the younger people even more so”

– “Whatever concept of god that I have wouldn’t conform with traditional ones – it’s more notional”

– “We came back to religion because of our son… he was a very loud atheist… a disrespectful atheist… we wanted him to expand his thinking”

– “Even though we occupy three different spots in our family on the atheistic side of the spectrum we’re very at home in this church”

– “One of the things that makes me hesitate to call myself an atheist is a kind of epistemological humility” re: history and other cultures

– “To say ‘now we know better… theistic tradition has no truths to offer’… feels ahistorical”

– “I have found it useful when listening to people talk about religion to swap in the idea of ‘goodness’ for ‘god'”

– The origins of the UK animal movement (and the abolition of slavery) “really coming out of religion… romanticism… individuals and their sufferings… matter to god”

– “Not just to know in some logical sense that slavery must be wrong… but to really feel it… god really looks at the suffering… that is simply intolerable”

– Scientific understanding that animals “are basically built the same way”

– “From a religious lens… our creator… has seen fit to make animals in a comparable manner… therefore they must experience suffering in much the same way as we do”

– “‘Brute creation’… getting at the idea that these animals were made by god… we’re stewards of their care…”

– Did the 19th Century UK and US animal thinkers recognise the deeper history re: ahimsa / animism etc?

– The focus on law enforcement (e.g. ASPCA) vs. a personal question of concern for animals

25:27 What and Who Matters?

– Monica: “I was a child animal lover… I loved pets… being around horses… became a vegetarian at 14… going to veterinary school”

– Vet school: “a daily effort to make individual animal lives better but often can be doing things that hurt them”

– “I’m thinking about animals all day every day”

– “I care about the animals as animals… I want to ease their suffering… I also care a lot about animals through the stories people tell…”

– “I want to relieve animal suffering… but I want to help them live longer for the people… sometimes a little bit of conflict”

– “Vets that are entirely focused on the animals are very unhappy… I might have actually been more of one of those… I quit for a while… suicide rates… moral dissonance… you think you know what’s right for the animal and the people who get to make the decisions for the animals don’t see it the same way…  you feel all torn up”

– “I try to honour what people want for their animals. It’s complicated… it’s a hard job.”

– Bill: “I grew up with cats who I loved but wouldn’t call myself a particular animal lover in a broader sense… was not a vegetarian growing up… only really have gone on that journey since we’ve been together”

– “One of the things I loved about writing this book is the dissonance itself… between people who can have dogs that they treat as members of the family… then there’s these systems… keeping animals in massive quantities… this great unresolved tension of modern life”

– Medical research on animals “keeping animals very far from human awareness… using them in an instrumental way… people have to turn off that part of themselves that might want to think about the feelings of those animals in order to say that there’s some higher good”

– Animal agriculture and animal research: “…colossal moral issues that are very unexplored”

– Concern for human virtue vs. compassion for the animals in “Our Kindred Creatures”?

– Henry Bergh “really brought the European animal welfare movement to the United States… New York in 1866… petitions signed… charter for the ASPCA… enforcement powers”

– Bergh’s focus on cruelism… “he thought it was harmful for the person doing the bad thing and for people watching… and doing nothing about it… morally corrupting for society… beating horses on the street… slaughter yards right near downtown… children could be watching… focused on the ick factor… than he was on the experience of the animal… corrosive… that rippled out into society and made us worse”

– “The visibility was really important to him – part of how he thought about making the world a better place was just moving some of that out of view… especially as it came to the slaughtering of animals… he wasn’t a vegetarian – he thought vegetarians were silly.”

– “He wanted no horses to be beaten in public or in private but he really didn’t want them beaten in public… was super-focused on law enforcement… he liked the bad guys to be taken down in front of a crowd… he loved to be in the newspapers… he was apparently not sentimental about animals at all”

– George Angell “… very, very focused on people’s ability to imagine themselves into the animals’ perspective… he starts the Massachusetts society… magazine “Our Dumb Animals”… he’s really responsible for turning Black Beauty into an international sensation… he gets a copy of it and just thinks that this is going to be a crucial text… he pirates it basically”

– “Black Beauty is generally seen as the first novel that’s written from the perspective of the animal… seen as very radical at the time… purporting to be narrated by a horse.”

– “For a society that was seeing… cruelty to horses all around them it was very affecting for people to read this book”

– “…the power of imagination… fiction and literature… you think about a problem in a different way by allowing yourself to imagine something that you either had never imagined before or you had allowed your imagination to suppress… it simply must be the case, to give the example of animals, that they must experience suffering in a certain way”

– Philosophy, science, spirituality… “If you’re talking about moral change that imagination needs to be part of that conversation… actual conversion narratives… the willingness to put yourself in another creature’s perspective… is part of how change happens”

– JW: What are the minimal practical implications of moral consideration? “What does it actually mean to care about animals?… if you do that… you have to re-code everyday actions… eating a hamburger… as intolerable acts of cruelty. That’s psychologically and socially really difficult to do.” Non-maleficence or not needlessly exploiting, harming or killing any sentient being? Hence veganism “exploitation, harming and killing are bad things and I’m going to do what I reasonably can to avoid causing them”

– “As far as we know none of the actors we write about were vegetarians… today… most activists on behalf of animals are vegetarian if not vegan”

– “The cruelty that they would witness just in any given day was remarkable enough by contemporary standards… I don’t necessarily blame them for imagining a better world that is not as good as the world that we are now capable of imagining…”

– “They were beginning from a baseline where, just in their daily walks around the city… horses being treated in an intolerable way… people could kick a cat… dog fights that people of all social classes would attend… the way that they would kill animals at the dog pounds was completely barbaric… there was so much really visible cruelty”

– “They developed a picture of a better world that just didn’t go so far as to say ‘should we be eating these animals at all?’”

– The tension between animal welfare and animal rights “people can care a lot about animals and wanting to improve their lives without rejecting completely the idea that animals can serve human use in various ways… as workers… as food… producers of eggs… as experimental models… they can want those systems to be revolutionised and improved… capable of engaging deeply with how animals might feel within these systems without wanting to abolish them”

– “Looking back over almost two centuries of struggle with trying to make some systems better… we feel like… it’s completely corrupt – let’s just get rid of them”

– “Back then they were entirely within the animal welfare frame”

– “If you’re a vegan… I’m going to get the coffee with oat milk… the other milk was made by a cow… you’ve made a set of mental leaps… you have to make those kinds of leaps today to be a moral person in the world… but they’re not exactly easy moral leaps for humans to make”

– “There are animal lovers who… would certainly not be willing to slaughter their own cow and who might look at the life of a dairy cow and say ‘my god what a terrible life … but the distance… literal physical distance… conceptual distance… how many leaps of causality exist between their consumption decision and the treatment of an animal… and how normal it is…”

– “The society that we have built… you see the early stages of that society being built in the period that we write about… allows the moral sense to not make… all of those hops”

– “That is the struggle that we have… if these things are leaps of imagination I think the imagination itself becomes taxed over the course of all of those leaps”

52:43 A Better World?

– JW: Positive shifts in human virtue re: non-human animals… but has it really helped animals that much given the industrial scaling of animal agriculture and exploitation? “Well done on improving human virtue but from the animals’ perspectives actually at the same time things have got worse”

– JW: The co-option of anti-cruelty / animal protection / veterinary organisations by the animal agriculture / exploitation industries

– The Crystal Heath Sentientism episode

– “The changes that they were able to win during this period were very, very real”

– “The ways in which the situation for animals got worse during this time period involved… the rise of industrial capitalism led to a focus on a certain kind of agriculture that lay outside of their worldview and perspective”

– “Managed to win profound moral change in society as it existed in their childhood and in their community… as simultaneously this other system of treating animals… arises… and they have very few answers to that… those are the systems we are still dealing with today.”

– “They set themselves a battle and they won it… and then… this other set of problems began that were just so much bigger and more complex… and they were very incapable of really understanding them and addressing them… we still struggle to address them today”

– Bill: “The moral of the book is not at all that these are figures who hold the key to solving the problem that currently exists…”

– Monica: “These guys didn’t have the solution to these big problems… but these guys did enact a very serious moral change… that animals were officially non-considered then officially considered”

– Monica: “My takeaway is a hopeful one. Moral change can happen and it can happen kind of fast. When you’re on the front end of it you don’t see it coming… but it can happen.”

– “The conceit of the book was like ‘why did animal welfare take off during this time period and other really important social movements didn’t… suffrage took decades to really get going… labour was struggling…”

– “We’re just looking for the thing… trying everything… one of these ideas of reframing how we think might just catch on… this really caught on in almost like an infectious way”

– “Animal societies don’t exist and then there’s one in nearly every state within several years and hundreds and thousands of people working for the cause and changing their lives”

– JW: What if these activists in the 1800’s had taken an abolitionist / rights stance?

– “In the case of experimentation on animals they do take that stance and it doesn’t play out very well for them… I’m not sure the more moderate would have played out for them either… there was a moral presumption about the rapid ability of medical science… to improve the lives of humans… that was so powerful… that it was very difficult to stand in its way”

– “When Bergh tries to prosecute a case on behalf of turtles he was really roundly ridiculed… there doesn’t seem to be a moral infrastructure… empathetic imagination to include creatures that were very different”

– “A really stronger perspective against eating animals I think would have had trouble really catching on…”

– “For all that we’ve been talking about imagination… taking animal suffering into consideration… this argument about the influence of humans… they intuited that it was a successful argument. People would see somebody beating a horse bloody in the street… setting aside the feelings of the horse… this wasn’t something that you wanted, as a sort of respectable member of society, to have your children witness”

– “There also was a fair bit of classism…”

– Concerns with temperance “A sense that alcohol was leading the working men of America into cruel behaviour against their wives and children, against their animals… a lot of these reform movements were movements of the elite… reacting to… a general sense of disorder… a rabble… behaving in a way that was contrary to good Christian morals”

– JW: “A classic elitist ‘civilising’ mission rather than necessarily a concern for the victims”

– “A lot of times our moral reasoning takes that form… a broader sense of rightness that’s being violated… you can try to boil it down to first principles but that’s not how our brains really work.”

– “Human centrism is a very difficult thing to overcome… we can’t escape our human perspective in imagining even the suffering of animals in order to try to alleviate it”

– “I wouldn’t say that it’s politically hopeless to say ‘we’re going to get society to broadly overcome anthropocentrism’ but I do think that it’s a tall order… climate change might ultimately be the thing that saves more… that kills the meat industry…”

– “Trying to get people to imagine their way into the perspective of cows and pigs to the point that they’re willing to do what’s necessary to abolish that industry feels way more daunting to me”

– vs. “I can’t even imagine a future for my grandchildren without eliminating some of these fundamental sources of these emissions with one huge one being the meat and dairy industry”

– “You can look at that and say that’s just an incredibly disappointing outcome… but often the thing that makes positive change happen is not always the thing that’s the noblest reason for it… my intuition is that might be the case here as well”

– JW: Humane education, the Bands of Mercy and tapping into our childlike cross-species compassion?

– Not being naïve about childlike compassion

– “To me the leap of imagination… is really about continuing to train the moral sense… to bridge these distances… how our actions affect other animals and other people… that really is very, very difficult moral terrain for humans to consider… 10^th order consequences, 20^th order consequences of our actions are something that we bear responsibility for”

– “That kind of moral education… because we are a globalised world… systems that dilute the effects of our actions that are hard to parse morally”

01:12:27 Follow Bill and Monica

– @murphydvm

– @billwasik

– Our Kindred Creatures

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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.