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The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
Bonus: Kindred Creatures with Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik
Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik join Claudia on the show to talk about their recent book Our Kindred Creatures. They discuss how the late 19th century was a time of immense change for Americans and their relationships with animals became increasingly contradictory.
Date Recorded: 15 July 2024
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. They live in Brooklyn, New York.
Featured:
- Our Kindred Creatures by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
- Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
- Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon
- Bonus: Veterinary Ethics and Animal Welfare with Sean Wensley
- S5E5: Animal Testing and its Alternatives with Thomas Hartung
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Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo. This episode was edited and produced by the show host Claudia Hirtenfelder.
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. It can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, and Instagram Learn more about the show on our website.
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Bill Wasik:Yeah, I mean you know. So the subtitle of our book is how Americans Came to Feel the Way they Do About Animals, and what we mean by that is, I mean, it's true that it is broadly a story of progress, but more I think what we mean is that our contention in the book is that these three decades are where you really see the emergence of the kind of contradictory complex of attitudes that we have about animals, where dogs and cats increasingly become members of the family, which is something you see, at least with dogs in the time period that we write about.
Bill Wasik:You see the emergence of an awareness and a concern, kind of at a distance, for at least certain wildlife species, with the rise of the conservation movement during this time period. But you really see the rise of this kind of shadow realm of animal use, as symbolized in our book by the rise of the industrial meat industry.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Hi everyone, welcome back to the Animal Time podcast. I'm so sorry for sounding so stuffy. I know that this doesn't sound good in your ear, so I will keep the intro short. I promise you that during the interview itself, I was right as rain. Today we have a bonus episode where I'm speaking to the authors of Our Kindred Creatures how Americans Came to Feel the Way they Do About Animals. We start off the conversation talking about moral revolution, but in the end we end up speaking about a whole range of kind of revolutions or changes in ideas that related to animals towards the late 19th, early 20th century and how there were scientific revolutions, health revolutions, revolutions with regards to animal welfare, and we end up having a pretty interesting conversation, I think, about some of the tensions that come up when thinking across time and across our relationships with various animals. Let me tell you a bit about the authors. Bill Wasik is the editor of the New York Times Magazine and Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and writer. Their previous book, rabid, a cultural history of the world's most diabolical virus, was a Los Angeles Best Time seller as well as a finalist for the Penn EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. They live in Brooklyn, new York.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:While I have you here, just a couple of announcements. One if you haven't subscribed to the Animal Highlight, which is our sister podcast and features content that directly and explicitly focuses on animals instead of the concepts as we do here, head over to the Animal Highlight and make sure you subscribe. If you've got a spot of time to rate and review the Animal Turn, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it If you voted in the Women in Podcasting Awards. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. The results are still pending, but I know many of you contacted me and said that you voted. I appreciate your time and the efforts and the energy that went into doing that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And finally, another kind of announcement that's quite exciting is the Animal Turn now has a merch store. If you head over to our website, you'll see a neat little tab that's called merch, with amazing designs that have been done by Rebecca Shen, as well as content featuring our awesome logo that was designed by Jeremy John. The profits, or the proceeds, will go towards supporting the podcast and the variety of creatives and folks that are helping to make the podcast better and better and better, and there is some content there that goes directly towards sanctuaries or nonprofits that are working towards making the world a better place for animals. So head over to the merch, Let us know. If you happen to buy something, make sure you tag us on social media. It would be wonderful to see that out in the world.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So thank you everybody for your support of the show and thank you, as always, to Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics for being a longtime supporter and sponsor of the show. I so value my connection with you guys. Okay, enough of all of the thank yous. I hope you enjoy this episode. It was a really fascinating and interesting discussion. I always enjoy talking to people who look at history, so enjoy. Hi, bill and Monica, welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Animal Turn podcast.
Bill Wasik:Hi there.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I very much enjoyed reading your book. When I picked up Our Kindred Creatures, I wasn't too sure which direction it was going to go, what kind of history you were planning on doing, and I learned a great deal, I think, about animal activism and its history in the United States. So thank you so much for your work on this book and for joining me on the show today. Now when I have guests on the show, I tend to want to center the conversation around the concept of sorts and, having, you know, read your book and thought a bit about it before today, I was really thinking that moral revolution seems to be at the center of your, your book, that that that's kind of or awakening, moral evolution or awakening seems to be at the center of your book, and that made me think a bit about your motivations for doing the book. Why, why did you want to write Our Kindred Creatures to begin with?
Bill Wasik:Well, we had written a previous book about the history of rabies. So we're married Monica's a veterinarian, I'm a writer, a magazine editor and we were interested in the subject of rabies and there were sort of breadcrumbs of history kind of going back 4000 years, and I think that you know we really enjoyed the process of writing together. We loved how it turned out and when we were thinking about what we want to do for a follow up book, we wanted to really focus on one time period and I think the late 19th century really stood out for us as just a fascinating moment, so much rich primary source material to go through, and also just a moment, just an incredible hinge point in the history of animals.
Bill Wasik:Exactly how we would do the book before arriving at this idea that we would focus just on America and we would focus on the three decades after the Civil War when you have not just the rise of the animal welfare movement but all of these incredible other shifts the early rise of the conservation movement of veterinary medicine, the beginnings of medical research on animals, as well as the movement against medical research on animals, zoos and circuses, and then the rise of the industrial meat industry really, I think, is a harbinger so much of the kind of animal order that we have today.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's incredible that time period, and so I have spent some time in the archives looking at historical documents and I know that putting together a book like this takes an immense amount of time and it's a lot of fun going through that kind of archival material. So you said such great source material, Did you know? Because throughout the book I mean, while there are animals throughout the book, you talk about turtles, you talk about horses, you talk about a whole range of different animals. It's really a story about the activists, the people who were changing the narrative in many ways in the United States. Did you know that going into the archives, Were you like oh, these are people whose stories we need to find, or did they kind of just emerge? How did you broach this?
Monica Murphy:I think both is true. We did start knowing something about some of the important players in this time period who affected the way people saw animals, but as we dug in, of course, there was ongoing discovery of more stories, more people, more moments that seemed important or interesting or hilarious or sad, and so, as you say, going through archival material is really, really rewarding and fascinating. So I think this book became what it was, largely because of the stuff we dug up in our initial explorations.
Bill Wasik:I would also just add, I think we think about the activists as in a sense the protagonists of the story in the kind of classical sense of the actors who sort of set the story in motion in certain ways. But in other ways, I mean, we're very interested not just in the animals that were affected and we try to kind of profile some of them throughout the book but we're also very interested in the other people who were caught up in the kind of not just the moral shift prompted by the activism but also all of the economic and cultural shifts that were, that were involved in changing how animals were thought of and how they were being used. And so you know, I think it's it's, it is ultimately the activists are the kind of through line of the book, but we in some ways, I think, are as interested, if not in some places more interested, in the people who are kind of on the other side of or in alliance with or, you know, part of the story in a different way.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I think I mean that really came up with the tensions between was it Henry Berg and PT Barnum, who I think to many folks might know their names already. You know PT Barnum being really well known for his menageries and eventually setting up of circuses and yeah, you had just incredible details there about that fire and you know aquariums and tanks exploding. Well, which I'd love if you could give the listeners some details on that. That would be wonderful. But kind of the tension between Barnum and Henry Berg, who's this character that most people know because of his heritage with the ASPCA. I've never heard of these stories kind of in tandem with one another. People tend to talk about Barnum in one area when they're talking about menageries and they tend to talk about Henry Berg when they're talking about activists. But you don't really realize that they had a shared history in many ways.
Monica Murphy:Yeah, we like to call them frenemies. They played important foils to one another, I think, in the way they interacted and engaged around animal welfare.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Could you maybe tell us a little bit about that story with regards to the whales, it was whales, right, that were being kept in the aquarium and just the I mean the scale, it gives a sense of just the distances that animals were moving, to kind of feed this curiosity that people had.
Monica Murphy:Yeah. So PT Barnum was famous in New York City for years before Henry Berg sort of brought his animal welfare movement to the United States. In New York and his museum, which he established in Lower Manhattan, was really just a very important, famous place. Visitors from out of town to New York City would would characterize it as a must see. Locals made a habit of taking their children there, and amongst the attractions, sort of nestled between the real and fake historical artifacts and taxidermy, were live animal displays. He really highlighted these in his advertisements to bring people into the museum and people responded they were very curious about animals from other places in the world that looked different from the animals they were used to seeing. So it was a real sort of peak entertainment that PT Barnum conceived when he decided to bring a pair of beluga whales down from Labrador to put on display in New York City. He became personally involved in the live capture of a pair of beluga whales and then transport by rail in special wooden crates where they were kept moist. He had publicity stops in multiple towns on the way down so that you know there was sort of a rolling advertisement for the attraction in New York City and then, once the whales were here in a sort of makeshift dirty basement tank. He promoted them widely. Better, come see them quick, because they're not likely to survive for very long. It was very popular and so those first two beluga whales became a succession of beluga whales, many of whom died in transit or died shortly after arrival in New York. He did, to his partial credit, improve the facility in which he kept them.
Monica Murphy:Pt Barnum was, for reasons, economic, but probably went beyond that. He was very motivated to try to provide the best possible care for the animals in whom he had invested. He wanted to keep them around. He wanted to keep the visitors coming. So he figured some things out about the conditions in which beluga whales might survive for a bit longer in his New York museum. But ultimately his American museum, its first iteration, succumbed to fire in just a year or so before Henry Berg would start the animal welfare movement in the United States. The beluga whales were among the casualties. The firefighters actually tried to use the water from the tank to subdue the fire, but ultimately the whole museum burned to the ground. And although Barnum's career wasn't done by any means, he would bring more animals to New York over the years. That was the end of the Luka Wales place in New York.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's a devastating story and you really captured, I think, the drama of it. I could only imagine being in a city at that time watching this massive and you spoke about the sounds emanating from the museum, right Like the number of animals that were shrieking and screaming. And you've got, of course, horses bringing water trying to put this out. You could only imagine the spectacle. And in between all of this you've got whales, some of the first whales ever kept in captivity. I mean, you really captured my imagination with that chapter.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But coming back to this idea of moral revolution, because in some ways I think, you know, maybe we're seeing a revolution of sorts taking place with whales. You know Canada is now starting to phase that out. You're starting to see more and more aquariums recognizing that whales, at least, should not be kept in captivity in these situations, and this is perhaps a kind of extension of what was begun in the late 19th century. But it's not often, I think, people will speak about animal rights as a revolution. It's an interesting take. What made you kind of frame it in that way of thinking about this as a moral revolution at this time?
Bill Wasik:this as a moral revolution at this time. Yeah, we came to this story, I think, not sure how much we wanted to credit this generation of animal activists with a moral revolution. You know, in Animal Liberation Peter Singer is pretty down on the animal activists of this era and very focused on how they were sort of too cozy with power, how they kind of stopped short of getting anything real done or really advocating for all the animals and not just some animals, et cetera. I think we were unprepared or one of the things that I think we realized as we got into it was you know they they really came into a situation where animals were thought of as property and it just simply was not thinking your way into the animal's perspective in any way, just simply wasn't done at the time.
Bill Wasik:You know we tell the story of Black Beauty, you know, which is written in the 1870s in England but really only becomes a global sensation when in 1890, george Angel in the United States, who's one of the main other than Berg, sort of one of the main animal activists here, he just starts pirating it and prints tens of thousands of copies and eventually it becomes one of the bestselling books of the century.
Bill Wasik:And the fact that the book was narrated by a horse, that it was a whole novel where the writer had taken the trouble of imagining a horse's perspective which today of course feels so old hat to us and it's like the stuff of countless children's books was very profound, and plenty of adult readers and critics talked about how affecting it was to have, you know, the perspective of a horse kind of narrated in that way, and I do think that a lot of the, insofar as there was a kind of moral revolution. I do think that that sort of initial move of human beings, sort of realizing that animals had to suffer, even if their brains didn't work exactly the way that ours did, that the suffering that they felt and could not speak of had to be something that was worth taking into consideration, and that that was a very powerful realization and that it led to a lot of positive change and it really did affect how they were treated.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I really appreciate what you said there about kind of moving the needle a bit, because Peter Singer is, it's almost without thought. A lot of us will speak about the animal rights movement and Peter Singer will kind of be this odd beginning point, and maybe it's because for a lot of people that was, you know, reading his work, was for them their awakening or their realization, kind of modern realization. But you realize that we had to have fertile ground for Peter Singer to think the thoughts he was thinking as well. And at this time in the late 19th century, as you I mean, animals are still overtly thought of as property today or they are still property. And I think maybe there's some, you know, conflict, especially when we think about pets. You know pets are property and now slowly, laws are starting to change that are thinking about how we can think through pets as being, you know, members of the family, for example.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But at that time, as you say, kind of the idea that any sort of moral consideration should be given to animals was brand new. You just did stuff with animals. It wasn't, you know, horses needed to take things, things needed to get done. The streets were full of trash and rubbish and horses would slip, there would be accidents. It just was the way it was. And horses would slip, there would be accidents. It just was the way it was. And I think perhaps then as now, people maybe thought if you were interested in animals or animals welfare, that was maybe the position of the privileged. You had to be in a privileged position to care about animals. Would you agree with that? Or am I just putting a whole bunch of different ideas in there that don't fit?
Bill Wasik:Well, certainly it was the case that the animal activists of this generation and all of the humanitarian movements, the leaders of all the humanitarian movements, tended to come from privilege.
Monica Murphy:And a lot of the workers who had direct engagement with animals, whether they're working in a slaughter facility or they're driving a horse or a team of horses. These people came from a different class than those who led the animal welfare movements, and so the sort of zeal for prosecuting people who, for example, would beat a horse because the horse wasn't performing work fast enough or hard enough, that did set up a situation in which you know a common critique of the movement was here you are prosecuting a man who will now languish in jail for beating the horse and his children won't get to eat and and all this you know for for this animal. So, as you say then, is now privilege was was definitely an accusation against the, the sort of movement itself.
Bill Wasik:But you know, I think I sort of coming back to this point about moral revolutions. I mean, I think that one of the things about coming to history and trying to kind of understand where people begin their own journeys and the history that led up to that and the possibilities that seem to exist as a way of understanding why they got to where they did and no further, I think is useful. One thing that often comes up a sort of surprise sometimes when we talk to people who come from an animal rights you know place, is the fact that none of the leaders um of of the movement in the 19th century were vegetarians, even though their vegetarianism did exist at the time and was sort of seen through the lens of certain health ideas, some of some of which were right and many of which were wrong.
Bill Wasik:So there was a vegetarian movement, but the animal welfare movement, as far as we could tell, didn't really seem to intersect with it.
Bill Wasik:And none of the figures who we thought about were vegetarians, which I think is symptomatic of a broader point, that the idea that in a world where animals were really seen as almost as objects or machines to sort of be used as anybody saw fit, without very much care, the animal welfare activists wanted to to sort of use them more humanely, the idea of a world where we didn't use them, was not one that they that.
Bill Wasik:That, I think, was I mean the economy depended utterly on animals Like they, they to to put an end to use of of horses, to just stop yeah that's exactly right and that if we are able to imagine a world where we don't use animals today, it is in part because we can imagine a world in which they're not being used.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Does that make sense? No, it does. It makes sense and it's actually interesting. I had Sean Wensley on the show not too long ago talking about animal welfare and veterinary ethics and practice, and towards the end of the episode we spoke about animal use and kind of how the history of veterinary practice is quite entangled with animal use, of how the history of veterinary practice is quite entangled with animal use. You know, the emergence of vets was attached in many ways to horses and their use and their abundance in cities and then when horse use declined in cities, vets shifted and changed and the profession kind of shifted and changed.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I hear what you're saying, that these people, the way they practice, might not be the same as how we think about animal rights today. I think a lot of people, when they talk about animal rights today, they'll equate it with things like veganism and vegetarianism. But historically there were different battles being fought Food, you know. But I wonder though so you say you know you think we have space now to imagine a world without animal use now because of the works of some of these people, but I think for most folks they struggle with making that separation. Most animals are still equated with use, even though we accept and appreciate that they're not objects. So historically animals were just objects that we can use, that they're not objects. So historically animals were just objects that we can use. And I think now there's maybe some cognitive dissonance where animals are not objects. We love them and they're amazing, but we can use them, which is a different kind of time really.
Bill Wasik:Yeah, I mean. So the subtitle of our book is how Americans Came to Feel the Way they Do About Animals, and what we mean by that is, I mean it's true that it's it's. It is broadly a story of progress.
Bill Wasik:Our contention in the book is that these three decades are where you really see the emergence of the kind of contradictory complex of attitudes that we have about animals, where dogs and cats increasingly become members of the family, which is something you see at least with dogs in the time period that we write about.
Bill Wasik:You see the emergence of an awareness and a concern, kind of at a distance, for at least certain wildlife species, with the rise of the conservation movement during this time period.
Bill Wasik:But you really see the rise of this kind of shadow realm of animal use, as symbolized in our book by the rise of the industrial meat industry. But there are certainly other realms of animal use that fall into this category, where the use of them is happening at such a distance, a physical distance, a psychological distance, to the point that we might be enjoying, or I mean the vast majority of people are consuming animal products without having a single thought about the fact that they come from animals, and that is made possible because it has all been moved so far out of human society. And I think that that's a really important shift and I think, if you wanted, I think if we were to give, one reason why the progress of this era didn't go further was that it was taking place kind of at the same time as the rise of industrial capitalism, which allowed for a different kind of animal economy that really moved the animals being used kind of out of the local sphere of concern where we felt implicated in how they were being used.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's really interesting. So I mean you've got industrialization happening, you've got heightened use across many, many sectors happening, but also what you? You have a bit of a cultural revolution happening. You know you spoke about black beauty. You spoke about, you know how the imagination of folks is changing towards animals, and this speaks to your contradictions. On the one hand, you've got industrial use and more need and varied need for animals, because it's not just that animals are being the same, animals are being used the same animals are being used in more various ways, right.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think what you spoke about in Chicago was quite interesting, because you know William Cronin also wrote about this that it wasn't just that meat was being packed in the same way, they started to find ways to use the offcuts, and this is really where packers started to make profits. And make money was not just like a butcher would cut up meat and sell meat. Fresh Packers would cut it up. They figured out how to freeze their railways, they moved meat across spaces and they made use of byproducts, and byproducts was where the profit sat. So you've kind of got that industrial revolution happening, on the one side, with regards to how animals are used, and on the other side to add to the contradiction, you've got this cultural and social shift where you've got stories like black beauty happening and you've got changes in the ideas with regards to things like fashion.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So you spoke quite a bit in the book about fashion. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that, because I think those often get overlooked when we have these conversations. We talk about meat and we talk about slaughterhouses, and they are, of course, very important, but the changes in fashion greatly changed, I think, the ways in which people thought about animals at this time as well. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Monica Murphy:Sure. Well, I think the best example is the use of bird and bird parts and products on ladies' hats, which was very popular in the 19th century. I think it had sort of waves of popularity At one point. The wings of certain seabirds sort of made a jaunty ornament on one side of the hat, and whole taxidermied hummingbirds or heads of owlsumes, but also the sort of very rare delicate feathers that come from the breeding egret and heron were considered very desirable ornaments for women's hats, such that if you walked through the park, which one ornithologist famously did during the 19th century, you could in an afternoon see hundreds of species of native birds displayed, or maybe it was dozens or scores of species.
Monica Murphy:It was many species of native birds displayed on women's hats, so you could go on a real bird walk just seeing ladies' hats. This issue of the sort of waste of bird life to ornament you know, provide ornaments for women was taken up as an important cause driving the early conservation movement in this country. Ornithologists organized around this issue, establishing the Audubon Society, which really was established sort of twice, but its primary sort of animating issue was trying to persuade women to use something other than birds and bird parts on their hats, and they actually, you know, did have some successes but moreover, they sort of got groups established that then could broaden the causes and do more in conservation. And of course we still have the descendants of those societies today.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, one of those societies is the Orban Society. And while reading your book I was thinking in many ways you're speaking about these individuals. You know, like I always thought his name was Angle, but you said it's Angel and Berg. But you've also got the formation of many societies. You've got the Humane Society, the ASPCA, I think you said the Auburn Society. There's a whole bunch of societies. So it seems to also be a time where there's an institutionalization of the movements. It's no longer just individuals trying to do things, it's them trying to institutionalize. And one thing that's interesting about this institutionalization is that it seemed to be very much centered on women. While there are some big characters like Berg and Angel, whose names come up repeatedly in histories, there are a lot of women who are forming these societies and leading these campaigns.
Bill Wasik:Yeah, this is a subject on which there was a big cultural shift even during the time period that we write about, on which there was a big cultural shift even during the time period that we write about.
Bill Wasik:So, for example, carolyn Earl White is one of the big animal activist figures during this period and she essentially starts up as the prime mover in the creation of the Pennsylvania SPCA, which is one of the big three that begin sort of at the very beginning of the movement.
Bill Wasik:But at that time in the 1860s, it was not socially acceptable, even in these progressive circles, for women to be leaders of movements and organizations. It wasn't seen as proper and so she had to stand aside for male leadership. By the end of the time period we write about she founds the American Antivivisection Society and really is I mean, at various points they have male presidents, but that kind of falls away past a certain point she really is very clearly the leader of that group and it's just generally seen as more socially acceptable, even by the 1880s and 1890s, for women to be in leadership roles. And in fact you really have this explosion in those decades of women's groups there even was. We write about how there's a conference of women's groups and there's hundreds of them, and this really takes off in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s.
Monica Murphy:Well beyond the leadership, the women were, I think, very much the sort of foot soldiers of these movements, and that goes back to before what we're writing about in the anti-slavery movement. Women were very deeply involved in that effort even if their names weren't at the top of the organization.
Monica Murphy:They were writing letters and they were, you know, sort of talking to their neighbors and their churches and providing sort of information campaigns and they, I think, really can be credited with a lot of shifts in public opinion, the hearts and minds part of these movements, and that's true.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I really appreciated how much voice you gave to it's a weird sentence. I appreciated how present women were in your book. You know it is kind of a, I think, a common narrative that women and animal rights movements and animal welfare movement there is a kind of connection and sometimes it's used negatively or historically it has been used to kind of dissuade this as just being an emotional, not serious movement. So there was, you know it was the moralizing was a negative thing, somehow a woman being involved was a negative thing. And now that it's gained some traction, even we brought up Peter Singer I know some critique has been thrown there as well saying he's become this kind of figurehead for the movement where his ideas are also precedented on a lot of people, indigenous knowledges and also women's knowledge that came before that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Of course he's done a great deal for changing people's minds. It's just it's interesting whose voices and whose ideas get included in histories like these and whose are excluded. A key thing you mention in your book is that one of the reasons that this time was fertile for thinking about animals and the ways animals experience the world and suffer or have the potential to suffer was because this time period now is following the end of the Civil War, and this is an important factor for shaping animal welfare or discourse about animal welfare. Why is that?
Bill Wasik:Well, I mean, I think you can kind of look at it two different ways, you know.
Bill Wasik:One of it is that you know this is a movement that begins in the 1820s and 1830s in.
Bill Wasik:I mean, it begins in the 1820s in England and then spreads throughout Europe. And I think that partly why it takes until after the Civil War to spread to the United States is that of course the sort of progressive humanitarian figures in America during that time period were just a hundred percent focused on fighting slavery, this kind of monstrous, you know very, you know very shameful American institution that the rest of the world for the most part had turned against already. And so, you know, after the end of the Civil War I think it kind of unlocked the energies of these people to focus their attentions on other kind of festering social problems. So some of it flows into women's suffrage, some of it flows into temperance, temperance, interestingly I mean, we sometimes think of as a kind of reactionary movement, but really was associated with a lot of the same figures who supported other more progressive social movements during this time period, the sense that alcohol was causing men to beat their wives and leading to the dissolution of families and that people were making money from and beat their horses.
Monica Murphy:Yeah, and beat their horses too.
Bill Wasik:Yeah, Many, many people in the animal welfare movement were temperance activists as well, and there was that class dynamic to it which was again slightly shameful but also somewhat correct. That drink really was leading to a lot of social problems during this period. So, at any rate, you know, but one of the causes that really benefits from this and it's the reason why I think it starts up and spreads so quickly after 1866, is that it's, you know, the people who who craved the end of slavery, whether they were fighting in the war, whether they had been really active as abolitionists, the sense that now that this sort of national shame had ended, that these other causes, could you know, had their time now, I think, was very much in the air.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it was a revolutionary time, I guess, and I really appreciate again those decades that you focused on, and it comes up for many reasons. You know it's also a big urban change. You've got a lot of urban changes happening. The city is changing in pretty dramatic ways and that's partly associated with what we were talking about, with the kind of increasing industrial production of things you know, a variety of things, these cultural shifts and changes happening where women are taking more and more roles in various institutions.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:There's more and more appreciation that the actions we take as individuals and as societies matter. They matter in terms of how we treat each other as people, whether it's different women or different races. But now I think what you're talking about is that it's not only among people that it matters. It also matters amongst humans and animals. But of course, this line between humans and animals hasn't always been as clear as what we maybe think of it as today, and one of the blurry stories that kind of shows this is your case about children and how children's rights was very much in America, was very much attached and associated with animal rights. Could you walk us through that a little bit and what happened there?
Bill Wasik:Yeah.
Bill Wasik:So you know, the way I sort of think about it is, that is that, as people were awaking to the, the needs of kind of um, just the depth of social problems that the government um, I don't think this was just true in the United States.
Bill Wasik:We this, this, the strong modern state, what we think of, as you know, hey, these are problems that governments solve that just simply didn't exist in the same way during this time period. And so one of the, I think, historical oddities of this era is that a movement for the protection of animals started up right after the Civil War, before there was really any organized effort to protect children against cruelty. And so another thing that I think readers are surprised by of our book is that the model that the ASPCA established the ASPCA, despite being called the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, actually only had jurisdiction in New York, and they were empowered by a New York state law to prosecute themselves cases of cruelty to animals. So you know, the moment that Henry Byrd gets this law passed, he literally starts going out in the streets. He has agents who go out in the streets. They see cases of cruelty and they directly arrest these people and take them in front of a judge.
Bill Wasik:So this is a private organization that's been empowered to do its own law enforcement. And so for years people would go to Henry Berg and say, hey, there's this case in my neighborhood of somebody who's mistreating a child, brutally mistreating a child, and he would say, well, that's not my, essentially, it's not my jurisdiction. But then eventually he decides to act. And so I believe it was 150 years ago.
Bill Wasik:This year was the famous first case of child, of cruelty to children, prosecuted in the United States. It was a little girl named Mary Ellen, and Berg hears about this kind of really, really rough case of you know. She was essentially being beaten and essentially imprisoned in this home, and he sends two of the agents to go and and and liberate her and arrest the adoptive parents and succeeds in court in prosecuting them, not on the basis of the cruelty to animals statute but on Habeas corpus, yeah, habeas corpus, which was very strange grounds, but so, essentially inspired by this, he and some of his allies go to Albany and have a law passed for essentially to for the prosecution of cruelty to children, and that in turn spreads around the country too. And you know a lot of the organizations that were called humane societies in the United States. They took that title because they were actually prosecuting and policing both cases of animal cruelty and cruelty to children and that in fact, by the early 1900s there were more of the organizations were doing both and were just doing animals that's fascinating.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:When did they start to split, like, when did you start to see the, the splitting of these dual functions?
Bill Wasik:beginning with the Teddy Roosevelt administration, that you really see the stronger kind of state that you know government set of functions that we think of today coming into view. And so you know you start to see police forces becoming more like what we currently think of as police forces. Where they are, you know, they're using elaborate detective work and archives to solve crimes that might have been committed weeks ago. Right, the 19th century model of police forces was if you see somebody doing something in the street or you grab somebody who just committed a crime and call a police officer and have them come over and take the person, then they might get prosecuted, but otherwise there was not that sense of policing as something that was. It was more what they would call like a constable and watch system.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It wasn't as bureaucratic, there wasn't as much.
Bill Wasik:Even taxation. I mean at the point that the era we're writing about at least the beginning of the era there's no income tax, there's no federal income tax. So that really starts up. And so you start to see things like cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. You begin to see the realization that, hey, these should be things that the government in some form is doing, as opposed to something that we would empower private groups to do.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's really fascinating because I think when I did some research on the history of animals in Canada and some of the first bylaws in Canadian cities were for animals and I think a lot of people are quite surprised by that because animals were so present, there were hundreds and hundreds of them in cities and they required policing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And, as you say, some of that policing was quite rudimentary. But still some of the first resources urban areas had were towards policing the movements of animals and those who owned animals. And I think many folks are quite surprised that children weren't part of this. Like I think children just fit into society, they were expected to do things and they only became visible, I guess, as ideas of vulnerability started to maybe make an emergence, like people were awakened, to use your terminology, to the idea that not all humans are the same, they don't all have the same histories and we have different vulnerabilities at different points in our lives. So it's quite fascinating that entangled history of children's rights and animal rights, because I think Children are mobilized in pretty interesting ways to work against animals as well, to say, well, these dogs killed children, so they have to be somehow. It's even more egregious if the harm is done to a child. So that shows a marked change in thinking about children in a relatively short period of time.
Bill Wasik:Yeah, you know, I definitely believe that this kind of move, this move towards the dual model of the humane society, I certainly think got in the way of the animal welfare movement of that time period, really fully embracing some of the more radical notions that I think were possible at this moment.
Bill Wasik:You know the turtle we write about the turtle case where, at the very beginning of his activism, henry Berg prosecuted the case of turtles having been stored, you know, upside down with their flippers pierced with cords, and it became a real sensation. He lost the case and I definitely don't think he lost the battle for public opinion, but it did kind of put on the table the idea that, hey, this isn't just about dogs and horses, this is hypothetically about any animal that's being treated cruelly, that's being asked to suffer. That, I think, didn't go. That kind of awakening on behalf of less standard species didn't necessarily go that far in the subsequent years and animal cruelty was ever going to decide that it was going to be more aggressive or more radical on this question of which species were taken into consideration.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I think you spoke about slippery slopes and how actually having that dual function meant that people said, oh, when does their authority end? It started to actually open up a lot of criticism for some of Henry Berg's actions and he was being caricatured quite heavily because it seemed as though he could do anything in effect, even though he I mean we make it sound like he was extremely successful. I think a lot of the cases he brought forward weren't successful, but he was a thorn, he was a constant. Both him and Angel were kind of constant thorns for a long, long, long time and there's something about that consistency that's quite remarkable. But in kind of thinking about other animals, monica, maybe you could talk us through a little bit about scientific changes and veterinary practice changes. Think this time period here is also it's not only financial capital revolution, it's not only a cultural revolution, but it's a scientific revolution happening now with the emergence of bacteriology and stuff. How did this change or shift the, the moral thinking towards animals?
Monica Murphy:so the this is the time period in which veterinarians in the United States are sort of becoming organized and becoming educated. Prior to this, pretty much anyone could declare themselves an animal doctor and, you know, open a storefront and charge money to take care of horses or dogs or what have you. But we see the establishment of veterinary schools where students are taught according to the best science of the day not necessarily the best science of this day, but what they had at the time to minister to the sufferings of animals and extend their lives. And so we, as those veterinarians, are becoming educated. They're becoming organized. They establish societies. They also establish medical journals, which is really critical to the improvement of practice in veterinary medicine as well as other professions. So the idea that scientific studies that were being done in Europe were brought to American veterinary audience through veterinary journals and case reports and other sort of interesting discussions about outbreaks and new findings were sort of right there for veterinarians to read to inform their practice, all of that is is new to to the the era and it's it's partly because of the economic importance of horses, as you mentioned earlier, that the veterinarians are able to sort of charge adequately for their services, to really sort of think deeply about how, how to do it best and spend money on their educations and take time to get together and encourage one another to better practice. It's also because of the sort of value placed on relief of suffering, because of the animal welfare movement, that veterinarians are, you know, more frequently called out and engaged to try to relieve pain. I mean, even the ASPCA hired veterinarians as consultants and to help prosecute their cases.
Monica Murphy:The science, though, that underlies veterinary medicine, as well as human medicine and other health professions, does, of course, rely on animal research, and so that is. You know, it's a. It's a tension, as it is today, for for people who care enough about animals to devote their careers to relieving their suffering and pain and and trying to help them be healthier, and and yet like to do a good job at this, you have to use science, and and science, especially then, didn't have really any good alternatives to animal testing in order to sort of further the understanding of how to take care of animals, and the best example of the great science that was sort of coming out at the time relying on animals was the work of Louis Pasteur in France. His work led to, after he did, a whole bunch of other important things like proving the germ theory and sort of establishing the science for asepsis.
Monica Murphy:Germ theory and establishing the science for asepsis he developed the first modern vaccines, the first two modern vaccines, and by modern I mean vaccines that relied on the laboratory manipulation of microbes to make them safe enough to induce immunity in vulnerable individuals, as opposed to the sort of generian vaccine. Jenner's smallpox vaccine was more of a happenstance harnessing of a natural virus to induce immunity in humans. Pasteur's great leap forward in sort of capturing and manipulating microbes to create immunity first found application with some veterinary vaccines, including chicken cholera and anthrax, both very economically important diseases. His first human vaccine, famously, was the rabies vaccine and as we know now, the rabies vaccine was tremendously important, not simply because it allowed people to survive bites from rabid animals but because ultimately it could be used prophylactically in dogs, which would prevent the exposure of humans to rabies but also really transform our relationship with dogs and make them just much more reliable companions who couldn't be infected with something that would cause them to turn on us and endanger us and our family members.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:How prolific was rabies at this time amongst us Not very. Not very.
Monica Murphy:Rabies, then and now, is a really horrifying illness, barely survivable, I mean, we should consider it not survivable. Once you're sick with rabies, you're almost certainly going to die of rabies. The course is short, but it involves great suffering and really sort of outrageous symptoms that horrify onlookers. And it affects children more frequently than adults. So it is, you know, really obviously. You know diseases that affect children are especially horrifying.
Bill Wasik:Right, rabies was feared, far out of proportion to its numbers, but it was so feared that it led to just like huge brutality against stray dogs. So you would have these like mass culling of dogs when there would be any kind of rabies outbreak. And so, yeah, I mean this creates so much cognitive dissonance during the period that we're writing about, because, you know, to create the vaccine, pasteur had to use I mean, he was using rabbits.
Monica Murphy:Dogs too, but mainly rabbits and a few guinea pigs.
Bill Wasik:And then to actually manufacture the vaccine, he was using rabbits as well, and so a lot of animals were dying in the creation of this vaccine, and yet not only was it saving people, but it effectively, over time, saves an incredible number of animals.
Bill Wasik:And so this created just an incredible cognitive dissonance, for animal activists was working because it had been created cruelly.
Bill Wasik:They had invested very strongly in a mindset in which animal research simply wasn't effective, that nothing useful could come of it, and so they were very strident about the idea that actually it was a myth and in fact the vaccine was harmful as opposed to being helpful, and they just simply were wrong about that. And in fact, the the vaccine was harmful as opposed to being helpful, and they just simply were wrong about that. This kind of rising more scientific attitude about sort of, you know, improving medicine by any means necessary for the greater good, even if that means these, these Sacrifices of animals, sacrifices of animals that I think we definitely still see in some forms to this day. You know, and there's a lot of talk about replacing animal models in research, and I think that it is definitely possible, but it would be an incredibly radical shift to end animal research, and that's I think you know. You see kind of in this era, in the debates that we write about, I think you see sort of in infancy, some of the same issues that we continue to deal with.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean, I think throughout the book, several of the fights and challenges that emerged, and there's something both reassuring and challenging about it because as much as things have changed, they've stayed the same in many ways. Right, even the debates over animals in zoos and the extent to how can we really justify putting animals in zoos for educational purposes or scientific purposes the extent to which those discourses have really changed substantially. I mean the real gut of the discourse is pretty much still the same. It's still centered on kind of making money in some way or form and using animals to create education, science. So you are having some of these benefits coming from, let's say, keeping animals in zoos, but whether those benefits can be measured or weighed against the harms done to those individuals is a big challenge. Of course many people like me would say no, it's not worth it. How do we justify doing that? But I appreciate that there are many others saying children would never be exposed to animals and never learn to love animals. And then of course I would say, well, are we learning to love them in the right ways? What does that mean? So I think that conversation is still happening, slightly varied, but it's still the same in many ways as to what was happening 100, 150 years ago.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Come to the conversations about animals and science, and I think it's the same. I think medicine is one of those like final frontiers where people are like anything that's to do with health. That's the limit. You know. We can't, we can't, we can't sacrifice health for animals, and I think this is when we reach these limits. I think it starts to raise interesting questions for animal rights activists and for those who. It becomes, I think, an easy case for people who rely on animals. You know, you'll have a conversation with people about what food they eat and they'll say, yeah, but we have to use animals for medicine. So it becomes this mechanism to use to justify all animal use, if that makes sense, because it is such a hard conversation to have and, similar to when I spoke to Sean, I do think again, I'm not hiding my colors here, but I do think that when we start to have these conversations and we start them from the space of no use, we come up with different and interesting examples and, of course, 150 years ago or 100 years ago, there was a little space to think differently about that, but then you've got people like Thomas Harting saying we're not 70 kilogram rats, and a lot has gone wrong in the science as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:As much as there has been really great breakthroughs, there have also been a lot has gone wrong in the science as well. As much as there has been really great breakthroughs, there have also been a lot of animals and a lot of science done just to do science, not really to any sort of benefit. And I think that that's happening more today than it ever was historically, because we're having this pressure to publish and this pressure to produce in a way that's not the same as it was then. Sorry, I just kind of vomited a whole bunch of thoughts. I'm not exactly sure where I was going. I think it's just to say that it's interesting because things seem to change but they also seem to stay the same in some ways but they also seem to stay the same in some ways.
Bill Wasik:Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that we sort of outside of this book, we did an article for the New York Times about kind of animal welfare versus animal rights, though not necessarily about them as opposed, but as sort of different ways of looking at the problems of dealing with animals and the questions of our moral obligations. And of course there is still there is a community of animal welfare thinkers who are beginning, as you say, not from a place of no use but from a place of, you know, insofar as animals are being used in human society, sort of how can we use fewer of them, how can we use them more humanely? You know, which I think is, I think, for people who come from the animal rights side of things can often feel like you're conceiving the whole, whole argument from the beginning if you begin from that place. But on the other hand, to your point, we're very, very far from a world in which there's a consensus for no use and especially around issues of health. But even in the food realm, I think that for all the progress that we made, even in the food realm, I think that, you know, for all the progress that we made. We're nowhere near, I think, a huge consensus on that and so I think it is useful.
Bill Wasik:I think that there is a value in the animal welfare perspective. You know which I think a lot of veterinarians just inherently in their jobs, like come at it sort of from that perspective. You know, monica is a veterinarian, doesn't walk into a room even with a, and then it's a bad example because, like, obviously pet relationships are, are, are, I'm not sure what you're saying.
Bill Wasik:Well, there are people, there's now a, there's now a sort of no pet movement, which is sort of funny, you know, because starting from a no use place can take you to some very strange places.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, it's funny. You said that because I was going to ask you about one of your final sentences treat thy neighbor as you treat thy pet and maybe you could give me some of your thoughts around that phrase.
Bill Wasik:Well, I think what we were sort of getting to there is that the level of love for our pets has become so much more familiar, family-like sort of even, than what it was in the period that we're writing about, to the point that, if you're asking, if you're asking readers, as we do in in in the end of our book, to sort of spare more of a thought for, like all of the animals that exist in human society that are not their pets- that's why human society, all the animals threatened by climate change and by yeah, exactly that, that, that trying to think about it through the lens of your own pet is maybe useful.
Bill Wasik:You know, for all of the ways in which I think you can try to convince people not to eat pigs, you know you can talk about their treatment in industrial meat production. You can talk about their intelligence through the lens of oh, you know, some scientists taught them to play video games. But the fact that they're as smart, if not smarter, than your dog is is possibly the most compelling thing that you can say about a pig, except possibly to say that they're smarter than your, your two-year-old or three-year-old or whatever. But the point is that, using that frame of reference to say, okay, if you're not going to stop and think about one of these animals through the lens of trying to imagine what it's like to be them, maybe it's more helpful to say you live with this dog and you would be horrified if people did X, y or Z to your dog. Well, imagine, imagine it being done to a pig.
Bill Wasik:I mean, it has so many of the same capabilities and so many of the same capacities for, for emotion, for so on. I think that's sort of what what we were getting at with love thy neighbor as thy pet and in the sense of the neighbor being that, that, that in some ways our solipsism, um, especially I think in this kind of digital era when it's so easy to kind of to, to retreat into your own curated bubble of life, is that you know, you know the a sense of care and connection for human beings in some ways feels like it's fallen lower than the attachments that we have to our animals. It's easy to sort of like think about the world through the lens of a very small circle of people and animals who you care about and sort of write everybody else off, and it's important.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it was interesting because you had had this whole conversation about systemic and how you know, you speak about the exploded circle and you talk a little bit about systemic, I guess, oppression, to some extent systemic use, but both of people and of animals and how you know, with relationships that can become entrenched, whether it's informed by class relations or race relations or gender relations or species relations, we can sometimes abuse each other in a variety of different ways. And I'd understood you as saying you know, some pets are eating remarkably well and living lavish lives, while some humans are. You know, some pets are eating remarkably well and living lavish lives, while some humans are, you know, living on the streets and homeless. And we need to recognize that these are not one and the same. But then you said love thy neighbor as you love thy pets, kind of immediately following that and I was like, wait, hang on a second.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You were just speaking about systemic differences and injustices and what about pet keeping as being a different kind of systemic use? And that's why I brought it up as you were saying that, because you were saying it takes you to strange places, because in some ways pets are well, not in some ways. In most countries. In most places pets are property and I'm sure if I wanted Linus, if I wasn't content with him anymore, I could put him down Like it's a systemic issue. So that's where my mind went. But I get your point that to apply that empathy and the feelings we feel to those close to us, to those who are further away, to use the relationships in our orbit to think about those we can't see and directly interact with.
Bill Wasik:Yeah, I think that's the spirit in which we meant it. Yeah.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm sorry. Sometimes my eye is a bit too critical and then I end up in odd places.
Bill Wasik:No, no, it's your dog.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Like you say. I mean, I'm grappling with it myself. I have a dog, I'm definitely I love having pets and I think pets are for many people. You know, the time you write about, animals were everywhere In cities in America.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Our exposure to animals was a lot more pronounced, and I did my dissertation on cows partly because I interacted with no cows in my life. Like I thought this was a fascinating thing that I, as a person who's eaten cows in my life, had never really interacted with a cow. And that's why I chose to do my dissertation on an animal that's invisible in my life, because that's really a modern phenomenon to not have these interactions with these kinds of animals, and for many of us, the animals in our homes are a connection of sorts to thinking more deeply about these matters. So thank you so much for your thoughts and your wonderful book. It's clear that you went through a lot of work and effort and I know stitching together a narrative is really tough, so this was wonderfully done. We've been speaking for an hour already, so I'm going to say do you guys have a quote ready and let's hear it.
Bill Wasik:Yeah, I like your idea, for do you know where it is, do you?
Monica Murphy:guys have a quote ready and let's hear it. Yeah, I like your idea for do you know where it is.
Bill Wasik:I put it posted there, okay, you know we dedicated our book to the nation's veterinarians, and I think why we did that? Well, not just because Monica's a veterinarian, but also because I think we tend to think about veterinarians as the people who who confront this range of issues try to improve the lot of animals without necessarily being able to pull levers to change in like broad, you know, in cultural and economic ways, sort of how animals are used. And I think that was a perspective that ultimately, we came to really value as we were doing the book. You know, it's easy to look back on these changes and sort of see them as things that were engineered by activists and by economic forces and so on, but of course, in the moment I think this is true today we kind of take the world that we're given and we use the levers that we have to improve it in the ways that are available to us and I think that in the lives of America's animals that, like veterinarians, really, you know, really play that role.
Bill Wasik:So Monica has a quote about veterinarians.
Monica Murphy:And it's from Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher. He's a famous abolitionist in this country and he was speaking to I think it was a ceremony at the vet school. I can't remember if it was a graduation. It was a graduation. Yeah, it was a ceremony at the vet school. I can't remember if it was a graduation. It was a graduation. So he's speaking to graduating students from veterinary school. This is an age of humanity. Men are sensitive to suffering as they never were before. Cruel laws are passing away and even cruelty and slaughtering animals is discountenanced. Do not let any man look down on you because he ministers to mankind while you minister to suffering brutes. Let your names be remembered for your fidelity, your humanity and your science.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Oh lovely. Yeah, I think it's easy to point fingers when you're not dealing with the day-to-day issues. And yeah, so I mean, I didn't even ask you at the beginning how did you become interested in becoming a vet yourself? How, how was, what was that journey for you?
Monica Murphy:Well, like basically all of my colleagues, I loved animals from childhood very deeply and I wanted to work with them. I just, you know, it seemed like it was going to be amazing to spend my day with animals, all day helping them, and I had an interest and aptitude for science, and so it did seem like a pretty natural fit, although, like very many of my colleagues, I, in the practice of veterinary medicine, have had a lot of heartbreak and frustration. And you know, sometimes what I want to do for animals is in conflict with sort of what their owners want or or what you know is is financially possible. So it's it's, it's hard work and I, I really am so sad for how many good veterinarians have been lost to suicide and depression and quitting. So I, yeah, anyway, I was happy that we found a place in this story to talk about them a little bit.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean, they are so important. I was at a veterinary ethics conference and I think it's important to remember that vets don't agree either. Sometimes we have this idea of a monolithic veterinarian who has the single idea of how the practice and the profession should move forward. But there's a lot of interesting debates about what your positions should be and how you should be mobilized and, yeah, I've learned all this new lingo about, like a veterinarian's trilemma, that you're having to navigate these different interests the interest of the animal, the interest of the owner, the interest of the profession.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But I was quite startled to hear how many vets do commit suicide, that it is depression and suicide amongst vets is a massive, massive problem. There was an activist at the conference who was trying desperately to just make sure that this was a point on the agenda because it is serious. And I think that as activists and people interested in animals, we talk about slaughterhouse workers and that we can't disavow their experiences and we need to appreciate, I guess, the systems and structures that put them in that position in the first place and be sensitive to the fact that it's not as though they are inherently violent, awful people, but same thing with vets that we have to appreciate that they are in a system and a profession that's maybe not entirely of their choosing either, which is challenging.
Monica Murphy:Yeah, I think I prefer not to divide up vets between companion animal and other vets. I know that every single one of my classmates I went to veterinary school, no matter what kind of veterinary practice they do now. They were all there because they loved animals. A positive difference for them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, Linus is now getting water therapy. He recently had a surgery and now I have a vet here who specializes in water therapy, which I didn't know that that was a thing that existed, but I'm very, very thankful that she exists and that someone was here to help Linus when he was in pain. So thank you for the work you do and thank you for the work you both do with writing. Last question how did you two come to figure out that you could write together without killing each other?
Bill Wasik:We did the first book sort of on a lark. We were surprised that nobody had ever done a popular book about a sort of book for a general audience about the history of rabies, and there was so much fun stuff to write about and that one we kind of divided up more along the lines of our kind of professional expertise. Monica handled the science and that stuff more and I handled more of the cultural things. But one of the great things about this book was that, having done it once, I think we felt more confident to branch out a bit more and you did more of the vet stuff in this book but I did some of the medical research stuff and you did the PT Barnum stuff more and we kind of, and then we edit each other's chapters and often add little bits to them to try to make it kind of feel like a coherent whole.
Monica Murphy:So you know we enjoy working together on our writing. It's really wonderful to have a shared mission, so it's been very good and I think we'll keep doing it Fantastic.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I know that you've got another book that's recently come out as well, on viral, viral matters, but not really. Oh, no, sorry.
Bill Wasik:That was. I wrote a book many years ago, back in 2006, about internet culture. Oh, this is an older book, okay, yeah, much older book, yeah, so no, this is only the second book that we have done together.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I see, I see, and, and you build.
Bill Wasik:You're trained as a, as a, as a writer and as a journalist. Trained is a strong word, but I I I've been a magazine editor for for my career and and now work at the New York times and and have written some.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Written some as part of my role as an editor, but mostly have been an editor throughout that time period, and was your interest in animals sparked by Monica's interest in veterinary?
Bill Wasik:practice I never would have.
Bill Wasik:I mean, I've always loved animals but I never imagined that I would write about animals until we got into this.
Bill Wasik:But the more I've gotten into it the more I've found it just a fascinating subject and there's just so many, so many different dimensions of it and it's a subject that you realize that people, people have strong feelings about that. They also have, like, never really interrogated their, their thinking about it, and I certainly would put myself in that category. Um, and I think it's difficult to, because I think, fundamentally, people's sense about, like, how to feel about animals and not just their suffering but about our obligations to them, are just very, very unsettled. Um, I don't even think. I think even even activists sometimes struggle, I think, to have a fully coherent kind of set of attitudes and practices around that issue, because so many things that we do in our lives implicate the treatment of animals and it can be very difficult, I think, to think it's a great subject, not just because it's fun to tell animal stories, but also because I think that, as purely as kind of a moral issue, there's so many complexities.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's an awesome subject and I'm really happy that you guys are writing this material and it's been a delight to talk with you today. Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple for sponsoring this podcast. This episode was edited by myself, the logo was done by Jeremy John and the bed music by Gordon Clark. This is the Animal Turn with me, claudia Hockenfelder.
Monica Murphy:For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom.
Bill Wasik:That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
