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
S7E2 - Healthy Publics with Melanie Rock and Gwendolyn Blue
Gwendolyn Blue and Melanie Rock join Claudia on the show to discuss ‘healthy publics.’ They explore how the idea of ‘public health’ has persistently been conceived of as human and unpack some of the opportunities and challenges with conceiving of multispecies health. From the historical roots of the ‘One Health’ to the modern challenges of public participation and representation, Melanie and Gwendolyn offer thought-provoking perspectives on stretching health frameworks beyond humans.
Date Recorded: 2 July 2024.
Melanie Rock is a professor at the University of Calgary is in the Department of Community Health Sciences. Since joining the University of Calgary’s medical school in 2003, Melanie has drawn on her training in anthropology, health promotion, and social work in a series of projects centered on multi-species research. These projects have spanned community services, family dynamics, and social policy. The funders have included the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. To date, Melanie has led or co-authored more than 100 scholarly publications.
Gwendolyn Blue is a critical interpretive social scientist who conducts research on environmental governance, public science, and participatory practice. Her focus is primarily on symbolic and epistemic politics (e.g. how issues are represented, whose expertise counts, which values matter), and how these politics influence participatory engagement across issues such as climate change, genomics, and zoonotic disease. She is particularly interested in identifying the assumptions, values, and contexts that ‘open up’ and ‘close down’ inclusive engagement.
Featured:
- Animal Publics: Accounting for Heterogeneity in Political Life by Gwendolyn Blue and Melanie Rock
- When Species Meet by Donna Harraway
- Biosecurity with Steve Hinchliffe on The Animal Turn.
- The Public and its Problems by John Dewey
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb
Phoenix Zones Initiative
An organization on a mission to change the policies and practices that drive the exploitation of vul
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.
This is another iRaw podcast. It's surprising to me, and maybe for many scholars in the social sciences and humanities, that on a day-to-day basis there's hardly any effort really to define public health or even what is a population. It's part of the practical reality and a lot has gone into explaining that population health is not the same as individual health. That's a big, big, big story for very important reasons, for good reasons. What we're moving into discussing today multi-species publics is different automatically because we're no longer in the world of a monoculture. It's not about purely humans.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome back to season seven of the Animal Turn podcast. This season we're focused on animals and multi-species health, and in today's episode we're talking about healthy publics. Two guests joined me on the show today Melanie Rock and Gwendolyn Blue, who have written with one another on numerous occasions. The concept of public have evolved and changed over time, and what potentials and pitfalls this means for some of our relationships with animals or the more-than-human world. Let me tell you a little bit about them. Melanie Rock is a professor at the University of Calgary in the Department of Community Health Sciences. Since joining the University of Calgary's Medical School in 2003, melanie has drawn on her training in anthropology, health promotion and social work in a series of projects centered on multi-species research. These projects have spanned community services, family dynamics and social policies. The funders have included the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. To date, melanie has led or co-authored more than 100 scholarly publications. One of the scholars with whom Melanie has often published and written with is Gwendolyn Blue, who is a critical interpretive social scientist who conducts research on environmental governance, public science and participatory practice. She tends to focus primarily on symbolic and epistemic politics. That is, how issues are represented, whose expertise counts and which values matter. All of these questions come up over the course of our conversation today. Gwendolyn enjoys talking about how these politics influence participatory engagements across issues such as climate change, genomics and zoonotic disease. She is particularly interested in identifying the assumption, values and contexts that open up and close down inclusive engagements. We have a fantastic conversation and, like the previous one, when we spoke about multi-species health, this idea of healthy publics, I think, really lays the groundwork and the foundation for the season that follows. How do we start to think about the different relationships humans have with a variety of species? This season is sponsored by Animals and Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics Apple, a research group in Canada, as well as the Remaking One Health Indies project, a research project that is based in Edinburgh and looking at dog-human relationships in India. Today's episode also has a third sponsor, and the Phoenix Zones Initiative seeks to challenge outdated policies and practices that drive the exploitation of vulnerable individuals and communities. They look at both humans and animals in considering how these various complicated situations collide and coalesce. So thank you so much to the sponsors for supporting the show and thank you, dear listeners, to listening to the show today. Be sure to go and check out our website, the blog, the merch store and, if you've got two minutes of time, please, please, please, leave a review or rate the podcast wherever you listen. Okay, let's get to the show.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Hi, gwendolyn and Melanie, welcome to the Animal Tone Podcast, thank you. Thank you so much. I'm really delighted to have you both on the show. I've heard a lot about your work from other scholars and I think the concept that we're focusing on today is really important. So, as you know, this season we're focused on multi-species health, and you both have written in different ways about animals and about health, but importantly for our conversation today, this idea of healthy publics. So I'm hoping that we'll dive into that a fair bit over the course of the next hour or so.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But before we get into that, you two represent scholars who have worked together for a long, long, long time. You're one of these, like duos, that have produced a lot of stuff together and have found a way to make it work, which is really fascinating. So could you tell us a little bit about your journey, how you two started working with one another and also how you became interested in animals? Was this always? Was this what brought you together or did you come to that separately? Give us a little bit of your story.
Melanie Rock:Well, I can go first. I'm originally from Alberta, the province of Alberta, where the city of Calgary is located, and it's conventional, where we are now to give a land acknowledgement for traditional peoples. So I'm not going to do the full rendition, but I just do want to signal that I'm from settler heritage. So I was at the University of Calgary already when Gwen or Gwendolyn was being interviewed for a position in a different department and I attended the public presentation. She can say more about this. It was in the multi-species realm and I was really impressed and really excited about the possibility that she would become a colleague, to the extent that, even though I wasn't on the committee or the selection that I did take the initiative to write a letter to to the hiring committee to express my enthusiasm.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow, that's amazing. I hope to one day have an interview where that goes, where someone from outside is like, damn, she's so amazing. I need to just tell everyone who's in charge that must've felt really good, and so you did. I'm guessing you got the job and you two ended up working together to felt really good, and so you did.
Gwendolyn Blue:I'm guessing you got the job and you two ended up working together.
Gwendolyn Blue:That's right, and I want to shout out to Melanie as well, as is when you're starting out in, especially with a job hire, it's such a nerve wracking experience and to have support, and particularly support from female mentors, has been absolutely fundamental for my entire career and and I think that it's especially when you're working in an area that at the time was not very prevalent. So people would often ask about my dissertation topic what on earth are you going to do with that? Like what does this even mean to study animals? To talk about animals in the realm of politics? That's much more common now, but I think when Melanie and I were both working on our respective dissertation topics and then as we became young assistant professors, this was still not very common in the realms that we were. So I was trained initially in cultural studies and my first thoughts as I went through all of the training and cultural studies was that there was a lot of omissions around questions of the animal. So we talked a lot about inequalities.
Gwendolyn Blue:That was very much prevalent in our training, but it seemed that the animal questions or as Jacques Derrida said was always pushed off to the side or animals were considered the backdrop, animals were considered something that really didn't matter in the study of culture and I found that to be profoundly both disturbing but also generative and was really excited to have found the work of people like Donna Haraway to open up that space to think about culture differently.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:What got you interested in animals in the first place? Were you looking at animals in your undergrad? Where did animals start to kind of, you said there. You know animals seem to be neglected and of course you know when you're looking at things like inequality at a particular moment. I think a lot of people were maybe speaking about how race and gender were often compared, about this idea of the human. It's kind of interesting when you realize how much humanity has been used as a kind of marker, but rarely were animals or animality brought up with animals, if that makes sense. I think kind of comparing people of color or woman to animals was regular, but animals didn't really make it into the analysis and then I didn't. I didn't think that way myself until until I think my PhD or later into my master's. How was the journey for you when you started to realize that animals were actually subjects or beings that were worthy of consideration in these debates?
Gwendolyn Blue:maybe I'll take that first and then hand it over to Melanie. I'll say also, I'm from Alberta and I am the third generation of growing up in a rural community in Alberta and I also spent a lot of time working in parks and I had a when I was doing my master's. I didn't know what to do my topic on. So I actually had an encounter with a grizzly bear and that changed all of my ideas about grizzly bears, because the bear didn't do what I expected it to do and I didn't do what I expected it to do, and so there's a. I can maybe give some examples of this later on, but it really got me thinking about what do we, what do we mean when we think about these?
Gwendolyn Blue:these animals that we share these spaces with and then, in many ways, know very little about.
Gwendolyn Blue:So I wrote my master's thesis on discourses of wilderness, looking at how we, how grizzly bears, are represented in popular culture, and then I took that into my PhD dissertation and again, it was about a surprise and it was a bit of a funny surprise, but it was a bumper sticker that I started to see when I would come home to Alberta and it was a sticker that said I heart Alberta the shape of the province beef. Now, bumper stickers are very common in the United States, where I was studying, but less so in Canada, and I just saw so many of these bumper stickers and it made me think well, what is going on here that people are putting this bumper sticker I heart Alberta beef on their cars at a time when we have an invariably fatal disease mad cow disease that is in the public news that's causing a lot of problems with our global food supply.
Gwendolyn Blue:And so it was that surprise that led me to think about what are the relationships with cows and particularly beef cattle? I know, claudia, you study dairy cattle, but I was really interested in this very personal, but also political, relationship with beef cattle and in the face of an infectious disease like mad cow disease.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Fascinating. What a place to be in when asking these questions. Isn't one of the biggest I don't know if this is a true, you know you read these kind of random facts and you're not too sure if they're true but isn't one of the biggest transport routes of cows in the world between Alberta and the United States? Isn't there a highway there that's just the transportation of cows being taken? I'm going to have to check this up. I don't expect you to know the answer to this. I need to fact check this. But what a place to be asking these questions. And I have to ask what was the encounter with the grizzly bear? Otherwise I'm going to forget. What was the encounter? What happened?
Gwendolyn Blue:Oh, okay. So I was working, I was living and working in a park called Kananaskis and I would ride my bike every day to work. And I was on my way to work on this tiny little trail that I would then access the highway, and up comes this bear. It was probably a juvenile bear, maybe one or two years old.
Gwendolyn Blue:And it was a grizzly bear and we had this moment where we locked eyes. And the funny thing is, at the time I was working to educate people about what to do about bears. So if you see a bear, don't run away. You know, be very calm, back up slowly, but what I did after having this, this moment of locking eyes with this small bear, was do exactly what the opposite of what I told people to do.
Gwendolyn Blue:I turned her out of my bike and I booted it out of there as fast as I possibly could. And then I did something equally stupid, which was to turn around again and look to see what the bear was doing. And the bear had just sat there with his head kind of cocked, looking at me like in this very curious manner and I didn't know and I was trying to figure out. I didn't feel scared. The bear was just really kind of curious, maybe a little bit playful, maybe just a little bit annoyed that something had gotten in its way, just like I was, but certainly not threatening. The funny thing is the day after I rode down that same trail and I ran into a moose, a young moose, I wasn't as scared. I rang my bell and tried to get out of the way. That's when I felt fear. The moose just had this look in his eye that I got out of its way as fast as I possibly could. I mean, they were huge.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I don't think people know I've never seen a moose in real life, but moose are ginormous animals. I think we think of them. I mean, there are many really really big deer out there, but their legs alone are sometimes taller than most cars. Right, they're massive animals, absolutely.
Gwendolyn Blue:Yes, and so that was my first real sense of danger in the wilderness was with a moose, not the bear which was interesting and it sounds like you had a really incredible presence of mind to just think about what this encounter meant.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's not like you're saying this encounter was what the encounter is of everyone encountering a bear, but that the fact that this wasn't the stereotypical idea of a bear will see you and maul you is challenging and it's deserving of attention that bears could look at us as something other than something to eat or a threat.
Gwendolyn Blue:I was reminded I hadn't read Jack Derrida at the time, but later on I was reminded of Jack Derrida's reflections when he's looking into the eyes of his cat and wondering what his cat thinks of him. And also I think that these questions of what does it mean to try to understand that encounter those contact zones between ourselves, but also ourselves with carnivores what an incredible story.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:How about you, melanie? How did you become interested in questions about animals and focusing on animals in your scholarship?
Melanie Rock:well, gwen and I have many parallel lives perhaps, and so one of them is I also come from rural Alberta and on both sides of my family are farming families, including livestock. And, claudia, I'm aware that you prefer cows over cattle and I'll just say that, like for me, growing up, that was one of the fundamental elements that had to be accepted and to be reckoned with was with that as a, as a family, then the livelihood was largely depending on animals. You know, and I do want to highlight that it's not to say that an animal or two is in a commodity space doesn't mean that there isn't an effective relationship. The two are not mutually exclusive and this can sometimes be a challenge, for me at least, in interacting with some facets of advocacy and scholarship in animal studies and animal advocacy. So I don't want to derail our conversations today, but I think it's just important to highlight that there can be some plurality and mutual understanding but also sometimes mutual misunderstanding. So I lived on a farm where the animals that were in a commodity space, at least some of the time, included cows, sheep those were the prime actors and then dogs to some extent as well, and so that was part of my early growing up was recognizing that this was actually not only an identity but also a livelihood.
Melanie Rock:I grew up in the 1970s. It's a time when in this part of the world, rural Alberta, that we went from much more of a subsistence and almost a national economy to be part of an international commodity market. Much and all is in the colonial period, and I don't want to suggest that the colonial period is finished, but under as part of the british empire. Then part of what canada could do as a country was try to try to keep out certain diseases like and that was that was scrapey as an example would be would be one which was, which was important later for, for bse, for bovine spongiform encephalopathy Well, I haven't said that one for the full on for a little while. So that was part of my everyday. There were horses around. My cousins and aunts and uncles and so forth on both sides of my family Also had animals in some cases, not all.
Melanie Rock:Some lived in urban areas, similar to what Gwen discussed. In my own case, my PhD is in anthropology and I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology as well, and so there was a lot of mention of animals, but there wasn't very much discussion of animals. You know Levi-Strauss famously said that animals are good to think with, and you know Donna Haraway is amongst those who have said that animals are good to live with. And Donna Haraway is amongst those who have said that animals are good to live with. But then also to highlight, we don't seem to live equally well with all animals and in fact, as human beings we don't live equally well either. So just to put the final pin on that is to say that when we are object, and for very good reasons, to the commodification of animals, the trade in animals, the subjugation of animals, then it's also important I fight from my point of view, in terms of my own experience but also training is to highlight that as human beings, as our own bodies, that we are also commodified too. And that was one of the key insights from Marx and Engels was to highlight that our labor, our time, the time in our body is divided up into chunks in a way, and that our bodies are supposed to be rented. You go and you work on a factory, you're rented. You're not full on a farmer all the time, or a cottage industry, your body's rented, but it's no less commodified for that.
Melanie Rock:And I think we're edging into the discussion of publics in the sense of what excites us, what bothers us, what solidifies us, what destroys us, is to say that that's within our intellectual and academic field, but also our social justice, as being critical here, that this could be a site of a lot of discomfort. And one advantage of the kind of training we have is to look very carefully and analytically at, as you were saying earlier, claudia, the notion of what is the human, the sort of universalizing move to the human, as though that is meaningful, apart from a whole set of suppositions and practices that make that leap possible. Of course very important, because the key element of a history of racism is to deny humanity to people. For sure, but humanity is also denied to people if they cannot speak for themselves in the usual ways, for example. You know.
Melanie Rock:So I guess that, to put it in a more coherent package, this was part of my everyday growing up.
Melanie Rock:In a more coherent package, this was part of my everyday growing up and I come, but increasingly.
Melanie Rock:That's an unusual position in North America to have had a rural background and grown up in that way. So as I became older and I traveled in different social circles, I was still carrying this legacy and increasingly that became irritating to me that it wasn't front and center, and certainly in the science studies realm that Gwen and I both have traversed and learned from and contributed to, then again, animals were kind of relegated to things only, especially at that time, whereas the relationships are much more complicated. So the diabetes example and around metabolism that I studied for my PhD dogs participated unwillingly, one could say, as experimental animals in the commercialization of insulin, but quite quickly dogs became patients who received insulin and at that time the insulin would have come from from cows and from pigs. So anyways that that those kinds of relationships I felt were important to understand, but they weren't. It wasn't possible really to do that as part of my PhD, I didn't feel, or at least I waited, I guess you could say, for after graduation to explore some of those ideas more fully.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, these are really complex ideas that you're playing with here, and people like you have laid the foundation for folks like me, who have just done my PhD, to build on and think through them. But I really appreciate the complexity with which you're viewing both humans and animals and, in the same way, of appreciating that these concepts of human and animal are powerful. They do something all the time, while at the same time saying that they're not totalizing, you know. And same thing is about victim and perpetrator. Like I do think that when farmers say I love my animals while at the same time sending them off to slaughter even though this seems highly contradictory and something that I would possibly argue with someone about, it's not that it's not possible.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think if there's anything I believe that humans have is the capacity to be contradictory and confounding even to ourselves, to do things differently to what we say or think we believe in, and I think we. I have a dog at home who I absolutely love, but if you really take a serious and critical eye to the pet industry, you start to ask some serious questions about what it means to put a leash around an animal, control his movement. We've spoken about this, I think a fair bit on the podcast, you know. So I think it's very easy to point fingers, not so easy to kind of think through the complexities of how we came to be in these structures, and that goes for both the animals and the humans. But I think there is power in saying that out loud, right To say that this is an unequal system that's really materially and socially very important for the animals involved.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So you've both had a background in kind of thinking about different diseases and ailments. Was this always part? And so it must be a really exciting time now as One Health kind of enters the discourse. You know I think there's a lot of trouble with One Health, but you've both got a long history of thinking about animals and disease and health. Why do you think health is an important kind of locus to think about our relationships with animals?
Melanie Rock:I can take that one on first and just to do a little bit of digging. You know is that in anthropology, medical anthropology, often at the beginning of a class at an undergraduate level, we would go through some key terms such as health, disease, injury, illness, sickness. Those would be some examples, and so the the one point to make was that health, in terms of the history of that word in english, comes from the notion of being hail or whole, that's the. That's the meaning of it. In French, santé has a somewhat different approach. It has historically emphasized more the notion of functioning or what we might think of as normalcy and pathology, and so the word in English of sane or sanity comes from that root in Latin. You know what happens when you put health on one side and sane or sanity side by side. I don't want to suggest it in French, santé as a word, which French is a second language for me, but that santé means sane only. But it does highlight that even in English, different words that refer to health have different roots and somewhat different meanings. So we always need to ask the question, as you were saying, claudia what do these words mean, or what are they being made to mean as we go along With respect to One Health.
Melanie Rock:Yes, that word and term has been in use now for at least 20 years in veterinary medicine use now for at least 20 years in veterinary medicine and I would have to say it's probably done a lot of good, but it also has been part of doing a lot of damage. In terms of the way thinking of the connections between human and animal health in anthropology, then the more serious work that has looked at how people have related to animals and especially what we might think of as livestock. Then there were a lot of medical or healing treatments that were practiced both with human bodies and with animal bodies. That idea of a common enough physiology that you could use some of the same materials and approaches on both is to be found pretty much anywhere where farming or livestock husbandry was practiced. And I'll just finish. One more point is to say also simultaneously what we might think of as witchcraft or magic, which also has roots with contemporary biomedicine. Also, there has been a lot of interest and concern about other animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So there are many kind of interconnections. When you open up the word health, animals invariably come up, whether it's animals being tested on, whether it's animals being treated, whether it's animals being included in the kind of mythology of what health is. Animals have a way of just emerging or being present when humans start to ask questions about human health.
Melanie Rock:Yeah, so that veterinary medicine in lots of ways has driven the contemporary usage of One Health. That's been highlighted in previous episodes on the podcast as well, and in policy circles. But the notion of human and animal health being linked together, including in Western medicine, is much older than that. So you could look at Claude Bernard in the context of French science or William Osler in terms of biomedicine. He was based mainly in Montreal and McGill and there was a lot of interest at that time in what people sometimes called one medicine or comparative medicine, comparative physiology.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Enough said more comparative medicine, comparative physiology. Enough said Fascinating. Gwendolyn, do you want to add something here to how we kind of think through the connection between animals and health?
Gwendolyn Blue:So my work, unlike Melanie's, isn't directly situated within the domain of health. I've been much more an accidental tourist, if you will, into what we might call health. But what I find fascinating about the idea of health, and we might call the framing of health, and particularly something like public health, which I think is a really unique aspect of thinking about health, is what it means when we open up these questions about who's included and who's excluded, what kinds of knowledge counts as health and what kinds of knowledge is left to the side. So those questions around framing and representation are what we might say public engagement with issues that involve science and technology, which is a really wordy phrase, but an important one, is where I situate most of my inquiries. So I think that it's in asking how is health defined, for whose purposes and with what effects is a very, very important question.
Gwendolyn Blue:And again, it's much more common nowadays, within the rubric of One Health or planetary health, to think about humans and animals as having conjoined activities when it comes to health.
Gwendolyn Blue:So my health is important, for my dog's health, for instance, but the health of I'll just go back to the example of beef cattle the health of beef cattle is also really important for the health of humans in various ways, whether you're consuming that beef or whether you're part of a beef producing nation.
Gwendolyn Blue:So I think that thinking of health, not only limiting it to the human which I think can be a really easy thing to do, to privilege the human when we think about health, to open that up to the question of the animal, is really important. And then I also firmly believe that place and specific cases or, even more simply, stories, matter. So in tracing, how is it that when we look at events that unfolded, do we think about health in different ways, and what are we doing when we define health in particular instances? So I can give some practical examples of why that matters and why I would say that health matters for humans and animals, and it was really an eye-opening moment for me to realize that it's not only my own personal health but that that is always a multi-species affair, and I credit a lot of Melanie's work for that insight. And this idea of the public also matters.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean you said several really interesting things there, because I'd like to know kind of the difference between health and public health. Again, I think a lot of folks use interchangeably, so what does that difference mean? And, of course, when you spoke about examples there, I think about your paper and how you discussed the floods in Calgary, so maybe we could spend a spot of time just unpacking those two elements. What is the kind of? What is public health really when we say public health, and also how were your experiences in Calgary and the Calgary floods? You know, how did these questions emerge during that time for you?
Melanie Rock:I can take the first part. I wouldn't claim to have more or better knowledge than Gwen does with respect even to health. I think the kinds of questions that Gwen has shared with you and with the audience are the key ones really, and that's to ask those questions what is happening here or there? That's really crucial With respect to public health, and I've been employed in public health now for more than 20 years, so a long time. In lots of ways my PhD was in public health and my master's, which is in social work. In lots of ways, social work and public health are work side by side, certainly in terms of community services and social policy.
Melanie Rock:The key thing to say is that public health almost always means people, human health, public health almost always means people, human health, populations, and usually there's not a lot of thought that has to go into what constitutes these populations. They're containers and they exist statistically, if not in a real or material sense. So examples would be the Canadian population, the population of people who receive dialysis, the population of people who are exposed to West Nile virus, and so on and so on. So there are, implicitly or explicitly, various kinds of boundaries or containers that are usually territorial in nature, either because they have jurisdiction national jurisdiction, federal jurisdiction and so on and or, you know, because they are centered around.
Melanie Rock:An institution like the Mayo Clinic has a population of patients, wherever those patients have come from. The cardiac unit at the Foothills Hospital has a population. That population happens to extend into northern Canada because people would come to a facility like the Foothills Hospital if they live in Yellowknife, you know if the situation is serious. So it's surprising to me, and maybe for many scholars in the social sciences and humanities, that on a day-to-day basis there's hardly any effort really to define public health or even what is a population. It's part of the practical reality and a lot has gone into explaining that population health is not the same as individual health. That's a big, big, big story for very important reasons, for good reasons. What we're moving into discussing today multi-species publics is different automatically because we're no longer in the world of a monoculture. It's not about purely humans at all.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But does that mean with the idea? So if public health is attached to specific conceptions of a population, whether it's the Mayo Clinic population or, let's say, population who's had heart disease so you kind of use these random-ish imagined connections to draw populations together and once you've got a population you've kind of got a public health thing container of sorts.
Melanie Rock:Yes, you do, you do and you have this sort of duty of care.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But this is not. This is exclusively a human species kind of population. No matter how you're cutting up these different populations, whether it's heart disease, whether it's whether it's Mayo Clinic patients implied here is always human.
Melanie Rock:So, in terms of public health as an institution like capital P, capital H, if you will like, the acid test, ph, the acid test is about is there humanity there? No humanity, there no public health. I mean historically. I don't want to say that that's the way everybody thinks about it today, for example, but if you were to look at all of the different programs in public health, say Masters of Public Health, epidemiology and et cetera, in terms of the way those disciplines and fields are instructed, the way they're taught, the way they're practiced, then it's about people.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And what you're suggesting is human. Animals need to be part of this conversation.
Melanie Rock:Well, they are exactly. And so there's a move already that might seem really subtle, between population health and public health, and that's already been, I think it's fair to say, a struggle, like within the context of human health sciences. Fair to say, a struggle like within the context of of human health sciences. That's a struggle to not focus only on individuals or families or so on, to look at bigger blocks, you know, but to then say, oh, and it's, the public is not purely human, because there are technologies the way you've described it, somewhat random or arbitrary. They're held together by a data bank or a hospital or a border, you know all kinds of. I guess they're not random in the sense that they have reasons for being there. It's not like a lottery, but there's not any reason that they should be there for the purposes that you then the whole thing together, you know, like chewing gum and binder twine, you know, on the farm, so to speak, it's not, you don't necessarily see it, but it's there, and sometimes it's rigidly held together and sometimes not so much.
Melanie Rock:When we start to take seriously that we're not only concerned about human health but also about the health of other animals and the environments that we share, then it's no wonder that that is quite challenging and even upsetting in some quarters, or why it can be frustrating to see after 20-odd years that One Health kind of can become really a pretext or excuse for killing off a whole bunch of animals or starving people. I mean, all kinds of things are happening under the auspices or umbrella of One Health that are upsetting, certainly for me and I'm sure for both of you and for the listeners. But it is a big move, like it's not a minor matter, to say that public health is more caring about more than human lives. That's a big move already.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And is it a big move? Because it forces us to look at these kind of technologies and structures that you were talking about in a more dynamic way. So when you start to add multiple species, you start to say well, these technologies are not obviously equitable in a pretty fundamental way. Is that? What makes it so drastic? Is that it compels us to look at technologies and structures that we've just taken for granted.
Melanie Rock:Well, I feel at this point I don't have any further need to pontificate, as though I have more answers or better answers than Gwen does, so let me pass the baton. But I think the way you've asked it, Claudia, those are key questions. They are key questions and maybe none of us really have the number one or the all-encompassing answers. That's challenging too.
Gwendolyn Blue:I'm going to build on the insights that Melanie has given us and, again, my training is really to look at issues of representation and what I find very generative about the idea of public health. And I want to say that it's not one idea, it's very multiple, it's constantly evolving and the term itself is, as society changes, the term it opens up as well. So we might think about public health as rooted in the nation, for instance, but I think increasingly people talk about something like global public health, this understanding that we can't just root our understanding of health in the individual, but nor can we just only take it from the population into this idea of the nation. But we have to think about these interconnections among nations because we have the flow of transportation, we have the flow of communication and we have the flow of pathogens, toxins, all of those things that are imbricated within this thing that we might call our health. So it's a generative term. It's a term that's constantly evolving, but I want to focus on this idea of public because I think that is really important. So it's health, as Melanie has discussed, a need to consider that health is more than human, but I think that there's something in the public as well. That's very important to consider, and so this transformation from biomedical health focused very much on the individual to public health is a trend. It moves us into populations, but it also encompasses a different kind of values and a different kind of an ethic, and there's two of those that I want to focus on. So, when we're thinking about the public as a population, we have to balance the autonomy again a very, very important value in a biomedical system right that you have to have your own personal autonomy.
Gwendolyn Blue:We can't have researchers, we can't have doctors just doing things to us based on their own will. We have to actually consent to the kinds of treatments that we have. But what does that mean on a population level, when you can't necessarily get the consent of a population in the same way that you would as an individual? And so examples would include things like the release of genetically modified mosquitoes, for instance, to address things like malaria or dengue fever. Those are open field trials, they're open area trials, and it's a different kind of consent that needs to take place, and so to get that consent requires more than just a conversation between a physician and a patient.
Gwendolyn Blue:It actually requires the community, and so in many ways we have this idea not only of population but also of community coming into our understanding of health, because we have these values that are deeply embedded in our understanding of what it means to have a healthy population. Or a healthy person involves things like consent, and we know that from the Nuremberg trials. We can't just inflict expert ideas of health onto people. And so community opens up then this idea of engagement. So there is an underpinning notion of a population, of community, and I want to say an important but perhaps not always fully realized idea of engagement, that there has to be this level of engagement with a population or with a collective of people. And then I think the work that we're trying to push a little bit more is to say it's not just engaging with human populations but also engaging with more than human populations, with animals, which opens up big questions of consent that are not easily resolved and require us to think differently about what we mean.
Gwendolyn Blue:Push beyond this idea of public health to really open up this generative potential, for how might we live differently, in a way that really is much more conducive to well-being, to flourishing? We can do so within the banner of public health, but maybe we can be experimental and play with it a little bit more here at the work of Steve Hinchcliffe, who has also been part of the conversations in previous podcasts, to reframe public health as healthy publics so we can think about. Maybe we need to push beyond this idea of population to think about these dynamic collectives of people, of ideas, of environments, of animals and other critters. I would add technologies as well, although that's complicated. I don't think that it's intractable. I think that we can do that, but we need to open up our framings so that we don't get trapped within these very human-centered but I would also argue health has been somewhat colonized by business-as-usual practices. Biomedical approaches tend to override our understanding of public health. Technological approaches versus non-technological approaches and, increasingly, behavioral approaches as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's really really fascinating. And again it seems like you're bringing it back to geography and space to actually think about the relationships that take place in a specific space and how, and I mean I guess the community and the public kind of they have slightly different connotations about who gets to make the decision right, who gets to who gets to, as you said, kind of consent. Sometimes I think we think about at least in my novice understanding. I think of public health as somehow being folks in a boardroom deciding what's good for me, whereas community health being us in the community hall deciding what's good for me whereas community health being us in the community hall deciding what's good for us, which is possibly a kind of a difference in thinking about who gets to make the decisions.
Melanie Rock:To that point, just to underline your impression that I'm in the Department of Community Health Sciences and the counterpart department at the University of Alberta, three hours away, is the Department of Public Health Sciences, and we might think, well, that's because we're sort of more community-minded in Calgary than in Edmonton. But honestly, a lot of it had to do with the fact that what we now think of as a medical officer of health you know so so people who would be physicians but who also have five years often of post-MD training and apprenticeship that it used to be called community medicine, now it's called public health and preventive medicine. You're both making, and that one of the challenges is that. Can we be simultaneously thinking about large groups, of large groups period, usually of people in this context, and also be community minded? Can we? How? What would that look like?
Melanie Rock:how would we organize ourselves not to lose out on a sense of community at the extent at the expense of some notion of a higher purpose or greater good. So I think that's what I heard you say. You know that I think it's important to highlight. We don't want to lose going to a notion of a public. We certainly don't want to lose out on a notion of or a feeling of community. But I'll leave it there. I just wanted to elaborate.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, I think that's really so. I mean I speak for myself here when I say I think policy is important and I think most people would like we talk about technologies. Policy is a really important technology that enables and disables particular behaviors right, it allows for and disallows particular behaviors, and I think we have to recognize the power of policy. But we also have to think about whose voices were, like you said, consented or consulted in the making of that policy. And sometimes it is a matter of voices or people were consulted but don't feel listened to necessarily or consulted, and I think that's also really important. And this again kind of brings up this idea of voice. And, gwendolyn, you were speaking about representation and obviously voice is a very important concept in thinking about democratic systems and thinking about how we make decisions.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But it's been used very much as a way to exclude animals from the conversation as well. Animals can't talk about what they want and I think there's an argument to be made here and in your guy's paper you spoke quite clearly about how this focus on discourse and language can be really exclusive. It's used constantly as a way to talk about animals and not with animals. So how do you think switching from public health to healthy publics. Does this? How does it enable, I suppose, space to think through slash hear what animals need in order to flourish or in order to be healthy?
Gwendolyn Blue:So, to answer that question, I want to pull up this idea of publics because I think that this is where and it's interesting even that switch from public health notice, that's a singular public to healthy publics we start to think more about diversity, much more about inclusion. Just in the addition of a small s and a switching of the word order, language is really powerful and can give us again these imaginative openings. So we could use the concept of the public, whether it's public health or healthy publics, as a I want to say an entry point, maybe a space in which there's an opening to walk through the door of entities that have been excluded from a very technocratic, elitist discourse or practice. Like you said, who makes decisions about public health? It's people who have been anointed to speak about public health, and I want to say that the public and public health means that that is inherently a democratic initiative and then therefore, should include a multiplicity of voices, both represented but also recognized as having legitimacy in that democratic space. Now, that might get people's backs up. That statement itself might make people very uncomfortable, but I think it's important that, as we think about health, that democracy plays a significant role. That's again a core value of public health. Social justice and if we think about justice it's also including democratic engagement is part and parcel of public health and its core values, and again, I just don't think that that potential has been realized. So, if I can, maybe we can look a little bit of this, this very powerful term, the public, publics, unpack that a little bit.
Gwendolyn Blue:So, melody and I, our work has been, I think, making an intervention that's banal, but surprisingly contentious, surprisingly contentious. So all we did I think this is a pretty simple thing is ask who is involved in the public and what does even the term mean? And can the idea of animal public be a reasonable concept? Now, the term public comes from thein publicus, of pertaining to the people, and the old french public, open to general observation by the people, and it's from that historical lineage that we get this idea that public applies to both a collective of people but also something very visible. So there's that double meaning that I think would inform most people's understanding of the public, and the term is very central to democracy. That's why we want to open it up.
Gwendolyn Blue:So the public matters, spaces of democratic engagement, the public sphere, also the ways that decisions are rendered. We render decisions, we are elected officials or are bureaucratic, scientific people who are unelected but still play an important role in governance, make decisions in the public interest. We have public opinion. We have public opinion, we have public engagement. All those things, I think most people would agree, are very important.
Gwendolyn Blue:So our intervention, again in the banality of it, was simply the first part, to argue that all publics are inherently animal publics. This is banal because humans are animals and therefore if humans are animals, then all publics, although defined as humans, are animal publics. But it's contentious because humans, at least in a Euro-Western political tradition from which our understanding of publics comes from humans, are considered exceptional in the realm of politics. We are political animals as humans, ostensibly marked as different from the rest of the animal kingdom by our supposedly unique abilities for reason and symbolic communication. And we know and again a lot of the work that you've done on this podcast has complicated that right we know that there isn't the state of exceptionalism that humans have, although we do have there isn't the state of exceptionalism that humans have, although we do have unique capabilities within the realm of symbolic communication, which we're not exceptional vis-a-vis other animals. There's difference involved.
Gwendolyn Blue:So can we open up theoretically this idea of the public, or is it something that perhaps we should just throw away? I mean, one argument could be let's just get rid of the idea of the public. It's so tethered to this notion of human exceptionalism that let's just get rid of it and stop using it. But I think that there's actually room. Room for us, even if we draw back to some of the Euro-Western traditions, to be able to prise this open so that we can allow animals to come in the door of politics. So if we go back to the ancient Greek idea of the agora as the meeting place for mostly property-owning male citizens to make democratic decisions in the city-state, that is where our ideas of the public were first laid down. And we can think about this in terms of, I would say, the thinking and talking heads version of the public, where it's this collective of humans coming together to interpret information, and this is either face-to-face or increasingly mediated in the modern notion of the public. So this is different from a mass or a crowd, because the public then again has this idea that there are certain capacities going on People are arguing, they're persuading, they're negotiating, they're reaching some kind of consensus, they're making decisions.
Gwendolyn Blue:It was the modern public that emerged in the 17th or 18th century in Europe through the salons, coffee houses and table societies, that we get this other idea of the public.
Gwendolyn Blue:This was an idea popularized by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and he argued that we get this new kind of public emerging then because political ideas were discussed among these emerging social classes that were markedly different from the ruling aristocratic class and there was a visibility to these publics.
Gwendolyn Blue:They were coming together in public houses. This is the important aspect of this that people were coming together and they're discussing political ideas. But there's also another notion of publicness in the 17th and 18th century that people would come together, they would share ideas through pamphlets, that there was a printing press that had already been established so that people could share ideas that could transcend the local engagements in these particular places. So we had ideas that were being spread and later through newsprint, through radio, television and, even more recently, social media, that it's representations, not only the ability to talk face-to-face, but also representations that make the public visible. So the act of representation constructs that public. So we've got publics as talking heads, we've got publics as being mediated through representation. And then in the 19th and 20th century we get another different inflection of the public.
Gwendolyn Blue:This one relevant to our ideas of public health, I think, where we see the professionalization of science. And this is important for the public, because science, to be able to have a realm of legitimacy, required the presence of a public to witness, legitimate and support and, importantly, finance its accounts of nature. So science then, as a professional institution, required the public but also used it as a marker of its own distinction. So here's where we start to see at this time, 19th and 20th centuries separations between science and the public. In the singular we see techniques of enumeration, using science to be able to construct publics, like public opinion polls that use statistical techniques to measure and categorize the public. So the public then becomes more like a population as a result of its separation from science but also the tools of science used to enumerate and categorize the public. So by the mid-20th century it becomes common then for science to be viewed as a profession that spoke to and not as a public.
Gwendolyn Blue:And it's really interesting that I talk to. I often study how scientists think about things in different realms and typically what I hear scientists say is the public. They want to talk to the public as if it's this thing that's homogenous outside of themselves, but rarely do a mini scientist? Not all, but many scientists don't see themselves even as part of a public. So the philosopher Bruno Latour then saw this separation as contributing to this modern sensibility that somehow science speaks on behalf of nature to the public. Right, it generates facts about nature that it gives to the public, whereas public speak on behalf of politics and values and generate matters of concern. That's what we want to complicate.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That was really fascinating because you kind of gave, I think, a little bit of a genealogy of public there, which was kind of cool to. I mean, it also shows the mobility of these concepts and these words and I think even when we were talking about health earlier, you can see the idea itself changes, but so too how the word is used changes and when, as you've mentioned here how it's represented kind of both in public discourse but also in, let's say, specialized or specific uses of the concepts, and sometimes those are different, right, like you can have even within different disciplines using the same concepts, but it's used differently. So seeing those subtle changes in how public slash publics has been understood over time was really useful. But something that really stood out for me was you said you know representations that make the public visible and at the beginning of this explanation you spoke about how increasingly you know decision-making and the public is mediated, and you mentioned this in your article as well during the Calgary floods, how media became a way to make the public visible and to challenge the idea of the public slash publics being human.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Only because people were outraged that animals weren't kind of geared towards or thought about with the housing situation. There was big floods in Calgary in 2013. There wasn't enough housing post those floods and people who had pets, such as cats and dogs, couldn't find suitable places to live. I'm sorry, I'm just giving a synopsis. And in essence, people went to the media as a mechanism to make the public visible and evidently, for them, the public included animals. Is that a? Is that a fair kind of? Because I think that's really tantalizing, because that to me, implies that many of us already recognize the public as being multi-species. We we already argue for and advocate on behalf of multi-species, health requirements and publics, but we maybe don't include it in that way in our kind of scientific thinking and our policy decision making, but that in our communities we kind of already know that.
Melanie Rock:Yes, if I could pick up the threads here, that that our everyday experience in families and communities is multi-species, yes, and that most of the time, when it comes to what we might think of as public policy, that that is more rarefied air and we have the impression that that's when, as you were saying earlier, that people sit around a boardroom, you know, and they make decisions about us and for us, with, often, things like public opinion polls or other considerations to guide the decision making. So that's that, I feel, is like it's worth highlighting. There's this sort of everyday embodied face-to-face we're, where not all the faces are human and a community where we live and our everyday experience outside of our immediate households is also multi-species. But somehow, and for some of the reasons, certainly, and all of the reasons that Gwen has highlighted and more, all of the reasons that Gwen has highlighted and more, when it comes to public policy, for the most part that is seen to be about people, and about people only in the first instance. There's like an octave shift.
Melanie Rock:And to come back to those floods, because it was in terms of the ethical tradition of cowsistry, which has its proponents and its opponents, but it is a very useful perspective, I think, for many of us in the social sciences and humanities, because it's case-based, so it invites us to look carefully and deeply into particular events and compare them over time and with one another.
Melanie Rock:So one of the contrasts that was unsettling about what the political response to the flooding that occurred in this part of the world Calgary, alberta, southern Alberta, as we call it today for the most part was that there was this realization that there are so many human-animal bonds, multi-species families and, by extension, communities that could not be supported or sustained because people's housing had been flooded, contaminated and so on. Now the other foot falling in the forest is that that is a daily reality for lots and lots of people and animals, that they cannot get housing in this part of the world. We live in a place where the rental market is very exclusionary with respect to human-animal bonds and animal welfare. Animal rights or animal advocacy organizations have responded variously over time to that reality, including in some cases in some situations, in some places, as you're saying, claudia, like that place-based element, by discouraging or even prohibiting people who are tenants who rent their homes from bringing animals into their lives yeah, I mean, I lived.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I lived in Canada and we weren't allowed to. We weren't. It was built into our rental agreements in Kingston and and then it was. It was a surprisingly. It was an interesting thing because we wanted to get a dog from a shelter but at the same time we were told by our landlord we're not allowed to. But then folks were telling us but that's illegal, your landlord's not allowed to tell you what to do and it was quite a complicated thing to navigate. And again, yeah, I think this brings into the tension of kind of policy and the reality of what people's lives are actually doing. And, of course, I was in a very privileged position. I think there's a lot of work coming forward now about homeless. You know, homeless folks who rely on their bonds with other animals to sustain themselves and they can't get not only housing but access to emergency housing. Okay, so it doesn't seem to be as catered for in policy as what is needed in practice yeah.
Melanie Rock:So we could say it's not fair or it's not equitable even across humans, with if we assume that people are equally attached to companion animals, that it's not fair, it's not equal for all humans, never mind for those who are on the other side of the species line. So you know it was an article treatment, the article to which you refer, and, as usual when Gwen and I have been working together, we often feel like we have sideline projects that become like forests. You know that's happened a few times. So so so squishing in like a complicated situation into one article but that was that's part of it is that there was a mobilization and there were various kinds of solutions that were being imagined. People did come together with their animals on behalf of their animals to highlight Gwen's point around representation how does this happen and who takes responsibility for whom? And sometimes it was people acting on animals for whom they had an affinity, but there wasn't any formal bond or legal responsibility, say. But unfortunately also that went away.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean we saw similar things happening with COVID, the responsiveness. For me, covid really highlighted how political will can make action happen. You know the speed with which you know we saw airlines grounded, we saw borders closed in a way we haven't seen in a long time. And that drastic actions I mean whether you agree with the actions that were taken or not is not my point here that governments can make really drastic decisions really quickly when there's a political will. That was even counter to an economic desire, which really makes COVID, I think, a fascinating case study.
Melanie Rock:Well, all I wanted to say because I think it's relevant to what our discussion is being around multi-species health and multi-species publics is to underscore that in Canada and in some other places, including Hong Kong, there was a COVID pandemic in 2003. It was SARS and, to my mind, as someone working within the public health sphere, as a social scientist aligned with, to varying extents, public health, I'm very disappointed in the lack of preparation for some of the decisions that were made and consultation, the way that we've discussed. But also to highlight and underscore what you've said, claudia, that because COVID coronaviruses are infectious, there's legal permission to do a lot and do a lot really quickly, in a way that, for example, there isn't for some other major killers that are not so-called communicable diseases, major killers that are not so-called communicable diseases. So I hope I'm underlining what you're saying as being grounded in fact and in policy decisions, rather than departing from it. Enough said.
Gwendolyn Blue:I wanted to add to this that the things that we've been experiencing the floods in Calgary, I would say, the effects that we're seeing of climate change Alberta has also been really hit by forest fires, as other parts of the world have, and we have the localized effects of forest fires in Western Canada, but we also see those effects coming into places like eastern United States, where the smoke makes it almost so difficult to live that the atmospheric air quality goes down so much, so that we see that we're interconnected with not only what we might think narrowly is health, but we can also see that health is connected to environmental changes and particularly climate change, and that those are never only human instances, or human affairs, if you will, that animals have been part and parcel of that conversation but fall by the wayside, I think, in our expert-based communities, and so I think that our intervention with Publix is really to talk.
Gwendolyn Blue:Who is our audience? We want to talk to the people who are at the decision-making table, to get them to reflect on the concepts that they use and the exclusionary ways in which these concepts can unfold. We see, with SARS the first SARS that Melanie discussed, that came out in 2003, and COVID-19 was the second SARS. Right, it was a SARS virus. We see this with mad cow disease. We see this with so-called bird flu.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, the H5N1 virus, right, and it's been going on for years and years. Everyone's like, oh, but it's hitting humans now. It's been killing millions of birds, hundreds of thousands of birds, for years, right?
Gwendolyn Blue:And if we're always thinking in this exceptionalist sense that we are somehow above or separate from animals. But I would say analogously, this sense that we've come with professional experts to think that professional expertise removes people from the public, I think is very, very dangerous. And if we just take a step back and look at what's happening in the news media, for instance, in the unfolding of public conversations, to have a more generative view of the public, I think that we can get a better sense of what's going on. As you really clearly noted, we in many ways, in a common sense understanding, know that animals and humans share health and that the health of other species informs our own health, and yet that slips by the wayside when we get into our expert-based community. So it is a bit of a poke at how experts frame issues and perhaps asking for more self-reflection on the part of scientific experts, but also policymakers, about the terms that they're bantying around and what that means for issues of justice.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's such an important point and I think also to just to resist the tokenism of these concepts as well, because they can kind of get grappled with, and I mean, you've seen this, I think, with concepts using feminism and critical race studies. They enter the policy space but then they get watered down to such an extent that actually the people who are advocating for these concepts, it ends up being used counter to the goals that people were originally hoping for and, I think, to bring One Health. This is why One Health is having so many debates is because One Health is actually a really radical idea. It's radical and it's transformative, but it can just like sustainability, it can get usurped into that kind of hegemonic narrative where it ends up serving to hurt the very beings, populations, communities that it was designed to stand up for in the first place. And I think I hear you that. Yeah, I don't know. For me, the more I learn, the more I feel like I know absolutely nothing at all, and I think to have a bit more humility happening in policymaking spaces and in expert spaces, and I think the pushes for interdisciplinarity are part of that. But I know we've already been speaking for over an hour now and we haven't even gotten to the quote yet, but before we do that, I just wanted to take a bit of a stab at just summarizing some of the points that you've raised here with regards to healthy publics, and let's see how I do so.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Healthy publics is kind of, as you mentioned earlier, an opening of an imaginative space to kind of reimagine what we mean when we say public health, and it's a questioning of what we mean both by the concepts of public and of health, and it's a stretching of them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's a stretching of them in terms of species, going beyond multi-species. It's a stretching of them in terms of space and also in terms of species going beyond multi-species. It's a stretching of them in terms of space and also in terms of power, whose voices, bodies, matter when we think about health. So yeah, multi-species or healthy publics is a kind of challenge, but it's also, I guess, a recognition of the fact that how public health is operationalized is not necessarily reflective of how many people would understand their own views of their environments and their publics. I think I'm missing a bit of stuff we touched on in the beginning. There was also representation, and how significant representation and mediated responses. I know that we can't get to a simple definition here, but I just wanted to make sure that I flag the most important points that have come up.
Melanie Rock:Melanie, what I wanted to say was good job, you know. And also not to feel as though you have to use all the same words, but to connect that every time we use that prefix in English re, re, represent, represent, recognize, recognize or rethink then we're on the right track, so to speak, if we're on the correct path, because it's about unpacking our assumptions and trying to stay close to the ground, while also realizing, realizing that increasingly, we do live in a globalized system. So, so as, as you know very well, and I've written about yourself, so I, I, I personally don't feel like you missed out anything. It's more to say that the kinds of questions that you're asking and the reflections are very pertinent. The only thing I just would want to underscore right now, for the sake of our community, of the three of us today, here and now, so to speak, but also an enlarged community of scholars and activists whose concerns are grounded or generated with and through other species, is this and that is that we want to get away from a deficit model of participation or representation, so that there's a triaging or judgment call that is made about who is worthy to be considered and who isn't. This is difficult because, I'll be honest, I do swat mosquitoes and I don't necessarily feel that I have like a really profound responsibility for mosquitoes in this way. I realize mosquitoes are part of an ecosystem but when one bites me I want to get rid of it. So that may seem obvious. But there are people for whom any life form, including insect life form, is sacred, and so even there we can't necessarily decide in advance whose lives or what kinds of beings are important. But those are the key questions.
Melanie Rock:And the deficit model of participation doesn't only apply to other species. It also applies to other people, including people with disabilities, people whose way of speaking reflects growing up in places where access to, if you will, symbolic capital being able to speak in a certain way was denied. So, in opening up the conversations and the spaces, the places, as Gwen has highlighted, an Agora that is not a town square where everybody can come, not a town square where everybody can come, but it's a mediated reality that hopefully that is actually the essence of re-democratizing, rethinking what that might mean. What is a demos? What is the population? What are our matters of concern? But it's that deficit question that is so important in Gwen's intellectual lineage and contributions about, quote-unquote, public participation or engagement what that means. That is crucial to underline, I feel, at this point, because that's a double move. It excludes other species, members of other species, but it also, by implication, includes only certain human beings and a whole lot of other people are outside the door.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Only certain human beings and a whole lot of other people are outside the door. I was just going to ask this focus on mediation, the extent to which it's fracturing the debate, because even what you're saying here is you know we might speak about. You know who has different access to different privileges, who's been hurt in different ways historically. You know, and you create different online communities, for example, that can be quite siloed where you. You know, and I don't know if you this focus on a mediated response and this is maybe coming back to the public.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I feel as though something has been lost a little bit where we no longer have public TV. You know, in South Africa I grew up watching SABC, which is the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and we went to school and on a Monday all of us would have watched the same movie and seen the same public service announcements and there was something unifying in having consumed the same contents that we could talk about. It actually like engage in a community discussion in some ways. But now, with the kind of fracturing of media consumption and everyone kind of consuming what's tailored to them, sometimes I enter spaces where I've consumed very different material or news to the person who's sitting next to me and that can make having these kinds of conversations about where our values lie exceedingly difficult and very difficult to kind of get even to the same table to talk about animals, let alone talk about whether we should include animals in our public healthcare systems. Gwen, do you have something to? I mean you focus on representation. What are your views there?
Gwendolyn Blue:I have a lot to say that I'll try to keep very succinct. I'm really glad that you brought this up because Melanie and I our first intervention was with animal publics and later bringing this into you had mentioned an idea of multi-species publics, I think that there might be a danger, with the notion of animal publics to think of like big, like us, right, like we care about certain animals and not others.
Gwendolyn Blue:So maybe we care about the cows and the bears, but we may less care about the mosquitoes, for instance. But I think multi-species, and especially how Donna Haraway understands species as thinking beyond and also challenging what we think about species so we can think about viruses, of infectious proteins, prions, being part of this public that is going to force us into some pretty expansive and imaginatory realms. But I think it's really important to think about expanding but also critiquing that idea of the public. But also and one thing that we didn't address is the role of technology, and technology plays a very central role in the formation of publics and this is something that has been part of the science and technology studies research on how a public is conceptualized and formed, that technologies, whether we think of public opinion polls, we can think of language, even as a technology that gives rise to this idea of the public Increasingly. I think that we have digital technologies that are both enabling certain types of publics but also, as you mentioned very much, disabling and forcing us into public conversations that become very polarized, that we get into an us and a them kind of mentality that is so, so dangerous. I want to just come back to one thinker that has informed both Melanie and I, and that's the work of John Dewey. And John Dewey's work is really important to me, and particularly because he recognized the importance of democratization and really upheld this idea of the public. I think we live in a time now where democracy is under an incredible amount of threat, as we know from everything from presidential debates and the ways that elections are unfolding, the rise of anti-democratic parties. It's dangerous, plus, as you mentioned, the kinds of social media conversations that we have. This is why it's all the more urgent to think seriously about how we conceptualize democracy and how we conceptualize publics.
Gwendolyn Blue:And going back in time to the work of philosophers like John Dewey, this is from the Public and Its Problems, and this is where I really credit Dewey with opening up the space of thinking about the public. So for Dewey, the public was all those affected by the indirect consequences of a transaction to the extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences cared for. To have those consequences cared for, that's I'm paraphrasing Dewey's quote. And by transaction Dewey really viewed human activity collaboratively and collectively. So not to focus on individuals but to focus on the collective and to focus on these changes that happen about so publics for Dewey.
Gwendolyn Blue:Emerged because of issues that weren't resolved. Now we could take Dewey a bit further. Emerged because of issues that weren't resolved. Now we could take Dewey a bit further. Dewey was a humanist. He didn't really have these more-than-human sensibilities, but we can push Dewey a bit further through the work of people like Karen Barad, donna Haraway and many others who have worked in the more-than-human spaces and that is happening. To think about those transactions, if you will, as complex entanglements among humans, animals and, I would say, technologies as well. Again, it's a complex endeavor, but I think that it really gets us to the heart of where democratic conversations are happening and perhaps some avenues for the future that we could be creating those futures right now, just by being attentive to what is happening in our public venues right now, just by being attentive to what is happening in our public venues. I just want to add to that that with things like biotechnologies, animals are also being turned into technologies that are addressing those problems, and that's something that I think also warrants our attention.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This is. I've got so many questions and this always happens near the end of the interviews where I'm like, oh my God, I've got like a bazillion questions because even in the, I mean, it sounds like you've you come or you have. So I actually have an action network theory type where you've got a whole bunch of different moving parts. You know technology, environment, animals, and whenever I hear this, I don't know, I find that the hair on my back stands up a little bit, because I think is it a matter of saying they are as and maybe this is speaking to that deficit model that you were talking about?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:My immediate concern is that are we saying that the ethics of dealing with technology is the same as the ethics of what animals are going through Like? I immediately become concerned that somehow, by having this diffuse focus, we are not bringing into view the very kind of serious, violent ways in which animals are not only treated but experience that treatment right, like it's an actual experience. But then perhaps this is a failure of myself, that that all you're doing here is to say unless we, unless we recognize the complexity with which these systems operate, we can't take seriously that violence and we can't respond to that violence. Have you encountered this kind of critique before? What are your thoughts on that?
Melanie Rock:Okay, I know that we want to be succinct, so all I'll say is yes and yes and yes. And for me, coming back to your questions towards the beginning of my point of entry as an academic into the world of animals, if you will, is that it was upsetting to me to read examinations of laboratory work by scientists and have everything in the category of the non-human. You know, as though, as though a mouse, so-called model, and a sensor are of the same order, like what happens, that that within social science research, that we, we and I I don't I mean this in an expansive way, but there can be this permission to equate like with, unlike what happens there. So that's all I'll say. Yes, those are examples of how I feel, like we're hopefully bringing threads together and a global community.
Gwendolyn Blue:I just wanted to say, I increasingly think it's okay to be unsettled and when we get our sensibilities at that kind of hair raising on the back of your neck, the sense that wait a minute, this is unsettling my conceptions of the world.
Gwendolyn Blue:I think that's a really important feeling, affect, if you will, to sit with, because our ideas in English are ideas that have populated not only academic discourse but our governance institutions for the most part and I'll speak from a Canadian sense, but I think that we can think of these in a broader, I guess colonial context those can be rooted to ideas that have emerged from Europe and that have, at their heart, exclusionary ways of thinking.
Gwendolyn Blue:There is an exceptionalism that is rooted in our ideas of publics, of democracy, of technology, all those English words, again, we need to be able to communicate, but they also trap us within a particular heritage. So it's okay to be unsettled. It opens up uncertainty and an unraveling that I think is of absolute importance, and an unraveling that I think is of absolute importance, and I will say that in a settler, colonial nation that we currently call Canada, attending to an opening up, that unsettling, is very important. We still have to make decisions and we will make decisions, but if we can do those decisions in a sense of being open to other possibilities, to recognizing that we will create harms, that there's trade-offs, but just reducing the amount of harms that are happening to groups that have been subject to historical violence is at least a consideration that I want to add in is can we do less harm to those who have been harmed? It's not perfect, but it's a step better than what we have done.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and to not kind of hide behind, like you said earlier. I think to resist the us and them mentality is really important and I think earlier on you had mentioned, you know, should we just do away with the idea of public? And I'm not too sure that we can ever escape our histories that have brought us to where we are. You know we can refuse to use the word public for whatever reason, but it will still. You know there are ideas and ideologies behind it and I think we have to think about the roots underneath it.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know you started this interview kind of giving me a bit of the I was going to say epidemiology, but that's not. What's the epidemiology is health. What's the background of words? Not the epistemology, not the epidemiology, the Etymology, yes, thank you, you gave kind of the breakdown of both public and health and I think it shows they change and they adapt with time, but they've got roots that go far beyond just their surface. So we can deny using the word, but it's actually how we enact the idea of public and I think this is what you guys have brought up throughout today through representation, through discussion, through recognizing, through. It's all about enacting publics in a way that's more sensitive and, as you said earlier, melanie Fair. So this has been a fascinating conversation and thank you so much for giving me so much of your time. I'm going to give you a quick minute to tell me about your quote and what inspired you to tell the quote, and then we'll start wrapping things up.
Melanie Rock:So it's been agreed that I'll be the spokesperson for the quote, and the quote is taken from a paper from 2011 by Mars and Lazon. The title is Materials and Devices of the Public an Introduction, and the journal was Economy and Society. This was a special issue on that topic and here is the quote, and it's quite long and a bit convoluted, so I'm going to encourage people who may not be following it carefully to look at the original and also the first paragraph of that paper, which gives some really, I think, important questions that we could pursue. Okay, so this, in a way, is their answer to that. Those questions at the outset of their article, their introductory essay.
Melanie Rock:The idea that language is the central vehicle of politics, that language in fact founds and sustains the difference between human politics and the lives and quarrels of those beasts or gods who exist outside the polity, is so deeply ingrained in our preconceptions of the political that it is almost impossible to imagine a public, particularly a democratic one, not constituted primarily by acts of discursive deliberation. And we provided this quote at the beginning of a paper published now 10 years ago called Animal Publics in Society and Animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think this talks to some of what you were talking about earlier that we can't just focus on language, and I think we didn't dive deeply into it. I don't know if one of you maybe want to speak about how can we go beyond language when thinking about healthy publics? Why is that even an important move when trying to think, challenge the idea of public health, to move beyond language and discourse? Gwendolyn, any ideas?
Gwendolyn Blue:I think that we can see again that idea of visibility, so that we start to understand the role that technologies, for instance, are playing, that technologies are not rooted only in language. So they're obviously tied to language, but it's not only tethered to language. And if we tether our understanding of democracy or specifically publics to this idea of language, again we introduce that idea of human exceptionalism and I think that the tendency then is to fall into this idea of the agora right of individuals talking to one another or of a community of similar types of individuals, that it's an easy slippage. So if we de-center language, it's not getting rid of language but rather de-centering language in our understanding of publics. We can start to open up understanding how else a public is formed through technologies but also through these transactions, as Dewey mentioned, I would say intra-actions, as Karen Barad put it, that our publics are sites of complex constructions that include language but exceed beyond it and extend beyond it. There's a material aspect to publics that also bears attention.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's so interesting because I feel like several scholars are tackling the same idea of language being put on a pedestal by saying animals have language and that's why they should be heard. They just don't speak in the same ways we speak, so we need to think more materially about how they use their bodies, how they move through space, whereas I think what you're saying here is not so much to focus on who is speaking or how they're speaking, but how the actual interactions or interactions, how the practicing of politics of health creates certain opportunities or discourages certain actions, that there's an interesting. It's like a different angle that you're thinking about language from there.
Gwendolyn Blue:And we might think of other terms, like articulation, as a term that's often used in cultural studies. It's a term that Donna Haraway uses as well. Articulations as connections, and so publics, I think, for me, are really spaces of important connections. Those connections may not have been made before, but they're in connections that are really important to be attentive to. In many ways address the gaps that we have the institutional gaps, the environmental, even the physiological gaps that are taking place, that are causing problems. So we can attune to an emergent public if we can push beyond these age-old ideas of publics as being tethered to language.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Fascinating Melanie. Do you have something you want to add there?
Melanie Rock:Well, Claudia, you highlighted the main thing I just wanted to add or emphasize, and that was about materiality, about bodies. So what I would, just in one sentence, want to highlight is that when we emphasize language as being the cardinal characteristic of humanity, that which makes us political, that we deny implicitly so much of our biology as human beings, not to mention the biology that we share with so many other species, including drosophilia, fruit flies, mosquitoes and so forth. So that element that the issues that matter politically cannot possibly only be matters of language or they wouldn't exist.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Oh man, it's been such a good conversation. Thank you, Thank you both of you, for bending my brain and helping me to think through this really, and this follows on so nicely from the previous season where we looked at politics and I think the connections between politics and health are age old. So thinking through what the future of health might look like and healthy relations I think is exciting. So, before we close, could you give me a sense of what you guys are working on now? And if listeners are interested in your work or finding out more about your work, where could they find or learn more?
Melanie Rock:I could go first on that. So, as I've mentioned with email conversation with you, claudia, I'm working on revising a book chapter about multi-species entanglements and I'm also trying to drive to completion in article form a paper in collaboration with colleagues in veterinary medicine about, if you will, free clinics or low cost to people and pets, provision of veterinary services in Calgary. So there's a partnership between a local nonprofit organization and the University in Calgary. So there's a partnership between a local non-profit organization and the University of Calgary.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Brilliant Gwen.
Gwendolyn Blue:A project that I'm currently working on, which I alluded to previously, was looking at the effects of genetic modification on animals and what that means for democratic engagement and for public engagement, and so one of the things that we've seen in Canada has been the approval of genetically modified animals, that they have moved from a research and development domain into commercialization, so that we see for the first time really, at least in a Canadian context, the release of genetically modified animals into our public domains.
Gwendolyn Blue:And we have fish, glowfish, we have salmon, and we also have fruit flies that are genetically modified to create proteins, pharmaceutical proteins, and so we are now looking at what the implications are of those approvals and what that means right now for public engagement and democratic engagement as well. So it's very exciting, and I think we're also coming into a place where animals, through biotechnology, are being turned into technologies themselves. It's not only genetic engineering, but it's also digital technologies as well, because I think genetic technologies and digital technologies are now converging into what we might call the bio-digital, so it's a space to open up, to think in a generative way and in a way perhaps that's different than previous conversations around these technologies yeah, I know, I think man Barra did a really interesting paper about like animals as infrastructure, which I thought was quite, because I think animals have been used as technology and infrastructure, and I mean for for a long long.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Here in vienna they're currently using sheep to mow the the the island because they don't want to use lawnmowers anymore, because it's a challenge to biodiversity and they don't want to impact insect life, so, but they're not genetically modified, so they're still being used as a technology where their life experience is not necessarily the key thing that's taken into consideration. They're being mobilized as a technology to address climate change issues, which I think is just really a fancy and interesting kind of case study. But of course, when you start to add, I think, bodily changes and the idea that you're just genetically modifying animals and really like, I think that makes people feel quite icky. I think people have always felt icky about GMOs generally, but now animals that are being I don't know it's. But then, on the other hand, I find some people really are very unquestioning about it. The fact that you'll just genetically modify mosquitoes so that they can't breed anymore, people like, yeah, that makes total sense, that's exactly what we need.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And sometimes I'm like have you not watched any horror films? Anyway, I'm clearly losing the plot. I'm sorry it's after 7 pm and at that time my brain starts to go to goo. Thank you both of you. I will put your contact details in the show notes so that if people want to learn more about your projects that are really interesting and fascinating, they can find out more, and I look forward to learning more myself. So thank you so much for being on the show. Hi Priya, welcome back to the Animal Highlight. It's good to have you back on the show. Who are we focusing on today?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Hi Claudia, thank you again for having me. So today I will be narrating an ethnographic billet from my field notes that follows a young skinny dog, hadi aka Bones, who arrived one cold October evening in the rural marketplace where I was conducting my fieldwork in India back in 2023. So Hadi's story highlights some of the social and moral entanglements that co-produce everyday life in public spaces. Taking these everyday entanglements into account may help open imaginative and institutional spaces for non-humans to be formally counted as part of publics in discussions of public health and healthy publics. The evening Hadi arrived in the market had been a more or less usual day. I was sitting with Rahul outside his shop around, where several free-living street dogs usually like to rest. Rahul had laid down flattened cardboard boxes for dogs to lie on and placed a water bucket next to the street for them to quench their thirst. I was almost ready to call it a day when suddenly I heard Prakash da exclaim from across the street. He shouted Arre, look, whose dog is that? He is so skinny, bilkul haddi, that is all bones. That he is so skinny, bilkul haddi, that is all bones.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I turned to spot a small, dark, dishevelled figure emerging from the bend in the street. The dog was young, his ribs protruded visibly and his left paw was slightly twisted out towards the side. As he approached, one of the onlookers jeered at him Oi had, hadi, where have you come from? As Hadi got closer to Rahul's shop, the dogs lying around immediately got up. They barked and went up to sniff Hadi. This is a common place meeting gesture among dogs. Once, satisfied that the new arrival posed no immediate threat, the dogs lost interest and left him alone. But when Hadi neared the threshold of Prakashda's sweet shop, I watched as Prakashda raised his hand, widened his eyes and shouted HUT, hut to scare him away. Hadi retreated and I grabbed my things and followed him. Scare him away. Huddy retreated and I grabbed my things and followed him.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I saw Huddy navigate the market spaces, entering shops. When the shopkeepers were distracted, water was thrown at him, accompanied by shouts of hurr, hurr and hut hut. Huddy dodged human feet and wheels on the street, these humans trying to avoid Huddy in turn. When the dog finally got tired, he had a rest under the shade of a parked vehicle. The marketplace has its rhythms, rules and ways of being that Huddy was clearly not accustomed to. The other dogs in the market also learn through experience and sometimes are actively socialized by people to become proper market residents. In general, the streets, alleyways and outdoor pavements that make up the market are public spaces open to dogs like Hadi. Dogs regularly encounter and negotiate these spaces with other humans and non-humans going about their business. There are unspoken social expectations, which include obligations of avoidance, accommodation and indifference. These practices enable diverse characters to assemble and momentarily intersect in the multi-species spaces, such as the market.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :While Hadi took a nap on the street side, I kept watch from a nearby pavement. Later in the day he got up and walked to a food stall and started looking up at the customers standing outside. One of the people there, whom I later found out was a local taxi driver called Sonu, looked down at Hadi and offered him the last pieces of the samosa that he was eating. Hadi ate voraciously. He must have been really hungry. When I asked Sonu why he gave Hadi his samosa, he simply replied and I quote Now that poor dog just came in front of me, so I gave him. This is the work of our dharam. That is duty. That dog was also looking at me with asha. That is hope. If in the dog's place there was a poor child or a disabled person, I would have done the same.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :It was only later, during a conversation with Rakesh Da, a local restaurant owner, that I realized how Sonu's sense of duty towards Hadi squared with the general indifference that I observed towards street dogs in the market. Rakesh Da told me that he did not observed towards street dogs in the market. Rakesh da told me that he did not care about the dogs in the market, but I also often saw him giving leftovers from his kitchen to the dogs who regularly approached him outside his restaurant. To explain how he related with those dogs, he used me as an example. He said now see, I used to see you every day walking about the market streets, but I did not go up to you to say anything or intervene. I thought let him do whatever he is doing. But now today you have come here to ask me questions for your research, so I will do my best to help you with whatever knowledge I have.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :The dogs for Rakesh da are one among many known and unknown human and non-human beings whom he indifferently accommodates in the public spaces of the market. His indifference, however, turns into active assistance and care in personal encounters when others are in need, whether that be a human researcher or a street dog Like Sonu Rakesh Da considers it his duty to respond in these personal encounters. While I was still following and observing Hadi in the market, I heard a voice from behind me Arrey, a new recruit of the market. It was Shyam, a local retailer I knew he went on. One of his legs is crooked, which is not good, and it also gets really cold in the night, which will be a challenge for such a skinny dog, but now that he is in the market he might just survive.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :I looked at Shyam cynically and I asked but who will take care of this dog here? Whose responsibility is he? Shyam smiled and then, while shrugging, raised both his hands and circled around in the air, gesturing towards the whole of the market. He then pointed towards the group of street dogs nonchalantly sleeping nearby and said look, they are also being raised by the market.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :In doing so, shyam signaled beyond personal duties towards others emerging from individual encounters, towards a collective reckoning with our shared obligations to care for others whom we share our public spaces with. Even though it is increasingly acknowledged that health entails caring for each other, mainstream interpretations of public health still consider those caring and being cared for as exclusively being humans, that is, the public in public health, is considered as human collectives. However, taking a closer look at our everyday public spaces helps us reconsider the boundaries of our collectives. As the reactions and responses to HADDI in the marketplace highlight, publics can also include non-humans arise out of everyday embodied encounters in shared spaces where humans and non-humans try to find ways to eke out, living within societal norms and expectations, and where we also find ourselves obligated to share care and make way for those in our presence, whether they be human or non-humans.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wonderful. I really enjoy your insights and your observations and I mean I almost feel like I can feel the market there and see Hadi bones, small little dog with protruding bones, trying like, appealing and pleading with people in the market and also other dogs in the markets for trying to navigate and find his way. But what I find really interesting in your observation there is it's not just about caring for and attending to these animals, there's also a certain amount of, I guess, ambivalence or ignoring. That needs to happen so you can't just be constantly concerned. It's not as though the humans are constantly concerned with these dogs. They are also somewhat ignored in the market.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Definitely. I think that's a very key point that you highlighted there, how I think I take it as another form of sharing, and neglecting others' presence in your space also could be a form of passive act of sharing At its root, if you are not intervening, like how Rameshda explained how he accommodated me in the marketplace. I was just there doing my own thing and he did not care. He thought I can do whatever I can. That was the same thing that people thought about the dogs. So the dogs, so the indifference, was not necessarily a negative thing. There. People were not necessarily driving the dogs away, but just letting them be basic form of sharing that often is not taken into account, I would say.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think it's really, really interesting because if you think about the public I mean, if every time I stepped out, sometimes people who I don't want to attend to me or give me attention, giving me attention makes the public a really awkward and weird place we almost need this kind of accepted awareness of one another, while at the same time an ability to kind of ignore each other a little bit, so that we can move through public space with some semblance of freedom little bit, so that we can move through public space with some semblance of freedom. And I think that's really an important insight, because so often in animal studies we speak about caring and attending to and of course yeah, I'm not saying the opposite of that is not to abuse them, but there is something important happening. In the word you used, there was indifference, and I think it's really an important part of the public which is really quite remarkable.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Definitely so. There were two acts of sharing, I would say. The first is the general form of indifference that I saw towards the dogs, of just letting them live their lives where people lived their own, and the other was form of active sharing, as in the case of Sonu giving his samosa to Hadi. And in these forms of active caring, people would make often these judgments of whom they should give. For example, like if our listeners also listen to the previous animal highlights, like I talked aboutlla and her being pregnant and people being taking care of bella while she was pregnant. So when a dog is like bella is pregnant, she is considered as a model being as a moral agent who is deserving of people's act of giving and assistance. So in general, people would not go out of the way of like giving food to every dog.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :But they would consider which dog is more vulnerable and needs our assistance, because people would generally consider these dogs as being able to take care of themselves, that they do not always need people's attention. People would make decisions about who is vulnerable. In this case, hadi was visibly weaker than the other dogs, so Sonu and other people also came in later on to help Hadi, and it was the same case with Bella and her being pregnant. So she was considered more in need of assistance.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's all super, super interesting because, I mean, I think there's also perhaps an awareness and alertness to vulnerability, but also maybe, once you've created a relationship which I think we spoke a bit about last time once you've created a relationship with a specific dog, you know, once Hadi has made himself known to specific people, he'll probably seek out those people again and a more sustained relationship can fall between them. Right, where people are giving not only to dogs I assume that they view as being more vulnerable but dogs who they are solidifying a relationship with right.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :No, definitely.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :So that often happens that people at first would not want to give to the dogs because people would not want to have active relationships with the dogs or any kind of animals.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Because it was often told to me that if you give to an animal, once you are brought into a relationship with that animal, relationship with that animal.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Because it was the same with the dogs some cows and ox that I saw also used to visit specific marketplaces and specific shops in marketplaces and specific houses where they had a history of receiving food and yeah. So people would at first not want to give but then, over time, there would be relationships uh that would be created and, for example, ramesh da, whom I mentioned in my narrative, he told me that, uh, that he considered himself a chacha uncle uh of uh some of the dogs in the marketplace and he used to tell me now that they won't go to everyone else. They know who cares for them. So, uh, and that's something that I also saw in my observations that when dogs used to go to, only used to go to specific uh people's, uh like specific people's uh shops and houses uh where they had formed relationships, but they would avoid other places where they had some negative interactions and they would associate that they're not really welcome.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, so you can really see the dogs are making decisions, informed decisions about where to go and what to do. And just out of interest, do you know what happened to Hadi so you did these observations? He was getting food. He was obviously very malnourished. Any idea what happened to him?
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Yep. So after a few days of these events I got to know that Hadi actually got adopted by a local tailor, who at first kept him with him in the room that he lived outside of the market and then, after a few days, he took Hadi to his village. It was only after like three months that I saw haddi again when he uh again came roaming in the marketplace, uh, but this time like he looked much healthier.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:he seemed to have taken up a life as a pet and a guard dog with the tailor wow, okay, so the tailor had taken him to his village and maybe brought him back to visit and you were still there, so cool that you were able to see the kind of circle of this story and he made like we were just saying, he made a connection and a relationship in the market that went beyond the market market.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :And so the tailor also, like, told me how he met her hoodie. So he just said that, yeah, he saw her outside of his shop and he just gave her some food and then, yeah, her D just kept coming every day to his place. And then how he put her put it was that I saw him and he saw me and he liked me and I liked him. So we just like, yeah, I just decided that I'm going to adopt him wow, that's beautiful.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Um well, I hope that they are still happy together, the two of them, and I'm happy to hear that he still has some freedom to roam the market and he's not as bony as he once was. Well, thank you so much, priya. This was a delight. I look forward to hearing your next observations and insights into dogs and multi-species health. Have a lovely, lovely day.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :Thank you so much, you too.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you so much to Melanie Rock and Gwendolyn Blue for being amazing guests and giving so generously of their time on the show today, to Jeremy John for the logo, gordon Clark for the bed music, to Priyashnu Thapleal for an incredible animal highlight and Rebecca Shen for her design work. Thank you also to our sponsors, to Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple for sponsoring the podcast, as well as to the Raw Indies Project for sponsoring this season and the Phoenix Zones Initiative for also sponsoring this episode. This episode was produced by myself and edited together with Christian Mintz. This is the Animal Turn with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.
Priyanshu Thapliyal :For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
