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
S7E6: Compassionate Conservation with Daniel Ramp
This episode dives into the principles of compassionate conservation, emphasizing the importance of recognizing individual lives and experiences in conservation efforts. Daniel Ramp outlines how traditional conservation often overlooks the welfare of specific animals, leading to harmful outcomes, and presents compelling arguments for integrating compassion into conservation policies and practices.
Date Recorded: 1 November 2024.
Daniel Ramp is a behavioural ecologist, welfare expert, and conservation biologist specializing in transdisciplinary approaches to coexistence and sustainability. He is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), where he is an Associate Professor in the Transdisciplinary School. He leads the development of research, teaching, and public outreach in the centre, where the goal is to stimulate innovation, novel research, and conservation practices that promote multispecies flourishing. Dan conducts research on compassionate conservation, wild animal welfare, environmental ethics, and wildlife ecology, while also collaborating widely with other disciplines. He has led many large research projects, working with government and industry to engage in evidenced-based policy transformation that promote multispecies coexistence and sustainability, particularly in production landscapes around the world. His passion is reimagining what nature conservation can be and who it is for.
Featured:
- Centre for Compassionate Conservation
- IUCN Red List
- Ecology. Whose conservation? By Georgina Mace.
- Preventing extinction in an age of species migration and planetary change by Erick Lundgren et al.
- Failing Forward: The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Conservation by Robert Fletcher.
- The elephant (head) in the room: A critical look at trophy hunting by Chelsea Batavia et al.
Thank you to A.P.P.L.E for sponsoring this podcast and ROH Indies
A.P.P.L.EAnimals 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
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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, X, LinkedIn, You Tube, BlueSky and Instagram Learn more about the show on our website.
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Daniel Ramp:And I think that one of the dangerous messages of conservation, if it only relies on threatened species status, if it only relies on extinction, if it others individuals from species that conservationists or other people say don't belong, and it becomes very difficult to think through how you can share because they're just completely othered and made killable. So, yes, you might on occasion pick up a moth from inside and remove it outside, but what happens if there was? If what we need is more of that, we need more of those experiences, we need more of this expansive moral positioning of ourselves in relation to individuals of others. And for me, that's what compassionate conservation primarily does. It just reframes how I might think of what conservation might be, because it really just connects me to the individuals around me as opposed to an abstraction.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Happy New Year everybody. It is 2025. Can you believe it? I was just saying to my husband the other day that 2025 sounds like I don't know a year. That was in the movies when I was a kid and some sort of you know, high-tech future where there were flying skateboards and stuff. Anyway, happy New Year. I hope that you had a restful break if you got a break and I hope that you're feeling rejuvenated with the start of this new year.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:First up, I'm sure you've noticed that we are running a tad behind schedule with the release of these episodes. I was hoping that you would have had the whole of season seven before the close of 2024, but alas, I've realized taking it slow and getting this out properly is probably better than trying to rush it to you. But, that said, you are starting the year with a really, really nice episode. Today I'm going to be speaking to Daniel Ramp about compassionate conservation, which is one of these concepts I've heard thrown around a fair bit and I haven't really been too sure what it means, how compassionate conservation is different to regular conservation, what it means, how compassionate conservation is different to regular conservation. If you're a listener to the podcast, you've definitely heard me be a bit critical of conservation in the past. Even though I recognize that conservationists do a great deal of good work, I'm sometimes a bit concerned about the mechanisms that they use or the strategies that they use, and I haven't always been clear why. And the conversation with Daniel today really helped me to think through some of these tensions, particularly as they relate to animals and animal health. So, yes, this is a season seven of the Animal Turn podcast that's focused on animals and multi-species health, and today is episode six where we're talking about compassionate conservation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:As you know, this podcast is sponsored by Animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics Apple If you haven't done so already, go to their website. They've got a really great reading group and they do a lot of interesting talks and things, and, anyway, I absolutely love Apple. They were something of my institutional home when I was doing my PhD, so if you haven't seen the work that they do, go and check it out. And, of course, the season is also sponsored by the Remaking One Health Indies Project or the Ro Indies Project, which is led by the wonderful Krithika Srinivasan, and you would have noticed that we're talking a lot about dogs in the season. That is a bit by design, because that project is focused on dogs. But in today's episode we don't really speak much about dogs until the really last kind of few minutes of the episode. Overall, we talk about compassionate conservation. Gosh, we speak. I think we start off the show talking about kangaroos and kind of the ambivalent conservation that happens with them in Australia, and then we really dive into some of the principles of what is conservation versus compassionate conservation and some of the problems with conservation, particularly as it relates to their ideas of protectionism, nativism and baselines.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Before we get into the episode, let me tell you a little bit about Daniel. He's a behavioral ecologist, welfare expert and conservation biologist specializing in transdisciplinary approaches to coexistence and sustainability. Daniel is the founder and director of the Center for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney, where he is an associate professor in the Transdisciplinary School. He leads the development of research, teaching and public outreach in the center, where the goal is to stimulate innovation, novel research and conservation practices that promote multi-species flourishing. Daniel conducts research on compassionate conservation, wild animal welfare, environmental ethics and wildlife ecology, while also collaborating widely with other disciplines. He has led many large research projects, working with government and industry to engage in evidence-based policy transformation and promotes multi-species coexistence and sustainability, particularly in production landscapes around the world. His passion is reimagining what nature conservation can be and who it is for.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I very much enjoyed this conversation. We had a long conversation, it's quite dense, but it is so interesting and so inspiring, and I feel really grateful that there are people out there, like Dan, who are thinking about the positive implications for what it means to look at a multi-species world. It can be very easy to feel bogged down and negative about just how devastating things are, but we really do need people that are sitting in the space and saying, ok, where is the work to be done? How do we create the types of futures that we hope for? And I really do think Daniel is one of those people. So I hope you enjoy listening. Hi, dan, welcome to the Animal Turn podcast.
Daniel Ramp:Hi, Claudia, nice to meet you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We've already been chatting for like 20 minutes in the green room, so I think we're going to have a lot to talk about today. And it's great that we're going to be talking about something related to conservation, because throughout the years talking on this podcast, I've been somewhat critical of conservation, but not exactly sure why I've been critical of conservation. Conservation seemed like this mantle that you don't disrupt, like what could possibly be wrong with trying to save lives, and then throughout time, I found that idea increasingly challenged. So I'm looking forward to talking to you about conservation and, in particular, compassionate conservation, today. So thank you for joining me on the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got involved in kind of conservation work and how this led you to thinking about compassionate conservation?
Daniel Ramp:Okay, so originally being trained as a botanist and a zoologist, working in Australia's landscapes trying to look at the conservation of some of our large megafauna that we have in Australia, like kangaroos and wallabies, wombats, etc. Most of the work that was done in conservation was focused on the protection of threatened species or the removal of introduced species. So this idea and so they were the sort of the primary actions that were being taken, and I was interested in kangaroos, which were an abundant common species, and the attitudes towards them from conservation was a little bit strange in the sense that they weren't really considered as a topic of interest, primarily just because they weren't threatened.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's really interesting because I think kangaroos for me, coming from outside of Australia, kangaroos are just these incredible animals. They're so different to any other kind of animal I'm aware of. Marsupials are only found in Australasia, right.
Daniel Ramp:There are some marsupials in other countries, so you have opossums etc. Oh, of course. But yes, most of the marsupial group within mammals come from Australia, so there's a kind of a particular evolution that's happened here that makes them quite distinct. In fact, the kangaroos and wallabies, the macropod group, there's about 63, 64 species that are within Australia and Papua New Guinea, et cetera.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow. And so you were interested in kangaroos during your PhD research.
Daniel Ramp:Exactly, it was during my PhD. Primarily I was a botanist. I was trying to understand well who are these critters that are eating the plants that I like, and the perception was that herbivory was not necessarily something that was good for plant diversity. And I guess the the the the wrap of that was that with with farmers and colonialism, since european colonization, there was this opening up of the landscapes, transformation towards production, um sheep production, cropping, etc and kangaroos weren't necessarily wanted in those particular landscapes.
Daniel Ramp:You have national parks, which are the reserves where we might set aside places for these animals and plants to live freely, but most of what we see is used for production. However, that sort of residue of exclusion from farming sort of made its way into conservation, in the sense that the attitudes towards kangaroos was primarily negative the impacts that they might be having, and so, once I've done my phd, I was looking and thinking about well, why are there, why is there so little protection for these particular species? A because within conservation spaces like reserves, their presence is a little bit it's it's it's kind of tolerated, but at the same time there's a bit of discomfort there. But certainly in production landscapes they were not wanted. And so, as you've got, on the one hand we have biodiversity laws at a national level that are set aside to protect these species, and yet farmers, a commercial killing industry and so forth will all help Anton killing as many as possible.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So sorry. So kangaroos are a protected species Because it's interesting coming from outside, right, Because you do hear all of these kinds of discourses of kangaroos running amok and taking over the landscape and causing massive problems. And, of course, in the age of social media, you've got all of these videos of kangaroos breaking into people's properties and looking like really staunch boxes, and some of them are, I mean, interesting and funny to watch perhaps, but underlying all of it is this kind of, like you say, this discomfort at kangaroos quote unquote invading space. So it's almost surprising to me to hear that there are these protected animals in Australia.
Daniel Ramp:That's right. We've done a fair bit of research to try and understand the sort of underlying reasons for that, and part of it is sort of that sort of colonial attitude of when Europeans came. They wanted to transform the land into something that could either be productive for the coffers back in England or else transform it into something that fitted with a sense of nature and beauty that Europeans were most predilected towards.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So like pastoral landscapes right.
Daniel Ramp:Exactly most um predilected towards. So like pastoral landscapes, right, exactly obviously, the, the, the macropods, kangaroos and wallabies etc. Were used for they were hunted. Many of the megafauna that had existed prior had had already declined, and so these were the sort of the larger species left from hunting and when Europeans came they also hunted them. But there was also this idea of removal exclusion. So they used to round up kangaroos and other wild animals in what they called batues sort of areas where they would lie in wait, corner them into a certain location and then either shoot them or club them, and the idea was just to basically eradicate and transform.
Daniel Ramp:So kangaroos are sort of caught up in that sort of historical dialogue and a transformation from one of exploitation and use to from the 19th century and the early 20th century to one of. Well, where does conservation fit into this particular scheme? How is are they of conservation concern? Well, some of them have gone extinct, but many of them, some of the largest. They're not necessarily threatened by extinction or threatened from extinction per se, because there's still a fair few of them, but certainly their numbers have been dramatically reduced.
Daniel Ramp:Their ability to live on the land is quite different. The kinds of experiences that they have are quite different from how they might have been originally. And I guess it's quite telling that there was a story about Charles Darwin in the 1830s had come to Australia and rode by horseback from Sydney over to Bathurst, which is over the Blue Mountains, and recounting that he didn't see a single kangaroo in that time and some of that's due to the habitat that he was going through. But there should have been kangaroos in those landscapes. They'd already been lost, wow so so conservation in the in the 20th century, in the late 20th century, was then struggling to think about or position them in regards to, or what? What is our response to them? They're not necessarily threatened. Conservation, conservation has traditionally taken this sort of broader view of actions for the greater good, ideas of biodiversity and prevention of extinction, but kangaroos don't sort of fit into that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, you know, it makes me think of, oddly enough, of pigeons as well, because you've got these species and I think if you would most or many species you would look at them, their numbers. If you were to think about them as any sort of human population and you were to think about the decimation of their numbers over time, it would be extremely worrying. Even though there are many of this type of species still here, their numbers have declined dramatically. So pigeons, for example, are an animal that a lot of people think of as being really ubiquitous because they're very visible, we see them, so we think, oh, there's many of them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But if you look kind of at this longer time scale, historical time scale, their numbers have diminished significantly and, as you said, with regards to kangaroos, they live very differently to how they once have. So there is both a kind of cultural shift, clearly, amongst different populations of pigeons and kangaroos, but there's also in terms of just raw numbers, which conservation seems to be kind of obsessed with, as numbers. Their numbers have declined when you look at it temporally. You mentioned that kind of the key tenets of conservation, one being the preservation of biodiversity and then the other being the kind of resistance or refusal of extinction, trying to like stop extinction. Is there something else Like are these really the driving principles of conservation or would you identify other kind of core principles of conservation?
Daniel Ramp:That's interesting. Certainly, conservation has never truly had a single core principle or a single set of principles. Okay, it's always been an evolving science, so from that point of view it's never necessarily been fixed. There's a great paper by the late georgina mace, who documented who conservation was for, and particularly around the relationship to people. So there has been this history through the decades uh, since the 1940s, 30s of the transformation of conservation's purpose, and it has ended up around in response to people nature conservation in the sense that nature was both not inclusive of people, in the sense that people weren't nature and therefore nature was wild other beings, therefore nature was wild, other, other other beings, uh, and then the protection of that nature from people.
Daniel Ramp:In the last few decades, though, there's been a recognition that that, that separation, well, that complete isolation of people from nature, just doesn't, hasn't worked, and so there's been a reconfiguring of the position of people in relation to nature Conservation, and biodiversity is one of those strong elements that has almost maintained a presence throughout that transformation. But I guess what's happened in the last few years is a recognition that biodiversity, as you say, the numbers could be the number of individuals, or the number of species, or the richness, the number of species that are in a particular place those are the things that matter alongside extinction, but there's been a recognition that that doesn't truly capture what you were talking about. We were talking about before with the kangaroos, that not only has there been a decline in their number, but there's been quite significant shifts in the way that they experience life, the cultures that they might then, um, create and socialize within themselves, and therefore their relationality to other kinds of species or even abiotic environments.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So has conservation I mean. So I take your point that conservation is something that has changed and shifted over time in terms of its orientation and its goals and its purposes. So, like you mentioned, what is it? We're trying to maintain Colonizers coming to Australia. We're trying to not only maintain something but create something, create a new landscape, while at the same time maintaining their own ideas of how nature should be. So there was almost like a, I guess, a normative idea of what it should be.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So now somehow creating this idea that there's an untouched landscape out there that needs to be sustained and there are animals that are attached to those specific landscapes, and the goal of conservation is to make sure that native species and pristine untouched if that exists landscapes are maintained. But this idea that now the nature-culture divide has been disrupted and that humans are accepted increasingly as impacting these landscapes has changed conservation goals. So I hear you and I understand you, and it's changed understandings of animals' cultures. Has animal culture and the ways in which animals behave really been taken into consideration? So, in looking at this kind of history of conservation, has it always been about maintaining life in the raw sense of the word, like keeping things alive, or has it also historically taken into consideration the shifting ways in which animals live, so their cultures, the ways in which they make their populations function?
Daniel Ramp:So look, I would say that it has historically. I mean ecology, which forms part of the basis of conservation, the study of the relationality of different beings, so their relation to others, has always been fundamental. So, whether it's wildlife ecology or plant ecology, et cetera, they've always been a fundamental to an understanding of what nature actually has. And so in many respects it's sort of disingenuous to say that they've excluded conservationists, excluded a version or a vision of what life might be. It's just been rather transactional and arithmetic, in the sense that it's the accumulate ways of accumulating or synthesizing what, what an ecosystem might be, so it's the evolution of certain species that contribute to certain functional niches within that particular ecosystem. That's a thing of beauty, and so that particular ecosystem holds not only awe and wonder and a sort of a transcendental wisdom to it but at the same time also it's part there are all these moving parts to the components within it. So I think that it's important to acknowledge that At the same time.
Daniel Ramp:I guess the sort of the mental experience of those individuals, the kind of lived experiences, the lives that they actually lead, have not been included, so documented in an abstract way. Okay, a frog living in this pond engages in certain things, it eats, certain things, requires these certain things to survive and prosper, but not from the point of view of understanding what that experience might be and how we might contribute to that, which is okay If we reduce that nature-culture divide and we say, okay, well, we're just intrinsic parts of nature anyway. What is that experience like? And how does that experience interact with the sort of the biological, the physiological, the genetic experiences that we're used to describing about those lives? And that's new and that hasn't really been explored?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So, if I understand you correctly, there's a tendency to consider populations. So if you were to observe a specific frog or a specific kangaroo, you might scale that up to thinking about many kangaroos and many frogs in a specific ecosystem, because ecologists would be interested in how a specific frog relates to a specific plant, relates to a specific pond and how they sustain and maintain one another. And, as you said, it's a thing of awe and beauty but not necessarily thinking about how the frog might be experiencing that pond or that plant and how changes over time to the availability of different ponds and plants to this frog have changed that frog's particular experience or its environment. Why would considering their experience be important? How does this help conservation?
Daniel Ramp:Well, yeah, and that is the perfect question, because if we think about and, and, in order to answer that I'll I'll first say talk about why. Why there's a need to consider something else. If conservation was perfect, perfect, um, and it was in the sense that it is the science of conservation is the kinds of things that we can track if we use technology. We use that with computers. Now we can create massive databases of all the species and perform amazing analytics of of the things that are going on. But there's still a disconnect in how we translate that information not only into policy, but then getting people to back that policy and bring it into their lives. So people always talk about connections to nature are important, et cetera. But when it's so abstract, when it's just species richness or the numbers of things, or there's no way for humans to be a part of it, then it can struggle.
Daniel Ramp:And if conservation was working, then you would like to think that, as human populations have grown and our use of resources on the planet, et cetera, have grown, and even in addressing things like climate change, why aren't we doing better? Why are we still seeing such decline? Why is it still so hard for us to stop using fossil fuels and all the other things that we know do cause harm, and yet it's so hard for us. So I think there's this. So, on one hand, it's not a criticism necessarily that the kinds of metrics are imperfect are imperfect. It's more to say, well, what else could be additional that might just help us get better traction or better understanding and also then create better policies. So who is conservation for? Otherwise, all we're doing is witnessing decline.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I mean it's interesting because, as you're talking here, it makes me think I had Gladys Kalemizu-Kususoka on the show and she's done remarkable work with gorillas. Because I mean, you can speak about decline and the spaces in which there's been failures, right, and I think you're asking a valid question why has conservation in effect failed really remarkably in many, many ways? In many, many ways? But there are incredible examples of conservation success which you hear about, and one of them being kind of gorillas in Uganda. But what's really interesting is, even when you look at examples of success, there are some conservation failures.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the gorillas are doing really well. They're doing what conservationists had hoped for. Their populations are expanding. They're now showing an uptick. They're the only gorilla population on the African continent that are growing, which is remarkable. But now they have nowhere to go, because gorillas need space, they need to establish their own kind of communities, and this has created a kind of challenge of, I guess, short-term thinking, maybe with some conservation strategies, is you want populations to grow, but then what? Sorry, I know that that's going slightly off key with what you were saying there, but there are kind of different scales I think of, and maybe I'm being too harsh with our conservation. Conservation has done a remarkable amount of work, but I do find myself increasingly kind of frustrated with some of the tenets of conservation right.
Daniel Ramp:So I think there's a couple of issues here. One is that the idea around protectionism whether it's the half-earth concept, where you basically say, okay, well, we need these reserve systems, so it's land sparing, if you like. If we're going to produce food in one area, then we need to make sure that we have these offsets, et cetera, these places where everything is spared, and that's an okay idea in the sense that it's certainly needed. If we don't do that, we're certainly going to see much greater decline than we're already witnessing.
Daniel Ramp:So those spaces that are relatively buffered, resilient from climate or habitat loss or people, then we should definitely do what we can to protect those spaces and maintain their integrity to some degree.
Daniel Ramp:At the same time and this is something that you touched on earlier we need to be careful of this. This notion of that nature ought to look in a particular way and that only some forms of nature have, or certain kinds of nature have, more value than others. This is grounded in this concept of baselines and in Australia it's a very strong concept, and you touched on the word native before. It's a strong concept because there was a. Well, there were really two moments when people came to the, to the continent, but, uh, the most recent one, in 1788, was this moment where europeans formally came, uh, even though they'd sort of been around for a little bit, but they formally came in a big way. And many of our conservation policies in Australia are about okay, well, if we are going to protect some lands and we are going to protect them from further degradation, then what state are we trying to transition them to?
Daniel Ramp:so if they've been degraded in some way, what would we do to intervene in order to take them back to something that was, I guess, more functional, more resilient, and our concept of that is pre-1788. So whatever was there previously is our baseline and that's what we ought to return it to, and so if there is a which is not, that's not to say that that's a bad idea. Yeah.
Daniel Ramp:But it can have unintended consequences which manifest incredibly broadly, such as if you have a novel ecosystem, an ecosystem that's evolving within the context of anthropogenic land use change, within the context of assisted migration of species from people, et cetera, and you've got this evolving ecologies of function and exchange and evolution. If you're going to conservation would say well, you're going to conservation would say well, that's not good Because that doesn't look like how it used to look. Then, even though it's a place for individuals that are flourishing, it doesn't have as much value as a remnant patch of vegetation or fauna that might be living in that, and that's incredibly problematic because it is incredibly limiting. And whilst in Australia you've got this moment of 1788, in Europe and in North America and in Africa, et cetera, those clear dates are not so strong. So, if you've got rewilding efforts, what are you taking things back to? How do you decide what is good and what is not?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's so fascinating because it seems like there's this move, on the one hand, if you bring different kind of policy objectives and goals into the same frame, there's this move, on the one hand, if you bring different kind of policy objectives and goals into the same frame, there's this move, on the one hand, by, you know, conservationists or you know whoever else to, as you say, hearken back to some sort of idealized ecology that once existed, that's idealized in our imaginations, to make nature this, to make nature great again okay, now I'm getting political but to make kind of nature what it once was as we hold it in our imaginations today, on the one hand.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But then, on the other hand, when it comes to thinking specifically about maybe human politics or human development you've got this development of smart cities and more technology. So we want to kind of move in the future, we want to move forward future-facing ways when it comes to human society and human spaces like cities, but on the other hand, we want to harken back. So it seems to me like we're still kind of maintaining this nature culture or human-animal divide when it comes to thinking through policy and governance of human versus animal populations.
Daniel Ramp:It's interesting. Certainly in urban environments, the idea of wildness and the sharing of space, ownership is just such a big issue. So I used to teach wildlife ecology and I would ask the students where they would go to see wild animals and they'd be like, oh, we have to go out in the bush or we have to go to the zoo. And I would often say, and what about the cockroaches in your house? Don't they count? And you know they would look at me as if I was crazy.
Daniel Ramp:But there is definitely this view of the sanitisation of modern life that is problematic. Just near me we've got this beautiful sandstone wall that is opposite the University of Sydney and that sandstone wall has been growing all these different kinds of epiphytes and plants that have been existing on there and algae are sort of all sorts of different plants and ecosystems really tiny that are occurring in that space. And just in the last week they went and water blasted all the sandstone and they took it all back to just the original sandstone, which looks pretty, has a certain aesthetic right, but at the same time it's lost its ecology. Yeah.
Daniel Ramp:And that's sad. And so the question becomes how. That's always going to be a temptation there's always going to be a temptation to ownership of these urban spaces when we don't find ways to connect people emotionally and intellectually to nature and reduce that divide.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's a really helpful example because I think it even talks to what you're talking about with regards to these idealized ecologies, because it's this movement of trying to create a blank slate. Something exists here right now, there are relationships that are happening here right now and we kind of just want to try and wash them away and restart again. That's at its bare bones, is what we're trying to do in some of these moves to say, well, there are some animals that don't fit that vision, so let's just wash them away. And it's this kind of simple eradication which you shared a fantastic paper with me by Ludgren and colleagues that spoke about assisted migration of species, which you said there which was such a helpful reframing, because so often we talk about these unwanted beings as invasive and here they kind of switched it to talking about them as migrants.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And this changes things, because even when you think about human politics, this idea of trying to reframe or go back to some sort of existed world prior to massive amounts of human mobility it seems untenable. How would we and would we want to go back to whatever that kind of separate world was? Sorry, I'm going on a tangent here, but is this what compassionate conservation is? So we've kind of been dealing with the critique of conservation to some extent. Is this what compassionate conservation is doing? Is it saying we need to look at ecologies and individuals as they currently exist and respond to that?
Daniel Ramp:Well, there's a few things in there, sorry, I have a tendency of just like slamming.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Here's 20 awesome things I was thinking and complex things and give me all of your thoughts immediately.
Daniel Ramp:Well, I'd love to start by talking about the assisted migration idea, because in policy, global policy, around introduced species, often they're called invasive aliens, right, and so there's this othering language that's used around introduced species to legitimise and make killable the animals that we see as aberrant and unwanted. Kangaroos are also part of that. They're othered in the same way, they're given pest status, even though they don't fit into that category of introduced Interesting and that's interesting. It is interesting because our end goal is to eradicate and we tend to just operationalise different arguments to get to the same point, and so I see introduced species as part of that, and you could, you know it's very controversial and there are really good reasons to take introductions of species seriously and to think about the kinds of global reshaping and shifting of species and what that means.
Daniel Ramp:But let's not pretend that that's, let's not pretend that that is aberrant, because the global movement of species has always occurred before we evolved. If you think that the nature-culture divide is important and that we're not part of nature, then what you're doing is saying that anything, any species, any individual that has some impact on, has been come for the ride with people, whether they've been domesticated or whether they've just come on our ships or we've brought them because we want to hunt them, or their seeds have just gotten away from us, et cetera that somehow that that's not something of value, that something should be returned. Again, it comes back to this idea of the baseline. So when we were doing this work on introduced species for the last sort of decade within the Centre for Compassion and Conservation, it became obvious that we needed to rethink, not to say that we should just ignore the effects that they have, but that we need to not be. We can't be so callous as to just say all introduced species are invasive aliens. Aliens don't belong. They cause ecological harm by default. There is no question.
Daniel Ramp:By using the term assisted migration, our justification for that was to try and reframe the discussion to be more inclusive. That's not to say that there is a particular view or not to shoot down others' views, but to say that when you use pejorative terms like that, it's very difficult to have a conversation where you consider the life justly. Even if you think that you need to take that life, you should take that life. Even if you feel that there need to take that life, you should take that life. Even if you feel that there is good justification for taking a life, you need to feel that the energy that you have within you needs to be right.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I've said it so many times on the show the speed with which killing becomes the first line of defense or eradication is the go-to strategy, is problematic. And it sounds to me that you're just trying to problematize some of these go-to strategies while at the same time placing a weight on them for the beings who are impacted by them. Right, like making a decision to eradicate I mean, that's a big word. Eradicate, that's like destroy, it's genocidal in its tone. Right, it's really like let's just destroy and do away with. And that's a really severe move. And it does enter kind of public discourse and parlance.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Sometimes I'll meet people and they'll have a particular hatred for a specific bird and you'll say why do you hate this bird so much? They should all die. And you're like why? And they're like oh, because. Or squirrels, you know, this squirrel is disrupting our domestic squirrel and there are reasonable arguments to be had for those frustrations. And there are disruptions and there are conflicts happening between different bird species and different squirrel species because they've been introduced to specific areas. Diseases kind of move with other animals, fish are taken into the hull of ships and completely change coastal ecosystems. These are all valid arguments, as you've rightfully said here, but the speed with which we decide to then kill animals who oftentimes didn't decide of their own accord to jump ship is pretty remarkable.
Daniel Ramp:And it becomes difficult to justify when, most of the time, the way that conservation programs that enact these kinds of killing programs determine or quantify success is basically just through the numbers that they've killed and effectively, many conservation programs are just addressing symptoms rather than getting to the actual causes of what's the underlying problem. And so if your goal, for example, is to say that, well, cats and foxes or other species need to be reduced because we want to prevent the predation on other species, fine, but are you suggesting that that's what you'll be doing in perpetuity? Because you can never eradicate, because it's just too difficult, and even if you could, how could you live with that decision to take all those particular lives? So I think it becomes problematic when there just seems to be no end to it and it becomes just a mechanism that's engaged in uncritically, just a mechanism that's engaged in uncritically, when we often we're doing science, the best science that we can do, to contribute to the debate around the management of introduced species, and you know, and we publish in the leading journals that other conservation and invasion biologists are publishing in. When we do that, the goal is not to make other scientists and other managers necessarily think that we're judging them morally for the kinds of actions that they're taking, but to say surely, as enlightened beings, we can come to have an open discourse that's transparent and open about what we see as values and what kinds of goals we're searching for.
Daniel Ramp:And this is actually why I think that the focus of individuals, which really comes at the heart of where compassionate conservation arose from, why it's transformative, why it enables a sort of a paradigmatic reframing of who conservation might be for, because it enables a shift from, or at least an acknowledgement of, individuals as living beings. If they're alive, don't necessarily need to be sentient. They could be abiotic as well if they're part of the more than human world. So the kinds of rights that they might have as individuals provide a really good platform for them saying is this conservation action justifiable? Yes, of course, the prevention of extinction of certain species is something that we should all do our best to prevent.
Daniel Ramp:But at what cost? And is it about returning the planet to some pre-anthropogenic state which, as Robert Fletcher points out, is complete fantasy? Or is it about saying okay, we live in this greatly reshuffled world. How can we put our knowledge together to come up with a way forward that just that that promotes flourishing, promotes different kinds of lived experiences, but where, where we're returning um our actions as moral agents to not just sitting by and watching but to actually be cognizant of the fact that the beings that we're dealing with are actually, they're agentive, they're autonomous, they've got sapience and sentience and all these kinds of things and feelings, et cetera that matter. So, just as we matter, they matter of things and feelings, et cetera that matter. So, just as we matter, they matter. And I think that's where the attention to individuals can really be a really powerful, and it has been for me. I mean, I didn't start my career in compassionate conservation, it wasn't around.
Daniel Ramp:But it certainly I was looking for something, something within conservation that would help me work out a way to engage in knowing how to protect flourishing lives around me, and compassionate conservation has been one vehicle to do that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I can immediately see the critiques that could be leveled against compassionate conservation and its focus against individuals. It becomes cumbersome. How do you enact this? How do you privilege Whose individual lives? Do you privilege over other individual lives?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You've got an invasive species that is disrupting a culture and a way of life in a particular ecology. Do they get to just come in and destroy what's going on and possibly also lead to the destruction not only of the makeup of that landscape but also leading to increased deaths of some other animals? Right, like, you know, like, where does the responsibility lie? And in fact there's often also, I think, what's underlying these questions of how do we act? Like, who's responsible for this destruction we're seeing? Responsible for this destruction we're seeing? And what's interesting is trying to straddle this individual and population divide.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We've been doing this in our human societies for a long time and we do it imperfectly.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We have always done it imperfectly.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But our politics and our policy and our governance has tried in many ways to, especially in like modern times, to kind of respect the rights of individuals, their autonomy, their right to make decisions for themselves, their right to move, to live, while at the same time recognizing that you've got different populations, you've got national populations, you've got different groups that need different attentiveness, different attention, whether you're speaking, let's say, about indigenous groups, or you're speaking about children, or you're speaking about your working class population.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Sorry, I'm going on another rampage here, but I just think it's interesting that we've somehow managed to find ways in policy to recognize that you've got a multitude of populations and you've got a multitude of individuals, and we've tried to create policies that respect both levels. But at the core of this is that individuals matter and that just taking a stance to kill a bunch of individuals would be war and conflict. And so I don't know what you think about any of what I just said, but I think it's really fascinating that it's viewed as this impossible divide when it comes to thinking about nature. But actually we've managed these complexities in our own human societies.
Daniel Ramp:You're right. You're right. The inclusion of individuals and their needs has been it has been traditionally problematic because it appears on the surface to sit as a polar opposite of the traditional conservation goals. How do you, how do you truly accommodate individual experience in biodiversity metrics, et cetera? And at the same time, it's worthwhile thinking through how we do this for people which we don't get. Worthwhile thinking through how we do this for people which we don't get. It's complex, and we rest on these ideas of nationhood and culture and the distinction of culture, and we cherish the diversity of those as long as they don't interfere with our own and so our moral circles and our sort of our moral spheres of who we respect and who we connect with and value connect with and value are narrow.
Daniel Ramp:I mean, I often think about citizenship as something that you would say to an introduced species, for example, in a new home. At what point do individuals of that species, or does that migrant, attain citizenship? Is it after one generation, is it after 200 generations, et cetera? Now, that might be one way of this is something that we've written about in the centre before when speaking about feral cats. So many of the introduced species in Australia have been here for a few hundred years now. That's many, many, many generations, whether it's rabbits or deer, or cats or foxes or whatever. At what point do you say? Well, they've become naturalized, and we do afford the idea of naturalization to species that we like, but we tend not to for species that we for some reason see as aberrant.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And the implications of that again came up in that kind of Ludgren paper. I was quite surprised to learn that, when it comes to recognizing and counting endangered species on the IUCN red list, that they're only really considering populations in environments that they are traditionally or historically have been found. So, like satellite populations or introduced populations or, as you've said here, assisted migrants, they're not counted. So I think you gave I think there was an example of deer from Java that are now doing really well in Australia and they're going extinct in Java. But they're doing well in Australia but their population in I hope it was Australia right? Yeah, their population in Australia is not being counted. And this has real material consequences because, of course, when it comes to trying to protect species from extinction, there's a lot of competition, a lot of species are struggling. So where do our resources go? I mean this just really drove home for me the material implications. This is not just a theoretical discussion. This really has material, real-world implications for where our resources go and who gets assistance when.
Daniel Ramp:So for me, yeah, you're right In terms of extinction. What we were trying to do was to say, okay, if truly the goal is to prevent extinction, then the exclusion of introduced species as potentially one solution, in certain circumstances, to mitigating extinction should be considered. So what we did was we came up with a range of scenarios for considering the populations of endangered or threatened species in their native ranges, their endemic ranges. How might we count their populations in their new homes? And at the moment, the IUCN Red List doesn't at all include the populations of species.
Daniel Ramp:So and in fact an example is I think there's I think seven species of deer in Australia that are roaming free today and have their own wild populations. I think five of those are in danger to some level in their own native ranges and yet conservation policy is unilaterally eradication in Australia, and that's not to say that the harms, that, if you want to put it that way, that should be ignored. We should think about how we might do that, but just to have this default policy where you're not even going to discuss that these populations could be insurance or again, it's one planet and this is where I was trying to go for this idea of citizenship, yes, we all want to belong, right, but this idea of nations and ranges is biology. Biodiversity has always flourished and grown and it's dynamic. It always changes. Biology biodiversity has always flourished and grown and it's dynamic. It always changes.
Daniel Ramp:So, to think that there's only one place that an individual or a species should be and it shouldn't be anywhere else is problematic. It doesn't necessarily sit well with the view that how best could we create conservation policies that worked at a global level when you're relying on these concepts of nativism and nationhood to adjudicate whether or not a species has rights or not?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:yeah, I think that's that's very helpful. Um, and and, as you kind of said, this idea of when, when do they become naturalized? When are they if they've been in australia for a long time, when at the national scale, when do they, when are they at what point considered belonging? But, as you've said, now at the global scale, the kind of politics of conservation changes quite dramatically because, like we said at the beginning, this kind of counting of numbers, how are these large populations that are doing well not being included in these thoughts and discussions? It seems really remarkable.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You mentioned that nativism I think I wrote down you spoke there with obviously critiques conservation quite a bit and I appreciate how nuanced you've been in saying it's doing this is born of a history and also of concerns that are valid, valid concerns that are trying to respond to a really complicated political and environmental world. But kind of, three of the problems with conservation that we've touched on and that I know you've written about is the instrumentalization which also kind of creates institutional violence against specific animals collectivism, so the tendency to think about animals at this kind of collective grouping scale instead of considering their individual status. And, as we're talking about here, nativism, so this desire to kind of have these idealized ecologies and historically specific environments in focus, and I think we've touched on these three critiques throughout our conversation in various ways. I appreciate that we've jumped around a whole bunch. I think we've touched on these three critiques throughout our conversation in various ways. I appreciate that we've jumped around a whole bunch, but we've definitely gotten to these concerns with conservation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But then, on the other hand, when thinking about compassionate conservation, I know that the principles that you mention on the website as well as in your writing are this idea of individuals matter. I think we've really driven that home here that in compassionate conservation individuals matter. They matter materially, but also conceptually. When you put individuals at the forefront, conceptually, policy responses change, actions change and that's important. And then we've kind of touched on the other three principles, but I don't think as much so the idea of do no harm. Individuals matter, promote equity and peaceful coexistence. Could you walk us through these principles just briefly, you know, before we go to your quote, because these are the kind of core of compassion and conservation.
Daniel Ramp:So you're quite right that we've touched on two of those, probably sufficiently. But so the first principle well, I guess these are guiding principles. They're not necessarily meant to be a mandate, they're not necessarily meant to be strict rules that codify any particular kind of action necessarily, that codify any particular kind of action necessarily. They arose as a kind of a way to inspire, I guess, a holistic practice that might be paradigmatic. And I guess the first one is the first do no harm. So it's not necessarily that I mean everything every being in some ways has has a relationality to everything else, right, and so we're always having an effect. And so to to say that there should be no harm necessarily, that's a pretty hard challenge.
Daniel Ramp:That I don't think anybody could necessarily live up to right, even. Um, just breathing oxygen means that that's anyway. But but the the the idea here is to create, I think here at the first is important because what it does is it says, okay, let's just relax, let's have a, let's have a look at this, let's bring things into dialogue. Um, if we're, if we're thinking about the fact that individuals matter and we're thinking about our responsiveness to, to other beings and and being aware of removing our anthropocentric lens to everything and trying to be as accommodating and as just towards other species and equitable as possible, then I think that we owe it to the situations and context to actually engage in proper dialogue. And okay, you could say, well, times are ticking and the planet's burning and we we have to act. But I think we've been doing that and most of the time, a lot of the time, conservation actions result in harm without really a good, a good, justifiable position on why that's necessary. So the first principle of first do no harm just enables that reflection. It stops you from just going ahead and shining a light on the fact that conservation is and does perpetuate harm to individuals. I think compassionate conservation is a very broad church. That's what we've written about. It's not necessarily prescriptive. There are some people who would be abolitionist in terms of the way in which, when you've got they would like to be, they would say okay, we understand that the world is full of harm, but if you're going to be a conservationist, surely the last thing on your plate would be killing? How do you marry those two things ethically? But for others, it's about the due diligence. It's about saying that we need to engage in the discourse in a proper and rightful way, and if we are left with conundrums or moral dilemmas where, in order to achieve one good, we have to, we have to engage in something that creates harm, then how do we? Uh, we need to be open about that particular decision and we need to be morally attentive to the cost that that has.
Daniel Ramp:I think what we see is problematic in many conservation practices is that lack of attentiveness, and I think that that is what gets the goat of many, many, many people. So a really good example is trophy hunting. Now you might make an argument that trophy hunting is important because it brings conservation dollars, and so there's some sort of. Everything requires a little bit of sacrifice, so maybe that's a sacrifice that was necessary. Chelsea Batavia and Michael Nelson have written so beautifully about this, the idea that well, and Ariane Wallach as well, the idea that the residue that results from that moral dilemma is something that we should take on board, contemplate and struggle with. And yet, when you see photographs of trophy hunters standing over their kill, the effect is one of satisfaction, the effect is one of joy, et cetera, and the argument there is well, is that an appropriate response to the sacrifice that that individual has taken, that people decided was an okay sacrifice to make because we couldn't do anything else. So that's an explanation of where that first do no harm comes about.
Daniel Ramp:The coexistence thing, I think, is where some of this debate comes and a lot of the work that we do in the centre really comes to bear, because it strikes me that and I spent the early parts of my career focused on protected area networks, reserves, making sure that they worked well and that the stakeholders engaged in their management were unified in the kinds of all that those places were not necessarily as protected as one might hope and, secondly, that they're few and far between.
Daniel Ramp:So do we just ignore the rest? So coexistence is really that, the rest that we share, and how do we get equity and how do we bring compassion for other beings into that space? Are we really just going to say, well, we're exceptional, we've been put on this earth and it's our right to just dominate and exploit and turn it into one big concrete car park? Or are we going to, you know, figure out a way to live that enables us to do the things that we want to do, but maybe it's commensurate with the lives and the lived experiences of others? And so that, so coexistence, and you will have seen it in um uh, some of the uh cop determinations, where there there is now this stronger focus on how do we build socio-ecological landscapes that are not only just create the flourishing of people, but they create the flourishing of of other species, and so we might want to consider this concept of multi-species societies, where there is equity and shared shared knowledge and shared experience.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And yeah, I mean we were talking about cities with regards to this right, and it makes me again with australia. I spoke to daniela clode about koalas and you realize that cities are increasingly refuge refuges for for animals. Animals are many, it depends on the animal you're looking at, but many animals have nowhere else to go, or cities have become sanctuaries in some ways for them, where there are resources that they can use, and you're seeing some remarkable design starting to happen. That's thinking about these spaces in multi-species ways, not perfect, but definitely a change from thinking about, because in many ways cities are this like prime this is a human space, but it's not, and it never has been completely human. But now, seeing that kind of attentiveness and recognition that our roads and our fences can be harmful, how do we make them less harmful? This is transformative. This is really a step towards what you're saying here in terms of coexistence, not in a romantic way, in a really like pragmatic. Things can be less violent, less harmful.
Daniel Ramp:No, absolutely. And I think that there's this, for where can compassion and conservation at least takes me? I don't know for other people, but where I've been really inspired, particularly in the last few years, last five sort of 10 years, is this idea that it's not just documenting urban ecologies or the the persistence of wildlife in production landscapes, except it's about thinking well. And it's not just thinking about, well, okay, if there's a, if there's a koala or there's a possum or whatever, where does it need to live?
Daniel Ramp:in terms of like a nest or a nest box. We do lots of nest boxes for birds and we put out feeders right. Feeding is massive in the UK and in Europe as a way of attracting birds to your backyard and there's actually been an increase in bird diversity in the UK based off the back of that kind of feeding. But it's thinking through and some people talk about this as calling it animal architecture- but, it's thinking through not just affordance of a house, because we don't just live in houses.
Daniel Ramp:We sleep in our houses, houses, we might eat in our houses, we might do other things in our houses, but then we go out, right and we, we go out and we socialize and we find spaces, parks or urban streets or whatever it is, and they're the affordances that we require in order to live fulfilled lives. Well, what happens if we imagine what kinds of other kinds of affordances other species might need to flourish in urban landscapes? So they already do that, inadvertently, not by design. They already do that inadvertently, not by design, but by their own suitability and adaptability to those particular constraints, the constraints of living in polluted, dangerous places.
Daniel Ramp:But some of them do really well, but what is it about those landscapes that enable them to do well? Not just that they are doing well, but what is it about those landscapes that enable them to do well Not?
Daniel Ramp:just that they are doing well, but what is it? Is it flowering plants? Is it certain kinds of crevices? Is it access to water? Is it whatever? What happens if we started to think about not only just putting drinking fountains for people in parks, but thinking about how we might actually provide water for other species in parks? You're speaking my language.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think this is, I mean, I think for me this is the most exciting space. Yeah, I just because the world is increasingly urbanized and I think focusing on cities is just so, so important and there are just simple, like almost simple, measures that could make and I guess focusing on cities is just so, so important and there are just simple, like almost simple, measures that could make and I guess this speaks to the other principle of compassionate conservation to promote equity in different spaces, to promote space as part of this promotion of equity. So is policy and the attentiveness you were talking to. You know different water fountains, exit points in canals, that if animals fall in, how do they get out. You know having people do this. They put stickers on their glass because they recognize that reflective glass can be really damaging. Different types of lights, for how cities are remarkable spaces that have a huge amount of potential.
Daniel Ramp:To speak to some of the conservation concerns and potentials and I think that one of the dangerous messages of conservation, if it only relies on threatened species status, if it only relies on extinction, if it others individuals from species that conservationists or other people say don't belong, then it becomes very difficult to think through how you can share, because they're just completely othered and made killable. So, yes, you might on occasion pick up a moth from inside and remove it outside, but what happens if there was? If what we need is more of that, we need more of those experiences, we need more of this expansive moral positioning of ourselves in relation to individuals of others. And for me that's what compassionate conservation primarily does. It just reframes how I might think of what conservation might be, because it really just connects me to the individuals around me as opposed to an abstraction.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I love that. I love that so much. I have two spiders in my bathroom at the moment and I'm very aware of them. I love that so much. I have two spiders in my bathroom at the moment and I'm very aware of them. And you know, I'm trying like sometimes the webs get shooed away, but I'm very aware that that's their space and probably where their whole life will begin and end, and trying to respect that, I suppose, is it's really important, it's not insignificant, but this has just been a really fantastic conversation and I really do feel as though I could speak to you for forever and ever about this, because it is exciting and there are challenges, but there are also opportunities to respond to those challenges and I think seeing these potentials is really invigorating and it's easy to get bogged down and think we're doomed, but reframing can really make things possible and and I think that that's glorious do you know?
Daniel Ramp:what the another sort of message that I think is really important is that often, within conservation, it just it does. You know, people talk about being in a poly crisis at the moment and the fact that everything's in decline, etc. So I'm so I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't. Of course we should take that seriously.
Daniel Ramp:We need to enact practices and policies that are going to address those concerns.
Daniel Ramp:Absolutely, but if you buy the kind of conservation narrative of nativism and the way that the othering of nature, then you're trained always to see a landscape that is imperfect. You're always trained to see harm as opposed to beauty. And I don't know about you, but I became a conservation biologist because I love other beings and share this wonder for them. That is just so vital. Just being connected creates vitality, right, and I think it was something that, in discussions with Ariane Wallach when she used to be part of the centre, was just around this idea of when we see landscapes that are open with a mix of weeds or feral animals, or we're trained to see them as harm. But there's also beauty there and if we don't connect to that beauty and if we disallow ourselves to connect to that, then we're really limited in the way that we might come up, be creative and innovative to find solutions to some of the complexities that we're facing. So you just prevent all those positive brain cells that are connected to solutions as opposed to just documenting decline.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and it's a shift in aesthetics and what we conceive of as being beautiful. You know there is an art to this. Vienna has done this remarkable thing and I'd love to do more research on it myself where they're using a lot of kind of there's not these like potted perfect plants, everywhere they're using kind of plants that look a lot messier. There's weeds. They've literally cornered off sections between buildings and they've put notices up saying that these are protected spaces. These are like little micro spaces, but they're recognizing and increasingly it's done for pollinators, for insects, but obviously the ripple effects of this are massive for other animals that are moving through the city that use these ecologies.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And the more you see it, the more beautiful it becomes. It's part of our psychology. You know, the more you're exposed to something, the more you're like, wow, that's really beautiful. You see the beauty in the weed and you stop calling it a weed and you maybe recognize it, for the plant it is and there is. And this is probably the same reason why, you know, when colonizers went to go back to what you were talking about in the beginning, when they went to Australia and they were trying to recreate their landscapes, it's because they had a specific idea of what is constituted as beautiful and there is so much importance in what you said there and reframing what we think of as beautiful and really taking seriously that we're constantly trying to recreate what we think of as being beautiful and we might differ in terms of what we think that is, but it's important.
Daniel Ramp:One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that the term native is often used to share a good. So if something is native, it belongs where it's a signifier for something of value, and that's not to deny that the species or the individuals that are being talked about within that framing don't have value. But as soon as you do that, you alienate those who are then non-native or introduced or migrant or whatever. I really just don't think that that's a valuable mechanism for inclusion. It creates xenophobia, speciesism. When it gets out of hand, it results in genocide and hate, and those experiences that relate to the othering of other people also happen to manifest or get built, constructed, through the ontologies of how we define and establish racism native species as good, non-native as bad.
Daniel Ramp:So those weeds in your front garden, when you go out to garden, the idea is you go out and you keep. They're the plants that I planted, they're the ones that I like, and then you pull out all the ones that you don't like. And that's not ecology, that's fictitious sort of construction of a view of nature that, yes, it connects you, it connects the gardener, etc. But it in some ways it's also destructive. It's not enabling the lives, all those individual lives, to have their own agency.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Gosh, there's so much more I want to talk to you about, but I think we're going to switch to your quote now. If you want to give that to us.
Daniel Ramp:It's actually from a paper I'm about to submit. Is that okay? Yeah, that's totally fine, as long as you're okay with sharing it, so it's unpublished at the moment Okay, sounds good. Compassionate conservation asks us to act as enlightened beings with the capacity to be virtuous, just and compassionate, so that we may reconsider our responsibilities and relationality to the more than human world neat and sharp and gets to a lot of what we've been saying, but it does raise one question for me why so?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I know I'm learning a little bit about virtue ethics. I'm not entirely conversant in this, but compassion is just one kind of virtue. So this idea that we're enlightened beings, of course, could be challenged. And a lot of people, when they hear enlightened, they'll think about rationality, like we have the capacity to think rationally, so we should capitalize on that rationality. And I guess what a lot of compassionate conservation is saying well, we also have the capacity to be compassionate, so we should capitalize is a bad word, but it gets to what I'm trying to say.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We should capitalize on our capacity to be compassionate. We should enable that ability and use it wisely. But surely there are other virtuous components that could also be used for conservation, like we could speak about respect, conservation or I don't know, I'm not conversant.
Daniel Ramp:No, no, no, absolutely. There's an interesting. For me, the choice of compassion was not to exclude other kinds of virtues. It was not necessarily particularly done with a uh, specific debate around. If we were to choose one virtue, which would that be? Certainly?
Daniel Ramp:Actually, in my time, I attended the first or part of the first Compassion and Conservation Conference at the University of Oxford in 2010.
Daniel Ramp:Actually, I wasn't there, but my colleague went and presented a paper for the two of us.
Daniel Ramp:So I didn't come up with the term compassionate conservation, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about it when founding the Centre for Compassionate Conservation in 2013, because it is, as you say rightly, just one virtue and there are other different framings, whether it's deontological or um in in making a call to the duties that we might uphold to towards other other beings.
Daniel Ramp:But compassion seemed like a for me at least, seemed like a good way of disrupting the norm, because it makes you reflect of eco-feminists positioned within the field at the time, discussing that with them about how conservation has traditionally, certainly in Western science, has been rather patriarchal, and that emotion you know that emotion-reason debate has often been a challenge and it's still a challenge for many in the conservation sphere, despite, philosophically, that debate being put to bed a long time ago. So compassion is useful not only because it speaks to a virtue that I think is useful, but it also comes. It also speaks to emotion and that can be disruptive, and I think conservation needs to be disrupted. The way that it's been constructed is, um built in anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, instrumentalism and collectivism, and I think that, not to say that those don't have any place in how we envisage ourselves as moral agents, but to say that they're not the only way of thinking and they are limiting when it comes to our consideration of our relationality to other beings.
Daniel Ramp:So compassion, I guess, for me is expansive and inclusive, and that's really its job. It's not to say that it's the perfect word or the perfect virtue. It's more of an opening and inflection point from which dialogue can happen.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Excellent and I'm looking forward to reading more about Compassionate Conservation and some of the work you do. You mentioned the Centre a couple of times over the course of the interview. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the Centre and maybe some of what you're currently working on.
Daniel Ramp:Okay, so the Centre for Compassionate Conservation is now 11 years 10 to 11 years old. We were founded off the back of a coming together of international scientists and people in animal welfare thinking about how can we, how can we really bring individuals to the fore within conservation, and most of the thinking had been from how do we bring animal welfare science and conservation science together. So the center, it was initially founded with that goal and and since that time it actually has grown and morphed and become uh, we're actually now based in. We're actually now based in the transdisciplinary school at University of Technology Sydney, which is a coming together of different disciplines. So the academics there come from all different walks of life and artists or psychologists or sociologists and scientists, designers, ethnographers so there's a whole mess of different people.
Daniel Ramp:The centre sort of really fits within that because compassionate conservation is sort of transcending those disciplines now. It's merging with humanities and animal studies. It's merging with law. You'll see around the world you'll see compassionate conservationists in universities working on legal frameworks and animal studies and geography etc. So there's this really wide, diverse expanse of people and the centre's purpose was to really generate safe space for that, to legitimise the space for those actions to happen.
Daniel Ramp:We're relatively small. We tend to have a range of staff and a lot of postgraduate students, so PhDs and Masters students that we teach and we work on projects all around the world Some of those. One of the key areas that we've been particularly involved in is the building of this, this idea of wild animal welfare. So animal welfare science was grounded in documenting, and here we mean welfare means the mental, subjective experience of an individual, and so what we've been doing is borrowing from all the knowledge from domestic animals and transporting that to validating methods that might work for wild animals, where we might only see them fleetingly as opposed to an animal that you can manipulate and handle and feel its body and see what's going on and talk.
Daniel Ramp:If it's an owned animal, then you can talk to the owner and so you're speaking.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:so, where agricultural sciences, for example, example, have done extensive tests and experiments on cows and sheep, you have a very good example of Bovide or how they might be impacted by stress or sounds, and you're transporting some of those ideas to thinking about wild buffalo, for example. Is that what you're saying? So? How might anthropogenic sounds be impacting the stress levels of wild buffalo?
Daniel Ramp:Sure, but holistically. So you can have all potential welfare indicators and they might reflect current states. There might be things that alert you to future problems. But the individual experience sort of the mental experience that an individual might have is born out of the multitude and complexity of all things taken at once. So on a given day somebody yelling at you might be the worst thing that ever happens, or it might just be water off a dog's back, and so it's very difficult to. If you just looked at that one instance, you can't blanketly say that somebody yelling at you is always going to harm you in some way. I'm not suggesting that people should yell at you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Hey, man, are you gonna get? But?
Daniel Ramp:just trying to explain the complexity. So what we've we've been doing has been using wild horses as a way to build this, this um. Take what we know of horses in captive situations and transport that to. How might we document that in wild ones and how might that tell us, inform us about things that would actually be of interest to conservationists, like population growth, like pack herd size, like longevity, like disease risk, et cetera. Welfare, the experience that they have are completely entwined with these things that ecology has taken as abstract and that's fascinating. So we've been spending a lot of time building that work, and most of that's been driven by one of our superstars in Andrea Harvey, who's a veterinarian. That's been driven by one of our superstars in Andrea Harvey, who's a veterinarian who's been reached out and working with wild animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Now, Wow, amazing. And I know, of course, that you're also involved in the Royal Indies Project and we haven't touched on that at all really throughout the course of this interview, which is fine because I mean, even now you've kind of touching on some of these differences between domestic animals and wild animals, and I think so much conservation is focused on wild animals that oftentimes what's happening with domestic animals almost seems invisible in those discourses. You know, of course, industrial agriculture and farming is a huge cause of concern both for wild and domestic animals. Often it seems invisible in debates about conservation. I mean, we can talk about the fires in Brazil at the moment as a really key example for the massive harm that is caused by that field.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But, of course, another effect of this kind of divide between domestic and wild is you've got some animals like dogs, who who um, we've many people in the west have firmly located in the domestic realm. But when you look at the row indies project, you're looking at a lot of wild. Wild dogs brings up a different connotation, like wild dogs, african wild dogs, but you've got street dogs or dogs that are um. So last word I promise you because I really need to wrap this up, this, this is like the longest interview ever. How do you think about like? Why is compassionate conservation, I guess, important when thinking about street dogs in an Indian city?
Daniel Ramp:Well, this is a really good one because you know, I hadn't thought that we would do such work on dogs. We've been working on wolves, we've actually been working on dingoes in australia, which are effectively a a wild canid and but very similar looking to a domesticated dog and they've got domesticated ancestry. But this project in ind, india, where we're thinking about how do we relate to these species that have, like assisted migrants, they've come along for the ride, they've been our companions, they've co-evolved with us In some ways they're entangled with who we are as people, tangled with who we are as people. You couldn't almost remove dogs from that kind of discussion because over the last sort of 10,000 years they've just been so integral. But in India you've got this situation where these Western views, I guess, of dogs as domestic and pets is infiltrating this idea.
Daniel Ramp:The way in which these street dogs are being conceptualised, western sort of epidemiological framing would say well, they're just vectors of disease. You know, they shouldn't exist on the streets. They're dirty, they might be unhealthy, etc. They shouldn't exist on the streets. They're dirty, they might be unhealthy, et cetera. They shouldn't be there. For many people and for many of the dogs they might be living flourishing lives. So compassionate conservation is fantastic for this, because what it does is it enables us to if we're doing it properly, we're removing that anthropocentric lens, we're removing that species framing, if you like. We're not othering them, we're saying, okay, well, what is the experience, or are the experiences, of street dogs? In what way might we create, afford them the kinds of things that they might need to flourish? Maybe they're already flourishing?
Daniel Ramp:Um, we might think the fact that they're eating waste is a negative thing, but lots of things survive on waste.
Daniel Ramp:Waste is just a term for something, is food that we just don't want anymore. In one respect, obviously, we don't necessarily want them to be in plastics and those kinds of things, but it is complicated. So what it does do is enables us to reflect on the way that their status shapes the way that we think, but also what we find when we go on the ground and this is some work that we've been doing in many different cities now, in India and in the Himalayas, et cetera is looking at how they're experiencing the context that they're living in, depending on whether or not they're living on a street, or they're a community dog, or they're an abandoned dog, or a feral dog, or truly, truly, truly, truly wild, like living with no relationship to people. How do they construct their lives? How are those lives ecological, and how might that knowledge assist us to think through their presence in what we traditionally perceive as our cities? In reality, they're dog cities as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Remarkable. It's such interesting work. Thank you so much for giving me so much of your time today and, yeah, this has really been a fantastic conversation. I've enjoyed having you on the show. So so much Best of luck with the center and your continued work with the project. Thanks very much of luck with the center and your continued work.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:The project thanks very much hi rashmi, welcome back to the show. I'm looking forward to what you've got in store for us today. Hi, claudia, thanks for having me here again. So today I want to talk about my time and observations from this place called Kaza, which is in this cold desert region of Spiti, which is an extension of the Chandhang Plateau in Tibet. So some of my observations from there.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:So as I walked down a quiet, frozen road in Kaza on a mid-November morning, I found myself in a vast empty expanse in this barren landscape of Spiti, which is a cold desert region, and it was very stark, it was chilly. But near the road I could see a group of dogs lounging in the warm sunlight and I paused to look at them and they seemed to be not bothered by my presence and I tried greeting them with a cheerful jule or, which is hello in Smithian, and only one of the dogs lifted her head. She gently looked at me and wagged her tail two times before returning back to her slumber. I was quite amused at her nonchalance and clearly the dogs were very happy to be left alone, so I just continued to pass through. I was actually on my way to visit Padmaji, who was a local woman who for many years has built a strong relationship with these dogs who live on the street near her home. She feeds these free living dogs leftover food scraps and she has names for all of the dogs that she feeds. Padma ji has lived in Kaza her entire life, witnessing the transformation of her once remote town into a hub for international and domestic tourism, and with this boom in tourism came an influx of food and food waste and the many leftovers from hotels and restaurants. That also attracted a lot of dogs around them, and many of the forest tourist walls are very eager to feed the dogs around them, and this food waste actually sustains the growing dog population.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:For some of the months and, as a result, during the tourist season, in the warmer months of the year, these free-living dogs thrive on what seems to be a reliable food source. But in the harsh winter months, when the temperatures can drop to below minus 30 degrees Celsius, the tourist numbers drop and many food establishments also close, and this is when these free-living dogs struggle to obtain the easily available food. And this situation can get so dire that there have been reports of cannibalism among the dogs and also increasing displays of aggression from previously friendly dogs. There have also been incidents of dog biting humans that began to surface as well. And although the dogs in Kaza were appreciated by some people for their instrumental role as scavengers and cleaners, many people started to resent the dogs because of these unpleasant encounters, and some even called for the dogs to be entirely removed or translocated or culled, believing that that was the only way to address the problem, which is to eliminate the dogs. But Padmaji observed that the dogs on her street never displayed any unpleasantness or aggression towards anyone, and from these dogs she learned that the dogs in Kaza were not acting out of malice. They were simply trying to survive.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:These dogs taught Padmaji that safe cohabitation between free-living dogs and humans was not just an imagined, idealistic possibility but a practical, attainable reality. The key to peaceful coexistence, she believed, is not in removing the dogs, but ensuring that they have access to food. So back in 2007, padmaji, who is the president of a self-help group for women called Mentok, brought together 12 other women members of the group and came up with a plan to ensure that the free-living dogs of Kaza had access to food during the scarce winter months. Every Sunday in winter, the women would gather to cook a week's worth of food for the dogs, including chapatis made of wheat flour or dough made of locally grown barley. The following week, at different times of the week, the food is placed at various locations around Kaza, and this practice of active cohabitation or co-living has apparently fostered a commune which is safe and flourishing for dogs and humans. This is evidenced by the reduced incidence of aggressive encounters between dogs and humans, as reported by Padmaji and some other staff of the block medical office in Kaza. I also met many people who praised and acknowledged this practice of encouraging safe cohabitation, including the administrative head in the Kaza town.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:But the story of these multi-species societies is not without its complexities. Much like in any community, there are inflection points of disagreement, conflict or resentment. While feeding the dogs addressed the immediate problem of hunger, it also led to concerns about the increasing number of free-living dogs in Kaza. Some locals worry that the availability of food, even through the challenging winter months, sustains an increasing number of free-living dogs who otherwise would have naturally died in the severe winters.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:The larger abundance of dogs brings about questions and concerns around zoonotic diseases as well. These concerns lead to a sense of alienation between humans and dogs, with some people distancing themselves from sharing spaces with dogs. Moreover, supporting the flourishing dog population throughout winters puts considerable economic and logistical constraints on these women, and they find it difficult to ensure access of food to so many dogs. So to address some of these concerns, padmaji and the active co-members of the Women's Self-Help Group collaborated with local institutions such as the Animal Husbandry Department to run vaccination and sterilisation drives Every year. They ensure that a certain number of dogs are vaccinated and neutered, and they also ensure that great care is taken for these dogs before the operation and also in the post-operative care, which takes about three to four days. So there may be lessons here that people can potentially learn to adapt and accept, to coexist with animals which are part of the multi-species communes in ways that are compassionate.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's such a beautiful story and really, I think, important, because I think sometimes we think about compassion and conservation in pretty utopian ways, ways and I think, kind of focusing on how these women have come together to try and help dogs does flag some of the challenges that come with caring for others, whether it's other species or just other community members, that it's not always straightforward. Right, there are financial burdens, there are emotional burdens, but it's really remarkable that these women saw a change happening in dogs and responded in a way that was really thinking about the dogs as part of their public, as part of their community.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:Yeah, that's quite right, and I think what they were capable of doing was that they looked at dogs as individuals, Because Padmaji because she had a habit of feeding the dogs around them, she had relations with individual dogs recognize and acknowledge these individual animals, individual dogs, and gave them you know, afforded them with respectable spaces around her, and not as something that's unwanted.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah that's such an important point and I think that's something that came up in the conversation about compassion and conservation was that oftentimes conservation has this tendency of thinking at this kind of population level, not taking into consideration the dynamics of specific contexts and of specific individuals. But something really remarkable happens when you move into this kind of scale where you're trying to actually think of them maybe more as neighbors or as community members, it calls into play a different kind of response. Right, that's not about biodiversity necessarily. It's about their well-being. And I think your case study here shows, you know, raises some interesting questions and it shows some interesting examples, you know, especially the fact, you know, population control is a common strategy in conservation and it raises a whole host of different ethical questions. And I know we were speaking before the show that you know it's not just about the dogs, you've also got to think about the other species who these dogs impact and it immediately gets very complicated, right, yeah that is true, yeah, especially like.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:What I take away from the idea about compassionate conservation is that we need to rethink our relationship with other than human sentient beings that are cohabiting our spaces and sharing the space that we're in, and it's not limited to just others as mere collectives or, you know, whether they're humans or animals, but also as individuals, and we need to also take it into account, so not just animals that are just sharing or are just our immediate neighbors, but also are maybe distant neighbours, such as, like I mentioned in our conversation before, in Kaza itself, there are other wild predators like zoo leopards and wolves, and they're also very much part of this landscape, and so this idea around compassionate conservation needs to, I think, needs to be extended not just to the charismatic endangered animals like voles or snow leopards, but also to all other beings around us, which includes the dogs that are our immediate neighbors.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I agree. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for a lovely script again and I look forward to having you on the show next time. Thank you so much.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:Thanks for having me.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you so much, daniel Ram, for being an incredible guest, to Animals and Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple for sponsoring this podcast, and to the Remaking One Health Indies project for sponsoring this season. A big thank you also to Jeremy John for the logo, gordon Clark for the bed music, rashmi Singh for the animal highlights, rebecca Shen for her design work and Christian Mentz for his editing work. Thank you to those of you who have left reviews and ratings where you listen the ones on Podchaser, on Spotify, on Apple. They really go a long way in terms of helping people find the show. So, thank you, thank you, thank you so much, and I have seen that some people have been buying our merch. That's very exciting. Thank you for supporting the show. The money will either go towards us or towards Sanctuaries, so it's going to helping make more content that you can enjoy and to supporting animals. So thank you, thank you for supporting us in this way. This episode was edited and produced by myself. This is the animal turn with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
