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The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
Bonus: Death with Katja M. Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan
Death permeates our relationships with animals, yet we rarely confront the complex ethical questions it raises. In this conversation with Katja Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan, editors of "When Animals Die," we delve into the emerging field of animal death studies - an interdisciplinary approach examining how animals experience and humans justify animal death.
Date Recorded: 21 April 2025
Katja M. Guenther is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where her research and teaching focus on gender, feminist activism and social movements, human-animal relationships, and the state. Her work centers on improving our understanding of how and why inequalities of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and species reproduce so reliably, and what we can do to challenge these inequalities. Most recently, she is co-editor of When Animals Die: Examining Justifications and Envisioning Justice (New York University Press, 2024). She is the author of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals (Stanford University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 American Sociological Association’s Section on Animals and Society Distinguished Book Award, Making Their Place: Feminism After Socialism in Eastern Germany (Stanford University Press, 2010), and numerous journal articles. Learn more: www.katjamguenther.com.
Julian Paul Keenan is a Professor of Biology and Psychology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, USA. His focus on animals has centered around consciousness and cognition attempting to understand how vastly different nervous systems have evolved. Dr. Keenan is the founder of the journal Social Neuroscience and he is the first to identify the neural substrates of self-awareness.
Featured:
- When Animals Die by Katja M. Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan
- The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals by Katja M. Guenther
- Animals and urban gentrification: Displacement and injustice in the trans-species city by Phil Hubbard and Andrew Brooks
- Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by ben Goldfarb
- Killer Cities by Nigel Thrift
- Living Car-Fr
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
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This is another iRaw podcast. Here in the United States we also fund our animal shelters in the same way we do our school systems, for example, which is entirely out of local taxes. So a neighborhood that is lower income is also going to be lower resourced, which means that in general the rate of killing overall in that shelter is going to be higher than, for example, another shelter that might just be 10 or 15 kilometers down the road but is serving a more affluent, and in the United States that generally also means a whiter population of people whose homes are producing higher property taxes and therefore more money for the shelter system, so it can be more innovative in implementing life-saving programs.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome back to the Animal Turn everyone. In this bonus episode we're going to be talking about the easy, breezy light topic of death. Death and dying haunt the edges of a great deal of what we talk about on this show, so it was nice to have the opportunity to think about death more deeply. Katja Günther and Julian Paul Keenan join me today on the show to talk about their edited volume when Animals Die examining justifications and envisioning justice. The book is structured in three parts, all with death in mind before, during and after death, and it has 10 chapters, from disciplines that are as wide-ranging as forensics to sociology. It has 10 chapters from disciplines that are as wide-ranging as forensics to sociology. We touch on some of these chapters in the discussion, but mostly we talk about what death is, the difficulty with defining death, as well as why it is significant to focus on death and what Katia and Julian are calling the emergence of death studies. Let me tell you a little bit about them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Katia is a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California Riverside, where her research and teaching focus on gender, feminist activism and social movements. Her work centers on improving our understanding of how and why, inequalities of gender, race, class, disability and species reproduce so reliably and what we can do to challenge these inequalities. In addition to editing this volume with Julian, katia has also authored the Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals. Katia has spent a great deal of time thinking about death and the ways in which our society is structured to make the lives of animals and their deaths possible. Julian, on the other hand, is a professor of biology and psychology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, usa. His focus on animals is centered around consciousness and cognition, attempting to understand how vastly different nervous systems have evolved. Julian is the founder of the journal Social Neuroscience and he is the first to identify the neural substrates of self-awareness. He approaches death and thinking about death from a much more biological standpoint than Katia and I and it was a really interesting conversation because Katia and I tended towards thinking about the social ways in which death is thought about and structured in society and Julian would kind of bring in the biology and thinking about how the brain works. And it was just a really, really nice conversation and I think it really shows Purchase to how this idea of death studies, or animal death studies, really can grow substantially. Anyway, it was a really, really interesting conversation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Just a reminder, if you have the time to please check out our merch store and to leave a review. That would be wonderful. Money from the merch goes towards helping me to get help to make more content and the reviews help other people to find the show. Also, as always, a thank you to Animals and Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics for their long-term support. They give me a little bit of money for each episode and that kind of helps to pay for hosting providers and websites and all of that which really, without their help, the show wouldn't be possible. So thank you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you so much to Apple for your long-term support of the show and, as always, thank you, listeners, for taking the time to listen and share your views. Yeah, every time I get an email from a listener telling me that this show matters. It makes a difference. So thank you. I always love hearing from you. Okay, enough ramble from me, let's get to it. Hello, julian and Katja, welcome to the Animal Turn podcast. It's great to have you on the show. I very, very, very much enjoyed reading your book when Animals Die and I'm looking forward to talking to you today about. You know, the light topic of death, everyone's favorite topic. It's easy breezy topic but I think an important one. So thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's great to have you, and normally I ask people right at the beginning of the shows to tell me how they became interested in animals. But maybe I'm going to do something a little bit different with you guys and ask have you ever thought about your death?
Julian Paul Keenan:I think that that was actually what brought me to the animals and then back to the humans was was that sort of question was thinking about? Um, yeah, I mean, you were mentioning, you know, it's not a happy topic, it's a taboo topic, it's a under investigated topic, it's a topic that really, at the end of the day, we don't understand, and um, so one of the things was like we always talk in biology and in neuroscience, do animals comprehend their own death? Like, do they know about mortality? And then that obviously brings you to well, before we ask that question, do humans know about their own mortality, you know, or is it just make-believe?
Julian Paul Keenan:And I always go back to there was a pretty famous show here in America called the Sopranos, and at the very end of the Sopranos you know millions of people watching all of a sudden the screen goes black and it's black for 60 seconds and everyone thought their cable went out.
Julian Paul Keenan:This was back in the day of cables and TVs, but really what the directors were doing was like that's what death is, is it's just going by, and and so even that I can't comprehend. So I think that that that before I get to, do animals understand their death and animal death and do I understand you? You know the. The question becomes can I understand my, our brains, our human brains actually capable of that? I mean, if the answer is yes, then you know, maybe we can go on to animal brains. And then, if the answer is no, maybe animal brains have something we don't have, that they can comprehend it and we can't which is a very unpopular position in biology and neuroscience that the animals might be able to outdo us on something cognitive. But that was sort of I think it's a great question because it really relates to you know what inspired at least parts of this book?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and I know you wrote about this in the book as well. You kind of spoke about the extent to which animals and humans comprehend or understand their death, and you spoke there a lot about the extent to which animals and humans comprehend or understand their death, and you spoke there a lot about the brain and biology. So maybe just for the listeners' sake, why don't you tell us a little bit about you, because this was really an interdisciplinary project here. What kind of research and scholarship do you do, and how did you come to think about animals in it?
Julian Paul Keenan:Yeah, I mean the great thing about Tatcha and I is we're complete opposites. I mean we're on opposite ends of the country, opposite ends of the academic spectrum. It's really, really wonderful. My end is neuroscience, and I always start every lecture by saying neuroscience is a science of failure, that, given all that we know, we really know nothing compared to what we should know or could know. And one of the big failures is we have no idea about death. Right, we just really don't have a cognitive, a real good view of death. So I'm interested in self-awareness. So way back when I was a kid, back in post-grad and grad days, I was studying self-awareness and how well do people know themselves and how is the brain capable of that? And obviously, how well do animals know themselves? And we started with simple tests like do chimpanzees recognize themselves in a mirror? And that led to some of the bigger questions. You know, are they conscious themselves in a mirror? And that led to some of the bigger questions you know, are they conscious?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I came at animal death in that way from a real, really hard science, neuroscience perspective. And how about you, katya? So have you thought about death and how did you come to think about this?
Katja M. Guenther:kind of connection between animals and death. Yeah, I don't know that. I want to say that I think about death a lot because I realize I don't really know how much or how little other people think about death. But I do think that most people at some point in their lives imagine what their immediate life world would look like without them in it, can't quite mourn for them if they died. They might be facing some experience where there's an increased risk of death, maybe been diagnosed with an illness or you have to have a major surgery right, and I think that naturally is attached to some moments of reflecting on what dying could potentially be like and also what the world after you you know, potentially could be like. So I would you know, I would confess to having those types of thoughts at various moments and I think, somewhat like Julian, it's a personal strain of thinking that then also connects into this broader research interest or question.
Katja M. Guenther:I am trained as a sociologist and I'm a faculty member in an interdisciplinary department of gender and sexuality studies that includes both faculty from traditional humanities disciplines and from traditional social science disciplines about the valuation of death. Whose life matters right, whose life is considered important. That in recent American politics has been very much with the Black Lives Matter movement, right. That has really been a claim to say we deserve to live, right, black people deserve to live in this country and not simply to be killed by police. And so I think that those kinds of questions around whose lives matter have always been at the forefront for my thinking about animals.
Katja M. Guenther:Why do we not mourn the lamb on our Easter dinner table? When we mourn certain other types of animals, right, our companion animals, for example, when they die and I think that was actually one of the initial questions that Julian and I had even talked about in regards to the book. You know was some of these were some of these disparities between different types of animals and the type of mourning that they receive. Animal shelters here in the United States, and especially those that engage in a lot of killing of animals, thinking about which animals count and how even cats and dogs, if they're put into a certain institutional setting, their lives no longer matter, right? Their lives only matter as long as they're connected to people's lives.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, your chapter on community cats in the book is probably the chapter that stayed with me the most. It's a practice. I know you wrote about abortive what is the phrase? You would see those kinds of fetuses post-death, but I didn't know that these kind of active abortions of animals were happening, um, with particularly like late stage, like kittens, practically kittens they were, birth was imminent, life was imminent and um, and and the kind of decision on the politics of deciding to just stop life from ever happening. Yeah, that really stuck with me, that chapter, and I imagine it must have been quite a hard project to do because you're speaking with people who really care about these animals quite deeply and put a lot of time and effort into trying to protect them right.
Katja M. Guenther:Indeed, yeah, community cat caretakers, or people who are involved in caring for so-called feral cats or community cats, invest a huge amount of their personal time and energy, and, at least here in the Los Angeles area, I also discovered that the majority, the overwhelming majority, of people who are doing that work are lower income women of color who are often, you know, quite financially unstable themselves.
Katja M. Guenther:So you know the degree of sacrifice that they're making, financially speaking, but also in terms of their time it's very time consuming is really significant, and they really value the lives of these particular animals and believe that these animals have a right to thrive, both to survive but also to thrive in urban communities, that they are an outcome of human intervention in their lives and that we therefore have a responsibility to these cats to provide them with longer-term care. But they also, as I talk about in the chapter, are overwhelmingly supportive of abortive spaying, because they know that these cats currently do not have those conditions present. They want the cats to have quality lives, and that's not generally currently possible here in Los Angeles. And so there is the position that the kittens are better off having been terminated in pregnancy than coming into the world just to suffer.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I grapple with that myself. I think in general, I'm of the position you know you shouldn't kill, but you know, if you're generous to what their views are here, that they're trying to prevent suffering. You know, and I think many people we I mean. What's clear here is that reproduction is definitely a key part of death. When we're speaking about death, we're also speaking about reproduction, reproductive rights and who has the choice to birth or have sex? Even right, like my dog, linus is from a shelter and he was spayed. There was no choice for me or for him in terms of reproductive autonomy. But of course, yeah, reproduction and death just have a very tight connection, no matter the space and the sphere you're looking. Yeah, julian, do you have any thoughts on that?
Julian Paul Keenan:Well, yeah, I mean, obviously the genetic connection is, you know, for biologists quite obvious and you know you can always say as long as you have like a fifth cousin. You know that you've technically never died. You know because your genes get transferred on from generation to generation. So you know if you are an asexual organism, right, and you go through mitosis, you know death. Death is a sort of odd thing. Have you died after mitosis? So it's not really a black and white thing in biology. You know death and that In terms of those conversations you know we're interested in trying to assess how effective it is.
Julian Paul Keenan:Are these actually effective methods in curbing population, making animals happier, etc. Try to figure those things out. Katju's book on animal shelters it's gripping, informative and for me it was like the first time I realized how disparity and racism trickled down to cats and dogs. It was the first time I had a slap in the face saying yeah, this is not just a human problem in America and I won't speak on other countries, but it's an animal problem. And I was sort of embarrassed that I never contemplated that but I thought it was. You know, it was my takeaway from her book.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Do you want to walk us through that premise a little bit, Katja? And what you wrote, it was animal shelters, right.
Katja M. Guenther:Yeah, the book that I worked on just previously really try to unpack how human ideas about race and ethnicity and gender and disability combine to determine which animals are most likely to survive in a kill shelter environment and it was, I'll say it's central to the book to demonstrate that shelter animal workers and the institution as a whole, the culture of the institution, has embedded within it the same norms and values as the United States as a whole.
Katja M. Guenther:Right, it's not somehow separated from the rest of human society and therefore holds on to certain assumptions about what kinds of people are the guardians to what kinds of animals, and that in turn increases or decreases the value of the animals.
Katja M. Guenther:So pit bulls, for example, have been a very contentious category of animals here in the United States, as in many other countries, and in the Los Angeles area they are very much associated particularly with Latino men from lower income strata who are believed to be in many cases breeding them and raising them for traits favorable to fighting them. And all of that rests on a longer term history of anti-Blackness and the association specifically between pit bulls and Black men and these kind of beliefs about masculinity, and the masculinity specifically of straight men of color, becomes attached to or embodied in the pit bulls themselves and ultimately increases the chances that they're going to be killed. In the shelter they're constantly subjected to special rules and regulations meant to police and control their purported aggressiveness. They have to go through an entirely separate adoption process than almost all other types of dogs, and those barriers to adoption obviously increase the likelihood that they're not going to be adopted. But they're also placed under such a level of scrutiny that, unless they're so-called perfect dogs, they're almost certainly going to be killed.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean it's really challenging and quite political. I think it was Hubbard and Brooks who wrote a paper about animals and gentrification in cities and even there they showed how if you look at just the different class dynamics of different neighborhoods you'll get different breed densities. So almost by looking at the breed you can kind of tell the class of the neighborhood. More teacup, fashionable type dogs have different concentrations in different areas, and I mean this happens across nation states as well and there's something about how our identity is impressed on these animals in the same way we do our school systems, for example which is entirely out of local taxes.
Katja M. Guenther:So a neighborhood that is lower income is also going to be producing a lower tax base, so their shelter is going to be lower resourced, which means that in general the rate of killing overall in that shelter is going to be higher than, for example, another shelter that might just be 10 or 15 kilometers down the road but is serving a more affluent and in the United States that generally also means a whiter population of people whose homes are producing higher property taxes and therefore more money for the shelter system. So it can be more innovative in implementing life-saving programs choosing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, I've heard of situations where you've got sanctuaries who are literally like bringing animals in. Their purpose is to give animals a good life and a place where they can live and die, but still, if you have an outbreak of influenza or you have some sort of pathogenic outbreak, they are subject to the same kind of laws and regulations that their state or their district is in and they might have to kill their animals or they might have to have their animals kind of vaccinated or managed in a way that they wouldn't choose right. So I think thinking about these larger structural dimensions is really important, and it is important when it comes to death as well. So I know one of the chapters in your book spoke about roadkill and I think this for me was a really big kind of takeaway. For for the book is my introduction to thinking about animals and death was thinking about the numerous number of animals that are killed in our farming system. Right, it's just the, the, the thousands and thousands of animals that are killed for food, um, and for clothing, etc, etc.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But your book highlights the kind of complexity with which you can think about animal death. You've got animals who are dying as a result of our infrastructure, like roads. You've got animals who are dying in laboratories, fine, but also in forensics. That chapter on forensics was just. You know that it's being used to shape and inform so much research about how we understand human death and the ways in which humans die. And then, of course, you've got new industries that are centered around animal death emerging, whether it's on the guinea pig, for example. So just the complexity with which you were thinking about death was quite remarkable, and sorry for this big ramble, because I think something that really struck me was that there is no clear definition of death. You said that right early on. You've said several times here, julian, it's not black and white. So then, what is death? Is it just a matter of one of those things? You know it when you see it.
Julian Paul Keenan:Well, it's funny, one of my infamous TV appearances was on Fox, which is, for your international people, a very conservative news outlet, and it was about brain death, right? So even in neuroscience, when you go to a medical hospital, it's oftentimes a judgment call Like is this person alive, how alive are they? Or, conversely, are they dead? Or how dead are they Right? So, not just animals, but again it's often a judgment call, which is a very bizarre thing. Something so simple as death is that I want to go back to and I'll add, since we were yeah, Reproduction, the same at the other end, right?
Katja M. Guenther:When does life begin? Right? When is somebody not dead but has come into being as a living being?
Julian Paul Keenan:Yeah, so is it fertilized? Is it zygote right? So again, it's. You know those things. I just want to comment on how admirable Katya is in terms of, like, clinical fatigue and going through that. It's absolutely amazing. You know what she's been able to do and be a scholar about that. So I just want to, I want to up my co-author, my co-editor, on this and say it's pretty incredible what she was able to do and still be objective at the end of the day and produce an amazing piece of literature.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, that's nice.
Katja M. Guenther:It's really nice to hear on a Monday morning.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:All right, after that lovely interlude I want to do. The subtitles of your book are about death and justifications and justice, so these kind of two key themes come up. So why don't we spend a little bit of time thinking about justifications for death? What justifies the death of animals?
Julian Paul Keenan:Well, from an evolutionary biology perspective, if you went back 20,000 years ago, you wouldn't notice humans. It would sort of be like what you think of raccoons today, like, yeah, you would see one every once in a while and that would be about it, you know. However, if you go back 10,000 years ago, humans are taking over the planet, right, and it's the beginning of what we call the Anthropocene, the human era, which is with us today, and a big part of that is our ability to domesticate not just plants, but domesticate animals. So, on one hand, you've got the killing of animals and the whole meat industry, which starts about 10,000 years ago, when we moved from hunter-gatherers to domestication. You can really justify that you are here today.
Julian Paul Keenan:I am here today because our ancestors started the meat industry 10,000 years ago and started slaughtering animals on a regular basis. They are an amazing, amazing energy resource. You cannot get energy any other way than from animals. So the justification is certainly there in terms of us as a species. And you know, having grown up on a farm I grew up on a farm you know my clinical fatigue led me to becoming a vegetarian and saying, okay, that was 10,000 years ago, but now we don't have to rely on that. So I think that there is clearly justification for it, but there are also alternatives to that as well, which you might say nullifies all of the justifications.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I mean this comes down to that classic question of need versus want, right? So we justify killing animals because we say we need them, but, as we were talking a moment ago, kind of structural differences and things change in circumstance, and at what point does that need become want or convenience? I mean, for me, I think this is a clear thing. With regards to the scale of animal death, right, obviously the scale is very different now than it was 10,000 years ago, is very different now than it was 10,000 years ago, and the scale of animal death or animals who are slaughtered, I think is also driven by convenience, the convenience and ease with which they are available, which certainly wasn't the case 10,000 years ago. So we justify their killing because we say we need it and we justify their killing because we say we want it. What are the justifications?
Katja M. Guenther:Yeah, I think that is given rise to a whole lot of socially complex justifications. We see, of course, a lot of religious justifications in the Western tradition, especially the Christian idea that humans stand above animals and that animals have in fact even been placed on the earth for humans' use, the idea that animals don't have souls, right, these are all ways of religious strategies of justifying the killing and consumption for different purposes, not just eating necessarily of animal bodies. You know, in the industrial meat period that we also live in now, you know, it's fascinating to see all of the different types of claims to justify meat consumption. There's been a trend here in the United States, I think primarily fueled over TikTok, emphasizing the essential need for men especially to consume high levels of meat for protein, right. So this whole sort of culture around steak eating and protein powders being added to your muscle shakes and so forth, that you can't, you know, and in this way, meat eating has long been identified as heavily gendered, in that men especially can demonstrate their masculinity by ripping into a rib, you know, and standing outside at the barbecue and grilling animal flesh.
Katja M. Guenther:So you know, there's the claims that may have some origin in health, but they've also taken on justifications that are layered with social ideas about masculinity and femininity, also about social status. It's not my expertise, but it's my understanding that in China, for example, with its massively ballooning middle class, that meat consumption has just skyrocketed, because eating meat and particular forms of meat, namely pork and beef, is a way to demonstrate that you have, you know, arrived right, reached a certain class status, and I think that has always existed right in Western cultures as well. Right, whether you have the filet mignon or the burger at McDonald's. Right demonstrates something about your position, right, your authority, your wealth, your influence in society as well, and so we can use those kinds of logics also to justify the continued killing of animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the consumption itself is also important here. I mean, we've got so these are kind of human justifications, I guess, for animal death. And you spoke also, julian, about the kind of genetic. There's genetics involved. The desire to pass on genes is entangled with reproduction, but also with death. How else would animals think, justify, I mean animals justified, I guess? I mean this is like an impossible question. How do, how do animals justify um, death or dying? And now we're really getting into philosophical realms, schrodinger's cat here. But like, how do we? Was there any kind of thoughts in your book with regards to how animals and animal cultures manage death of their own?
Julian Paul Keenan:Yeah, they have no rules, you know, it's just my. I have chickens right now in my backyard, you know, and their favorite thing to eat are their own eggs. So you know, and they're you know, one of the cool things is about science is how it adapts to like new findings. You know, when I was a beginning bio student, cannibalism was the exception and now cannibalism has sort of become the rule throughout the animal kingdom that we see a lot of, you know, a lot of that going on. So again it's, it's in biology we talk all the time.
Julian Paul Keenan:In fact, our main I don't, I don't one of our main, I'll just say one of our main concepts is energy. Right, and just a great way to get energy is to take the energy that someone has already gotten for you and that comes from, you know, killing and eating, killing and consuming animals, you know, and one of the things we should also think about with death is particularly with humans is, you know things like whale oil and religious, you know spiritual sort of thing, and you know curing, impotence and medicinal sort of things that go on with animals as well, you know, and coats and warmth and hide providing shelter. So it's not just consumption and the energy, but it's also other things that you can justify. That might have been the most long-winded answer ever to a question on a podcast, so my apologies.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No, no, no, no, no. Trust me, I've literally gone in rambles in asking questions that are longer than that, so you're fine and I think I think more what I was asking here was about. It was about animals culture around death, and I think that I mean I think there's a lot more going on here than just cannibalism While that does exist. I mean that's also could be viewed as a kind of cultural artifact. That does exist. I mean that also could be viewed as a kind of cultural artifact, and I know with chickens consuming eggs, this is also again tied to kind of deficiencies that they're trying to manage as well sometimes. But there is increasing kind of evidence and showcasing that animals have cultural practices around their own deaths, Things like elephants mourning their dead, going to specific places to die. These could be thought of as you know death actions, preparations for death.
Katja M. Guenther:Yeah, animal cultures around death is not something that we address head on, as far as I recall, in any of the chapters of when animals die, but I think it's a really interesting area of inquiry.
Katja M. Guenther:And when you said cultures around death, you then went on to talk about cultures of grieving or mourning and remembrance, but what I immediately went to was thinking about how the actual act of killing has cultural components as well. If, for example, we think about culture as shared rituals that and that strengthen bonds between individual actors in a community, um, right, then sort of predatory behaviors of like group hunting, for example, could be interpreted as a type of a cultural practice, because we now know, we now believe, that wolves, for example, and African painted dogs and other canine species in particular, when they engage in hunting together, are increasing their group bonds, and also that there are specific roles that different members of the pack play in the hunting, that the predatory animals have modes of communicating with one another during the actual hunt, you know, to provide cues about who is expected to do what. Right in a given moment.
Katja M. Guenther:It's a deeply social you know behavior and I think any human who has observed you know lions hunting as a pride or any kind of pack animal right hunting as a group, will observe that.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I mean, I think a great example here are orcas, right, and I think there's quite a bit of evidence to show that orcas, you know, while of the same species, have different cultural practices, in that different pods of orcas consume different foods and they consume them sometimes exclusively differently and they've developed different hunting techniques and practices, which is quite, yeah, it's, I think you're right.
Katja M. Guenther:They're also entangled in kind of death practices, whether that involves, you know, killing or consuming of the dead, and rituals and practices around dying itself. Yeah, and orcas are also a great example of a species where we appear to observe pronounced mourning. Right, it's here in the United States. I think it's been actually off the Canadian coast. There've been at least two instances I can think of in recent years of mother orcas who lost their young and continued to carry them around with them for weeks right following the death of the calf.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, and you mentioned at the start of the book that you're calling this kind of. I mean, when you start to talk about these big concepts death, life, birth you realize that it's not easy. And you mentioned at the start of the book that you're kind of dubbing this animal death studies. Now, I hadn't heard that before. Is this somewhat established, or is this an emerging field, like what is animal death studies? Because clearly there's a lot to talk about.
Katja M. Guenther:I would say it's not established, at least it's not an identity that I think scholars or others who might be engaged in it necessarily have. And yet it is a field in which people are working already and I think part of our writing and naming animal death studies was to acknowledge people are doing this work but we're not necessarily talking with each other about it, in part because of some of the disciplinary variations that uh julian mentioned at the beginning of this conversation. Like uh, you know, he's a biologist and neuroscientist and I'm a a feminist sociologist. Right in what, what universe in contemporary universities would we come into conversation with each other? You know our disciplines are really siloed, but if we are able to conceptualize both of us working in this field of animal death studies, that opens up a new space or creates a space for interdisciplinary collaboration. Right, it's not a disciplinary specific field.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean, I think this is one of the things that makes animal studies itself so interesting is because it is inherently interdisciplinary. I mean, you could sit within your own silo, but if you really want to do justice to writing about or thinking about animals, if you're in the social sciences, you almost necessarily, I think, have to look at and learn from the natural sciences and biology and veterinary ethics and ask these sorts of questions. But the same is also true on the other side. I think natural scientists have perhaps a lot of work to do with regards to learning from the relationships and the discussions that we've been having in the social sciences about questions of power and economics and why they are so important to thinking about animals' lives. And this brings us to the second part of your subtitle, which was on justice. What made you connect this? What's the connection between death and justice?
Julian Paul Keenan:Well, the way the hard scientist did it is in that taphonomy chapter that you were talking about. Right, looking at the forensics. So we have a very hard line sort of thing and I love that chapter and it's a very cool chapter because it really looks at you know, one of the things you can do is can you solve animal crimes? So you know your neighbor kills your dog. You know one of the things you can do is can you solve animal crimes? So you know your neighbor kills your dog and you know that your neighbor did it. How do you prove that your neighbor did it? So a very cool what we would say over here you know CSI or law and order kind of forensic. Look at that. But I think that that's. That's one sort of chapter. I think Katja's sort of view on this is much wider and I actually look forward to her answer on this.
Katja M. Guenther:I didn't and I think this is true for you too, julie and we didn't want us to stop with only examining justifications for death and knowledge and understanding of death, but also to think about what it would look like to live in a more just system of social organization for humans and for animals, where we might have a very different relationship right between humans and animals.
Katja M. Guenther:That would increase opportunities for animals to have livable lives, right lives that are appropriate to their species, that offer them the resources and the stimulation and the care that is appropriate for for their species, and that we would extend that also to all groups of humans. Come up as much in our conversation so far is also thinking about the linkages between violence against animals and violence against certain types of humans and how, both historically and in the contemporary period, some groups of humans have been defined or constructed as being more animal-like than others and how that's been used as a justification for displacement, for genocide. And what would it look like to move beyond that right Is that, if that is even possible I hope it is possible but to start teasing out some ways of thinking about more just systems of existence that would allow members of all species to thrive?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And what might some of those be?
Katja M. Guenther:Well, I mean, I think that one of the core practices that we would need to move away from is, you know, humans' deeply held belief in our right to control animal lives and our superiority to animals.
Katja M. Guenther:That especially is used to justify practices like large-scale industrial farming right.
Katja M. Guenther:But also to move into worlds where, in general, we take animal concerns and how animals would want to live if we could understand them fully.
Katja M. Guenther:I'm thinking, like, about Matthew Calarco's chapter in the book on roadkill, which you mentioned earlier, uh, claudia earlier, and this was sort of a wake-up moment for me, um, when I read this, that it had never occurred to me that roadkill uh, at least in the united states, but I suspect this is true probably in almost every part of the world is the number two cause of death following farming for for meat for animals, and if we were to include insects as lives in that, I think it's probably number one right, we just don't even value or consider animal lives.
Katja M. Guenther:But I've also just finished reading a beautiful and interesting book on the construction of animal crossings and the increased movement to rethink humans' right to roadways and to transportation right and to consider instead what animals need in order for them to not be run over by trains and vehicles and so forth. Small, small step. But if we were actually to, you know, very proactively develop strategies globally for animals to be able to pass over roadways or train tracks, you know we could really significantly reduce mortality among free roaming animals and spare them a type of death that I think is probably also particularly, you know, unpleasant and can occur at any moment of the life course. So even very young animals are being killed.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I think it's no small thing at all. There's a fantastic book called Killer Cities that speaks not only about roads but just infrastructure in general. You know, animals are displaced and in that book my mind was kind of blown with thinking about under the ground, because he speaks it's Nigel Thrift and he speaks about how, you know, building underground you're also displacing a lot of soil, a lot of animals and a lot of death happens in the kind of building and the constructing of our societies. And I think I mean to add to your question of justice. I think slowing down is probably a key thing, this kind of productive churn of just having more and needing to be productive. You speak about capitalism a lot in the book and I think it features prominently in several of the chapters and I think it's about bringing animals back into conversations like to your point about the construction of uh of cities.
Katja M. Guenther:For example, there's been a lot of uh hoopla, at least here in the los angeles area, about a community that's being built. Um, in phoenix, arizona, that is going to be america's first purpose purposely built car free community. Um, there's no parking anywhere inside of it.
Katja M. Guenther:There's some places at its peripheries where delivery trucks, you know, can pause and drop things off, but it's meant to be someplace that's entirely for pedestrians and will have no cars. So there's been a lot of writing about it in the American Southwest and like is this the future of American? You know community planning to live in car-free. You know communities that then are connected to each other via rail or some other mechanism, but there's literally nothing I have seen about these, about this community. Has there been any conversation about animals? And look at pictures of it. It's sort of townhouse-style buildings. It actually looks to me a lot like sort of old European cities, like small alleyways with, you know, tight buildings, which is fine and good. But I'm wondering, like how are animal beings part of this landscape? I know from personal experience that Phoenix is a place where you encounter, among mammals, coyotes, javelinas, desert hares, of course, insects, lizards, spiders. Where and how are all these beings even part of the planning process?
Katja M. Guenther:They're simply not there, and so the whole strand of talking about animal democracy and bringing animals into our political processes, and I think that's a big part of justice as well 100%.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think this lack of inclusion in our future visions will contribute to further death in future, because you'll end up with political situations where you might have a coyote in a neighborhood that you didn't want, but you had all of the everything you constructed was pulling them in, was saying, hey, this is a great place for me to be. And it's one of my key critiques of kind of greening strategies. We like to talk about greening cities and creating, but this will also attract other animals, and I'm happy to have other animals here, but not everyone has my outlook. So we need to realize what policies and practices are there to protect animals that your new green cities are going to attract. And, yeah, without that lack of, I think, political vision, you end up creating circumstances for future death, because far too often I think, when animals become a nuisance or an inconvenience in these situations, death is the answer to how to control them, as you said earlier. Do you have any other further thoughts, julian, on the question of justice and death?
Julian Paul Keenan:Sure, I mean. Well, first of all, on that note, I mean, in New Jersey we have bear hunts and you know as horrible as that sounds, right, no one wants a bear, you know, in their backyard, you know it's so managing those things and the death of, you know, animals is an issue. Yeah, I remember like 30 years ago I was asked to join a primate human rights group that sole purpose was to advocate that they could vote. So you know how we, how we handle these issues, right, and if we go too far on one extreme, is, is, is is something we obviously have to think about, but maybe that's too esoteric. So in our institution and almost every institution, and I believe the federal government defines it this way we have an IACOC, which is basically a research board that says you know, if you're going to do research on animals, you have to meet certain standards, but that ends at vertebrates, so if you're doing invertebrate animals, you can do anything that you want. So the fact that you guys brought up insects is a really important distinction here, because we really don't value the lives of insects. And so insect death and you were talking about this before we got on the podcast about ants, right, that insect death has taken a backseat to other higher animals, and higher animals basically means vertebrates.
Julian Paul Keenan:So I think that it's an interesting thing that we think about how we classify animals, and I'll stop on this. One of the things about dogs is really there weren't separate breeds until about 400 years ago. That the breeding of dogs. You were a dog breeds until about 400 years ago. That the breeding of dogs. You know, you were a dog up until about 400 years ago and now we've started to classify dogs and it is a little interesting that and again, it's the thing I loved about Katja and it was the real attraction to work with her is how the classification of dogs also mimics the classifications of how we value death, that certain deaths just don't mean a lot to us, whereas other deaths are just horrific and horrible and it depends on how we've classified them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So yeah, I really. I mean, there's been an explosion of research now and consideration with regards to thinking about the lives and the deaths, I think, of insects and kind of questions of consciousness and what do we know with regards to how they experience a pain or pleasure. I think Jeff Sebo is doing quite a bit there. But you know, I think part of our culture is that we do, in general, tend to value whatever we conceive as being closer to us. And I think you've got these exceptions like octopuses, octopi, that are quite different to us in almost every single way, like we've diverged from the evolutionary tree, from one another a long, long, long, long long time ago, but they are hyper-intelligent, ingenious, and they've captured people's imaginations in a way that perhaps insects don't.
Julian Paul Keenan:If I can interrupt you, Claudia, they're invertebrates, so they would go under the class of insects. You know all the cephalopods. We would not have to get, you know, research permission to work on them. Sorry for interrupting, but no, not at all. You bring up an interesting point.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's a, and you know, I think that they are one of the ones that have captured people's imagination and have actually gotten people to mobilize around getting more rights for more animals with regards to questions and ethics related to research, and I know the current proposal that octopus farming is taking off now and becoming legal in European and I think in the US as well that this has got oh hello, Good doggy friend saying hi, and this has gotten a lot of oh, he's so gorgeous.
Katja M. Guenther:Sorry. She's come back from her morning run with her other Borguian, so she's feeling a bullion. But I will tell you I don't know if you even have this animal where you live, fadia, but she encountered a stunk a few nights ago. Oh, and did she get a spray? Oh, she got so sprayed, so two stunt specific baths, but she's still. When she comes up and kisses me, I'm like okay it's a lot.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:At least it wasn't, at least it wasn't a porcupine. Um, yeah, that would have. That would have hurt. Um, all right, and I mean, you bring up such an interesting. Now my brain is like doing a dance, because I think what we were talking about with regards to, like, the ethics of how animals are researched on and also how they're killed, like we use all these euphemisms for killing them in order to do research, and it must be said that a lot of research that's done on these animals is also often not necessary. It's done to kind of get a PhD project or something finished where we know the answer already, and I know a lot of scientists will disagree with me on that, but I don't know, julian, is that unfair to say?
Julian Paul Keenan:No, it's definitely not unfair to say, and, like one of the things that you know, I have a colleague, steven Pinker, and he he wrote this book about how the world is getting less and less violent, which is absolutely true, as long as you ignore world war II. Uh, like the world is, though, and one of the things that he brings up is is you know the rise of vegetarianism, the rise of PETA, and you know the rise of actual animal ethics. When I was an undergrad and we took experimental psych, everyone got a rat, and what you would do with that rat depended on what group you're in, you know, and you would do some sort of psychosurgery where you would implant electrodes, and, you know, in one of the groups, the animal would hit a bar and I'm making nonverbal, that's not very helpful on a podcast the rat would hit a bar and it would keep pressing the bar, because what was happening in the brain is that dopamine was being released, and it felt really good, and the animal, the rat, would hit the bar to the point of death. They would actually kill themselves, and we would then note that in our notebooks and say, oh, isn't that interesting that the pleasure seeking killed the rat killed the rat. So we don't do that anymore and I hate to leave on a hopeful note, but there are some hopeful trends in animals that we do see the rise of vegetarianism.
Julian Paul Keenan:We do see the rise of animal research.
Julian Paul Keenan:So, for example, at the institution I am right now, animal research has become this is vertebrate animal research.
Julian Paul Keenan:I'm example, at the institution I am right now, animal research has become this is vertebrate animal research.
Julian Paul Keenan:I'm pointing out those that are ethically guided has become so costly because of the care that you need to take for animals that most people don't do it, which is a very good thing, right, because you need to have a vet, you need to have the right facilities, et cetera. So our animal facility is basically empty at this point, which is good because, exactly what you're saying, because a lot of the animal research has, you know, we've identified as being redundant or unnecessary or really treats the animals poorly to the point where it's unsustainable. So, yes, I agree with your premise that, yeah, a lot of it is bad, but I also want to point out the good things that have happened, that I know regulation is not a big thing in America these days, but that regulation, the number of lives that is saved, in terms of at least vertebrates, has been spectacular. So, yes, I agree that we could do a whole lot more, but I do want to acknowledge that at least something has been done.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's important to note and I know that other technologies, you know there's some. I had Tom Harting on the show and he spoke about how for him sometimes this is almost like slow science. The fact that in some ways, animal subjects are still being used as models to understand human health is strange. When you've kind of got this onset of artificial intelligence and organoids and human, my mind was completely and utterly blown. Speaking to him, he was talking about how organs are being grown. I was like whoa, this is like sci-fi stuff from when I was a kid. I can't believe these things are happening now.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So, okay, before I ask you for the quote, perhaps we can. Just, we've jumped around a little bit with regards to the book. We've touched on several themes that came up with the book, things like killing, consumption, capitalism, as well, as you know, various justifications, but also why this is a question of justice, and I think, arguably, maybe something we haven't said is that we would like to see less animal death. Right, this is a question of justice because there's just too much death, and we've kind of mentioned, I think, several really interesting chapters. We spoke a little bit about community cats. We've spoken about Matthew Calarco's question of roadkill.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We mentioned your Julian chapter on, you know, thinking about human and animal conceptions of death. There are several others that we mentioned, but I don't think we've spoken yet about the whale hunt kind of questions of how indigenous knowledges shape and think about death through. You know, questions of reciprocity. We did speak about Christianity, but not perhaps how indigenousologists talk about that. I briefly mentioned the guinea pig chapter, which I think was really interesting. The guinea pig chapter, just like the emergence of a new meat industry, slash international cuisine around the consumption of guinea pigs. Are there any other chapters that you want to highlight or just dive into a little bit before we start wrapping things?
Katja M. Guenther:up.
Katja M. Guenther:What stands out to me across a number of the chapters is a theme around technology and if and how it is used to improve or generate the quality of life that animals experience. I'm thinking about Carrie Ducote's contribution on the governance of avian influenza in the United States, and that, of course, has such an ongoingly timely topic. Right, it's like avian influenza is here to stay. And her presentation and description of the practice around culling, or the mass killing of birds who are even suspected of being exposed to avian influenza and influenza. So you don't even have to, you know, be definitively sickened by this illness, but who you know have have been identified as high risk. It's, it's, it's the least, uh, it's the least technologically advanced approach, right, literally, letting the birds suffocate to death, um, and then, at the same time, work that is being done, uh, like in the chapter by Lisa Jean Moore, to create transgenic animals, right, oh, the spider goats you know directly from the creation. And then, ultimately, what appears to be the path to extinction, again, right, of the, you know, of the spider goat.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I mean. What I loved about that chapter, though, is exactly what you say, is it highlighted the kind of entanglement of reproduction and death, Like they literally brought a new type of being into existence for the purpose of some sort of product. You know the silk, and it was interesting and they were being monitored and a year-long project, but now no longer feasible. There's another animal that can make the silk more efficiently. So now these goats just don't have their use value anymore. To straight up, bring up some Marxian terms they're not useful anymore, so we'll just let them go. And it's this question of is there something lost now in them disappearing and being removed? It's a brilliant chapter, really interesting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Julian Paul Keenan:So the avian flu. We're speaking now, in April of 2025. Egg prices in the United States have gone off the charts because we've had to kill all our animals. I mean all April of 2025, egg prices in the United States have gone off the charts because we've had to kill all our animals, I mean all of our chickens, because of, you know, another outbreak in avian flu. So, you know, my chickens in the backyard are, you know, are luckily safe because they're not part of this huge monoculture that's, you know, come out of the egg industry and you know. So that chapter is certainly pertinent, even, you know, a year after this book has been published. And then you had Lisa Jean. That chapter is so fun that the spider goat chapter that I didn't think I would ever say that a chapter was fun on animal death. But if you know, if the readers pick up this book and they read that, you know it's an actual enjoyable, fun and exciting chapter to read and Lisa Jean Moore should be thanked for writing such an entertaining but, you know, informative and important chapter.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:What you said there about the avian influenza also just made me think briefly here about the mobility of death, because I think avian influenza kind of shows how death and disease move as well. So it's not just farmed birds that are being impacted by avian influenza right, it's now being picked up by wildfire who are then spreading it to other farms and amongst other, and you're kind of getting the same way. Pandemics move amongst human populations, diseases, and same thing with swine flu, african swine flu or fever. I mean it's causing incredible numbers of death and the fact that this death is included in the capitalist calculation of these industries is really quite remarkable. Anyway, thank you both of you for this work, for a really fascinating discussion on death. I don't think we reached any conclusions. There was no analysis to our conversation, but I think that's perfectly fine. Do you have a quote ready for us?
Katja M. Guenther:I do, I'm just pulling open my book, so my quote was actually questions, so no finality at all. That Julie and I wrote as we were thinking about the immense complexity of animal death and all of the different arenas in which it occurs, the wide range of justifications. I mean on that topic alone we could write an encyclopedia. Right, it doesn't need to be a slimmer anthology like this one. We need to develop and keep talking as a field about animal death studies and bring people together into interdisciplinary conversation. So this is from page eight of when Animals Die. How can we make sense of so many living things being subjected to violence and killed? Can we make sense of it? What can we know about the way other than human animals experience death? Where can we see the interconnectedness of human and animal lives and deaths? And, perhaps most urgently, what can we do to stop the horrific rates of animicide and speciesicide? Rather than turning away from these questions, animal death studies and the contributions to this volume move toward them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, that's a great quote. To sum up, I mean the book and what we've been talking about here today. You mentioned the animicide and species side. I can never say anything with the word species in it. Could you just give us a quick definition of those, Because I think they're really important and powerful concepts. Yeah, absolutely.
Katja M. Guenther:We talk in the book about species side as referring to the killing of members of a species with the goal or outcome of species annihilation. So it doesn't have to be that it's intended that the species is going to say become extinct, but that is the ultimate outcome of species. Species side is that a species no longer exists.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Is that within a specific geography or would so like? Let's say, in New Zealand they're trying to get rid of toads and they actively are killing and eradicating toads. Would that be a form of species side? Would be yes.
Katja M. Guenther:So just the act of, even though they're, but I would say that the eradication in many places to try to rid an ecosystem of so-called invasive species are species-icidal campaigns.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay.
Katja M. Guenther:Powerful Right. It's not complete, but it's underway right, Just as we might refer to it's underway right, just as we might refer to campaigns attempting to annihilate a population and people as genocide.
Julian Paul Keenan:But before it's complete and it sounds horrible, until your kid has died of malaria. You know I'm all for mosquitoes till something like that happens, right. So you know, weighing species aside, you know which sounds on the outset horrible, you know. But then you realize the number of deaths that are caused by mosquitoes starts to take you on another, you know, and it's not just death, it's misery. You know, from Zika to malaria, you know that, as a human, you start to think. You know well, maybe having mosquitoes isn't the greatest thing on this planet. Human, you start to think, you know well, maybe having mosquitoes isn't the greatest thing on this planet. And you know, if other animals have gone extinct, you know, would the world be so bad without mosquitoes? And that's, you know, that's one of the things that we have to weigh when we think about animal death, like you know, is are there justifiable times where you can actually get rid of a species?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think, and I think your logic, a lot of people probably agree with you. But the problem, the challenges, is when you kind of think about one species, you know at a time when you start to count up the number of species that we apply that kind of logic to, it just racks up and it counts up. And I think you know Krithika Srinivasan and you know she speaks, and I think Matthew Kalak also spoke about this the logic of sacrifice, this idea that how do?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:we distribute the risk of a society and who burdens most of these risks. And I think again, this speaks to kind of the interconnections of different human populations and different animal populations who in our societies has to bear the most of society's burdens and who has to bear most of the benefits. And yeah, I'm going to take your point, julian. It's not as simple as just saying you know, this is bad, but I would also caution on the other side. It's not as easy as just saying that's the solution, right.
Julian Paul Keenan:Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen, I'm as liberal as they come. You know, and making claims that it might be, you know, in everybody's interest other than the species itself to get rid of that species is a difficult thing to say. Acknowledge that we have that capability and that we can ease suffering, you know, and you know, then you know it does become something that is that we have to think about scientifically, like you know, is keeping a certain species around a good thing to do or a bad thing to do?
Katja M. Guenther:Well, it's the example of the toads as well. I mean, I think those toads exist in other ecosystems that you were mentioning in New Zealand, but that is also, you know, in. How do we handle invasive species has been a contentious topic, right about those rights so-called invasive species to exist in the ecosystem to which humans overwhelmingly transported them.
Julian Paul Keenan:And you know clearly we're making choices there. You know, an invasive species that we have here in America is, you know, the Italian honeybee, which is awesome.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Everyone loves the honeybee and it, you know, is and cows and pigs and horses.
Julian Paul Keenan:Exactly Now. Those are all invasive species. But then when you start talking about you know jellyfish, people start to say wait a minute, do we really need jellyfish around? You know they're. You know what good are the jellyfish.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And sometimes our tendency to intervene. We were very quick to intervene and part of the reason toads are in New Zealand and Australia is because they were introduced to as an agricultural response to another animal. So I think it's this kind of constant. So, coming back to the mosquitoes, my question ends up being well, what are the ripple effects of removing mosquitoes, absolutely.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:They're also key pollinators. They're key food sources for numerous other species. Oh, absolutely, fever. What is the tick bite fever in South Africa, but it's when you get bitten by a tick you end up with Lyme disease. Lyme disease Lyme disease is spreading more and more as the climate is changing, et cetera. And these are really important and significant and, I think, one we have to ask ourselves have we ever really been successful at eradicating an animal or a species from a specific location? I don't think we had. There are some isolated cases, but in general they've proven fruitless. So I mean, I take your point, I take your point, but I just I think it's there are knock-on effects to our interventions, right that could lead to other unforeseen circumstances.
Julian Paul Keenan:Yeah, absolutely yeah. Yeah. I mean the bats would be very upset if we got rid of the mosquitoes, that is for sure we would have a. You know, I'd never win the you know that contingent of my electorate.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:No little like who cares about krill. But the decimation of krill is like destroying one of the reasons that are destroying the ocean, because they're these tiny, seemingly insignificant creatures, but actually they are really significant and important it's um yeah, more work to do, to understand, to make informed decisions, I think, is what we're all saying here, is not quick decisions. Yeah, so sorry, katya, I so that's species side, species side, I was going to say let's not forget about animicide before we Animicide.
Katja M. Guenther:So I think animicide more broadly, so it's not specific to a species but refers to any kind of organized campaign or effort on the part of people, of humans, to kill animals for human gain, you know, of some form. So we could think of like factory farming as a whole as a type of animicide, right. It is involving the large-scale killing of animals chickens, pigs, cows, other types of um by location as well. Um is a type of uh of animicide where the the end result isn't um the extinction of a species, right, but the end result is the ongoing uh killing of these animals, uh, with the consequence of humans profiting in some way.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Does the intention need to be to kill animals, or could something I mean deforestation happens intentionally, right, like you think about palm oil deforestation and its impacts on animals in Indonesia. Would that be considered, then, a form of animicide? I mean, I think that's intentional, but could you imagine unintentional animicides, so runaway fires that are caused because of human activities, right?
Katja M. Guenther:Yeah. And I would definitely include foresting, deforestation, logging, etc. I would include that as a type type of animicide. And in some cases, since you mentioned indonesia, species side right, like orangutans, are being functionally rendered extinct specifically because of the incursions into their land from from palm oil plantations but the intention with forestry is not to hurt them.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the intention with forestry is not to hurt animals. So the intention with factory farms is to kill animals. Right, kill animals to make a profit. But the intention with logging is to get wood to make profits. The direct intention is not to kill animals. But that would still be a form of animicide, just because of the numbers of animal deaths that result Okay, I'm with you just because of the numbers of animal deaths that result.
Katja M. Guenther:Okay, I'm with you. Yeah, I think I would consider it as such and there probably are others who might split hairs with me about that and I totally would acknowledge that as well the degree of intent. And so when you mentioned, for example, like wildfires which I've just experienced here in Los Angeles and where so far there's been literally no media reporting about what the estimated number of casualties has been of so-called wild or free roaming animals that you know might get more into murkier territory, about intent, right, we've obviously failed to intervene in climate change processes that would reduce the risk of wildfire. But we also know in California that wildfire has been part of this landscape for seemingly as long as the landscape has existed. You know human activity is accelerating that and especially is accelerating the the way the fires move and the intensity of the fires, which presumably gives animals fewer opportunities to escape.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:um, but I, I think they're probably we wouldn't be talking about that so much as animicide yeah, and I think I mean just the lack of reporting there brought to mind a kind of key distinction you made also in the book is there's physical death but there's also social death. There's a kind of you know, I mean the social invisibility of animals here. But yeah, I think I mean I don't know if we have time to necessarily pry those apart here, but it is important to note that you can have social death, you can be disregarded socially, which is perhaps a form of dying. And Julian, do you have your quote ready for?
Julian Paul Keenan:us. I mean, my quote is very similar. It's Paola Prada-Tieterman, page 178, and she's talking about forensics. But she goes on to say this issue raises the question is the death of an animal ever justified to perform observations that will not directly help anyone in the immediate future? In other words, as we take on a godlike role, which we've sort of had for the last 10,000 years, right, how do we weigh our own existence versus the ability to have control over other animals and animal death? And I think that that is one of the things that I love about working with Katja and people like you, claudia, is like spurring, like OK, where are we drawing the line? You know, is it ever OK to kill another animal? Or do we go full Buddhist and say it's never OK to actually try to have some sort of meaningful discussion about what is okay and what is not okay? I'll leave it there. It's a great point.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think the idea of drawing lines often the social sciences. We're not too fond of lines and boundaries. I think we like to-.
Julian Paul Keenan:No, we're not.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:At that set. I think, from a justice perspective, lines are pretty important. Figuring out where those lines are is it's not easy and there's going to be disagreements, but I think that is an important part of the project is where do we draw our lines and what do we expect of our different societies. And yeah, I think that's a really important point. All right, folks, thank you so much for your time and for indulging me with understanding all of these different concepts and ideas. Before we close, perhaps you could tell the listeners a little bit about what you're currently working on and, if they want to get in touch with you about some of your work, how they can do so. Julian, why don't we start with you and then we'll end with Pacha?
Julian Paul Keenan:Sure, my next book is coming out with Cambridge University Press and it's on how to do neuroscience at an economically challenged institution, so it's a very different book. But I'm also working on a project that involves the potato and, like animals, the potato has been very coveted because of its energy richness. So the potato has been exploited to the point of what we've seen, with animals backfiring right. So we've seen amazing famines caused by the monoculture of the potato, the most famous being the great hunger in Ireland and just like the meat industry coming back and, you know, causing death and disease and exploitation, et cetera that we see in the meat industry, the potato is also in a very similar position. It's coveted, but it's also come back to hurt us in a lot of ways. So if you're interested in contacting me, I'm at Montclair State University in beautiful New Jersey, united States, and we accept donations to further research. We are a minority-dominated university, so anyone who wants to send money our way feel free.
Katja M. Guenther:Thank you so much for having us, claudia. I am currently working on two projects. One of the projects focuses on intersections of power and inequality and placemaking in the context of human relationships with two different groups here of cats excuse me, two groups of cats here in the Los Angeles area, one of them Pumas, also known here locally we call them mountain lions most of the time and community cats or so-called feral cats. And I'm really working to bring together ideas from feminist animal studies and queer ecologies and urban ethnography and also disability studies to look at how different human-created structures of inequality are shaping the human-animal entanglements with those two types of cats the pumas and the feral cats and in turn how those entanglements help define the place of the city of Los Angeles. And by place I'm referring to, like the sense of identity or belonging or character that humans ascribe to geographically bounded areas.
Katja M. Guenther:And I'm really particularly honing in on how Pumas today are now recognized as native or indigenous residents that demand conservation support, whereas in the past they had been viewed as pest animals who were retarding sort of the progress of Western conquest by white settlers who were, inversely, the community cats who were brought to the United States by those same white settlers now are being viewed as pest animals who need to be managed or annihilated. So that's one project. The other one is a different kind of project. It's more of a manifesto and a scholarly examination. Working title is simply Against Animal Shelters and it is a book detailing and arguing why the sheltering model of caring for unhoused companion animals doesn't work and that trying to reform animal shelters both in the United States and other countries is really a form of magical thinking and that we need to do away with animal shelters altogether as institutions and embrace some other more radical ways of reimagining human care for animals who are temporarily unhoused.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I love it guys. I want to buy that book. From neuroscience potatoes to thinking about animal shelters and placemaking yeah, it all sounds really interesting. I want to buy both of them. I want to buy all three. I need to learn a bit more neuroscience at the beginning. I think we know more about stars in the galaxies than our own brains, which is I mean, no, you didn't say that, I just said that, but we know more about stars in the galaxies than we do our own brains, which I think is pretty remarkable.
Katja M. Guenther:And I should add that I'm a faculty member at the University of California in Riverside. Yeah, I'm happy to hear from folks. My email address is just my first name, which is spelled K-A-T-J-A at UCRedu.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wonderful. Well, thank you both of you for joining me on the show and for being so generous with your time and thoughts.
Julian Paul Keenan:I do.
Katja M. Guenther:Thank you so much.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you, katya and Julian, for being wonderful guests today, To Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the bed music. Thank you also to Animals in Philosophy, politics and Law and Ethics. Apple for sponsoring the show. This episode was hosted, edited and produced by myself. This is the Animal Turn with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.
Julian Paul Keenan:This is another iRaw podcast.
