The Animal Turn

S8E2: (Mis)representation and Activism with Christopher Eubanks and Carrie Freeman

• Claudia Hirtenfelder • Season 8 • Episode 2

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Carrie Freeman and Christopher Eubanks join Claudia on the show to explore animal (mis)representation in media. They examine some of the ways in which animals are represented in activist messaging and the interconnections of animal rights with other social justice movements.

 

Date Recorded: 29 February 2025 

 

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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Modern Language, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media, & Commun

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The Pollination Project empowers volunteers across by providing the funding they need.

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Siobhan O'Sullivan:

This is another iRaw podcast. We podcast to make the world a better place for animals.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, and I also think that I thought about. I'm thinking about the misrepresentation that comes along with these big federal government subsidies. So obviously we're never paying the true cost or people that consume the animal products are never paying the true cost. But also the narrative is much different for individuals that need subsidies or support from the government. We often look at them, as you know people that can't do in their life, or welfare queens, and they're having all of these babies and you know they're getting all this federal assistance, when the vast majority of the income that comes from animal ag is from the government and it is framed in a totally different way. It's framed, as you know, everyday workers that are, you know, doing the best that they can for their families and providing food for America and the world, but they are getting the largest sums of money from the government and the people that are, you know, getting the federal assistance government housing. That's a fraction of what we're giving these large organizations and entities.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Welcome back to the Animal Turn everyone. This is episode two of season eight, where we're focused on animals and media, but we have the added ambition of thinking about that in the relationship with notions of difference primarily race, that in the relationship with notions of difference primarily race. My guests today, carrie Freeman and Christopher Saul Eubanks, are well equipped to help us think through these intersections, and we focus on a massive concept of representation, or misrepresentation if you prefer. While we started out quite broadly, we found ourselves gravitating in the conversation towards a consideration of how misrepresentation and activism interpolate in media, and it was exciting, to say the least. So a little bit about my guests. Carrie Freeman is a professor of communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta and researches and teaches strategic communication for activists, environmental communication and critical animal and media studies. Her award-winning books include the Human-Animal Earthling Identity, some of which we speak about today, as well as Framing Farming Communication Strategies for Animal Rights, the not-to-mention co-edited anthology, critical Animal and Media Studies, communication for Non-Human Animal Advocacy. Together with Deborah Merskin, who will also make an appearance this season, carrie helped to write style guides, which aim to give media practitioners ideas and tools with which to think about how animals can be better represented. Carrie also serves as a faculty advisor for GSU's animal rights group, the Peace Club, and is a co-host of In Tune to Nature, a radio show on Radio Free Georgia, so she is fully involved in media and thinking about the relationships between media and activism and animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Christopher, also known as Saul Eubanks, is a social justice advocate, international public speaker and non-profit director. Raised in Atlanta, he has dedicated himself to doing advocacy work that advocates for collective liberation. After learning about the horrors of animal exploitation, christopher became vegan and began doing community organizing to help co-organize Atlanta's first ever animal rights march. He has spoken across the globe about animals, their rights and their interconnections with communities. Christopher has been featured in Boxer's Media's Future Perfect 50, a series that highlights 50 individuals around the world composed of thinkers, activists and scholars who are working on solutions for today and tomorrow's biggest problems.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Apex Advocacy, a non-profit animal rights organization that teaches grassroots activism and creates various campaigns to empower Black, indigenous and people of color to advocate for animal rights. So these two, christopher and Carrie, know each other. You're going to see this and hear it in the episode. They're from Atlanta, which is where the symposium took place earlier this year, and they feed off one another in really interesting ways and, yeah, I just really enjoyed this conversation. So that's also just a reminder that this season is part of a board of projects which included the symposium, but also a special issue focused on media, race and animals, and that was headed by Natalie Pazal, tobias Linner and Ellen Gosefsky.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

In turn, this season was jointly sponsored by the Pollination Project, the School of Modern Language, the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the School of Literature, media and Communication at Georgia Tech University, as well as our longtime sponsor, animals in Philosophy, politics, law and Ethics, apple. If you want to talk to me more about potentially sponsoring a future season of the Animal Turn or you want to feature the Animal Turn in grant applications to speak about knowledge dissemination, for example, please feel free to shoot me an email so that we can discuss this in detail. My hope is that the Animal Turn serves as a pedagogical tool, and that includes being there on the base at the start of projects, design and creation. So give it some thoughts and reach out to me if you've got some ideas. Anyway, for those of you who are not in the research space and thinking about that, uh, thank you for tuning in and listening.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I think that thinking about misrepresentation in media is just generally important for us to do, and if you enjoy the show and have a spot of time to leave a review, that would be so great, really appreciate it. You can do it on Podchaser, apple Reviews and, I'm not mistaken, on Spotify now too. I need to double check that, but yes, I'm pretty sure it's certain you can. There are loads of places to do it Rank rate, do all those things that help make us calculable and measurable in a world of calculable and measurable things. So thank you so much for listening to the show, for leaving reviews, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, carrie and Christopher, it's lovely to have you on the show. Welcome to the Animal Town Podcast.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Great to be here.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, welcome, welcome, welcome. I think this is going to be a fascinating season where we're focused on media and power, and not just media and power media power and how it intersects, I think, with a whole bunch of both social justice and environmental justice issues, but also matters related to identity like race, gender, class and, of course, species. So I'm delighted to have you both on the show today, because you both have expertise in these areas, so I'm looking forward to learning from you. But perhaps my listeners don't know that much about you. I find that hard to believe, but perhaps they don't. So could you maybe, just here at the start, give us a little bit of a sense of who you are and what your interests are in animals? Chris, why don't we start with you?

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, sure, thanks. I'm glad to be here. My name is Christopher Eubanks. I was born in Cincinnati, ohio, raised in Atlanta, georgia. I've been doing animal activism for about almost eight years now, been vegan for about eight and a half, almost nine years and I was vegetarian when I was younger. I didn't consume animals' bodies. For about 10 years I read the autobiography of Malcolm X and that kind of introduced me into the concept of not consuming animals. Because he didn't eat pigs. He was mindful as a devout Muslim about what he put in his body. So the concept of not consuming animals is a gate. That was a big introduction for that. Then later on in life I decided, ok, I really want to look into veganism and learn more about veganism, and I saw the film Cowspiracy, went vegan that same day or went plant based that same day.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

The same day.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Wow yeah, wow yeah. Because at the time I thought I was like being really great with being an environmentalist and I was like, oh, I'm consuming this product that really does harm these products that does a lot of harm to the environment. So, yeah, went vegan the same day, then started learning more about the veganism and obviously I started seeing more about the connection to animal rights. So within the next year I became fully vegan and then started to participate in local grassroots activities in Atlanta around animal rights. I was affiliated with a few organizations whether doing things with PETA, mercy for Animals, the Humane League and that kind of got my feet wet into being involved in animal advocacy. I will say within a few years I began to develop into a bit of a leader in the Atlanta animal rights space. I was organizing for a lot of the local organizations and I just started to see that the community in Atlanta there was some diversity in terms of racial diversity, but largely there was still a great opportunity to have more racial equity and diversity within the animal advocacy landscape.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

So that's when I started my nonprofit Apex Advocacy and we'd work to get more people of color involved in animal advocacy. So that's a quick rundown, I guess, of my history and kind of how I am, how I got to where I am now.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

When did you launch Apex?

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

At the end of 2020. So right in the, I guess, heart of the pandemic.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It's incredible how much visibility you've managed to get both you, christopher, and the organization Apex Advocacy in a relatively short period of time. Like I know your Instagram profile, I know that you're very active with speaking at a variety of different events and I'd say that you've become a leader beyond just Atlanta. Across the world, people kind of know your name as a vegan activist, which is a pretty remarkable feat in a couple of short years. Do you think it's your incredible personality and organization skills that have you? I do.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, I think it's a combination of things, I think.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Initially, I've always been really good with wording things.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Just to kind of toot my own horn, I've been a bit of a wordsmith so I started using social media to speak out for animal rights. So I developed Twitter at the time it was Twitter, now it's X but I was using Twitter a lot to speak out in different ways for animal rights and a lot of my tweets started getting a lot of notoriety, started seeing them on different platforms and I started growing and had tens of thousands of followers and I was also doing a lot of grassroots organizing. So I was, you know, very visible online but very visible in the community, organizing vigils and doing vegan outreach. So I think the combination of those and obviously there's not a lot of black men in positions of power or that are known for animal advocacy so I think all of these things kind of compel people to reach out to me, contact me and, yeah, and I started Apex under that guy. So I think all of those things were like a combination of what kind of compel, I guess? Follow me and support the work that we do.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I'm really looking forward to jumping more into this a bit later, because I do think it's related and attached to what we're talking a bit about today the idea of representation slash misrepresentation Because I do think a lot of folks are surprised to learn that when it comes to a plant-based diet, there's a higher proportion of black people who are more likely to be plant-based than white people. Yet when it comes to representing veganism or even just people's kinds of imagined ideas of who is constituted as a vegan or plant-based eater, that's not the case. It's often thought to be a very white lifestyle, often missing the politics of what veganism is. Somehow it's like they imagine a woman in yoga pants walking down the streets eating her plant-based food, and the politics of both animals, I think, and of the representation of meat eating is often invisible here. So I wonder, just like you say, you being a black man who is also speaking out about the connections between race and species where it just resonated with a lot of people, I think.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Oh yeah, I believe. So. I believe that was one of the various things, because I think I had a certain level of authenticity when it came to addressing these issues, instead of maybe it not being as many people in the past, Although there are some incredible advocates, you know, Omowale Adewale is the one person that comes to mind, whether it's Dr Breeze Harper there are tons of people that have done it but for some reason, when you look at the larger picture, they are far and few of the voices, far of the many, only a few of the many voices that are, I guess, looked at or seen as people that advocate for animal rights. So yeah, I think that is very true for sure.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah. So, Carrie, let's talk a little bit about you. I know that you are a fellow podcaster and someone who talks about animals often, but also a scholar and someone who's thought about animals and media a fair deal. So why don't you tell us a little bit about you and how you came to be interested in animals?

Carrie Freeman:

Yeah well, like Chris, I started out as an activist, and so I think a lot of us start out by figuring out that we don't like the way animals are being treated and then we realize we're implicated in that and we probably need to stop eating them. And we're like, oh shoot, that's difficult. But I did go vegetarian in 1993 and then vegan in 1996. And I got involved in the animal rights movement when I was at University of Florida in the early 90s as an undergraduate and so just continued as an activist. But I was working in like nonprofit and corporate jobs and I wanted to have that activism be more part of my job. So then I decided I would go into academia and research about it and so I just chose to stick with the media, because that was also. I had a communication major from before. So I was like so I see it as the cultural route to change.

Carrie Freeman:

But within academia there really wasn't much animal rights activism being studied in the media realm or the media and journalism. It usually fell more into philosophy and law at the time and now it's really expanded out and maybe sociology and stuff. So it wasn't the most obvious track, but but so I. I did my master's thesis on farmed animals and how they were covered in the news, and then when I got my doctorate at University of Oregon, I studied vegan advocacy like the kind of literature that Chris and I might leaflet of, like the why Vegan pamphlets and the factory farming literature and was making strategic recommendations to activists related to that and also just studying, yeah, media representation more largely. So sometimes I'm looking at the way media makers talk about us as activists and fellow animals, or sometimes I'm recommend.

Carrie Freeman:

I'm studying how we as activists talk about ourselves and other animals and what we should be doing, but I'm always very prescriptive and everything that I write I don't just describe and critique things.

Carrie Freeman:

I like to tell people what to do, and so the activist side of me, so there's always a recommendation, whether it's for activists or the media in that.

Carrie Freeman:

And then I had written a book that came out in 2020 that was called the Human-Animal-Earthling Identity Shared Values of the Human Rights Movement, Animal Rights Movement and Environmental Movements, trying to find ways that we could work together to bring kind of progressive causes for all living beings together, and because oftentimes I see animal rights as kind of this isolated movement that gets marginalized and I want us to be more included, and but the big theme throughout my research is also and it'll come up on our conversation today how humans can think of themselves more as part of the animal kingdom and that if we don't shift that mindset, we're not going to get anywhere. If we keep such a strict separation between the human and other animal species, especially like a hierarchical where the humans are the most important on top and then the other animals are kind of somewhere down there, we're never going to get past our problems of exploitation. So those are the things that I study, but I'm usually studying the environmental movement and the animal rights movement together and making recommendations on how we can do better.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And I really love this idea of how you're mobilizing earthling. We had a conversation on the show before speaking about animals and media and of course I think representation did come up. But we were talking about contagion contagion in popular media, because often this kind of boundary marking happens with using disease discourses right, the animals are dirty or they're sick or the reason why a pandemic emerged, or like they're easy to blame. But they're often just plot fillers in these movies. There's very rarely a kind of real engagement with thinking about why the animals were in the lab in the first place. Or mad, why did mad cow disease emerge in the first place? They're just kind of great, vapid, quick plot filler.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

But I really like how you use earthling because earthling is something that often comes up in popular media, right where aliens would come to us and say hello, hello, earthling, and it's. It's a beautifully equalizing um concept in the realm of everyone's walk, speaking about human and non-human animals and human, animal and like there's all of these trying to conflate human and animal into a single concept, but earthling kind of just says well, there's all of these trying to conflate human and animal into a single concept, but earthling kind of just says, well, we're all of earth right yeah, although and when I say earthling, that brings in the plant and and ecosystem part of it too.

Carrie Freeman:

of course, everyone can think of earthling. If you want to think of it as someone who is an earthling, then it brings it back into the animal realm. But I was thinking when I used the term earthling in the human animal earthling identity. I was thinking that we're okay, first we're part of the human race and species and then we're part of the larger animal kingdom, but as an earthling we're a species among many who live in ecosystems on this planet. So just trying to expand our own identity out to not only include the fact that we're an animal but that we're among plants and like we all are needed and nobody is kind of more important than anyone else, really, yeah, yeah, that like hierarchicalization oh my God the hierarchical.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Whatevericalization, oh my god the hierarchical, whatever. You know what I mean. It is a hard word hierarchicalization and of of different species, and of course, it's not only humans that are represented as being above in in film. This is challenged oftentimes, I think in um, like children's films or where, but where they've created animals that are very human-like, like they've got human qualities and human jobs, and in general, I find the more animalistic a character is in a child's film, the less likely they are to speak, for example, or the less smart they often are. Anyway, this is going down a different rabbit hole, but I think as soon as you start to ask about hierarchies, really interesting ideas come forward. So why don't we switch now? Thank you, you both have incredible stories and, carrie, I do want to hear more about your podcast as we progress, maybe towards the end of the episode.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

But let's talk now about misrepresentation. So, again, thinking misrepresentation, with the miss also kind of brackets it off. So we're thinking a little bit about representation. So maybe, before we go to the negative, let's talk about representation. If you were to think about how both of you with your activist backgrounds, how animals are represented in media, and maybe let's talk in particular about activist media. What would your initial thoughts be? What would your ideas be in terms of how they are represented?

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, when I think about how animals are represented in, I would say, do you mean specifically in the animal rights space or in media in general?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Any way you want to think about it, as someone who's been really engaged in a variety of activist spaces because this is not only a tension, I think, across different movements, but also sometimes, at least for me I find animals somehow often get obfuscated or made invisible in discourses about veganism. It's often surprising to me how often I'll see literature talking about veganism or pamphlets promoting the kind of healthfulness of a vegan diet, for example, with zero mention of animals. So that's them. I think that's a misrepresentation in my view of veganism. But then I'm trying to think well, how are animals represented in this kind of literature? How are they included? And of course, many of the violent imagery comes to mind. For me this seems to be a common tactic in activist media.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, I think actually, as you mentioned, that one thing that comes to mind often when I think about how animals are represented in the larger animal rights space. I think in our efforts to want to be more impactful and do more for the animals, we often begin to view them as numbers and quantify them and we lose kind of the quality of who they are as individuals. I remember, Leah Garza, we had an animal rights march in 2020, I believe yeah, that was the first one, no 2019. It was right before the Wright Report. Covid.

Carrie Freeman:

Yeah, well, yeah, chris, organized Atlanta's first animal rights march, so that's what you're referring to, right, Chris?

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, Yep, yeah, yeah, exactly, I remember you being there and so many students from GSU and just Atlanta in general. But I remember she Leah Garza is president of Mercy for Animals. She was a guest speaker there and she gave a speech about, you know, animal suffering and the total amount of animals that get killed. But then she highlighted, she told us to close our eyes and she gave a story about one particular animal and everything that they had endured in their lifetime before they became food, and the process of them being slaughtered and separated from their family. And at the end she added okay, now magnify that by you know, 10, 20 billion.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

And it really helped to, I guess, help identify sometimes how we start to lose plight of the individual as we're advocating, even as people that are caring for these issues and advocating for animals. A lot of times animals get lumped into numbers and I think it is impactful to know the numbers and be able to highlight the quantity of what is happening and the suffering and the scale, Even as animals are. Even the amount of animals that are killed is technically in the trillions and maybe even more. Who knows? Technically into trillions and maybe even more, who knows? But we only can kind of quantify the animals that we have in our systems. In regards to the farmed animals, those are the ones that we can kind of highly quantify.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

But ultimately I think that we in the animal advocacy space sometimes lose the connection with the individuals in our search to be more effective and stronger and impactful and kind of reduce animals to numbers to you know, achieve the goals of our advocacy or organizations, and I don't think it's something that's done intentionally at times, but I do think that the animal advocacy space deals with from time to time.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

That's such an important point because I think part of the reason why numbers have become so important in these discourses is because many of the animals we're talking about farmed animals are not counted as individuals. So I think it's been a matter of trying to make the individuals. Ironically, it's been a move to try and make the individuals known. Do you know what I mean? Because often, when it comes to speaking about agricultural animals, they're not spoken about in terms of numbers slaughtered. They're spoken about in terms of weight slaughtered, right, Especially with fish. Yeah, it's the ton of fish, right. So when you start to actually do so, I mean it's just. It's a very interesting observation because I think it was a strategic move to make the numbers of individuals known.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

But, like you said, it has a different kind of emotive effect when you, like I, can't even think about what a million is, and then, to try and get my head around what a trillion is, I saw someone do a really incredible Instagram video the other day to try and explain the difference between someone who's earning an average salary in America, someone who's earning a million, and someone who's earning a billion, and they used a grain of rice to kind of show these differences, and the difference between a million and a billion is, I mean, it's, it's, it's. I think our brains tend to think about it as being like double, you know it's maybe like twice. No, it's orders of magnitude bigger, right, and then you start to speak about trillions. So there is something powerful in that, but I think you're right. It's perhaps most powerful when you connect it to that individual story. That really cuts home. Carrie, do you have something to add to it?

Carrie Freeman:

Well, yeah, this makes me think that a lot of times in the animal rights movement we're trying to show that, oh, this is so important. Look how many animals are affected. So it's millions. But when people don't really care about one animal, it's like they don't care that we're killing billions of chickens, whether it's 10 billion, whether it's 20 billion, whether it's 20, whether it was 500, like it doesn't really matter, because they it's not that important, it's not wrong. So that's the. I think that's what's so frustrating to to us in the movement.

Carrie Freeman:

Um, of course, even like if you watch television shows and you just see people, or on the news, the extent that we go to save one human life and I think that is noble and that is what we all should be doing their meeting or for dinner. But they went out of their way to save the life of even somebody like on a crime drama, who is like causing harm to other humans, but that person's life is more important than any chicken that they're eating. And I'm not trying to say that one is more important than the other. I'm just saying that so long as we continue to eat other animals needlessly when it is needless, we basically said their lives don't matter. So whether we kill, you know, a thousand of them, ten billion, a trillion, it doesn't really matter.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I'm not sure people I think people do think animals lives matter. I think they tend to act kind of in contradiction to what they, what they so and if they were confronted with that lamb, or then, yes, they would, but I also think so.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

coming back to representation here, like how the animals are represented in the media, is also important, right? So when it's your beef being represented, they're kind of detached. There's no real representation of cows. It's a commodity that's being represented. But then you often have in the news stories these animals who escape, and it's remarkable how much the public who eat these animals on a day-to-day basis, get behind the escapee. They're like they don't want to eat that animal, that cow, but it's because I think that cow story has been told differently.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

That cow story has not been told as a cow as a commodity. That cow story has been told cow is escapee, and so I mean I think there's something there in terms of tapping into. I don't know.

Carrie Freeman:

I don't know. I don't know what the cow's agency is. Desire for freedom is something that we can relate to Exactly. Yeah, and you know, and maybe we see them as heroic. I remember Saturday Night Live did a skit years ago that was so funny, where they were trying to sell meat but they were claiming that the meat was always from animals who had bad personalities and were mean and so it was like OK to eat them because they were jerks and so, and I actually thought that was really telling satire oh, it's, all those great stuff yeah yeah, I was like, yeah, okay, maybe you know it's okay to kill them, um, because we don't like them.

Carrie Freeman:

But it also highlighted that we don't know who we're eating.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

We never know who we're eating and their stories are lost yeah, I, I did see I think it was someone from Veg News at the recent climate change conference going up to people at the conference saying what saves more fish not using plastic straws or not eating fish? People refused to answer the question or they just said plastic straws which and this is at a climate change conference. So the kind of willful at this point, I think it's willful. There are different scales here of, I think, willful, ignorance or actually just sometimes people are just it's not something you think about. I really do think for many people it's just not something they think about, just it's not something you think about. I really do think for many people it's just not something they think about. But at a climate change conference, that's a different league of person where I'm expecting a lot more from you and your response.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, it's funny that I think I've seen a video of that before or like a highlight of that before. But yeah, the fact that they are even serving these things at these events, that some of these you know quote unquote progressive events, is startling. It just shows that we have a lot more work to do. And I guess you know one thing as we're talking about this you know, initially I was thinking about how the misrepresentation of animals in the animal advocacy space leads advocates to I don't want to say care less, but I think as we began to view them more as numbers, I think the psychology of what we work on and you know what initiatives we champion begin to alter because we're thinking more now about larger numbers instead of as much as individuals. But I also think that you know there's an opportunity as we spoke about the pig that escaped the slaughter truck to recalibrate people's perception of how they view animals.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

I think you know if more people viewed cows and pigs as individuals that are as worthy of life as their dogs and cats, then, you know, maybe our society would feel more about these pigs and farm animals and feel in similar ways about them as we do dogs and cats that are a part of our family.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

So I think even there's a misrepresentation when most people think about farmed animals. They don't really think about them as individuals. They kind of think about them as the free version of the packaged thing that they buy in the grocery store. So automatically a disconnection. But if, who knows, I think this is a, you know, maybe a million dollar, trillion dollar question how do we as an animal advocacy community connect more the individuals that are living inside of these bodies as pigs and cows? How do we connect that to everyday people? Because there is a really big disconnect. So I think there's a misrepresentation there and some of that has been done intentionally, you know, by factory farming and the companies and businesses that profit off of their bodies, to keep people thinking that these are individuals that exist for more than just our consumption and pleasure and commodification.

Carrie Freeman:

Building off what Chris is saying and also going back to your point, claudia, about the comments with the fish and the climate movement. This reminds me of like Dr Jennifer Jaquette has written. She writes a lot about marine animals and just she's trying to get our government agencies and scientists to stop referring to other to marine animals kind of as stock, you know, or as like seafood, and to recognize like if we don't recognize individual fish as part of the ecological system and as individuals who deserve to live, not saying that some people and sometimes might not, and some other animal species are going to eat various marine animals, but we tend to look at them as a food source, and I think that's what's happening at that climate conference is we're thinking more in anthropocentric terms all the time. So then, when you're referring to fish, the most important thing is that people have enough fish to eat or to make a living fishing, and I don't wanna diminish the fact that for some people in some parts of the world, that may be the main thing they have to eat, and so but in terms of commercial fishing, and someone just going in and just getting as many fish bodies as they can to sell them in the marketplace for profit. That's a very different issue.

Carrie Freeman:

And so the environmental movement just thinking of fish as like a commodity instead of a member of the ecosystem, like that I mean I know like maybe when it comes to octopus or dolphins or mammals and stuff, we have that reverence, but when it comes to the smaller animals or the crustaceans and the fish species, we tend to, you know, put them in a broader category.

Carrie Freeman:

But a lot of it stems from just thinking in terms of us, like what do we need? And I, because even the marine organizations, will still say people need fish for protein, and they won't acquiesce that there might be other ways that a large portion of the population could get their protein. They just kind of acquiesce that, oh, the fishing industry needs to remain. Maybe we should put some restraints on it, but they're there. So I think that's part of why people are hesitant to say to anyone you can't eat other animals, because they think they might be insulting other humans who need to do that or relating to their livelihood. And it's more important not to insult humans than it is to promote and respect other animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, you touched on so many important points there, you know, I think I think I mean many agricultural animals are called stock. But I think we find relating to and comprehending fish and fish experiences particularly difficult. And I remember reading Jonathan Balcombe's book where I mean it's one of my favorite facts where he just says in the opening page of what a Fish Knows, there are more species of fish than there are mammals, amphibians and birds combined. Now just think about that, right. Think about the difference between a human and a lion and a giraffe. Think about the extent of variety amongst just mammals. Now, there is an ocean of variance. With fish it's like another planet.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It is it's different experiences different ways of seeing and feeling and comprehending their world, and it's marvelous and it's incredible. But I think, as much as we struggle to see many animals for their own sake, fish, because it is in some ways a different world, it seems unrelatable, I think really do struggle, and because we don't perhaps see it or experience it in the same ways. But I think what you touched on there with regards to the community impacts of these practices is really important. So, christopher, I know that you've spoken about this when it again.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

When it comes to thinking about the entanglement of different issues, carrie, you're right, animals are somehow weirdly invisible in the environmental justice movement or conversations about how we can protect the environment. Somehow, animals, somehow there's this climate, but animals are not really included, unless they're endangered. Yes, exactly so like if you've got a polar bear who's represented of and they are struggling. It's not that polar bears are not struggling, but yeah, they're kind of used as metaphors for what I don't know. I don't know. But also this like community impact and how different communities are impacted differently by these choices. You know, some people live very close to slaughterhouses and have to deal with just the stench of being near these places. Right, and this is, I think I mean environmental racism. This is 100 percent that.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, yeah, I've spoken about this often and you know, kerry, I kind of spoke about this a bit when I visited GSU and, you know, spoke there recently. But yeah, it's so many factors I have to have a whole section in my presentation where I initially talk about, you know, animal rights and the fact that these are living sentient beings and you know the fact that they deserve equity and ownership over their existence. But then I kind of conclude halfway through my presentation about why does this actually matter to us? Like sure, it's great that you know I have this understanding that I view animals as individuals that deserve, you know, ownership over their existence, animals as individuals that deserve, you know, ownership over their existence and they deserve the right to be free from harm and exploitation. But then I try to censor it and say, okay, you know it is unfortunate for us that that for animals that that's an issue of life and death, but for us it's an inconvenience, it's something that really doesn't. You know, whether I eat an animal or don't eat an animal, for most people in their everyday life, things may or may not change. So I try to start speaking about, okay, why is this actually important?

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

And I speak about a lot of the things that are impacted by, you know, factory farming and people living next to capels, centralized animal feeding operations, and a lot of environmental racism is caused due to the large scale production of factory farms.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

And there's a great movie called the Smell of Money which I've also shown at Georgia State University and it talks specifically about a small Black community that was dealing with a lot of land sovereignty issues because a lot of the factory farms and the largest producers of pork and beef in the world pretty much stole people's land to set up factory farms and it was literally in their backyard. So you know cows and pigs, they don't have toilet bowls and septic tanks, so all of that waste and manure it sits in these big, large fields and it grows and you know there's no proper filtration system. So these factory farms were spraying the feces and the urine into the backyards of the community. And this is a large black community and you know that that's one example of the environmental racism component. But also another component is the psychological toll that is being impacted on people that are doing the work of slaughter. These are facilities that aren't located Like you won't find slaughterhouses near football stadiums or you want to find them in low-income, black and brown and rural communities.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Have your next climate conference next to a slaughterhouse facility and have it sitting outside.

Carrie Freeman:

That'll be eye-op opening. Please do that.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

And so the people that are in these jobs are, you know, typically low income. They don't have a lot of opportunities in life, they don't have a lot of education. So that's the pool of candidates that are typically doing the work of slaughter. Candidates that are typically doing the work of slaughter and, as your, as this job is meant to kill, you know, hundreds or thousands of bodies a day. Think about the psychological toll of that. So we're putting low income.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

you know, black and brown and people in the rural communities that don't have access to education, don't have hire education and we're essentially forcing them to commit acts of violence for days, months, years. And as you, you have to live with that. You don't just compartmentalize, you know cut off, you know two or 300 chicken heads a day for work and go home. You know that lives with you, even if you just do it for one day, for one hour. I met slaughterhouse workers or someone that was interviewing for a slaughterhouse job, walk in, see the operation and then say you know, this isn't for me, I can't do this as I was protesting. So I guess I think about how all of that actually impacts the people in the community, and more than just the health, but also the psychological toll that it takes.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And I mean so. It speaks to racialized geographies, it speaks to racialized labor practices, right? So, like the one, I was living in Canada when COVID hit and the one set of people who were still allowed to kind of enter Canada were migrant laborers who were picking fruits and working on farms to, you know, having to actually be to use, you know, in a space that leads to a lot of injuries, a lot of psychological trauma, and it's not evenly distributed amongst different groups. I think. I think that's blatantly clear.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

You know, when I come across my friends that are very much interested in social justice movements but not in animal rights, I say to them well, this is a social justice, like, if you're concerned with labor rights, if you're concerned with the rights of women, if you're concerned with the rights of men, if you're concerned with the rights of people of color, you should be thinking about slaughterhouses, you should be thinking about the ways in which they operate, how your food is made, but somehow food is depoliticized. Or do you find Carrie and Christopher? Do you find these kinds of nuanced representations of these connections in media? Do you find this kind of representation emerging?

Carrie Freeman:

I would say it often is kind of bifurcated and it can be even not only on the news but even within movements, like if it's a vegan movement. We would focus on the pigs in that situation that Chris is talking about and we may mention the people in the community who are poisoned by that as well, about the farm workers and the neighborhoods and how humans are impacted. But then sometimes, if you're coming at it from the standpoint of how the humans are impacted, there's very little mention of, like the hundreds or thousands of pigs in that farm, because it becomes almost insulting to the humans to, according to our the way we elevate human life over other animals' lives, to even kind of give much credence to the lives I mean we might. There might be a slight nod to oh that the pigs are treated horribly in this farm too, but I feel like is there needs to be a way and that's what I tried to talk about in my human animal earthling identity book for all the movements to work together and to have a fairly equal concern for the individuals being farmed and for the people who are exploited in that process, and for the human rights and labor rights movements to show deference to all those individuals, as well as the vegan rights and animal rights movement, showing deference to all these individuals that if we took a more holistic way, whatever the problem is whether it's the climate or slaughterhouse issues or biodiversity issues there's a whole host of species who are affected, and humans are always negatively impacted, as well as non-human animals.

Carrie Freeman:

And like is there a way we can show concern for all of these beings at the same time? Like in the palm oil movement, you know like there's all kinds of slave labor and child labor, and then you have forest destruction for raising palm oil, and then we also know that the orangutans and other animals who live in those forests are affected. So it's good to mention all like that. These like to have maybe a common enemy in a way, like that these companies or these corporations trying to make money. They're exploiting so many beings, they're devaluing the lives of so many individuals who they see as expendable, and we need to show concern for all of them. And then we strengthen our own movements by then forming those alliances and not kind of acting like one entity is more important and then the other one is someone who could be overlooked, and not kind of acting like one entity is more important, and then the other one is someone who could be overlooked.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, actually this is a good question because there's something that I'm actually about to start working on, because I can't go into too many details as of now, but our organization is putting together an undercover investigation and it is about a variety of social justice issues. It's an issue I can say that it revolves, it addresses race, it addresses animal rights and, I can kind of say workers' rights too in a sense, but it is also speaking about the prison industry. So one of the things that we're trying to do is, when we put out this investigation and share the work. We were just talking the other day about media platforms that would be good partners or ones that we think would be interested in the way we're about to frame this conversation, and it wasn't a lot.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

We had a handful that came to mind, but there wasn't a strong group of outlets that we felt we could easily push this to. We have a few partners that we think are trusted and strategic, but it wasn't a lot that we felt would be able to share this in the way that we wanted to share. Also, actually, we actually thought our thinking about writing two versions of this undercover investigation one that appeals to, I guess, the more animal rights centric community community and then another one that appeals to more of the communities that are focused on prison reform. So even with the work that we're doing as a group that is working on how these issues intersect, we're not finding a lot of media outlets that we feel strong that can kind of tell the stories that we want to tell.

Carrie Freeman:

And Chris, I'm wondering in, like when you're telling that if you feel like you need the two versions, like one that appeals to people's interests in protecting humans if you it, maybe you could lead with that, but then still end really strong on kind of the non-human animal component, and then even vice versa for the vegan movement or animal rights, like start with the non-humans but end really strong so that they each get somewhat equitable attention. But maybe you're leading with the different one, rather than doing it in a way where we feel we need to minimize either the human suffering or the the farmed animal suffering to appeal, because I feel like if we do that we're just reinforcing that some are more important than others.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Exactly.

Carrie Freeman:

Yeah, but I totally get your. Challenge, though, is like how do we reach people when we're used to hearing things packaged mostly in an anthropocentric way?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

honestly, you mentioned the word they're framing, which I think is quite powerful, right, and I think this is maybe more symptomatic of a much broader debate where it's. You said bifurcation earlier, carrie and Christopher, you said framing, and I think that we've become so used to simple stories, simple narratives, that many of us have lost the kind of ability to be generous, to perhaps appreciate that people are going to make mistakes in this conversation and also to be open to making mistakes. I think people are terrified of making mistakes In having these conversations. I think people in the animal rights movements are really afraid of making mistakes when it comes to talking about other social justice movements. But I think people in animal rights movements are really afraid of making mistakes when it comes to talking about other social justice movements. But I think people in the social justice movements are worried that discussing animals might diminish the kind of focus on their cause. Same thing, same thing with animal rights.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

So there's this kind of protectionism and I think Corrie Lee Wren has done some really interesting work on kind of social mobilization where what she says is this kind of protection, this like boundary protection, is the one person and the one thing that it's actually helping is the industry that we're trying to fight. So you mentioned a villain earlier, but that said, carrie, I think it is difficult to kind of represent all of these things on an equal footing, in an equal way. I do think there is a perhaps room to be strategic and political with this, even if it means accepting a slack misrepresentation just because if you, at the end of the day, there's a material factor here beyond the representation, right, if you end factory farming, even in a specific place, you end factory farming even in a specific place, you end it for that community and those animals there. But is this just another animal welfare argument that sustains a much bigger picture? Obviously I don't have the answers to this. I'm just brain spitting at both of you.

Carrie Freeman:

Can I say in my dissertation, which turned into a book called Framing Farming, I was making the argument that at least if you're in the animal rights movement, you should be. What I was saying is ideologically authentic, in the sense that if your motivation is this particular form of species justice or interspecies justice, you don't necessarily try to placate by arguing don't eat meat because it'll lower your cholesterol or something like. But if that, if cholesterol, is your main concern, then go for it. Like then that should be. So part of it is about being authentic to who your organization is and what you represent, while still showing deference to all kinds of you know issues.

Carrie Freeman:

But but I totally get your point, claudia, and this is what we tend to do is be very utilitarian, like, okay, let's water down our message to appeal to meet people where they are, because they're anthropocentric and they're speciesist, and so we'll kind of diminish what's happening to the animals and talk about how we need to change things, mostly for the humans. But in doing so we're just kind of reinforcing the same ideology that we don't do things to help other animals, we do things to help humans. So that's why I feel like there has to be a way that we that, yeah, that we also do things, because what for moral responsibility towards the injustice towards other animals, and that we need to privilege that. And I will say, as who else is going to do that besides the animal rights movement? Like we do have to take the lead on that.

Carrie Freeman:

And if we shy away from that and still kind of focus on the human benefits, you know, to public health or or those kinds of things, then you know I guess we're still playing into that same cultural idea that humans are so much more important. But it you can also I get, claudia, that it can be difficult, and that's what I was trying to do with the framing farming book was finding a way to appeal to American society based on values they do care about, while foregrounding animal rights, the idea that we should not use anyone else as a means to an end, and just trying to link that to just different American ideals about liberty and freedom and justice. And so I'm also liking the term interspecies justice too, and I like also how you know, chris's Apex Advocacy group is framing veganism as like it's like a boycott of animal exploitation, it's not just a lifestyle.

Carrie Freeman:

So I think those things are important to politicize the food, as you said. It gets depoliticized like oh don't tell me what to eat, and that kind of thing, or this is just cultural. So if we aren't going to stand up and say that these speak frankly, that these lives of these individuals do matter, and not just always say only like only care about other animals if also benefits humans, you know that I feel like if nobody's doing that, we're just perpetuating the idea that they're not that important lastly said, I read a piece by will kimlick a couple of years ago where he called the animal rights movement the orphan on the left, which I thought was an interesting framing way um one of his.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

The argument he was making is that, in general, the animal rights movement is a social justice movement.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Right, it's saying there's something socially problematic in our society with regards to how humans interact with other species and it needs to be changed but that where different social rights movements tend to support each other not to say that they agree with everything all the time, but in general they have a shared vision right of where we are hoping to get to one day in terms of ideas of equality and fairness but that animal rights is often neglected in those conversations.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Has that been your experience or is this changing? Do you find that animal rights are increasingly actually part I mean, I loved it when Angela Davies came out and said she's a vegan and veganism has been a very important part of developing her ideas, but only now is it the right time to really say this out loud that you know there were other battles that needed to be done and that the world was not yet ready to have that kind of conversation. Do get the sense that the world and I mean I don't expect you guys to have all the answers and and if you get it wrong, I'm not gonna, you know, check up on you later, but in terms of how things are being represented and and how you're seeing different issues being represented, do you get the sense that the time is coming, that this is a good time.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

I guess I feel that it's becoming more and it's becoming. It's still hard to have these conversations and for people to be open to these concepts, but it is becoming easier to do so. So I know that may sound like it's a contradiction. It may not be as hard as it was five years ago, but it's still hard. And what I will say is I do see space for more people to. I see I'm starting to see more spaces where people are accepting of intersectional justice, where we can speak about multiple forms of oppression at one time or advocate for more than one form of oppression at a time.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Animal rights and the rights of non-human animals isn't very much high on that hierarchy, unfortunately, but I do think there's starting to be more conversation.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

One thing that I have seen in a bit of a shift towards making the rights of animals more mainstream is discussions around factory farming. It seems to be like a low-hanging fruit for the most part. You know you may see people that are in other social justice movements also be aware of the harms of factory farming. So I would say we're maybe gaining progress in that one specific area, but even then I still think the conversation is largely around the treatment of animals and factory farming treats animals wrong. Oftentimes, I feel that when I have these conversations or when I hear these conversations, the framing is we still need to eat animals. They're still inferior, we still have power and control over them, but we should do it in a better way, in a more ethical way. So, while we are making some progress overall, I don't think we're still. I think there's room for these conversations more so than ever, but it's still not a lot of room, unfortunately.

Carrie Freeman:

Yeah, I would agree with that. I know what you're talking about, chris, in the sense that especially the younger generation, because, like Chris mentions, he comes a lot to Georgia State University where I work and we have the Peace Club Animal Rights Group and he's been a frequent speaker and involved in activism on campus and so there's a lot of younger people that when you talk about veganism or animal rights they seem open to the idea. Veganism or animal rights they seem open to the idea. So it's not like they're laughing at me or him or you know when we're talking about these things. But I think if you start to compare it to other things that relate to humans, then people don't feel comfortable showing kind of an equity. There there's like the speciesism kind of arises because I think we're afraid to insult human groups accidentally by kind of doing this equation.

Carrie Freeman:

But when I look in my studies of some of the human rights movement or the environmental movement, but human rights in particular, I still think they do feel comfortable ignoring other animals with social justice movements and I mean you could argue like, ok, well, they're fighting for one species or maybe a human or one type of human in a particular context. So I get that that's industry. If they totally ignore that or like at times where a human rights movement would suggest that we should be gifting farmed animals to poor humans groups, you know, like so that they can make money off of their bodies. You're like, you're saying it's okay to like imprison this female to save this other female, but because they're different species, so they just. There's still a blind spot there where kind of anything that helps human groups, even if it hurts other animals, is still kind of okay, and that it gets to the root problem that we don't really see ourselves as part of the animal kingdom and with some equity, yeah, there. Now, when it comes to the environmental movement, they're naturally going to talk more about animals to some degree, because that's, you know, they've got the environmental movement has the most species they have to talk about, but they know that they're trying to get humans to change, so they have to talk a lot about humans.

Carrie Freeman:

And so still, if it comes to like the climate justice movement or something you're going to hear about climate refugees more often being humans, and that is definitely going to be true, and we see, even here in the United States with the different hurricanes and floods and fires. People are wanting to move around like I don't want to live here anymore. This is too dangerous, although I'm not sure where you can go where it isn't dangerous. But wild animals are also impacted and certainly the farmed animals who are trapped in these places are impacted. But but wild animals are impacted and they're refugees too.

Carrie Freeman:

And so often, I would say even in our vegan movement, when we talk about the environmental benefits of being vegan or vegetarian, sometimes we still leave out how it helps the wild animals, like that it saves their forests, and it's not just that like, oh, we can decrease the climate problem for us. You know, I feel like the climate problem is caused by us and we talk about the problems that all kinds of humans are facing and the inequities there, but also the inequities for climate. Justice is that all these other animals, species, did not do anything to cause this problem and they're impacted and we really don't care about them. And where they need to migrate, cause also, if they migrate, you know, outside of a park and like in certain States, they're just going to get killed, like if you're a wolf or a bear, and the spaces where they can move are increasingly limited, right?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

as the world is more urbanizing and these are all interconnected, right?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

As consumption patterns increase, um, you know, as, as and this is, this is a global phenomenon, like I just wrote down development and I circled it, because there is also this idea of the more developed a place becomes, the more consumption becomes a part of that identity, right? And I mean sorry, I've got like a bazillion thoughts now after what you just said because, in terms of crises, 100%, the ways in which we consume, of course, meat and dairy are directly related to the ways in which land is being taken away from other species, right, like there is a direct correlation here. The fires in Amazon, the destruction of the Amazon forest, is connected to the production of soy which, surprise, as you guys know, is not mainly eaten by vegans, it's mainly used to feed animals, right? So there are all of these interconnections with how different species and also the uptick of some species the kind of the ways in which crows are doing better than ever before and jellyfish are doing better than ever before is also connected to these kinds of ecological changes and it's all intertwined.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, as we talk about crises too, I think one thing that comes to mind when we think about animals either being misrepresented or not represented is animals that are caught in war and the content global conflict and how that never really gets addressed.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

When we speak about not necessarily body counts but, um, just this is something that I can't proclaim to have done tons of research about. But even as an animal rights activist that has a nonprofit and has been doing activism for you know, seven, eight years now, I really couldn't break down the details of how animals are suffering in war in great detail. You know whether it's, you know, animals in Ukraine, gaza or other parts of the world where there's high global conflict, the stories of animals are rarely covered by media and a lot of times even by us that are advocating, so I know there's something there that is going unaddressed, that isn't being addressed because they are. The numbers are probably so I don't want to say large, but so difficult to quantify or understand or the process to understand that it gets it's an afterthought and it's something that we just shy away from either addressing or attempting to detail, but it's something that you know.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

The animals don't even have any representation when it comes to global conflict 100%, and I think this goes back to what you mentioned earlier with regards to kind of factory farming, in terms of thinking about the ways in which animals and their justice issues are represented. Factory farming is low-hanging. It's low-hanging but it's important fruit, but there are, like you say, so many other debates and questions that need to be had. And now, thinking in terms of misrepresentation, what really frustrates me and angers me is you'll have animals that are really struggling in these conflict zones or crisis areas where there's fires, and it'll be a fluff piece at the end of a news story, right, there'll be the hard hitting news and then you'll have the two news anchors kind of having oh, and these people saved a mountain lion today, in, as though it's like a lighthearted piece.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And I just don't think that it's, given the Carrie to your point earlier, this kind of the seriousness with which these are serious. These are animals that no longer have anywhere else to go and I think that there's a disingenuousness to that, where the severity of the situation for those individuals is really not highlighted in any sort of significant way. You know, chris, as you said, it gets lost in the kind of numbers or the abstraction of nature. Nature is struggling. That animal's whole life, that animal's whole world has just gone up in flames.

Carrie Freeman:

And I think it goes back to my point before that people are afraid that if you show concern for other animal species' lives in a time where humans are obviously very impacted, that you're saying you don't have your priorities straight, you don't understand that humans are suffering or you've got some kind of privilege that makes you tone deaf or something like that, and so then we don't want to be accused of that and so then we don't want to be accused of that. So I think everybody just kind of dismisses it and just talks about rescuing people's cats and dogs from a fire or something, because ultimately, yes, you're saving the cats and dogs, but you're making the human guardians of those animals kind of happy as well. Like it, really there's a speciesist bias in the news, and this was something I even at my master's thesis back in early 2000s. I was pointing out that if the news wants to be more kind of objective and fair and they don't want to be biased, they have to recognize their bias towards human supremacy. And they don't even really acknowledge it. And it's an okay bias for them to have, because not many people besides me and Chris and you people are calling them out, except we have places now like Sentient Media, the Sentient Media organization that is trying to kind of counter this.

Carrie Freeman:

But I get really upset when you see these floods and hurricanes and stuff and you know how many like farmed animals are trapped in like a chicken warehouse, a poultry or chicken broileriler house and you really don't hear about it like we're. So they could say that from you know a certain hurricane, x number of humans were killed and that is a tragedy. But the number usually of non-human animals who are killed might be in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and like that just doesn even the fact that we don't report that as a tragedy means it's not a tragedy, apparently and it's. And then for those of us who try to make it a tragedy, we don't we're kind of seen as these people that don't understand how the world works or have the wrong priorities. So if we can't reshape things and the news media has to do this, they have to be part of it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

They have to show that all the lives in any crisis deserve to be mourned, yeah, and I'm happy you mentioned same-sex media there and also, like we Animals Media, because I think they've done a really good job of actually Vox and I was also doing really a lot of important reporting on.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I would say, the Guardian there's, the Guardian is doing a lot and the Guardian is mainstream, right. So the fact that you're starting and it's sometimes hard because you're in your own bubble and like I hear about the numbers of chickens that are being killed because there's specific reporters at the Guardian or at Vox that are making sure that these stories are told, but that's not really getting to everybody in the same way. But it is heartening to see that places like the Guardian it's actually one of my favorite sources because it's a variety of different content related to animals. But I take your point because I think you're right it's not given as much credence or visibility and unless, of course, we're starting to talk about the disruption of food chains, which I saw in Canada.

Carrie Freeman:

Yes, it's discussed as an economic issue, like how the farmers are impacted, and I think that's a legitimate thing you can talk about.

Carrie Freeman:

If people's livelihoods are impacted, go ahead and talk about it. But you also need to give credence to the fact that the hundreds of thousands of animals are trapped and then they suffocated to death or they drown or whatever happened, or crushed under the buildings. And so also, I want to make it so that we can push back yet again on the humane washing that the animal agribusiness industry does, as if they're caretaking for all these animals when there is no way they could ever take care when there is a problem, you see how they can't caretake and nobody could. Like it would be hard enough for me in a hurricane to deal with my one dog, elliot, if I had a thousand dogs, I can't, you know, I can't help my dogs in that situation. So I think that's another way we can reveal the cracks in their rhetoric about taking care of animals, because otherwise it just becomes an insurance write-off, like if there's any real problem and they can't feed them and you know, then they just kill them all or suffocate them all and then it's an endurance write-off, isn't?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

there some crazy stuff about subsidies in the US when COVID hits and all of the farmers needed to do those mass cullings of birds and the suffocation of birds. Correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, you guys both know the US context much better than I do, but aren't there massive subsidies being given to farmers that need to, you know, get rid of their stock? Quote unquote.

Carrie Freeman:

I do think that taxpayers pay to subsidize, yeah, farmed animal crises for the ag industry and one of the.

Carrie Freeman:

I don't really see that in the news, but one of the ways I think I found that out is because Cory Senator Cory Booker, who is one of our few vegan congresspeople and he's super awesome he had put together this Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act and even though it hasn't passed and honestly in our Congress it would never pass, but he's putting in all these things that say no, the have to have our meat.

Carrie Freeman:

And then some of the slaughterhouse workers were dying of COVID because while the rest of us were staying home, we forced them back into these tight quarters. So, like Cory Booker had all these things and the people who worked on that Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act to safeguard humans and non-humans and also to say where's our tax dollars going and to let people know how much we end up subsidizing. I wish that people had to pay the true cost of meat if they think the cost of eggs are high now, if they really had to pay to clean up all these neighborhoods and for all the waste and for the greenhouse gas emissions, if we quantified all that and put that and didn't subsidize it like, yes, this food would be very expensive, it should be expensive, and so then we should be eating more affordable foods like beans and peas and lentils and nuts and things.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

That's a key misrepresentation. I think that you've just touched on. The price itself is a misrepresentation, yeah.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, and I also think that I thought about. I'm thinking about the misrepresentation that comes along with these big federal government subsidies. So obviously we're never paying the true cost, or people that consume the animal we're never paying the true cost, or people that consume the animal products are never paying the true cost. But also the narrative is much different for individuals that need subsidies or support from the government.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

We often look at them as you know, people that can't do in their life or welfare plans queens, and they're having all of these babies and they're getting all this federal assistance, when the vast majority of the income that comes from animal ag is from the government and it is framed in a totally different way. It's framed as everyday workers that are doing the best that they can for their families and providing food for America and the world, but they are getting the largest sums of money from the government and the people that are, you know, giving the federal assistance government housing. That's a fraction of what we're giving these large organizations. It's a corporate welfare.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Exactly.

Carrie Freeman:

Yeah, corporate welfare.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

This is such an excellent point. You know, what would be such a cool project is to take these two discourses and do like a flip the script type thing, where you take literally one way people are speaking about how we can't do anymore, or handouts to, you know, the immigrants that are just sucking our country dry and the discourse of saying, well, these are hardworking Americans who are farmers and feeding our nation and actually just using the exact same thing, but flipping, because I think you're exactly right, this is a framing issue and it's a question of who we think deserves wealth and support and justice at the end of the day. Super interesting topic. Do you guys have quotes you'd like to share?

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Sure, so I think so. I know my teammate, yvette Baker, made me aware of this quote. I'm not sure if it's something she said or if it's something that she pulled from someone else, but I thought it was a powerful quote. It says let me pull it up it says there has never been a social justice movement preceded by a mass consumer movement, and veganism is no exception. And I just love that quote because I think we kind of hinted on this earlier.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

When we frame the conversation around diet change and food one, it loses the context of it being a social justice issue. But also we tend to think that that's the solution, like, oh, ok, if we just, you know, eat more plants, then veganism will go viral and animal agriculture will cease to exist. And that's not true, unfortunately, because of the fact that we just spoke about the federal subsidies, the fact that animal agriculture receives so much money that they can afford to not, you know, sell as much year after year, as long as they get more and more money from the government. So you know the fact that a lot of times we, although diet change is important I think it's definitely important in changing the narrative of normalizing, not consuming, animals. We definitely have to remember that we can't purchase our way out of exploitation. It's going to take some other elements of change.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, like this runaway profit motive is actually a crux, like even if there weren't, I mean, we'd be in a far better place if we weren't consuming animals. But there are also questions of just like this idea of runaway consumption right, we could even look at our clothing and say fast fashion is also destroying people's livelihoods and the planets. And do we need? It's this like conflict? Convenience? Convenience is like a it's a convenience is a terrible thing in many ways. It's lovely, but it's also terrible. It leads us to just making, I think, poor choices often.

Carrie Freeman:

Oh yeah, I really like that quote, chris, because it also gets to the point that a lot of times the I think because the animal rights movement has had trouble changing laws. It's just so difficult for us to change laws because the animals are so disrespected and as property. We've taken a consumer route to change because we kind of the market-based way to change was kind of the only way that seemed feasible, by just us asking individual after individual after individual will you eat less meat? Will you stop eating meat? How about this? And it's exhausting for those of us in the movement trying to individually kind of ask everybody to make these massive changes and deal with all their family issues and everything. So, but a lot of other movements like to focus at the systemic level, like the environmental movement, and that's why they tend to like to not tell people necessarily to go vegan but just to say, like, eat more plants or eat less meat or something kind of more general. But yeah, we would like it if we could get the institutions to change and then that makes it better and easier for the rest of us to afford to eat well and eat by eating plants. So it's just it's. I think there are some reasons why we kind of focus on the consumer side, but that is not, I agree, that's not the best way to run a social movement, because it depoliticizes the issue and takes it out of the justice framework.

Carrie Freeman:

The quote that I had, I picked one that was about meaning making, since we were talking about the media and communication, and so it doesn't mention animals particularly, but it's a quote by the philosopher Michel Foucault Discourse is the thing for which and by which there is struggle. Discourse is the power which is to be seized. Rights movement in order to make any tangible material difference in the lives of any animals, humans included, on the ground or in the water, in our lives, we have to think differently and talk differently so that we build a different social order, because Foucault's notion of discourse wasn't just meaning like just the words, but how the words create institutions and laws or they maintain a certain view, so, and there's a whole infrastructure of making other animals property and used for the benefit of humans, and just we talk about their welfare, as Chris mentioned. Like it's that's the appropriate thing to talk about is treating them well while we're using them. To talk about is treating them well while we're using them and the animal rights movement is charged with this massive idea of reframing that discourse so that it's about the rights and liberty of those individuals not to be used by us, not just to be treated well while we're using them, and which is more on par with some of the things we would say in terms of human rights that every individual matters and they have a liberty and shouldn't be used as a means to an end.

Carrie Freeman:

So, until we can gain those same dignity rights for other animals by reframing who we see ourselves as with more humility, and if we can be not afraid to do that, because sometimes if we're afraid, if we're put in an animal category that's been used, especially racialized, to diminish and exploit people based on that. So I do think those of us, especially in privileged positions, should be like expressing our animality, our kinship with other animals. Um, maybe we're at less risk by doing that, but just the more we can show our own kinship in our language, the more we would, in theory, recreate a society where it's not okay to use other sentient beings as a utility.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I love that you brought in Fakar because it just it is the establishment of a new norm.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It's kind of dealing and I think any justice movement has dealt with this it's trying to create a new normal right are currently in right now, because that's our norm and our reality, and I know Dinesh Wadiwal uses Foucault a lot as well, and I remember him saying in a lecture once that you know vegans and people who are in the animal rights movement, all they're trying to do is live, in a way, in a world that doesn't yet exist, right, so they're literally putting into practice ways of being, ways of interacting and ideologies that, while we might be in the minority, um, you know, these things can change. Really. Big systems, really, and I and this I've actually got goosebumps. Now it's arrogant that my own speaking is giving me goosebumps, but I'm like this is it's a, really, it's a, really. You're so profound.

Carrie Freeman:

Yes, thank you, thank you I agree, though that's what I want is for people to recognize my performance, no just that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

The big change can happen. It has historically happened, so why is there any reason to believe that this movement is any less significant?

Carrie Freeman:

Right, the regime of truth can change and so, yeah, there is agency. In Foucault's quote, the discourse is the power which is to be seized. Because we can do it. You can change the discourse around race and gender and species, but it's a struggle to do it because there's power structures that want to keep things a certain way that privileges a minority of elites, and so it's like okay, how can we show people that if we like, if we think more biocentrically, like life centered instead of just human centered, anthropocentrically, if we can make that shift in? The news was, was had a biocentric frame and, like our television shows and movies and the way we talked, we had a biocentric frame instead of a human centric frame. And the way we talked, we had a biocentric frame instead of a human-centric frame. That would create a new regime of truth where it would be common sense to show concern about our wild animal, citizenry, neighbors, community members, whatever you want to call them.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Well, that's why the work you two are doing is so important, whether it's through lecturing at a university or working through an advocacy group or creating, you know, media institutions like Sentient Media or we Animals. I think all of these different institutions, you know the ideas are infiltrating in a variety of different ways and spaces, and I think that that's really promising. There's so much more I want to speak to you both about. With regards to misrepresentation, I want to talk about feminist ideas and how gender issue of how female bodies are used in animal agriculture is often underrepresented in questions about feminist literature and discourses.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I wanted to talk about developments and how a lot of development programs are contingents on redistributing and facilitating industrial animal agriculture in other parts of the world, which also undercuts often indigenous and local ways of creating food, but also interacting with land. There's so much more we could talk about metaphors, industries, messages, but I think we are not going to cover it all, I'm afraid. So I'm going to give the last word to both of you. If there's something that you would like to unpack a little bit more, by all means go ahead. And while you're doing that, if you could also give us a snippet of what you're currently working on.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Yeah, I guess I'll start off, I think, as we kind of close out, one thing that I didn't. I think Carrie just made me think about it in her last statement. But I often think when I see movies and I see animals acting in movies, you know I are horses being written in these films and uh, there's dogs that are on sets and they're a part of the, the working uh group there.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Um, yeah, and those uh conversations are rarely ever had. I think this may be to be uh, animal advocacy organizations highlighting that, but um, but yeah, that was just another thought I had. But yeah, just in terms of what I'm working on now kind of highlighted that we are working on an undercover investigation. We're definitely looking forward to putting that out. We are hoping to put that out within the second quarter of the year and you know, if anyone is interested and wants to support and stay in touch with the work that I'm doing at Apex Advocacy, they can go to apexadvocacycom slash support and you know it'll keep you on the loop about the things that we're doing.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

And, yeah, I'm really excited about this year for us we're doing some new things. We have another event called Pre-Animal Activist Week, where we bring people from other social justice movements that are not vegan and we educate them about animal advocacy from the intersectional land. So they learn about a lot of the things that we're talking about in the podcast today, how animal rights connects to issues that they are already passionate about, and the goal is that they take this with them in their advocacy efforts in their organizations and that animal rights becomes a part of their tool in the fight for justice. So yeah, so that's just some of the things that we're working on. So, like I said, anyone willing to support can go to apexadvocacycom. Slash support to support our work.

Carrie Freeman:

And Chris, your new animal advocacy guide for BIPOC activists is fantastic. It's a whole like team of you that put it together and it's really deep and very nuanced and it's and you can get it in like a booklet form or you can see it all on the Apex Advocacy website, and Chris was kind enough to come to Georgia State and present for us about it. And, Chris, I want to have you on my In Tune to Nature radio show to talk more about the ideas in that book. But that's a really big contribution too. That's open to the public and is an opportunity for speaking engagements.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Fantastic, absolutely yeah. Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I'm very, very keen to learn more about your undercover investigation. There's been interesting stuff with prison farms in Kingston. I don't know if you know Kingston and Canada. I can give you more details, but Canada had long-running prison farms that have just been reopened by the government because of a foreign direct investment tied to the Chinese government, which is just like controversy upon. It's very interesting and political, but I know that these kinds of prison farm situations are quite common. So I'm very keen and I really appreciate appreciate how, over the course of this interview, you pulled our attention to the fact that, as people interested in animal rights, as advocates for animals, there are so many different spaces we need to think about right, whether it's slaughterhouses, but also conflict zones, media narratives, how different communities are impacted and, yeah, I've learned so much. So thank you for your time on the show today.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Thank you.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Carrie, you want to tell us any final thoughts and what you're currently working on?

Carrie Freeman:

Oh, yeah, I was also saying, in addition to the In Tune to Nature podcast that I've been doing for like 12 years or something, that's something people can check out. But I also have an animalsandmediaorg website that I co-author with Dr Deborah Merskin, who does media studies, where we give recommendations related to journalists and PR people, advertisers, entertainment media makers and the general public on how to better represent other animals more respectfully and include them in our representations, and it's also something you could draw upon if you're writing a letter to the editor or you know about or giving any constructive feedback to a filmmaker or anyone, you could refer to the animals and mediaorg guides. We're trying right now to get it kind of merged with sentient media, because Deb Merskin and I, just as scholars, we don't really do enough with it to promote it. It's been around since 2014. And I think still a lot of people don't know about it because there's really no nonprofit behind it, so we probably could do more with to develop that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Have you seen, animals and Society recently launched a different segment of the journal that is movie reviews. So instead of only book reviews, they're doing movie reviews. So that could also be a cool avenue for making sure that the journal is aware of what you've developed, because, yeah, it's kind of speaking, I think, a little bit about what we've spoken about today, but certainly to be scholars reviewing, you know, something like where we started to think about women in films long ago.

Carrie Freeman:

We said, well, how often is the woman, how often a different woman, speaking to one another, not about a man, right, yes, and that's changed, like what little tests we can use to see whether the other animals on set, like all the horses and dogs that you mentioned well, maybe the dogs might get more attention, but sometimes the horses are just like a prop or, you know, like we never know their stories. It's like they're just somebody who's pulling a carriage or something, and so it's like, yeah, they don't really matter. And well, one of the things that I've kind of merged, well, I've moved more towards the wildlife category and like, not that I'm not concerned with the food category, because I definitely know that the best way to save species on the planet is for us to eat plant based and that the leading driver of extinction, one of the leading drivers is, you know, commercial fishing and animal agribusiness. But I've just been more interested in saving and making space for other animals to live on this planet, and so my next book is about coexistence between humans and wild animals, particularly in the United States, and I've chosen UNESCO World Heritage Sites just because that's a very biodiverse area that kind of gets a lot of attention. So I was looking at places like the Everglades and Yellowstone and Glacier Bay and Great Smoky Mountains National Park and just where there are a lot of elk and bear and panthers and birds and other animals, wolves, whales, that kind of interact with tourists and industries and hunters and everything so trying to.

Carrie Freeman:

I really want us to find ways to start noticing and caring about the wild animal community who's part of our nation or our continent, because I think we kind of leave it up to the hunters honestly to develop the wildlife plans and to enact them and to give money to wildlife agencies in the United States, and so most of us who either care about wildlife or don't think about wildlife because we live in cities and we're not as connected, we just abandon our wild animals to people who want to just consume and hunt them and like. So we're not protecting our wild animals unless they happen to be endangered. It's like in america. The only way you can get protected as a non-human, free living animal is if you're under the endangered species act and if we recover you it like, then you're open.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I mean, look at what's going on with wolves now. I think it's kind of it's devastating how it happens, right oh you're in danger, Okay, we'll protect. Oh wait, now your numbers are a little bit too big. Now we get to shoot you again.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It's happening in Europe as well, and I think the question of space is really just. It's a material thing, like and this again has to do with misrepresentation the idea that there is just massive tracts of wild land out there, and I think the bbc is slowly doing better with bbc earth in terms of saying like at the end of each one, saying the urban environment. So this is how this documentary was made, because people have created this imagination that there's just so much space and room out there for other animals that they'll be okay. But that's just not the case, right?

Carrie Freeman:

Yeah, especially like that Crossings book that I think it's Ben Goldbarb that wrote that about road ecology is fascinating. I did not realize how devastating roads are to other animals and that is one of the worst things that you can do is put a road in an area. I didn't realize the multiple impacts that has because I'm so focused on the farm and the vegan thing, you know. But I was like, oh my gosh, every, every time you turn around, just aspects of the way we humans choose to live in the world in such an unnatural way has such reverb like reverberating impacts, ripple effects on all these other species and we don't take accountability for it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Well, thank you both of you for just incredible. I'll make sure that I put links to both of your websites in the show notes. Thank you for saying what you need to say and for helping me think a bit through animals and misrepresentation. Today we had a wide-ranging conversation that touched on everything from numbers to framing, to the intersection of different justice movements, to discourse, which I think is really a good kind of way of thinking through how animals are represented and misrepresented in a variety of media. So, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

Christopher Soul Eubanks:

Thank you.

Carrie Freeman:

Yeah and Claudia, thanks for your profound questions and insights. Absolutely Goosebumps, goosebumps everybody Literal chills, I think it's true, I think it is, and you are a good interviewer. Yeah, thank you for hosting this podcast and doing the work.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Thank you so much to Carrie and Christopher for your generous thoughts and your enthusiasm and your numerous ideas when it came to thinking about animals and misrepresentation, also its connections with things like race and identity. It was a really enriching conversation and I enjoyed it so much. Thank you also to Natalie Tobias and Ellen for making this project possible, and to Jeremy John for the mongrel and Gordon Clark for the bed music. The season was jointly sponsored by the Pollination Project, the School of Modern Language, the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, as well as the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech University. This episode was hosted, edited and produced by myself. This is the Animal Turn with me, Claudia Hedgenfelder.

Siobhan O'Sullivan:

For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.

People on this episode

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Claudia Hirtenfelder

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Carrie Freeman

Guest
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Christopher "Soul" Eubanks

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