The Animal Turn

S8E10: Grad Review with Gina Song Lopez and Taylor Jobling

• Claudia Hirtenfelder • Season 8 • Episode 10

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Gina Song Lopez, researching vegan movements in Taiwan and China through the lens of local culture and social media, and Taylor Jobling, a law lecturer unpacking how Australia’s legislation categorises animals, come on to the show to discuss the main themes and tensions to emerge in Season 8, Animals and Media 

 

Date Recorded: 8 December 2025


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Gina Song Lopez :

This is another I roll podcast. When people from not out other countries look at what's happening in Asia and think, for example, that dog eating festival is wrong, or like the pet uh pet pet cafes are wrong. It's it's so easy to turn in turn it into a meme, you know, like it's because it's like a very a very direct, clear and like message. This is wrong, and there's like no context around it. So it kind of also makes me worried about, especially now in this era of anti-globalization and division and racial tension, it's like how easy it is to mimify uh and not without actually understanding all the context around it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

This is season eight where we're talking all about animals and media, and kind of throughout the season, we've had a slant/slash also focus on thinking about how animals and media intersect with other forms of difference, including race and gender, for example. It's been a different season. Uh, instead of doing the one-on-one interviews, which is the norm with the Animal Turn, we've had a whole host of different kind of panel discussions that are focused on specific types of media, whether that's social media or news and film, TV, etc., as well as some other concepts that are related to media, including things like rhetoric and representation or misrepresentation. It's been a fascinating season. I've learned a lot. Uh, as someone who produces media, it's opened up some thoughts and ideas for me with regards to how animals and media intersect, thinking both about material animals, actual, actual animals, but also uh the function of representation and the harms it does. Needless to say, it's been a really fascinating season. I've learned a great deal. I've met a lot of people. I'm so thankful to Natalie, Tobias, and Helen for including me in this project. It's been a it's been a good couple of months of thinking with people, uh, both some of whom are looking at animals and are in animal studies, and some of whom are not. So it's been an experimental season in many ways, and I hope you've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed making it, and uh thank you again to to Tobias, Helen, and Natalie for including me in this. I'm so grateful. Uh and while I'm giving out thank yous, thank you, of course, to Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple for sponsoring this podcast. Uh, so if you don't know anything about Apple, I work quite closely with Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlicker, who are just also amazing people. And if you don't know it, their book has just come out. It's a follow-up to Zuopolis, which is often mentioned on the show. Uh, it's called Animals and the Right to Politics. They didn't ask me to promote it. Uh, I've got complete autonomy over what I say on the show, but it's really fantastic work, and I think that the work of Sue and Will is just amazing. And a testament to that is how regularly other scholars bring them up in the show. So if you didn't know it, the book is out, and I think it's gonna make waves. So make sure to go and check that out. It's been published by Oxford University Press. So it's been uh an interesting season, it's been a fantastic year. Thank you, listeners, for joining me this year. Thank you, and especially thank you to those of you who have left reviews on Apple on iTunes or on Podchaser. It really makes a huge, huge difference. Next year we're gonna go back to our regular format of me doing the one-on-one interviews. I've got some really cool seasons lined up for next year. I've already started doing some of the interviews, and uh, I'm not gonna give too much away now, but 2026 is gonna be a video. Okay, Kelly I'm waffling. Now, I haven't even told you who the guests are, but let me tell you a bit about them. Uh, Gina Song Lopez is a PhD candidate at the Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies and a member of Critical Animal Studies Network, both based at Lund University in Sweden. Her doctoral project focuses on the rise of vegan advocacy movements in Taiwan and China, and her project is particularly interested in examining how new ideas and practices such as veganism are understood, translated, and promoted locally. Gina is also part of the advisory board of Animal Alliance Asia, an organization that engaged in promoting a culturally relevant and inclusive animal justice movement there. She's just approaching her exam, her PhD exam. So I'm so grateful that she managed to take the time to join us on the show. Anyone who's gone through that process knows that in the weeks uh leading up to that exam, it's pretty intense. Taylor Jobling uh is also joining us. She's an early career scholar and a lecturer in law at the University of South Australia. Her master's thesis focused on animal welfare legislation in South Australia and its ability to protect the rights of animals. Through this research, Taylor has been actively involved in animal-related legislative reform and as a result was recently awarded the 2025 Civil Emsley Animal Law Scholarship for her contributions to animal welfare research and practice in Australia. And counter to Gina, she's just gearing up and getting ready to enter a PhD program. So it's really interesting. And you'll see how their different interests in advocacy and law uh I think enriching some of what we learnt over the course of the season about the interconnections between animals and media. But I leave it to you to decide. Let us know if there are any themes or tensions that we forgot. Uh feel free to send comments or leave notes on the shows themselves. Spotify now is this cool thing where you can actually leave notes on it directly, which was kind of cool. Okay, I've waffled enough. I'm sorry. I'm approaching the holidays and I can't help myself. Enjoy the show. Alright, hi Gina and Taylor. Welcome to the Animal Tone Podcast. This is season eight where we're looking at animals and media. And uh, this is our grad review. Yay! I love doing the grad reviews because it's it's kind of a really cool opportunity for me to think back over the season and what some of the core themes have been. Uh, and as I was telling you in the green room, this has been a really protracted season. I started in February and I've kind of it took me a good minute to edit. It's been one of those years, right, where everything just kind of happens and there's too much happening. But finally, the season is coming to a close, and I very much enjoyed getting ready for this episode because it gave me an opportunity to just think back over all of the episodes and find some of those synergies and gaps. But I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it too. But as always, let's get to know you first. Uh Gina, why don't we start with you? Like you tell us a little bit about you and uh how you came to be interested in animals.

Gina Song Lopez :

Yeah, uh yeah. Uh hi, Claudia and everyone. Uh thank you for having me. My my journey towards work like looking into animals, my it's a little bit long, I guess. Uh so I grew up in Paraguay, uh, where uh if you know anything about South America, um you'll uh there are many meat exporting countries. So I spent quite a lot of time in the countryside where I saw animals on their way to the slaughterhouse. So that kind of already got me start thinking about the life of animals and thinking about going vegetarian. So back back in in the early mid-2020s, being vegetarian was like, I guess, the main thing. Uh there were very rare many few vegans in in my circle. Uh so from there, um, I went to college in Australia where I met many friends that were vegetarian or vegan to their their degrees. So like some uh some were studying like biology and things like that. So that kind of like got me going more also in in the sort of the dietary side of things. But it wasn't until I moved to Taiwan and I did my master's that I really got engaged with animal advocacy to some degree. So um I was my my original plan was to uh study Taiwan's uh environmental movement and its relationship to democratization. But then I realized that this was an area of research that was already quite full. But I was lucky enough that around that time I started noticing that animal rights and veganism became a thing in Taiwan. Like this was around the mid-2010s. And I was very lucky that I met a uh a group of activists that were promoting veganism, and they actually organized the first uh vegan march in Taiwan in uh 2017. So then I decided I actually this is the thing I should be studying. And from there, I finished my master's and then I was applying for PhDs, and I decided to keep building on this.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And you've just uh done your defense for your PhD in Sweden, right?

Gina Song Lopez :

Uh it was the final seminar, so it's kind of like the before before the the public defense, yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Okay. And and you said it went okay. It went well.

Gina Song Lopez :

Yeah, it it went okay. Uh now it's just like revision times and a little bit of a crunch, but yeah, hopefully getting there.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Classic PhD crunch. And what what was your PhD on?

Gina Song Lopez :

Uh so oh yes. Uh so I'm talking about the vegan advocacy movements in Taiwan and China. So it's a little a little bit of a comparative work because uh even though uh Taiwan and China they're both uh xenophone societies, uh they they exist in very different political contexts. So I was very interested in seeing how advocacy for veganism kind of translates in both contexts and what are the possibilities in in this, yeah, in these movements. Yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

That's super interesting. Are you analyzing media to do that or in doing interviews?

Gina Song Lopez :

What's your I do a little bit of media, but mostly social media. So I I have been looking at uh vegan vegan content creators, influencers, and how they talk about veganism or promote veganism. Uh I know in in Taiwan especially, there are a couple channels on YouTube that around late 2010s became very popular because um they were actually talking about veganism, introducing veganism to a to a to a Taiwanese public and trying to like make the case that veganism is different from the Buddhist vegetarianism. So like they're they kind of changed the discourse around it as a more of a lifestyle choice, but also as an ethical and moral behavior, or even like Buddhist vegetarianism is also moral behavior, but they were kind of introducing a new morality to it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

That's so interesting. Gosh, I can already see why and some of the ideas we're going to talk about today and how it intersects with you. And your story is just, I mean, it's interesting on many levels. So you've traveled a great deal, you've thought about animal relations as well as eating relationships in a variety of different contexts, right? From from Paraguay to Australia to Taiwan to Sweden. I mean, even just by virtue of being in Sweden, you kind of get a sense of what these different cultural dynamics are in terms of relationships with animals as well as eating. Um, and I think I share your story in some ways where I've lived in multiple locations and it gives you an interesting insight into what your home situation looks like. Um, you know, I realize the things I took for granted in South Africa are somewhat different to how people take things for granted in other places. Uh and also your focus on Taiwan and China, as well as the use of social media, so interesting. Isn't it? Am I correct in saying, I mean, if you would actually count the number of social media users there are, I mean, is that possible? Do people ever do that? Like if if I don't know, uh, this is maybe a dumb question, but like, isn't aren't Chinese consumers of social media like the largest population of social media consumers in the world?

Gina Song Lopez :

Yes, yes, I think I I think there, yeah, there are definitely studies on that. And actually, like my centers, the Center for East and South East Asian Studies had a project about digital Asia where they actually focus on this. But it this was before my time, but I know that they have done this kind of research. And yeah, China definitely is like if we you want to look at the use of social media, China is definitely a place that should not be neglected because yeah, it's just you know it's a huge country, 1.5 billion people. Yeah. Um, and also like the the rate in which things became digitalized and people adopted social media is just yeah, it's yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, and you add to that that the social media environment is also so different because of rules and regulations with regards to access to things like Facebook and Twitter, blah, blah, blah, being very different in China. Um, you know, and there being alternative forms of social media. And then, of course, we could get it to TikTok and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, we've just gotten started. Uh, thank you so much for sharing your story and and congrats on your very interesting PhD work. Uh Taylor, how about you? Tell us a little bit about you and your journey.

Taylor Jobling:

Yeah, so um, I'm a lecturer in law at uh the University of South Australia, which is soon to be Adelaide University. And I got into that role by doing a lot of casual teaching at the university and doing a kind of a fair amount of um research assistant work in a fair variety of different areas of the law. So I've done some in family law, criminal law, international, and human rights, and I wasn't necessarily in a specific area that was of huge interest. I loved all of them and I do love and research in all of those areas still, but I was trying to find kind of my niche and what I found interesting. And after I did my um law degree, I decided to continue with academic work because I loved being a research assistant. I loved kind of like sitting away and doing all my typing and my writing by myself and being able to think about new ideas and share them with my colleagues. Um, and I was actually inspired by which you've spoken about in numerous episodes, the documentary blackfish. It really had a deep effect on me watching that. I watch it quite often still because it still has that really profound effect on me. And initially, what I wanted to do my master's thesis in was animals in captivity and specifically marine animals in captivity. After I graduated high school, I tossed up whether I would do a law degree or whether I would do um kind of biology and marine science. And I ended up choosing law, which I'm very grateful for that, and I'm glad I stuck with that. But the ocean has always really interested me in that way. And I kind of went down the route of when I was doing my master's of thinking about what topic I can do, what's a localized topic, what's something that I deeply care about. And I ended up just choosing the Animal Welfare Act in South Australia and looking at how effective it is as a piece of legislation, what it does for animals, how it protects animals. And that's kind of the research I've done there in the last three or four years has really um catapulted me into thinking about what I love about animal studies and animal welfare, which is thinking about how we categorize things. How does the law categorize animals? How does the law categorize people? And kind of those marriages there is where most of my research has um been and where it continues to be. And so now I'm I'm sticking with that animal rights and welfare lens, but looking at it mainly through that human rights characterization perspective. And sometimes I touch on the media, sometimes I touch on um comparisons with family law in Australia as well, but it's very much Australian focused.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, it's interesting when you start to think about the connection I think between law and media, because in some ways law didn't come up that much in this season. But I think the connections between law and media are actually quite important. I think there was one episode where we spoke about the increase in, you know, regulations with regards to animals being used in um movies and that kind of statement at the end that no animals have been harmed in this film. But I think, you know, law with media and with everything else is a kind of constitutive thing, right? It makes specific actions possible, it makes specific ideas possible. So I find law kind of a fundamental genre to be talking about when you're speaking about anything, uh, whether it's animals and sound or animals and media, like law is kind of always there. So I'm really delighted to have you with us to just kind of make that a bit more explicit. So you say that you're focused on the Animal Welfare Act, right? Uh, but you also say that you have a kind of deep interest in the oceans and marine wildlap. Have you managed to bring those two back together again?

Taylor Jobling:

Uh very, very slightly, only in the way we categorize animals in kind of the states and territories. Animal welfare is the um like kind of legislative power of the states and territories. It's not something the big the federal government can do. Um, so it's there's really uncoordinated responses across every state and territory in Australia as to what we do when it comes to animals and even how we categorize those animals and like what can is considered to be an animal, what is considered to be a crustacean or a cephalopod. We get very deep in the nitty-gritty of that. That's about as far as I was able to go in my thesis when it came to that kind of marine life. Um I'm attempting to, well, I will be starting, sorry, a PhD um later next year. And I'll I'm looking to see if that's kind of the route I'll go down, whether I'll I'll go down the marine biology route or whether I'll um continue with what I uncovered a lot of in my thesis, which was thinking about zoos and animals in captivity generally. And you could definitely bring back in, you know, the aquariums, the personal aquariums that people have and the licenses they may or may not have to keep those um uh types of animals in captivity. So it's all thinking about those things and as you said earlier, what the law does and does not do and how it comes together with those theories of it's very multidisciplinary in thinking about the media, thinking about allied health and psychology and um even poetry and philosophy and what those things do for animals and how the law reflects that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, and super important, interesting. And of course, over the history of the podcast, thinking about marine life and fish and the ways in which they've been sidelined, I think generally in discourses is interesting. We tend to have a bit of a bias towards mammals and a bit of a bias towards thinking about terrestrial animals. And more and more, I think, especially with the kind of increase in ideas of fish farming, more and more industrial fish farming and the rise now of um octopus farming, more and more people are starting to think about the health of oceans uh as well as how they're implicated, both in law and discourse. So I'm excited to see where you go with that. Uh and of course, as you're speaking now about film and law and aquariums, uh, you know, you mentioned blackfish, which came up over the course of the season, and of course, so did finding Nemo. And one core thing that just stuck with me, I mean, that's an example I've used often on the show, but I just remember Tabia saying in that first episode, you know, it's literally a story about a fish trying to escape a fish tank, and then people are going out to buy fish to put in a fish tank. And I just, in many ways, that captures, I think, one of the key themes that emerged over the season was this kind of tension between representation and material reality. Um, and yeah, so for me that was a really big theme. What did you guys pick up with regards to that? Was did that stand out for you as well?

Gina Song Lopez :

Uh yeah, definitely. Um, when when when the the conversation about how media representations sort of translate into the real world, I was actually thinking a lot about how here is where like my area studies focus come into view because I was thinking how, for example, in in recent years you have seen this popularization of a lot of Asian media, like you know, anime, k-dramas, and things like that. And usually in these in these mediums, also like animals as food become like are like a big focus, especially in the genre that is like sort of like the food, like gourmet manga or or genre, or like in K dramas, also, you know, there is always like a lot of like this sort of food diplomacy going on. part of the the project of exporting um culture. And at the same time, as these products have become popular, you see a lot on the internet, like in social media, a lot of attempts to reproduce the dishes that you see in K-dramas or in anime. And that that ultimately ends up in being animals turn becoming food again. So I think this is something that I like I personally feel very strong about. And when I talk to people, they they see the connection, but I don't think it's like a white, like a mainstream conversation going on yet.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, and and that kind of marriage between food representation and cultural representation is obviously a big uh you know it's it's one of the core reasons why people hold on to meat consumption or dairy consumption is because it is a critical part of culture and cultural identity. And yeah, speaking about K-pop there, I think the book is called How Korea Got Its Cool, if I'm not mistaken. I read it years ago and it's about how Korea has been extremely successful. South Korea has been extremely successful at exporting its soft culture, at realizing that if you export music, film, food, you actually gain a lot in in terms of like you say, diplomacy and relations and you you start to capture people's imaginations. And I think Korean food, I was lucky to have lived in Korea for a good number of years and it is remarkable. So I was there prior to being vegan and then I lived there again. Actually I went vegan when I was living in Korea. And that was a really interesting transition for me because I noticed a big difference in terms of how people responded to veganisms in veganisms, vegans in Korea and in China. So if we tried to book for example outside of Seoul, Seoul is a metropolitan space and you know it's a bit more flexible. But if you wanted to book a restaurant and you wanted a kind of a traditional dish but it only requires kind of removing one ingredient, which is the meat, people would say no, you can't come in. Because it's again it's a it's a cultural dimension. You'll go to a restaurant for that dish. If you're eating dakalbi, you go to that restaurant to eat dakalbi. If you're eating yeah gamja tang or whatever it is, you go to a specific restaurant to eat that specific dish. So asking for any sort of changes to the dish and some of them are more difficult to ask for changes than others. Like gamjetang is literally a soup. You're not going to you know it's a bone broth soup. You're not going to have changes there. But there are others that include things like rice cake and chicken and you're frying it yourself. So to just ask for none of the chicken so that you can have the rice cake and vegetables. And no jokes we literally had it once when we had 12 people that wanted to come two of us were vegans so we were just like we just don't want chicken with it. They're like no we can't help you. So they turned down a booking of 12 people contrast to that to my experience of being vegan in China where literally it didn't it didn't matter what we ate people would drag us into the kitchen and be like show me what you can eat and I'll make whatever you want. So there was a definite kind of culturally different relationship with I think making of the food but also what people were willing to change or not to change. And anyway sorry I went totally off message there um that I think you're right like food and k-pop and and and Korean genre in general features very strongly in in their social media presence in TV in in film. So yeah I'm sorry I went totally off there.

Taylor Jobling:

Taylor any thoughts well yeah it it reminds me of a lot of what is spoken about in this episode and like you said with finding Nemo and the the different cultures how they perceive animals and what you can and can't do in other countries. I know in one of the episodes one of your guests talks a lot about the animal cafes in Japan. And um I was in Japan quite recently with my partner and there's literally a street where they have one on every single corner. It's capibara cafes, it's guinea pig cafes, it's otter cafes it and they're try holding these animals in front of you, begging you to well by how cute it is begging you and showing you how cute they these animals aren't to come in. And I think that's just that's horrible but you can't you can't change people's views if they inherently don't think it's bad or they inherently think that animals are less than humans they aren't going to change people aren't going to do those things. And I think that that's where those conversations can marry with what you were saying with finding Nemo and how you know an uptick in people going out and buying fish for their children. Or similarly we have a big problem in Australia I'm sure other countries do too around Easter people start buying bunnies and then they get dumped to the RSPCA months later because no one wants bunnies. People get puppies for Christmas and then they get dumped and then the RSPCA and other um organizations have to handle them. And if they get such a high volume they have no choice but to euthanize these animals because there's nothing else that can be done when people are doing this. But I think part of what I cover in my research and part of what I think is so interesting. It's definitely spoken about a lot in this season and other seasons is you just cannot inherently make people care about things that they think are less than. And I think that that's one of the biggest issues is that societal understanding of what animals are, what they mean to us and what they mean to society is different across cultures and you can't always be, you know, we can be mad at that in our own personal understanding of what we think, you know, morals and values and what we would do. But it's hard to look at other people and just say no you shouldn't be doing that. So for example, um one of the highest industry moneymakers in Australia is the meat and dairy industry. We have thousands of people in rural communities where all they are able to do and the only way they are able to make money is through meat or dairy or consumption. And there's nothing that you can necessarily do about that because those people have the right to be able to earn that money and make a living and support their families and contribute to the economy. And that could be part of the reason why certain states are hesitant to change animal welfare laws because it means that these communities will have an effect and it'll have such a massive effect on the economy in Australia that it's hard to justify. It's hard for legislators to justify why they should change that when there's such an uptick and considering things going on with the cost of living crisis and the housing crisis in Australia as well, people are hesitant to make those changes, I think. And it's really it doesn't mean that this conversation isn't important. I think it's an incredibly important conversation to have and to draw these parallels of attention. But I think people are hesitant to even admit oh I have these opinions therefore it means that I think animals are less than I don't think fish have feelings or I don't think fish can feel things. And that's you look into the history of legislation in Australia and there are quotes from parliamentarians saying well the research in the 80s said fish can't feel pain so fish aren't animals and that's you know outdated research in itself. So history and science is always changing and you have to move with it in that way. And I really think we're at a really critical point in our community where we are people are saying no, we do don't feel this way anymore.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

We do not want these um norms to continue and therefore it's outdated in the law, it's outdated in the community and it's outdated in lots of other disciplines as well yeah I mean I'm um I appreciate the fact that you started speaking there with kind of examples I think you know this a run through in this whole season was thinking about animals but also thinking about how thinking about animals is often cross cut with other notions of difference, particularly with notions I think of of race and racial difference. And very often when it comes to speaking about animals and animal rights, I think examples from Asian communities are often used to kind of show some form of brutality and oh isn't it terrible that there are cafes in Japan and oh isn't it terrible that you know Koreans still farm dogs although that's less and less the case. But isn't it terrible there's always a reason to point at an other somewhere else doing something awful. But then you switch to focusing on Australia and they're kind of dominant mechanisms of producing food which also includes harms to massive numbers of animals, right? Including sheep, pigs, cows. And that's kind of invisibilized in a different way in media. In many ways that's normalized in mainstream media and mainstream Western media is a way in which to the correct way to interact with animals, the normal way, the right way, the justified way, if I'm listening to you correctly because it makes money and it's reliant on cultures and industries. But depending on where you are doing your analysis from or your critique from it's often very common to then look outside of your culture and say well that relationship with animals is incorrect for whatever reason. And there's something in that move that's uh troubling but also an opportunity right there's there's something about being able to point the finger back at yourself and say well if we think that way of interacting with animals is not appropriate um what is it that our culture can do and of course we have zoos in Australia Australia's the longest running zoo so it's it's very easy to look at cat cafes and we've got pet and zoos down the streets right so there's a hierarchy of different animals that we're valuing um and it's doing different harms to different animals. Of course having a night owl in a cafe who's being handed from person to person and not being allowed to sleep is experiencing suffering. But that suffering is also different to the suffering of a goat who's been you know used and reproduced and is perhaps more socialized interacting with humans, but it's still captive. So yeah it always calls for nuance with regards to thinking how the actual animals are included in the discourse and materially as well and thinking about what those harms are. And of course as you were speaking um pigs came up the pepper pig paradox I think is very useful here because it shows that tension between material realities and discourse so clearly.

Gina Song Lopez :

I I have some so many like points to like uh so go for it. Go away. So like starting with the discussion about you know animal cafes I I was really interested in in the discussion about how for example when Japanese people go to the animal cafe this is as a chance to like for mental health kind of like you know relax get get away from like easy lifestyle and put an animal as a therapy while at the same time like when when uh foreigners go into uh Japan find this quite horrifying and so that started got got me thinking about you know like the the whole moral circle and how basically the the different moralities at play when it comes to the relationship with animals which I think in in a way ties into the discussion about the animals as you know as the main resources to be extracted from in development projects right because then you you when when you have all these policies sporting uh meat and dairy that there's like a certain moral imperative in there like okay we need to make make sure to feed our population and and you know contribute to like national building and country at least in the in in the in the Chinese case when you look at like sort of food policy like a main imperative is to like secure food for for the entire nation and then so then animals becomes like the the the the the beings that are sacrificed for the good of the nation. So and and no one thinks that is like wrong. But obviously when you when you when you look in from outside and you have all of this knowledge about animal ethics you think oh this is not right but it it just kind of um enhances the the the idea that we should really focus sort of like the moral education and the morality and how more morality is framed by the powers that be. That's kind of like what what I was thinking and for example and also like tying to the discussion about when people from not out other countries look at what's happening in Asia and think for example that dog eating festival is is wrong or like the pet uh pet pet cafes are wrong. It's so easy to turn in turn it into a meme you know like it's because it's like a very a very direct clear and like message this is wrong and there's like no context around it. So it kind of also makes me worried about especially now in this era of of uh you know anti-globalization and division and racial tension is like how easy it is to mimify an act without actually understanding all the context around it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah that's kind of like all this the three three lanes of thought I was having at the same time yeah super super important and and interesting and of course the the Mars test was trying to see well you know there's the the tension between the material animals and the the discourse the representation of them um which I think is to some extent what we're talking about here and how that's entangled with human others, right? And something I thought and of course representation is key here and something I thought that was quite interesting in terms of the Mars test was how Natalie started to speak about how body swapping functions differently in in children's films. So if it's a black character who takes on an animal form they tend to almost lose power whereas if it's a white character who takes on an animal form they tend to gain powers they tend to gain so so you see these kind of subtle ways in which representations of animals are shot through with I think racial understandings, also you know geographical understandings and cultural understandings of different peoples which I had never I had never thought of with that kind of nuance but with them looking at films directed at kids it's it's interesting. But then also in terms of what you were saying with the consumption it makes me think about what Christopher was saying with regards to media that activists put out like the use of how animals are treated as numbers. And I always think about that in an industry perspective how industry will talk about animals in terms of tons. But Christopher said that that's a common strategy for activists as well. You'll speak about the numbers of animals impacted instead of the individual stories. So yeah like you say context matters both geographically in terms of the specific countries and places we're looking at but it also matters in terms of the specific medias we're looking at right like to really pull apart those threads I guess.

Taylor Jobling:

100% I think that something I know that I in when I'm in the classroom I I go through with my students we talk a lot about um the history of Australia and the colonization of Australia and how that impacts our legal system and students can really be taken aback by how deeply interconnected the roots of colonization have affected all of Australia and it has subsequently affected our views and affected what we do and how we act and what we see as okay. And when we were colonized the UK saw animals as property and they saw really only pets and agriculture as a part of that. You know, you kept pets for companion animals and then agricultural animals for property because if someone tried to steal your cow in your field, you were able to go to the government and say give me money for that cow because they've taken my livelihood away from me. And that's the system that we had set up in Australia and it continued to be that way. And it hasn't really changed much since it's how we speak about it and how we act on it can slightly change. But really we still have those deep rooted categories when it comes to animals. And that's what I find so interesting when thinking about um international comparisons between animal welfare law or um uh like uh you're saying Gina like uh policy and food consumption and how that is different in different countries, what that looks like it's so deeply rooted in culture and what other countries think is moral or immoral. And sometimes it's hard to have that conversation and you can't always point that finger by saying what these people are doing is wrong and I don't agree with it. When it's like, well if you don't understand that nuance it can create a more harmful conversation in the same way it's easy to mean it's easy to feed into that racist view of oh this country does that therefore all these people do that all these groups of people do that. And then you can get into that really slippery slope of comparing people to animals and how what that looks like and the racial connotation of that and what that can do for society and people as well. And I think that's a really interesting through line throughout the season is thinking about what um like trans speciesism looks like and what that looks like for other people and how we categorize because deep into our history in places like France, we were categorizing people as animals or we were categorizing animals as almost like people and punishing them for murdering each other. So it's that moral kind of cyclical nature of thinking about what does this mean? And historically certain races and religious groups have been compared to dogs and pigs and cattle and they are used in that way to dehumanize them. And similarly we can use we could do the same thing to animals where we can categorize them in ways and compare them to people, which dehumanizes or immoralizes them as well. And I think that that is a really interesting and unfortunate tension that can come through in society.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

This kind of creating of a subject and also these moral frameworks or moralizing frameworks I think was really pronounced in episode three when we spoke about human supremacy and kind of primal rhetorics I think that stood out a lot for me. I think Lauren you know spoke about like who constitutes the subject and this is ringing with regards to what you're saying like who constitutes what is animal animality and I remember David saying you know animality extends beyond the animal it's mobilized by you know the powerful in in many ways which I think is quite useful. And I really found the conversation of primal rhetorics super interesting. So here we were switching almost from a more I think racial focus with regards to how understandings of animals are shot to root ideas of race to kind of thinking about how they've been mobilized to secure certain like race positions but also gender dimensions, right? So like how to be a man you have to have not just meat but you have to get meat in this really like violent way and you have to kind of it's not just any meat you have to eat blood and balls and to really kind of show your your masculinity which I found really interesting. And I'm busy reading The Omnivores Deception um with John Swanban so I'm saying his name wrong and he's going to be on the show uh in future and he's got this interesting chapter where he's speaking about like the rise of carnivorism amongst women and and how they're increasingly writing books about like becoming farmers and the joy of slaughtering and killing animals. And this is really fascinating and it speaks to what both of you are saying in terms of context how you've got to look at history and time in terms of how these framings change over time. Yeah what do what do you guys think about the kind of primal rhetorics? I remember there was a lot of discussions about the like liver king, right? Yeah there was a lot of talk about the liver king, the raw egg nationalist um I think one of the key messages from that episode came through that in many ways there are some people who get to play with animality but there are others who don't. So you know there are there are some people who get to like be animal and not be judged for it and actually mobilize kind of animalizing tendencies like eating raw meat, like carnival and somehow still have an okay position and I put that in quotes because I'm not too sure in society. But then there are others that had this kind of animalized idea imposed on them from the outside, right? And that's I think some of the history you're talking about, Taylor, like how applying an animalized understanding of specific groups of people has been used as a mechanism of control historically.

Gina Song Lopez :

Maybe like so a point that I maybe that what is interesting from that, because actually like you know, as as someone that looks at me like Western media and like Asian media, I find this this this conversation is definitely like I have seen it mostly in the Western media and I I guess mostly it's like you know whites men that you know that are promoting this kind of discourse. Because if it was like a a non-white person promoting this discourse, I wonder how the reception will look like does that make sense?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, yeah. So and I mean I think that's an interesting question because chances are if we were to look there would be non-white people promoting this right probably in like the bodybuilding space or like what it means to be a real man and how you have to eat meat. Because this is not just about race, it's also about I guess gender and also I think a bit of a backlash to vegan rhetorics and feminist rhetorics.

Taylor Jobling:

I think one of the the things that I find so interesting about so many of the people and the conversations they've had is thinking about who is allowed to or should talk on behalf of animals and how that dynamic plays in as well as kind of just like the nature of a hierarchical structure and like what that looks like, who's on top, who's on the bottom if people are on top, does that automatically mean humans are on the bottom and what that looks like in everyone's disciplines. And I think that is something that has really come through a lot in this episode thinking about marginalized communities and how that looks in racism. And I think it was in the first episode Ellen talked about um family violence and women fleeing family violence and what that looks like for um whether they leave the pet at home or do they take it with them. And one of the things that's so great about what Australia have just done is they've made some changes to the Family Law Act that now include um judges being able to make some decisions about where pets go, what they look like and they're able to literally consider whether there was family violence, whether there is a risk of the pets being left behind or the risk of violence to the animal as well, which is um really great that they are starting to consider that because it's moving those societal hierarchy structures away where it's trying it's trying to it's trying to look at what do we do with animals? How can we note that they are important to people they have an important place in the home people love their pets they care for their pets in many ways people think of their pets like children. They find um joy in their pets like they do children and whether you a lot of people disagree on whether pets should be kept at all whether that is a moral or immoral thing as well so that is something to always note but thinking about what steps can we do, what can we actually do on the ground that will help people right now and I think that's another thing that comes through in this season as well is small changes or big changes. We need to think about what's going on now. It's really hard to kind of destabilize these hierarchy structures that have been in place for hundreds of years for a lot of the countries that we're talking about that deal with these things and what can we do to move forward and consider the safety and consider the outcome and wellbeing of all animals. And while yes it's pets it's categorized in this way and sometimes we do categorize I think that really comes through in the season thinking about hierarchy structures who can speak on or should on behalf of pets in that way or animals sorry not just pets animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah no I I I agree with you and just a side note I know Will Kimlick and Sue Donaldson have written about you know there's a lot of conversation about personhood and I know they've written about both family law and labor law as being two kind of exciting places where they are actually seeing legal material legal changes for animals in Canada, in Australia and several other countries which is exciting to note. But yeah I also had uh Who Speaks slash voice down as a kind of key theme. You know, there were questions of anthropomorphism throughout especially I think with regards to kids' films. But also I thought was really interesting when Christopher Eubanks spoke you know saying activists are often people who say that they speak on behalf of animals and that in many ways he thinks that he's been um accepted both by black communities but also by animal activists because he he he expresses what he knows about animals in an authentic way and he's often clear about the limits to how he can know animals, but he strives to kind of speak on their behalf, quote unquotes in a way that is authentic, which I thought was quite interesting. Also a key kind of voice, I think, and this maybe goes back to the primal rhetorics were the idea of influencers and the role that they play in kind of shaping popular discourse, right? So whether it's these um people that are you know the raw Ignationalists and stuff who are kind of shaping a more conservative view of relationships with animals versus just social media influences generally. So same thing with the Japan cafes, etc that the social media influences are really playing a role. And this also came up with considering types of media and this for me was really interesting because different types of media can mobilize speaking animals in different ways, right? So in in films you've literally got animals who speak but to what extent do they speak with animal interests in mind? Flow was a really good example that was given in episode one and if you haven't watched it flow is really worth it where the animals don't speak at all but it's very clearly animal interests at play in the film versus thinking back to you know a lot of movies where animals are literally talking but they're speaking with human interests. That's interesting. Then I think about gaming which I that episode just blew my mind. I had so much fun having that episode and thinking about the potential of gaming to really bring about comprehensive engagement with the ways in which animals experience the world that for me was just you know a lot of the time we were being negative I think about who speaks on behalf of animals and often the negative ways in which it's mobilized to serve human interests.

Gina Song Lopez :

But the episode with gaming kind of gave me some pause I was really excited about that episode and I'm not a gamer yeah I told you the gaming episode was my favorite because I I am a casual gamer uh I will say um and yeah they they were talking about uh you know the Witcher uh Red Dead Redemption I have played the Witcher but I have not played Red Dead Redemption um all three of them are like best game ever so yeah but actually I think they did not mention one game called Horizon which is said in a post-apocalyptic world in which so you're like this you're the main character is a is a is a woman um she basically uh she she has like very uh strange origins which makes her like an outcast in her tribe so in this post-apocalyptic world uh basically humanity has organize back to like organized in tribes and she was like an outcast in her tribe and then she like learned sort of the her origins um in this world um there's the animals are actually machine animals so like you you will learn at some point that these machine animals came as a form of uh fight the destruction that will come with from this the word destruction and they're like they're meant to like help terraform so they're kind of like a sort of bio biomachines that are trying to like you know like sort of like the what animal the the role animals play in in ecology so the this the these these machines are doing that but they have they have gone birth sick so then there's like a lot of like you you you you hunt these machine animals and you harvest this parts but then at the same time you are trying to like uh uh what's the word like fix the virus that are making them corrupt and yeah it's uh there's like a lot of like sort of anti col anti-capitalism ecological thought in this in this series yeah and I mean I think gaming and and also literature which I don't unfortunately didn't come up that often in this season but I think gaming and like sci-fi literature that are playing with the imagination in this way because you know Taylor earlier you were speaking on like we're kind of in some ways the policies and the laws are you could think of like the railroad games that Michael said like we're we seem to be on this track and how do we get off this track there's this one way to play the game um and maybe the idea is to create an interactive game of sorts where we're able actually able to think about laws and policies and the ways animals what their interests are like yeah we we can play with the imagination in really interesting ways uh which I've yeah that episode just bent my brain because like you said it you can create these apocalyptic or utopian futures and you can play with what's possible in a way that kind of alleviates some of the pressure of when you're actually looking at policy or or scholarship.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah I don't know I I was very excited by the gaming episode.

Taylor Jobling:

I'm not really much of a gamer at all I wouldn't even say that I probably the word much is incorrect. I don't game at all um but it was it was really interesting to hear and I do um I have played Red Dead Redemption when it uh the second one when it came out because it was a big deal for a lot of my friends. They were like this is like one of the best games ever made you have to sit down and play it with us. And I was like this is actually really fun. And then I realized you can kill your horse you can kill a woman you can kill a man you can just do whatever you want. And there's consequences in the game like there is a real life you know you get chased you get you know the a um a target is on your back and you're wanted for the behavior you do. But I'd never experienced that kind of game where you can really do whatever you want and that I found really that lawlessness I get why people would be excited by that. But that I think I think I see a lot of ways where that could be a very problematic um way of of going about things and and and not to sound like you know you see in the media a lot where people are like oh these violent games what are people doing? Why is this connected to the youth and what they're doing and that can be you know a bit of a tied rhetoric when we think about what violent games actually do um and what the statistics are on that. But it is interesting thinking about those dynamics and how it represents animals and if it's representing people in a certain way it's going to represent animals in a different way. And I I I liked the um the game that you were describing Gina and how it's a different it's looking at that different perspective of how it could be used in ecology and how society might need to evolve and what they need to do. And I think um as well you Claudia talking about literature and that the the gap there, something that I find sorry, because I'm a very big reader I love reading something I find really interesting and just kind of notable right now is the rise in monster romance as a genre and what that means for animal human relations, what that means for um just in general how society view a lot of things a lot of parallels are drawn in these types of books between racism and um what certain animals represent or certain people who emerge with animals represent. So you get a lot of mermen, you get a lot of minotaurs, you get a lot of just aliens and things like that. And these books tell such in a lot of ways they can tell very compelling stories about you know two people who are different falling in love and you know the the outcomes of that and what that looks like and how they navigate communication and and a lot of other things. But it also is interesting at why maybe some of these things are so popular and what this means and what the the animal parts of these romances what that might mean. And I think that's a really interesting untapped market to think about those that yeah just how that interplays with what people are thinking right now.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Because there is a bonus episode to this season and it's focused on monstrous others. So we're going to be talking about the intersection of monsters animals and media which is pretty cool because uh Stranger Things has just come out so we'll have a big conversation about Vecna. So that's something to look forward to in future. But I do want to just uh I guess in defense of games say that I think a thing that they were saying in that that it's not lawless, that games always have rules and there are always consequences which while there is perhaps you know there is a lot of killing of animals in games etc and that's where I think the potential to play and play with those representations is kind of interesting and important. A key thing that they were saying uh the the guests in one episode were saying was there are always consequences to your actions and actually most games have built into them a kind of moral framework. So this is going back to what you were saying earlier. There is an idea of what is and is not possible but there's also an idea of what is and is not allowed. And there was a murderous hobo app, which is just a term I now absolutely love that people that go into shared gaming spaces and just kill and kill and kill get alienated, right? They get kicked out either by other gamers or by the game itself because it's just it's not in the spirit of what a game is a game requires you to accept the rules of the game whatever they are and then abide by those rules and that has I think huge transformative potential. Would you agree with that Gina?

Gina Song Lopez :

Yes yes a hundred percent and actually when when they were talking about like how the system determines the outcomes like even though you you're free to do a lot of different things there's a system that still like assesses what how like um you know your reputation in the game and things like that and what you can do. It it it really like if you think about it it really also translates in real life the way the system works and it you know predetermines the kind of things you can do and and for example like basically morality and legality are not are that don't don't know equal each other in many cases. So yeah I I was thinking a lot a lot about that from from that that episode yeah something that I I and also like in that episode you you discussed a little bit about like animal agency in like if you can play as an animal and there are games in which you can play as an animal for um and one game that I really enjoy is in which you can it's called goat simulator you and basically you're a goat and then the it's it's an it's kind of a semi-open world and you and basically you can do whatever you want and break break mayhem in the city and it's it feels a little bit kind of like animals taking revenge on you know it's it's it's a really fun game I really recommend it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah I think we also spoke another medium where we're saying perhaps there's untapped potential. So I think gaming is just ripe for the picking in terms of potential and I think more honest representations of animals in film is also there for the taking and better documentaries that are not done you know with these kind of grand narratives is there for the taking but podcasting, right? So podcasting um yeah I think that there's an untapped potential there to better represent animals but that yeah I don't know um I've been thinking about that a lot because how to actually represent animals voices and podcasting despite it being a sound medium is actually remarkably difficult. It seems like it's a lot easier to represent animals in visual mediums like games and and film.

Gina Song Lopez :

But but I think like what what you're doing right now with with with the annual turn is kind of like one example of how can you can try to question the way we talk about animals and try to decenter the human from it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Sure I mean I think podcasting and news and and social media to some extent as media have educational value but I think kind of in terms of imaginary transformative value of really being able to empathize with other animals I think that's where gaming and film are perhaps um better mediums i I mean I don't know I'm not I could be wrong here we'll think about it. Okay so I'm having a look at some of the themes I had I I definitely had so I had audience is a key theme that came up like who is media directed at so whether it's at academics or children and kind of consumption of media itself being a really important thing. And intersecting equalities inequalities was a big theme obviously and we've spoken a bit about that already in terms of um you know comparisons of different suffering which Tobias was keen on saying look we need to make sure that we accept that there's deeply entangled oppressions but also we need to avoid kind of this comparing of who is worst off which I really appreciated. The racialized depiction we've spoken about material impacts we've spoken about a bit um intersections of speciesism and sexism uh culture yep we've done a good job here guys and and hierarchies and of course then there is actual discourse and rhetoric which I think we've started speaking about here with whose voice matters and we just actually started getting into another I guess subcategory for me here which is violence how violence is represented I think the interesting thing in thinking at least specifically about the um the rhetoric episodes in listening to that I learnt a lot of new things to be honest.

Taylor Jobling:

It's not something that um I always touch on a lot in the ways that was spoken about in my research and I found it super interesting to think about what these kind of political affiliations can do and how, as you were talking about earlier that that masculine look of you know I'm wearing fur and I'm ripping into meat with my bare hands and I've got blood all over my face and I have these strangely non-tribal but tribal painting marks on me. And that's it's this very sensationalized look and fake look at what it means to be a man or what it means to be a warrior what it means for these communities and these societies. And I find that really really interesting in the examples of the QAnon shaman and you know the liver king and in a lot of ways they've also been memed a lot online. Like a lot of the ways I've engaged with that rhetoric has been people making fun of them and looking at them and going you are not succeeding in what you think you are trying to outside of your country or even within the country because a lot of people are very critical of these types of people because our country our community doesn't value these things. So we can see straight through it. We can see through what you're doing. And I think the the good thing about that episode and the kind of challenging thing for me listening to it was thinking we have some of these kinds of discourses and discussions in Australia, but it's very different culturally in terms of whether that type of rhetoric is successful and whether people have that kind of gritty look at the animal and the humor. It's it's very different. And so I think it's still tying back to that cultural and societal discussion of what that looks like yeah what people think about um animals and and humans and their and their relations and that can be something that's very different. And it also can be due to the you know ties that Aboriginal people have to our country and the ways that we um need to make that important in our conversation. In a lot of ways Australia falls so short of making sure um Aboriginal voices are included in the conversation and making sure that their ways of knowledge and their ways of being and their ways of living are included in our story when they're not for a lot of in a lot of ways and in the law, they're not included in the law, they're not included in community conversations and that can be really difficult to marry those ideas as well and what that means. So I think just generally the the challenge I had with that as a um listener and a researcher is just thinking about how that fits into what I'm doing, but also just how it fits into the that that conversation. It can be hard to even touch on.

Gina Song Lopez :

Yeah I and I actually I agree with you with you in the terms that I think my mostly what my engagement with that has been more like the memes and people making fun of these because they're they're definitely characters. And I guess that sort of makes me think of sort of the spectacle around it. So it's actually it's not even about the animals or about the culture. It's a little more like the spectacle spectacle of this this human uh that I guess it's an outlier in terms of behavior and and the the lifestyle they're promoting. And in in a weird way it reminds me of the reason why people are so fascinated with like trust reality shows. Kind of so I mean but then again it's like when if if one think about how does this affect animals at the in the end of the day is the animal is not even the center of it is like them anthropocentrism and the sort of like I don't know the yeah the the the this a certain certain kind of privilege I guess that was a bit of a concern for me I think in the season.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

So the season was trying something new it was trying to bring together consideration of animals while at the same time bringing together consideration of other avenues of difference right I think I mean questions related to indigeneity race sex gender culture a whole host of different workers' rights age um came up in the season which is very valuable um and and is asked for often in the scholarship and in in media but I do worry that to some extent the animals themselves in our kind of conversation of representation um and of different mediums that the animals themselves got a bit lost um that that animals just kind of disappeared from the season a little bit that they weren't as kind of materially and symbolically present. Maybe I'm being unfair but I don't think so I've got a feeling that animals in an ironic way were pretty absent in this season.

Taylor Jobling:

I think you're being a bit hard on yourself in general when coming on to when thinking about the point of the podcast and thinking about the kind of conversations you've had with the theme being media. In my opinion that's an inherently anthropocentric conversation. So we create the media that we then consume and so it can be easy to get into that cycle of thinking about well are we centering voices and centering things or other people or people who suffer discrimination and all of those voices can be lost generally but that's kind of the focus of media. So it is hard to tie those things out. But I do think that it's so clear that every single person on this podcast is trying to center animals and is trying to introduce them in ways that we can think about how we might reconceptualize them, how we might use their voice, how we might lend their stories to things to ensure that they are being centered. So that's where I think you're being hard on yourself because it is in my opinion our job as scholars and researchers and people in the media to speak up for groups and individuals who can't speak for themselves. And that's obviously very common in the law where people who have incapacities are afforded extra protections. It's the job of the government to ensure people are protected and people who don't understand their rights and responsibilities are still protected. And there are so many similarities between human rights law and animal welfare law. And one of those is that communication limitation between people who have incapacities and animals as well. We can't necessarily communicate with animals in the way that we might hope and that is a real barrier. There's generally a real barrier similar to family law you can't always communicate with children in the way that you would hope. And so it is hard to have those communication barriers and how we kind of marry that tension between how they're represented fully and diversely as they are in nature when it comes to animals versus how we might represent people who are discriminated against and underprivileged and people with incapacities, there is that tension there that comes from communication.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I know I hear you but I think there are strategies we can use to better place animals and the impacts for them in a more meaningful way, right? So like you mentioned blackfish at the beginning. So instead of just talking about what blackfish or ex-documentaries, the ways in which they had impacts on the communities that they represented, right? And the economies that they represented, a strategy for us as scholars or as people who are communing about communicating about this is to actually center those specific animal stories, like what happened to those animals. And to some extent I think we did this fairly well in the social media episode where we spoke about the you know the monkeys in the sanctuaries we spoke about the cats in the cat cafes we spoke about the bulls in the bull runs. I think we do still have a kind of responsibility to make sure that the animals themselves and the impacts for them, even if we can't necessarily have a one-on-one conversation with animals, that doesn't mean that they should be obfuscated in these conversations. And same ways I can't speak on behalf of the indigenous communities or the Asian communities or but I still make an effort to ensure that they're included in the conversation. And in some of these conversations I think sometimes I felt like in in an effort and I think that this is a common there's a great book called What Comes After Entanglement and it's it's a common kind of challenge where when you want to I think especially groups on on the left who want to be inclusive and make sure all voices are heard, it's a common challenge like how to speak about everyone and all concerns all at the same time and and that can sometimes not only be a challenge but also counterproductive. The the views of Jessica and Jan in particular were quite fascinating here. Like Jan was very clear with you know don't try to sneak animals in this idea that you've got to sneak animals into the conversation is is not helpful especially when you're dealing with news just tell people the facts you don't need to interpret anything you need to you don't need to make stuff up just tell people what's actually happening and and the story is going to be just fine because there's enough there it's important stuff right do you know what I mean like it's different I'm not I'm not saying I'm not talking about talking to animals. I'm talking about making sure that a fair amount of space is given to really thinking like really thinking about them.

Gina Song Lopez :

Yeah and I I mean I feel like I I agree with Taylor that maybe you're a little bit being a little bit hard of yourself because I've got to do better everybody. No you're so this is this because like as you said this is a very very different season and that you in the in the sense that you have bro people from very different fields that maybe they don't really deal with animals but by participating in this podcast you can actually have also like encourage these people to think about the role of animals in their research. But this is kind of similar to what we do at the critical animal studies course at Lund University because it's a course that is open for students from any background and sometimes we get people from like economics or from like law or like marketing and things like that. And this is a good chance for them to actually start thinking about animals and maybe how through their career goals maybe animal like how are animals connected to their career goals. Sometimes it's it's very hard to see the connection but through this course like you know they're really like are encouraged to think about it. So I think this is very important because right now we're in a bubble in which we all kind of share similar thoughts and ideas and by by maybe making the message a little bit more digestible for the outside that then they can start you know get in first contact and start like exploring this right this is kind of like I think that's why I think this is this is a very important season actually because like you get this uh going outside of the circle yeah I hear you and I mean it was helpful because you also get new concepts kind of cross pollination.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

You spoke about translation earlier Gina and I think yeah there's translation in terms of thinking about human and animal others but there's also translation across disciplines um as an educational resource but also you never know what's going to spark a change in someone and in their thinking.

Gina Song Lopez :

So okay I'll be and that's only you talk about the After Entangle by Eva Haifa Girode right uh I I I really like that book and why she talks about the ethics of exclusion which yeah it is really important. Like maybe uh when you make the message too digestible and everyone everyone matters or everything matters then you lose sight of what actually matters. And I think in in in thinking about what actually matters we also have to think about even though maybe a lot of a lot of messages matter at the same time there's there will be always a message that is louder or a group of people that have the privilege to advance a certain message more than others. So I I think that's why again even though we're we're in a very let's open up the conversation we should always kind of keep mind of the of the agenda like what is the end goal and I mean I then I under I understand why your your concern of not like not uh branching out too much from talking about animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah um but I mean I think you can't like like you said Telly you can't really understand in many ways understanding animals and what happened to them is also a project of understanding humans and and as we said at the beginning kind of different human cultural dynamics different human laws um so it's I guess in some ways what the season has tried to do is be sensitive to thinking about how people are positioned in those stories relative to animals in those stories um which is not always easy to do without doing the thingification and the memefication of both people and animals um which is good. So we've picked up on a couple of themes um are there any themes I've missed so I think we've spoken about discourse, rhetoric inequality content, different audiences, um gender, race and some of the gaps we've spoken about is perhaps with literature, you know, maybe thinking about literature but also perhaps navigating this tension of representing animals versus others. Anything I I've left out or something you feel like you really want to highlight from the season?

Taylor Jobling:

So another thing that I want to highlight in terms of I guess themes that that emerge from this season we had a lot of discussion about um hierarchical structures and we've had a bit of a discussion as well about who represents and who gets to voice animals and and underprivileged people. I think another thing that comes out very strongly in this season particularly in thinking about media is how narratives in various disciplines can educate people and how that is used to change people's perspectives or the things that it that it can do. And I think media is such a powerful tool for that. We've already talked about that a little bit in this episode but I think shedding light on these issues and voicing these issues does so much for so many people. And I think Jessica discusses it in episode nine on news where the new the nuance can be lost sometimes when thinking about animal welfare and how it interacts with other things. So how animal welfare interacts with the news or the law or film or literature or podcasts like we've sat we've been saying and I think that um how that narrative can be changed through media is so important. So a specific example I find so impactful is thinking about documentaries, how documentaries are impactful for storytelling and so many are discussed this season but I think so many of them do so much for people. I know the Cove did so much for people when thinking about dolphin culling in Japan and how that shed light on that particular issue. Similarly Blackfish I talk about that a lot because that is something that definitely radicalised me watching blackfish it radicalised a lot of my friends as well and how animals in captivity can truly suffer and how it shed light on Tillicum and what he was going through and despite the fact he still died in captivity but people were made aware of what was going on. Earthlings challenged obviously so much of what people view about animal abuse, exploitation meat industry and cowspiracy has done a lot of that for discourse and farming and um I know a lot of people personally that have switched to vegetarian or vegan because of watching that documentary. So I think that that how storytelling can talk about animals and center animals is such an important like we we talked a little bit about the the problems and the tensions there, but I think it it also does so much in bringing light into these issues. And it does kind of always go back to that tension of categorization because obviously in all those document all those documentaries I've just listed, all of those animals have been categorized. So we are able to empathize with them because we see the category we're in we can empathize with Tilicum because he's a wild animal that is held in captivity in a tank that is not the the size that it should be for him to enjoy when they swim hundreds of thousands of kilometres every day. Similarly with the COVID about dolphins and and the specific stories it tells it has still has that tension with categorization. But again I just keep going back to in the law we kind of need to do that sometimes in order to protect people and things and um living breathing beings as well as the environment and land and native title rights. We need to categorize them so we can help them. But I do note that categories can also have that harmful aspect where you're thinking about if something doesn't fit into that category, it can either allow it the animal to suffer or it can allow discrimination to occur or allow people to harm and do things to animals and to people if they don't fit into these particular categories.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And I think that when talking about objects you're also speaking about subjects when you're speaking about conscious beings right so whatever the subject of the law is has also to some extent been objectified by the law, right? A population is an object of the law. And this could be whether you're speaking about mothers for example right mothers become an object of the law because they require specific provisions so that they can move through society in particular ways, right? They need particular protections and particular affordances and allowances and in that movement of creating them as objects you also create particular opportunities and limitations for them to be subjects and this is particularly important when you have um categories that are limiting right so if you become a problem in the law a delinquent in the law this you are also objectified as in the law as a problem as a delinquent and this again opens particular opportunities and forecloses some right so thinking about going to prison for example so how you are seen in the law really changes your material circumstances right so you could think about the law as a space of configuration but media is also a space of configuration it's a it's an imaginative space of configuration where I think just to build on what you're saying where I think you're having that same kind of object subject tension happening right so you've got numerous kinds of object figures emerging in film. Sorry stick with me I'm on a roll you've got numerous kinds of object figures in films you've got the animals who are saved you've got the animals who resist you've got the animals who are helping humans you've got the animals who are news stories and the animals who are resources right these are all ways in which animals have been objectified by the media and and by law etc etc and in some ways when they're objectified in that way it creates opportunities for them to be subjects or not but it also creates opportunities with which we as humans can think about them as belonging in our societies. And it limits oftentimes if we only think about whales as wild animals slash captive animals. If we only think about dogs as pets if um if we only think about rats as pests this creates limits to how we can actually interact with the animals as well as limits for how they can interact with the rest of the world. So that's for me really what makes media so important is it does. It does this dual function of representing the animals but also creating the space with which to imagine alternatives. And if we're only just regurgitating the same shit over and over, we're not doing that kind of spatial imaginary work. The problem thing for me was most clear in that episode with the possums, right? How the the possums figure in Australia as these not only like legally as as issues but very much in the kind of imaginations of people possums are problems and and that means really important things for the ways they they live their lives.

Taylor Jobling:

Australia we have a big problem with dingos and because they are labeled as pests they can be killed in a lot of different states um simply due to the fact that they are pests and they are considered a big um problem to farmers and so they're not able to kind of be protected in that way in a lot of different states. They all have different laws about dingos and there was a the case of Brighton and Will in 2020 about um a man who um essentially beat a dingo to death a wild animal to death in his um uh in his back uh yeah in his backyard for um attacking um some animals that he had on his property and the law isn't able to do much we're constrained to those those harmful categorizations of pests so therefore the law is not able to step in and cruel actions can happen to animals and to things so again it's that tension I keep saying the word tension but it's important I think in thinking about what categorization can do. It can help and it can shed light on these issues which is a big theme in this season I've found whereas it can also be harmful it can mean voices get lost it can mean um suffering and pain and exploitation can also get lost yeah that came up a lot in that popular media and pests episode and I think pests is one of those categorizations that really shows how these conversations stretch across human and animal divides right historically has been used to for variety of different populations to control populations in in very specific ways.

Gina Song Lopez :

I think that's a really good like point to link the the conversations around you know like the systems and especially like as we were talking about in terms of like the the video games and the system how that predetermines a lot of outcomes but then also you know how like this legality of like these other uh categories can be included like dealt differently in uh according to law and actually that does connect to the quote that I picked a little bit so I actually for to talk about this quote I need to give some context because this is a quote that I got from um an anime slash manga slash anime uh work uh known as One Piece. And and I think it's actually maybe relevant to this year because One Piece has been in the news uh because the the pirate flag that show up shows up in the series has been used you know as a symbol of the Gen C protest. And this quote is from a scene that happens as Luffy who is the main character is dying from blood loss after a fight and it depicts the moment that is sort of like it kind of can be interpreted as a sort of racial reconciliation between fishmen and humans. So uh the fishman This in this series are a race of marine people, so like they live uh uh underwater. And they have historically been enslaved and discriminated against by humans that live in the surface. There was also an incident in which in the past in which a fishman who was a hero who freed many slaves, including uh human slaves, died because humans refused to donate blood to this hero after he died from fighting to freedom. So since then, there has been a law in the series in which the fishmen are forbidden to donate blood to humans. And in this scene, uh a character named Jimbe, who is a fishman, uh, he's a well, well shark fishman. Um, and he's also a pirate, and he decides to go against the law to donate the blood to the dying, dying Luffy. As the blood transfusion scene is happening, uh, there's an unseen narrator who explains. Both the wounders and the wounded alike bleed red blood. That small narrow tube, far too tiny to call a road, was unlike prejudice, born of hate and fear, or battle, washing blood clean with more bloodshed. But it was nevertheless, uh, more than any wild dream or ideal fantasy, a vivid and real representation of the true road towards the sun. So I find that that quote from that series very powerful. And also One Piece has uh is a really good like media source to to think about animals in in like especially like how um Asian media has become more mainstream.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

You've helped us go full circle. You brought both in marine life and and bringing in Asian media, which we started we started the season or episode with. And so the the quotes itself is talking about kind of the blood flow and how humans and animals are connected.

Gina Song Lopez :

What's the yeah, yeah, basically like the how uh everyone shared the the the blood is still red, like uh the the you know the victims of the meteor visors uh still share the same blood, and this is a reason how they you know how they cannot reconciliate because you know you can move past all of the prejudice and differences and just see that you you still bleed, like you still suffer, uh whichever side you you belong to.

unknown:

Yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, so we we we we experience pain and there is suffering and and maybe we can connect over that. So I think again, like Tobias said, instead of trying to compete for who suffers the most, to take seriously the suffering of the suffering that exists, right? And in the various forms that it comes.

Taylor Jobling:

I think my quote perfectly links to Gina's in in thinking about these these themes of discrimination and how that works. So I think I'll just get straight into my quote. Mine is from um English philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham, who a lot of people would know and was an early advocate for animal rights within the law. And one of his quotes is one of, I the quote I've picked is one of his most famous quotes, but I think it it ties so well into everything we've spoken about, as well as the fantastic quote Gina brought in. So perhaps it will someday be recognized that the number of legs, the hairiness of the skin, or the possession of a tail are equally insufficient reasons for abandoning to the same fate a creature that can feel. What else could be used to draw the line? Is it the faculty of reason or the possession of language? But a full-grown horse or dog is incomparably more rational and conversable than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. Even if that were not so, what difference would that make? The question is not can they reason or can they talk, but can they suffer? And I think that just goes in line so well with what Gina has said about discrimination and we all have the same blood, we all have the same life and connection and community. And I think that's what pulled me to uh Bentham's work and why I've used it in a lot of my um research and my thesis, and as well as how well they kind of marry together, what Gina and I have found.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

That classic quote, yes. And I'm happy to have it, I'm happy to have it on the show. Um, and also, I mean, of course, Bentham has not been critiqued, but people have always added there's the question of suffering, and then there's also the question of joy and experience and love. Like suffering is the baseline. Yes, sure, we should take that suffering seriously, but we should also take seriously that these animals can and do and should and have every right to experience joy and flourishing and you know what I mean. Um, but Bentham, I quote, has a way of just cutting across the divides, right? Thank you so much. Um, okay, we're gonna wrap up now. Thank you both of you for giving me so much of your time and thoughts with regards to the season. Uh, as we wrap up here, you could tell me what uh you're currently working on and if people want to get in touch with you um or find out more about you, how they can do so. Uh Gina, why don't we start with you?

Gina Song Lopez :

Yeah, uh so yeah, I'm in my final, final uh leg of my PhD. So now I'm just kind of working on revisions and uh so I can hopefully have have my defense in March. Uh so yeah, that's my main work. But I also have um recently published an article about the animal uh the vegan movement in Taiwan, and I have a forthcoming article about the uh plant-based food advocacy in China.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah. Amazing. Such important work. Um if you've got the links, make sure to send them to me and I'll include them in the show notes. Taylor, how about you?

Taylor Jobling:

Um so next year I will be um looking to start my PhD still in animal welfare and the law, and I'm working out some of the logistics of that. Otherwise, I have a forthcoming article with my colleague Courtney Dolphin on the Family Law Act and some of the changes that Australia have made with regard to the Family Law Act and um animals now being included as companion animals and what that will look like in the courts moving forward and how that might affect families in Australia. Um, and otherwise, I'll be um continuing to teach and research at um Adelaide University in 2026.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Great, it's wonderful. You guys are at different ends of the uh the PhD experience. And I think what you what you mentioned there is also so interesting is how the kind of imagination of the protections people think exists, right? Like how the protection of animals is represented is also an avenue we didn't really get into this season because that's also something. Like people have this idea that animals are super protected and there's all these things that are in place, but actually that's really the contentious um and not always the case. Um super interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing those articles. All right. Uh thank you so much for uh joining on my joining me on the show, for letting me know about your experiences and uh for helping me think through uh this season. Uh, have a great day. Thank you for having us. Thank you to both Taylor and Gina for giving so generously of their time and ideas in this episode. I very much enjoyed talking to you. Thank you also to Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple, for sponsoring this podcast, as well as to the Pollination Projects, the School of Modern Language, the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech University for co-sponsoring this season. The bed music was composed by Gordon Clark and the logo designed by Jeremy John. This episode was produced, hosted, and edited by myself. This is The Animal Turn with me, Claudia Herkenfelder.

Taylor Jobling:

For more great IRU podcasts, visit irall pod dot com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.

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Claudia Hirtenfelder

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Gina Song Lopez

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Taylor Jobling

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