S9E1: Animals' Cultural Histories with Sandra Swart

Claudia speaks with historian Sandra Swart about the importance of recognising animals’ cultural histories. They discuss the maturation of animal history as a field and focus on the cultural histories of baboons and elephants in South Africa. 

Topics covered: 

• Working definition of animal culture 
• Fuffification and disnification of wildlife 
• The deep and urban history of baboons 
• A lone elephant in the Knysna Forest 
• ‘Rogue’ elephants in the Pilanesberg
• Animal Highlight: Elephant history in Kingston, Ontario

Sandra Swart is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is Director of the African Anthropocenes Research Centre, Guest Professor of Anthropocene History at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and co-Vice President of European Society for Environmental History. She received her DPhil in Modern History from in 2001, and simultaneously an MSc in Environmental Change and Management, both at Oxford University. She studies the more-than-human history of southern Africa. She is an editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities. She is the co-author with Greg Bankoff, of , Breeds of Empire: The ‘invention’ of the horse in the Philippines and Southern Africa, 1500-1950 (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press 2007); co-editor, with Lance van Sittert, of Canis Africanis: a dog history of southern Africa (Brill, 2008), co-editor of Gender and Animals in History (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), and co-editor with Emily O’Gorman, Mark Carey and William San Martín, The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (Routledge, 2023). She is sole author of Riding High – Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010) Her most recent book is The Lion’s Historian – Africa’s Animal Past (Ohio University Press, 2025), winner of the Southern African Historical Prize 2025. Learn more. 

Date Recorded: 20 May 2026

Featured: 

• The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart 
• Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa by Sandra Swart 
• The Dreaded Comparison by Majorie Spiegel 
• Cooperative Hunting: How Eels and Grouper Partner on Prey
• Animal rights/human rights: Entanglements of oppression and liberation by David Nibert
• Lions of Gir
• Stones Walking Tour: Colonial Elephant

Other Episodes of The Animal Turn Mentioned:

• S2E3: Animal Culture with Carl Safina 
• S6E8: Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan

Quotes: 

“Until the lion has the opportunity to tell the story of the hunt it will aways be a story of the hunter” (West African Proverb).

“I would be proud to call myself ‘the lion’s historian.’ I hope I have many years ahead exploring social and environmental history in a way that takes the other animals seriously. But let us not concede that we historians are more like baboons than lions. Of course, I mean this in the nicest possible way. A good historian is baboonesque – a trickster figure, adept at shapeshifting and boundary-crossing, unconstrained and omnivorous in our intellectual pleasures. We diligently and delicately pick the lice from the archival armpit. We are not afraid to grasp the nettle or to pluck the prickly pear of public polemic. We are strangers on the rocks, the watchers on the krantzes, the sentinels on the wall. We see and remember” (Swart, The Lion’s Historian, 2023, 294).

“We need to write histories taking a broader view beyond that of the hunter. We need accounts that connect deep history to the present moment. We need stories in which gender and generational context are not forgotten. These new histories will allow us to understand our own past as more complete in a multi-species and more-than-human context. But I would go much further and suggest that the other animals have their own histories too, both entangled in and independent of our human histories. Our understanding that animals have their own ‘cultures’, their ‘having history’ becomes irrefutable. What, after all, is history if not cultures changing over time?” (Swart, The Lion’s Historian, 2023, 83).

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn,Blue Sky, and Instagram

 Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo. Thank you Rebecca Shen, Christiaan Menz, Herre de Bondt, and Carlo Salzani for back of house and content support. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder. 

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

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

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Fluffification And Why It Harms

Sandra Swart 0:00

This is another eye roar podcast. And it also does a grave disservice to the animal because it it romanticizes the animal, makes it a flat, two-dimensional Disney version of the creature. When you know it takes away the agency, the agentic sentience and historicity of the animal, the very subjectivity of that animal, if you make it a cuddly stuffed bear. So it does no service. Our job is not to romanticize the animal, our job is to historicize the animal. So that's very important. I'm so glad that you, you know, you introduced the idea of fluffification because this is a mission. Historians, it's our job to point it out and to say, no, this is how people have had to struggle to survive. We pay homage to them, but we also learn from these strategies. So it's not just about idealizing what they've done, we can actively learn from the very pragmatic life ways they've developed to survive, to coexist, and to co-create cultures.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:20

This has been a long time coming. For those of you who are listeners to the show or longtime listeners to the show, you know that when I started my PhD, I knew nothing about animal studies, nothing about animal geographies, and certainly nothing about animal histories. And yet here we are. I really, really enjoy animal history, and I'm a huge believer that anyone who is doing any research on any specific animal should be also looking at and considering their local and global histories. Animals' histories are important and they matter. And when you think about animal history, oftentimes we think about environmental histories, but what we could and should also be thinking about are their cultural and their social histories. So I'm delighted to kick off season nine with my guest Sandra Swart and talking about animals' cultural histories or animal culture and history. What is the significance of thinking about animals' culture in a historical way? Sandra Swart is a professor and chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She's the director of the African Anthropocene Research Center, guest professor of Anthropocene History at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, and the co-vice president of European Society for Environmental History. Sandra received her D Phil in Modern History in 2001 and simultaneously an MSc in environmental change and management, both at Oxford University. She studies the more than human history of Southern Africa and is the editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene Studies in Environmental Humanities. She is a prolific writer and author. She's written several books, co-edited numerous others, and has many, many book chapters and journal articles. She's most well known, I think, for her work on horses and horse histories. And you might be familiar with her book, Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa. What we talk about today quite a bit is her more recent book, The Lion's Historian, Africa's Animal Past, which was the winner of the South African Historical Prize in 2025. It's a brilliant book. It's a page turner, it's interesting, it's funny, but it's also tragic and exciting and sad and thought-provoking. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different species, dives into their local and global histories, and asks a whole host of, I think, social, cultural, and ethical questions. We speak about a number of the chapters today, primarily baboons and elephants, but we also touch on lions a little bit. It's well worth a read, and I really encourage you to go and get that book. Needless to say, I am happy that Sandra joined us. We have a really fun conversation. I learned a lot from her about elephant histories in particular. But yeah, this is a great place to start season line. I'm happy to have you with us.

Meeting Sandra Swart And Her Work

Claudia Hirtenfelder 4:15

Hi Sandra, welcome to the Animal Time Podcast. I'm very excited to have you on the show. Um I'm a big fan of your tweets. No, you're hilarious. It's not every day you come across someone who has humor online, but you're you're fun. And um you're also an awesome academic. I've really enjoyed engaging with your scholarship over the years and uh reading The Lions Historian was a delight. And congratulations. I believe you won you won an award, the South African Historical Award. Is that correct?

Sandra Swart 4:47

I did, I did. Thank you so much. What a lovely, warm introduction. My students tell me I'm terrible on the Twitter and I should be banned. But actually, you know, really. Um it's so nice of you. But yes, and thank you as well. I did win the Southern African Historical Book Prize. Rather fabulous. Considering that 20 years ago, being an animal-sensitive historian was absolute career suicide. I wouldn't have suggested to even my least favorite postgraduate. So it's rather nice that we've arrived as a discipline.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:21

Uh well, congratulations. Uh, it's very well deserved, and I very much enjoyed um the book, particularly the last chapter about baboons, which I'm hoping we'll get into uh at some point during this interview today. But before we get there, you said, you know, when you started 20 years ago, no one was career suicide to be trying to do animal histories. Did you always know you wanted to look at animals and animal histories? How did how did you get here?

Sandra Swart 5:46

Um that's a I think I did. I think I did know. From a very young age, I had wild fantasies of being a vet, of being a wildlife expert. But my passion is history. And so combining these seemed an almost inevitable path. You know, long before one this would be a normal thing to do. So I was doing my PhD in history at Oxford, and because Oxford is so eccentric, you're allowed to do things you can't do at other universities. It's got a kind of confidence that lets you do that kind of thing. So at the same time as doing my PhD in history, I also did an MSc in environmental change and management to try and bring these two passions together. And I think this this was at the time a very outre, a very almost outrageous thing to do. But I'm so glad I did because it it gave me the skills to do to do this, to do something, you know, completely new and and frowned upon and a little bit rule-breaky. You know, I wrote my first book on the horse as a non-native species in southern Africa. And at the time there was an elderly professor who always greeted me in the corridor with, ah, Dr. Swat, and how is my little pony? So, really, not a thing one was encouraged to do. But you know, after you get your PhD, you can do whatever the hell you like. And my PhD was on the Afrikaans poet Eugene Morer. And over the four years of doing the PhD, I grew heartily to dislike the man, as one does of one's subject. You either fall in love or you you loathe. But what I liked about Eugene Morare was the time he spent with the baboons in the mountains. And I realized after that it's the baboons that interest me, not the people. It's the way they interact with the people, sure, but it's the animals that interest me. And I was liberated to just write for the last 20, 25 years animal sensitive histories.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 7:42

Amazing. So was um a foray into looking at baboons or horses your first step into looking at animal histories?

Sandra Swart 7:49

It was horses. So I decided, you know what? A massively unundervalued force for change in Southern Africans, Southern Africa's past has been the horse, which was a non-native species introduced in the mid-17th century and an absolute game changer. The horse was introduced against the protestations of the Dutch East India Company, you know, the world's really first big multinational. And the local settlers at the time were not supposed to be colonists. They were just supposed to be making a little refreshment station for sailors traveling around the coast and selling the goods around the world. But they they had started to suffer a few incursions into their fortified area by local communities, and they thought the horse was the way to go because it was the mid-17th century's equivalent of shock and awe. So they begged the Dutch East India Company, send us horses, send us horses, and they remained very stern and said, we will not try to tame zebras. So these early settlers tried rather disastrously to tame zebras. Didn't work out about the story of the horse and how it changed history and changed Southern Africa's history, how it changed not only stuff you'd expect, like military stuff or transport stuff, but even genetic human stuff, because now people could travel faster, they could travel further. You need to marry and change. So it changed, you know, uh demographically it changed how people are. It also changed quotidian interactions between people, it changed metaphors. Horses became totems for some groups. You know, it was a fundamental force for change that's been ignored, right? Because we have the holy trinity of the the historians' holy trinity as race, class, gender. But I'm saying to you, could we just add species? It might not work for every historical project, but just allow your ocular range to expand. Just see the creatures at the edges of the of your vision. Look around the archive. There could be animals there. And then if you allow that to happen, it can change the story that is told. It's not just adding animals, make it a slightly fuller story. It can fundamentally change the story that is told.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:14

Yeah, 100%. And uh, I mean, just like your professor speaking to you in the hallways, this idea of, you know, calling you, how's my little pony? There's some idea that doing animal histories is not doing serious histories, not doing serious work. But I and what I hear you saying here is it's very much an important part of how these stories are told, not only in terms of telling human stories, but also in terms of telling stories of the animals themselves. So, yeah, the horses in Southern Africa greatly changed the ways in which humans interacted, but their introduction to South Africa and Southern Africa changed their cultures and their histories as well in pretty profound ways. Um, and not just horses, of course, you know, other domesticated animals like cows and sheep that were introduced there as well, right?

Sandra Swart 10:57

And I would even go further, I would say not just domesticated animals. It's really something I hope we can do a deep, deep dive into, is that actually co-created human animal cultures, obviously with domestic animals or with livestock. I don't really love the term livestock, but domesticated animals, companion animals. We we can already know, of course, human lifeways changes will change their life ways. But what about wild animals? And I want to do, I want to do a deep dive into elephants with you to talk about how humans change their cultures too.

How Animal History Became Possible

Claudia Hirtenfelder 11:33

Yeah, that sounds great. Uh, before we get into that deep dive, let's let's maybe start with uh an understanding. So I've spoken about culture a number of times on the show before. Uh early days, I think I had Carl Safina on and we spoke about culture, and it was quite a I think a biological grappling with culture.

Sandra Swart 11:50

I actually love that one. I think that's an extremely useful one. And I want to say, you know, I'm I'm talking now today as a historian, but I so value the interdisciplinary nature of animal-sensitive history. And we have to be really open to listening, to talking, to bringing in ecology, bringing in ethology, bringing in conservation science and to the stories we tell as well. So I love all those podcasts that you've done as well.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 12:16

Thank you. That's super kind. Um, but then I guess my question is what is it about uh culture and I mean, you have this really great uh one of uh a great quotes, because I was gonna ask you what is the connection between culture and history, but then at some point in your book on page 83, you go on to say, uh animals, hang on, let me go. I would go much further and suggest that other animals have their own histories too, both entangled in and independent of our human histories. Our understanding that animals have their own cultures changes everything. Once it becomes clear that animals have cultures, their having history becomes irrefutable. What, after all, is history, if not cultures changing over time, which I think is so beautiful and it captures this idea that culture is not static, right? Culture is a dynamic force. So, how do you understand culture and why is culture important for historians to be interested in?

Sandra Swart 13:16

I think it's lovely if we begin with culture and we struggle to define culture. You know, you want to start a fist fight among anthropologists or historians in a bar, just ask them to define culture. And I really, you know, in 1952, the Harvard Peabody Museum came up with 164 different definitions of culture. But I want to say we don't have to be precious about it. You know, as the Supreme Court said of pornography, we know culture when we see it. But allow me to give a few little bits that build up the definition. When we talk about human culture, or more daringly animal culture, there's some things we must agree on. And these things are it's the behaviors and knowledges, the behaviors and knowledges that make up what the animals are doing or what the people are doing. It must be learned through social interaction rather than just through instinct. I think that's fair. It must be transmissible across the generations. So it can't be just that one human or one animal did the thing, like potato washing by primates. It's got to be transmissible down the generations. I think we can agree. And it must show local group specific behavior. If this is seen across the species in all places, you know, then how do we say it is specifically cultural? That seems to me to be a species-level behavior. Okay. Then it gets harder. So for the animal, um the animal historian, it must be observable to an outsider. I think that's probably true of humans too. You know, it has to be observable to an anthropologist or a sociologist. Okay. And then I would say local variable, the variable nature, the local specificity is crucial, crucial, crucial. And it must change over time. Otherwise, you can say it's a kind of immutable characteristic of the species. All humans do this, all elephants do this over time and space. No. If you want it to be a cultural thing you're looking for, it's got to be specific to place and time, and it must show perhaps some change over time. That's what makes it harder to be us, makes it harder to be historians because we can't just take a snapshot of what's happening now. We have to figure out ways of showing how it was different before. We our job is to show change over time. So these are the sort of building blocks of culture, I suggest.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 15:47

Could we say them once more? Just again.

Sandra Swart 15:48

So just a quick run through. Absolutely. So learn through social interaction. It doesn't just come to you from instinct. And even things that we thought in the past, oh, this is just instinctive, like bird songs or a whale song. No, no, no. It seems to be some evidence of social teaching. It must be transmissible down across the generations. Fair enough. It must show local group specific behavior, not just species-wide. And then we can argue, but uh, you know, we can get into an arm wrestling over this, but I think it should be observable to an outsider. You know, that's necessary but not sufficient. Okay. So local variation change over time. All right. These are the building blocks, and that's what I'm working from. So we're not going to worry about the 164 different definitions of culture. This is what I'm working from. And I think we can agree this is a rough and ready way to proceed.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:51

Yeah, okay. So we're looking for changes over time, we're looking in social arrangements and how they've changed over time, and some kind of geographical and social space.

Sandra Swart 17:02

Some social teaching is going on.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:05

All right.

Sandra Swart 17:06

Oh, even though that might look, yeah, yeah.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:08

So it doesn't necessarily mean um this wouldn't necessarily mean that cultures are contained within a specific species, because you also spoke at group level there, right? So you could have interspecies cultural dynamics where say a human is teaching a horse or a dog X or Y, um, or the dog or a horse is teaching the human X or Y. Um, those over time are also cultural artifacts. So it's not just that we're gonna agree.

Sandra Swart 17:34

So so my point is that you know it can be a co-created culture. It could be a co-created culture of total conflict or of coexistence in some way. And it doesn't even just have to be between people and other animals, it can be between different species that don't involve us at all.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:55

So it makes me think about the eel and the is it the group of fish? I always get it wrong, um, where they they support one another in hunting practices. The eel goes into a rock face and the fish waits outside uh and they've learned this. And I think there's quite a few uh instances of birds and reptiles also figuring out. Uh, I mean, we would often talk about this as symbiotic relationships, but it sounds to me like symbiotic relationships are a form of cultural dynamism.

Sandra Swart 18:23

If the symbiotic relationship is not everywhere, but we can see it in some places, then we have to say something cultural has happened, you know, but but something cultural has happened. For the coming together of the two species, and if there's a rupture in that, if if a species is then removed, one species is removed from that area for several generations, can we it would be a natural experiment to then see is it if that species is then reintroduced, do they automatically just go back to the old way of being symbiotic together? Or is something lost forever because there's no generational teaching? This would be a wonderful natural experiment, be it a little bird in a crocodile's mouth, be it a cattle egret, be it, you know, the honey guide, be it a rotel or a honey badger following the little the little um falcon, you know, in the Kalahari, it would be a wonderful natural experiment to see if those things are completely severed if there is a um a rupture in in generational transfer of knowledge. It would be really great. But that yeah, you know, it would it would be incredibly cruel to try and impose this as an actual experiment. So I hope this isn't clear. I hope it is not

Defining Animal Culture For Historians

Sandra Swart 19:37

attempted.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 19:37

What you say here raises, at least in, you know, when we speak about conservation, when we speak about biodiversity, we tend to speak in terms of numbers and immutable kind of entities, right? As though translocations aren't also um disruptive. And when you start to bring in culture, you realize that just because a baboon is a baboon, it doesn't mean a baboon is a baboon the same everywhere, right?

Sandra Swart 20:01

Well, exactly. I mean, you know, I could call my next book that a baboon is not actually a baboon. But perhaps that's our best example of a natural experiment that we could use. Because in fact, the ancient landscape of fear between humans and baboons, before the ancient landscape of fear, there was a different time, a kind of pre-Lapsarian Eden of actual cooperation between, and this is important to tell the deep history, so you'll forgive me, it's a it's a bit of a long story, but actually, humans and baboons co-evolved so closely that sometimes paleontologists, when looking for human remains, will use baboon remains as a proxy for where they're likely to find our early ancestors because we loved the same environment, we wanted the same food, and we feared the same predators. So we were very closely evolved. And there's some evidence to suggest we really benefited by being good neighbors together, living really closely, because they have senses we don't have, we've got height they don't have. So we could warn of the coming of a predator, and we can observe each other also quite closely. What foods are poisonous, baboons know where water is. Okay, we can follow, we can benefit by living closely together. And so there's we co-evolved in a way that then was to leave a legacy. We then became synanthropes. Baboons can live very closely with us. So when the terrible rupture in our relationship between the two species happened, when we became transhuman farmers and then worse, crop farmers with settled delicious things that we produce that are high calorie and easy to get, we not unnaturally the relationship radically shifted and baboons became for us bad neighbors. And this is a relationship we can see written on the rocks. You know, there's literally rock art depicting outraged agriculturalists. Chasing baboons with agricultural implements, because that's when the relationship shifts and they become the early stages of vermin, problem animals, all those terrible terms that were written into law, written into society that made baboons bad neighbors. So this is the natural experiment. In a sense, because we have the deep history, they co-evolved to have not have neophobia, they're not scared of us, and they co-evolved to we together as primates. We like the same stuff. They like our junk food, which is why they wander into our towns and suburbs now with our overflowing garbage heap and landfill sites. So, in a way, this is the natural experiment of the rupture of generational loss of knowledge. Because actually, agriculturists were in a lot of places taught baboons we can no longer live together. The neighbors, that's over. The relationship is done. We're not just on a break, it's we're divorcing. But then there came a time when the agriculturalists were gone. City dwellers and suburbanites are there. But the baboons and us, we've lost our ways of living together in a lot of places. Both sides have failed. They've lost the knowledge of fear of us, we have lost the knowledge of how to give fear without cruelty. And so now there's this terrible conflict in the suburbs, this broken relationship with really, you know, when baboons are found, they're investigated, they do a necropsy, and the little bodies are absolutely an archive of hate. In them are pellet gun bullets, real bullets. There's there's this disproportionate violence towards baboons, which which comes out of a low-level simmering anger within Southern African society. You know, we're a very stressed society, and the baboon is now perceived as an invading outsider. People have paid good money to put up these high fences, these burglar guards, but they're being invaded. So they overreact to the baboon in a way that previous generations perhaps would not have done, loss of knowledge. But baboons have lost the fear, the low-level anxiety, and ways to avoid human conflict. So they've also failed with generational knowledge. So perhaps here is our natural experiment.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 24:23

Yes. So there's been a loss of cultural dynamics between our two groups.

Sandra Swart 24:28

Yes, exactly.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 24:30

Yeah, um, it's I mean, it's an incredible story that that chapter on baboons. I think you show a lot about how our cultures are interconnected, but also how baboon cultures have evolved and developed. You speak a fair bit about intergenerational trauma, uh, which I know is a again a tricky concept when it comes to speaking. Any any concept that's people would accept readily, I think, when it comes to humans, when you start to talk about it with animals, people get a little bit weary.

Sandra Swart 24:54

You know, how I think particularly because, as you know, I'm an Africanist historian, I'm very well aware that the dreaded comparison between people and animals has a very real power to wound and hurt people. And until very recently, there were people written out of history in Africa. You know, people who are accused of having no archive, they don't really have a history. Who can forget the terrible Hugh Trevoroper, an Oxford Don, unluckily, I shamefully confess, who said that in Africa we don't really have history, just the gyrations of tribes. So, of course, there's, I'm a proud Africanist historian, we push back against such nonsense. We, of course, say that humans have a history, but we also know that because of being erased, being written out, people in Southern Africa are extremely sensitive to any animal comparison. And particularly one is very cautious with baboons because baboons were used as a very toxic, a way of enforcing the sort of toxic taxonomy of people, of saying some people, you know, with this terrible misunderstanding of Darwinism, we got social Darwinism imposed on people, and of course, people within some groups were said to be closer to the other primates than others in this racial hierarchy that structured society. And this was performed on a very quotidian, terrible level. Let me give you an example. For many farms, even until the 20th century, when a baby was born to a farm laborer, they would take the baby to the farm, the farmer, the farm owner, and say, I've had a baby. And the farm owner, as a joke, but actually as an incredible way of policing the racist social order, would say, Aha, I see you have had a baboon and you have cut off his tail. Let me give you a gift to welcome. And it so can you imagine how how raw and how wounded people feel? So, as a historian, I am careful and sensitive to say, hey, I am not writing anyone out of history when I write animals into history. No, in fact, let us let us have radical egalitarianism here. It's not writing anybody out, and actually, following the animal has very often taught me a lot about totem or about rock art, about parts of history that are very often excluded from mainstream history. So no one is losing from this. Yeah, we're all gaining.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 27:34

Yeah, and I think it also points to kind of the entanglements of different oppressions, how these systems of power operated to diminish a variety of different groups. And as you said in the beginning, it's not only questions of gender, race, and class, but also of species, how species functions as a tool to manage and control.

Sandra Swart 27:53

And I like how you say entanglements of oppression rather than intersectionality, because that that has got its own political baggage. I think entanglements is so nice. That is a better way to put it. It's it is one cannot be pulled apart from the other. Intersectionality just implies a coming together, an overlap, a Venn diagram. Entanglement means if you rip one away, you do violence to the others. And I prefer that. I have to credit you in a little bit.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 28:29

No, no, don't credit me. You credit uh David Neibert. David Neibert has this great front. Um, no, well, this is a really great introduction. Okay, so we we've got we've got a kind of sense of uh culture and and how culture entails uh you know transferral uh over time, changes over time that are also localized and specific. Um, but also that it's not just a kind of when we speak about culture and cultural changes, it's not just a matter of speaking about um, you know, fluffy coexistence and happy feelings. There's also talking about um ruptures and harms and how these things have changed over time. And this has been significant for human populations and also for animal populations in some ways that are connected and in other ways that are distinct from one another. Um, okay, so that's that's really helpful. And I think, like you said, looking at history helps us to understand change. Uh, and you pointed out at the beginning that you think looking at wild animals cultural histories is really interesting and important, and you wanted to dive into elephants.

Baboons And A Broken Neighbourhood

Claudia Hirtenfelder 29:37

So why don't we why don't we go there now? I know you start the book with a story about elephants, um, but perhaps you could tell us what your your thinking is.

Sandra Swart 29:44

I would love to. And I also want to just respond to um something you've just said, which is about the fluffy, warm Lion King kumbaya feelings that so often pop up when people write about animals. And I just prior to our little um foray into the dark woods with the elephants, what are elephants doing in dark woods? Well, I'll tell you in a moment, is just to pick up on the fluffiness and say that I'm this is something that also animates me, is also a mission I'm on. And that is because we are living in this radically urbanizing world. We are so cut off, we're so severed from the natural world, and with the shifting baseline syndrome that people are suffering, we don't even know what we don't know about animals. So, ten years ago, when I would ask my students, and students, if you're listening, I love you very, very much, and I'm not throwing you under the bus, but this is a safe space. We're all on the same side here. Ten years ago, when I would ask my students, hey, list five local bird species, list for me five local mammal species that you'd find on the mountain above my university town. Sure, no problem. Now, when I do it, I did it recently, in fact, I did it last week, and the darling student, who is a good sport and played along with me, had to confess that he had to abandon the project because I said list five bird species that are local. He started with the African grey parrot. No. Then he what did he go to? He went to something even stranger. It was, I don't think, a bird that exists. I think it was Angry Birds or something, but he panicked. And after that, we had nothing. So, so you know, this was a shock to the system. So talk about shifting baseline syndrome. We don't even know what we don't know about our local, increasingly impoverished ecologies.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 31:46

That's such an important point because we talk about shifting baselines in terms of the you know, the the um biomarkers outside. We talk about how there's a reduction of species, but not necessarily.

Sandra Swart 31:56

What about the knowledge of the species? It's all about that base, as a late lamented singer used to say. All about the base, about the base. So I have to say, you know, that's a shock. So that's our students do not know, and we do not know, and we're all cut off in ways that we do not even know we know. Plus, in many places of the world, we're now living in such ecological deserts. I mean, it's hard sometimes to read tweets from the UK where people are very impatient with Africans complaining about living next to apex predators until, you know, it's very difficult for me to put up with that when I know that the scariest apex predator the UK has is the badger. So if a creature comes from wind in the willows, you know, who are you that if that's your scariest creature, to lecture others on ways to coexist with apex predators or very large herbivores like hippos and elephants, who are they to say there's a bit, you know, to lecture others on how to live? No, and it comes from this problem that you identified the fluffification of animals, the I call it the disnification of wildlife, where we learn that elephants are gentle giants, that rarely bears are just uh are teddy bears, not grizzly bears, that lions are actually just fluffy creatures. They're all simba from the Lion King and Hakuna Matata, and it's so easy to live in these multi-species ecological assemblages. Absolutely not. And that is a mission of mine as a historian, also to show how difficult it has been for accommodations to be made by societies who live over many generations with apex predators or large herbivores and who have crops affected by it, who have stock, who have domestic animals affected by it, or whose kids maybe are killed, or at the very least cannot go to school because they're coexisting with crocodiles in the local river. Or, you know, let it the idea is it's not our job to romanticize animals. And it also does a grave disservice to the animal because it it romanticizes the animal, makes it a flat, two-dimensional Disney version of the creature, when you know it takes away the agency, the agentic sentience and historicity of the animal, the very subjectivity of that animal, if you make it a cuddly stuffed bear. So it does no service. Our job is not to romanticize the animal, our job is to historicize the animal. So that's very important. I'm so glad that you, you know, you introduced the idea of fluffification because this is a mission, historians, it's our job to point it out and to say, no, this is how people have had to struggle to survive. We pay homage to them, but we also learn from these strategies. So it's not just about idealizing what they've done, we can actively learn from the very pragmatic life ways they've developed to survive, to coexist, and to co-create cultures.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 35:09

Yeah, I think you show this very well, and we will get to the elephants, but I think you show this very well when you speak about um lions in your book, because you talk about, I mean, it's also not living alongside animals is difficult, but it also has great potential to be uh wonderful. Um, and even though it's difficult, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be pursued. So I think that's also because sometimes the other the other end of that spectrum is to say all of these horrible things could happen, and that leads to eradication campaigns, which is certainly also not the answer or not what you're advocating for. Exactly.

Sandra Swart 35:42

And if we if we are going to argue, and I think we should for coexistence, I mean, of course this should be our ideal. We have to think of radical ways of doing it, and some of those might lie in the past. You know, there's a vast reservoir of knowledge from animal side and from human side of ways of coexisting. So, so you know, in reconstructing these histories, we're proving first that it has been done before. That gives us some hope. Secondly, we're saying, and this is historians' absolute superpower, this is why the world tolerates the existence of historians. Because we know we can be boars, we know we we're dreadful at dinner parties, we know. But this is why the world tolerates us. It's because of our secret superpower. The superpower is simply to show that it was not always so. But the status quo we have now is not biological, incontrovertible. If it has changed before, it can change again. That is so empowering.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 36:43

I agree completely. Uh everything is not written on the wall. And I think we live in a time right now where people feel as though everything is done and dusted.

Sandra Swart 36:52

And not only that, but where they have a kind of enui, a kind of learned helplessness because we're on this in this world on fire. What are we even to do? It's a world biodiversity crisis, habitat crisis, uh climate change crisis, rising fascism. It's it's coming at you all the time, and social media has only amplified it. And this creates, are we, learned helplessness and therefore hopelessness. And that is a real toxic little cocktail because that means no change can be affected. And we see it, we see generational apathy, um, despair. But actually, the antidote to despair is action. We can only have action if we have ideas that it can be changed.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 37:38

And to your point, these people and animals have lived alongside each other before, not perfectly, not in ways that are romantic, but certainly has lived alongside each other before. Um, and of course, we have contemporary challenges. You know, people might listen and say, yeah, okay, but someone living 200 years ago, 300 years ago had a different environment. Certainly. We need to be responsive to the environments we're in. Um, but that's not to say that we can't learn from things and learn from past experiences. And I think what you do with the lions is you also just show, uh, I mean, lions and the elephants is you show how relocating animals and doing what we think of as being a benign practice can actually lead to conflicts in ways that we don't perceive, right? The supposed quote-unquote man-hunting lions and the um the elephants-gone rogue were animals that were divorced from their cultures and their learnings from their populations, from their lion kin and from their elephant kin. Um it can foster more violence in future by not heeding the cultural dynamics.

Sandra Swart 38:41

This is exactly right. This this, you know, and I illustrated with this lovely case study in the Kalahari with the Zutwazi, who had learned to have this kind of uneasy but workable coexistence with lions. The lions could read their body language, they could read the lion's body language, and they occupied two different, you know, work shifts. They lived in the day, the lions operated at night in a way that was absolutely fixed. The lion belongs to the night, the night belongs to the lion. And if they did encounter a lion in the felt, they would drop their eyes and walk away at an unhurried pace at a diagonal angle, not to look like you're fleeing, not to look like you're charging, but just drop your shoulder, walk away at a diagonal angle. And you know the lions, of course, did the same if they encountered a large group of people in the felt. But the exact same, genetically the same lions living in Etosha, which had forced um fortress conservation with human beings removed from the lions and this generational knowledge completely lost, those lions were deadly. And in fact, they were so deadly that in the illegal border war that South Africa wage with neighboring states, Etosha was the one place you couldn't cross if you were trying to come into Southwest Africa, now Namibia, because the lions were absolutely deadly. They could and did kill people. People didn't know how to respond to them, they didn't know how to respond to the people, so they in effect became opportunistic man-eaters. And there you go, there it is.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 40:15

Yeah, and of course, we don't always have to look to history to understand these relationships. I mean, history is certainly a treasure trove of understanding, but you got, you know, the hyhenas and hurrah are an example of a contemporary city living alongside and figuring out ways to live with hyenas. Uh, I think this is one of the reasons why animal studies in uh India is really remarkable because scholars are stepping forward and doing incredible um multi-species ethnographies and figuring out.

Sandra Swart 40:42

I think so too. I think some and I've got very good friends working in Indian animal history or Indian animal critical studies, a variety of different things, subdisciplines. And one of the great case studies is the Lions of Gur, you know, where people live very closely and also people who have studied tiger human interactions, which must not be romanticized. Tigers are widow makers in those woods, but but a wonderful, thick, nuanced history. It's one of the best spots to really encounter animal sensitive history in the wild.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 41:21

Yeah, nuances king, I think. Um, okay, so let's get to the elephants. Let's uh let's learn about the elephants.

Knysna’s Lone Elephant Ghost Story

Sandra Swart 41:28

Well, you don't need to twist my arm to talk to you about elephants. I'm even wearing my lucky elephant socks today for this talk. Okay. Because I know um I won't shame myself by showing them to you because I not only have elephants on them, they're also shocking pink. But here we are. So, elephants, I want to tell you two stories. If you'll forgive me, I'm a little long-winded on this because the elephant tales are so illustrative of the power of understanding animal culture. One is a ghost story, and one is a horror story. So I will bring you down a little with the ghost story, but I'm already comforting you by telling you that surprisingly, the horror story has a happy ending. So bear with me. So the ghost story happens in the most ghostly place in South Africa, which is the Nyisna Forest. So it's this deep, dark, Afro-montane forest. There's a mountain on one side, the ocean on the other, and it's a place of mist and mystery, there's ferns, there's ironwood, and there's wood owl, there's honey badger, there's leopard. But these creatures are not alone. They've got the last free-roaming elephant in southern Africa, really, living with them as well. And she's the freest, but probably also the loneliest, because freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose for her. She's the end of a story of colonial violence and rapacity. So prior to the coming of the colonial settlers in the mid-16th, uh 17th century, there were probably about 3,000 elephants roaming the southwestern Cape Coast. They figure it out through paleoecology, and there it is. It's also written on the rock art. There's a lot of close living between humans and elephants at the time. There's evidence of therianthropy, shape-shifting, certainly some evidence of those communities thinking of elephants as people, a little akin to themselves. Social animals live a long time, but highly intelligent. So with the coming of the settlers, however, the elephants are forced out of the fertile, um felt savanna areas, to put it crudely, of the southwestern coastline. They harried, they're hungry, they're harassed, and they're forced into the bad lands increasingly. Why are they forced? They're raiding for crops, but particularly it's for the ivory trade. People really want those teeth. They forced into the last forest, this dark, unwelcome place for people and elephants. But and they a few of them survive there. It's enough, it's a sustainable population. They can survive. It's not their natural habitat, but they make do. They make elephant paths. But then they begin to warn each other that catastrophe is coming. Because people with the rise of industry and the mining industry in particular in South Africa, the gold, the diamonds, people need timber. And so the woodcutters come to the forest. And then there are rumors of gold, so more people come to the forest. The gold mining doesn't pan out. So these desperate guys who wanted to be miners now resort also to ivory poaching. So this is the last refuge. And there's a and the elephants are whittled down to a tiny population. But there's something different about these elephants. They're terrified. For them, this is a total landscape of fear, and they avoid any person. And when they do, when they do see a person, they hyper-react to the person. So this is a different thing that is happening. Their cultures have certainly radically changed. And so they survive in the dark woods. But more and more, you know, farms surround the forest, and elephants are still attracted to the cropland. So even when the ivory trade is ruthlessly suppressed, the elephants are still hunted covertly because it becomes illegal to hunt elephants. They're as a kind of Hail Mary to protect the last few, they call them royal game. And so it's no longer legal to hunt them. They're no longer vermin, they are now protected, but they're still hunted. They're still hunted. And the signs go up, they still say danger, elephant. But the danger is now clearly to the elephant, not from them. And so only a few remain. And it increases it becomes clear that something like local extinction is about to happen. They're about to be extirpated. And then it seems as though perhaps there's only one elephant left. This old ghostly creature I described at the beginning of the ghost story. An old female called Oput, meaning old foot, named after a famous Afrikaans novel by uh Darlene Matea. So she's called Oput, and she's this last free roaming elephant. And people realize she's the last of her kind. And it was going to be that. But then 1994 happened. And perhaps I'll just remind some of your listeners what happened in South Africa in 1994. It was the most optimistic thing in the world. It's a thing that changed my life. I'm a child of Mandela. What happened then made me return from Oxford University and return to South Africa and make out a life as a professor at a South African university, which I wouldn't have done if this thing had not happened. But we had the end of apartheid. In 1992, white South Africans voted to end apartheid, this terrible toxic racist system that had put them at the top. They voted to say this ends. We must be a democratic society. And in 1994, we had our first multiracial democratic elections, and I cannot tell you how it was a time of hope. It's hard to describe to people who now live in South Africa, which is not doing terribly well. We won't go into that. And that's another kind of ghost story or horror story. But but then it was a time of absolute hope when a racial order was overturned and it felt like history itself could be reversed. And at the same time, people felt a kind of hope. Should we not reverse history in the dark forest and bring in little elephants? Let's return the elephant to the forest. And so they did what they could do. In 1994, they couldn't really bring large elephants in. They only had the technology to bring in babies. And what they were doing was every year they were culling elephants in the Kruger National Park to the north, big park, South Africa's hugest park. They were culling elephants because of a perceived overpopulation of elephants there. They would wipe out the adults from the sky. And then they would sometimes send the baby elephants to other game reserves. Because they could only at the time logistically move the little ones. So they brought in three little elephants to the Nyisner Forest and they put first put them in a little pen to habituate them to the area. Sadly, the first, the littlest elephant died from stress-related pneumonia. But then do I hear a sort of growling? I love it. Sorry, it's minus waking up. I love that. It's it's apropos the story because things are about to get very growly. So the littlest elephant died from stress-related pneumonia, but the other two released into the forest and the whole country held its breath. Would they find the old female oput? Yes, they did. We were so excited. We were going to reverse history even here in the forest. But alas, cultures matter, history matters, and the little elephants returned to what they knew. They couldn't take the dark gloaming of the forest, and they didn't have the culture of fear that the old female had grown up in. They were not scared of people. They returned to the farmland. They liked the crops, they liked the open sunlit verges, they liked people, they didn't have a problem with people. They didn't live with the constant anxiety of the old female. So they returned to the verges again and again and again, and it could not work. And after five years they were just relocated to a local game reserve, and the experiment had failed. So now we have the old ghost, old opert. What to do? Some people have said it is too sad to let her live. She has these streaming temporal glands which indicate anxiety. At night, well, there's been a wonderful experiment, uh camera trap in the forest, which got lots and lots of photos of her and of no other. And the heartbreaking thing is that at night she can, she, she sometimes lies down with the biggest thing that can bring her comfort, a kind of the only thing big enough to be a little bit like an elephant, and that is logging equipment in the forest. I mean, this is a story that just breaks your heart. And so some people said, why not just put her out of her misery? I don't think we can do that ethically. She still tries to live despite the constant low-level stress and the incredible loneliness that she's living with. Others have said, okay, why don't we dart and relocate her to another troupe? But we cannot do that either because the stress will certainly, you know, damage her and hurt her immune system, but could even kill her from stress. And then her culture is completely different to any other elephant culture. This that she doesn't understand what they how they have lived, and they won't understand how she has lived. Will she be integrated? We don't know. The stress of that is not something one can consider ethically. Another group have said, well, why don't we dot her and artificially inseminate her? Then she can have a baby and she won't be alone. This is, I think, the strangest suggestion to offer.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 51:41

Could you imagine waking up all of a sudden pregnant?

Sandra Swart 51:44

Sort of handmaid's tale meets a very well-meaning, you know, it's incredibly naive in a sense because elephants practice aloe mothering. Elephants raise their babies with aunties and grandmothers. Who is to say she could have the baby and know how to raise it? Um, but also then what are we doing? We're visiting this intergenerational trauma upon another generation. Why do we inflict the loneliness upon another generation? It makes no kind of sense. So the thinking is at the moment, it's been a hundred years of solitude, you know, increasing loneliness for elephants in the woods.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:21

How old is she?

Sandra Swart 52:22

You know, she's my age, so she's early 50s.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:26

And she's been alone for how long of that time?

Sandra Swart 52:29

It's hard to say. But at least we know a decade, you know. It's it's hard to say exactly, but a decade, probably more. Probably more. You know, this is conservative estimate. The loneliness of that, you know, it it is hard to it's hard to understand. This is extinction just before it happens. It's extirpation. We're we're watching in slow motion the incredible cruelty of species extirpation and extinction. So the sentient being is alone. Another group has said, why can we not? This is also the story of romanticizing the other. Another group has said, Well, we as a species have a job to do. We should habituate her with a person and at least make a kind of my octopus teacher friendship with the elephant. Of course, one cannot. First of all, it puts the person in undeniable danger. Because don't forget, an animal that is hyper-reactive, who has grown up with a culture of fear, will hyperreact when a person is inflicted upon them. The last person a Neisner elephant killed was in 1963, when a woodcutter stumbled upon an elephant and was killed by them. We don't know the details, but we know that was the last uh person killed by a Neisner elephant. And also that the stress it would inflict upon this elephant. Well, first of all, she would either attack or flee. How would the habituation work? How would it look? It's it's a case of the disnification of the elephant. And we must we must not consider it. So the thinking has been that we're going to leave her to at least live out her days in a place she knows and understands. And we leave it there. That is that is the ghost story. And that is a story of entanglement of elephant and person and people and and environments.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 54:21

I mean, I think it's it's really powerful to also just say to maybe step back the hubris because there is a tendency, I think, to constantly intervene and to see what decisions. I mean, she's in undeniably, she's in this position because of decisions humans have made. Um, and you know, I get the impetus to want to take responsibility and ensure her safety and well-being uh 100%. I understand that. But she perhaps also has her own decisions and reasons for doing what she's done, for not leaving the forest. Um, she might have struck up friendships that we don't know of because we can't see everything all the time.

Sandra Swart 54:59

We cannot know what is her inner life, and it is so dangerous to think that we could. I think it is a good and empathetic exercise to try to see through the eyes of an elephant, but we must admit it's kind of a Rorschach test or an inkblot test for us. And as you say, an act of hubris to assume we know what's happening for her. We can tell a little bit from those streaming temporal glands. We know a little bit about stress for her. It is there, and we can imagine empathetically her loneliness, but I think here, less is more.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 55:31

I think But I mean, if we were to talk about, let's say, stress and loneliness, you know, look at half of the world's human population are struggling with stress and loneliness. And I don't think our answer to those problems would be to, you know, put humans out of their misery or artificially inseminate them so that they wake up with babies.

Sandra Swart 55:49

Um, you know, you well, I think well said, and and when we, you know, if we get a chance to talk about future book projects, I want I want to write about human loneliness and how we can counteract it with this kind of more than human history. I want to I want to show how we're not alone and ways to reconnect again. So you've really touched on something I'm absolutely that's very dear to me and that animates, you know, when I wake up at 3 a.m. screaming, am I doing the best thing I could do with my one and only precious life? Um, I comfort myself with the thought that this kind of history can actually be useful in this world. And it's that kind of thing.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 56:27

I think like like like you said, um, you know, when speaking about your students and that shifting baseline is we need to enrich in those baselines, right? Um with with stories that are not, you know, we speak about the standardization of products, of projects, of ideas. Um, things have been standardized and there's a it's kind of their anemic to some extent. But when you start to pull out the richness of stories and of histories, you realize, like you said earlier, that things can be different and otherwise in ways that matter. So not to romanticize, but in ways that really you feel different. You know it's different when you're living in line with, I think this is I always struggle with like sounding woo-woo, but you you do feel it is substantive to I think contribute to narratives and ideas that matter, right? It's not like marketing. It's not, I'm sorry, no, that's I don't want to think of standard on the market. It's not um, it's not it's not vapid in any way. It really is trying to shift ideas and ways in which we conceive of and understand the world. And I and there's nothing small about that, I think. Maybe I'm just saying that because I also do animal history and I'm being slightly um I'm also screaming in the middle of the night.

Sandra Swart 57:39

I I think we should all be screaming at. We should be asking ourselves: do we have lives that matter? Are we trying in our small, accretive way to make things to tell stories that make us understand the world a little bit different, but also maybe make the world itself a little bit different? Just just a little bit in our own way. And I like the word you use to move away from the anemic and to make the world bloody, make move away from the bloodless, make it bloody, make it make it flesh, make it real, make it raw, be the lion's historian.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 58:14

Yeah, I don't know if I would have used the word bloody. For me, anemic is just uh devoid of substance somehow, but um bloody bloody brings the materiality to the fore for sure. I like it.

Sandra Swart 58:26

I like that. And here, of course, we don't alienate our vegan listeners. I'm talking about the blood that flows through our veins, the stuff that animates us, the the fleshly, the visceral, the histories that you feel in your gut. I mean, I have to tell you, in writing the recent book, there were many times when, although perhaps it sounds self-indulgent, I did cry. I think it is cathartic and honest to cry if it is truly a tragic story. And this ghost story made me cry. Opad, if opid doesn't make you cry, you know, you're dead inside, as Chandler Bing was years ago.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 59:04

You know, there's and there's something about these stories of the lastlings that does tap in. Um, you know, the the being the last dodo, being the last elephant. And it's not we we tend to speak about them only again at a species level. But I think in her universe, in her world, she is it. And you know, you could think about this in terms of even some dogs. There are millions of dogs around the world, but they only have them and their human in their home, and they could have a very um satisfying life. But you know, what does it mean to only have one of your species? Is this a is this a substantive loss in how you understand yourself? And that's a cultural question.

Sandra Swart 59:44

It's a cultural question because I think the loss, the loss we perceive, if you take animal culture seriously, the loss we perceive is slightly more nuanced. Because, of course, in conservation, when there's loss, we think about genetic loss. Okay, not in this case, you know, she's Luxodonta Africana, she's the same species, the same DNA material. And then we also think about animal welfare. You know, it's sad that she's dying or the last of her kind, and others have died. We also think about demographic stuff. We think, oh no, we're losing a large number of species. But what about culture? Can animal culture be lost? Are we, when we lose uh animal culture like this, with extirpation, with a low local extinction, are we also losing culture? And is that not something we should think about in our conservation strategies? Um, at the the Nizner Forest elephant, sure, but what about baboons who know how to live next to the ocean? What about lions that know how even to live next to the ocean? You know, that's an animal cultural knowledge that could be lost if we if we extirpate animals in that area and then later try to introduce them. They might not have the knowledge of how to do it. And we also know we're living in a time of rapid climate change. So shit's pivoting, things changing really fast. And those knowledge repertoires, they exist within the body of the creature. They're like each old lady elephant is a living library of Alexandria. We may not wish to burn her down. If an environment changes rapidly, the species can't evolve rapidly. No, it's got to be knowledge repertoires, it's got to be memories of other ways of being that's then kicks in and allows that species to survive.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:01:33

And of course, it's not just the atomized individual, it's them in relationship to their environment, right? It's the elephants and the um, I was gonna say the wolves and the lions who happen to live in distinct relationships with specific environments. Um, you know, that's that's uh they're in place. The same way I think that's what Carl Safina said right at the start of the other interview is just imagine, imagine being dumped in the middle of nowhere and you don't know, you know, you're still the same species, but you don't know how to relate to the landscape or the individuals there. That's traumatic. And some people are some uh you know, some people are more adaptable than others, uh, some will be more resilient than others. Uh sometimes that's you know, species helps there, but other times it's also individuals and personalities and the relationship. Personalities thorough.

Sandra Swart 1:02:21

And also the knowledge repertoires, expulsions, dare we say, allow you to be more resilient.

Rogue Elephants And Rhino Killings

Sandra Swart 1:02:26

But this does allow me to segregate rather nicely to the horror story because it's about being ripped out of place. It's it's a time out of joint, it's a severance, it's a brokenness, it's a disruption story. Buckle up, because it's going to be a bumpy ride. It's it's not a ghost story, so it's it's a story about some serial killers. Now, the thing to remember is that obviously Oport and her fellow forest Meisner Forest elephants were not the only elephants under threat. The East Coast Ivory Trade, now this is where I come from, this is I come originally from Durban, and the East Coast Ivory Trade happened in Port Natal all the way up to Delagoa Bay in now Mozambique, and the last East Coast elephant was killed, was shot in about 1890. But in the early 1980s, some people in game reserves in Zululand started thinking: wouldn't it be nice to return the elephant? Shouldn't we think about returning elephants to their ancient ancestral grounds in Zululand? And particularly in a game reserve Shishluri Umfalosi, which is now Shishluri Imphalosi. But why not, let's think about it? How would that look? And so they did what had happened later in the Neisner Forest, they brought some baby elephants in from the Kruger National Park. Now, they were bringing them in from these kuls that only stopped in 1996 in the Kruger Park. And as I say, the only ones they could bring in at the time were these little baby elephants. So they could only bring in the babies. They brought them into Zululand on the East Coast, but they also brought them in to a much stranger, more interesting place called Pilansburg, which is outside Johannesburg, which is a totally man-made environment. They decided to start a game reserve completely from scratch, from an absolutely desecrated area. They started to build with incredible hubris. They called it Operation Genesis, and they made a completely new game reserve. They built a whole new ecosystem, bringing in the predators, the herbivores, even the plants. And they were going to establish. I had no idea. Oh, yes. No, it's a strange story.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:04:54

I've been to the Pillensburg many times. Completely fabricated environment. Wow.

Sandra Swart 1:04:59

And you'll never guess, without the talk about hubris, they called it Operation Genesis. Now, what they were about to discover is that playing God without being omniscient is a tricky business because your creations can become monsters. And that's exactly what happened. So let me tell you what happened. They brought in some baby elephants. It was a very well-intentioned effort. They were going to make a more complete multi-species ecological assemblage and conservation terms. This is a no-brainer. But they neglected the one thing I think you'll find that mattered animal culture. So they brought these baby elephants in from the herds that had been culled. So these baby elephants had seen the adults in the herd killed. Then they did forced removals and they forced them into this new place and released them. Well, a few years into both programs, it became clear that. Something that was terribly, terribly wrong. These elephants were, as they grew into teenagehood, hyperreactive, belligerent, and actively dangerous compared to other animals, but also to people. They chased cars, they broke down fences, they didn't behave well with other elephants either. And then things got even worse. Hard to believe it could, but it did because rhinos started turning up dead. And I don't need to remind you that rhinos are a very vulnerable population. It's the death of any rhino hurts hurts us all because they're rarely poached for their horns. So they're very, very vulnerable. They had a flotation with extinction themselves. So the death of rhinos were taken really seriously. And first the rangers thought, is it poaching? What's going on? No, it wasn't poaching because the horns were still there, but the rhinos' bodies were turning up lacerated, mutilated. Something was awful, something was terrible. So the rangers sprang into action like a police department, started taking photographs of the crime scenes. They were measuring footprints. And then they started putting together a wrap sheet of possible criminals using alien aliases for the criminals. And they started figuring out who had caused the murders, what was behind the serial killing. And it was teenage elephants. It was young, predominantly male teenage elephants. And then a person was killed in Pillensburg. And the professional hunter they set in to kill the particular elephant that had killed this person was also killed. So it was a question of what shall we do? Shall we end the experiment and just put these strange elephants out of their miseries? Just call it. Let's just perhaps we will just need to kill them all. Because this experiment cannot continue. How on earth to explain what was going on here? Because this is behavior that you do not see in normal elephants at all. And here it's not a question of nature or nurture, it's very much a question of the body and culture working together to explain what had happened. It's not two poles of a continuum. It's, you know, as you said earlier, entangled. This is entanglement of the most deep kind, deeply enmeshed. Because what was happening was these young male elephants and one female elephant, and several were simply shot as repeat offenders, and several were shot as they charged the game rangers trying to investigate what was going on. They had to be shot because they were just going to kill the people. What was happening is they were all young male teenagers except for one female who had to be shot, and they were in must. Now, must is a Persian word meaning drunkenness, drunkenness, and it's that surge of testosterone, this hormonal confusion that hits young male elephants when they become young men. But it was hitting these baby elephants 10 years too early. So in their lustful, aggressive confusion, they were mounting and killing rhinoceroses and attacking each other, attacking cars, and then attacking people. They were undergoing this hormonal surge too early because of the lack of male older elephants, and there was no cohort, an older generation of grannies, grandpas, moms, and dads to teach them polite behavior and also by their biological proximity cause the must to come in a decade later when the young men were ready, and it could be policed. The surge of testosterone could be policed by the older males and the wisdom taught by the older females. You know, the policemen and the teachers, you need both in a society. So all of this, people called it unnatural, but these young male elephants were in crisis. But on top of that, something more had happened, and that was the loss of their culture. The movement, they saw their adults killed, the culling, which was logistically sensible and viable, the and the movement, the forced removal of these young elephants, they had forgotten that animals have cultures, and so they hadn't factored it in. They didn't really realize it was going to play this role. But it was a kind of severance from culture, a severance from teachers, and it created Lord of the Flies elephants, psychopathic pacchiderms. But really, you know, it was also like humans who suffer from PTSD, because on top of the loss of culture, there was this incredible trauma from watching the parents being killed from the skies, and then also this forced removal to a completely strange place. So it was all of these things working together to cause this massive problem.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:11:13

Yeah, I mean, what's what's startling is, you know, and thinking back to the idea of like not wanting to romanticize, but I stand by this. I think too readily uh questions of culling and killing come up as the means and mechanism of coping with not enough space, with um issues that we have created. And time and again we've been shown that it doesn't work, um, or it leads to changes in family and cultural relations that lead to more violence and more problems. You see similar things happen with coyotes and wolves in North America, you see it happening here with the histories of elephants, um, you see it happening time and again, even with badges you brought up earlier, right? This idea that if you can just kill some of a population, that it's not going to leave scars. And, you know, you look at human histories, you look at human stories, and we know that whenever there is mass amounts of violence, it leaves scars on cultures that last a long, long time. Um, because if we're talking about culture, things get passed down, and it's not just the good, it's not just, you know, um the sharing of food and the dancing, it's also the trauma and the violence and the danger. Uh and I mean we we know this as people from South Africa that history leaves long scars, right? That take a long time to deal with. And I think if we take seriously animal cultures, then we have to take seriously those scars as well. That they are to damage a population is not only biologically but socially is going to leave wounds that are going to be out of our control, right? Like the idea that we can then control them because they're just an elephant is an elephant and you can just put them anywhere and it'll be okay. I mean, I think conservation science is in general waking up to this. I think these are mistakes. I think things are, I hope things are getting better, but it is really concerning.

Sandra Swart 1:13:12

Um I think these mistakes, you know, it is okay that we made this massive mistake as long as we learn from it. And that's where historians come in. So this is how they decided to try and rectify the mistake. And we also learn from the attempt at can we say reparation, at repairing, at trying to heal, trying to, if we are agreeing that they have a culture, this culture is an absolute crisis, it can't continue. What do you do to repair a culture? What they did was this, and I think this is really interesting. Um in Pilansburg, they force first brought in the only large elephants they could bring in. It began to dawn on everyone that this seemed to be a cultural issue, that this in fact needed to be solved in a way which could have to go beyond the biological. So they brought in two elderly circus females into Pelansburg, but had some minor effect on teaching the young elephants at least how to behave to one another, modeling a kind of good behavior, but couldn't do anywhere near enough. And they certainly couldn't stop the young men coming into must early, that they didn't have the biological proximity with the control of through hormonal control, it couldn't be done. But what they did instead, um, they found a wonderful solution in Zululand and then later in Pilansburg. And I have to say to you, it is the biggest Big Brother program in the world. They brought in, they found a way, and it had never been done before. They did it for the first time. They found a way on these large trucks to bring in large male elephants from the Kruger National Park, a cohort of them, and then release them into Zululand, into the Zululand game reserves. And no one had ever tried to move elephants that big before. They introduced them into this toxic situation, and it worked. It actually worked. It put an end to the teenage craziness. The youngsters no longer came into must prematurely, but it didn't just work on a biological level, it also worked on a social level. Polite behavior was enforced. The older males enforced a kind of um not to the extent of seriously harming them, but quite roughly putting the youngsters in their place with a kind of corporal punishment. And the juvenile delinquents learned from their elders and their youthful crimes were stopped, and there was no hardly any recidivism. They were relatively easily brought back into polite society. Not one cannot romanticize and say there was a complete healing, but certainly there was enough cultural restoration, possibly because it wasn't as deeply ingrained, it was just the first generation that had suffered this kind of, and very recently within the last X number of years, they had suffered all these different things. And so, and they had grown up as youngsters to the age of about six or seven with elders that enforced exactly this culture because they were also in the Kruger.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:16:37

Well, I was going to ask then, does that make their behavior as uh delinquents, as you said it, cultural or just uh because I mean you can think about many instances where people behave badly, and that's not a cultural, I mean, you perhaps you could frame it as a cultural response, but it could also be, you know, a fear response that's got actually very little to do with culture. It's just been brought on by severe circumstance, right? Where you behave in ways that are um, I mean, to what what extent? Because if we accept that culture as something that's passed down intergenerationally, right? Um, and these were just the first generation that had behaved this way, then is it is it cultural or is it a happening and a circumstance that happened that had the potential to become I think that's the key.

Sandra Swart 1:17:23

So it it would have it would have then become their culture. They would then have joined the Neizner elephants in the culture of fear and hyper-reactivity, but they had not gone quite the same route culturally as the Neizner elephants, who were also facing total violence, total fear. The Neizner elephants became circumspect and afraid. They had gone a different route, which was hyperreactivity, yes, but belligerence. So that was quite interesting. It was the beginning of the formation. We don't often see the beginning of a cultural shift. Here we were seeing the beginning of a cultural shift where behavior coalesces away from the individual into group behavior. And I think we were seeing the beginning of the cultural shift that over several generations would have made them super, super dangerous animals. How do I know it would have happened? Because we've seen it before. It happened in Ado years ago, when they first forced the last remaining elephants in the Eastern Cape into Addo, those elephants were so dangerous that you they they were like the Nyesne elephants in having the landscape of fear, but their reaction, like the Zululand and the Pilansberg elephants, was to engage in hyper-reactivity and belakosti. Like they went to war, they didn't flee. So in the fight or flight, they went on on the whole fight thing. And and those are actually hunted out, the the ones that are exhibiting that over several several generations, which is why when you go to Ado now, the elephants are delightful, peaceable Kruger Park-style elephants.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:18:55

But you know, I can't help but question though, here, because in all of these, the Pillensburg, the Kruger Park, Addo, these are all to some, I mean, and I love these spaces. I don't go to zoos, but I do go to uh parks because I feel like they're spaces that are in many ways reserved for animals to be able to do what they do. But then I hear you speaking now, and they're also highly policed and controlled spaces where animals are not allowed to express themselves in the way they might choose to express themselves. And perhaps sometimes those are in ways that we don't like. Uh perhaps they are aggressive. And again, I don't want to, going back to what you said, I don't want to romanticize what it means to live alongside. But at what point do we step back and not have Ado Elephant Park or Pilansburg as a place where tourists can go and sit with cars and observe and be in quote-unquote harm's way, when maybe it's a matter of just letting them have space to figure out their own shit for a minute. Um, you know, because there is that kind of harkening at all of them, edge of all of these stories. Yes, there's delinquent elephants, there's elephants going aggressive and rampaging, but throughout all of them, there are ghosts of humans intervening in their lives that are shooting their, shooting their peers, shooting their kin, um, managing the spaces they can move or not move, and and they are then it becomes a question to what extent are they protesting human actions or just having a kind of response, fine. But yeah, I don't know, there's there's something there, like maybe it's also a recognize recognizing that we don't have to and shouldn't necessarily always have access to these animals all the ways we want to.

Sandra Swart 1:20:30

Do you know what I mean? I I do, I do know what you mean, but I'm also an incredible pragmatist. Because I want animals to survive, I know that we obviously have to have spaces where humans can pay to go and be with them. If it pays, it stays. And I would encourage more visits to nature reserves and game reserves and going on the safari and admiring and being with. But I also don't really share, in a sense, the same problem with people being in those spaces. Normally in cars, it is completely fine. I, you know, and in fact, it is not terribly intrusive. Normally, most species, not all, but most species will exhibit almost the complete range of behaviors in front of your car and not care. You know, so so right to the extent of some pretty shocking OnlyFans behavior that you wouldn't think would be in front of a car, and certainly is exhibited. So I'm actually okay with that. And also if it pays, it stays. And I'm the ultimate pragmatist with keeping the next generations of animals alive in Africa. But then I also think we mustn't forget that one of the things that I so often see in conservation discourse and biology journals and ethology journals is the idea of the complete separation of the human and the animal. And that when there is human-animal interaction, that's only ancillary or supplementary to the real stuff, which is animals doing their own thing. And also one, so it too perhaps too often thinks that animals will prefer human-free, pristine environments. But actually, as we saw with the little baby elephants in Eisner, they were running to the people. They liked where the croplands were. They want to be with the people, the baboons are coming to the people. So we've kind of got to factor that in. They're agentic, they're making the choice in a sense, and they're very happy to be with us. And we're the one continent where for millions of years, not just hundreds of thousands, but for millions of years, we co-evolved very closely with animals. And this is partly why we never managed to actually domesticate any of the animals here. We co-evolved with them. So the ones that had the characteristics that would allow them to be domesticated didn't exist here because we would have exterminated them long ago. So, in a sense, the we're so entangled with each other that I am okay with the with the entanglement continuing. And I'm okay with the the wildlife walks and the wildlife that live in peri-urban

Coexistence Needs Space And Risk Sharing

Sandra Swart 1:23:08

areas.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:23:08

Yeah, we have to do it. I don't want to say I'm suggesting that we shouldn't be um entangled with one another. And I think in many ways, places like Cape Town and some of what's happening with both shippos and baboons, you know, you're you're seeing, you're seeing people, and like we were speaking about India, people figuring out ways to live alongside. I think that's great. Yes, exactly. But I think you were saying it's more like about about checking, sort of checking our own hubris and our own arrogance and our own sort of inserting of ourselves into spaces where it's not, you know, there's a lot of managed, there's a lot of management and control, and only uh only specific behaviors are permissible, only specific cultures are permissible. Um and again, I'm not sitting here with any sort of answer to this concern, but I think it is worth saying out loud that there is a tendency time and again for humans to intervene when we see behaviors from animals that we find objectionable. And sometimes that's uh, you know, out of threats or risk. And I had Krithika on the show, Krithika Sranysan, and one of the key things she said was we need to figure out how to redistribute risk. Um, and not this idea of the same people having to contend with and deal with risk all the while while another group of people are sitting posh in, you know, expand. There is a need to really contend with how to, and animals are taking a lot of the risk, right? Being with their populations being constantly controlled. Uh and I mean I think there are exciting things happening in Southern Africa, the creating of these corridors where elephants are able to move.

Sandra Swart 1:24:43

Yes, that's the key. If we just have the, I mean, and it's not a matter of just, in fact, it's incredibly difficult to make a transfrontier corridor, but risk, you know, with huge respect to the people who are making it happen, it is being made to happen. And even on a very local level, because I also think we should think local, within municipalities, there's also the idea of green corridors happening. In Stellenbos, there's several, which is this little university town with the mountains, just to tell people who don't know, they're green corridors so that caracals, which are lynxes really, can move. So Cape Leopards who are in the mountains have corridors that genetic diversity can happen. Yeah. Otherwise, we're also going to get local extinction.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:25:22

I mean, it's all it's a question of space, right? Like it's it's having space to move and space and parts.

Sandra Swart 1:25:28

But also, like you say, no, it's also about the risk. I like that you bring up the risk. Because also, as a species, we're shit at risk. We don't understand risk. And this is, of course, why sharks in many places, you know, are being locally extirpated. One of the reasons on the East Coast, the great white shark is going is in real trouble, is because of the shark nets that the, I think the sharks board put up in 1978 to help the tourist industry because we're bad at assessing risk. You are far more likely to be killed driving from Joburg to Durban to go on holiday than you are likely to ever be killed by a great white shark. So we're just terrible at risk.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:26:07

We just we don't want any risk, but we want all the reward. And it's um it's challenging. All right, I've got a feeling you and I will never stop talking. Um I love it too much.

Sandra Swart 1:26:18

I love it too much. But I want to tell you about my if if there's a single solitary minute, I can quickly tell you about the next project. This time we haven't gotten to your quote just yet. So why don't you tell me your quote and then we'll then we'll talk about what you're working on next.

The Lion’s Historian And Baboonsque Method

Sandra Swart 1:26:34

All right. Well, this this would be very, very nice. It's it's very silly, but it really brings me back to being a historian. And my book was called The Lion's Historian, um, because um there's this West African expression, until the lion has an opportunity to tell the story of the hunt, the story of the hunt will always be that of the hunter. And so this was, and it's frequently quoted by African scholars really about African history, saying, don't let African history be written by the colonizer. But I want to say, let's take it super literally and let's see what history looks like if we make the animal front and center in a lot of ways when we go in. Of course, no one is being written out, but if we make it animal-sensitive history, if we have a multi-species lens or a more than human lens, and we really take it seriously, what can we do with this? So I I kind of call myself the lion's historian because you know, until the historian has a lion of the lion has a historian of his own, he's not going to get a fair shake at telling the past story. So at the end of the book, I say, I would be very proud to call myself the lion's historian. I hope I have many years ahead of exploring social and environmental history in a way that takes the other animals seriously. But let us concede that we historians are more like baboons. Than lions. Of course, I mean this in the nicest possible way. A good historian is baboonesque, a trickster figure, adept at shape shifting and boundary crossing, unconstrained and omnivorous in our intellectual pleasures. We diligently and delicately pick the lice from the archival armpit. We are not afraid to grasp the nettle or pluck the prickly pear of public polemic. We are the strangers on the rocks, the watches on the crances, the sentinels on the wall. We see and remember. And that's the job of any story.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:28:39

Amazing, amazing. Yeah, and you capture there the job of finding, of telling these stories revolves around looking and finding details. And you've done a remarkable job in the book, I think, of putting together a whole host of different animal stories. So thank you so much for that. So what's what's coming next?

Sandra Swart 1:28:58

Well, I'd like to confess it's terribly late. I sort of have angry emails from the publisher. Well, I almost feel they might have given up on me, but it's due and it's going, I want to call it baboon, a love story, but the publisher feels that might attract the wrong crowd. So it might be baboon, a human history, and it's about the long, entangled history of baboons and people over the last several millennia.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:29:26

Amazing, amazing. Well, I really look forward to that because obviously, I mean, baboons have been in contemporary history of late quite a bit. Uh, there's a lot of, there've been a number of cullings of baboons in zoos, and it reminded me of what you spoke about in the book. Um, with with yeah, just what happened on baboon hill was incredible. Um, so so that should be coming out soon-ish, I'm imagining next year-ish, ish. We're all imagining next year. We're all hoping for next year. The end of the book is like a it's like the worst. It's to try and get that done is hard. So um, best of luck. And I know that you've also got that idea contending with uh questions of human loneliness.

Sandra Swart 1:30:06

So I'm that's what, but that's the next one. I want to call it, you know, you can only finish a book if you promise yourself you can write the next one. So, in order to assure myself that the perfect is the enemy of the good and just finish the baboon book, I very much after that have promised myself a book called something like kin, how to fight loneliness, how to fight human loneliness by recapturing our animal family.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:30:34

Interesting. Capturing is an interesting word there, though.

Sandra Swart 1:30:36

It has a lot of uh I think capturing would be too active, but perhaps by rekindling, refining, rekindling, remembering, re-re-connecting.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:30:51

Yeah, refining. Yeah. Going in search of we'll we can we'll we'll we'll keep workshopping this. It's amazing. Um, both books sound incredible. I look forward to reading them when they come out. Thank you. It has been so nice talking with you. I've so appreciated you too. It's been really quite wonderful. Thank you for for the time and for all of the work.

Animal Highlight: Elephants In Kingston

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:31:16

Welcome to the animal highlight. For the highlight in this season, I've decided to use excerpts that I created for a walking tour in Kingston. Uh, as I said at the start of this episode, I was new to animal histories. And by the time I left Kingston after four and a half years of being there, I developed a walking tour about some of the animals of the city. And I tried to grapple with and understand their histories only using archival material. So that's all available and can be found on the Stones website. The link will be in the show notes, and I'm going to share some of those over the course of this season with you. And of course, considering our conversation on elephants today, I'm going to give you the script from Elephants in Kingston. Enjoy. Elephants, the world's largest land mammals, live in socially complex matrilineal societies that rely on the wisdom of elders. Partly because of their impressive stature and complexity, humans have always been drawn to elephants, and our unfortunate compulsion to dominate them dates back to ancient empires like the Egyptians and the Babylonians. Under British colonial rule, wild animals across much of Asia and Africa were hunted, captured, and killed on a massive scale. They were killed not just as trophies or for their ivory, as continues to this day, but also to be killed, stuffed, and put on display as specimens in natural history museums when scientific taxonomies started to take hold. Other elephants suffered longer torments in that they were kept alive and shipped across the world to be put on display in zoological gardens or carted around as parts of menageries constructed around the idea of the exotic and the Orient. Many elephants traveled through Kingston as part of these travelling menageries and circuses. In 1835, a single elephant was brought into Kingston as part of the massive menagerie and Avery. A pavilion that could house 4,000 spectators was set up, and the elephant was the main draw because she was equipped with, I quote, a splendid saddle trimmed and decorated after the Eastern style, close quote. People could not only look at her, but they could ride her too. As these spectacles became more popular and more competitive, the number of elephants involved increased, and the tricks they were compelled to perform grew ever more demeaning. In 1852, the museum and menagerie visited Kingston, dubbed the largest traveling exhibition in the world, with enough seating for 15,000 people. Once again, elephants were the main attraction, but instead of an individual elephant giving rides, a team of 10 elephants hauled what was called the Great Car Juggernaut, and it was followed by a procession of cages with other animals to create, I quote, a spectacle of more than oriental splendor. Another attraction was a small elephant calf who had been captured with his mother in Ceylon, what is today known as Sri Lanka, and weaned during the long voyage to North America.

unknown 1:34:31

Mr.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:34:32

June and But are said to have pursued the elephants for months, and with the assistance of, I quote, 260 natives, they were able to subdue the animals. As the decades wore on, the spectacles became even more extravagant. Included in this walking tour is a photograph of a woman riding an elephant down Princess Street in the 1880s, passing in front of what looks like a 189 princess. The elephant might have been part of Four Paws Circus, which visited Kingston several times that decade and was known to have an excellent street parade as well as the only living giraffe in America. By this time, circuses were big business, and four paws included two tents, elevated stages, and racetracks. Undoubtedly subject to violent and coercive training methods, the elephants were made to do military drills and build pyramids as well as to perform as characters such as the boxing elephant or the clown elephant. Other big circuses such as Pete and Barnums also visited Kingston, and in 1885, they even had a show with Jumbo shortly before the world-famous African elephant was killed in a train yard in St. Thomas, Ontario. While circuses and zoos continue to exist in the 21st century, the inclusion of elephants is much more controversial. In 2016, Kingstonians protested the use of captive animals when Shriner's circus came to town. And in 2018, the most well-known circus in the world, the Ringling Brothers, said it would stop using elephants in its shows. The human fascination with elephants seems to be shifting from a desire to capture, dominate, and display them towards a more respectful relationship. A great example of this is the 2014 landmark case in India concerning Laksmi, now known as Jasmine, who is an elephant that was forced to perform at events. The Indian Supreme Court decided that elephants are social beings deserving of protection and dignity, and this is now enshrined in the country's constitution. Considering Asian elephants have, for almost 200 years, performed in Canada because of their entanglement with the British colonial empire, perhaps it is time Canada looked to the emerging ideas of India for guidance on how they should be treated.

Thanks Sponsors And Where To Find Us

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:36:44

Thank you to Sandra Swart for being an amazing guest, to Jeremy John for the logo, and Gordon Clark for the bad music. Thank you also to Rebecca Shen, Harry DeBont, Carlos Solzani, and Christian Menz for their support at the back of house. As always, a huge thank you to Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple for sponsoring this podcast. This episode was hosted and produced by myself. This is The Animal Turn.

Sandra Swart 1:37:11

With me, Claudia Hurtenfelder.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.