The Deal With Animals with Marika S. Bell
85: Crossover Special! All Around Science with Bobby and Maura
You may remember. Back from October 16th, this last year, 2023. I was a guest on a really great podcast called, All Around Science. It's a really fun podcast hosted by two huge science nerds, that help us learn all sorts of really cool scientific things that are going on right now.
I really wanted to introduce you all to Maura and Bobby and all around science..
So I invited them to put together a couple of the segments from their past episodes that closely relate to Anthrozoology or the connection and interaction between humans and other animals. And here is what they have brought to us.
Guests: Maura and Bobby are two people who love talking about science so much that they did what everyone does in the 2020s… They started a podcast! They have a passion for education and science communication, and all they really want you to do is to love learning about the world as much as they do.
Bobby Frankenberger is an audio producer and science communicator by day, and a stay-at-home dad also by day... It's a busy existence. Between reading science news in the school carpool line, editing podcasts, and cooking dinner, Bobby finds time to volunteer to teach science and math in elementary schools and fly planes.
Go to the Blog Post Here!
All Around Science
Episode with me!
Show Credits Thank you also to John Lasala for his beautiful music and audio engineering on Series 11!
Read the Blog! (Guest profiles, book recommendations, trailers and more!)
What to start your own podcast in he Animal Advocacy or Animal Welfare Space? Check out my Podcast Mentoring Services!
You may remember. Back from October 16th, this last year, 2023. I was a guest on a really great podcast called, All Around Science. It's a really fun podcast hosted by two huge science nerds, that help us learn all sorts of really cool scientific things that are going on right now.
I really wanted to introduce you all to Maura and Bobby and all around science..
So I invited them to put together a couple of the segments from their past episodes that closely relate to Anthrozoology or the connection and interaction between humans and other animals. And here is what they have brought to us.
Guests: Maura and Bobby are two people who love talking about science so much that they did what everyone does in the 2020s… They started a podcast! They have a passion for education and science communication, and all they really want you to do is to love learning about the world as much as they do.
Bobby Frankenberger is an audio producer and science communicator by day, and a stay-at-home dad also by day... It's a busy existence. Between reading science news in the school carpool line, editing podcasts, and cooking dinner, Bobby finds time to volunteer to teach science and math in elementary schools and fly planes.
Go to the Blog Post Here!
All Around Science
Episode with me!
Show Credits Thank you also to John Lasala for his beautiful music and audio engineering on Series 11!
Read the Blog! (Guest profiles, book recommendations, trailers and more!)
What to start your own podcast in he Animal Advocacy or Animal Welfare Space? Check out my Podcast Mentoring Services!
This is the Deal with Animals. I'm Marika Bell, anthro-zoologist, cptt, dog trainer and an animal myself. This is a podcast about the connection and interaction between humans and other animals. You may remember, back from October 16th this last year, 2023, I was a guest on a really great podcast called All Around Science. It's a really fun podcast hosted by two huge science nerds that talk about and help us learn all sorts of really cool scientific things that are going on right now, and I enjoyed myself so much. I really wanted to introduce you all to Mora and Bobby and All Around Science, so I invited them to put together a couple of the segments from their past episodes that closely relate to anthro-zoology or the connection and interaction between humans and other animals, and here is what they have brought to us. Let me tell you mwah, it is Chef's Kiss. Just great fun science. So I hope you really enjoy this special episode and happy New Year.
Speaker 2:Mora, you just got done. Talking about how planets lose their water, I'm going to talk about how humans lost their tails.
Speaker 3:Oh, oh.
Speaker 2:All right. Tails in animals have been, and still are, a very prominent and important part of our evolutionary history.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of tails out there.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of tails out there and a lot of our ancestors had tails. We evolved from fish about half a billion years ago and fish had tails and they still have tails, but our ancestor fish had tails and every step along the way, all the evolutionary steps, there were tails. The creatures that evolved all had tails. So tails have been with us for a long time but suddenly, about 25 million years ago, tails disappeared Right.
Speaker 3:Human tails.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, not tails in general, not tails in general. Tails disappeared from our evolutionary line. Right, got it, got it, got it. So the question how? Why? Why did they just go away? And how did that happen? Well, a team of scientists working in New York say that they think they've, or they have identified the gene responsible for tail growth.
Speaker 3:Oh, cool yeah.
Speaker 2:So, in order to locate the gene, the team at NYU compared the genes of six tailless apes to nine species of monkeys that have tails. All right, it's a pretty basic idea. They're just comparing the genetic makeup of the tailed and they chose apes and monkeys for, I think, obvious reasons, but because they share a relatively recent common ancestor right.
Speaker 3:Right, right right.
Speaker 2:And so what they found was a gene that they called the TBXT gene TBXT, tbxt and it was present in all of the apes, but missing in all of the monkeys.
Speaker 3:So a new gene stops the tail? Yes, isn't that interesting, oh cool. Yeah, that's the first thing.
Speaker 2:I noticed too. Like you would think it would be the other way around. I would so the mutation in the TBXT gene involved 300 nucleotides which were nearly identical in humans and apes and located in exactly the same place. So we're pretty sure that that's what caused the loss of a tail in both apes and humans, which we all again, we come from a similar evolutionary branching as apes do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, makes sense.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, correlation isn't causation. So the scientists tested whether the TBXT gene was preventing tail growth by inserting that gene into mice.
Speaker 3:Oh.
Speaker 2:And so, interestingly, many of the mice that they gave the TBXT gene to didn't grow a tail or they grew a stunted short tail. So it worked. Their hypothesis was confirmed what they were hoping would happen happened. So the scientists think that the TBXT gene must be working with other genes to prevent tail growth. And the reason they think that it must be working with other genes and not just by itself is because, well, we grow a coccyx instead of a tail, right? Yes, and our coccyx is pretty much anatomically identical between humans, like everybody has a pretty, I mean, of course there are some differences, small amounts, but pretty much every human has the same coccyx.
Speaker 3:So your coccyx is the tail bone, the base of your spine, the bone at the base of your spine, where the tail would have emerged from.
Speaker 2:If we were to grow a tail, it's where it used to be, it's sort of a vestigial bone, right okay.
Speaker 2:It's where the tail used to be. So we all share the same coccyx all humans. However, inserting that TBXT gene into mice created this wide range of stumped tails to tailless mice. They weren't all the same, so they think if it's all the same in humans, there must be something else. It can't be the TBXT gene alone, right? So yeah, which is really interesting, this is actually. They weren't the first ones to discover the TBXT gene. It was first discovered by scientists in the 1920s Russian scientists.
Speaker 2:Really, yeah, a long time ago. And I don't think that they identified the exact genetic sequence, because I don't think they could back then, but because technology limitations. But what they did back in the 1920s Russian scientists, what they used to do is they would take animals like mice and they would just blast them with X-rays and see what happened. Wow, they would just irradiate animals and see what happened?
Speaker 2:And then they would say oh look, something happened to this one. Let's compare their genetic code or their genetic, let's compare their genes to the ones that we didn't blast with radiation and see if there's a difference. So one of the questions that they weren't able to answer with this and that they want to ask next is a much harder question to answer. But why would lacking a tail provide an evolutionary advantage in the first place? If you think about it like if the gene randomly popped up in an ape ancestor millions of years ago, why would that ape have thrived without a tail?
Speaker 3:Because when it comes, to evolution?
Speaker 2:that's the question you want to ask, because that's typically not always, but typically how evolution works. Is a feature or a mutation survives because it provides some sort of survival benefit, Like fitness benefit is what they always call it. But so the reason that they wonder why would a lack of a tail provide a benefit? Is because it's it's curious, right? Monkeys or all of our common ancestors, lived in the trees, and tails serve a very specific advantage in trees to create balance while you're moving through the trees.
Speaker 3:Sometimes they can even use it. They have like prehensile tails. They can wrap it around things and use it to pull on things yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so they said that the first apes that evolved without tails were actually even bigger than the monkeys, and so lacking a tail would seem to be disadvantageous, because they'd be more likely to fall because they're bigger right, and they don't have a tail.
Speaker 3:So interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they don't really have answers to questions like that and I don't know this is just me personally speaking I don't know that they ever will have answers. This is the problem with. That's a tough one With like this type of question in evolution right, like we can talk about the facts of how morphology changes and how genetics changes and everything, but everybody always wants to ask the why? Question.
Speaker 3:Well, okay, here's another possible, again speculating. Could have been a bottleneck event, you know when a species, all of them die off, except for like one handful of them. Could have been that they just happened to be the tailless ones.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's a bottom-like event. Could just be coincidence. You're right. Could be.
Speaker 3:I mean, I don't know if there's any evidence for that, but that kind of thing can happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's another thing that happens in evolution, where it's just there's some other side benefit, like a side effect that does cause an advantage, one that I jotted down in the notes that, because I was trying to think of what Speculate. What some things could be is maybe the lack of a tail, like. Well, what they do know is that the muscle that use that would support the movement of the tail, changed into a band of muscles in the lower back that supports standing upright, and so perhaps it's just that maybe lacking a tail did provide a disadvantage, but the ability to stand upright provided more of an advantage to compensate.
Speaker 3:And to do it consistently and well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So, but we may never know. I mean, we almost can't know because you can't go back and test that right. No, but it is always interesting to speculate why those things would happen. But we do know now that Gene's responsible, so I think that's really cool.
Speaker 1:That is very cool All right.
Speaker 2:So back in at the end of December, the UK the United Kingdom decided to make an amendment to their animal welfare sentience bill, so that was introduced. The animal welfare sentience bill was introduced to the UK Parliament back in actually May of 2021 and it aims to recognize vertebrate animals as sentient beings, and the hope here is that the bill will cement into law the idea of animal sentience so that it can be taken into account when considering issues on animal welfare. Okay, now, the reason I'm bringing all this up and the reason I'm talking about it right now on the show is because the amendment that was made to this bill that was just introduced back in December is to add octopuses to their list of sentient animals.
Speaker 3:Because they are famously invertebrates.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly Because, like I said, this bill was all about vertebrates and now they're trying to extend it to octopuses, which are invertebrates. Right? Why is this a big deal? Why am I talking about it? Why did I bring it up? Why did I decide to think about it now?
Speaker 2:Well, the reason I thought it would be interesting to talk about and we'll get into some more of the details and then we'll have some discussion about it but the reason I thought about it is because just recently, on one of our episodes, we started talking about and briefly mentioned the idea of sentience versus sapience, and so this news item popped up and I thought, wow, that's a coincidence.
Speaker 2:What a cool opportunity for us to revisit that discussion and talk about sentience and animal welfare and ethics in the treatment of animals and how that all factors in. Well, the reason that it's a big deal that they're even making this change at all is that the EU, the European Union, has had animal welfare laws in place for some time that protect the treatment of animals and limit their farming practices. Lots of countries, of course, have these kinds of laws in place to protect animals, and these laws specifically acknowledge the sentience of animals as being a fundamental basis for regulating their treatment. This is the European Union. They've already talked about animal sentience. However, these laws are only applicable to vertebrate animals, and that's animals. For those who don't know, that's animals with a backbone, so that covers most animals that you think about when you think about farming and yeah, including fish in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so, but since the UK is not a part of the EU anymore, oh, okay they can make amendments to their own version of this law and have, and they've then decided to amend it to include octopuses after looking at scientific data. That's another thing I like about this is that they actually looked at the scientific data in order to make this decision. It allows those creatures the same sorts of protections and regulations on their treatment, and this is coming all at the same time that there's a company in Spain, nueva Pascanova, that's recently announced that they have managed to be able to figure out how to farm octopuses and they plan to open an octopus farm next year to be ready to ship octopus globally by 2023. Huh, and this is the reason that's that that's news is because it's notoriously difficult to farm octopuses right. They don't like to maintain captivity. They get really aggressive and territorial and sometimes eat each other in captivity.
Speaker 2:That doesn't sound ideal, yeah it's not what you want if you're trying to farm your octopus. They get bored easily and require a lot of stimulation, and they'll sometimes starve themselves, seemingly voluntarily, oh my God, yeah. And so figuring out how to be able to farm these animals is new, it's different. It's a problem that's been known, and they claim to be able to have done it. So this comes at a very important time. This question of should the octopus be considered as also part of this sentient animal consideration, because we've, you know, like octopus, octopuses have have long, have been known for some time to be very intelligent creatures.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they are yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and so we got to talk about that. But okay, so you asked what is so? That's setting the stage, why is this something that has come up right? Okay, but you asked what is sentience in the first place?
Speaker 3:Versus sapience.
Speaker 2:Versus sapience. So if you had to define sentience, how would you define it?
Speaker 3:by the way, Okay, Based on our conversation the last time we discussed this Sentience would be being aware of your surroundings. Being aware and not necessarily like in the sense of you're getting information or light rays or whatever, but being able to recognize patterns and be able to make decisions about your environment.
Speaker 2:Right. So the definition of sentience is actually very simple. It's defined as the capacity for a living creature to experience feelings and sensations, and so it's sort of, if you think about it, that sort of implies a spectrum.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:And sentience does for sure exist on a spectrum. On one end there are things that are clearly not sentient Bacteria Like bacteria plants, mushrooms.
Speaker 3:Maybe not plants. Plants actually have a.
Speaker 2:Well, see, and that's when you have to start deciding okay, where do you start entering into the spectrum? Plants do have the ability to maybe sense environmental input, maybe, but do we call that sentience? I don't know. Again, it's a spectrum, right? Yeah, yeah, For sure. So you have to be down there on one end of the spectrum and then you have the other end of the spectrum, things that are obviously are sentient, like humans, of course, dogs, cats, probably most animals that you think of and interact with it like a petting zoo.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:And in the middle there's everything else, and that's where you tend to run into problems in debates is the middle area. Sentience usually involves some level of experience of pain, pleasure and possible emotional experience like joy and misery. Not necessarily, but at least you're talking about things like pain and pleasure. In fact, when you're talking about animals sentient animals, that you want to consider the treatment of those animals. A lot of that discussion talks about their ability to experience pain right.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, that's true, that's true.
Speaker 2:In fact, some people claim that insects are probably less ethically problematic to farm because there's a lot of evidence that they don't experience any pain. Oh, really, yeah, I didn't know that it doesn't depend on the insect, but they don't experience at least some of them I've heard that don't experience pain in a meaningful way. One thing that is important when you're defining sentience is to distinguish it from sapience. So a lot of people, when they hear sentience, I think they think sapience.
Speaker 3:I was in that category.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly A couple of episodes ago you were one of those people. I was, not too long ago also. Sentience is not sapience. Sapience literally translates from French to mean wisdom.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:And in neuroscience it refers to the ability for a creature to have such a high level of thought, such that it's self-aware.
Speaker 3:So you can think about thinking.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Think about the experiences that you're having.
Speaker 2:So clearly the prototypical sapient animal would be human right, mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:We are modeling this whole thing after ourselves Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and that I think is an interesting that you say that, because I think that underpins a lot of the ethical discussions here is that we are sort of the litmus test for all of the thought about all of this right, we're all basing it on us and our experiences.
Speaker 2:But sapience is. I mean, we're called homo sapien, right, and that's why it's our whole deal. Yeah, that's our whole thing. That's our one thing. But there are other animals that are considered by science to be sapient. Can you think of any? Have you looked at the notes? Did you already see?
Speaker 3:I didn't look at the notes, okay.
Speaker 2:Can you think of any other animals that are considered to be sapient?
Speaker 3:I'm going to go ahead and guess a bunch of different apes.
Speaker 2:Yes, the great apes are considered sapient correct.
Speaker 3:There are some birds that are very intelligent. Were there any birds on the list?
Speaker 2:Yes, magpies are thought, are considered to be sapient there are other birds that are like in the running, like many people think. I think crows are probably up there on the list. A lot of people think that crows might be up there, but it has to do with self-awareness, right? There's another one. There's another one that we know. I don't know if you can think of it.
Speaker 3:Hang on, okay, hang on.
Speaker 2:The next one we're going to do is self-awareness, self-awareness. How do we test self-awareness? Do you know?
Speaker 3:Actually no, I don't. How do we test self-awareness?
Speaker 2:So there are probably different ways that we can test self-awareness, but we obviously can't ask a creature if they're self-aware. It would be much easier if we could speak great apes For sure. That's why we try to be able to figure out how to talk to these animals that we consider to be very intelligent. I mean, we've spent so much time trying to teach Gorilla sign language right, so that we can answer questions like these. But we can't really know directly what animals are thinking or feeling or experiencing. So we have ways to infer from indirect evidence whether they're sapient. We can look at behavior, brain scan, stuff like that. The classic test for sapience is the mirror test. Have you heard of this? No, you have not? Okay, great. So the mirror test is a famous test of sapience and it's when a creature sees itself in a mirror. Does it recognize the reflection as itself, or will it mistake the reflection for another creature?
Speaker 3:Okay, I have a guess.
Speaker 2:Okay, is it whales? No, it's not. What a good guess, though.
Speaker 1:They're not sapient.
Speaker 2:I don't know that we know if they're sapient or not, but I say that's a good guess, because I would not be surprised to hear that they were the answer is elephants.
Speaker 3:Elephants yes, okay.
Speaker 2:Elephants have, I believe, have, so to speak, passed the mirror test. And when you said that you had that sound of realization, right, there's other things that we can think of that elephants have done that seem to make them appear self-aware. There's so much like elephant art, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, great words.
Speaker 2:Yeah, stuff like that, and so that's the classic test for sapience. But the point here is that we have to infer these things from indirect evidence, and it's the same thing for sentience we have to infer sentience from indirect evidence.
Speaker 2:Where do they lie on that spectrum. We have to sort of infer that. But sapience is a different sort of measure than sentience. I believe. I'm not totally sure about this, but I believe it's possible. It might be correct to think about sapience as like one end of one extreme end of this spectrum, but I'm not sure. It might not be accurate to call sapience part of the sentient spectrum.
Speaker 3:I'm not ready to say that, well, I don't know, because if you, if sentience is experiencing feelings and sensation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So sapience, I feel like it kind of is a different category.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can feel like maybe it's one of those things, that that you probably can't be sapient if you're not sentient.
Speaker 3:But Right, because you're kind of zeroing in when you talk about sapience. You're zeroing in on a singular experience, right, and saying this one experience knowing that you exist and knowing that you are thinking that puts you in a different category. I wouldn't say it's definitely on the end of a spectrum. You're not necessarily feeling or sensing things more than other creatures.
Speaker 2:You're just doing this one specific
Speaker 2:thing, and sapience seems to be, whereas sentience has a lot to do with, like you said, feeling and sensation which we talked about Sapience, seems to be more of an emergent phenomenon of consciousness, right In the way that it's described, which, again like you said, that's I feel like you can get sensation and perception out of the normal operations of putting neurons together with for sensory cells and stuff like that, and if you put enough of them together maybe you get further down the spectrum. But you have to have some sort of extra phenomenon coming out of that to become self-aware, you know.
Speaker 3:So what's interesting about that? And whenever I think about different characteristics of organisms, I always ask myself how and why would this have evolved?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:If we're not the only sapience species, then there's some pressure that is pushing us to start thinking about thinking, to start realizing who we are.
Speaker 2:Maybe or is it again just some sort of emergent phenomenon, as that comes as a result of a collection of other very beneficial high level thought.
Speaker 3:So it's sort of a byproduct, is what you're saying?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly, and because many things evolve that aren't necessarily advantageous, but they just happen, and maybe that's one of those cases I don't know that being self aware and having the capacity for existential dread, you know.
Speaker 3:I mean it's one of our key drawbacks. No kidding, I mean it also on the flip side thinking about thinking allows us to create things that are kind of impossible otherwise.
Speaker 2:Well, it allows you to yeah, it allows us to create the institution of science in general. Exactly exactly Like. What is science if not thinking about thinking and how to improve our thinking right?
Speaker 3:So I guess in that way it's enhanced our survival.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you might be convincing me. Then, maybe, maybe, and I'm speculating.
Speaker 3:I haven't. Like I mentioned, I didn't look at the notes. This is something that I haven't thought too deeply about, ironically.
Speaker 2:You haven't thought too much about the fact that you can think about your thought.
Speaker 3:I mean I have in general, but it's not something in preparation for this episode that I've really spent some time digging into. So you know, I'm sure there's a few philosophers out there who have a few thoughts to chime in as we're talking, but it's really interesting to think about, to think about how that helps us in the long run. How is it beneficial? But then, of course, the drawback of existential dread often rears its head as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I just it's funny that we're taking this side conversation into sort of like epistemology and this philosophy of how we well. I don't know. I think that talk conversations about the philosophy of knowledge and what we know and how we can define information and knowledge. I think that very much is tied to science, so I don't think that that's veering too much away from it at all.
Speaker 3:Fair enough. Fair enough, and just to clarify, if the term epistemology is a way of knowing, a way of sort of a set of structures around how you think about things, which science is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, epistemology very generally is the philosophical theory of knowledge and what knowledge is and how we know things and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So yeah, that kind of brings it to the absolute next level Thinking about thinking about thinking right. Thinking about, thinking about thinking.
Speaker 2:Man, we are so advanced, oh, we're so smart. But one of the things that sentience in animals to bring it back to sentience and creatures and octopuses and stuff like that one of the things the questions that comes up is the ethics of animal treatment. When you're considering the sentience of an animal Right Now, it seems pretty clear that sapient creatures should be treated with the highest levels of dignity and respect that we can offer. Right.
Speaker 3:Fair.
Speaker 2:Because of the nature of sapience. The question really comes when you have creatures, and when I say the question, what I really mean is the controversy and the debate comes when you have creatures that are identified as sentient but not sapient, like octopuses and dogs or pigs which is why this conversation came up in a previous episode and that's when you start to really think about that. They're not sapient, sure, but they're sentient. Where on that sentient spectrum do they lie and how sentient do you have to be to be afforded certain levels of treatment and care and, like I said, dignity? And I think most people agree that sentient creatures should be treated humanely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But there's no clear consensus on the definition of humane Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is a big question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, no, kidding. Like should a rat be experimented on? Like a rat? Where does it fall in this spectrum If sentience and I guess the key assumption in this conversation right now is that sentience is the main thing that we're considering when we talk about ethical treatment of animals so should a rat be experimented on? What about a squirrel, a pig, a dog? What's the difference between those animals? Is there a difference?
Speaker 2:If there, is no difference, then why is it that we are so averse to experimenting on dogs now, whereas we're not, maybe, on pigs or rats?
Speaker 3:right, that's interesting too. One of the things think about the list of animals you just gave us. Some of them we eat, some of them we don't, depending on the culture. Yeah, it's cultural and some people are horrified by the thought that people eat pork, that they eat pigs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're horrified by the thought of eating dogs.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:And it's very much based in your culture and what you believe about those animals. So clearly there is not, like you said, consensus.
Speaker 2:Right, right, and there's not even necessarily consensus on what we should think about. But sentience, being what it is, is apparently something that is being used as a metric, at least in the European Union, I know in the United.
Speaker 2:States here in the United States. Here we also use that as a factor. There are laws about what animals you can use for what, what you can cook, what you can't, what you can experiment on. But and like, if you can experiment on something, what kind of treatment it gets before, during and after that experimentation you know, should it be euthanized immediately afterwards?
Speaker 2:Should it be? You know what type of care does it get before All that kind of stuff? And so I just thought it really interesting this conversation coming up now after we had just talked about sentience here.
Speaker 3:Well, we talk a lot on this podcast about research done particularly on mice and rats, and they have been a key focus. Just now I talked about this brain surgery that's only been attempted on rats, and this is every time I find something like this. I know that these studies go through rigorous ethical review, that they don't even get to start until they can prove that they're treating these animals humanely. But not everybody listening to this will agree on what humane treatment is, and that doesn't mean that every single lab is following it to the letter. There's also going to be cases where people are cutting corners or ignoring the regulations, and there's also to further that there are situations in the past where they've had totally different regulations that, to us, are completely inhumane, and we build on that research that wouldn't have existed without those, those inhumane treatments, and so we talk about those things on the podcast all the time. Sometimes, sometimes we know, sometimes we don't know that these treatments have been humane or not, and so I think it's an important question for us to ask ourselves.
Speaker 2:I think it's important to continue to ask those types of questions we can't sort of, even though we might not be on firm footing and have a clear delineations and definitions and clear understanding of it it's.
Speaker 2:We can't just decide to ignore it. We have to continue to revisit the question and, while government and philosophy are typically the ones who are making like pronouncements about these types of decisions, about ethical treatment of animals and everything, and we certainly don't have answers right now, we're just asking a lot of questions right now but I think that science and the reason I brought it up and wanted to talk about it is because I think science can inform those decisions that other people are making with data. And that's what happened. And and one of the first things that piqued my interest was I was very happy to see that the UK was was adding the octopus to this list of sentient sentient animals based not just based on, you know, a documentary they saw about a guy who lived with octopuses but but actually on looking at, I think there were like 300 papers that they read and they looked at science, they looked at the data and and it helped them make this decision and I think that that that was very heartening to me.
Speaker 2:I was very glad to see that that that that is being considered in the in the conversation and I and I hope it continues to and we can further refine our understanding of of these types of questions.
Speaker 1:That was Bobby and Mora from All Around Science. Thank you so much for joining us on this special crossover episode with All Around Science, and we'll be back in January with series nine, because I know a lot of you are probably thinking about how you can cut down on your meat intake to help the planet and to help animals and to help your own health, and January is an awesome time to do that. So I look forward to bringing you series nine Vegan Culture and if you haven't done it already, make sure you go to our website at thedealwithanimalscom. Check out the new blog, which will give you all the links in the show notes, a summary of the episode and more information about the speakers. I'll also be posting special events and that sort of thing as well. From the website. You can also sign up for our newsletter, and I highly recommend you do that so that you can get the sneak peeks and never miss an episode.
Speaker 1:Thank you all for joining us as we try to answer the question what's the deal with animals? I'm your host, marika Bell. I'd like to thank Kai Straskov for the theme music and Natasha Matzart for sharing her skills to help grow the podcast. You can see links to the guest book recommendations, as well as their websites and affiliated organizations in the show notes and at thedealwithanimalscom. This podcast was produced on both historical tribal land of the Snoqualmie and Quinalt Indian nations. The deal with animals is part of the Irore Animal Podcast Network. What do you think is the deal with animals?