The Deal With Animals with Marika S. Bell
86: Can Dog Cuddling Influence Reduced Meat Consumption? Care Ethics with Dr. Maurice Hamington (S9)
"We don't share a lot of things. We don't really share much language with animals. We don't really understand all the instincts of animals, but, we do share embodiment with them. And so that becomes a basis for imagining what their perspective is like, just like it becomes the basis for understanding what's going on with other people."
- Dr. Maurice Hamington
Episode 1 of Series 9 Unveiling Vegan Culture Transcript
In this episode we invite philosophy professor Maurice Hammington to explore the world of veganism and the moral imagination that underpins it.
Our goal is to question the norm and inspire thought, broadening the scope of our collective understanding. This episode is an exploration of the intersection of animal ethics, veganism, and care theory.
Guest: Maurice has authored or edited twelve books including Care Ethics and Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan 2019) authored with Ce Rosenow, Care Ethics and Political Theory, with Daniel Engster (Oxford University Press 2015). Maurice is a Member of the International Consultants for The Melete Center of Philosophy for Care. University of Verona and a Steering Committee Member of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
He and his partner Stephanie love living and hiking in the Pacific Northwest as well as enjoying the local vegan cuisine. Maurice's Website
Go to the Blog Post Here!
Book Recommendations: Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education by Nel Noddings
Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos by Maurice Hamington PhD
Other Links:E22: Ecofeminism and Entangled Empathy with Dr. Lori Gruen
31: Attitudes Towards Animals with Matti Wilks (S5)
47: Expressions of Emotion in Animals with Dr. Mar
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!
"We don't share a lot of things. We don't really share much language with animals. We don't really understand all the instincts of animals, but, we do share embodiment with them. And so that becomes a basis for imagining what their perspective is like, just like it becomes the basis for understanding what's going on with other people."
- Dr. Maurice Hamington
Episode 1 of Series 9 Unveiling Vegan Culture Transcript
In this episode we invite philosophy professor Maurice Hammington to explore the world of veganism and the moral imagination that underpins it.
Our goal is to question the norm and inspire thought, broadening the scope of our collective understanding. This episode is an exploration of the intersection of animal ethics, veganism, and care theory.
Guest: Maurice has authored or edited twelve books including Care Ethics and Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan 2019) authored with Ce Rosenow, Care Ethics and Political Theory, with Daniel Engster (Oxford University Press 2015). Maurice is a Member of the International Consultants for The Melete Center of Philosophy for Care. University of Verona and a Steering Committee Member of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
He and his partner Stephanie love living and hiking in the Pacific Northwest as well as enjoying the local vegan cuisine. Maurice's Website
Go to the Blog Post Here!
Book Recommendations: Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education by Nel Noddings
Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos by Maurice Hamington PhD
Other Links:E22: Ecofeminism and Entangled Empathy with Dr. Lori Gruen
31: Attitudes Towards Animals with Matti Wilks (S5)
47: Expressions of Emotion in Animals with Dr. Mar
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!
We don't share a lot of things. We don't really share much language with animals, we don't really understand all the instincts of animals, but we do share embodiment with them, and so that becomes a basis for imagining what their perspective is like, just like it becomes the basis for understanding what's going on with other people.
Speaker 2:This is the Deal with Animals. I'm Marika Bell, anthrozeologist, cptt, dog trainer and an animal myself. This is a podcast about the connection and interaction between humans and other animals. Welcome to the first episode of series nine unveiling vegan culture. I chose this as the first episode because I feel like it gives a really good basis for how people start to think about veganism, and the basis for that stemming from moral imagination.
Speaker 2:Part of moral imagination is putting ourselves in another's shoes. There's a funny meme going around right now about an AI machine suddenly becoming sentient, and the researcher is super excited. And the AI machine goes on to say that its capacity for thought is so great that the difference between it and us is like the difference between us and chickens. And now it's going to take a look at how we've been treating chickens so it understands how it should treat us Disturbing and funny at the same time. I think what this conversation gets to is not just how we would want to be treated if we were a chicken, but could we use our imagination to understand what it would be like for a chicken to be a chicken? And by understanding that, we can imagine all sorts of other things that chickens might experience. And this also leads us into a conversation about how we can use our moral imagination to exercise the empathy muscle, to better empathize with not just other animals, but also with each other, and the implications of that are truly profound.
Speaker 2:And for those of you who signed up for the Deal with Animals newsletter, I'd love for you to email me and let me know what you think about this episode. What did you find interesting, what surprised you and what did you not agree with? Asking these questions and discussing them with each other can really help us to exercise our critical thinking muscle. So thank you for joining me as we ask the question what's the deal with animals? Would you please introduce yourself and share your pronouns?
Speaker 1:My name is Maurice Hammington, I go by he him, and I'm a professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
Speaker 2:Today we wanted to start by discussing your chapter on advocating veganism from a care perspective, and I know this because one of the first times I came across one of your papers was when I was doing my master's degree in Anthropozoology and I found a paper called Learning Ethics from our Relationships with Animals Moral Imagination from 2008.
Speaker 2:I was looking through this and I'm reading yours and I kind of went wait a second, did he just say what I think he just said? And I reread it two or three more times, because quite a lot of the time you read one paper and you go okay, this one isn't really what I'm looking for. You kind of go into the next one, but this one I think I had to read. I think I read it three times just to make sure that I really got the gist of what you were trying to say, and then I ended up using it pretty much all the time with my work because I loved the idea that our relationships with animals are partially important, because it helps us empathize with other people better as well. Would you say that I kind of summed that up?
Speaker 1:Yes, I think it's very true. I think animals are very important to us in those relationships and there's a lot of evidence for this in how we know that, for example, people who have very poor relationships with others, people who are abusers of others, often are animal abusers first, and we know that people who are troubled, troubled youth and those who are in prison benefit from relationship with animals. I'm sure you're quite familiar with prison animal programs and the like, and so there's a lot of evidence that builds up that that relationship is very important to us and it builds up a number of different skills that we can use to empathize with others.
Speaker 2:I just want to ask you a quick question just to start off, which is if you would share a formative childhood memory of your connection with animals, because this is a question I ask everybody, but I feel like for this conversation it's particularly permanent.
Speaker 1:Well, I was fortunate enough to grow up with animals. I had a dog when I was little and then later we had rabbits in our backyard and I remember my father would not allow the dog to be in the house, and this was back in the 60s and the dog would kind of run the neighborhood and I would go in the backyard. I was very little and I would yell out, lady, and I was nervous because I didn't know what direction the dog would come from. And the dog would come running all happy. And so I've been fortunate to always have a relationship with a companion animal.
Speaker 2:Do you have a particular memory of lady besides jumping over the fence and actually coming when called, which is a shocker for me, and any other particular memories that?
Speaker 1:Oh, just the pure joy and enthusiasm and licking my face and just how, what a delightful relationship it is to have a companion animal who just unabashedly adores you.
Speaker 2:And do you think that it's possible? If you're a child that has not had relationships with animals, particularly at a young age, is it still possible? Do you think, to really connect with animals later in life, or do you? Have that sort of critical learning experience at a young age.
Speaker 1:I think it can happen at different times in your life. I think it just makes for a richer, fuller life if you do have these companion animal relationships. But I don't want to preclude the fact that you might have those relationships later in life, and so I think that there is something about the bodily relationship, the tactile relationship that you have with an animal that wins you over, even if you are inexperienced with that relationship. So I think it can come whenever.
Speaker 2:So if somebody is able to say, touch an animal that they might otherwise be nervous about, that helps them to be more connected to that individual animal, potentially also more connected to that species as a whole.
Speaker 1:It can if we develop our moral imagination. I think I need to explain a little bit about care ethics.
Speaker 2:Yes, let's get into that. What is care ethics?
Speaker 1:So I am a feminist care ethicist and care ethics is this relational morality that developed in the 1980s out of feminist thought, and what it said there was that these feminists were tired of the old answers to moral questions and they wanted to re-center the thinking about ethics around relationships.
Speaker 1:And so this form of morality is very contextual, it has a space for emotion and imagination, and its currency is indeed relationships, and it is broader than most moral approaches, and that's mostly.
Speaker 1:People want to know what is the right thing to do, and that's an important question, but that's an adjudication question of right and wrong.
Speaker 1:Care ethics has some implications for those questions, but it goes far beyond that into our daily lives and our relationships, and so why this is important as we start to think about animals is from a relational standpoint. It flips our thinking about morality a bit, because, instead of what's right and wrong in an instant, relationships take time, and there are spatial issues as well, and so when we're talking about touching an animal, that's the beginning of a relationship, a proximal one. You're close to that animal and you're taking some time with it, and the more time and the more space you share, the greater the chance that you will develop a rich relationship with that. You can think of the analogy between people right. So if you spend a lot of time with somebody, there is a good chance that you will develop some understanding of that person. You may not agree with that person on everything, but you will develop some kind of empathy and understanding of where that person's coming from.
Speaker 2:For more about moral development, check out episode 31 with researcher Maddie Wilkes on children's attitudes towards animals.
Speaker 1:And so then, the moral imagination is taking your experiences of care, of relationship with others and extending it out to others, drawing analogies through the body, and this is the one thing that we share with animals. We don't share a lot of things, we don't really share much language with animals, we don't really understand all the instincts of animals, but we do share embodiment with them, and so that becomes a basis for imagining what their perspective is like, just like it becomes the basis for understanding what's going on with other people. If somebody doesn't somebody comes from another country I don't share language with them, I don't share culture with them. If they fall and they hit their head, I don't have to wonder oh, I wonder if they like that or something like that. No, I have a body, and so I know what that experience is like in my own body, and so I have a basis for understanding what they're feeling and a bit of what they're going through. That's not to say that culture and language aren't important, but sometimes we think of people as discrete entities that are completely different from us, and it's just not true. We share a great deal In feminist theory.
Speaker 1:They talk about this idea of everyone being second persons instead of first persons. First person to use the I, but we're second persons. We're our identity, developed out of relationship. I don't know what it is like to be human outside of relationships. All my parents, my family, my friends, I am a product of all those relationships and so there are not. Other human beings are not completely different than me. Sorry, siri, watch With animals. There becomes a basis, the embodiment, the tactile relationship becomes a basis for mutual understanding. When I pet my dog, when we come in contact, there is a demonstration of affection that goes both ways with a companion animal like that.
Speaker 2:That gets harder, though, too, isn't it, as you range farther from the taxonomic species that you're familiar with.
Speaker 2:So, as a human, my understanding is that animals enjoy being petted right.
Speaker 2:But, for instance, we just began fostering a leopard gecko, and of course, the children want to hold this guy all the time, and leopard geckos don't love to be held Like, I think, any reptile.
Speaker 2:That's not their favorite thing to be picked up and carried around, but they do like the warmth of our bodies, and so they often sort of come to this understanding that this is actually not such a bad thing most of the time, and they're okay with it, but I don't know if they ever like being held or like being petted, and that's, of course, the first thing my daughters want to do is can we pet him? And I had this thought of like well, you could pet him, and his response is to arch his back and push into your hand a little, which I know. If a dog were to do that, or a cat were to do that, I would assume that they are having a good time, because my experience with those animals says that that's the behavior they demonstrate when they are enjoying the interaction, but with a lizard, I actually have no idea if he's enjoying that touch or not.
Speaker 1:What a great learning experience, what a great opportunity to try to understand this animal that you have this kind of proximal relationship with. What you said at the beginning is absolutely true the farther you get away from mammals and so forth, the harder it is, the more work your moral imagination has to do around that animal. The thing about care I look at good care as having three things humble inquiry, inclusive connection and responsive action. And so one of the things about care is that there's always knowledge involved in it. The more we know, the better the possibility is for us to care. Now that knowledge is a very complex thing.
Speaker 1:There's lots of things to have knowledge of. There's the general that you have knowledge of, but there's also the knowledge of that particular being that helps you to care for them. And then the second thing is this empathetic, making a connection. And the third thing is being responsive in your action. And those elements is what, I argue, make up what I call good care. And so your experience with the gecko is this you're learning about their responses. They can't tell you everything that they're experiencing, but you're doing your best to try to understand, to learn and respond accordingly. But it is a lot easier with mammal bodies.
Speaker 2:Humble inquiry makes me go back to Suzanne Clothear's essential question how is this for you? Inclusive connection, how is this for you now? How could this be better? And responsive action, adjusting our actions based on the response we got to the first two questions. It's simple, or is it? We also need knowledge about the animals behavioral norms, biology and individual history. Armed with all of this knowledge, we can have a true connection with other animals and perhaps other human beings as well. But this doesn't really happen naturally, for everyone, does it?
Speaker 1:Human beings have natural capacities to care, and I use the word capacities intentionally. We have capacities to care. It's a matter of whether we develop those capacities and exercise them and to get better at them. Just like any other physical capacity, you have to practice it. You have to do it over and over, you have to think about it if you're going to get better at it. The same thing about care. If we valued care more in our society and we practiced it and thought about it, we can get better at caring.
Speaker 1:There's a psychologist at Stanford who has written a book about empathy. Some people say well, empathy is something you're born with or empathy is something you develop. He says that he's done studies and you can develop empathy, but you have to think about it, have to be intentional about it and work at that. All those skills of good care are things that I believe we can develop when we have a relationship with an animal. That's another iteration, another opportunity to have a relationship and a caring one. We become attuned to different skills because, as I said, we can't talk to that animal. We have to rely on other aspects of our relationship with one another to figure out how to best respond.
Speaker 2:Another aspect of embodied care that really put on the light bulb for me was the idea of using embodied care to understand animals better, using it as a critical form of anthropomorphism. Can we imagine what other animals are feeling? Simply by imagining how our bodies would feel in the same situation, For instance, if there was a sheep caught in some wires and not able to escape. I can imagine myself in the same situation and be able to critically anthropomorphize to make a fairly safe assumption that this sheep is probably in pain and experiencing fear. I might even have a visceral reaction to seeing any wounds on the sheep that would make me feel those in my own body.
Speaker 1:In some of the articles I wrote I talked about in defense of anthropomorphism, because anthropomorphism gets a lot of criticism, and appropriately so, because we're projecting from our own experience onto the animals. That can be very inaccurate. At the same time, the attempt again you're sending out your imaginative flights of fancy, trying to figure out is important. You do have a basis for making some assumptions, like you said, with the sheep caught in the wires.
Speaker 1:I think that anthropomorphic attempts are okay as long as we know what they are and what they're used for. But your idea about understanding others through the body is why I talk about these different capacities of the body that can be developed to make these connections. There's a feminist philosopher in France that I've been working with who's developed this idea of kinesthetic empathy and that, like you said, you cringe in your body. There's this visceral experience we have around other people's bodies, depending upon what's happening, or other bodies, and I think in the history of Western thinking we have kind of denigrated the body and the things that come from the body and the emotions, and place the mind above all. And if we valued some of that embodied experience, not in replace of the mind, but with the mind I think that we would come around to understanding one another better and use that resource that we have in the body to connect with others in a powerful way.
Speaker 2:There's some ways in which you can't imagine other people's experiences, and I'm thinking of certain things like I mean even something as simple as a bee sting. If you've never experienced a bee sting and you see somebody experience one, you can tell you what their pain is and they can talk to you about it. But you're not really gonna viscerally understand what that feels like unless you've had the experience of yourself and I think having kids is one of those things that people talk about it. You can't really experience that unless you've had your own kids. You can empathize a little bit, but it's very difficult without having gone through it yourself and the mind just isn't quite capable of that.
Speaker 1:One of the things I like to say about care is that it's in this kind of space in between, this kind of liminal space, and so we tend to think in binaries, like it's either this or that. And I think care is kind of postmodern in its acknowledgement that it's not quite that clear. So when we talk about we can't know what somebody else is experiencing or we can't know what that animal's experiencing, that is both true and not true at the same time. If it was a Venn diagram, it would. There would be some overlap where I can't. There's no way I can know somebody else's experience. I could never own somebody else's experience, but I can have an inkling of it and I can have that in my body.
Speaker 1:I can kind of understand something about it, without claiming that the worst thing in the world is when somebody comes up to you and you're feeling terrible about something and they say I know what you're going through and that just feels so pompous or something.
Speaker 1:It feels like hubris, right, that they say you know what you're going through, but it's somewhere in between.
Speaker 1:It's not that you know with specificity, but there is a kind of an understanding that's there and that's that space that we're trying to work with, I think, when we think about animals, because we can't know with the kind of precision of articulation and we fool ourselves with articulation too because you read a book and you see, okay, I've got these words and so they're telling me exactly what they're saying.
Speaker 1:But we know that there's more going on than the words, right, there's all kinds of feelings and understanding, and so I think there's a certain way that care acknowledges the reality of the way the world is and always has been. We tell this story about the history of humanity that it is kind of dog eat dog and we had to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and there's the survival of the fittest and all that stuff, and that there's some truth in there. But there's also this truth that we've only survived through cooperation and compassion and working with one another and relationships as well, and that's just as true as story as the other story is about humanity and it always will be as long as there's humans around.
Speaker 2:So advocating veganism from a care perspective. So what does that mean? Based on what we've just talked about, why would you be advocating for veganism from this particular standpoint?
Speaker 1:Okay, once again, I'm a philosopher so I have to explain a little background before I get to the answer to your question. So I'm writing this book called Revolutionary Care, commitment and Ethos. It's all done, I just send it off. And so the first part of the book explains about how I'm thinking about care theory. This part I told you about these three parts of good care. That care is a process. It involves knowledge, humble inquiry, responsive I mean inclusive connection and responsive action. These, all these things are, and other theoretical things are, explained in the first part of the book.
Speaker 1:The second part of the book I go into what I call provocations and invitations, because, a care ethicist, I told you that care is not about adjudicating things and saying this is right and this is wrong. So I'm not gonna kind of come out and say veganism is the absolute only way, this is the right way or anything is the absolute right way, because care doesn't really work that way. It's relational and it emphasizes what brings about flourishing in humanity as opposed to being emphasizing right and wrong. So the last half of the book does these invitations and basically it's this if you're committed to care and they talk a lot in that first part about committing to care. I like the word commitment because it comes from within.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we think about ethics is coming from outside, like rules telling us what to do and so forth, and then that creates all kinds of gamesmanship about I'm gonna try to go around the rules or does this count, or all that kind of stuff. Care. I try to dispense with some of that by focusing on individual commitment. Do I commit to being a good, caring person, if that's what it means to be moral? And so if you buy the first half of my book's argument, I say well, here are some invitations for you, some ideas to think about. These are intentionally provocative, somewhat radical, and I talk about that word radical and it is. I talk about feminism, that if you're committed to care, you should think about feminism. I think I talk about socialism, not in a particular Marxist kind of way, but generally what socialism means, creating public infrastructure and so forth. And the most controversial position I take, I think, is veganism, and that's the one that most people give me the most pushback for.
Speaker 2:More than socialism.
Speaker 1:Yes, more than socialism, because we I mean socialism has a long history, even, I think, even more than feminism does I also. Oh, the other one is humanism. I talk about humanism and what that means.
Speaker 2:Now I was joking a little bit because at the moment it feels like socialism is like this no-go zone in a lot of family conversations for a lot of people and political conversations around friends and that sort of thing. But you're right, veganism is typically the one that can get just about anyone going, no matter their political views.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so basically I talk about, if you're committed to care and this idea of inclusive connection, then that care needs to extend beyond the human condition and it needs to extend beyond animals I mean two animals and beyond to the planet and ecosystems and those kinds of things. But specifically, veganism is an opportunity to demonstrate your moral commitment repeatedly throughout the day, every day. I didn't get that.
Speaker 2:She doesn't understand your thoughts at all.
Speaker 1:No, this must be the Siri philosophy student version. That tests what I'm trying to say. So not wanting to bring harm, to allow flourishing in the world and making those decisions all the time. And so, yeah, I look at some of the traditional arguments for veganism and try to bring it from a care perspective. A care perspective is more concerned about particular animals. If you take somebody like a Peter Singer, it's looking like at a classification. He takes a utilitarian view and is not so concerned about individual animals as animals as a whole. A care starts from the particular. So you have a companion animal and so your moral imagination should move to from the fact that you have this relationship with this companion animal to your plate at dinner time and what you have on it there, and the perspective of you wouldn't want your animal, this animal, to feel pain. You wouldn't want other beings to feel this kind of pain, and so why bring that to the dinner table?
Speaker 2:So I pulled something up from one of your papers, something that you said. It says in this section I argue that companion animals facilitate the skills necessary for responsiveness and caring. So I was recently listening to someone argue that, as a vegan or a true vegan, if you wanna call it that should not or would not keep companion animals, that it would be in some ways unethical to have companion animals at all. And I've heard this argument before and of course, I don't like it because I like having companion animals around. But there are aspects to it that I also understand.
Speaker 2:We can't ever really give a companion animal everything that they need, necessarily. I'm looking at this leopard gecko in his little tank and I can't call him a domesticated animal. He's maybe a tamed lizard, but right, he's a wild animal in a cage. Dogs in a lot of cases would choose to live with us, but sometimes do not choose to live with humans, and that is okay too. But actually removing animals from homes completely and saying it is not moral to have a companion animal at all, would that, I think, in some way be a detriment to what you're saying and that having companion animals around is actually gonna maybe make us better care.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things about care is that it doesn't take any of these absolute kinds of positions Like you must do this in order to qualify for something, and so this is to say that and I've heard this argument as well is that we shouldn't have. There's animal abolitionists, right, some of which don't want us to have even companion animals, and I think that we benefit from this relationship. It's kind of a mutual relationship but also it creates one of those speculative positions, and I don't like ethical positions that are just completely mind games. We don't live in that context where we're going to free all the animals. It's just not going to happen. This is the context that we live in right now, and so what we need to do is the best for our animals and then work toward improving the treatment of other animals. Sometimes in ethics they get really caught up with hypotheticals like the. I don't know if you've ever heard of the trolley problem.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, go over it really quick.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the trolley problem is there's this trolley, it's out of control and you have to decide whether you pull a lever to save a person that's here, but if you pull the lever, the trolley will go and kill three people on this other trail. And there's all kinds of iterations of this, variations of this situation, and I personally think a care ethicist would hate this problem, because care ethicists think about the long term. Why don't we have safety protocols or whatever before all this? And the trolley problem seems like this crazy hypothetical that nobody's actually ever going to be in. And so the situation is that we people do have companion animals, they do have pets, and so then what do we do with that information?
Speaker 1:Rather than saying that there is this important line that you shouldn't cross to be moral, that's not the case. Remember, my approach to veganism is, as a kind of provocation, I'm saying are you value in care? Are you thinking about care? Is care really important to you in the ways that I have described to you? And then, basically, I'm saying well, then, perhaps you should consider this based on that, and I would rather the person came to that rather than be told that there is here's the bright line that you can't cross in order to consider yourself ethical.
Speaker 2:I think that makes a lot of sense, particularly just in this idea that people are dealing with a lot all the time and struggling with the one more thing issue of like. Okay, well, there's the argument that everyone should become vegan and I'm using that should as a quote here, because that would be better for all animals. Like, we don't have to eat animals, we don't have to cause them suffering that way. So exploiting animals we can all agree is bad. So that means we all have to stop eating them. And then there's a lot of in between where people go okay, well, yes, but I am not comfortable doing that yet. So I'm just gonna stop eating a certain kind of meat, or I'm gonna stop eating meat on Mondays that's become the popular thing, right or I'm gonna stop eating meat for a month and just see what it's like.
Speaker 2:And for a lot of people, that's sort of how they're approaching it. They take this piecemeal. I'm just gonna get slightly better and better every week or every month or every year, or when I feel comfortable with the next step, I'm gonna take the next, and I don't. I think a lot of people do struggle with that because they don't feel maybe they're doing enough or they don't feel that they are gonna be accepted in either camp. I guess you say you don't like this idea of there being a separation, but when you're talking with people there often is a separation.
Speaker 1:You said the magic words, marika. You said getting better and better, and that's why I think about care as a process, morality, a process of improvement. And if you commit to care, then you should also be committing to be reflective and improve on what you're doing. And so if you make a step by stopping stop eating meat on certain days or a certain classification of meat, or whatever that's great. As long as you don't, as long as we never get complacent, as long as nobody gets complacent and say well, now I don't, you know, now I'm a caring person, I'm done, I've got there and so I don't have to improve. We all I mean, it's it's care, is this ideal, but none of us can achieve that ideal. We all fall short, we are all not as caring as we could be, and I think we can always improve.
Speaker 1:I should say I also don't think that care is altruism. I think you need to take care of yourself along the way, and it's okay to have multiple goals. Sometimes in ethics they have this purity test, that that if you have to have, you have to fully intend to help the other, and I don't think that that is healthy or reality either, and so I don't think of care as altruism. So I I welcome people who come to veganism piecemeal. I guess 25 years ago or closer to 30 years ago, I came to veganism piecemeal myself and I don't. I don't begrudge this, I just invite people to think about it. I'm trying to provoke people to think about it a little bit.
Speaker 2:I know it's. It's hard to pick up a book sometimes if you feel like that book is going to challenge you in that way. Right, I mean, we always want to read books that are interesting, but books that are truly going to make you uncomfortable because of the the potential that it might change your mind about something you don't want your mind changed about. At the moment, it can be a really hard ask to even pick that book up. And I did pick up a book like that recently and I won't share what that was because this is definitely a different podcast. But I was concerned that, like, okay, if I read this, does that make me well? I have to then change after I've read this and and through the process.
Speaker 2:And I think the author did a good job of putting out there that this is, this is how she thinks about things. This was how she has come to understand these things. She invites people to be the scientist and to to examine what they're doing and here's ways they could do that, but at no point does she say you have to do this. You can actually just read this book and not do any of it. You could read this book, think about it and do one of these things, or you could not do anything for a while. Come back to the book and then try all of it later. There's no way you have to do it, or at all. It's just about putting the information out there and letting it percolate, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I think about care, is it? It involves trust and respect in in a relationship, and, in a way, showing respect for the readers or any kind of audience is to say that this is, this is ultimately your decision. This is and that's why I like the word commitment, because it's about you taking control of this and and this is like honoring your agency in this I'm hoping that I make a good and interesting argument for something, but ultimately it is your choice and I'm like I said, I'm not going to give you, I'm not going to give you a formula to say if you don't do this, then you're not a caring person, kind of thing. But I want to get people to think about how important this relational aspect of our plight in the world is, and I think the time is right Right now. This is this happens to be a kind of golden age of care ethics.
Speaker 1:There are books being written about care in law, in business, in health, in all kinds of different places, and we're seeing it seep into a bit into the public imagination. It's got a long way to go to fight how people are thinking about the world right now, but we're starting to see some, some inroads here. There are movements, for example, the Black Lives Movement. If you read their vision statement, there's a lot in there about care, and there is we have politicians who are talking about care, economists who are talking about care, and so there's this is there's. That's why I try to jump on the word care revolution. I think there's enough going on there, and I think veganism can play a part in it. Sometimes I think there are criticisms of vegans being elitist, privileged and not something that's accessible to everybody, but I think there's another way of going about it and I think there's a, there can be a relational approach to veganism.
Speaker 2:I think I know what you mean, how a lot of this veganism mentality can sometimes feel out of reach for a lot of people who maybe don't have. Vegetables are expensive and fresh food is sometimes hard to come by in certain areas. So so are you saying that for people who maybe veganism itself and not eating meat at all is economically difficult proposal that there's other ways of going about maintaining a care ethic?
Speaker 1:I think another thing is the context. It used to be that it might have been true that it was more expensive to be vegan because there weren't as many options, and I don't think it's as true anymore. Also, I mean, there's also the question of, you know, being healthy is a little bit different, right? You can be an unhealthy vegan and eat junk food that is vegan, and you can be an unhealthy meat eater, and so eating healthy and eating something that is more whole food-based is another part of the equation, and if you go in that direction, then it can be very inexpensive, because things like beans are inexpensive, but it's the morality of it. I think that is the attraction.
Speaker 1:I begin all the chapters in this book with vignettes, with stories, and the story of this chapter on veganism is about Margaret Robinson, who is a Canadian scholar and also a member of the MiC-MAC First Nation People of Canada. Amongst the Native American literature you find a lot of dismissal of veganism as again another kind of white colonial attempt at suppression of people and smacking of a lot of privilege, and what she argues is that the MiC-MAC and other Native peoples have this wonderful relationship with the earth and with animals and that is naturally anthropomorphic in a sense that they have names and stories and relationships, and that veganism is actually more in line with the Native traditions than is meat eating, and the MiC-MAC are very much a fishing-oriented people and so this is a very hard sell. But she's argued quite persuasively for this and she's written articles like veganism and MiC-MAC legends and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:For a little bit more about a conversation on ideas around veganism in indigenous traditions. Check out episode 64 with Dr Lisa Kemmerer.
Speaker 1:So, despite what some people say about veganism and I'm sure it's true in certain ways it doesn't have to be an approach that is elitist and off-putting and it's something that can be more and more available to people. Right now, we're seeing a bit of a shift commercially, so that more affordable vegan products, vegan food chains and so forth are coming forth, but I also want to emphasize that they may not always be the healthiest either, and that's not something I talked about either. I didn't talk about to you. It's in the chapter about self-care. Self-care is an important theme that runs throughout as well, and veganism is another way to get at self-care vis-a-vis the traditional American diet, but it's not an absolute. As I said, you can be a very unhealthy vegan as well.
Speaker 2:So remind us again the name of your book.
Speaker 1:It's revolutionary care, commitment and ethos.
Speaker 2:Excellent, and because this episode is going to come out sometime early 2024, hopefully it'll be well on its way to the publisher at that point and people will be able to find it relatively soon after they hear this episode. So that's great. Would you also share what book? If you could gift a book to all of the listeners, would that be?
Speaker 1:Well, I think I would like everybody to know about care ethics and the most accessible book is, I think, is one of the original books written by Nell Nottings, a professor of philosophy and education at Stanford University who passed away last year. Nell Nottings wrote the book Caring, first in I think it was 1983. And then there is a second edition that came out in 2013. But the book Caring it's not a long book, but I find her writing very accessible and until somebody like me writes an introductory book to care ethics, I think it's the best introduction to the thinking of it. I often, once people are new to it, I give them one of her articles called the language of care, and that's just a few pages and it gives them a sense of what we're talking about in terms of care ethics.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that. I'll definitely link those in the show notes and the article as well. If I can find it, I will link in the show notes and make sure people can get to that. So what is the deal with animals?
Speaker 1:The deal with animals is that we can learn so much from them in our relationships and the subtleties in the way we communicate, and so and think about how amazing it is to have a relationship with an animal, a being that is completely different than us and can't talk to us, and we can forge these wonderful kinds of relationships and that's just fantastically hopeful. I actually think that the potential for moral progress comes in a part from our relationship with animals, because if we can overcome that kind of gap, can't we overcome gaps of our political differences, our cultural differences amongst people? And so I think there's it's just a wonderful, amazing thing, and I think we can learn and have many epiphanies in our relationship with animals that that we can apply in our relationships with other people.
Speaker 2:Epiphanies. I like that. It's a good word. It's a good word when thinking about animals too, because I think that when people have little experiences with animals, I love that moment where, when you introduce them to a sheep, for instance, I got to do occasionally or a hedgehog, or even their own dog when I used to work with people in their homes, I would go to their homes and I would say they would tell me all about how their dog was not learning anything. Their dog was hate, to use the word stupid or stubborn or all of these labels. And then I would stand there and say, okay, well, just give me a couple of minutes.
Speaker 2:And this is how I like to start all of my sessions is I would just ask the dog to touch my hand with their nose, and I would do that without saying any words, just put my hand out there, and they would, of course, naturally come and investigate it and accidentally bump my hand, and I would use my clicker and click that and give them a treat, and the people would look at me like, oh, that was, that was just an accident. He didn't do that on purpose, but almost the very next time he would do it on purpose, right, the very next bump would definitely be. It would be, it would be investigative, right, like wait a second, did I just make that happen and they would do it again and I would click and give them a treat, and you would. There would be a light bulb moment, right, they're like in the dog's eyes. You would see that happen.
Speaker 2:And if the person was standing next to me they would see it happen too, where the dog's whole face changes and he just goes, got it, bump and, and at that point they would be bumping, and again I had not said anything to the dog, just the clicker and the treat to let them know that that was the behavior I wanted and the people I mean it never got old. The look on people's face and the gasp and the holy bite. My dog actually understands what you're saying and you didn't even say anything. And that epiphany moment, that that people sort of realized that when it's just a communication that they can actually do and have that relationship with their dog they didn't realize they could have, that was amazing and I loved seeing that every single time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. I think when you again, when you spend time, when you live with a companion animal, the subtleties are amazing. One of the things I thought about and I found authors who talk about this is you can even argue that, for example, dogs have a kind of ethic of their own, because when you are rough housing with them, or most of the time when they're rough housing with other dogs, they could hurt you, they could hurt that dog, they could hurt you, but they don't. They, they realize how far they can go with it and and that shows a kind of moral restraint. Now again, I'm anthropomorphizing a little bit, but something's going on there. They're not simply acting out all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're reading the situation and adjusting because of their care for you and for their relationship with you. Well, that's, that's a great way to end the episode. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Great being here, Marika.
Speaker 2:That was Dr Maurice Hammington, professor of Philosophy at Portland State University, and now you know how cuddling a dog might convince you to eat less meat. In our next episode for series nine, we're going to talk about one of the practicalities of being vegan, because it's not just about eating meat, it's also about animal products. There are some products we use in everyday life that come from animals, so if we're looking at eating less meat, maybe we also might want to look at using less animal products that support the culture of animal consumption. So we're going to be talking to Ashley Byrne, peta's Director of Outreach and Communications, about how we think about the clothes we're wearing when we think about using less animal products. But between now and then, why don't you jump on the deal with animalscom and sign up for the newsletter? It's a monthly newsletter that gives you all sorts of sneak beaks into the episodes, as well as information about the guests and events coming up in the future, and if you heard something really interesting in this episode, I would love for you to share it with your friends and get the word out about the podcast. Thank you for joining me as we try to answer the question.
Speaker 2:What's the deal with animals? I'm your host, marika Bell. The theme music for the deal with animals was composed by Kai Strandskoff. You can see links to the guest book recommendations, as well as their websites and affiliated organizations, in the show notes and at the deal with animalscom. This podcast was produced on both historical tribal land of the Snoqualmie and Quinal Indian nations. For more information, go to the Snoqualmie tribes ancestral lands movement. So what do you think is the deal with animals? The deal with animals is part of the Iroar Animal Podcast Network.