 Well, I'd like to thank Peter and so as for organizing this meeting and everybody for coming to this meeting This is gonna be a very different talk from Chris's. I suppose that talks will vary, but isn't that exciting? So the title of my talk is who lives who dies and why ignoring and redecorating nature and species speciesism and I'm really interested in this notion of Compassionate conservation as Anna said in the real world and there were just some general messages I'll repeat these as I go through my talk, but I like to think of Beginning principle first principle first do no harm Animals are not property. We do not own them and really the major question that we're asking is who lives who dies And why do we make the choices we do about who lives who dies and why? and I want to talk to you about some real-world examples because we're faced with a lot of very difficult Situations in the wild Some general questions should individuals be traded off for the good of their own or other species what trade-offs must be made between ethics and conservation and I Want to encourage you to think out of the box about what we must do now I think Michael the biases talk showed us last night that and we all know this anyway, but time's not on our side There's there is a sense of urgency Just a whole list of questions That I'll just pick out a few but in my in my own research I'm interested in what animals feel about what's happening to them. So what does it like to be a hamster? What does it feel like to be a hamster? What's their point of view? Why do we do invasive things in the name of science food clothing or entertainment? Why good welfare isn't good enough? I'll get back to that but my colleagues often say well I'm following the laws and we're following the regulations So I'm allowed to do whatever I want to do no matter how heinous it is to other animals And my big project that I'm working on now is called rewilding our hearts. I'm writing a book on that and the major Question is how can we build corridors of compassion and peaceful coexistence? And what can we do to expand what I call our compassion? footprint and I like to say that compassion is not weakness and it's not a luxury It's a necessity now and that's why we're all here In in biology in the sciences students are often told that they shouldn't be sentimental and you shouldn't be compassionate And I think that that's just completely wrong I'm just putting this slide and I made a few changes just because Michael talked yesterday about who we eat and who we wear The point I want to make about this is when we're deciding about how to deal with different individuals It's a matter of who We're talking about not what we're talking about So if there's an animal on a meal It's who we're eating and if you're wearing leather or other types of animal skins It's who you're wearing not what you're wearing. So people often Get surprised when they'll say well, what's for dinner? And I said no you mean who's for dinner and it changes in name of the nature of the conversation Because we're eating who's sentient beings usually not watts. So these are just some happy pigs But I think this is a really important thing because language really Controls if you will our actions and we have to have direct encounters I love what Chris said I make by living if you will doing field studies on lots of different animals So and I live in a forest in Colorado. So I've got lion Cougars mountain lions and bears and coyotes and foxes Right at my door. So this is my friend Geraldine who's a rescued potbellied pig and really what she turns out to be is Bacon sausage and ham But people don't think of that that when they are that when they order a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich They're actually ordering a pig lettuce and tomato sandwich or babe You know all know then the movie babe. They're actually ordering a babe lettuce and tomato sandwich It definitely gets people to think Now I'm a scientist, but I think there are other views of the world Sciences, but one of many ways to learn about animals other animals because we're animals and to access who they are So I just say this because a lot of people get intimidated by science But they shouldn't be it's just one way of knowing there's lots of ways of knowing about the world and science It's just one way to access other animals now one of the things that I rely on is Darwin's idea is about evolutionary continuity. This is a dog who's read Darwin and is bored by the whole thing But it's an important principle so Darwin's ideas about evolutionary continuity say the differences among species of differences in degree rather than kind their differences that are shades of gray not black and white and I like to think of the bumper sticker of Darwinian continuity is if we have something They have it too. So we have hearts and we have stomachs and we have brains most of us So do other animals we have emotional lives we have moral sensibilities so to do other animals So the challenge is to learn about them not to just say well It's really hard to know about them. So let's pretend that they don't have them at all Which a lot of my scientific colleagues do because they're threatened very much by good biology They accept continuity in biomedical research That's why animals are used and abused but they don't like to accept continuity in terms of moral sentiments or emotional lives So I don't I don't know how they live with themselves, but they managed to This notion of species Speciesism we have Richard Ryder in the audience who really developed the whole idea about speciesism and the point I just like to make is a very simple one that When we use words like higher and lower we're really misrepresenting animals There are no such things as higher and lower animals the words higher and lower translate into more valuable or less valuable better or worse Dispensable or important so it's just something we really need to remember in that I like to say that individuals do what they need to do to be card-carrying members of their species When a chimpanzee outperforms a mouse people like to say that the chimpanzee is smarter than the mouse But when a mouse does something that a chimpanzee can't do Nobody says the mouse is smarter than the chimpanzee and we now know that birds such as new Caledonian crows make very complex and sophisticated tools much more so than do chimpanzees But you don't hear people running around saying crows are the new Albert Einstein's of the animal kingdom When in fact they probably are Now One criticism of the work I do and probably that others of you do in here is people like to say Oh, you're just being anthropomorphic as if that's the great curse And you're guilty of being anthropomorphic so nothing you do has any value, but but really the way my Colleagues use it. It's really double-talk. So for example, if I say an elephant in captivity isn't happy They'll say oh, she's happy. You're just being anthropomorphic and then it gets really quiet Because they're being anthropomorphic too But it's okay for them to use words that they criticize you for using and if you believe in Continuity at the bottom. We're not inserting something human into animals that they don't already have it's very important So as far as I'm concerned really is if we never talk about anthropomorphism again, that's just fine. It's it's it's silly It's purely academic. It doesn't really help the animals and it's used in very self-serving ways So the arguments against anthropomorphism are used in very self-serving ways by people who like to harm animals Now it's really important. This is one of my favorite slides But working with animals and you all know this but when you're working with animals daily you learn that they have different sensory systems So we know that whales and elephants have Use infrasound very low-frequency sounds that can travel for tens of kilometers through the ground or hundreds of kilometers through the water Bats use ultrasound a lot of animals have very keen senses of smell. We don't so I like to say that it's very important to remember When we're talking about other animals to remember their sensory worlds who they are Okay, and it makes it easier to get into their place in the world and animals do show a lot of selectivity. I Like this slide I show it all over I've shown it in the state of Texas where the great George Bush is from And nobody has thrown me out But but the important point is that animals make choices just like we make choices and they make extremely fine choices of What to do who to interact with how to live their lives and It's amazing what we're learning about other animals Chris just mentioned George Shala and I do field work like he does and I love this quote Where he's basically saying that animals should not be seen as objects and that you really can't study and understand them unless you have emotional contact and intuition and Intuition comes in some people think intuition isn't part of the scientific process It's very much part of the scientific process. I I love this quote and I'm really glad that you mentioned George because he's a very He's just a really great Scientist now here's the challenge and we're going to skip through some slides in saving some time later on But the challenge that it would face today is people who are interested in animal protection You can animal welfare animal rights I like to call it animal protection because the animal rights and animal welfare have baggage associated with them But people are interested in protecting animals So those people who are focused more on animals are more interested in protecting individuals those who are more concerned with environments habitats and conservation are more concerned with Protecting species populations and ecosystems So that's where the questions of is it okay to trade off individuals for the good of their owner or the species comes in Okay, if you're working for the animals the answer is no So you've got to come up with solutions that honor Individual sanctity and the value of individuals it's a it's a big challenge and I'm working a lot with conservation organizations because They really do many of them want to know about more humane Solutions than going in and poisoning tens of thousands of rats or snakes or shooting animals or harming them But that's a big challenge so I tell my students that if this one field I'd get into and this is where compassion of conservation comes in this would be the field because These meetings on compassion of conservation. There was one in Oxford in September of 2010 We had one in Chengdu China in June 2011 it's gay it's gaining a lot of momentum particularly among young students because they don't want to kill animals They don't want to trade off one wolf for another wolf So I'm just laying that out there and I will return to this in a bit Just some general points. We are a very conceited lot. I mean, we're basically big-brained Big-footed invasive mammals. We do a lot of wonderful things. I'm a very I'm an optimist. I'm very hopeful about the future usually But we do amazingly good things and we do amazingly horrible things But we're really confused about our relationships with animals So when people tell me they love animals and kill them I say I'm glad they don't love me Because people will say oh, I love deer. That's why I go hunt them and I'm going. Oh, I don't want to be stuck in an elevator with this person When people say I'm not sure of dogs or other animals are emotional beings. I say I'm glad I'm not their dog and The one question that I ask people around the world is Would you do it to your dog? Would you let your dog trade places with a cow or a pig on a factory farm? Would you let your dog become a mouse or a rat or other animal in a laboratory? And once again, it's a difficult question and they'll usually say oh no And then you ask them why and then they just flutter around here and they're making pretty bad excuses But once again, I think we need to ask the hard questions if we're going to make any progress And we should expect good answers So this one is good. It says I'm not a vegetarian, but I love animals and says you mean you love animals except for the ones you eat. I Mean, this is the kind of kind of situation a lot of people find themselves in So I think it's really important to come clean on the choices. We make I Mean, it's hard to be perfect and nobody is but but I think we need to come clean and Defend the choices that we make and since we're focusing on non-human animals here Those are the animals so back to this compassion that conservation had to be Rewild our hearts about who we are and what we do and of course who other animals are I Know so that's one of my favorite slides And I won't go through it all but basically a gorilla saying this land is my land and I'm a sentient being and All I've done here is just list some of the questions that we are dealing with But, you know, how do we deal with individual protection and the protection and the health of ecosystems? Should we be trying to restore or recreate ecosystems? We really can't restore or recreate ecosystems. Ecosystems were what they were, and they are what they are. But we just can't recreate in 2012 what an ecosystem was in 1912. Just can't do it. So how close can we come? Should we be doing it? And the big question I'll return to at the end is, can we do it all and maybe we're just trying to do too much? I mean, maybe we just need to focus our concern. We have limited time, limited money, limited person power, and we just can't do all that needs to be done in a very wounded world. How do we coexist? Just some pictures, because I think it's important to see animals at an animal conference. These are lions who I met in the Serengeti. Just totally ignoring us walking around a baboon who lived on top of a roof in Nairobi National Park who got very upset when human beings sat down to picnic to the point that he would urinate on them. Hyena, totally, totally unaffected by our presence until his friend came along and he kind of looked up and he said, oh, you boring human beings again. These are serious problems in the sense that these are very habituated animals and we have become part of their natural world. This was taken on Fraser Island off the coast of Harvey Bay in Australia, that's a dingo, and I was the only member of this group going there who knew animals, so I sought refuge behind these women because they thought this dingo was really, really cute. But we don't know who this dingo was, but there had been major problems of dingos biting humans on Fraser Island. We're the intruders, by the way. This is their land, this is their home. And so just so you can see, these are bears by my house, just up the road from my house, two brown bears, a black bear, I mean, and a brown bear. And here is a picture of a town in my, of a cow meeting a bear. So in nature, too, you have these improbable relationships that form, but the animals are there, and these are some cougars right by my house. These are wild mountain lions. I've three times been as close to mountain lions as I am to my computer, not purposely. And I'm glad I'm here now, and it was lovely to meet them, but I don't need to meet them again. Because the fact is that when my house was built, I redecorated their living room. Okay? I mean, that's the facts. I can move if I want, but I never would want any harm to come to my neighbouring animals. And this is a cougar by a shopping centre in Denver, Colorado. Just hanging out, but they're there. And this is a bear, I do bicycle racing, and I was doing a very difficult bike race up a very steep mountain in Colorado. And I was ready to just say, this is just too hard. It's time to go home and drink a beer. And a bear walked out in front of me, and actually made me perform very well, so I did very well in the race. But I mean, I was riding, and I was delirious after three hours of riding, and I looked up and I see this big black blob walking across, and it was a bear. So it's wonderful because it was very inspirational. And this is my neighbourhood fox who comes by many mornings to say hello. So we have to have encounters with nature. I'm going to skip through. So my basic research is really asking questions about animal emotions. What are animals feeling? And so do you think this is a happy dog jumping into a swimming pool on a hot day? And what is his friend thinking? Now, a few years ago, the question of what his friend is thinking would have been, some people would have been thought it was silly to ask, but there's been a lot of research now showing that animals really like to be treated fairly. And the name of the research is called inequity aversion, or an aversion to being treated unfairly. And it goes very simple. I'll tell you one study, many studies have been done. You put two dogs next to one another, and you train them to shake, and you give them a dog treat, and they both shake. Very easy, right? If you then change the reward that you give one dog to be a more favoured reward, maybe a bigger treat, maybe a marrow bone, the other dog who still receives the little bone stops shaking, will not perform. So what does this say? And these findings have been, we've made these discoveries in other animals. It tells you that other animals are monitoring what other animals are doing and what they're getting and they don't like being treated unfairly. So it's not silly to ask what that dog is feeling, and this research is just hot off the press, but it's among the many amazing things we're learning about animals. You think that that's a happy dog? That's what I was saying, people who think that animals don't have emotions may have no emotions on their own. Do animals love one another? This is a fox couple who mated for at least five years. They raised their young together. They traveled together. They defended food and territory together. They missed one another. They sought one another out when they were apart. So these animals do love one another. They don't quote love one another like scientists like to say. I think people may quote love one another, but surely not other animals. And I do work with Jane Goodall, and this is a picture of a male chimpanzee doing a waterfall dance, and Jane has pondered whether these have any spiritual component. And I like to think of or ask whether animals exclaim, wow, as they ponder nature and the ups and downs of daily life. I think they do. I think they have an aesthetic sense, a spiritual sense. And if you're a good Darwinian, then if we have spiritual lives, so too do other animals. We just need to discover more about them and not say, well, those are just silly questions. So once again, what's so exciting about the field of ethology is that there are so many wonderful questions that remain to be studied. A lot of people just like to answer them yes or no without data. What is this elephant doing? These are elephants in Samburu in Northern Kenya. Elephant is dying. Elephants come in to see what is happening. A baby elephant who has died. So this raises questions about do elephants grieve and mourn the loss of others? Do animals in general? Yes, they do. This isn't saying, and we could return to this in the discussion, this isn't saying they have the same concept of death that we do, but it is saying that they do mourn the loss and grieve the loss of friends and families. And when you see something like that, as I've seen in the wild, it's palpable. You feel it and you know that they're feeling it. So once again, these are very reasonable questions. This is not a happy gorilla. This was a gorilla who lost her baby in the Hamburg Zoo and carried the corpse around for eight days. You don't need to be a scientist to see the pain in her face. And I've observed magpie funeral rituals. I watched, there was a corpse in the road of a magpie who got hit by a car and there were four or five magpies around the corpse and one went in and pecked, stepped back. Another one in and pecked and stepped back. Another, then one flew off and brought back some pine needles and laid it by the corpse. Another did it. Another did it. And then they stood in a circle around the corpse and they almost imperceptibly went like this, bowed their head and flew off. I was with a friend of mine who knows nothing about animal behavior and said, so I said, Rod, did you see that? And he did. And he said, well, you probably see that every day. I'd never seen it. But once I published it, I'm constantly getting emails now about people seeing these types of rituals in different birds. So once again, it's out there for us to study and we shouldn't be writing these things off. So why do animal feelings matter? What can we do to make the lives of animals much better? And I love this one. This was from the 2004 Republican Convention, as far as I'm concerned in America, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. So let's remember animals have a point of view. And I think the universal guiding principle for me would be first do no harm. And Michael mentioned this last night, but something I've written about. I wrote a book called Wild Justice. And I wrote a book called The Animal Manifesto. And I actually believe in the inherent goodness of human beings. We're learning a lot about the inherent moral sensibilities of young children. This inequity aversion, there was just a study done showing that 15-month-old children do not like being treated unfairly and are open. So this is just a smattering of books that have been written or edited recently on the evolution of fairness, cooperation, compassion, and kindness. Okay, we need to overcome popular media in which blood sells. Turns out that people say, well, animals go to war, Jane Goodall saw war. Well, she only saw it once in 50 years, by the way. And Bob Sussman, who's one of the co-actors of this book, has done an analysis of available data. And for every species that's been studied, more than 95% of their behavior is what we call pro-social or positive. We're inherently nice. Dr. Kellner's great book, Born to Be Good. So part of the paradigm and part of the revolution that we need in the mindset is to accept the fact that we and other animals are good. And that we should be tapping into that. That sure animals compete one another. We're sure we compete with one another, but it's actually rare. And I'm part of a project called Peace Ethology and deals with the science of peace. So I just think that this is something that we really need to tap into and we need to bring into early childhood education. So the problems around the world is that animals are still considered to be property like objects. It's very hard to enforce any of existing regulations or the few laws. I'll finish off by talking about some of the work I do in China. I work with a group called Animals Asia. And we rescue moon bears from the bear bile industry in China. And this is Cathy, and she is maybe about this tall. And she's standing next to a cage in which Franz, Franzi, a little bear was raised. Franzi was kept there for 15 years. That's me feeding Franzi. She never grew to be bigger than this tall. Jill Robinson founded Animals Asia. And that's me feeding a bear named Jasper. And that's Jasper. He lived for 15 years in that cage. There's a catheter in his gallbladder. And all he could do is move his head for food and water. We just rescued a bear who spent 30 years. I mean, you're talking about animals living in cages the size of this podium for upwards of 30 years. But I'm showing you this because there's hope. And that's Jasper today after his recovery, which is amazing. This raises so many interesting questions about animal behavior and animal resilience. I mean, Jasper spent 15 years in that cage and is quite recovered actually. He welcomes other bears into the sanctuary. He breaks up fights. He comes when I'm there to his name. And he's an amazing bear being. So some bears who are only, if you will, in cages for one year, never recover. So it's really interesting to think about individual differences. We know that many animals suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Just like humans do. They show the same spectrum of symptoms. That's Jasper's girlfriend. She just had a pedicure. I'm just showing you this because it's amazing to see these bears. I've been there when they arrive. They all have liver cancer. They're all in horrific condition. It can take up to two or three years for them to be rehabilitated. So coming back to these questions, some of the questions I'm interested in, like should individuals be traded off for the good of their own or other species? I mean, we're constantly trading off other animals for food and clothing. People don't think of that. And that's what I think we really need to bring home is not only questions about conservation and compassion, but everyday choices that we make and compassion. So an example that shouldn't be done in the United States is a project to reintroduce black-footed ferrets, their little rodents, into ecosystems and now endangered. And part of the protocol is hamsters are raised solely to be practiced prey for the ferrets. Their only purpose, they're called purpose-bred animals, is these hamsters are born and then fed to the ferrets so that when they are released, they know how to kill their prey. I think this is wrong and I would stop this project right away. I mean, it's surely open for debate and a lot of my colleagues prefer for me not to come to their meetings anymore, but the fact is, think about that. Would you do it to your dog? No, I mean, everybody who I know who works on this project loves their dog, but then I'll say, well, you don't love hamsters and I'll go, no, no, we love the hamsters. And I'm going, well, if you love the hamsters, like why are you raising tens of thousands of them solely to be practiced prey? And the ferrets are not good predators, so they're just tearing them apart very inefficiently. That shouldn't be done. Another real-world project is I've been consulting with some people studying tigers in Bangladesh where villagers kill or try to kill the tigers for taking and harming or killing their livestock. So there's tigers going around who are really injured and there's no veterinarians, there's no sanctuaries, there's no zoos. And so this woman wrote me and said, should we be euthanizing the tigers, killing them? And I said, yes. And that raised a lot of questions, but the fact of the matter is there's no alternatives right now. You can have these tigers languishing in pain or you can mercifully kill them, euthanize them like we do to our companion animals. So these are the real-world questions that I think we need to deal with. Another is, this is a cover from e-magazine that says, so you're an environmentalist, why are you still eating meat? It blows my mind that people who love environments don't realize not only the horrible pain and suffering that comes to factory-farmed and food animals, but the environmental degradation. Once again, this is a question that a lot of them wish would go away, but I think we should be asking them. I do a lot of work with Jane Goodall and I think kids are the answer to me having humane education early in school, so we did this book called Kids and Animals. It's available free online. It's actually been adopted in many school systems around the world because it is free online. And we had kids fill in the blanks of what they're thankful for or what they dream of. And this says, I have a dream that for every animal that there was a person in which loves and takes care of it, I'm proud to be an animal lover. I'll just show you a few drawings from it. It's a wonderful book. I have a dream that all the animals are safe from people. And the little boy who did this was actually named Darwin. We thought he was very well-educated for a five-year-old and we said, oh, you know about Charles Darwin. He said, no, that is my name, and I am thankful for cats and horses. So we need to go to the kids. I always enlist young children to do activism. I love organizing protests. And in the town of Boulder where I live, there was a move to kill prairie dogs, little rodents who were living on the school grounds because they supposedly dug holes into which kids fell. There was never a case of it. So I and other people protested and they never listened to us, so we got kids to protest. The nice thing is we also get very old people. So we had an 88-year-old woman protesting the death of elephants at the zoos. And when the police come by to break you up, they have no idea what to do with young kids and older people. So the point too is that, you know, kids are really naturalists. They're sponges for knowledge. I mean, you don't have to convince kids about the niceties of the world. It gets uneducated out of them. It gets they become unwilded, I like to say, by much education. So some guiding principles I like to think of as some kind of global moral imperative would be to the starting point would be do no intentional harm, respect all life, treat all individuals with respect and dignity and tread lightly when stepping into their lives or into their homes. And I've written a lot about what I call a compassion footprint, the footprint we leave by being compassionate to counter the carbon footprint. And just some little things, you know, that I've listed here you can read, but I think we all need to agree to do more, to add more compassion and peace to a world that really does need healing. And I love this line from Nelson Mandela that said, we must exceed our own expectations. I mean, it's hard to ask people who are doing all they can to do more, but we're really a tiny subset. I mean, we really are of people in the world. So we all need to do more. And the animal manifesto I like to say is treat us better or let us alone. Most animals have done very well without us. Thank you. And our companion animals and other animals do need us, but most animals don't need us anymore. So I like to think of the time being really right for compassionate conservation, you know, right now. And I'd like to see this the century of global compassion and the era of empathy. And as a positive optimist is get rid of negativity. Stop worrying about what didn't work and concentrate on what does work. When you work with kids, you have to be positive. And I think when you're trying to enlist adults to work on behalf of animals and other nature, you need to be positive. You need to talk about the successes. And there are lots of successes, there really are. It's just that for some reason we so concentrate on the blood and the negativity. So I like to I always call local news stations and write to newspaper saying you need to start off your news with positive stories and not have the positive stories jammed into the last 30 seconds of a terrible news forecast. And I think that in terms of conservation biology, we need to move out of our comfort zones, personal and professional. And once again, I think we need to be much more choosy in terms of the projects that we undertake. I hate to say that, but it seems to me that we're spreading our wisdom and our money and person power too thinly. And we just might have to accept that some species and some projects have to go. I'm not saying that I can pick the ones right off hand, but I think we might have to do that. And I'll just end with Jasper, because I like to end on a positive note. This is Jasper on his hammock at the Moon Bear Rescue Center outside of Chengdu, China. So thanks for listening and I appreciate being here.