Scotch and Hope with Marc Bekoff

[00:00:06] Jasmin Singer: Yeah, I feel like I know you so well, even though I probably have just read all your work, and that's why I feel like I know you so well, but you are sort of iconic for us and for so many people in the animal protection world. And so I just want to say thank you for all that you've done to change the world for animals, and thank you so much for spending time with us here today.

[00:00:27] Mariann Sullivan: And you have been on our prospective guest list for a while, because it's been a long time since we interviewed you. And then we happened to get in contact with you, and we just found out that you just brought out the second edition of one of your classic books. So we get to talk to you, not only about your work in general, but specifically about that book, which I just think was very fortuitous.

And the book, of course, is The Emotional Lives of Animals. And I'm so excited that you decided to update it because I feel like the time really has come. You wrote about this issue before anybody was writing about it, but a lot has been done since then. So why did you pick right now to revisit that book?

[00:01:04] Marc Bekoff: Well, I resisted doing it for a while. The first edition was completed 2006, give or take, so 18 years ago, you know, and my publisher kept asking me to do a second edition. And doing second editions is not half as difficult as doing first editions, it's almost twice as difficult. But, according to the Library of Congress, a second edition book only has to be 20 percent different, and then you can call it a second edition, but I added almost 300 references to the new one.

It's really expanded. And I write a lot for Psychology Today, so I re digested that material, but I really said no for a while, and then, in a moment of weakness, I said, all right. And then I got off the phone and I went, oy, what did I just do? But I'm glad I did it, and you're right. I mean, so there's a lot of new information that I've added.

It's a stronger book in the sense of really no more degrees of freedom. You know, we've got to help animals better. I... the afterword talks about why I get cranky. And the reason I get really cranky is because, why are mice and rats and fishes and birds and, and, invertebrates still classified as not animals in the Federal Animal Welfare Act?

For your listeners, every revision of the Federal Animal Welfare Act in the United States has this clause that says we have redefined the word animal to exclude rats, mice, birds. So that's one reason I get cranky. And why is it possible for more pigs to be killed per hour in industrial agriculture?

You know, why can you still drop mice into blenders? I mean, you know all the horrific things people do. So this is really a stronger call for action. I basically say in there, and I've said it before, we don't need any more research on animal emotions, animal sentience, you know, you could weave in animal cognition to know that we need to treat non human animals better, but we've known that for centuries.

But, it's, unabashed about doing this kind of thing. And my editors really, I've done five books with this group and they're wonderful. They just say, go, go for it. So that's what I did.

[00:03:25] Jasmin Singer: What's your publisher?

[00:03:26] Marc Bekoff: It's New World Library. So they did the first edition of this book, and they did the Animal Manifesto, and they did Rewilding Our Hearts, and they did Unleashing Your Dog. There might be another one thrown in there, I'm not sure.

[00:03:42] Jasmin Singer: Was your team down with the cause? Like, were your editors vegan, or were they just supportive of you?

[00:03:47] Marc Bekoff: No, when I started with them, they just, I mean, it's impossible for me to believe it was 19 years ago, they just asked if I had been writing about animal emotions and I did an encyclopedia of animal behavior.

And they just asked me, would you like to do a book on animal emotions way back when? And I said, yeah, I would. In all honesty, I hadn't been really thinking about it. And so it's the same crew of people, which is amazing in publishing. 'cause you can, you know, at the end of any week you could lose half your editorial team.

So they're all, when I say they're all in my or our camp, I'm not sure they are, but they support me and the message 100%. And that's what I really care about. And I told them when I finally in the moment of weakness said I would do it, that I really wanted to make it a call for action. And they just say, go for it.

[00:04:41] Jasmin Singer: So do you think that understanding animal emotion is the key to getting people to empathize with them, treat them a bit better?

[00:04:49] Marc Bekoff: Yeah, I think, you know, weaving in sentience, the ability to feel, you know, academics can beat the hell out of everything and make it disappear, but I do. I think, you know, that old Jeremy Bentham quote, it's not, can they reason or can they talk, but can they suffer?

So I, I do. And I think, I don't even think, there's been really a sea change among the lay public, for sure. There's no doubt about that. You know, you don't always see it in action, but in interest, without a doubt. So, I do, because a lot of people live with dogs, so I always say, would you do it to your dog?

You know, these horrific things that people do. Or if you love dogs? Cause I know people who say, I love my dog and I love deer and I go shoot them and I always say, I'm glad you don't love me. And then that gets into some kind of conversation about the use of the word love. But I think things are slowly changing. I do.

[00:05:46] Mariann Sullivan: I think that, you know, when we all first started this, you longer ago than some of the rest of us, because you were onto it really early, there wasn't as much information about animal emotions. I mean, that's really exploded from what I understand. The whole field has just exploded.

And as you said, people's attitudes have changed, though sometimes I get out of touch with that, but I think you're right. So why doesn't their behavior, do you ever think, answer this question we all ask ourselves every day. What is the disconnect between what people really are starting, not everybody, I mean, you know, there's psychopaths and whatever, but for a lot of people really feel and understand a deep connection to animals, understand the emotional life.

Why do you think things don't change more?

[00:06:32] Marc Bekoff: I think among researchers and my colleagues, things have changed, but they haven't changed more because they make their living doing certain things. And they justify doing it in the name of humans, sort of classic utilitarianism. I think it just takes a long time for people to change.

Among my friends, because I bicycle a lot and so I ride with my team a lot, a number of them have become vegetarian. One of my friends who I ride with a lot, she's become vegan. These are all really, they're nice, good people, right? It's just, it takes time for them to change.

And I think it's also because people are so stressed out in other areas of their life. And Jessica Peirce and I wrote a book called The Animal's Agenda, and we talked a lot about this. I think one of the things about which people really want control over is, I always say who they eat, not what they eat, but their meals.

It's one of the few things, when you think about it, and I've talked to a lot of people, it's the one thing they have control over is who they eat. And they don't want people telling them, you shouldn't eat this because of this. And so I'm not sure, but I do think it's because a lot of people feel they've lost control of their lives and there's only certain things over which they have control, and that's their meal plan.

And actually Jessica was great because we wrote this book a while ago, but I still work with her. I don't have the references, but she found some references about how people respond to when they're told what their meal plan should be.

[00:08:10] Mariann Sullivan: Interesting.

[00:08:11] Jasmin Singer: That is, yeah. So is what we have found out about animal intelligence and emotions even astonishing for you, Mark?

Even though you always knew that there was a lot going on, like, are you constantly wowed?

[00:08:25] Marc Bekoff: That's a good question. Not as much as other people, just because I've spent so long watching animals, and I'm really a field biologist, and although I've written a lot and studied dogs, mostly free ranging, you know, some feral dogs.

So, on the one hand, I love to see the accumulation of knowledge. On the other hand, it's not shocking to me. But it's pleasing to me, you know, that fish show distinct personalities and people are working on personalities and some insects. And today I just posted on my Psychology Today site a really wonderful review of sentience in insects.

This guy Bob Fisher and a woman named Megan Barrett gave a talk in Denver two weeks ago, and I hung out with them, spent a lot of time, and really Bob's interview that I posted today is second to none.

[00:09:20] Jasmin Singer: He lives here too, and that must be why he didn't go to our animal rights gathering, Mariann, because he was with Marc.

[00:09:25] Mariann Sullivan: Right. I remember him saying he couldn't come because he had to go to Denver. Now we know why. We live in a very small world.

[00:09:33] Marc Bekoff: Oh, okay. Yeah. Bob came to give a talk here, not because of me. Yeah, and I knew about Bob and Megan's work. I actually, was such a small world.

I have a section in my new book on their work and I wrote up a shorter essay for psychology today about it. And when I saw the invite, I kept thinking, Oh, those names ring a bell, but yeah, Bob was here and they have a, I don't know if they do, but I know there's a book coming out in the fall on insect welfare. So maybe to answer Jasmin's question, I'm not shocked to learn that insects can be sentient, they can feel pain, you know, that lobsters don't like being dropped into pots of boiling water, but to me what's wonderful is this explosion of knowledge, and that's actually part of the blurb for the new addition of The Emotional Lives of Animals.

I mean, it's unbelievable how much has been done in the last 15 to 20 years. The other point I make when I talk to people is, sometimes when I just start adding stuff or seeing what's been done, I'll make a little checklist of, does this information mean we have to do more for animals, or does this information mean we're being overprotective?

There's just no, nothing that I check that says we're being overprotective. Part of that is because sentience to me is an interesting variable, but really the important variable is that every individual has intrinsic or inherent value, whether they're sentient or not.

I actually just had a, literally before this, a friend of mine called, I had no idea he was going to call.

We had a very similar conversation about degrees of sentience, because some people will say, well, you know, chickens don't suffer as much as mice, or mice don't suffer as much as chimpanzees. And in my view, that's just ridiculous. My pain and suffering is my pain and suffering. Yours is yours. And who am I to say you're suffering more or less or having more joy or less joy than I am.

So, these arguments about degrees of suffering are really, they're predominantly speciesist. You know, so people will say chickens don't suffer as much as mice, so therefore we can just do whatever we want with chickens.

[00:11:58] Mariann Sullivan: I've been really struggling with all of this of late and, you know, thinking about degrees of suffering and talking about it on the podcast and so I just really don't, I guess, I think it's because of all this information that's coming out about insect sentience, which some people treat this information with glee.

I guess I've always worried that insects were sentient, and I've avoided hurting them. But the actual knowledge and that people are paying attention to it, I find overwhelming. Like, like the world is just this huge morass of suffering and there's no way around it. Like, how do you deal with that when, like, we kill so many insects. I mean, I don't think there's a way that we could even imagine living on the planet without killing so many insects, and it just seems so unavoidable. And if we believe that a mosquito and a cow, they're suffering are equivalent, what does it, like, how do you exist in the world with that kind of... tell me, because I know that that's where you are, and I was really interested to read that in the book, and like, I don't know what to do with that information. It seems to be what I mean, maybe it's because we know Bob. And it just seems also so much of the work that's being done at NYU now is about insect suffering. And it seems like all I'm reading about is insect suffering. And I'm like, Oh, my God, we can't even get people to be nice to pigs!

[00:13:14] Marc Bekoff: No, you're, you're 100 percent right there. So, I wouldn't necessarily use the word equivalent, because I can't be sure about that, but the loss of an ant's life to that ant, I imagine, is as significant to the loss of one of Jane Goodall's chimpanzee's lives to that chimpanzee. And then, of course, a shit storm develops because people say, well, ants don't have this self concept, you know, whatever.

And that's not what's important. What's important is they're alive. And, you know, what you just said is really interesting because it's almost analogous to what we were talking about before. Like, how can you care about ants when there are elephants and chimpanzees and mice suffering?

How can you care about animals when there are people suffering? And once again, I don't get into that. I just say, I'm interested in this, and if you're interested in another species or asking other questions, be my guest. You know, I don't know that anybody's ever studied the following, but I bet you I could predict the results and maybe you could too.

I think people who care about non humans care more about humans than people who care about humans care about.

[00:14:31] Mariann Sullivan: Oh, totally. I totally agree.

[00:14:33] Marc Bekoff: And you know, somebody said, well, Why do you say that? And I only say it from having met so many people, but I think that there's this umbrella of compassion and empathy.

I wrote about it in the Animal Manifesto, called it a compassion footprint, and I just do. I mean, I think people who care about non humans care more about humans than vice versa.

[00:14:56] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I completely agree with that.

[00:14:59] Jasmin Singer: So you mentioned sentience and obviously, we're talking about emotions. So I'm curious about how they relate to each other, like, how does sentience relate to emotions?

Especially, like, how do I say this? If sentience is the ability to feel, does that mean both physical feeling, like pain and emotion? Like, feeling love or joy?

[00:15:22] Marc Bekoff: Mm. Well, I tend to use feelings and emotions interchangeably, but emotions are really bodily processes that, you know, that's how they're described.

They emote you, they move you, the result of which is subjective feeling. You know, the emotional lives of animals sounds a lot better than the feeling life of animals. And most people I know who study animal emotions, you know, maybe when they get in the ivory tower, they start peeling it apart or dicing it apart.

But it's a good question and I just blend the two. It's hard to imagine feeling empathy if you're not sentient. I'm sure there's philosophers out there who could beat that to death, but I'm not in the mood to get into it with them while there's animals dying. So I think they're related in the sense that if I'm feeling joy or feeling sorrow or grief or embarrassment or jealousy or guilt or whatever you have out there, and I have the capacity to feel those different emotions, then I'm a sentient being.

Like I said, you know, when people start going to town on that, I usually bow out because it diverts the attention away from the practical aspects of using what we know about sentience and emotions on behalf of other animals. And I don't want to spend one blanking second debating it.

I actually wrote that in the book and part of it was in the first volume, too, that people have a right to do whatever they want and they could still write books about whether we know what consciousness or sentience is. You know, one of the people in our field, and I don't know if she's still active, is Marian Dawkins.

As late as two years ago, she wrote a revised edition of one of her early books. She was still arguing that we just don't really know if non humans are conscious. So I refuse to review the book. I also don't waste my time beating people up that way. I mean, you know, she's clearly in the minority, but it shows how somebody with a brain, she's very intelligent, blah, blah, blah, can still say publicly, we still don't know that animals are conscious.

[00:17:29] Mariann Sullivan: Well, I don't know whether Marian is conscious.

[00:17:32] Marc Bekoff: Yeah, well, I don't know if you're conscious and I don't really care. You're alive. I guess.

[00:17:37] Mariann Sullivan: Sometimes I'm in doubt myself, but it kind of really brings up the next question I wanted to ask you because this always makes me insane. I just feel like it's like science, or at least this area of science, just took a vacation for the 20th century.

It was Darwin. He made these unbelievable discoveries and had these unbelievable insights. He started to see it all. It had all begun. And then it just like fizzled out and total blindness. So animals aren't even conscious, like, and now it's kind of renewing again. Do you agree? And how do you explain that science just went away and took this bizarre route?

[00:18:17] Marc Bekoff: Yeah, I like that phrase, they took a vacation. No, I think what happened... and it's possible, maybe the study of animal emotions, the people doing that took a vacation, but I think what happened was that as we learned more and more, some of it was just shoved under the table because the procedures that scientists use.

So they all of a sudden decided that we really need to learn something about some disease, some physiological process. And the only animals, because we are animals, on whom we can do this work would be non humans. And so a lot of them just knew what was going on, in terms of what we were learning about their emotional lives, but ignored it so they could continue on with their work.

I mean, think of Harry Harlow's just disgusting research on motherless monkeys. Just think of all the work done on brains, just lopping brains out to see what parts of the brain control certain behaviors.

It was also their livelihood. The way academics were structured was you could get your nine month salary, but in order to get summer salaries, you had to get federal grants, and it became paradigm science.

You know, my mentor did this, and their mentor did this, so I'm going to do this. And I think things started changing, well one big change, and it's totally insufficient, but the five freedoms, for example, in 1965. I mean, they're archaic, but they were a step forward.

[00:19:48] Mariann Sullivan: Well, they're archaic in a way, but we've never actually achieved the five freedoms.

[00:19:54] Marc Bekoff: Absolutely. And that's exactly what I was gonna say. And they were so simplistic that animals deserve food and water. They should have the ability to perform species- specific, species- typical normal behaviors.

[00:20:06] Mariann Sullivan: Right. That would be unbelievable if we did that.

[00:20:08] Marc Bekoff: Yeah, no, exactly, but the reason I say that, you know, then it led up to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in 2012 and that was like reinventing the wheel. I mean, my goodness gracious. So my attitude is that this evolution, if you will, of using information on behalf of animals has been very slow, but I think in some ways it's speeding up.

So there's two things I can say on this, in The Animals Agenda, Jessica Peirce and I developed the idea that we called the knowledge translation gap. And that meant that we are obliged to use the knowledge we have and translate it into action. The other thing was the science of animal well being was just such a ridiculously weak move.

And the reason we wrote The Animal's Agenda, one of the major reasons, was to replace the science of animal welfare with the science of animal well being. The science of animal well being focuses on individuals and, you know, you'll hear people who destroy the lives of rats and mice and other animals in labs say, well, we care about each individual, but how can they say they care about them and then they do the horrific things?

When you focus on the life of each and every individual, then it doesn't matter if you've got a thousand lab mice or a hundred thousand wild brown snakes or other animals, you're killing an individual. It wouldn't matter if there were a million people like me or each of you and somebody said, well, you know, there's enough of you, so we're gonna kill you.

And the reason I focus on that is because I'm also a big fan of Compassionate Conservation, which really, the roots of which were laid some years ago, but has really taken off. And one of the basic tenets of Compassionate Conservation is that the life of every individual matters.

So, you can't kill barred owls to save snowy owls, or whatever species you're trying to save. You can't kill salmon to save cormerants. These are real world issues. And so it focuses on the life of every individual.

And, once again, I really like that phrase, you know, they took a vacation. I think what it is that people had that old blank phenomenon saying, Oh, my goodness, what look what we're learning. And now we're going to have to do more to justify the horrific things we do, which is the basis for the formation of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, the IACUC committees.

They never existed some years ago. You know, why you actually have to sign something off on an NSF or NIH grant about animal use. You know, you never had to do that before. So, you know, once again, is it fast enough for us? No, not even close.

[00:23:05] Jasmin Singer: Well, okay, speaking of things that are perplexing, how do you understand the official recognition of animals as sentient beings in countries where, of course... right? You know where I'm going with this... like factory farming, and animal laboratories, and slaughterhouses, not to mention bullfighting still exist in these same countries that are recognizing animals...

[00:23:29] Mariann Sullivan: what do they mean when they pass those laws?

[00:23:32] Marc Bekoff: Well, it's a feel good move. I actually just did an interview on this on Wednesday. So if I sound like I'm lecturing you or being pedagogical, you can tell me to shut up and whatever. But, one of the key examples I've written a lot about is New Zealand.

New Zealand was one of the first countries to recognize nonhumans as sentient beings. And they've got one of the longest ongoing violent wars on invasive wildlife in the world.

[00:24:00] Mariann Sullivan: And a huge, huge dairy industry.

[00:24:03] Marc Bekoff: Yeah, and a huge dairy industry. And so Spain recently passed it, but Spain, bullfighting, you know, I wrote some articles about this.

And really what I was trying to do is, it wasn't going to be balanced. I mean, I'm a nice guy, so I didn't want to damn everyone. But, it just, it's a feel good move. Animals are sentient beings, but we're still going to allow bullfighting, and we're going to still teach kindergartners and elementary school students to torture invasive possums or other animals in New Zealand and we're going to teach them how to use all these heinous methods to get them out of the country.

What it does do on the positive side, and I know this from some of my friends and I know this from people who have written to me, is the idea of animal sentience resurfaced because of these moves and then the hypocrisy really got some people thinking about what does it mean? From that point of view, I think it's good, but the people I know living in Spain and New Zealand who would be in our camp are just appalled by the fact that the government would say, yeah, animals are sentient beings, but we're still going to torture and kill them.

[00:25:17] Mariann Sullivan: It's almost worse. I mean, it's almost better to at least pretend that they're unconscious, like Marian.

[00:25:24] Marc Bekoff: Absolutely. And I've talked to some people about it, who still continue their rather destructive ways. And for some of them, it's made them think more about what they're doing.

And when they ask me what I think, I usually just say, well, I'd like you to transport your thoughts and feelings into action. And for some people it has. You know, Oh, I see what that means. No, it's wrong and it's a double cross to say animals are sentient beings and then go to bullfights or allow bullfights.

[00:25:55] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, people are so bizarre every single day.

[00:25:58] Marc Bekoff: Don't get me going.

[00:26:01] Mariann Sullivan: Actually, we've been talking a lot about the policy, that but a lot of the book is about the science itself and about the animals themselves. So let's talk a little bit about that rather than dwelling on how peculiar humans are.

One of the things that you talk about is, the way this science is done, which can be pretty challenging, I think, especially if you don't want to harm the animals. And a lot of it ends up being anecdotal evidence. Can you talk a little bit about what's good about that, what are the problems with that, and how this research is done into emotions of animals?

[00:26:33] Marc Bekoff: It's a great question because it also relates to some interest and growing interests that people have about studying play or aggression or dominance or reproductive behavior or parental behavior, whatever you're interested in, in non or less invasive ways.

So your question is a really good one. And in the book, I note that one reason some people are changing the methods by which they study animals to make them less invasive is because the data are better. And there's a section in there, a woman named Gisela Kaplan in Australia, who's been very concerned about abusive research in birds.

That's one of her major interests is bird behavior and the way in which the animals are marked and followed or treated, when people are trying to collect data on them. And the data really say nothing about who the animals are because the animals are stressed, for example, or injured because they get a wing clipped or a bird band is put on a wing or they're asked to carry something, an instrument to record certain behaviors or physiological parameters.

So, the reason I like what you just mentioned is, one reason some people are changing their ways is because the data are compromised. So you're studying the behavior of coyotes, who I've studied for years, who have previously been trapped. Or, the study of birds who have been trapped and harmed to mark them.

And that's sort of the basis once again, of compassionate conservation. So despite the fact that a lot of people are very critical of compassionate conservation, I think ultimately the data that come out will be better and it'd be more useful to conserving or treating the animals better, if you will.

[00:28:27] Mariann Sullivan: So anecdotal evidence can actually be more valid than setting up an experiment since it's more natural, even though it's probably harder to gather in a lot of ways.

[00:28:37] Marc Bekoff: Well, it could be. So we used to say the plural of anecdote is data. And what we meant by that was that as you collect story after story, if you have 100 stories of the same thing, then those stories are data. So I studied dogs a lot and I really haven't done much work in years with captive dogs. When years ago we had rescue dogs we studied. So I studied free ranging dogs. I had a student studying feral dogs. I go to dog parks a lot, because that's what I get paid to do, watch free ranging dogs. And I just have people saying, Oh, well, dogs can't or don't do that, and I'm thinking really, I just saw it 100 times in an hour at the local dog park.

Okay, so what I really like about your question is that yeah, anecdotes and stories can be very powerful for motivating new research. There used to be a lot of resistance to that, it's definitely decreased greatly. When I studied coyotes, I've done some work on wild wolves in Yellowstone, you know, and people will say, well, coyotes and wolves don't do that.

Once again, I go, really? I see it every day! Because they're looking at captive animals who can't express their full natural behavioral repertoire. Or they're looking at animals who can't get away from other animals in a cage. They're forced into certain sorts of social interactions where the likelihood of seeing a particular behavior may be zero.

So, I think that there's been a change there too, at least with a lot of the people I'm working with now: some high school kids, some undergrads, some graduate students who say, you know, I really want to study this particular question, but I don't want to do invasive research. I don't want to trap the animals. I don't want to mark them. Okay.

I mean, when we studied coyotes years ago, and I know a lot of people doing field work now, they're using methods that, you know, do the animals like it? I don't know if they like it or not, but it's not like getting a leghold trap. You know, they'll walk into a box, they'll get food, and they're released immediately.

For example. there's a lot of interest now in the way in which different methods affect behavior, including are the animals stress. So I just see more of that happening, but there's still a lot of people that go out there and trap animals and wrap collars around their neck, and abuse them during the course of research.

[00:31:02] Jasmin Singer: Okay, well, that's sad. So switching gears and also sticking on the subject of anecdotes, tell us a few favorite anecdotes, but not the sad ones, that really convey important things about animals.

[00:31:16] Marc Bekoff: Yeah, I have a lot.

[00:31:17] Mariann Sullivan: You have a whole book through.

[00:31:19] Marc Bekoff: I studied penguins in Antarctica, Delhi penguins, so we were in this rookery, there were about a quarter of a million penguins, and by the way, they don't all look alike, and they all have very unique personalities. So one thing that was really fun to do was watch them, when they're forming pair bonds or they've got a long term pair bond and they make their nests out of little stones, is watching them steal stones from one nest and bringing it back to their nest.

And some of the individuals were very careful, they'd look around and when another penguin was looking away, they would dart in, grab a stone, put it in their mouth, and just walk away as if nothing happened.

Others would actually scheme, you know, they just wait like, Oh, come on, Harry, you got to go down to the water and get food for your babies. And they'd just look around and then, the minute they felt that there was no longer any attention given to them, they would dart in, grab the rock, and run away.

I mean when you're studying penguins and you're out in shitty weather for a long time, and, you're really trying to watch these animals, you see things like that, that are really great. So that's one story that was years ago, and I still laugh about how sneaky they could be and how bold some of the penguins were and how timid. others were. And I, and I recall that Jane Goodall got grief for assigning personalities to chimpanzees when she first started the research. And, you know, what people would say when you start talking about personalities in penguins or birds. Well, people are writing about that now.

People are writing about bold and timid fishes, for example. So, you know, times have changed that way. Another was when we were studying coyotes years ago. We were looking at some packs of coyotes, where there were males and females paired, husbands and wives, children, because I've always used those terms and my colleagues hate it.

They want to talk about pair bonds and females and males and offspring or the young of these couples. And I'd say, well, they're their children. And I finally convinced people to allow me to use the word children in some of my papers. But, it was this group of coyotes. We knew them all. We knew mom. We knew dad. We knew a couple of their children from overlapping generations. And one day mom just disappeared. All of a sudden the behavior of the group just really changed, they went off looking for her. It's in the book, it's called Missing Mom, and they went off looking for her. And you know, just over time, the number of forays they made to look for Missing Mom decreased in number and in the duration.

And finally, they came back, they just gave up, you know? Basically, things were not the same. I remember when I wrote this years ago, I said they missed her and some butthead wouldn't let me publish that because they said, well, you don't know that they missed her. And I said, well, of course I know they missed her.

They went looking for her, their whole demeanor changed. So if it were you, and I really didn't say what I wanted to say to this guy, because number one, it would have had no effect, but number two, I don't like being nasty that way. So that was really riveting. And, so I had seen stuff like that before in some wolves and dogs, but for my students, it was riveting.

I mean, they were seeing firsthand the breakup of a family and, you know, somebody said, well, do you think mom died or just disappeared? We have no idea. Two years later, people found a carcass and she had had a little tag in her ear, but it was gone. And these people were wonderful. They looked at the ear, but they couldn't tell whether the ear was ripped naturally, or there was a little hole, you know, due to the ear tag.

So I have no idea whether she died or disappeared. I don't know. And one other story that was really interesting with the coyote work was beginning of one winter, a brother and a sister disappeared, and we didn't see them for the rest of the year. And the next year, they came back together to their, we call it their natal place, where they were born.

And both their mommy and daddies were still alive. And what was really interesting is, we would not have known they were the same coyotes a year later, but because they had little tags in their ears, we knew they were brothers and sisters. That actually got a lot of people rethinking dispersal patterns for families of carnivores. So that was really interesting.

I could tell you stories until you'd fall asleep, believe me. But when you're out with wild animals, you see things that you just ain't gonna see in animals in cages.

[00:36:24] Mariann Sullivan: And as all of your stories also reveal, you see a lot of mysteries, don't you? You can't answer every question.

Do you think that frustrates a lot of scientists? They want to pin down exactly who animals are and exactly what they're doing?

[00:36:40] Marc Bekoff: Oh, it does. I always say the more I know, the more I say I don't know.

[00:36:44] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah.

[00:36:44] Marc Bekoff: Oh, it does frustrate them. You know, on the one hand, some of my work, we came up with some grand theories that weren't as grand as we thought they were.

They were interesting. And in a couple of cases, we came up with some grand theories that have really sustained the decades. And people are discovering the same phenomenon now. We were out there, we had 4, 000 hours accumulated of watching coyotes over eight and a half years. Believe me, that's a lot.

To the last day, we were still, quote, learning things. You know, the curve asymptotes, when you start doing something like a sport or an academic thing, your learning curve, your performance curve goes vertical, and then the reality hits where You want to run faster, ride faster, jump higher, or learn more, the curve just sort of levels off.

In the last six months of the eight year study, one of the women who was working with me, I'm still in touch with her now. She was an undergrad at University of Colorado. We needed to know who mated that year. And we had run out of money. So she just went to work as a bartender in the Cowboy Bar in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

She was a wonderful woman. She loved going drinking beer. So she got to drink all the beer she wanted to. And she was able to tell us who bred that year. I mean, it really was a capstone. And I'm still in contact with her and everything now. And again, she says, Don't forget who stayed there during that blanking winter when it was minus 50 degrees.

I said, I love you, Lisa. It was great. So, you know, there was a good example where just collecting those data, it was really important to put sort of the end of a tale, if you will, T A L E, of a breeding pair of coyotes.

[00:38:36] Mariann Sullivan: Wow. So many amazing stories. And, there's so much that we need to talk to you about, but we don't have that much time.

And you mentioned Jane Goodall. And before we let you go, you have another book out that you edited, so tell us a little bit about it, but most of all, tell us a little bit about Jane Goodall and your friendship with her.

[00:38:54] Marc Bekoff: Ah, there's only certain things I can tell you, but, um.

[00:38:58] Mariann Sullivan: Tell us the good stuff!

[00:38:59] Marc Bekoff: No, there's, it's, it's all good stuff.

[00:39:01] Mariann Sullivan: It's all good. I'm sure it is.

[00:39:02] Marc Bekoff: No, so, I'm glad you asked. I mean. We really worked our tails off to get this book out in six or seven months. It was at least working two years of work.

So the guy with whom I did it, Koen Margodt, he lives in Belgium and he did his research on ethics in chimpanzees. And he and I run the ethics committee for the Jane Goodall Institute. For a number of years, I was the ethics committee and Jane would say, what do you think? And I'd go, no, yes, maybe.

And, you know, maybe she would mark something from zero to ten. So, I got the idea, because Jane was in Denver in March of 2023 and we hung out a lot, we did a lot, and her 89th birthday was coming up the next week, and I'm not a mathematician, but I thought, oh, if she's turning 89 now, she'll be 90 next year.

So, after spending a lot of time with her, called Koen and said, Let's give Jane a birthday book for her 90th birthday. And I had done one for her 80th birthday called The Jane Effect. So we decided we wanted 90 essays or 90 candles. Jane knew nothing about it, and we have wonderful essays in there from big superstars who are really good on the environment or animals. Leonardo DiCaprio, and I just found out today Jane and Leonardo are going to be producing a film on wolves and dogs.

Joaquin Phoenix, who I think you all know, he and Rooney Mara wrote a wonderful essay. Brian May of Queen who is, I mean, he's great. And we were emailing and he sent something in the email that's in the book. I have two quotes in there from Brian about what the word anthropomorphism and what the word anthropocentrism mean to him.

And, you know, he's really in our camp. And then the nice thing is there's stuff from her kid, Grub, and her grandchildren, from people who worked with her back in 1960, when she hit the ground there. This would be... my math isn't that good. Sixty four years ago. What's great about the book is number one, it was a surprise.

And, we decided to give it to Jane around New Year's because we were afraid the word was gonna get out. We were really concerned, and we wanted Jane to be surprised. So, Jane and Koen, and me, and Mary Lewis, who some of you might have known, she works really closely with Jane.

And Tom Mangelson, a very famous photographer who did the covers, we did a Zoom and we had sent a book to Jane's sister. We really wanted to surprise Jane. So Mary said, well, we're going to have a meeting of the ethics committee, i. e. Koen and me. And, Jane was exhausted and, you know, I don't think she said it, but like, why can't we just do this some other time?

And Mary kept saying, no, we got to do this. So we gave it to Jane and we toasted with scotch because Jane loves scotch. And it was noon here and like seven in the UK. And if I drink, I love scotch at night. And so I picked up a glass that was empty, but I tried to wrap my fingers around it. And we were toasting to Jane and the wonderful book and all the other stuff.

And Jane just said, wait a minute, your glass is empty, Marc. So I got some scotch. I had a shot of scotch at noon and I slept the rest of the day. The book, it's a wonderful book, not because we did it or, or because it's about Jane, but partly there's very personal stories in there that no one ever knew about.

To us, it was a perk because Koen and I and Tom Mangelson know Jane pretty well. But there were some stories in there that just made me crack up. Like she has a great sense of humor. There's one of her sitting in a bathtub outside of Tom Mangleson's house drinking scotch, there's one of her playing prairie dog.

Prairie dogs do this jumping, yipping display as an anti predatory behavior, and there's a picture in there. And I'll tell you, and then I'll stop, the neatest thing in there, there's some pictures of her doing her early research, and people don't understand how tough that research was, and is, and how tough Jane was, and is. And there's a picture of Jane 30 feet in a tree holding on to a branch looking for chimpanzee nests.

[00:43:28] Mariann Sullivan: Wow. I mean, you know her personally, and I don't at all, and she's just such a reserved, buttoned down person. And yet, one of the most beloved people in the world, and one of the people who has really changed how people think about animals.

[00:43:42] Marc Bekoff: Yeah. I mean, she had a great effect on me.

I, I wrote a few words in there because I had written something for the Jane Effect. So when I was a grad student, her husband at the time, Hugon van Leeuwen, the great National Geographic photographer when he came to the States, used to stay with me. And, you know, it was a time where Jane, I mean, people knew that there was this woman studying chimpanzees, but they didn't know much about her.

Among the things that Jane did early in her career that really affected me and a lot of others was she named the chimpanzees and she ascribed personalities.

You know, Jane had never gone to school. She was a secretary, she just wanted to go to Africa. And so, you know, when she went to Africa and met Louis Leakey, he basically hired her for six months. Now 64 years later, there's still research going on, but the fact that Jane named the animals and the fact that she assigned personalities was monumental in the history of fieldwork and ethology.

Because I was doing that. I worked with a guy named Michael Fox. Some of you may know Camilla Fox, or of Camilla. She founded Project Coyote. So Michael is her dad. And I used to babysit Camilla when she was three years old. And Camilla at three was running around the house yelling, don't eat animals, don't eat animals.

She's one of my closest friends today. And I remind her that. But Jane naming the animals and assigning personalities was huge in the future, if you will, of ethological field work. She's a remarkable woman. I mean, it's hard to put in words. I mean, I've worked closely with her. We did books together. We still write articles together. We're actually writing a young kids book now, for four to six year olds, five to seven. I don't know. It varies. She's a remarkable woman.

[00:45:33] Jasmin Singer: For 46 year olds? That's so exciting. I'm just kidding, that was my kidding. That's my, I'm a dad joke person, Marc. Accept that about me.

[00:45:42] Marc Bekoff: No, it's great. But she's traveling now. Yeah, she's going to Turkey now, and she'll be home in four days.

[00:45:47] Jasmin Singer: Yeah. It's funny, because I've actually heard about Jane and Scotch before, which is funny, because I haven't heard, like, that many, like, behind the scenes things, and that's one I've heard before.

And so I might have some scotch tonight with my dinner.

[00:46:02] Marc Bekoff: Well, there was an article in the New York Times, and the word scotch was in the title.

[00:46:07] Jasmin Singer: Oh, really?

[00:46:08] Marc Bekoff: Yeah. There's a bunch of pictures in there of Jane and I toasting and then Jane, Tom and I, because we used to hang out at Tom's cabin.

If you don't know Tom Mangelson, look him up. He's been the BBC photographer of the year, many years. He's, he's an outstanding photographer and he likes his scotch too. He would take pictures all the time.

So there's pictures of us toasting and I'm just telling you we're not under the influence, but there's a picture of Jane and I sitting on a couch. We both have our computers out. I was actually helping her verify some references and write some text for one of her books.

And people said, how could you do that when you were loaded? We weren't loaded. I promise you we weren't.

[00:46:51] Jasmin Singer: Well, on that note, Marc, as Mariann said, we could probably keep you here forever because there's so many things we want to know and I love your stories and your insights and just everything about the work you do.

Unfortunately, we don't have more time, except for our Flock Q& A, which we'll do with you momentarily, but for the purposes of the main interview, I just wanted to thank you again for joining us today on Our Hen House. I'm sure that our listeners will be getting your book. We will link to it in the show notes.

Can you reiterate the name of it for our listeners?

[00:47:27] Marc Bekoff: Well, it's called the Emotional Lives of Animals, and the subtitle is, is: a leading Scientist explores animal joy, sorrow and Empathy, and Why They Matter.

[00:47:38] Jasmin Singer: I love that.

[00:47:39] Mariann Sullivan: And, and the, the Jane Goodall book is Jane Goodall at 90. And another book that, came out relatively recently that I highly recommend to people is Dogs Demystified.

You put out a book about every three weeks. So, um, no, we have to list a few.

[00:47:52] Marc Bekoff: Well, I like writing books, but I got to tell you that I'm working on two now. I'm working on one with Jane. Well, I'll tell you what's exciting before we go is I'm doing a young adult teenage book on animal emotions. It's a huge audience of very passionate people. I'm psyched, and I'm working with some of them, a girl in high school in New York who wants to shut down the Bronx Zoo.

She said, what do you think? And I said, well, I think it's a great idea. I don't know if you'll do it. And she said, I don't care if I can do it or not. I want to... I won't even put in words what she actually said, but I want to shut down that blanking zoo. . Yeah. And a 10 year old boy who's gone vegan and he's trying to get his parents to go vegan.

There's so much out there. So anyway, yeah.

[00:48:36] Jasmin Singer: I love, I love ending with either scotch or hopefulness.

[00:48:40] Marc Bekoff: I like both actually.

[00:48:41] Jasmin Singer: Yeah, me too. That's your next book after those two.

[00:48:45] Marc Bekoff: Scotch and hope. I'll be talking to Jane soon. I'm going to suggest to Jane that we write a book called scotch and hope.

[00:48:51] Jasmin Singer: I love it. You heard it in your first.

[00:48:53] Marc Bekoff: And we'll give you credit, Jasmin.

[00:48:55] Jasmin Singer: Okay, good. Amazing. Marc, thank you so much for all that you do and for sticking on with us today on Our Hen House.

[00:49:02] Marc Bekoff: My pleasure. Thank you for your time.