Our Kindred Creatures with Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

[00:00:04] Mariann Sullivan: So nice to meet you. I love the book. Really, I can't believe that this book got written and it's out there because it's not a topic everybody would be writing about. And I'm excited that you were. I think for most people listening to this podcast and for animal advocates in general, it's kind of hard to look around at what we're doing to animals and think, well, it could be worse, but you really make a case for, uh, it could definitely be worse.

And a lot of stuff got better. So why did you decide that it was important to tell that story?

[00:00:34] Bill Wasik: Well, so, you know, this is the second book that we've written together. Monica's a veterinarian, and I am a journalist and editor. And we wrote a history of rabies, called Rabid, about 10 years ago. And while we were working on that, we really just zeroed in on this time period of the late 19th century, just as a time when there was just an incredible amount of change happening.

I mean, in how animals were being treated in part just because society was changing so much and you have the rise of industry and science and so on and we just became really fascinated with that time period and decided that we wanted to do a book that really dialed in on just this one era.

[00:01:10] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I have felt like there have always been people who cared about animals, but it really became a social and political movement in the 19th century, at least as you point out in the UK and the US. I know there was a lot going on in the 19th century. I actually used to live in Park Slope, but I now live in upstate New York.

And upstate New York, they called it the, the burned over district because of the fire of all the spiritual movements up here. And, it was apparently a crazy time. But, how did animals get hooked into this?

[00:01:39] Monica Murphy: Well, I mean, animals were very much part of the fabric of life of that time. Even in cities, the average city dweller would run into many animals, large and small. What we think of now as companion animals and food animals. They were really still right there. From the horses that moved everything, from private transportation, to transit, to the movement of goods and deliveries, to the pigs that were still sort of snuffling around in the trash, the chickens and, and dairy animals that people kept, you know, close to home. Meat animals were slaughtered close to where they were eaten before refrigeration, so they were sort of brought live into cities en masse to sort of move from railway depots and ports into knackeries, slaughterhouses, stockyards.

So it was right in your face, what was going on between people and animals. So amidst all that, there was of course a lot of horrors in terms of how food animals were disposed of, how sort of carelessly dogs and cats might be treated, and probably most importantly for the people who became the activists, how horses were mishandled, you know, because of the imperatives of big business and industrialization.

And so it was really a situation ripe for change.

[00:03:05] Mariann Sullivan: And so this fire that was lighting up people in a lot of different causes, and of course, the horror of the Civil War, and recovering from that. it's exciting to me that it actually extended to animals, because that's sometimes a hard argument to make. And I think that you make a good case for leadership and there are two, there are a lot of heroes in your book, but two who stand out the most are Henry Berg, who was quite a character, I have to say, and George Angel.

And I want to hear a little bit more about each of them, but do you agree that one of the things that happened here was leadership? Can individuals just turn a moral compass around that is that deeply embedded? And, you know, people just walked by these animals suffering every day and never noticed it and then at some point they started to notice?

[00:03:48] Bill Wasik: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that when this movement started, it was a more top down kind of environment around activism. It's actually funny, you can kind of witness it change a little bit during this time period. But, you know, when Henry Berg starts the ASPCA, he sets the model, which is you sort of come into a city and you recruit the elite and that's how you start your society.

So yes, but in terms of talking about the two leaders, you know, they're similar in certain ways, but they're different in other ways. I mean, I'll start with Angel, in part because he's the one I think readers know a little bit less about. He founds the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, He, you know, is the son of a Baptist preacher, grows up without a lot of money, his father dies when he's very young, becomes a successful lawyer, and, like many people, is sort of excited or galvanized by the abolitionist cause.

And when he hears about what Henry Berg is doing in New York, two years later, founds the Massachusetts Society. And he really has a kind of evangelist fervor for, really for education. He's very focused on families and children. His society founds a publication called Our Dumb Animals that becomes sort of a national publication and kind of sets the template for trying to influence people to cruelty. You know, there's a little fiction, there are essays, there's poetry. He's really, really focused on that kind of inspiration. He starts the Bands of Mercy, you know, which is the little clubs for kids to join. And he's really the one who's responsible for the success of Black Beauty, which, you know, was a relatively obscure novel from England.

That really takes off in 1890 when he just pirates it and begins publishing, you know, tens of thousands of copies, and turns that into one of the 19th century's best selling books. So that's Angel.

[00:05:41] Monica Murphy: Henry Berg, who sort of led the transfer of the movement across the Atlantic from England where it had started to the United States, was much more focused on prosecution of people committing cruelty.

He called them cruelists. And he had more fervor for being out in the streets, identifying bad actors, and publicly arresting them. Perhaps making a speech, you know to anybody nearby at the point of arrest Getting into the courtroom. He prosecuted a lot of these cases himself personally and he really was eager to see the people committing crimes against animals brought to justice and he wanted it to be very, very public.

So he sort of created spectacles that journalists would, you know, enjoy writing about. And he thought that the best way to sort of influence society and the way animals were treated was really through this model of coming down hard on, on people committing bad acts.

He's really quite a different figure from Angel, but he was very sort of powerful and his model was also carried across the country, and you see SPCAs popping up all over the place that also have a real zeal for prosecution and sort of have law enforcement powers and are really taking the movement into the streets directly to animals suffering abuse and bringing people to justice.

[00:07:13] Mariann Sullivan: You do still see these two threads. Kind of, the teaching children particularly, but decided to be humane care about animals and then prosecuting the cruelty today. I thought it was interesting and you pointed out, and I guess I kind of knew this, that there were vegetarians back then, and you mentioned that Horace Greeley was a vegetarian.

I don't think I had ever heard that before. But I didn't feel like this was part of the movement at all, but that's something much more modern. There wasn't this idea that we shouldn't use them or shouldn't eat them, it was more that we should be kind to them, in the movement itself.

[00:07:45] Monica Murphy: Yeah, that's right. I mean, Berg, I think, thought vegetarians were hilarious. And he saw this as much more about stewardship of animals in human use, really sort of creating a climate in which the animals who serve mankind are treated in a sort of gentle and humane fashion. He did not in any sense seek to bring about the end of human use of animals.

And that was true for Angel too, although he had this sort of sweeter approach, but he was not a vegetarian.

[00:08:17] Bill Wasik: But no, I mean, I don't think we... I don't think in our research, we found any animal advocates who identified themselves as vegetarians. And reading about vegetarianism, for the most part, it was health issues.

There wasn't really animal welfare issue.

[00:08:31] Mariann Sullivan: Going back for a minute to Black Beauty, I mean, there was a copy of Black Beauty in my house when I was growing up. I didn't read it because I knew the bad things, like one of the problems with animals is that everything that happens to them is so awful that people who care about them kind of don't want to know.

And that was me. So I didn't read Black Beauty. But, can you imagine a book having that kind of influence now or a book or any kind of cultural event? I mean, there's a wider array of media, but is it possible for people doing that kind of work like writing about animals or caring about animals to have that cultural impact anymore?

[00:09:04] Bill Wasik: I mean, it's funny. It's something that I think a lot about working as an editor because, you know, I think one thing that we don't often appreciate is that, you know, fiction was, I sometimes think of it as fiction was a technology, which is sort of a weird thing to say. But I mean, the idea of a book narrated by a horse was really, I mean, you call it a novelty, but it really was, it kind of gobsmacked people.

I mean, I was not prepared going back and looking at reviews. I knew that it wasn't published as a book for children, but you go back and look at the reviews and you see the degree to which people were just so profoundly affected by this use of a first person animal narrator that forces you into the perspective of an animal.

And they just found it incredibly moving. And as we write about in the book, George Angel was really influenced in his decision to pirate Black Beauty by the example of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, you know, had been such a sensation in the decade before the Civil War in terms of galvanizing Northern readers on the issue of slavery.

And again, Uncle Tom's Cabin was remarkable for just how, fully and, and kind of dramatically she depicted the sufferings of slavery, the cruelty of slavery. And now, I mean, to your question about today, it feels like the whole bag of tricks, right, of, of fiction certainly has been exhausted.

You know, I think that we have technologies that allow for us to be immersive in other people's or animals experiences. I mean, I guess to, to your question, I think the thing that could stand a chance today would be something that really tried to break through the sense that we've seen it all.

But yeah, to your point, I wouldn't want, I'm not sure I would want to watch it, but...

[00:10:53] Mariann Sullivan: That's the problem! I just interviewed Chris Bryant, who has a firm for animals in London. You know, for animal organizations and vegetarian, vegan meats and whatever. And he was saying that it's clear from all the research that the most impactful imagery for people is seeing cruelty, like, a lot of advocates say, we have to dress it up, we have to make it nicer. And he said, all of the research shows that seeing the cruelty is the thing that really changes people or makes them really rethink what they're eating. But it's very, very hard to figure out how to get them to look at it.

Billboards are one technique because people look at billboards, even though it's only a glimpse, and it has to be very short or people turn it off. Anyway, I digress.

You talked about the horse, and clearly the horse, I mean, the old image of the ASPCA emblem was all about horses. Berg was largely about, well, he was about a lot of animals, but horses were central.

Had horses, like, what was the trajectory between people becoming more conscious about how awful it is what we're doing to horses and the invention of the internal combustion engine? Did one feed into the other to really change the status of the horse?

[00:12:04] Monica Murphy: I don't think it did. We thought it was really interesting that during this period at the end of the 19th century, when internal combustion engines, I think they might've been invented before this period even started, but they weren't coming into frequent use until sort of the end of the period we write about.

But steam engines were in heavy use throughout this period. This was an industrialized society. And yet the number of horses on the streets of cities in the United States was growing year by year. It wasn't as though steam engines and railroads and so on came around and just swept horses off the streets.

It was to the contrary, you needed more horses as the economy grew and horses brought the coal to the steam engines. So it really wasn't until the second decade of the 20th century that you get peak horse in the United States. They were on the streets alongside automobiles for many years.

There is a moment we write about in the book where people were sort of looking at horses and thinking like, uh, maybe we should rely on these guys less and look for technology to replace them. But it wasn't when they were considering the cruelty aspect. It was in the wake of the 1872 horse flu, when horses got very, very sick, for a short period of time, but it swept through so fast that you'd see a whole city of horses go down more or less simultaneously.

And transportation brought to just a complete and creepy halt. Sort of like the first days of our recent pandemic where, you know, we walked around midtown and there's nobody there. The 1872 horse flu really, was a wake up call to, to some people about how sort of vulnerable the economy was, relying on this animal who, who could get sick, it turns out, and fail to, to sort of work.

So it is complicated, sort of, that reliance on the horse throughout this time period. And unfortunately, it was more economically driven than the humane, sort of, considerations that eventually did remove horses from this kind of use.

[00:14:12] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I kind of, I mean, there just seem to be so many parallels with food animals that I can't help but hope that similar forces take hold, both the kind of increasing attention to cruelty, plus the invention of substitutions, which seems to be proceeding, and then the bird flu.

Like, which is just an utter disaster and hopefully will at some point make people pay attention to whether we should depend on these animals. I know you wrote, as you pointed out, you wrote a book on rabies, a best selling book on rabies, and it's a key, but it's a key factor here as well. And it's something I kind of hadn't thought of before, but about our relationship with our most beloved, I think our most beloved animal, the cat lovers would argue, and changing our relationship with dogs.

Rabies really had an effect on how people related, even though people, it seems like from the stories you tell, people always love dogs through the whole thing. They always love their dogs anyway. Like that seems to be a constant in human behavior, but rabies really interfered with that relationship, didn't it?

[00:15:16] Monica Murphy: Well, it did, because there was You know, always this possibility that the dog you loved might sort of, turn on you, and before they really understood sort of how infectious diseases and rabies in particular worked, it was a kind of mystery how this exactly happened, but your beloved dog who you are super close to might just turn and, and become a really dangerous, dangerous animal.

It could kill you, your children, and so that was a real sort of, darkness, affecting the relationship between people and, and their dogs back then. And even though rabies never killed lots of people, it was a real horror because, because it's an awful disease. So it was the sort of thing that would be written about a lot in newspapers and I think sort of captured the imagination, disproportionately to, sort of, it's actual burden of infection.

And so, the eventual control of rabies really did free up that relationship between people and dogs in, I think a really important way.

[00:16:28] Mariann Sullivan: And you talk a lot about too, the growth of the, like, dogs became, as they are today, to some extent, kind of status symbols and, and that's when that era really took off of the bred dog and people having dogs for a lot of different reasons than they had before of having to do with status and beauty and contests and all of that. Do you think that whole development still continues in the way we look at dogs.

I feel like it did, having just witnessed the Westminster show. It seems like people still have that combined attitude of dogs as a status symbol and dogs as they just love them. I mean, we love our dogs so much. It's kind of an odd combination of factors.

And that was part of the development during this era too, regarding animals, wasn't it?

[00:17:09] Monica Murphy: I mean, absolutely. And, of course it continues, and of course, you know, now that we have this global economy, the world just brings us all sorts of ridiculous things for our dogs and our cats. But, I just thought it was fascinating to see how the idea of dressing your dog in a cute outfit or providing it with a really fancy meal is not a new 21st or even 20th century sort of confection.

This is, this is something people were doing at the end of the 19th century too. And then, as now, like there were people in the media who had fun sort of, you know, painting sort of a ridiculous picture of people indulging their pets in ways that were really sort of flamboyant or maybe silly, but people have been looking for sort of creative, over the top ways to indulge the pets they love, you know, for a really long time, I think is the message, and you use what you have at your disposal.

I think if they, could have had some of the gadgets we have now to indulge their pets then, they would have gone for those too.

[00:18:18] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I was also very surprised that that was not a new development that that people have always had that relationship. The book, I mean, in addition to these charming stories of how much people love their dogs, this book contains a lot of stuff that's hard. I mean, it's hard to read it.

It's hard to hear it. How hard was it to research and write it?

[00:18:38] Monica Murphy: I mean, it's always hard to come up close to stories about animal suffering. I do think since we were writing about a time period, you know, so, so long ago, it does make it a little bit easier to confront some of those horrors. I find it much harder to think about things that are happening to animals right now, I guess, than to sort of contemplate the horrors of 150 years ago.

[00:19:05] Bill Wasik: Yeah. And I will say the thing that I think was most interesting to us is the evolution of attitudes. You know? And so, when you come across. I mean, you know, one of the really fascinating threads in the book is about P. T. Barnum and his exhibition of animals and, this weird sort of collection of attitudes that he embodies, where he simultaneously is fascinated by animals and sort of prompts viewers to really, like, love animals, but then he also is just willing to go and get, you know, whales from the St. Lawrence Seaway and bring them to New York, and they live for, you know, a week or something like that, or maybe longer than that, but... you know, it's simultaneously, like, hard to write about that, but it also is, I mean, I think the thing that powered us through is that those evolution of attitudes was really the, that was the sort of subject we were trying to get our arms around.

[00:19:55] Monica Murphy: Well, I think also researching and writing about P. T. Barnum maybe is when, on some level , I sort of felt it most deeply because P. T. Barnum played a complicated role in the evolution of people's feelings about animals, because on the one hand, he did really, really terrible things to animals, but on the other hand, he really held up animals as individuals and sort of promoted them as personalities and so writing about the awful things happening to dogs at the pound or the awful things happening to animals in the stockyards of Chicago, it's a collective group of animals, it is harder, I think, to empathize with the sort of individual experience of the animals when we're thinking about those issues, but P. T. Barnum's whales, like, it's easy to identify with them and his elephants and so on. It is the contemplation of the individual animal experience at such a long distance of time is I think inherently hard, but P. T. Barnum really, when you consider his career, you do come across animal stories everywhere that really do bring it home, what was happening to those individual animals at that time.

[00:21:07] Mariann Sullivan: I mean, the premise of your book is that progress has been made and obviously progress has been made because the descriptions of some of what was happening right in the streets are not things that you would see today. So, where would you say that progress has been made and where would you say that progress still remains to be made? I mean, we still have vivisection and that arguably is at least bigger if it's not worse. And we still have circuses, but there has been a shift. Well, so let me not answer my own question and let me ask you, where do you think that things have headed in the right direction for animals?

And where do you think that, perhaps, I think you make a very compelling case. For some of it, we just hid.

[00:21:48] Bill Wasik: The subtitle of the book is how Americans came to feel the way they do about animals. And, I think that it is a story of progress, but in other ways it's really the story of that bifurcation or the complex set of attitudes that we hold today, or sort of amount of caring that we have for various species today.

And yeah, to your point about hiding it, I do think you know, this is the era when, when industrial meat production really begins. And You see during this time period that animals that, as Monica said earlier, were, however they were treated, the fact is they were, in the early, mid 19th century, they would be raised and slaughtered and eaten, you know, all within a relatively small geographic area.

You know, the movement that we're writing about during this time period is very focused on the sort of treatment of the animals around you, the ones that you can see. But this rise of, industrial sort of animal operations in the Midwest really challenges that whole way of thinking about it.

And you have this kind of shadow realm of animals, where the animals are raised and slaughtered and then the meat is shipped. And the connection between your consumption and their lives and deaths is just very, very abstract. And I think that that's something that happens during this time period and I feel like is the kind of defining quality of so much animal suffering today, which is that the distance, the sort of the literal distance, the conceptual distance between our behavior and their treatment has just become so vast. In some ways, I think it's the story not of progress, but it's the story of the creation of the problem. I think the biggest problem that we face in terms of animal treatment today, which is this distance between our behavior and their treatment.

[00:23:44] Mariann Sullivan: It's such an interesting way of looking at this and it's something I think about all the time, but Like, is this a feature of human nature that, it seems like, at least at the beginning of the story, I'm not sure for the entire history of humankind, but for the beginning of your story, people were very comfortable with seeing absolutely horrific cruelty being enacted in front of them.

They just were able to shut their eyes to that. It kind of reminded me of stories of hangings, you know, how hangings used to be festive, a fun day out for the family kind of kind of events. And our attitudes changed and, you know, people do not want to, they do not want to see animal cruelty.

They're horrified by animal cruelty, but are also kind of aware that it's going on. Do you think this is something about human nature, or is this something that can be addressed? Are you just describing something that happens, or is this a kind of a, a work of activism in a way to demonstrate that we should not be so comfortable with thinking that we love animals?

[00:24:44] Monica Murphy: Well, I encourage everybody to sort of think of themselves as an animal lover, even if they sort of fail to, you know, in certain ways they live their lives, to sort of act that out in a perfect way. I mean, animals need as many friends as they can get, but the problem you're describing, it's a big problem.

It's not just a problem in animal advocacy. It's a problem with climate change. I mean, that's probably the most existential, big way that that kind of distance we have from, and ease with which we can just set it aside and ignore it and not, think of, our day to day activities as really having a relationship to these big, big problems.

It's difficult because there is a human nature element at work here that we have to sort of push through in order to make change. I know that there are activists and concerned parties and scientists and so forth, like actively working to figure out how we're going to translate the sort of imperatives into behavioral change.

But, I don't think I know how that will happen. Do you?

[00:25:54] Bill Wasik: Well, I mean, it's a complicated question. I mean, where my mind was going was to this metaphor of the circle, right, which Peter Singer uses and people have used over the ages. It was one thing that was really interesting was to see that even the book written in 1776 by this retired Anglican vicar, you know, Humphrey Primmett, who writes the first known, full length book about the sin of animal cruelty also uses this metaphor of the circle, right?

This circle of concern. And to the point about, well, how is it that we can look to the past, where people could just witness spectacular acts of cruelty happening right in front of their eyes and laugh or see it as entertaining. And now we're horrified by it.

And how does that kind of change happen? And this is a metaphor that people have sort of come back to, which is kind of a version of the golden rule, right? Like, realizing that you would be horrified if it were a family member who was being treated this way in front of you. It's kind of an act of imagination as we get into in the book to sort of say, well, wait what is it like to be that person sort of? And that is, in a certain way, you know, how, how progress has been made on the animal issue as well. I mean, I think part of why I keep coming back to this question of distance and not just distance, I mean, the other thing is the kind of diffusion of responsibility. I do think that one reason that it's hard to make progress on climate change, and I also think it's hard to make on issues like food animals, is not just, Oh, you know, I order a hamburger, and that leads to some cow off somewhere that I'll never see to be slaughtered.

But even that, it's not even clear that it's one cow and it's not even clear sort of where it is or that maybe they're not even in the same place like that sense of, um, you know, in the conclusion of the book, we did an interview with Dale Jameson, who's a really profound thinker on climate change.

And one of the points that he made is throughout human history, There's been a real struggle with the idea of feeling moral responsibility for an indirect effect of your actions. A number of spiritual traditions, I think, you know, Christianity, it's like the doctrine of double effect or something like that.

This isn't in the book, but he gave the example of, you know, Buddhist monks who are not supposed to eat meat, but who will sometimes. Indirectly, oh, well, if it's, I can't remember the example that he gave, but at any rate, the, the...

[00:28:22] Mariann Sullivan: right. I mean, Buddhist monks will, if it's given to them as alms, will, I mean, I'm not speaking for all Buddhist monks, but I think that is a common practice. If, if animal food is given to them in charity, they will eat it.

[00:28:35] Bill Wasik: But the point being that even the kind of second order effect of our actions that it's long been the case that people have struggled to feel as though they're morally responsible for that. And now, with climate change, and I think even this is true with meat consumption, animal product consumption, it's almost like a fifth order effect, or so on. And if you think about all of the diffusion of it, and that's just really, really hard to activate our moral senses around. So like that to me is the really vexing problem. And I think it requires, and I think a lot of us have tried to do this, it requires a kind of re weighting of our moral sense. And I think, yeah, a lot of us are trying to think that way around climate issues, you know, to understand that it's all very indirect. It's global.

It's happening elsewhere. It might be happening decades in the future, right? The really deadly effects of our emissions today could be decades off.

And that requires a kind of a revaluing of the moral sense that I think is really hard to do, but I think we are trying to do it. And we've got to do it because otherwise, you know, we're sunk.

[00:29:35] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, no, I definitely agree. And I think it's something I struggle with all the time of how you communicate that and how you communicate the idea that individual action is actually in aid of systemic action and even though you can't fix the whole problem, I think with animal products it's even easier to make that argument than with climate. Because you can make the argument that by not buying animal products, you have some small influence on people around you.

And, well, I guess you could make the same thing with climate, but they're both like, just unbelievable emergencies that it's really hard to get people to treat them as unbelievable emergencies because they're right. Individual action really isn't going to make a whole lot of difference to all of the suffering that goes on.

One of the subjects you talk about is religion and how Judeo Christianity has kind of there's just very little history of attention to animals in that tradition, but going back to the period that your book is about, how romanticism kind of shifted religious attitudes as well.

It wasn't just an aesthetic movement or a philosophical movement. It really influenced the way people saw religion. Do you think that kind of thinking, has some influence on the way people, consider changing their ways today?

[00:30:47] Bill Wasik: Yeah, I mean, you know, when they talk about the romantic turn in religion, it sort of happens before you see it in literature and that sort of thing. And it's really, the adjective is used to describe the sense that individual suffering is even worthy of God's attention.

And that begins to get preached from the pulpit, particularly in England. You know, I think this is like early 1700s and it, it becomes very influential in the rise of abolitionism and also the rise of the campaign against animal cruelty in England. I do think that we have become kind of ever more focused on suffering and pain and suffering, even, you know, psychic pain and suffering as an ill.

And I do think that that is sometimes almost to an unhealthy degree if you look at some of the discourse. But I do think that that is a sort of salutary continuing development is to understand that consciousnesses can really experience pain and suffering and that the reverberations of that can be long.

And I do think that that's a positive development in terms of increasing sort of awareness of animal cruelty issues. Do you think that's true?

[00:32:02] Monica Murphy: Maybe. I mean, as a veterinarian, I see people talking about PTSD in animals in recent years, and that was definitely not something that was discussed, you know, going back a couple decades.

But, I guess I feel like within the span of our lives, the understanding that animals experience pain and suffering, like, that's been pretty solid the whole time. I think for the most part that there's a sort of failure to imagine the suffering of animals, when bad things happen to them.

It's just, I think, more what you're just talking about before, the disconnect in modern living between what you do in the fluorescent lit grocery store

[00:32:36] Bill Wasik: or even in your apartment, right? It's like you know, the app economy where you press a button and food gets delivered to you, right?

Like you're not thinking about the animal that got slaughtered to make the meat that goes into it. And also increasingly you're not thinking nearly enough about the person who has to ride an e bike in the rain to bring it to your door. You know, we've increasingly just disintermediated the process of acting in the world.

And it's become more and more abstract, more and more disconnected from what actually has to happen in the world to bring stuff to us.

[00:33:09] Mariann Sullivan: So what would you say that we can learn from the movement of the 19th century where things were different, but not completely different when people needed to shift from how they saw animals? What can we learn from that for today's activists?

[00:33:22] Monica Murphy: For me, one of the sort of most pleasurable but also profound things about looking at history at all is, is that when you zoom out from sort of your own life experience and look at the arc of history, it can be tremendously encouraging in terms of issues like animal welfare because it's easy to get bogged down in all these awful things we've been talking about in the livestock industry and elsewhere.

And then when you sort of look at the last 150, 200 years, you see like, it doesn't feel like change is happening, but change has happened and continues to happen. And I find it tremendously motivating and meaningful to sort of have that context around the things I do now.

[00:34:11] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah,

[00:34:11] Bill Wasik: Yeah. And I would say, even in recent years, the movement against elephants in circuses, the way in which such great adoption rates of animal shelters, I mean, these all seem small, but it does feel like the progress is being made.

And, you know, Monica and I did a story for, the New York Times Magazine recently, where we went to this kind of animal welfare event that's put on by the AVMA, which is a bunch of students who will eventually go into animal related fields, including into, livestock handling and agriculture. And these are not animal rights activists by any means.

In fact, to the contrary, they are preparing to, to go into a system that uses animals, but it was very interesting to see the ways in which they are trying to incorporate welfare concerns and how they think about it. And again, this is not going to be the revolution against animals, but you do recognize that even within the system there are thoughtful actors. And again the change doesn't happen at the pace that we would like it to but I do think that positive change continues to happen.

[00:35:22] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I fear for those students because I think they might get ground down, but I tend to be on the cynical side when it comes to the meat industry and as to the rest of it, I just think you're totally right that reading history about what was really an unbelievable change in attitudes towards animals over a really short periods of time.

It didn't finish the job, that's for sure, but it really was striking to realize how much changed and how people's minds were able to shift, in such huge ways in such a short period of time. So thanks for writing it. There's a hell of a lot of stuff in there that I didn't know.

And I thought I knew a lot about this. So, and thanks for coming on today.

[00:36:02] Bill Wasik: No, thanks for having us.