Keeping Wild Animals Wild with Liz Tyson

Mariann Sullivan: It's a delight to have you. I'm really looking forward to hearing about the work that you're doing, because you get to do not only do policy work, but you get to actually, well, at least your organization works with real animals, which is exciting. And let's start out with a little bit of an overview.

I'm old enough to remember the movie and remember the song. So I have some familiarity with the concept of Born Free, but obviously there's a lot of history that's gone on since, back in the sixties. So can you just tell us a little bit about what Born Free USA is? And a little bit of the background and just kind of an overview of what you do, and then we'll get into some details.

Liz Tyson: Yeah, of course. So Born Free Foundation in the UK started 40 years ago this year. And as you say, throughout the film, the two actors who are the main actors in that film, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, they established the organization with their son, Will, who continues to be the president today.

Essentially, in a nutshell, our work seeks to protect wild animals and to keep them in the wild, hence the name. As I say, Will is still part of the organization. It has grown over the years into a global family, if you like. And Born Free USA is a member of that family we focus on specific issues to the US, and also work in West Africa.

Mariann Sullivan: Oh, okay. I didn't realize that.

So tell us, let's start with, uh, you have a sanctuary, which is why I mentioned that you were lucky enough to actually, your work actually relates to real animals, not just policy. So, so let's start talking about that. Where is it? Who is it? Who lives there? What are its goals?

Liz Tyson: Absolutely. As you said, I do. I think I have the best job in the world because it does combine the policy side of the work. And I also get to oversee one of the largest accredited primate sanctuaries in the United States where we have 226 incredible individual residents. We've been on that site for many, many years.

We took over in 2018. Prior to that, the Sanctuary was run, I guess, as a behavioral observatory. It wasn't really a Sanctuary. It went through a couple of iterations. And since we took over in 2018, we've been working to ensure that it is a Sanctuary and operates to the highest possible standards. So as I say, 226 residents living across 30 enclosures, ranging from 5 acres to sort of quarter an acre.

Most of the monkeys, or as many of the monkeys who can, live in these large open top enclosures. So they have trees to climb, they have foraging opportunities, they have social opportunities, and our golden rule for the Sanctuary, no matter where the monkeys come from, if it's the pet trade, if it's the lab trade, if it's the zoo industry, our golden rule is no monkey lives alone.

So that's our real goal is to help them become monkeys, because most of them have never seen another monkey before since they were torn from their mothers. So it's a real journey of recovery for them, and our job is to help them in that journey.

Mariann Sullivan: So did you both inherit monkeys from this prior facility that ran this, space or whatever? And do you accumulate new ones?

Liz Tyson: Correct. Yes. So the backstory is, is really unusual. Where the place was founded in 1972 when around 145 Japanese macaques were trans located from Japan to Texas. The reasoning behind that was, was there was a large troop of Japanese macaques around Kyoto. They were provisioned by tourists and people in the area and the troop split into two.

One kind of went up into the mountains and the other went down into the city, creating human wildlife conflict. So the authorities were going to kill the monkeys and then somehow, some combination of an anthropologist who was working there and a rancher in Texas decided to bring some of the monkeys over to Texas, ostensibly to save them, but it was also kind of some kind of experiment to see how they acclimatized.

Certainly not the kind of experiment that we would do, because it really was potentially very dangerous to the monkeys, so we ended up with a population of hundreds of Japanese macaques who were allowed to breed, to whatever extent they wanted over decades. So when we took over, one of the first things we needed to do was kind of get that under control because as you probably know, a true sanctuary doesn't breed animals to live a life in captivity.

So over the years the Japanese macaque population has gradually been decreasing and we have continued to rescue, so probably about half of our residents now, probably about a hundred and fifteen or so animals we have rescued and the other half of the descendants from that original troop.

Mariann Sullivan: That is a crazy story. And it just shows how, like people have always cared about animals in one way or another, but the animal protection movement was kind of the wild west up until relatively recently, with people doing all sorts of crazy things, particularly, I think, with, actually, with, I was going to say with wild animals, but that's something I want to sort out right in the beginning.

Like, I don't like to call animals in captivity wild animals, because it's confusing because they're not in the wild. And some people call them exotics, uh, if they're animals who would naturally be living in the wild, but are now in captivity. Is that the term you use, and is that the preferred term?

Liz Tyson: We use a combination of things, and really, we use the words that are going to communicate as well as possible to our audiences. We have a couple of hard and fast rules. We would never refer to a zoo animal, or a lab animal, or a exotic pet animal. We would say that they were an animal formerly used in experimentation, or formerly exploited in labs, or an animal who formerly lived in a zoo, or a gorilla who lives in a zoo rather than a zoo gorilla, because what we don't want to do is define these animals by the way they're exploited.

Mariann Sullivan: So you wouldn't call them like a zoo gorilla or a lab gorilla? Those are the terms you would never use.

Liz Tyson: Yeah, and then in terms of wild and exotic, I think the general term for kind of the pet trade in wild animals is usually the exotic pet trade, and that's what's understood. One thing that I tend to do myself and generally as a policy within Born Free, rather than use the wild, so animals living in the wild, because that has certain connotations as well, we would say free living animals.

And that would help kind of differentiate between captive wild animals and free living wild animals. So I think that's the terminology that I would generally use.

Mariann Sullivan: All right. It gets a little confusing. So I know there has been a lot of amazing, like, work I could never have anticipated done on behalf of chimpanzees in this country in the past, maybe 10 years. But I also think that perhaps, and this is not a criticism of it in any way, but that has kind of come at the cost of monkeys.

It's not necessarily that experimentation has stopped, it's just that they started doing it, they realized a lot of what they were doing to chimps, they could actually do to monkeys instead, who were, I guess, easier and smaller and cheaper and less controversial. So, is that true? I can see you nodding, but, uh,

Liz Tyson: Yeah, I

Mariann Sullivan: listening can't see you nodding, but, uh,

Liz Tyson: Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. And I think monkeys have been the go to in laboratory experiments for so long. And like you say, I think chimps have had the spotlight in some ways, and thank goodness they have for those chimps who've been able to then be freed and who are no longer being used.

But then if all we do is divert attention from one sentient being to another, then are we really winning? And of course, the issue with using monkeys in labs also came up significantly in the past few years because of COVID. And I think the way that these narratives are formed by the animal testing industry is really, it's repulsive in some ways because they refer to the animals as if they are making some kind of sacrifice, as if they're working with us towards a shared aim.

And that's why another thing that we're very careful with, with our terminology and how we refer to monkeys, not only would we not call them lab monkeys, I'm very firm that I do not like to make the statement that they have been, quote, retired from laboratories, because again, that indicates that they had a working life, which then now, you know, going to green pastures, they're not retired because they never had a choice to be there.

So I think the narratives around animal testing, as, as you know, they're overly sanitized by the industry. The reality of it rarely comes to light. And then when the reality of it does come to light, it's, well, which would you prefer? You know, is it a monkey or your child with cancer? Is it, you know, your aunt who is, has X illness?

And it's a false dichotomy. The two things are not really related to one another because we know that these tests are not seeing the results that humans need. And it's a very dangerous and very cruel distraction that kills millions of animals.

Mariann Sullivan: I mean, it's a hideous way of putting things. And I mean, even if it was useful, there are still enormous questions about the ethics, but considering how much of it is not useful. All right. So, one thing I wanted to know was, which I kind of skipped over, is where do you get monkeys from?

You know, do you get them from labs? Are you able to rescue them? But also I'd just like you to tell us a little bit more about monkeys. I don't think I've ever met a monkey, and I really do probably know more about chimpanzees than about monkeys because I've read more about them and there's more been going on.

But so tell me what monkeys are like and then tell me where you get them from.

Liz Tyson: Oh, monkeys are wonderful and terrible all at the same time. Um, I've

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, they kind of have that rep, I have to

Liz Tyson: I mean it's true. It's true. There's no smoke without fire. And I've been lucky enough to work with primates for the past 20 years and I started out working with new world primates. Starting out with woolly monkeys who I stand by today are the most beautiful primates you will ever see in your life.

If you haven't seen a woolly monkey, please look them up. So they are new world monkeys living in the Amazon, Central and South America, and then the sanctuary that we have in the U. S. are macaques and baboons. So for me, the joy of working with these animals is also the heartbreak of working with them because they are so complex.

They are so… We all know that animals are individuals, but for some reason, you know, monkeys just have that level of cognition, that, those complex behaviors, complex social hierarchies and interactions both with each other, with us, with their environment, that I learn from these guys every single day.

They have friendships. They love, they grieve, they have, you know, arguments. They have their frenemies. They play political games to maintain their position in their hierarchy. They are incredible beings, they're funny, they are mean, they can be kind, they can be gentle, they can be aggressive, they can be dangerous, they're the whole spectrum. They're just like us, they're like any animal, you know, they have this deep, profound complexity and inherent value of their own.

As you can tell, I'm a fan. And the monkeys we care for at the sanctuary, it was a complete pivot for me in terms of my career, because I'd never worked with old world monkeys, so monkeys from Africa and Asia. So we care for macaques. We have a number of different species of macaque. All of them have their own behaviors, their own kind of social demographics, their own vocalizations, their own physical language.

It's really interesting to see them interact. We also look after baboons. Mainly olive baboons, and then we also have a smaller number of vervet monkeys. Where they come from, it's a mixed bag. Recently we've been getting more and more monkeys from the pet trade. We also do rescue monkeys from labs, but that is a really, it's a fine line for us to walk because often, if we take monkeys from labs, we don't get any background information from them, because they don't want to share what's happened to them.

Labs are very cautious working with sanctuaries because they're scared that we're going to tell the stories of the monkeys when they come to us because they are traumatized, they've been harmed, and they, of all of them, have, you know, these really difficult journeys of recovery. So we need to kind of play nice with the labs to some extent so we get the opportunity to rescue, but then there is always the challenges of who do we take, and ethically, if a lab is saying, can you rescue these two monkeys, but we know that they're going to continue testing on monkeys, are we just freeing up cage space so that it can be filled with someone else?

But then if we don't rescue them then that, you know, obviously rescuing those monkeys changes their lives forever, and it puts them into a safe place. So it is a really difficult line to walk. And it's one that we walk very carefully. And it's one that we put a great deal of thought into.

But of course, what we will always do is prioritize the individuals. And generally speaking, if we can save a life, we will save that life.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, people are faced with these kind of quandaries all the time in animal work that, unless you can fix the whole thing. Are you just putting a finger in the dike or whatever?

Liz Tyson: Absolutely.

Mariann Sullivan: All right. So, while we are on the subject of monkeys, I mentioned, uh, in the beginning that, you know, a lot of what you do is policy work, it's not just working with the animals.

So one of the things you're working on is the Captive Primate Safety Act, and I think that's one of the things you really wanted to talk about today. Can you tell us what it is?

Liz Tyson: Of course. Yeah. So one of the things I think is really important about our work is that we do the kind of start to finish and we are in a really interesting position because a lot of the time if you have primates in a sanctuary you are just focused on running that sanctuary because of course sanctuaries are difficult and expensive to run.

We have the luxury of both having the sanctuary so we have individuals whose stories we can speak to to inform our work on a policy level. And the Captive Primate Safety Act will do more or less for primates what the Big Cat Public Safety Act did for big cats back when it was introduced at the beginning of last year.

So for your listeners who weren't aware of this, the Big Cat Public Safety Act essentially banned private ownership of big cats in the United States. It also banned public interactions with them, which meant it more or less shut down the cub petting industry, which was fantastic. Now the Captive Primate Safety Act would do similar.

It would ban the private keeping of primates. What it wouldn't do is ban all interactions in zoos, which we're disappointed about. But you know, we're not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. So our hope is that we will get that law implemented and then we will essentially make the keeping of primates as pets illegal.

What will happen with that is those who already have primates will be allowed to keep them, I think as long as they're registered and then as those primates die, they will not be able to be replaced. So as with so many animal welfare laws, it's not the generation who is there right now, who are going to benefit from this, but it's going to be the future generations who are not going to suffer in the same way.

And that would be an incredible win.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. And I mean, so many things with animals too. It's like even if we had the will to fix it all in a minute. I mean, when you think of, you know, people talk about this with farmed animals all the time. I mean, obviously we can't just stop slaughtering them.

Like. What would we do with them? But like, we have gotten ourselves into such an enormous, hellish hole with what we do to animals, it's hard to imagine an ethical way out of it, but it sounds like that's a really important first step.

How many primates are, what kind of primates and how many of them are there in the pet trade or in people's homes?

Liz Tyson: Estimates have said 15, 000. I'm not sure how up to date that is. But in terms of which animals are in there, I actually did this analysis for our sanctuary work in the last couple of days. And in over the past five years, there have been 151 cases of animals who needed rehoming. And of those, the majority were macaques.

So the species that we care for most, I think 33 percent of them were rhesus macaques. And those are the monkeys who are most commonly used in laboratories. The second most common were lemurs, so prosimians who are not monkeys per se, but prosimians who are commonly kept as pets and in zoos, roadside attractions.

Mariann Sullivan: How like insane is it to keep a primate as a pet like either a macaque? I mean, it seems like it would be a full time job at least.

Liz Tyson: It really is, and you know what, there's a couple of things with pet primates, and macaques in particular, the vast majority of macaques carry a virus asymptomatically called herpes B. Now herpes B, if contracted by humans and not treated, is fatal in between 80 and 90 percent of cases.

Mariann Sullivan: my Oh my god.

Liz Tyson: And people have these animals around their children.

You know, obviously at the sanctuary we have really strict safety protocols, PPE, all of that. We don't directly interact with the animals because that's not what we're there for. But people have these animals in their home. And then, you know, the canines that they grow are dangerous weapons, which they know very well how to use.

So what generally happens is people buy a baby monkey as a pet, that baby will have been torn from their mother at often a couple of weeks old. They are vulnerable. They are helpless. They will cling to you and they are adorable. They will gradually get older. They're not going to be happy about you putting a diaper on them.

They're not going to be happy with people coming and going into their house. What will generally happen, and this is a very simplified explanation, but a monkey reaches adolescence and in their natural environment, they would begin to work out where they sit in the hierarchy and the social hierarchy monkeys do that by challenging other members of the group.

So they would kind of fight their way to the top, literally. And so they will challenge the members of who they consider to be their troops. So that might start out with the family pet. It might start out with the children because they're going to, you know, confront the kind of weakest members of their group.

So we get children who've been bitten. We get owners who've been bitten. And then generally what happens, that monkey reaches about six or seven years old, their canines have come in, they're very, very strong proportionate to their weight and they have, you know, two arms, two legs that they can use in very different ways that we can, and so just the potential for them to inflict harm is immense, and a lot of the time the monkeys we get will come to us because they've bitten someone, because they've injured someone, and then the person is like, we don't know what to do next.

One of our most recent rescues attacked his owner's son in law, and he had to have 18 stitches in his head and his shoulder, and it took two grown people to pull this 15 pound monkey off this grown man.

Mariann Sullivan: Wow. That's insane. But not even remotely surprising. I just, I just can never like, why do people not want dogs?

Liz Tyson: I know. There are so many of them that need rescuing. All the shelters are overflowing.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. Like there's loads and loads of, of, or cats, you know, like if you want a pet, I just never have understood that whole like, Oh, well I want this, this unusual weird animal. It seems to be a very common impulse. Humans, you know, they're odd, and that's a kind word for it.

Let's talk a little bit about zoos. A lot of people, you know, that's kind of a crossover issue for even for animal rights activists. Like, should there be no zoos at all?

What's Born Free's position? And your position?

Liz Tyson: Put simply, yes. There should be no zoos at all.

Mariann Sullivan: All right. We're on the same page. Mm-Hmm.

Liz Tyson: Obviously Born Free was founded off the back of this, you know, people think about the film and Elsa the Lion, but there was also the, the true kind of starting point for Born Free was actually an elephant called Poli Poli who was used in a film called An Elephant Called Slowly and then gifted to London Zoo.

And she died very, very prematurely in her concrete enclosure in Regents Park in London Zoo. And that was really the impetus for Born Free to be found. And I think, like you say, it's something that people sit on the fence with even in the animal rights community, which has surprised me for a long time.

And I think that's partly because zoos do such a fantastic job of doing their own PR. And really what I find very interesting is that zoos haven't really changed much. You know, the enclosures might be a bit bigger, they're not generally concrete anymore. There's kind of some nice landscaping going on, but a lot of the major zoos are still on the same footprint that they were on decades ago.

So they don't actually have any more space. The zoos are designed with the visitor experience in mind. So they create areas, you know, quote, the African savannah or the Amazon rainforest. And actually what the design is built around is so that the visitors can see as many animals as possible in as short a time as possible.

Whereas those animals are then confined to these small spaces that don't come anywhere near their natural range. They're put into social groups that don't work for them, that they don't get to choose. Artificial insemination is extremely common in the interest of, quote, saving species.

And zoos have managed to convince people that they are required to protect species and that they have saved many endangered species from extinction. But the truth is, there's been about nine species that zoos have been able to point to, and this is over decades, that they have had some role in supporting the kind of reestablishment of. And a lot of those projects were not actually linked to animals being kept in zoos, but it was zoos being involved in field projects so that the captivity of the animals was not an important factor.

We know that zoos don't release animals. We know that the vast, vast majority up in the kind of 80 odd percent of animals in zoos are not threatened in the wild. So most of the animals in zoos are simply there to, as zoos would put it, you know, they're ambassador animals to then draw attention to the issue and then people will be concerned about conservation and protect animals because they visited the zoo.

Now that doesn't make sense either because I mean, let's be honest, most people in the U. S. at some stage have gone to the zoo. And if the zoo was so great at converting people into conservationists, surely we wouldn't be in the, you know, the sixth mass extinction. Zoos are not converting people to become conservationists.

And even if they were, are we really saying that hundreds of thousands of animals being essentially sacrificed, in the sense that they will live the most limited, miserable life in captivity, so that we can go look at them for a couple of minutes on a Saturday afternoon? And research has shown it is literally a couple of minutes that people stand at an enclosure.

Can we honestly say that that is an ethical way to use animals? The final point on this, as you can tell this is something I feel very strongly about, the final point on this is that, this kind of myth that zoos are required to get people to go and visit them, to see the animals, to care about the animals, if they care about the animals, they'll support conservation. That would make sense if the conservation organizations that do not hold animals captive were suffering, but the conservation organizations that don't hold animals captive, for example, the World Wildlife Fund, Nature Conservancy, and I know they have their own issues, they raise far more money than zoos do to support conservation efforts. And I think the collective zoo industry around the world raises less money than the Nature Conservancy and WFF on their own. So at best,

Mariann Sullivan: they have to maintain all those zoos. I

Liz Tyson: Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, it's not, it's either just not an efficient way to raise money for conservation because you're sacrificing these animals and you're maintaining these massive facilities, or it's just not really supporting conservation at all.

Mariann Sullivan: I once heard, I don't know whether you know who Jim Mason is. He's a great guy and he wrote this book called An Unnatural Order. Um, old school animal rights activist, I once heard him talk and he said, this is always stuck in my head that teaching children about animals by taking them to zoos is like teaching them about sex by showing them pornography.

Bye. I mean, they

Liz Tyson: that. I love that. Yeah,

Mariann Sullivan: It's such a good analogy. It's

Liz Tyson: It really

Mariann Sullivan: sordidness and the, um, and the, I don't know, the misuse, uh, of something that should, you know, that they need to learn about and they should find beautiful, but instead, like looking at them in cages, I mean, you look at kids when you're at a zoo and they're not struck with wonder. They're really not.

Liz Tyson: No, and there was some research a couple of years ago that looked at, I think it was about 3, 000 students who visited London Zoo and it was a piece of research published by the zoo industry to my understanding and they kind of spun the data which was interesting. But what the data actually showed was that the children experienced either neutral or actually negative learning outcomes So they didn't learn anything, essentially.

So, and it was interesting that some of them kind of undid learning by going to the zoo. And like you say, you know, I mean, what can you learn from a tiger sitting in a cage completely outside of his or her ecosystem?

Mariann Sullivan: You just, I mean, you learn all the wrong things. You learn that they're there for us. They're there so I could learn something. They're there for me. Like, it doesn't matter what's happening to the, yeah. Though some of them are deceptive in, you know, the way the enclosures look better than they are, but still they don't look great.

Liz Tyson: No.

Mariann Sullivan: So, what are the best ways for children to learn to care about wild animals?

Liz Tyson: I think that's a great question because I think that's one of the biggest arguments that's put forward for proponents of zoos, which is kind of, you know, not everyone can go on safari to Africa and it's almost kind of created a sort of class argument about it. But you know, there's plenty of ways that children can learn.

They can learn from documentaries. They can learn from books. There's some really amazing work being done. You should look up the project Zootronic. And that's looking at kind of virtual reality zoos where you could actually immerse yourself in an ecosystem and see all of the animals and plants and all of the other elements of the ecosystem without harming anyone.

And I think it's also about adjusting our expectations of what we have a right to see. So I think it's, it's something that we get asked a lot. Well, if I don't take my child to the zoo, what's the alternative? And that kind of implies that the child has a right to see those animals. And actually, you know, with all due respect to them, it's not our job to come up with an alternative, because if a zoo is unethical or unkind, then that stands alone.

Mariann Sullivan: No, but it is, it's our job in the sense that we do want children to learn to care about animals and grow up and support them and try to preserve them. So not so much that it's our obligation to the children, but it's our obligation to the animals to, for children to learn

Liz Tyson: You're absolutely right. Yeah. I think, you know, and I, I think something really interesting is, you know, every single adult knows a child who's obsessed with dinosaurs or obsessed with outer space or, you know, obsessed with pirates or obsessed with, you know, whatever it is. And you know, parents kind of bend over backwards to make sure they have, you know, all the books and they watch the films and they do this and they really kind of cater to those passions.

So I think any suggestion that we need to see captive wild animals in order to create passion around subjects has never met a five year old with a dinosaur obsession.

Mariann Sullivan: So, I know this is a big question, but moving away from zoos to animals who are actually living in the wild, I would love your thoughts on, on how to think, because I really don't know the answer to this, how to think about species preservation in light of the fact that we're living with potentially catastrophic climate change. I feel like I have to change the way that I've thought about it in the past, change the way I've thought of, because animals are going to move around a lot and the world is going to be shifting.

I mean, like I said, this is not a fair question, but I just appreciate your thoughts.

Liz Tyson: Yeah, it's, it is a really tough one and it's one that I struggle with. When we try and, you know, cross over the worlds of conservation and animal welfare, and certainly animal rights because they're not always great bedfellows. You know, conservation has been focused for so long on species conservation, regardless of individual needs.

So that might mean, you know, killing a non native species in order to allow a native species to flourish. It might mean sacrificing individuals of one species in order to support other members of the same species. And like you say, add on to that just human mass destruction of everything.

It creates a really complex situation that personally, I don't think how do I phrase this? So I think conservation of species in the wild has traditionally been a white colonial project. And it hasn't involved local communities. It hasn't involved local knowledge. It hasn't taken into account kind of local socioeconomic issues.

And I think some of the most effective conservation efforts I have seen have been community led, which makes perfect sense because, you know, the, the quote, Western scientists coming in and not knowing the lay of the land, not knowing how to protect those species. You know, there's an organization, Neotropical Primate Conservation, who I used to work with, and they've basically spent years working with local communities to facilitate the development of reserves, of wildlife reserves.

And that land is owned and in trust to the community who have a vested interest in caring for it. And that's some of the most successful conservation work I've seen. I think we have to accept that certain habitats are perhaps beyond saving. And then I think that the ethical question is how far do we go to protect species within those habitats, if they can no longer sustain the individuals? Because the place that that goes to in kind of, you know, wider society is zoos. Is, you know, let's keep the tigers alive in a zoo, and then we can kind of say that we've saved the species, even if there's no habitat for those tigers to ever live in.

And I think I've just gone on kind of a circular, a circular quest there where I didn't answer your question at all.

Mariann Sullivan: well, no, but I mean, I, I didn't really expect you to because there's a lot of questions here and I'm not sure anybody has, has the answers . I mean, we talk about being against zoos and in favor of animals living in the wild, but you know, the wild is something of a contested term.

I mean, like how big does the space have to be for it to be the wild instead of a zoo?

Uh, I'm sure that's a, an issue that comes up a lot.

Liz Tyson: It is. And I think, you know, for us at Born Free, I would say we are doing the best we can with the information we have. And, you know, we will adjust as time goes on. So an example is just last week, our West Africa team in Benin rescued 626 mud turtles who had been trafficked, probably on the way to, some of them the pet trade, some of them for food, some of them perhaps with traditional medicine.

They were seized. They could be released, they were native to Benin, there were five of them who were native to I think Nigeria, and so they were transported there. It was kind of this, it was a small rescue mission because turtles are small and it doesn't take that much to move 600 animals, and they were rescued and they're on their way to be released right now.

And for those 600 animals, that's life changing. And that worked for them at the time, and we're gonna continue to do that kind of work to the extent we can when it's in the animal's best interest.

Mariann Sullivan: Do you think we're going to have to change? I mean, we'll change the way we think of zoos and, preserves and where the line is drawn, but, but also do we have to change or we going to have to change how we feel about quote unquote invasive species as, you know, animals are going to be a lot more on the move as their habitats shift.

Liz Tyson: Yeah, that's a really tough one. So I think the issue of non native species has come up in a particular case study in St. Martin in the Caribbean, also Barbados, St. Kitts, Antigua, where there are populations of green monkeys who are not native to that area, but have been released.

So, St. Martin is a good example. The reason we found out about it was because the government had ordered the killing of the population of Vervet monkeys and that was based on some really bad research and poor science. which I won't get into just now, but about population expansion that was never realistic.

But the government wanted them killed. Some of the local people like them. The tourist industry seems to like them quite a lot because they're an interesting draw. Some local people are having their livelihoods impacted because the monkeys are crop raiding. And so there's all of these differing views, but what this seems to be hinging on is the fact that they're non native. But I guess we need to kind of wrangle with that because from an ethical perspective, if it's humans who have caused that population to be there, which is, let's face it, what happens every time there is a non native species, then do we not have an obligation to treat the result of that in as humane a way as possible.

So what we suggested was that a sterilization program could take place on the island. We offered volunteer support for that. We offered to send vets who could train local vets. We said that we would try to secure funding we didn't know if we would be able to get it, but we were willing to work with them and we were just ignored because I think a lot of the time people want very, very quick solutions. The government wanted this problem over and a sterilization program would obviously take place over years. But In addition, killing them, killing whether it was 450 or 2000, depending on which population census you believe.

Monkeys are smart, and to capture them and trap them, that isn't going to be a program that is done in a couple of weeks. That is going to take years. So our argument was, if you're going to trap them to kill them, trap them and sterilize them. And you can start with the troops who are crop raiding. And they will have a, you know, a particular social structure.

They will have an area that they spend time around. So you can start impacting the problem quickly. But if you remove monkeys from the area, then you are going to be opening up territory for others to come into. It's really the same principle as you have with, you know, feral cats and dogs.

So,

Mariann Sullivan: exactly. Yeah.

Liz Tyson: so yeah, it's, it's an issue.

There isn't really a, there isn't a solution to it right now, because obviously the government has sovereignty and has the power to make those decisions. And it. I would imagine it's going to roll out across most of those islands that have those monkey populations where they will just seek to essentially destroy them.

Mariann Sullivan: It is exactly the same kind of attitudes that you come across with feral, well, I mean, we don't really see feral dog issues in the United States because we round up dogs, but with cats. And the first impulse is always, let's just kill them as, as if, as you point out, not only that, is that ethical, but that it's easy.

Liz Tyson: Yeah, it's not easy.

Mariann Sullivan: It's not, it's impossible. I mean, there's no way you're going to kill them all and they, they reproduce. So, yeah, it's, not just the, the ethics of it. There's just this blind spot that humans have that they think that they can get rid of animal issues by just killing a lot of animals. And it's just not even realistic.

I know one other issue I wanted to talk to you about before I let you go, because I know you don't work on farmed animal. I mean, a lot of our interviews are about farmed animals, but not all of them. But you kind of have done work on factory farming of fur animals, haven't you?

Liz Tyson: Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, of course. And I think, you know, we, we work on wild animals cause that's our area of expertise, but we care very deeply about other animals as well. We're a vegan organization. So we do have great concern for other animals, but we just focus our efforts on wild animals.

So yeah, fur farming, I mean, it's had its day, it's on its way out, we know that. The fur industry has been in decline for years. People don't want to wear fur anymore, the consensus in the US and Canada, there was a poll that went out a couple of years ago, 70 something percent of people think fur is cruel.

The industry has not yet fully got the message, but they are just kind of, they're in the dregs of the industry now, and we're hoping that it will be done in the next few years. And, you know, COVID was, I don't want to say that there was a silver lining to COVID because it caused such, it was horrific. It caused so many deaths.

It caused such tragedy. But what COVID did do was help people understand the dangers of zoonotic diseases in a way that had never been, never been articulated or understood before with the general public. Zoonotic diseases was something that, you know, we working in animal rights or welfare or kind of, you know, welfare scientists knew about, but, you know, Joe Bloggs on the street wouldn't

Mariann Sullivan: I, people don't even know that flu is connected to animals. It's unbelievable. I mean, this disease that kills so many people every year and that, you know, is a huge problem. We, you know, have more or less under control, but somewhat less under control than we would like to. And they don't even know that it has anything to do with animals.

Liz Tyson: Yeah, exactly. And there's, you know, there are so many zoonotic diseases and of course fur farming was then put into the spotlight, particularly mink fur farming, because it was found that minks were excellent carriers of COVID 19 and millions of minks across Europe were killed as the governments took firm action to bring in bans.

Again, as we were saying before about, you know, it's the future generations who benefit, not the current generations. Unfortunately, every animal who is currently in a fur farm is going to be killed. You know, that's going to happen regardless if the law changes tomorrow or not, which is devastating. But if we think about future generations, there are now some bans across Europe, which have banned fur farming in direct response to the zoonotic disease risk.

The U. S. hasn't taken any action at all. The U. S. hasn't even really done any work to understand how COVID moved through U. S. fur farms because it was found on U. S. fur farms. And, you know, we now have the Avian bird flu coming in, like virologists have been anticipating and they've been saying for years that there is another pandemic around the corner.

It's not about, it's not about if it's about when, and we know that those viruses will be coming from animals because that's where they come from. So I think it gives us a unique opportunity right now to hold up, you know, such an incredibly important public health risk. If people don't care about the welfare issues, and a lot of people do care about the welfare issues, but if they don't, you can be sure they're going to worry about the public health issues, and we think that might be how we're going to end at least mink fur farming in the US, because if we can't get legislation passed because people care about the animals, we may have a much better chance of getting it passed because people are concerned about themselves.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. And especially since, as you say, fur is it's not highly thought of anymore. And I mean, no matter how stupid people are, it does seem we could figure this one out. It just seems so completely obvious. So, are you thinking federal legislation, state legislation?

Liz Tyson: So we've been in partnership with other organizations. We have helped to draft the Mink Virus Act, which would ban mink farming in the U. S. It would offer a buyout program for the current mink farmers because we're not in this to vilify the individual farmers. We understand that people have livelihoods.

We understand that, you know, they have their own needs and it's not about the individual farmers, it's about the animals.

Mariann Sullivan: Now, I totally approve of those kind of bioproblems because I think they're, they're necessary. On the other hand, like people lose jobs all the time. People's businesses go under all the time and the government does not come in and save them. But whenever it has anything to do with animals, I mean, the government's got to go in, but, but I don't think you can pull it off without actually

Liz Tyson: And I think politically, that's a really important element of it, because I don't think we'd get both sides of the aisle if we didn't have that

Mariann Sullivan: I agree. Yeah.

Liz Tyson: And so that's what we're hoping. Obviously, we're running coming to the end of this Congress. And you know, there's quite a lot going on in the next few months, so we don't anticipate it will pass this time, but we're hoping to get that and our other priority bills, introduced again in the next Congress and push it forward.

But I think there's a great opportunity here to ban mink farming, and honestly it would be kind of be an easy win for the government because it would be closing the door on an industry that is already pretty much gone. You know, it would just be drawing a line under it.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, and it's not an industry in which there are a lot of good jobs. It's like, it's just usually, fur farming is so weird. It's small scale and, and, there, there aren't a lot of employees taking care of these

Liz Tyson: well, yeah, and that's the thing, isn't it? That's, that's the issue that, you know, one of the major animal welfare issues is that they're just in these, you know, industrial style farms with no one really looking after them. Um, you know, they're fed and watered, but they're often filthy. There's no veterinary cover.

That's why whenever anybody goes in undercover into a fur farm, they come out with the most horrific images of animals who have, um, you know, infections, they're missing limbs, they're cannibalizing one another. So yeah, by its very nature, the fur industry doesn't employ many people.

Mariann Sullivan: Are there any other policy matters that you're working on that we should know about before I let you go?

Liz Tyson: I think that the other major thing that we're looking at is trapping. It's something that, again, you know, like fur farming, it's hard to believe this still happens. It's, it's archaic. We know how much it harms animals. No one can pretend that traps are humane, and yet that's what the, you know, the trapping community put out there into the world.

We are trying as a priority to get the Refuge from Cruel Trapping Act introduced, and that would ban trapping on national wildlife refuges. It, beggars belief that trapping is allowed on wildlife refuges, where you

Mariann Sullivan: I know. What does the word refuge

Liz Tyson: know, I know. So, I mean, if we can't do that, then, goodness, what can we do?

So, I think that's something, again, we want to focus on that for now at a federal level. We understand, though, that trapping in its wider sense will probably need to be tackled on a state level to get. So, we're going to go after the refuges first, and then, look at banning recreational trapping at state level.

And there are some amazing local and state level organizations also working on this in various spaces.

Mariann Sullivan: Well, you started out this by saying you have a great job. You have an amazing job. Like it's really, you really, cause you, the whole range from actually getting to get to know some monkeys all the way to working at the federal level. So yeah, we couldn't wish you more luck with all of these projects.

And thank you so much for joining us today, Liz. It's really been enlightening.

Liz Tyson: Thank you so much.