Living in a Zoopolis

Introduction

0:01Hi-Fi Nation, a show where philosophy and reality meet. From Slate. It's Burgundy, France, in a city named Attun, early Renaissance. Even then, Burgundy was famous for its wine. But Attun sits on soil that's only good for growing barley and wheat. Well, in 1522, rats got into the barley crop, ate through much of it, and that could very

0:31well destroy the livelihood of the peasants who grew it, maybe even lead to starvation for the people who rely on the grain for food. This is a big problem for the people in charge, which back then were the clerics. The local bishop kind of huddles it up with the other heads of the church in the area.

Historical Context

0:51That's Gabriel Rosenberg, historian at Duke University. And they decide that they're going to put the rats on trial. And if they can convict the rats of larceny and theft and such things, they'll be able to anathematize them, which is essentially the ability to ban them from Christian society. What possessed the bishops to put the rats up for trial as a solution to this particular

1:22problem? Was there precedence for this? In early modern and medieval Europe, it was possible to try animals for a variety of crimes. It's arguably the case that this represented a different sort of perspective on animal agency.

Due Process

1:40Whatever their reasons, the decision was made to take the rats to court. But luckily for them, the French were big fans of due process. Even rats deserved the best lawyer they could get. And because they couldn't afford one, they had to have one appointed to them. In this case, a young one. Bartolome de Chazenu was kind of an expert in Roman law and widely respected probably in his community as being highly learned.

2:11Getting assigned a Chazenu was a little bit like getting assigned a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone who would eventually become a legend in jurisprudence.

Chazenu's Strategy

2:21So the Chazenu had the perfect strategy. If you're going to treat the rats as being legally responsible, you've got to give the rats the same kind of legal rights you'd grant a person. So the day of the trial comes and no rats have appeared. Chazenu makes a motion. He says that they have not posted adequate notice around Burgundy to let the rats know that they all need to get there. And Chazenu notes that some of the rats are very young and they can move quickly, but

2:51some of the rats are very old and it might take them a long time. So they can't be tried in absentia and found guilty. They need to delay the trial. The court apparently finds this persuasive. They post notice in every church in the land announcing that the rats are to make an appearance. So fast forward, we have the next meeting of the court. Once again, the rats do not appear. And Chazenu once again comes up with an objection. If you're going to make someone come to court where they have to travel across lands that

3:26are controlled by their enemies, it is a well-established precedent that you need to give them a guard. And of course, you know that the enemies of the rats are the cats and there are many cats in the countryside of Burgundy. So then Chazenu proposes that they ought to tax all of the cat owners and all of Burgundy to pay for guards so that they can protect the rats in their journey to the court.

Modern Animal Rights

3:54From Slate, this is Hi-Fi Nation, philosophy in story form. Recording from Princeton University, here's Barry Lamb. That argument won the day. Nobody, it turned out, wanted to pay the taxes needed to help the rats defend themselves in court. It wasn't clear in the historical record whether the rats were formally acquitted or if the court

4:25just decided to let it go. But that wasn't the last time de Chazenu was going to break ground in defending animals in court. He wrote the book on it, Concilium Primum, a treatise on how to rightfully try animals in courts of law. Underneath the set of legal principles and appeals to Roman law was an assumption that de Chazenu held. Animals had legal rights and entitlements.

Animal Personhood

4:54On today's show, we're bringing you stories of animals in court, past and present, to see what it might be like to live in a future where animals have legal rights. What kind of rights and responsibilities would lions, pigeons, or our pet dogs have if we gave them their moral due? And treat them as citizens who are different, but no less people than we are.

5:24Producer Alec Opperman brings you the rest of the story of de Chazenu.

5:31Gabriel Rosenberg actually doubts that the rat trial of Atun happened the way he just told it. The source of the story may not have been reliable. More on that later. But many other animal trials in Europe are well established in the historical record. Probably the most famous one is the pig of fillets, who is responsible for eating a baby and is then put on trial. This was 14th century in France. That pig was executed for that crime.

6:01There's even a reproduction of a painting of the event. The poor pig is dressed in human clothes while a crowd of people are there watching as the executioner prepares for the act. There may have been some element of what we would describe as a supernatural kind of belief about animals as being representatives of the devil or some kind of supernatural evil. There is the cock of Basil in Switzerland that was put on trial in the 16th century because it had given an egg and therefore perceived as being demonic.

6:37There was a case where a sow and her six piglets were caught in the act of killing a five-year-old. The prosecution called at least eight witnesses in the trial of the sow who was found guilty. But the piglets were exonerated for their mother's crime. Then there's a case in Pamplona in 1586 where a local priest presided over a scourge of worms charged with destroying the local vineyards.

7:07The question was whether the worms acted with malice or were instead agents of God sent to punish the locals for their sin. We have records of the case only because the priest invoiced the city an exorbitant amount of money for the proceedings and the city refused to pay it. Which raises the question, did animals get prosecuted because people thought that they could be morally responsible agents or was it something else? I suppose you could come up with maybe a little bit more cynical gloss on the situation, which is that maybe the local church didn't necessarily believe that there was a demonic threat posed,

7:48but that they may have believed that this was a way to appease the peasantry and make them think that they were doing something about this very serious problem. In other words, the rats, a horse or a cow or a pig were scapegoats. But there is evidence that these weren't just kangaroo courts. While some animals were convicted, others were acquitted. Like when a court found that a pig mauled a human only in defense of her piglets. There really was a sense that animals could be guilty or innocent.

8:22They could have good reasons in addition to bad reasons or supernatural reasons for doing what they did. I don't think that there's any doubt that early modern and medieval European people had a different sort of perspective about what animals were capable of. The question that you kind of have to ask yourself is, how does a 16th or 15th century peasant who is directly reliant on a harvest, how do they relate to animals and what do animals sort of represent to them?

8:53And it's not only going to be negative. There's also a sense that maybe that animal agency captures a sense of wonder and beauty. You kind of need to put yourself in a perspective where the sort of like ecological domination of the non-human world that we experience today was not quite as finished, not quite as complete. What I'm hearing Gabriel Rosenberg say, Alec, is that in addition to all the satanic, demonic possession stuff,

9:28it's because animals can't be controlled by humans and that they were a constant threat that made people see them as having agency. Right. And on the flip side to that is that once it seems that we were able to control and extinguish just about any other animal on Earth, we started to think of ourselves as the only morally responsible things. Right. And the interesting thing about Deshavenaux and medieval Europe is that today there are people who think this,

9:58people who think animals have agency and personhood. There are people who want to protect animals from humans. Like they say, how awful we are that we harm all these animals who are more like us than we think. But what's weird is that these kinds of animal rights advocates don't accept the flip side of agency, which is moral responsibility. That's something they share with their opponents, right? The opponents of animal rights. Both sides think taking an animal to court for a crime sounds ridiculous.

10:33That's a really kind of great and important point. I guess we might say that it's symptomatic of the ecological conditions. When was the last time an animal held power over you? The ecological conditions that we live in in the 21st century are pretty different. The ability of animals to hurt you directly are pretty radically diminished. Even if there was the occasional opportunist or politician looking to exploit commoner views about animal agency for personal gain,

11:10there were plenty of true believers, respectable and even enlightened ones like Deshavenaux. Toward the end of his life, when he was a distinguished and important judge in France, he faced an important decision that tested what he truly thought about the rats he defended in his youth. Interestingly enough, it was because a group of people were seen as pest. According to the story, a religious sect known as the Waldensians were becoming a problem to the Catholic Church and the monarchy in southeast France.

11:43It's a heresy, and they run afoul of papal authority and eventually the French monarchy as well. The French crown offers an order to suppress this heresy. What does suppress mean in that context? Put to death. Execute en masse.

12:07An extermination order was issued, and Deshavenaux is the judge who was last to hear the appeal. And he seemed prepared to allow the church and the French government to go through with it. An old friend comes to Chesineau and says, have you become such a heartless, cruel man in your old age? Because isn't it the case that when you were a young man, still not yet like a whole famous big mocker around France in the judicial community,

12:38you argued that rats should receive full due process before they could be excommunicated. And how is it that you'll say that rats, which aren't even people, ought to have full, robust legal rights and full due process, but these religious dissenters, who are people, that they don't have a right to argue their case before the court. And Chesineau is moved by this. He's so moved that he holds off any kind of ruling.

13:11He avoids, essentially, giving the green light to the massacre.

13:20Eventually, Chesineau dies. Without him to stop the extermination order, soldiers raze the Waldensian town and surrounding villages. This account of Chesineau's last days and how it relates to the rat child autun comes from a book by a Swiss Protestant, John Crispin, written about 50 years after Chesineau's death. It's called The Martyrology of the Protestants, which ought to give you, I think, even from the title, a pretty good sense of what it's invested in being able to record. He's saying that the French crown's activities to suppress religious dissent

13:55were so barbaric and so violent and so unlawful that they essentially amounted to treating human beings like animals.

14:06In fact, worse than animals, who at least had their day in court.

14:14Hi-Fi Nation will return after these messages. Alec, you came to me interested in animal trials because they're getting a revival today in the U.S., right? Yes. The medieval courts were almost universally about animals as defendants. What rights they had were the rights of defendants. Today, there aren't any rights at all, but people are trying to establish them for animals as plaintiffs. Meaning animals are the ones suing or charging people for crimes against them.

14:49Right. The last piece on our argument calendar this morning is the cetacean community versus George W. Bush. The whales, dolphins, and porpoises could not swim their way into court to be before you today. And they're not participating by telephone. Attorney Lanny Sinkin is representing the cetacean community in front of the Ninth Circuit of Appeal. Dolphins, whales, and porpoises communicate with sound, and they use sound waves to echolocate and navigate in the oceans. The Navy's use of sonar disrupts all of this,

15:21and is so loud that it damages the hearing and even organs of the cetaceans, sometimes causing hemorrhaging.

15:28No one doubted the harm it was causing. The question was whether dolphins and whales had any standing to sue. In the past, only a human could sue for harm done to a dolphin, but they had to prove that harming dolphins was in some way a harm to the human also. That's what Lanny Sinkin was trying to change in this case. There should not be a situation where an endangered species cannot get judicial protection simply because there's no human surrogate. And what the U.S. government was trying to prevent.

16:00Animals are not persons. They cannot have standing under these statutes. This particular case is part of an ongoing series of cases of lawyers looking to establish a basic legal right for animals in U.S. courts. So we actually filed the first ever case for an animal seeking habeas corpus in the United States, and that was on behalf of Tommy the chimpanzee back in 2013. That's Monica Miller. I am a staff attorney for the Non-Human Rights Project, as well as the legal director and senior counsel for the American Humanist Association.

16:33In addition to the privately imprisoned chimps, Miller and the Non-Human Rights Project saw a writ of habeas corpus for an elephant, Happy, who resides in the Bronx Zoo. That case made it to the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York State. Habeas corpus is the right not to be imprisoned if you haven't committed any crime. It is one of the oldest and most basic legal rights given to people in common law countries,

17:05including the United States. People have this right even if there's no explicit law that says you do. In English common law, the king's bench would issue writs of habeas corpus to free women from abusive husbands. It's been used for children who were not considered then legal persons. And then, of course, you've got the black slave cases in our country and in England. And the most celebrated and famous one is the Lord Mansfield case freeing James Somerset, a black slave. When he landed on English soil, the court declared was free because slavery is so odious.

17:40So why are they trying to establish a legal right for chimpanzees and elephants in a court? Shouldn't they be trying to pass a law giving animals these rights? So there's actually two answers to that. The first is that it's a lot easier to try to convince two out of three judges or four out of seven judges that something is the right thing to do rather than a whole Senate and a House and a governor. And the other thing is that habeas corpus is a very special kind of right that Monica

18:10thinks allows her to bypass lawmakers altogether. The common law is judgment law. People sort of forget about common law. We think of statutes and our Constitution as our source for laws, but there's really a third body, and that's judgment law. We don't need a statute to say that it's illegal to detain happy. We're saying that the court needs to look at evolving notions of fairness, equality, justice, updated science, and all of these other variables that require a court to reevaluate this law. Just like a judge in England could just give an enslaved black man or an abused wife in England

18:43the right against imprisonment through common law, Monica Miller was trying to argue that a court could just extend habeas corpus to members of the animal kingdom. So we're using that law by analogy, not because elephants are like human slaves, but because the science is showing that the deprivation of happy's bodily liberty is akin to detaining a human being. So did they win? Did Lanny Sinkin win against the Navy? Not at all. Nobody's won anything.

19:18Wow, we're even less progressive than medieval France. Even the rats in Atun won something. But it's not winning that quite matters right now, at least to Monica Miller. It's how they're losing that's kind of interesting. After we lost three of these chimpanzee petitions, the court finally said, yeah, I see enough merit here. I'm going to require the state of New York, basically, to come and justify the detention of these chimpanzees, which was really remarkable. We were able to get past that first step. Counsel, I'm on the screen. This is Judge Jenny Rivera of the New York State Supreme Court.

19:50How can the court apply habeas when we're not talking about a human? Monica Miller's argument was that elephants are cognitively complex and emotionally intelligent. Elephants like happy can recognize their own reflection, showing a certain kind of advanced self-awareness exhibited by humans, certain primates, and dolphins. It's a test that even human newborns fail. Most importantly, elephants feel the pain of captivity and isolation. She should at a minimum have the same right as a similarly situated individual that also has

20:22autonomy. Your point is well taken. I will ask it of your adversary. Monica won over Judge Rivera and one other judge, but lost the case five to two. When we first started these cases 10, you know, 15 years ago, Steve would get laughed out of court. Stephen Wise, non-human rights project founder. You know, we'd be poked fun at where the headlines would just kind of like stop monkeying around or like there was just kind of like a jokiness to this. And now we're being taken so seriously that we have moral philosophers and Supreme Court judges from other countries writing briefs to support us.

20:56And then we've got the written decisions amounting to hundreds of pages between Judge Rivera and Judge Wilson, who both wrote separate dissents. That is in itself remarkable. And at least one American court has ruled that animals can have standing without a human surrogate. In Loggerhead Turtle vs. Volusia County Council, a Florida court ruled that turtles had standing under the Endangered Species Act. So, while dolphins and whales didn't get their day in court, loggerhead turtles will, and maybe slowly,

21:34even more species will become plaintiffs in cases against the people who hurt them.

21:44Alec Opperman is a freelance producer. Hey listeners, do you have unruly critters in your life? Dogs that won't stop eating clothing items or cats that meow all night long? Head on over to Slate.com, where this week, we've called on our favorite expert pet owners to answer your trickiest pet questions. We're calling it Faux Paws. And it's got all the advice you need to tame the beloved beasts in your home.

22:19Support Hi-Fi Nation and get it completely ad-free by signing up for Slate+. Slate Plus gives you unlimited reading on Slate's website, access to every article and advice column, as well as bonus segments on your favorite podcasts, like Slow Burn, Amicus, Political Gab Fest, Slate Culture Gab Fest, and more. You can sign up for Slate Plus at slate.com slash hi-fi plus, or click the link in the show notes. Now back to the show.

Future of Animal Rights

22:51That was the past and present of animal rights in the West, where even the most optimistic animal rights advocates don't think they're winning legal rights for animals anytime soon. And that's despite the science, not because of it. But what about the future? If we do give animals their day in court, what other kinds of legal or political rights follow for them?

23:20Philosophers have imagined such a future. And it isn't a simple one.

Philosophical Perspectives

23:25I am Kristen Andrews. I'm a professor of philosophy at York University and the York Research Chair in Animal Minds. Kristen Andrews studies animal thinking and feeling, the kind of things that matter to figuring out whether animals are persons and therefore deserving of certain kinds of moral treatment. I was part of a group of philosophers who wrote an amicus brief supporting chimpanzee personhood. And that group was then asked by the Non-Human Rights Project to also support a brief on the Happy case.

23:58While Andrews did write in support of releasing the two chimpanzees kept in private captivity, she didn't write in support of transferring Happy to a sanctuary, even though other philosophers did. The reason was her own humility. I think Happy the Elephant is a person the same way I think the chimpanzees, Tommy and Kiko, are persons. But with Happy the Elephant, she's been living at the Bronx Zoo since 1977. She's not living with any other elephants right now.

24:30She hasn't been for quite some time. But she is living in community with other humans. And the question about whether that's the best situation for Happy, given that she's been living there in that environment for so long, is unclear to me. I don't feel confident in any judgment I'd make about what would be best for her. It's not just her own limitations that worry Andrews. She thinks any person put in the position of arguing and advocating for the interests of particular animals

25:03will run into the same problem. One way of putting into practice the idea that animals are deserving of rights is the guardianship model, which is to think of animals as having rights the way young children or some disabled adults do. Another human is put in charge of advocating for those rights in particular cases, making arguments on behalf of another to be adjudicated by some judge or third party. The problem with guardianship models is the same sort of problem that we see

25:37in guardianship models in human communities, when the guardians are from a different culture of the child that they're supposed to be taking care of. We have a lot of historical problems associated with, say, Western Europeans deciding what's best for indigenous North Americans, taking children away from their parents because they thought that that was the right thing for them. And I worry that guardianship models are going to be anthropocentric on top of being culturally insensitive.

26:08One alternative to guardianship models is the Zoopolis model, based on the book Zoopolis by Sue Donaldson and William Kimlicka. In a Zoopolis, humans aren't caretakers for animals. It's more like we're alongside them, cohabitants in a political community. The rights an animal has doesn't depend on what a particular human advocates for in a court,

26:41but rather the place of the animal in the political community as a whole. Let's start with wild animals. I think that's the most straightforward case on the Zoopolis model. What you have when you've got, say, herds of wild Asian elephants is you have individuals who should have collective rights, like sovereignty, that gives them right over territory and gives them the ability to govern themselves, decide how they live.

27:11When human farmers move into those communities, move onto that territory and start planting fields, and then the elephants raid the fields, there shouldn't be any surprise there because the farmers have taken land that used to belong to the elephants.

27:30In a Zoopolis, conflicts that arise between wild animals and between humans and wild animals would be like territorial disputes in the human world. One country annexes another, or two nations fight over a piece of land. The right response to a pack of lions attacking a hyena is neither to save the hyena or help the lion. Most of the time, the right answer is non-interference,

28:02even if wild animals are suffering as a result of the conflict. Interference by humans in communities of wild animals, well, that's foreign intervention in a Zoopolis. And we know that the morality of foreign intervention is complicated. Sometimes it's okay to intervene on behalf of oppressed groups inside another country. But many times it isn't. It depends on a lot of things.

28:32With wild animals, giving them rights means a right to exist on land of their own. It's a right against invasion, colonization, exploitation, and intervention without just cause. And then on the other extreme, we have elephants like Happy, who lives in a zoo situation, has had caretakers that she knows well, that she's lived with for many years in the zoo situation.

29:03The rights that Happy perhaps should have would be something like a citizenship right, have some rights about how she lives in the zoo situation, with the other humans, and perhaps with the other animals that she might be interacting with. In this way, Happy is a lot like the dogs and cats that live in our houses.

29:26Domestic pets, zoo animals, these are animals we have intimate relationships with. We love them, and they love us. So their rights are very different from wild animals. We owe them like we owe our family and neighbors. If a coyote were attacking your dog, the morality is not at all complicated. You do what you have to do to save your dog. That trumps the coyote's rights

29:56to non-interference in her hunting.

30:00We owe Happy the best possible life in captivity we can provide, because after decades of living with people, that is her community. In a zooopolis, animals we have intimate relationships with have citizenship rights. They have a right to well-being and protection, and their interests should be represented in decisions about what happens to the group.

30:26And then in the middle of these two extremes, in between the wild animals and the animals we take into our homes and zoos, we have denizen animals. We have animals that live amongst us. We have the rats in our backyard, the wild parrots of San Francisco, the raccoons who are raiding the garbage cans in Toronto. This is a different sort of a status, because we haven't taken them out of a natural situation, but we've changed the natural situation

30:58quite dramatically in a way that these animals rely on the garbage cans that we put out every Wednesday. And these other animals sometimes are annoying, but other humans who live around us are also sometimes annoying, and we have to learn to live together. In a zoopolis, denizen animals who are a nuisance aren't eradicated as a first resort or even a last resort, any more than its right to exterminate

31:30Waldensians, or loiterers, or people who go to Burning Man. Just like nuisance people, denizen animals have some right to use the environment. But unlike our pets, they don't have a right that we satisfy their material and emotional needs. And we don't have an obligation to protect them from predators.

31:57Going from today to a zoopolis future is a big change, a revolution in animal rights. But how radical is it in particular cases?

32:12Talking to Kirsten Andrews, it was clear she saw many animals as having personhood status with zoopolis rights. And I would have thought that that meant there's a lot of things you can't do to animals because you can't do them to people, like breed them or sterilize them or force them into labor. But as soon as I asked those kinds of questions, she pointed out a gap between animals having political rights and what it's okay

32:42to do to them, which was not a gap I expected.

32:50I think it's hard to give general answers about whether it's okay to control the reproduction of a captive animal because I think it's going to vary from situation to situation. If we have a situation where there are no resources, where there's no money for the care of a chimpanzee offspring, I think that we might say it would be immoral to let that chimpanzee reproduce and let that offspring be born and die. Though we might not.

33:21We might say it would be better for the chimpanzee to have the experience of birthing an offspring even though it will inevitably die before it became an adult. These are hard questions. The use of animals in labor is another question that I think requires a really careful contextualized analysis before we give an answer. Certainly using an animal for labor when the animal has no interest in performing that behavior, when that behavior is aversive to the animal,

33:52when it causes the animal pain, seems extremely ethically problematic. But using an animal in a labor situation where the animal is enjoying themselves, seems happy, doesn't strike me as problematic. I'm going to try to bring back my question. My question is, seeing animals as having political rights and personhood status, it doesn't automatically rule out certain kinds of treatment. There's still a kind of reasoning and calculation we have to do.

34:24So my question is, seeing them as people, as political agents, what does it automatically rule out in the ethics part? Does it automatically rule out any way we currently treat animals? Yeah, seeing animals as persons immediately rules out that they're objects that can be bought and sold.

34:47So how does this not rule out pets? Yeah, pets, I don't think pets should be owned. I think that pets should be cared for the way human children are. But the idea of owning pets is rather creepy to me. I think of myself as a caregiver of my dog. I have a dog in my house. I wouldn't sell my dog to anybody. And if somebody kidnaps my dog, I wouldn't want to just get the cash value of buying another dog. That seems super weird.

35:18Does it rule out all of animal agriculture? Yeah, this is where we get the conflicts of interest cases where the ethics is going to have to take into account the rights and interests of individuals who are in conflict. When you have humans who need to eat and humans who want to eat meat and animals who want to live and not be eaten, then I think it's a dilemma that requires careful ethical thinking. And I'll leave that to the ethicists.

35:52Animals are bought and sold in animal agriculture. Like, you know, I'll buy 60 head of cattle. Like, this is before, even if we don't talk about the killing. And you just claimed that it was, you know, it rules out buying and selling. So, if that aspect of animal agriculture, which is necessary for the transfer of property, we're not even talking about the killing here, right? I don't know. It's, like, this is where you get way beyond me. Like, this is not my area of expertise. I do not know what to say

36:23about animal agriculture. I would just say that I think that in 100 years, we're going to have a very different view about our current treatment of animals, our current animal agriculture practices. How we get there is a question that is beyond me. Yeah. I mean, all I was asking was it doesn't seem like a conflict. It seems like the politics already precludes that. And there are some ethical issues that you might ask about, you know, hunting wild animals and so on. Right. The buying and the selling

36:53is absolutely essential to the practice of agriculture. I mean, this is exactly why the judges are deciding against animal personhood cases. If happy, the elephant, is a person, something that can't be bought or sold, then what about our pets and what about the cows and chickens? There's a slippery slope that will include all animals. I mean, it will just radically change society and society is not ready for that radical change. I think that's why the judges are deciding against the case, not on the merits of the particular case,

37:25but on the consequences for society.

37:31Hi-Fi Nation will return after these messages. Kristen, we know that medieval Europeans thought of animals as having some kind of agency. They actually held animals morally and legally responsible for bad acts. Do you think that seeing animals as persons today automatically means

38:03that there are some things we can hold them responsible for doing? Yeah, I don't think that animal personhood immediately entails animal responsibility. What is needed on top of personhood would be something about having rules or norms that the animals hold themselves responsible for. one of the things I'm working on is animal normativity, questions about whether there are social norms in non-human animal communities.

38:35There's suggestive evidence that there are because chimpanzees will change their behavior when they immigrate into a new community. The other sorts of behaviors that chimpanzees engage in that might be a social norm would be an infanticide prohibition. So chimpanzee infanticide is something that happens. Males will sometimes kill infants, but it's rare. And chimpanzee females will protest when chimpanzee males mishandle infants.

39:07Now, is this protesting a social norm against infanticide? This is an ongoing research question. Okay, it sounds like you're saying that if we do hold animals responsible, it should be on their terms. It should be to the norms that they hold each other to or can hold each other to. Now, I've heard from a lot of dog owners that their dogs can feel guilt for violating norms of a house. Do you think that means we can hold dogs responsible for violating human norms?

39:38So the scientists who've studied dog guilt say that there's no evidence that dogs feel guilt. Because if you talk to the dog in the same way as you do when they've done the bad bad act and they hadn't done a bad act, they'll put the same kind of guilty expression on. So the thought is that this is just a submission response to a certain way of being talked to by the human. Now, this doesn't mean that dogs don't feel guilt. What I think is more interesting is

40:08when you look at multiple dogs in the household and if there's a rule like don't poop on the rug or don't jump on the sofa, and one of the dog engages in the behavior that's prohibited, and the other dog nips the dog who engaged in that behavior. Those sorts of scenarios I think are more promising for the idea that there might be social norms in households with humans and dogs, these norms that are created in a cross-species community of

40:38the human who says don't poop on the rug, and the dogs who internalize this and then punish the other dog in the house when they poop on the rug.

40:53Okay, Chris, in the last eight minutes, I want you to be as imaginative as you can. You're writing a futuristic or science fiction novel, and we're talking about a future, I don't know if it's 50 years or 100 years, the society that you're envisioning is going to treat animals all as persons with the political agency that you think that they warrant, and we're also treating all animals ethically and so forth. What is that society like?

41:24What are the institutions in it? Are there courts? Do the animals vote? So in 100 years, I envision that we'll have tools that allow us to translate animal communicative signals so that we understand better what animals want. But I don't see us using these tools to include animals in our political systems. I don't see animals debating their rights in courts or anything like that. But I see humans treating animals with

41:54the care and consideration that they treat other humans who aren't able to advocate for themselves. I see us living amongst other animals with a kind of appreciation and awe and joy curiosity that we really right now only share with animals who we see on TV shows or who we live with. So in 100 years, I suspect we're not going to be eating animals. I suspect that we're going to have all

42:25kinds of alternative proteins at that point in time. And so our animal agriculture practices will be very different. That our animal agriculture practices will be much more of a sanctuary sort of model where animals who want to live with other species including humans will be living in those multi-species environments.

42:50Human civilizations would have to shrink, right? Not only will we not be encroaching on new habitats, but there must certainly be those roads have got to be gone if we're going to preserve chimpanzees. That sounds to me like it has to be true. I don't think that the current human population level would have to shrink, but we certainly can't keep expanding at the rate we're expanding. That is not sustainable.

43:24HiFi Nation is produced, written, and edited by Barry Lamb. Additional producer for this episode is Alec Opperman. For Slate Podcasts, Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio, Derek John is executive producer of Narrative Podcasts, and Ben Richmond is senior director of Operations. Follow HiFi Nation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at HiFi Nation. That's H-I-P-H-I Nation. Complete transcripts, show notes, and reading suggestions for every episode is available at

43:54HiFi Nation. That's H-I-P-H-I-N-A-T-O-R-G. Thank you. Thank you.