Our Animal Instincts

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Many of us share our homes with animals. Furry, feather, or skidding. What is it that day?

We are definitely like my family members, head-pissing. Yeah, it's my right hand man. I got no kids, so that's my son. You know, he's my baby.

Yet as much as we love our pets, our behavior toward animals can be paradoxical. Don't you think it's kind of weird that we're hitting our cats meat and we have strong beliefs in not eating meat on this? I think the more you love animals, the more you might consider being a vegetarian. You know, English Bulldog was made by science.

You know what I'm saying? I'm just in Red House Belong with Mother Nature. I don't think English Bulldog is a part of Mother Nature. So I'm a walking hypocrite and I recognize that and I'm okay with that.

This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the contradictions and quandaries of our relationships with animals. When had Herzog's son, Adam was young, he had a pet mouse named Willy. One day, Willy died. So how used this as a teaching moment?

We thought it would be a good lesson for the kids in terms of understanding death to have a funeral for him. After all, you know, he was a pet. The kids really, really liked him and they were very upset when he died. And so we had a funeral.

We got a little cardboard box and made a little casket. We took him into the backyard. We buried him and we actually had a little headstone farm. We got some rocks and made a little headstone farm.

A couple of days later, Hal's wife found some mouse droppings in the kitchen and asked him to do something about it. Well, my wife said, neat Nick, and the idea that we would be sharing our house with little creatures scampering around, that were mice, was not something that she could live with, so she asked me to kill the mouse. And I did. I went out and I bought a mouse trap.

I put a little dab of peanut butter on it and put it under the kitchen. And the next morning I got up and the mouse was dead. And of course you did what you always do with dead mice, which is you put it in a cardboard box and took it out in the back and gave it a funeral, right? No.

I threw it in the bushes. Two dead mice, two very different responses. They were in different psychological categories. One was a pet, which a lot of people, including us, sort of consider Willy a family member.

He had a name and the other was a pest. He was free-learning by stealing our cheese and generally being what mice do, that is to say a pest. So, you know, there's a completely different psychological relationship between Willy our pet and the pest. Hal Herzog is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University.

He's been studying human animal interactions for more than 30 years. He writes about the contradictions in our attitudes toward mice and other creatures. In his book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Why it's so hard to think straight about animals.

I asked him how the labels we place on animals, good mouse, bad mouse, pet, or pest, change how we interact with them. Certainly one of the deepest and most important reasons that we treat animals differently is related to the categories that we put in. That's absolutely true. So, here's a second story that also lays out a slightly related but different contradiction.

Your family once also owns a pet snake and a nasty rumor spread about what you were feeding the snake. What was the rumor and what is that reveal in some ways about the relationship we had with animals? I got a call one day from a friend of mine who's an animal rice activist and she said that she had gotten a call from one of her friends saying that I was going to our local animal shelter and getting kittens and taking him home and feeding them to our bowl constrictor who was likely a pet and had a name. What does this reveal about some of the contradictions we have about animals?

You talk a little bit in the book about the abhorrence with which we receive the idea that anyone would dream of feeding kittens to snakes. But of course, in your mind, there's also produced something of an orthotic experiment and some questions about cats and snakes. It did. And actually, for the next couple of days, there was something that kept nagging me about that.

I was thinking like, okay, what's Sam ate? He was a carnivore like cats and what he ate was mice. And so I would go basically to the pet shop and buy mice to feed to the snake. Life mice and I would kill the mice and give them to the snake.

I thought, well, wait a minute. There's cats being euthanized at the animal shelter that are unwanted. Wouldn't it be more ethical for me to actually go to the animal shelter and get the bodies of dead kittens as opposed to buying life mice? Wouldn't that be morally permissible?

Wouldn't it be morally better to actually feed kittens to bowl constrictors than to feed mice to bowl constrictors? And of course, then that means you went out to the animal shelter and did what the rumor was saying that you were doing. Of course, I did not. We had a pet cat at the time.

We still have a pet cat. We live with cats. I love cats. I would never feed a cat to a bowl constrictor.

So this was a classic example of head versus heart. And I realized that moral consistency oftentimes leads us astray in our interactions with animals. And that really haunted me ever says like, how can I live in a world in which it was okay to feed kittens to bowl constrictors? An interesting shaker.

The original title of my book was Feeding Kinsta Bowl Constrictors. But the editor of my agent immediately made me change it because they said nobody would buy a book with that title. It sounds like the start of a bad co-end brothers movie. It does.

And it snagged me a literary agent, but they wouldn't take the next step. Tell me about another story that you described in the book. This guy Jim Thompson, he's a doctoral student you met and he owned this very beautiful bird. And he started thinking about that bird and then he did something unusual with this bird.

Walk me through what he did. Yeah. He was a graduate student and he was a very logical rational person. And he had a pet bird as a cockatill as I recall that he really loved.

And his mother had given him a copy of an animal rights magazine. I think it was Animal and Agenda at the time. And he read the magazine. It changed his life.

So he became an animal rights activist. Hardcore. Became a vegan, quit wearing leather. Made his girlfriend, started doing all that stuff as well.

And then one day he looked at the bird who lived in a cage. And he came to the conclusion, the intellectual conclusion, that it was unethical to live with a bird in a cage. And so he took the bird outside and he freed it. And the bird flew out of the cage and he said it was an amazing sight to see that bird took off.

And then he told me, he looked at me and said cheapishly, you know, I know she probably died. I know that I was doing it more for me than I was for the bird. And he recognized that about himself and yet he chose to go ahead and do it. So how do you explain that contradiction?

It's the sort of contradiction that we see all the time in our relationships with animals. And that's why the field of anthozoology, the new science of human animal interactions, is so both intellectually and psychologically fascinating because we all have to live with these contradictions. For example, he was addicted to horse racing. He was a statistician.

And he was addicted to horse racing. When he came to animal rights activists, he decided he was going to quit going to the track anymore. But every month he would feel this urgent. He would go to the track.

And then he told me that he would feel bad about it for weeks. You know, it made me think about all the ways in which we sort of relate to animals in some ways as if they were sort of fellow creatures. In other words, if we kept a fellow human being in a cage, it would seem absolutely unjust, immoral and wrong. And releasing that person from the cage would seem like the only right thing to do.

And in some ways we extend that logic when we talk about the bird. That's what he was doing. And as I was reading the story, it reminded me of another story you have in the book. This was a different story.

But in some ways it has the same subtext. Cookie was a 12 foot long Nile crocodile at the Miami Serpentarium. A six year old boy once fell into cookies and closure. And the crock did what crocodiles do.

He grabbed the child, pulled him underwater. What did the owner of the Serpentarium do next? Well, the owner of the immediately the owner of the Serpentarium jumped into, you heard the people watching, you know, Gasp and Horror. And he knew something was going on.

He jumped into the cage and tried to save the kid. Little David. And failed. And that night, Haas woke up in the middle of the night.

I'm assuming he didn't get much sleep. He had a revolver, a Luger in his bedroom. He put the shells in it. And he went into Cookie's cage and he put nine bullets in his brain.

And by the way, he had had Cookie for many, many years. And Cookie was a favorite of his. It was an animal that he loved in a way that probably only herpetologists, somebody like me, who studies reptiles and likes them, you know, can understand. I argue that in some ways it's the operation of a phenomenon that cognitive psychologists call heuristics.

Heuristic is sort of a mental shortcut. And it sometimes leads to good logical correct answers. But sometimes it doesn't. In this case, it seems to be the operation of a type of heuristic called a moral heuristic.

And the moral heuristic is revenge. And at one point, the New York Times actually wrote an editorial about that event. And the editorial writer, I think, got it right. And the editorial writer wrote, killing Cookie made no sense intellectually, but it felt right emotionally.

And the reason it didn't make sense intellectually, of course, is the idea that a crocodile would do what a crocodile does is hardly surprising. That's what crocodiles do. His brain is smaller than a walnut. He is a creature largely of instinct, particularly when it comes to food.

And he was doing what crocodiles do. He was not a moral agent, which I would argue is one of the biggest differences between humans and other species. We are moral agents. So the interesting thing is that Haas, the owner, in some ways related to Cookie, as if Cookie was a person, that Cookie was a moral agent.

And in some ways that's a variation of what Jim Thompson was doing with the word, wasn't it? Which is, you're assuming that the animal has agency and behaves or has human-like qualities, and that you're therefore obliged or required to treat this other creature as if in some ways it had human-like qualities. I'm sure that if you interviewed Haas, he clearly would know the difference at an intellectual level between a crocodile and a person. But you're quite right.

He's basically treated in the same way that we would a person. This similarly played out in a bizarre incident that happened in Tennessee, where an elephant named Mary killed its groom while in a circus parade in 1916. And they hung the elephant to death. And to me that was the ultimate example of where we've anthropomorphized animals that we give it capital punishment in a sense, for something that was clearly not morally culpable.

So people listening to these stories would say, wow, those are really crazy stories. But as you pointed out in the book, this tendency we have to anthropomorphize animals is actually really ubiquitous. You draw a contrast between the way we relate to the giant panda and the giant salamander. Tell me what the giant salamander is, what it looks like, and how our attitudes to what these different animals are shaped by the ways in some ways that we anthropomorphize them.

Yeah, so the animals in some way are similar. The giant panda and the giant Chinese salamander, and that they're both endangered and they both live in China. And they're both really special, although in quite different ways. The giant Chinese salamander is basically a six foot long bag of brown slime with beady eyes.

And to me they're striking. I wouldn't say that they're beautiful, but they're stunning just in their size. I don't know, they're just charismatic, but I don't think most people would agree with that. But you're not going to see the World Wildlife Fund putting a picture of the giant Chinese salamander on their logo.

Instead they use the panda. And the panda, you know, in some ways looks a little bit like a human, but it's basically a faker in the sense that it has these giant circles around its eyes, which ethologists call baby releases. So we look at that panda and it basically logs onto that, jams into that maternal instinct that we have when we see creatures with big eyes and it impose on them that in some ways it reminds us of a human infant. So for example, researchers have shown that one of the biggest predictors of whether or not people will give money to save animals is the size of the animal's eyes.

And panda certainly have it when it comes to eye size. When we come back, do our pets actually improve our lives? Pet owners. We're better off in terms of their psychological and physical health than non-pet owners, but so are people with Mercedes-Benz.

You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shaka Vedandam. Ah, the faint scent of Fakker 50. It's time to dust off your It's Not Burnt, It's Well Done, Apron. You're ready to tackle the garden.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shaka Vedandam. When we think about pets in the United States, we often picture cats, dogs, maybe a hamster. But how hurts dog says our relationship with animals, especially those we consider pets, is largely dictated by our communities and culture.

So for example, I've got a friend that's an anthropologist who was born and raised in Kenya. And in the village where he was raised, they kept dogs. The dogs were allowed to roam freely in the village. They really liked dogs that we would consider mean dogs because they scared away animals and they scared away strangers.

But they were considered pets. In fact, in his language, they don't even have a word for pet. And I once asked him, I said, Niyaga, would you let a dog in your house when you were living in Africa? He said, no.

I said, would you let a dog eat at the table? And you know, feed them to table scraps? He said, no. I said, no, but you let a dog sleep in your bed.

And then look at the horror on his face. It was like if I said, hey, I got this really cool rat. I just caught down at the Hudson River. You want to sleep at the night?

And in fact, I recently got some new data on this. So it turns out that in the United States, we have amongst the highest rate of dog ownership in the world. And there are enormous differences between countries in dog ownership. So there's about 250 dogs per thousand people in the United States.

In Egypt, there's about 5 dogs per thousand people. So these cultural variations and what people, you know, what's acceptable is a pet and what's not is just huge. I want to spend a moment talking about the relationships that we have with pets in North America. I know that people spend a lot of money on pets, but as I read your book, I was just shocked at how high that number is.

How much we spend on our pets every year. It's pushing about $80 billion a year right now. It's an enormous amount of money. I mean, that's a feed of aircraft carriers.

Yeah, it is. And if you even adjusted for inflation, the amount of money that we spend on pets each year in the United States has more than doubled in the last 30 years per capita. The real increase in spending has been at the high end. Gourmet Pet Food for dogs.

You can buy food that you would eat. In fact, I tease my wife and say, what we're going to do is we're ready for the giant decline. The giant decline is we're going to stack up on dog food and when the hurricane comes. But it's also things like pet daycares, pet spies.

There's a hotel that has a zen room where you can get your pets a massage. And I don't know what else pets do in a zen room. We're talking about dog parks. We're talking about jewel columns.

We're talking about pet fashion weeks. We're talking about all these things and the pet food industry calls this the humanization of pets. And it really has taken off in the last 30 years. And what do you think is happening psychologically here?

Well, you know, people in some ways are perhaps investing more in their pets than they're investing in their fellow human beings, maybe even their fellow family members. Yeah, it's interesting. I thought about that a lot. And I think it's partially due to demographic trends.

One of the things that we know is that there's a paradox. Many paradoxes in our relationships with animals. One of them is who's most in love with their pets. So it turns out that people living alone tend to be most attached to their pets.

However, they also have, they're less likely to have a pet. And so people that are least attached to their pets tend to be adults with children in their family. But they're most likely to be living with a pet because they get pets for the kids. Once the kids leave, they get rid of the pets.

So what happens is people living alone are more attached to their pets. And what we know is that there's now more people living alone. People are getting married later. If they're getting married at all.

They're living longer after the kids leave. And, you know, there's a number of trends. And so there's more people living alone. And these people tend to be more attached to their pets.

Another factor is advertising and publicity by the pet products industry that push the idea that pets are good for people. Then if you get a pet, you will be happier and healthier person. Is this actually true? That owning a pet is good for your health and your longevity?

We have overwhelming evidence now that for a lot of people, you know, interacting with their pet does have short-term effects on their physiology, lowers their stress, makes them feel better. The question you ask, however, was different. That was, are pets really good for our health and make us live longer? And here my answer is that we don't have particularly good evidence for the long-term impact of pets on human health.

I have a stack of reprints in my office, which people have found that, you know, people with pets, you know, they sleep better, that they go to the doctor less, that they have better wellbeing, that they're less lonely, etc, etc. But I have another snack of reprints in my office that says just the opposite. That people with pets are more lonely, that they're more likely to go to the doctor, that they're more likely to drink a lot, that they're more likely to have ulcers. But you never hear about those studies, you know, in the news, they don't make the news.

There's very little evidence that pets make people live longer. And one of the problems we have is which direction the causal arrow points, for example, recent study by the Rand Corporation found that pet owners, in fact, were better off in terms of their psychological and physical health and non-pet owners, but as they pointed out, so where people with Mercedes-Benz is. People with pets tend to be wealthier, they tend to be younger, they tend to live in nicer places. In other words, the socioeconomic factors may be that it's not that pets are making people happier and healthier, it's that happy or healthier people are more likely to have pets.

We have very little data to test those two different hypotheses. You present some really striking studies in the book, which talk in some ways of the downside of having pets, you say that some 85,000 Americans are injured each year according to the CDC, because they trip over their pets or otherwise are injured by them. And I understand your neighbor, Anne, is one of those victims. My neighbor, Anne, is one of those victims.

She's a classic case, she was walking her dog and the leash wrapped around her leg and she fell over and she broke her collarbone. I recently went on Facebook and I put a call and I said, if any of you have ever been injured by walking your dog, please write me now. I could not believe the response 80 people responded to me. Many of them were professionals in the field.

Some of them even sent me their x-rays, which I was, and some of these incidents were not trivial. Some of these incidents were life changing. So there are downsides to pet ownership. So there's a new frontier in pet ownership now and I want to play you a clip.

This is from the company Sony and they presented this account of a dog at a tech conference. Let's start with design. First, the obvious. Ivo is adorable.

He wags his tail, wiggles his ears, wigs his eyes, and even does that doggy smile. You know that smile that dogs do when you're scratching just right and they kind of tilt their head and half-close their eyes and they open their mouth a little and smile? Yeah, that's fine. So of course how Ivo is in a real dog.

Ivo is a robot and it really looks like humans are completely indiscriminate when it comes to who we will consider and what we will consider to be pets. Yeah, the thing about Ivo is got an interesting history. Sony originally developed Ivo. And Ivo is a robotic dog and it does all kind of things.

It'll fetch. It'll signal you its emotions. It'll respond when you call its name. The problem with Ivo is that it's metal and shiny.

So it doesn't have fur. So Ivo had some real expensive. It really cost about $2,000. But it didn't catch on initially.

But Ivo was recently resurrected by Sony. And I've looked at the new promotional videos of Ivo and I'm ready to get one. It looks pretty good. And there's been studies where they've taken Ivo and some other types of robotic pets into things like nursing homes and to see if they have the same impact on people living in nursing homes.

In terms of morale and well-being as they do a real dog. And it's also been sort of mixed. But some of the cases Ivo has actually done better in some cases than an actual animal. And some of this I'm guessing might have to do with the fact that Ivo doesn't have some of the downsides that owning a real dog might have.

Ivo is not going to bark uncontrollably at night or bark at your friends when they come over for a party. I mean dogs and cats and pets can sometimes induce stress within families and emotional and psychological problems within households. Absolutely they can. The other thing that Ivo doesn't do is raise the pesky ethical questions that come with pet ownership.

You don't have to worry about the ethics of depriving Ivo of a sex life by castrating him. You don't have to worry about the ethics of leaving Ivo alone for long periods of time while you're at your office during the day. You don't have to take Ivo for a walk three times a day and then pick up poop as you walk it down the road. So I think Ivo's got some real advantages.

There's been an explosion of research into pet ownership. And in fact one of them actually looks at how humans come to choose different pets. The researchers Michael Roy and Nicholas Christenfeld took pictures of owners and dogs in dog parks to examine the important question of whether dogs and their owners tended to look alike. Walk me through the experiment and what did it find?

Yeah what they did was they took pictures of dogs and owners in dog parks and then they showed these pictures to people that did not know the owners of the dogs and they asked them to match them up and they presented sort of a 50-50 choice. They asked people which dog belongs to the son which of these two dogs. And if people did not look like their dogs you'd expect a 50-50 hit rate. They simply random chance.

But they didn't find that. They found it was between 65 and 70% of people correctly matched what people looked like knowing nothing about their person with their dogs. Now Shaker I read that study and I'm just shaking my head thinking no way that this is true. However there's now been at least three studies that have replicated this in different countries under different circumstances.

So I reluctantly become a believer. There is some tendency for people to look like their dogs. So besides the many animals that you already talked about you also own a cat whose name is Tilly and you have what other cat owners might think is a rather idiosyncratic way of expressing your affection for Tilly. In the book you write don't feel bad Tilly I love you even if you are a socially constructed parasite.

Yeah, these questions are parasite and this is the view that pets are basically a form of evolutionarily what's called nest parasitism which we see in birds. So for example let's take the cow bird. What cow bird does is it lays its eggs and another bird's nest, let's say a rinsed nest. And it then flies away and leaves its eggs for this rinsed to hatch.

The rinsed sits on the egg until it hatches and so the rins winds up raising the bird of the baby of another species. And that's how we got Tilly. What happened is this little kitten showed up one day on our doorstep. I was away.

I came home and my wife had this strange grin on her face and I thought you know I never quite seen that look. What is that? She had this grin and she says come here come here come here and she shows me this lovely little cat. And we were hooked.

We were hooked. So what do we do? We've been raising Tilly ever since. We've basically been cons by Tilly's mom to take care of her nestlings.

We don't share any genes with Tilly. But yet the average pet owner over the life of the pet will invest roughly $10,000 in their pet. So we have a $10,000 worth of nest parasite living with us. We get our money's worth out of it.

Well you think you'll get your money's worth because of course it's the parasite that's having the last time. Absolutely. When we come back, how the contradictions in the ways we think about animals lead to paradoxes in how we treat them. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

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She's an indoor outdoor cat. And so when she went to go outside, I let her outside. And what she does some of the time is kill small animals. Sometimes birds.

More often it's small mice and volals, creatures like that. I am actually more conflicted by being a cat owner than I am over any other aspect of my relationships with animals. And of course the cat is doing what comes naturally to the cat. The cat is a predator.

You can't expect the cat to be behaving any different. But the fact that millions of Americans own cats mean that in some ways they're at least indirectly sanctioning this mass motor of for example. Yeah, and mass murder it is. Depending on the statistics, somewhere between 1 billion and 5 billion birds each year are killed by our pet cats.

Furthermore cats are obligate carnivars. They have to eat meat. And so I've got lots of friends that are vegetarians and vegans and they're morally opposed to eating meat. But yet they keep cats and they have to buy animal flesh to keep their cats happy and healthy.

It's a big moral problem for some people. You ran sort of the calculations on this and you described them in the book. Mathematically a cat consumes about 2 ounces of meat a day. That's about 50 pounds of meat a year.

By contrast snakes only consume maybe 5 pounds of meat a year. So the impact of having a cat, the moral impact if you will, is 10 times greater than the moral impact of owning a snake. And of course most animal lovers will be horrified if you would suggest replacing kittens with snakes. Or maybe even as we discussed feeding kittens.

I actually developed a scale one time I was interested in this issue and I developed a scale which I called the feeding kittens to Bowe constrictor scale. I was actually trying to make fun of psychological skills. But it turned out to produce some very interesting things. So for example, most of my students that I gave the scale to said that it was okay to feed mice to Bowe constrictors.

But it was not okay to feed mice to cats which was interesting. When I asked them, why is no cat to feed mice to a Bowe constrictor but not a cat? One of my students put it perfectly. She said if my cat ate mice she wouldn't be like me.

And that to me I can't say the whole thing about what we project onto the animals that we live with. If my cat ate mice she wouldn't be like me. Well she's not like you girl. But in some ways bringing sort of cat food home just like you bring your own groceries home allows that student in some ways to preserve that illusion.

Absolutely she's preserving the illusion. She's preserving the illusion. Now if I were a better person perhaps I would keep my cat indoors. Which is what a lot of my friends tell me is I should make her an indoor cat.

Well I resist doing that. And my reasoning is probably equally fallacious. Is that if I were a cat I would rather be an indoor out there cat than a cat that lives in a big cage and spends its day looking outside through the window with the birds flitting around. Now I know that by letting my cat go outdoors I subject her to the tough things in the wild.

In other words she could get eaten by a coyote. She can't get hit by a car because we live on a road that doesn't have any cars go down. But the life of an indoor out door cat tends to be shorter even though she's had a long and good life. But I can't completely justify doing that because of the toll she takes on the small animal life.

But I live with it. So the more we think of animals as sort of members of our family the more we think of them as being like us. In some ways this raises a profound moral paradox does it not. Which is that if we actually think of these animals as being like us how in the world can we in any good conscience confine them to our homes confine them to cages treat them as if they were our captives to do with as we please.

Well I think that's a great point. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. And I've really quite seriously been thinking about is it ethical to keep animals as pets. If we really think of them as autonomous beings what right do we have to take away all their autonomy by controlling every aspect of their life.

What they eat, where they go, when they go. And increasing where they're taking control of their genes which created its own problems. And so I'm thinking increasingly that I'm wondering about the ethics of keeping animals as pets. To me the logic of pet keeping is not that different than the logic of meat eating.

I eat meat and I know the arguments against it are good. And they're better than my argument for eating meat which is basically I like the way it tastes. Well I feel the same way about my cat. I love my cat.

But she carries with her a moral burden. It's my moral burden. It's not her moral burden. I'm the moral agent.

I'm the adult in the room. And I'm the one that has to deal with thinking about this stuff. Although most people conveniently repress it and don't think about it. You say in the book that you live in what one philosopher calls the troubled middle.

And that's what you're talking about here. That you're in some ways you're trying to navigate these contradictions. And it's really impossible to do so with consistency. Yes.

One of the things that I've concluded in 30 years of studying human animal relationships is one of my colleagues. The only consistency about human animal relationships is inconsistency. And I think that this is the human condition. As a psychologist I study human animal interactions because I think they reveal a lot about the human condition.

And so the real subtext of my work in some ways is how do you get out of bed in the morning and get through the day and be a good person. I'm wondering how in some ways as you're pointing out these contradictions are unresolvable. Given the contradictions that you've laid out and the paradoxes of being a pet owner, some of the moral costs that come with being a pet owner, if you're current animals you would lose them if they were to die, would you get replacements for them today? Boy that's a great question.

That is such a tough question. I've thought about it. I definitely would not get a dog. I miss having a dog actually.

My wife and I are both dog people. We haven't had a dog for 10 years. And it's because our wife's now doesn't lend us. I don't think a dog would be happy living in our house because we're away too much during the day.

I can't stand the idea of leaving them in the kennel. Our cat's happy to live by herself. I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is that I would give another cat.

The moral dilemmas of pet ownership pale in comparison to the moral dilemmas posed by our use of animals in sport and as food. Hal explores some of the deepest contradictions we have toward animals by looking at the sport of cockfighting. First of all, cockfighting is a moral legal now than it was when I was doing that work, but it's just as brutal now. So basically in a cockfight what you have two chickens and you have two handlers and you have a referee in a pet, which is roughly 15 feet in diameter.

The referee says, pit him, the handlers let him go and the two roosters try and kill each other. One rooster almost invariably dies because they have gaffes which are basically knives attached to their legs. And it's basically about gambling. There's money changing hands.

And so I entered this clandestine world and lived in that clandestine world for a couple of years. Now anyone who hears what you've just described would say, all right, this is morally unconscionable. We cannot allow this to happen. We need to ban this sport.

It has been banned in all parts of the country and many parts of the world. But tell me a little bit more about what happens when you look more closely at the life of one of these roosters that's raised for cockfighting. And you contrast this in some ways with the life of your average broiler chicken. Yeah, well first I want to say that I do not justify cockfighting.

Everything you said about it is correct. It is brutal. It is unjustified. It's now banned throughout the United States and it should be banned throughout the United States.

So I'm not trying to justify. For me, as I started studying cockfighters and how they thought I became really interested in their moral worlds. And I also began to ask myself some difficult questions. And one of the difficult questions was if I were a chicken, if I come back in the next world as a chicken, would I rather be an East Tennessee Gamecock or would I rather be a McNugget?

In other words, a chicken raised in a broiler house to become a McNugget. And to me, there is no doubt in my mind I would much rather be a Gamecock than a chicken destined to be served at McDonald's. Can you describe to me how you reach that conclusion? What is the life of that Gamecock and what is the life of that chicken that ends up as a McNugget?

Okay, first let's take a Gamecock. They live long lives and they live lives that are generally compared to a broiler chicken pretty darn amazing. They live on average two years. They're not usually fought till they're two years old.

For a chunk of their life, they live in a free range or they have way more room than a broiler chicken. They're fed incredibly well, a very diet. They get plenty of exercise. If they win a couple fights, they will use them as a stud rooster.

And what they'll do is they'll spend their life chasing the hens around. Not a bad deal. On the other hand, the life of a broiler chicken is absolutely horrendous. Their life only lasts between six and seven weeks.

They're basically meat machines, which means that they put on weights so fast that their legs can't really hold up their bodies. And so they have chronic leg pain, who's been called the world's largest animal welfare problem. They're jammed into giant broiler houses with 30,000 chicks in a broiler house, where they'll never see the sun. They'll never get to play on the grass.

They'll never get to peck it bugs. Their lungs will be burned with ammonia. It's an absolutely horrendous existence. And they will die.

A pretty lousy death will be crammed into a series of cages. They'll be hauled for miles in an open truck jammed into small little cages with their feathers flying down the interstate, where they will be hemmed upside down by their legs, dipped into an electrified water bath to stun them. And then they'll go through a carotid artery set of blades that will hopefully kill them quickly, although oftentimes it does not. So the life of a gamecock, oddly, is vastly better than the life of the nine billion chickens that Americans eat each year.

I mean, that is a billion with a B. You're writing the book, while Americans will sleep easy at night knowing cockfighting is banned in all 50 states, 35 million chickens will be stuffed into wire crates on their way to processing plants tomorrow. That makes you think, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely does.

When I began doing my research on the comparative cruelty of cockfighting versus McNuggets, I was stunned. I mean, I was absolutely stunned and I realized, you know, cockfighting should be illegal, but the casual chicken eater is committing a bigger sin in their own way than is the roosterfighter. And by the way, roosterfighters love their animals. That was one of the things I had to try wrapping my head around.

I was like, these guys really love chickens. The comedian Chris Rock once went on David Letterman and talked about some of the contradictions and the way we think about animals. He contrasted the football player Michael Vick, who went to prison for promoting dogfighting with the former governor of Alaska and hunting enthusiast, Sarah Pillin. She's shooting moosees?

She got the moose? Holding a dead bloody moose? Michael Vick's like, why am I in jail? Can that white lady shoot a moose?

Black man want to kill a dog? That's a crime. It does sound like a double standard, huh? Yeah, it does sound like a double standard.

We see the same thing in lots of areas of human animal interacting. For example, cockfighting is a sport of lower socioeconomic status whites and Hispanics. On the other hand, compare that with the sport of kings horse racing. Horse racing is finally coming under the gun.

In the last couple months, as you probably know, almost 30 animals were killed at the Santa Anita race track in California. And this has been going on for years and years and years. A number of red horses have died. Numbers in the thousands and thousands each year.

But yet very few people get bent out of shape about horse racing compared to cockfighting. So it is a class thing in some ways, isn't it? Very much so. Very much so.

It's a class thing. We started this conversation how by talking about some stories and paradoxes and contradictions from your own life. And I want to end the conversation in the same way. When you were in grad school, you were once asked to put a number of different creatures into boiling water.

Why were you asked to do this and walk me through what happened? Yeah, I was working in a chemical ecology lab. And we were interested in the chemical perceptions of, in this case, it was reptile snakes, maybe snakes. And we basically were interested in whether or not these animals were born with an instinctive preference for certain types of foods.

And of course, they eat live animals. So in this case, there was another researcher in Utah that was interested in doing somewhat research for his dissertation. And he said, our lab, basically a menagerie, it came in a big box, which said, basically said, this side up live animals. And the box contained an array of animals.

It contained worms, crickets, it contained some scorpions, it contained a lizard, it contained another snake, it contained in a mouse. And so I was the lowest ranking member of the lab. So they assigned me to basically convert these animals to a solution that could be dabbled on a swab and exposed to these snakes. And so the procedure involved dropping these animals into water that was not quite boiling.

And I thought, okay, I'll do it. And I dropped the first one in, then I think it was a cricket, and it just died instantly. And then I did the scorpion, which was a bigger animal. It didn't die so quickly.

And then I had to do the, as I recall, it was a lizard. And I like lizards. I like reptiles, and it was not good. It took a much longer time for the lizard to die in the water.

And I was getting upset. And then I was working my way up the phylogenetic scale. And then there was the mouse. It was a cute little mouse.

It wasn't a lab mouse. It was one of these cute little whittling mice. And I took a look at the mouse. And as I recall, I actually picked it up.

I was getting ready to drop it in the water. And I just couldn't do it. And I just put the mouse back in its cage. And I went and told the lab manager, I can't do this.

Somebody else is going to have to do it. That just haunted me for a very long time. And it really was the event that got me on this journey that I've been on for more than 30 years now, about trying to understand why it was so easy to do the cricket and harder to do the lizard. And I couldn't do the mouse.

And I've never come to grips with it. But I've been chasing that down. It really is the thing that got me thinking about the psychology of human animals interactions and why we treat some animals different than others. So one way that people justify eating meat and treating animals the way they do is that they believe there's a status hierarchy between animals.

And so long the lines are what happened in your lab. So worms are lower on the scale than scorpions, scorpions are lower on the scale than mice. You once watched the Steven Spielberg movie, ET, with your daughter. And you came up with a thought experiment that probably ruined the movie for her.

Actually, my twin daughters, they're both there. And probably most listeners are aware of what happens at the end of the movie. So ET and Elliot are running around California. They're buddies for the previous two hours.

And at the end, ET's mom comes back to get them and they're flying saucer. And ET's with that great big head and big eyes. And he says, he croaks. He goes, come with me.

We'll go back to Zork and we'll have a great time. And Elliot says, no, I can't do it. And ET takes off. And it goes back to Zork and it's all good.

And I went to Zork and I said, hey, girls, what if ET wanted Elie to go back to Zork with him? And so he grabs Elliot. And he drags him screaming into the flying saucer because he wouldn't use coming in a research experiment. They wouldn't use him in an experiment because there's like this AIDS-like virus invading the people of Zork.

And the Zorkians are much smarter than Americans. They're much smarter than Elliot. Would it be okay for ET to kidnap Elliot and take him and use him in biomedical research experiment? If my kids were horrified, no, dad, no, no.

I thought the same thing, no, that would not be a good idea. But on the other hand, what I realized was that our use of animals in biomedical research is based on the same premise. You know, we're smarter than other creatures. We're way smarter than mice.

We're way smarter than dogs. We're somewhat smarter than chimpanzees in our own ways. And that's our justification for using animals in biomedical research. And I was forced to the conclusion that, look, we're going to use animals in research.

We got to let ET take Elliot back to Zork and use him in a case. Obviously, it's the same sort of thought experiment that I did when I concluded we ought to feed kittens to bull constrictors, you know? But I still can't wrap my head around that. My heart's telling me one thing, even though logic is telling me something else.

And that's the gist of a lot of our inconsistencies with our interactions with animals. Hal Hart's dog is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University. He's the author of the book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Why it's so hard to think straight about animals.

Hal, thanks for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Oh, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. To learn more about Hal and his research, check out his blog, Animals and Us, from Psychology Today.

This week's show was produced by Thomas Liu. It was edited by Tara Boyle and Raina Cohen. Artemicludes Parth Shah, Laura Quirrell, and Jenny Schmidt. For more Hidden Brain, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

If you like today's show, please remember to share it with one friend. We're always looking for new people to discover Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.

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