← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:01]
Max's Owner
Don't chew on that, Max.
- [00:02]
Cooper's Owner
Cooper loves that chew too.
- [00:04]
Max's Owner
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food. Wow. He is loving it. What do you feed Cooper?
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Blue Buffalo Representative
Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula.
- [00:12]
Cooper's Owner
He never leaves a crumb.
- [00:13]
Blue Buffalo Representative
I love it because it's made with
- [00:15]
Cooper's Owner
high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies and wholesome whole grains.
- [00:19]
Max's Owner
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- [00:31]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
So good, so good, so good.
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- [01:00]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Humans have long believed themselves separate from and superior to the animal world. There's new science revealing that the animals we have lived alongside for millennia have helped shape the way our minds work today. On today's episode, science writer Michael Bond joins host Dr. Ganesh Taylor to argue that our relationship with animals has influenced human thought, culture and cogn and what this means for the way we understand ourselves. Let's join our host, Dr. Ganesh Taylor, now with more.
- [01:36]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Welcome to intelligence squared. I'm Dr. Ganesh Taylor, Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh. Our guest today is Michael Bond, an award winning science writer specialising in human behaviour. He is a former editor and reporter at the New Scientist. He won a British Psychological Society Book Award for his book the Power of Others. And his acclaimed book the Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way is an exploration of how humans navigate the world and has been translated into five languages. Today we will be talking about Animate, his fascinating new book which tells the story of our relationship with animals over the last 40,000 years and how living with animals has shaped our brains and our cultures. Welcome to Intelligence Squared.
- [02:31]
Cooper's Owner
Michael, thank you very much.
- [02:36]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
So thank you so much for writing this fantastic book. I'm a biologist too. I'm not a paleoanthropologist or anything like that. I'm just a good old fashioned biologist. But I learned so much reading this book that I would love to pick your brains a little bit about various topics within it. But just to get us started, I kind of wondered why, just to start at the top, basically, why did you write this book now?
- [03:09]
Cooper's Owner
So previously I've written about human psychology, particularly the dynamics of different groups and how people behave towards others who are different to them. And animals are, you could say, the ultimate out group if you like. And our behavior towards them reflects some of the behavior that you see in the dynamics between human groups. So I was starting from that angle. But there's also been a lot of research in biology lately on the cognitive abilities of other animals, on consciousness and intelligence and emotions and that kind of thing, which suggests that they have qualities that we had underestimated. So it was really a combination of my previous interest in human psychology and the recent research in animal science that seemed to be a good reason to dive in.
- [04:14]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, right, let's dive in and start unpacking this. I think it is really important to note that this is one of the major themes clearly in the book is this sort of othering that humans have, this sort of human centric sort of humans as being other than animals psyche that we seem to have these days. But that's very much in stark contrast with how things were before. So your book starts with a sort of really interesting, interesting expose of ancient history and cave art and what we understand of what human beings used to think potentially about animals and how they thought about it. And you know, you have this incredible start where you talk about these. Is it Neolithic cave art?
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Cooper's Owner
Neolithic. And previous to that, the Paleolithic, sort of late Ice age. Yeah.
- [05:16]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
And just to give our listeners a real sense for that, how many years ago are we talking about here?
- [05:23]
Cooper's Owner
So these cave paintings, they date back to around 40,000, in some cases 45,000 years old. And they appear all the way through into the early Neolithic, so up to about 8, 9, 10,000 years ago. So we're talking about from the period when humans first started to Homo sapiens first started to settle in Europe. And it's really, these paintings are the only evidence we have just about of the culture of those early humans. And the paintings consist almost entirely of animals on the walls of these caves.
- [06:08]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
I mean, it's just the numbers themselves, the dates are really mind boggling just in and of itself. It's pretty wild to imagine that they were human beings that cared about animals 40,000 years ago, cared enough to actually go to great lengths to generate these images. I actually went and watched the documentary, the Herzog documentary that you talk about in your book that shows some of the only footage of some of very rare caves with the paintings in. And you know, it's remarkable to consider that humans did this so many years prior to any form of technology. I mean, even the lights with which they were viewing these paintings and generating these paintings is completely unlike anything that we have now. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about how it was for you seeing this documentary. And also I think he went to some of these caves. Right. If I understood correctly. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
- [07:16]
Cooper's Owner
Yes, I mean, it was extraordinary going into these caves and just looking at this, this artwork, imagining how they were painted, imagining the artists going back 30, 35,000 years, the caves that I was looking at and the things that really stand out about it. Well, firstly is just the quality of the art and the obvious skills of the artist. They had an obvious knowledge of perspective and form and use of color. It's also the detail with which they painted these animals. They clearly observed the animals very closely and paid close attention because some of the details of the anatomy and the shape of the animals they would only have sort of known that by close observation. It's also strange that there are so few humans in these paintings. I mean, among the tens of thousands of animal paintings in the caves, there are perhaps around a hundred of humans and the human. The paintings of humans are usually not straight humans. They're hybrids or very anthropic figures, a mix of animal and human. Or they're involved in some strange ritual. It's impossible to know really what's. What's going on. But clearly animals dominated the worlds of those people and they were surrounded by them. They depended on them for their food, but also they had to avoid them for their own survival. So that sort of sense of immersion comes across in the art.
- [09:16]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Yeah, quite. I mean, I was also struck by the fact that there was at least mention in, in part that the sort of location of the cave art is often in spaces that were previously inhabited by some of these animals, like the cave bears and other such animals. And so there's this real sort of outward facing sort of feeling to it. At least I got reading it this idea that humans are not really thinking about themselves at that stage, rather thinking more about what do they see in their environment, that they are within the environment of these organisms and sort of observing them and reflecting on them and that the separation between human and animal is not really there. And that sort of leads me onto the next Sort of thing, which you sort of beautifully unpack in the book about this idea that there's a role for potentially religion and sort of social culture in this separation and the sort of erection of boundaries between animals and. And human beings and how the different sort of faith lineages have different ways of handling that. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about how you came across that and any thoughts that came to you in particular about why this separation even there?
- [10:40]
Cooper's Owner
I mean, some of the. What we imply about religion and spirituality at that time comes from the apparent reverence with which they painted animals. The animals in the cave art are rarely sort of generic figures. They're more. They appear to be portraits of individual animals. And there was clearly a kind of reverence and perhaps awe that they felt towards them. But there's another set of evidence that tells us something about the people of that time, which is the burials, how they were. Often people were buried with animals in their graves. There's a famous archaeological find in the Middle east of a child who was buried around 80,000 years ago with the antlers of a fallow deer on their chest. And then a little later, a young woman with her newborn child. And the child had been laid on the wing of a Hooper swan. And there are many cases of people being buried with their hands next to the wings of birds or parts of the wings of birds. It's hard to say exactly what's going on in those cases, but clearly the animals played some kind of ritualistic role in these people's lives. And likely a spiritual role, possibly a religious role. Perhaps these animals were helping or accompanying people into their journey into the afterlife. Who knows? But you get a pretty clear sense looking at this kind of evidence, both the burials and the art, that that relationship between animals and humans, it lacked the kind of stiff boundaries that you see today, the interspecies boundaries that you see today. But that started to change in the Neolithic when people started to settle down and develop agriculture and domesticate animals.
- [13:00]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
So, I mean, I just have to say this one thing which I think really made me raise my eyebrows. That point about bird wings and being next to human wings in the burials. Of course, the study of homology, the similarity between body plans and human beings and animals, is something that comes again around in human history much, much later. And we come to appreciate that the vertebrate limb is something that is conserved, for example. And it was really striking to me, this idea that even then, 40,000 years ago, people sort of intuitively understood that these structures are Similar or there's something to them, to place them in those locations. They aren't being buried with wings on top of their heads, it's next to their arms, the sort of homologous structures. But I'd like to lean into this idea that there is this separation, as you said, that sort of starts to develop in our human cultures. And you talked about this idea that in certain sort of faiths, even that we still see in our modern day, the way in which animals are treated within those faiths is quite different. So the sort of multi dayic faiths where animals and animal human hybrids still exist versus those where it's very clear that animals are treated as being sort of commodities, perhaps, if that's the word that you might use. So when does that sort of start happening? When do we start to see this switch from sort of viewing ourselves as part of their world or them as part of ours, to being more sort of utilitarian really?
- [14:46]
Cooper's Owner
You actually see it in the art which starts to take on a different form in the early Neolithic. There's a Neolithic settlement in Turkey, Catalhoyuk, where there are murals of animals, but the animals appear with humans. And there's one particular, that mural that stands out where there's a red deer stag in the middle of a group of men who appear to be teasing it or baiting it, and someone's hanging onto its nose, another figure on its tail. And that is the period when people started to abandon the hunter gatherer lifestyle of their ancestors and settle and develop crops and domesticate animals. And from there on in, the art presents a picture of animal, human relationships that is more one of sort of domination with people using animals. And you see that in Middle Eastern art all the way through the later Neolithic. And then that develops into the philosophy of early Greek and Roman civilizations, Aristotle and then into the Middle Ages and through to today. That sense of animals being something that humans can use and being inferior, we've sort of used that as a way of trying to establish human superiority and give us a reason for seeing ourselves as having some higher purpose and not simply the physical fate that we see animals enduring, dying, decaying, returning to the earth. But as you mentioned, there are plenty of. I mean, that's a particularly sort of Western dynamic. There are plenty of, of communities who have never recognized that strict boundary between human and animal. I mean, there are, for example, many Native American communities. The animalistic beliefs there they see humans and animals are sharing a common origin. So humans are seen as formerly animal and animals as formerly Human. And there's a sense of kinship and codependency. And you see that in many Eastern religions. So it's not a homogenous picture throughout human history, but certainly the sort of dominant attitude in Western civilizations has, has been one that animals are there for something, something that humans can use.
- [18:01]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
I have to say, one of the most amusing parts of the book for me actually was the part where you were talking about the surprisingly large numbers of cases where humans have sued animals, like treated animals, as if they had, you know, choice agency who committed crimes. I mean, I was completely giggling to myself reading these sections of the book, imagining, you know, groups of monks suing termites. I mean, first of all, how did you even come across that? But secondly, what does that actually tell us about how we really think about these animals? I mean, we clearly have quite a complicated picture even in those times in our minds.
- [18:49]
Cooper's Owner
And there's a historian who collected accounts of these animal trials a couple of hundred years ago. And so he was a good source of this very, very sort of strange episode in medieval history. But it sort of demonstrates that a lot of people, particularly people who were close to animal, who worked with animals, they didn't recognize this grand difference between humans and non humans, and they considered animals to be responsible for their own actions. One of the most famous animal trials is of a pig who killed and partially devoured a child. This is in southern France in 15th 16th century. And the pig was convicted and condemned to death and was hung like a human would be. And there's another case actually, where a pig was hung dressed in the clothes of a man, which suggests that the pig was looked on as a creature that had some kind of moral responsibility for its own actions. But in all these cases, and in the one of the termites and the monks that you mentioned, the animals were given a lawyer who would defend their case. And in terms of the termites who had been accused of, of eating the furniture and the food in this monastery in Brazil, the monk, the lawyer, tried to argue that they were perfectly permissible for them, they needed to eat, and that they were clearly industrious, more industrious than the monks. And what happened there was that the termites were guilty and they had to be moved from their side. But I don't think these trials were any kind of joke. They were just a reflection of how a lot of people viewed animals and the sort of moral equivalent, animals and humans being part of the same moral community.
- [21:26]
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- [24:00]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
I mean, it's striking, isn't it? Because on one hand we, you know, in our past, we have these episodes where we have treated animals as being part of the same moral landscape and simultaneously we treat them as very much not. I mean, you know, one of the taboo subject that comes up a couple of times in the course of the book is of course, bestiality, basically people who transgress sexually into engaging with animals in that context and the relationship at times with cultural acceptance and normalcy that you report and other times where, for example, it might lead to mental illness. I believe there was one case that you talk about in the book. And so there's this sort of real sense of discomfort, actually that we have in relating to animals where sometimes there are other. And other times we sort of turn a bit of a blind eye and sometimes we hold them to the same standards and we'll take them to court. I wonder if, you know, what is the sort of sense that you got going through all of these different sort of phases of history and different kind of scenarios as to, you know, does it leave you with a sense that our relationship with animals is something that is always in flux and always complicated?
- [25:20]
Cooper's Owner
I think it does. It was really impossible to find a real thesis through all this because the. I mean, one thing you can say is that through history, since the Neolithic, there seems to be always have been a sort of discomfort or an anxiety associated with the idea that. That humans are a kind of animal. And that's perhaps where a lot of our norms and customs of so called civilized behavior come from. The ways we eat and you know, how nudity is often unacceptable. Bestiality, as you say, a lot of these practices, they induce discomfort because they emphasize the aspects of ourselves that we share with animals. And of course that reminds us that we also share a fate with them, that we will die and we will return to the earth. And I think a lot of our attitudes towards other species are an attempt to sort of deny that. That common ground animals are less intelligent, less rational, less moral than us. And therefore we can claim this sort of higher ground, this higher purpose. But there is so much flux within all that because different communities have always had different attitudes depending on their own relationship with animals, their own closeness to nature. But a lot of it, I think, does come back to this idea that animals, it's easy to treat them as. As an out group in order to Establish some sense of purpose or meaning for ourselves.
- [27:23]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Yeah, there's definitely. I mean, I pick this up in several points in the book that there's this idea that animals, in a sense, reflect something about ourselves back to us. And of course, the death point is very valid. But also, you know, to say it explicitly, you know, you also talk about how we attribute many sort of negative human traits to different animals. And of course, one of the discomforts that we see in this reflection is the way we treat animals because we think of them as less superior to ourselves. But of course, we also do that to different humans. When talking about different humans that we have, you know, discriminated against in a historical context, we often use negative animal like. Like language to describe those groups. And that's something that you talk about in your book.
- [28:13]
Cooper's Owner
Right, but the. The use of that kind of language. Yeah. Is very, very prominent. I mean, people describe others as animals or vermin or. Or bestial, and that's always an insult. So we've sort of used that kind of attitude, our attitude towards animals, to denigrate members of our own. Of our own species. And that's been the case all through history. As if. I mean, it was the philosopher Marion Mischley who observed how people treat members of other cultures as if they were members of other species. I think that's a very, very pertinent point. It's a very easy out group to sort of use in our own attitudes towards each other.
- [29:21]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Yeah, quite, quite. And of course, I mean, the classic example of that that you discuss in the book is about wolves. Wolves, who obviously, I believe, are actually the first domesticated species. We now recognize them also as being dogs. Right. But wolves also, who were hunted to near extinction by human beings, with whom we have a very, very sort of terse relationship where, you know, you talk in the book, at least, about the lengths to which human farmers will go to sort of defend their crops and lands. Well, not crops so much, but herds and livestock from these animals. And how wily and clever and deceitful these animals are seen to be. And yet somehow how most like us they are, in a sense. And this question of who domesticated who and. And the continuation of that in dogs is really something that I was struck by reading your book, basically.
- [30:31]
Cooper's Owner
I mean, our persecution of wolves is. We always argue that it's because they take livestock also that they're a threat to humans. There's this persistent idea that wolves will kill humans, but there are very, very few cases of that happening. I mean, one study found between 2000 and 2020. I think there was nine cases worldwide of wolves killing humans without rabies, which given the number of interactions is very, very small. And I think it is so interesting how similar wolves are to humans in their behavior. Wolves have a similar social dynamic. They look after their young until adulthood. They are extremely adaptable. They can survive in almost every environment, every landscape. So we sort of treat them, it's back to that idea of they are in some ways part of the same moral community. We judge them as if they have a moral responsibility for their own behavior. And so we don't like it when they kill their prey with apparent what looks like cruelty. We judge them on, on, on, on human, human terms. And they also of course remind us that we are animals ourselves. And I think it's those, those that's the sort of subtext for why they've been so persecuted rather than just the apparent threat they cause.
- [32:30]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
But of course also, I mean I, I, I don't remember the exact statistic now, but it is something quite shocking. Like I genuinely think that something in the order of half of the biomass on Earth is human beings and their pets, cats and dogs. Dogs being the majority of the pets. Listeners should probably go fact check that. Exactly. But it is something shocking like that. And of course dogs are domesticated wolves, right? So we have this domesticated version of a species with which we feel very differently about. Right. We don't consider them to be very other. I appreciate the fact that your cat has joined us on screen just as I start talking about dogs. But it's true there's these sort of cultural tropes as well, right? About dog people and cat people. And in the book you talk about it, I now truly believe it. Seeing the cat on screen, you are more of a cat person I suppose. But it's interesting that in certain ways we feel very comfortable to ask people that, right? Like oh, are you a dog person or are you a cat person? I mean a slightly light hearted question I really wanted to ask you actually was another one of these types of questions that people get asked all the time, which is what do you think your spirit animal is?
- [33:57]
Cooper's Owner
Well, I'd never been asked that before. Maybe this guy cat. I find cats interesting just because it's impossible to know what they're thinking and they're very independent and yet they are in some ways socialized. But I think if I had to be a different species I might choose something that had quite a sort of non human experience, a different experience of the world, like a swallow or some kind of migratory bird which has that ability to navigate using aspects of the environment that we can't sense. But, I mean, that point about our domestic animals, I mean, we do treat them like they're part of the. The family, and we grieve deeply for their loss. And dogs they domesticated from wolves 20, 25,000 years ago. Because the two lifestyles were similar, it is thought that they hunted together. And so dogs became part of human communities. It's not clear how cats became domesticated. They kind of probably domesticated us as much as we did them, but that this is an example of just how conflicted our attitudes towards animals are. We adore our pets, but we are very anxious about the parts of ourselves that we share with other species. And this, the attitude of other animals being inferior is very dominant throughout many cultures.
- [35:58]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
I mean, it also strikes me that, you know, one of the reoccurring themes is, in a sense, to me, is this idea that animals really are deeply within our psyche, right? Deeply, deeply so. And that that appears both during our childhood where, you know, talking about animals and relationships, you give some statistics about how children often rate animals as being equally important in their relationship landscapes mentally as other human beings, so that there's no distinction there. But also, you talk in the book a good amount about the sort of clinical manifestations of sort of animals and animal imagery in what happens in human beings who aren't as functional, say, for example. And I wondered if you could sort of talk to that. This idea that there are many phobias, for example, that people have, or emotional reactions that they have towards animals or perceptions of animals, even if they've never even come across those animals. So there's this real sense, at least I got, of animals being really deeply rooted in our minds. Is that fair to say?
- [37:21]
Cooper's Owner
I think it is. And there's an interesting contrast between our sort of conscious experience of animals and our unconscious experience. So animals appear in our dreams disproportionately, given how little interaction we have with them now, also in hallucinations, people with forms of dementia and visual impairment that come with visual hallucinations, animals appear in those hallucinations, a huge amount and distorted animals and human animal hybrids. And then there are, yes, lots of pathologies, lots of people who have this sort of instinctual fear of birds, spiders, more obvious, and snakes. There are then more serious mental illnesses, psychosis, such as lycanthropy, a rare disease, but an alarming one, where the patient has the feeling that they are another animal. I mean, they Fully believe it and adopt the animal's behavior, often a wolf. So they will adopt the sort of roaming behavior of a wolf and the wolf's attitude towards humans. And this is highly dysfunctional. And it's not clear why people or why their brains sort of fill the gap in their pathology with a sort of sense that they are a different animal. But that's been recorded throughout history. There's definitely a sense, I think we seem to be sort of attuned to other animals, even though day to day we may not experience them aside from our pets. But that ancestral closeness, if you like, is still part of our unconscious and plays a part in a lot of our sort of unconscious state of mind.
- [39:40]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Quite as we're reaching the end of our time. I wondered if you could just sort of share with us what is the sort of call to arms or call to action here that you would like for readers to walk away with this book. Like having read this book, basically what is the thing that you want, you hope that people think about more going forward and sort of carry in their day to day lives.
- [40:08]
Cooper's Owner
So that's quite a hard question because as we've been talking, our relationship with animals is so conflicted and contradictory and different people have different attitudes. But I suppose I would hope that people, that the book would encourage people to think more deeply about how we think about animals. The historical idea that we're different because animals are less intelligent or less rational, I mean, that's now is being undermined by modern biology very clearly. So what's left? And it seems clearer that our attitudes towards other animals are largely influenced by our attempts to try and establish a sense of meaning for ourselves, for humans in the world. And that's the sort of motivate, that's the level at which we're motivated to think about animals as separate to us, as inferior. And it can be frightening to consider our own physicality, our own sort of animal nature, and to focus more on our bodies and the things that we actually share with animals. Because it reinforces, as we've been saying, that sense that we do actually share the same fate as them. So I guess I would hope people will just think at another level about why they treat animals that way. And remember that other animals, aside from the differences in intelligence and thinking abilities, they are generally mostly sentient. They are trying to survive in the world just like we are. And that's the level, I think that we should determine our behavior towards them, not on the kind of sort of illusory arguments that have been used so often in history.
- [42:33]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Michael, thank you. That was Michael Bond, the author of How Animals Shape the Human Mind, which is now available online and in Stores. I'm Dr. Ganesh Taylor. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us.
- [42:52]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For more ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member at intelligencesquared.com forward/membership. And if you'd like to join us at any future events, you can see our full live events program over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared.
- [43:17]
Dr. Ganesh Taylor
Thanks for joining us.
- [43:35]
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- [44:07]
Cooper's Owner
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