Neighbours at War

Welcome to Quartz of the Living. Today we have with us Dr. Dinesh Wadiwe, an associate professor in human rights and social legal studies with a background in social and political theory. Dinesh is an active critical animal studies scholar and also has extensive research experience in disability rights. He is author of the war against animals and animals and capital. Dinesh is also co-editor with Matthew Crullow of Foucault and Animals and Dinesh is also a disability rights researcher and was part of a team of researchers who have produced two reports for the Australian Disability Royal Commission. Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Wadiwe, it's an immense honour to have you as part of the Quartz of the Living podcast. Thank you so much for having me on this. To begin with, we would love to hear a little bit about your journey. But for some of the early experiences and encounters or rather questions that drew you towards thinking so deeply about animals, violence, capital and political theory. Thank you so much for the question. In some ways it was an accident that I started thinking about animals as an academic. I had always personally been interested in the treatment of animals and as a young person was quite horrified on a personal level about some of the ways that we treated animals and quite early as a teenager I decided to become a vegetarian, I started to question lots of the ways that animals were long treated. However, I never made the link in terms of my academic or theoretical work until much later. When I was writing my PhD, my PhD was focused on how states had evolved in the use of violence in the 20th century, so there was a much more standard political theory thesis. And in the midst of that I spent a lot of time analysing the evolution of torture techniques in the 20th century. But somewhere along the line in doing that work, I started to notice that lots of the horrible ways that we have devised to treat humans overlap with the horrible ways that we treat animals. And for example, I started to see that there were some shared logics behind some of the torture techniques I was reading about in cases of human detention. There's a shared logic between that and some of the ways that animals were treated in animal agriculture. And this started me on a journey towards thinking about human engagement with animals. And in some ways it helped to link this personal discomfort that I had around how we treat animals with this theoretical set of questions that were emerging for me around our society encourages the animals to add a structure to that. Thank you so much for that response, Dr. Vadiville. And what you spoke about about how humans have been interacting with animals. One of the, you know, the focus areas of this season of quotes of the living has been neighborly encounters. And we are thinking about neighborly encounters beyond animals living in our cities, but also the intimate ways in which we encounter animals in our daily lives. And I recall that in your work on war against animals, you describe the live hand. You talk about chickens on the slaughter line who scratch, peck, and sometimes defecate on workers. And you also invite us to think of floods, fires, and other forms of disruptions that you think of as resistance. And there have been some arguments about how these acts are often futile, but you insist that they are still acts of struggle and resistance that animals are never really simply passive. So I'd like to ask, how do you think this attention to resistance should reshape our ethical vocabulary? Because when we recognize resistance, does it place a different kind of obligation on us than in terms of what violence or what violence is, we allow ourselves to commit against animals? I came at the question of resistance as a political theorist, and I was interested in resistance as a political way to describe the insubordination of beings towards power. In this respect, I think resistance is useful for a vocabulary, and it's one that's different from lots of the vocabulary that attends animal ethics generally. And one way I'd like to think about this is that animal rights theory is perhaps quite unique in that it was born in its modern incarnation, in its prominent mainstream articulation. It was born in analytic philosophy departments, and largely shaped by questions around from moral philosophy about what is the appropriate or responsible ways we should act in relation to animals who we regard as sentient, as intelligent, as having worlds or lives or emotions of their own. That led to a certain vocabulary that has shaped contemporary animal rights philosophy and ethics, and that's largely been a vocabulary that's interested in assessing the capabilities of animals in relation to their capacity to suffer or their capacity for intelligence. And to accord rights or recognition based upon that recognition. For me as a political theorist, I'm less interested in those conversations in moral philosophy, though I think they're important. We're much more interested in questions around power, violence, justice, and institutions. Resistance for me is a useful word because it moves the frame of our discussion to thinking about the relationships of power that shape animal lives, the way that violence and domination cooperate to shape the outcomes and perspectives or opportunities for animals. But also the way that animals might exercise agency within these Five Sessings. One reason that resistance is a useful word for me is that in some ways it doesn't have to get into and debate over the extent to which animals can be set to suffer or are intelligent. We can actually witness the way that animals resist in particular kinds of ways, and in this way, we can tell us that this phenomenon directly tells us about the ways that animals interact with our engagement within. So it tells us directly about the agency, if you like, of animals themselves. So for that reason I found it very useful, but I've also found it useful in a quite direct sense because much of my work tries to theorize the epistemic violence that we apply to animals when we think about them. And what I mean by that is the way that our knowledge systems cooperate to silence or prevent the perspectives of animals from interfering with the ways that we would like to use them. Animal resistance, in my view, directly responds to this subjective misconception that we have. And that's because, in my view, when animals resist, they are directly to describe or pushing their will onto us, including their will to live despite our will or a general human will to make animals die or suffer for our own purposes. So from this perspective, I think resistance is really useful because in some ways it tells us directly that animals are speaking to us. Animals are directly resisting our utilization of them and telling us that they have their own lives, they have their own desire to not be used, to not die or not suffer in relation to our demand to make use of them. I remember when I was reading your work and the points of resistance, often I guess in many situations when we think of non-human others and more than human others, we see visceral images of them in pain, often to a lay person it seems, the emotions of fear or the emotions of their animal is perhaps not understanding what is happening to them kind of passes off and you feel some sympathy, but when that framing of resistance, at least when I read it for the first time in your work, it really got me thinking exactly about the word that you mentioned about im subordination and then what that means for our ethical response. And I think exactly on what you said that it shows that they have their own desires and their will to live. And I think my next question is then also something that you mentioned in a larger sense in your work, which is that how resistance is paradoxically also central to systems of capitalist production. And I think this became quite clear during the COVID pandemic in a more human sense when so quickly and easily the world world shifted to Zoom calls and work from home norms. But essentially the fact that workers engage in quite quitting and animals develop diseases or resist confinement in different ways. And often then in response, different capitalist processes adapts to this through antibiotics, genetic engineering, and much more sophisticated technologies. So then for me, at least this was suggesting that this very act of resistance is almost a catch 22 because it's providing capital with opportunities for innovation and generating newer and more sinister, more harmful ways of domination. So what is this dialectic? What does this dialectic mean for you? How do you understand this interplay between resistance and capital is just this, capital is very resistant ability to constantly adapt to this and be more in genuine in the process. That's a great question and very interesting. And I'll say upfront that I don't have all the answers to this question, though I could speculate. And in some ways, I think we can break the question down into firstly, understanding what is this process by which production processes or capitalism itself leaps on the resistance of beings to work and transforms that resistance into value producing activity. So that's one question. The second is, what do we do about it? So they're two different parts of that question. Just in relation to the first point, there are lots of examples within animal agriculture broadly where the resistance of animals is left upon by production processes as a source of creativity. And this to me, I find quite, it's quite insidious in some ways to think about. And maybe to give you one example, and it's an example that I give in the introduction to the war against animals is the introduction of curved corals into slaughterhouses. So traditionally, traditional solar houses had a straight shoot that led animals to the stun gun or to the space of slaughter. And no surprise animal agriculture producers found that when you have a direct shoot to the side of slaughter, animals to see what is coming, and they tend to halt or walk or slow down heading towards the shoot because, of course, animals can perceive either individually or collectively that this is not a place they want to go. This led animal agriculture scientists to develop more efficient means of feeding animals into slaughter shoots, and this led to the development of curved corals. So these were shoots that had gentle curves that obscured from site, the final destination. What this meant is that animals could more smoothly move through those praels and not perceive what was going to happen, and it led to speeding up production in those sites where this is implemented. In this sense, actually, we could read this as an example of the way in which the resistance of animals themselves is co-opted by the production process to produce more efficient forms of production. So in this case of the curve grow, we can see how the resistance of animals themselves is co-opted by capitalism. It leads to the attempt to counter that resistance and the creation of production techniques that actually prove more efficient for containing, killing, making animals suffer. In this respect, unwittingly, the resistance of animals is co-produces the means of more efficient production that lead to their demise more quickly. And to me, this is in a way indicative of the way that the capitalist production process works, which is to constantly innovate to find ways to reduce average labour times, including by quelling the resistance of beings to that labour itself. So we can apply this to humans, we can apply this to animals as well. In terms of what do we do about this? So again, I think what was interesting about the question is, well, if resistance is always countered by capitalism, how do we escape this? To an extent, I think this tells us something about the way that capitalist production processes are complicit with the horrific violence we see against both animals, but also humans, boiling. To me, this is a lesson about what does it mean to think about production as a genuine reciprocal form of co-production, rather than the parasitic form of production that we find on the capitalism. So this is why in some of my work, I distinctly link the project of animal liberation with deliberation of all of us from capitalism as an economic system. In my view, capitalism as an economic system is parasitic in nature. It leaps upon life, it sets that life dry in order to make money. And we see this directly in an unlikely culture. This is very different from imagining a form of production where beings can centrally co-produce to produce flourishing that is enjoyed by everybody in the production faceless. And that to me is a very different form of economy and one that we're a long way off from imagining in terms of our relations with non-human animals. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Wadewell. I think just taking from your last point, of capital being this very blood-sucking parasitic process and how liberation for animals would mean liberation for all in some sense. I'm just going back to something which you said, right at the outset, right when we started today's conversation around the shared logics of torture. And I also remember somewhere in your work that you've mentioned that while there are many logics which, of course, the violence against animals is also shared by human counterparts. I know from the perspective where I'm sitting in India, Dalits often religious minorities, of course, gender-based violence. There's a lot of parallels in that sense. But I think somewhere you've also written that there is a certain uniqueness which faces the brutality which is mattered out towards animals. And the question that I want to actually ask from this, because when you were talking about resistance, the idea was they are also expressing their desire to live and their will to live. And in that sense, they have their own complex rich lives, right? And so much of how we think of them is like the other, like their animalities is outside of us and we are human in that sense and also human juxtaposed against them. But I'm, I'm trying to go to try and complicate this a little bit. School speaks about the concept of the Umwelt, right? And he mentioned he gives the example of the tick. What I understood broadly from that is the fact that when some animals are so in many ways constrained by their environment, that when certain specific triggers are present in the environment, that they will automatically respond to it. And of course, in the, in the example of the tick that was the smell of butic acid on mammalian skin, the warmth of blood, the feel of hairless skin. And the fact that a tick can wait years suspended in this state till those specific triggers appear. Now, when I was thinking of that in my own terms, right? There could be some triggers, for example, if the weather outside is, is beautiful, and I'm almost called out in a way to go outside and experience that. But let's say if I have this kind of recording, then I can control myself, so to speak, to not do that. And then going to how the difference, the, the differentiation which you touch upon in your book about, high triggers, different conceptions of this. For me, this was reaching or pointing towards some, some state of difference, which was almost making it seem that because human beings have this larger control of how they choose to respond to the larger world, there is a sense of differentiation, there is a sense of superiority in in many ways, just to just to play devil's advocate. What is your sense of of this, this conception or this idea of um belt and the specific triggers which which come from it? I think it's a really great question, and I guess my starting point is to immediately want to disarm the idea that we can understand what animals perceive and understand and that there's something magical or unique about the way that humans understand the world that escapes animals. And that to me is often the starting point of my word, in that I wouldn't start with a strong claim that there's something special about humans that separates us in a fundamental way from animals. When Bonox School makes this claim about the tick being tied to the environment in some way, and as you mentioned, this is read by a gambler through quite a go, and how to make the observation, or try to suggest it towards the idea that there's something fundamentally different about design or this human perception compared to the tick. And in that view, there's humans have a kind of a kind of being that always involves understanding, which means a kind of distance from the environment and a capacity to engage or praise the environment in a way that animals do not have. I think for me it's actually much more interesting to travel this separation. And that's because firstly, as we know, there's almost daily evidence from scientists, which says that to our surprise, all these many animals who we've assumed do not have these capacities actually do. They have in way, they have capacities in ways that we've never understood, and we've continually misunderstood and underestimated them. Secondly, I just think we, using a starting point where we assume that we don't understand what animals perceive is actually very useful for just renovating both how we see animals and also how we see ourselves. So in the case of Bonox School's tick, it's certainly true that the tick, like all beings, including humans, find themselves in an environment that they respond to. But we don't know what the tick perceives, or this pace by which they perceive, or whether the tick has some kind of understanding of the environment in the way that we might understand humans as having an understanding of the environment. Similarly, I think one of the things that that distinction does is that it assumes that humans do not have an um belt, that humans do not, their being is not structured by an immediate environment in the same way that the tick is. And actually, I think there's every reason to believe that humans are the same, that we obviously have different capacities, different ways of seeing or sensing, and maybe different ways of understanding. But this is also a being that is shaped by environments as well. So I guess I would just say that, and this is, this is my reading of some of those scholars, Bonox School, or a gambit, or a hi-degas discussion. My reading would be, I think at this point, we have every reason to just complicate its hard distinction between the human and the animal, the human and the insect, and lead with a much more humble proposal that perhaps we don't, we certainly know that we are different from these other beings, but perhaps we don't understand fully how those beings exist with their environments. And the extent to which they, those beings understand or can reflect on those environments, even if they, this reflection looks completely different to the way that humans reflect on the environments, in a way that we understand. Thank you for that Dr. Vadi Veel. Actually, trying in a couple of other responses that you've just shared with us, I want to also take us to the larger framing that you've made of the human and animal relationships, and the kind of situation that we find ourselves in, in that relationship, because one of the significant departures in your work is from Donna Haravi's framing of human and animal relationships. And she emphasizes companionship, the companion species manifesto, and the transformative interactions that occur in what she calls contact zones. She also talks about how we constantly shape unshape and reshape each other in relationships, characterized by mutual becoming. And there is a sort of a negotiation between these two, you know, set of lives. If we follow Haravi, the ethical response that emerges from this relational process, and the main stay is one of companionship, kinship, love, and mutual care. But I think in your book, the main stay that you have described is war and constant violence. It's deeply difficult to disagree with that framing, because simply because of my personal experiences also when we go out into the city, and see the sort of deep violence that is needed out to more than human lives, whether animals, birds, insects, plants, etc. It's really difficult to contest the argument that you make about the constant and the deep nature of violence. And while Haravi does acknowledge that violence, she does not frame it as a war. Can you speak more about this departure? And what do you see as the limitations of the companionship framework? And why do you think it is essential to name the relationship as one of war rather than one of fraught but generative entanglement? And it's a really perceptive one and interesting to engage with. And in some ways, it's useful for me to point out that I only partially differ from Haravi, though I differ in a very important sense. So let me just say upfront that I think Haravi produces, has produced a very useful corrective pointing out that our engagements with animals are relational. And these relational engagements are co-shaping to an extent. So meaning that this isn't about a one-way engagement where humans tell animals how to be and animals don't shape us. So Haravi usually points out that actually if we look at human animal engagements, they're co-shaping and they're relational. And I think that I actually don't contest this aspect of Haravi's analysis. And I'd say actually it's highly useful. And in some ways this links with Haravi's important contributions within post-humanism or science and technology studies where she has highlighted the way that non-human agents constantly shape what it means to be human. Where I do depart though is firstly in wanting to highlight that probably the most important relation that we have with animals is violence. And I want to say that actually violence is a relation, but it's a special relation. And it's one that actually is worth documenting and I guess my work tries to document that particular kind of relation. So we think about violence. The nature of violence as a relation is it's non-consensuality. So how we define violence could vary. So some people would define it as a harmful relation. I'm going to say that what shapes violence or what makes violence violence is a non-reciprocal strictly non-consensual relationship. I would also note that violence, violent relationships are co-shaping, right? So they have the capacity to shape both sides of that violent relationship. And they also are multilateral relations or bilateral relations in so far as those who experience violence aren't simply passive victims. There are also beings who resist that violence. And that resistance of that violence also shapes the actions of the perpetrator. So to me that's important to describe all that to make clear that actually violence is a relation and that we need more time to describe what is unique about the way that relationality and co-shaping happens in violent relationships. My objection to how we work in relation to companionship isn't so much that how our way outlines the nature of these relationships. her shaping forms of relationality, it's just that violence is missing from this and the way that violence produces regimes of domination is missing from the concrete. To me, I find this really hard to reconcile just because, as you pointed out, I think it's empirically incontestable that most of our direct, mainstay relations with animals involve violence, which aims to establish a relationship of domination. That to me, it just seems incontestable, and I think it's interesting in the 10 years since the war against animals was published. Nobody's really written a critique to say, "Danesh, you're wrong. There are all these examples of peaceable, companionship relationships out there that would contest the idea that there's a war against animals." Actually, no one's really written this, and I don't mean to say this to say, "I'm definitively right," is really to just say, "I think actually there's something empirically correct in the idea that generally, if we look at most human animal relations that are direct, we are talking about relationships of domination." Even when we look at those relationships such as companion animal relationships, say with dogs and cats, it's very hard to contest the fact that in most cases, these relationships are very directly about humans making use of animal lives for their own ends and applying forms of violence such as microchipping, doing sexing, control over food, control over movement in order to generate human benefit, that none of these controls are about animals themselves. I make all these comments to just say that to me, the main form of relationality we need to understand when it comes to human animal relations is violence and the way that particular violent practices produce relations of domination. This doesn't take away from the fact that maybe amidst all of this, there are forms of love and peaceful relationality that do happen. For example, I know lots of animal advocates who rescue animals from horrible situations and try to give those animals homes that feel completely different from the violence that they experience before. I don't want to say that those relationships don't happen, but I think again, if we look at it broadly, most of our relationships with animals involve violence and domination, and this is why I've, in different work, I've proposed that maybe we'd be better rather talk about contact zones, maybe we'd be better talking about conflict zones, which to me is actually a more accurate description of most relations between humans and animals. Thank you so much for that response, and as I mentioned, I think it's really difficult to disagree with that framing. Although I do understand that there are some scholars who have spoken about that sort of a deep relational way of being with more than human life forms, at the outset, I can think of scholars like Radhika Gowentrachin who have spoken about the goat who died and got sacrificed for family, and similarly, had a way to suggest that humans must learn to kill responsibility and talk about practices like Jallikatta, cockfighting, or other animal sports as intense sites of interconnection, learning and cross-species invention. At the same time, she also speaks about animals and other more than human life in laboratories as significantly unfree, but she curiously also talks about some degrees of freedom which resists a simple category of passive victim, which is often allocated to different animals. So I understand that you spoke about contact zones as conflict zones, but I'd like to understand your framing of these practices a bit better, and do you see where something other than war might be taking place, or do you think these instances deepen the logic of that war, even when, as you mentioned, there might be involvement of companionship and rescue from otherwise deeply violent histories. I want to deepen that explanation a bit more. That's a great question, and I want to preface my response by saying that as scholars and activists, we pick particular frames because they help us to explain the world, and they help us to move forward in terms of achieving transformational change. In my view, Harrowway with that book in Species Me, selects a particular frame quite strategically, and she's actually upfront about this, so she says upfront that we could use a narrative that's more polarizing, such as the narrative from Animal Rights Theory, which would suggest that humans are perpetrators and animals of victims, and that this is a one-way parallelation and it's morally wrong. Harrowway says, "Well, this misses some complexity," and she's much more interested in developing a framework that has capacity to see co-shaping relations. Actually, there's a really fascinating part of the book where Harrowway talks about draws from a scholar of colonialism called Mary Louise Pratt and makes an argument that the problem with a kind of one-way dualistic framing of relations of power like colonialism is that it misses that actually there's a lot going on in the actual texture of how, say, the colonists and the native live together, and so she wants to, in a way, produce a different frame to give us a much more textured understanding. In the war against animals, I, of course, returned to a more dualistic and structural frame that tries to really highlight the way that all of these relationships are effectively relationships of domination. I could rightly be accused of committing the error that Parrowa describes of creating this sort of binary logic by which we could understand that by which we could understand the way that humans relate to animals. However, one of my concerns with Harrowway's analysis is that I just think it goes too far in this direction of negating the way that violence and domination shape relations of human life. Something I know, actually, in the footnotes of the war against animals, is that the word violence itself rarely pops up in the work in Harrowway's when species meet. Although she describes what I would describe as only disturbing violent practices such as use of animals in experimentation, the word violence itself does not come up. And to me, this is both strategic and worrying. It's strategic because it allows Harrowway to produce a particular narrative around human animal relations. I'm a narrative of co-working and co-relationality mutual dependence, mutual co-shoping. But this, of course, in some ways is a political move because it denies the reality of the violence and domination that animals experience. I say it's political because actually there's a long history of this with social movements that have dealt with human forms of oppression. The use of the word violence is always political. And it's political because when you say that something is violent, it demands a particular response that previously you wouldn't have had to engage with. So let me give you one concrete example, for in many legal systems historically, women could experience forms of violence from their partners, their husbands in marriage, and this be not treated as violence under the law. As partly as a result of lots of agitation from social movements, particularly feminist movements, we've seen legal systems increasingly acknowledge that forms of interpersonal violence that could be domestic or sexual violence within the context of marriage are actually violence. In my view, here violence serves a particular purpose in mobilising a political worldview and political action and not calling something violence in this case is also political. It allows for forms of domination to occur without it being challenged. In this respect, I think for me, in this book, the War against Animals, it was very useful to. to deliberately describe violence when I see it, to deliberately see forms of non-consensual, non-reciprocity as examples of violence, and to describe the way that these contribute to systems of domination. So when Holloway in that text describes these scenes that as forms of co-shading such as experiments or forms of rigorous, disappointing of dogs for dog shows, I recognize and respect to an extent what she's trying to do. But from my perspective, there's a political purpose in actually naming violence as violence because it allows us to actually be frank about the relations of power that shape those entanglements and also allows us to imagine how can we move past that form of domination and imagine forms of relations that are genuinely about deprivation and freedom. - Thank you for that, Dr. Wadiweil. And I want to stick with and stay with what you spoke about about naming that violence which disrupts apparently feasible or peaceful relationships. You spoke about it in the context of gender like women and men in marriage, but also when you speak about it in animals and the context of human animal relationships. I think one of the most powerful things that I read has been the sentence that you use in what against animals about how sovereignty guarantees an unending flow of pleasure and it lays in place in almost absurd economy of greed. And for some of us who may not be familiar with that argument in the context of Foucault's conceptualization of war and sovereignty in the context of animals, I would love for you to elaborate that a bit more about why you talk about this as an unending flow of pleasure in an absurd economy. - Thank you so much. Yes, I'm happy to share. How did the war against animals was shaped by a set of lectures Foucault gave at the College of France, Michelle Foucault, the French philosopher. Okay, but the College of France, I think it's 1976 to 1977. So these are published under the English Title Society must be defended. And in those lectures Foucault asks this question about political sovereignty. So it's interested in the ways that states, nation states form and claim a legitimate right to rule which we might fall for right to sovereignty. He notes that lots of the liberal discourse on sovereignty imagines that it is through some sort of social contract that sovereign nation state sovereignty gains its legitimacy. So if you read pubs or Rousseau, you'll get this idea that the sovereignty of nation states is founded upon the implicit social agreement of the constituents of those policies. And this is usually described as something like a social contract against this Foucault says, well, the reality of the foundation of the nation states as we know was nothing about fair rational or just processes, but instead actually histories of violence, this possession, oppression, slavery, theft, you name it, war, destruction. Like it's actually everything that is unjust is what has founded most modern nation states. As Foucault points out actually in some ways maybe it's just sort of think about the foundation of sovereignty through the lens of war. Partly Foucault draws on the German theorist of war, Karl von Krasovitz, and von Krasovitz puts for the proposal that war is policy or politics pursued by other means. So when Krasovitz says this, what he's saying is that it's the moment that diplomacy or politics breaks down that people pick up guns and fight instead of trying to talk through their differences. Foucault inverts this and he says, well if war is policy or politics pursued by other means, then surely politics is war pursued by other means. So surely politics is about the embedding of war like relations within the political sphere that is that are largely hidden so they don't exist in the form of outright hostilities. He uses this analogy to say in some ways this is precisely what sovereignty of the nation state refers to. In most nation states, it is processes that are unfair or about war, dispossession, slavery, colonization that lead to the foundation of that nation state. And usually sovereignty is basically an expression of the winners of that war and the rights that they claim over the losers of that war. I am speaking to from Australia, Sydney Australia and this is a settler colonial nation where directly we have this experience of the foundation of sovereignty. The British came and annexed this territory. They stole sovereignty from indigenous people and declared sovereignty for themselves. And in this declaration of sovereignty pretended that indigenous people were never here and never had rights to the land before. So in a sense for coast describing actual real historical processes here, these also describing the way that in a sense sovereignty sets the frame for the rights that beings experience within that sovereign domain. Importantly, it creates this relationship where the victors end up continuing to enjoy the spoils of the war and sovereignty is basically becomes the political agreement to enable this continual enjoyment of plunder or what I call in the war against animals, this flow of pleasures that arises from that declaration of sovereignty. Now all of this background is background to how I use this argument in the war against animals because when I read this section from Foucault, I immediately thought, well, isn't that what we did to animals? Didn't we create mass scale forms of violence to ensure that animals were conformed to our will? And then we declared ourselves through our own own hubris as sovereigns. We imagined that we are the supreme creatures on the planet and that it is our right, our entitlement to do these things to other beings. And we similarly imagined actually, not only that we have a right to use animals in this way, but we also imagined in this whole context that animals themselves either don't care about the way that we use them or even in some cases imagined that they want us to use them in this way. They want us to treat them with violence in order to meet our own ends. Is for this reason that I would emphasize what I would call the epistemic dimension of our war against animals. It is not just that we use physical force against animals for to make those beings comply to our wills. It's also that there's a knowledge dimension where we imagined that we treat animals kindly that the ways that we use animals are the things that they would themselves want. So there's this sort of deception going on here. And this, by the way, is completely in conformity with the way that Michelle Foucault saw sovereignty because he would say that actually the way that sovereignty works is that those who declare sovereignty will declare that peace has arrived and they'll install war like violence within sovereign arrangements in order to ensure that they continue to receive the benefits of that claim of sovereignty. But all the while pretending that war isn't happening and that to me seems precisely the way that we engage with animals. We, at the same time as we pretend that we are kind to animals that we love animals, we direct the most horrific violence against billions, if not trillions of animals quietly, as if these two things are completely compatible. And that to me is the epistemic dimension of that violence. - Thank you. And given that how you're framing how sovereignty is presently framed and the impact that it has on any possible ethical response, then the fact that our ethical systems can then only regulate or mitigate the worst excesses. And perhaps sometimes not even that. And then even in your book when you touch upon the fact that that essentially leaves us with the welfare regime and I think you speak about the five freedoms and so on. My question then is that what is your take on welfareism generally as an approach because so much of the world, work that is happening, the good work, the somewhat lukewarm work and so on, is in many ways happening under this welfare regime. And I think just one example that I would like to give something which is very alive for me is a couple of months back, the Supreme Court in India had passed an order around stray dogs in the national capital. And the order was quite abrupt, it essentially said that all these dogs should be rounded up. What I found quite remarkable is what transpired after the order is very ordinary everyday citizens who are usually not really concerned with the larger political dictates of the Supreme Court as such, came out on the road and in their own small and big ways supported there, you know, they're more than human others. I'm just wondering then as a strategy as an as an operative, what do you feel about welfareism? Do you feel as a system, it is fully, fully bleak and doomed? Or do you feel that there could be crevices or there there's and I know it's not a simplistic yes or no answer, but generally what is your sense on on this? I think that's that's a great question and one thing I'd say is that the history of let's say animal rights theory or animal rights law has often seen a distinction between rights and welfare. So it's been this ongoing tension and the animal rights people say we don't like welfare, the welfare people say you animal rights people are unrealistic and there's this ongoing tension. I don't really play into that tension and though I think in a way I think we've got to be careful about welfare and I'll talk about why and it's like, so just in relation to not playing into the tension, in some ways I would say that welfare is the most rational response given the reality of the structural relations we have with animals. So if we follow through the face or side advance in the book, we humans have declared a kind of sovereignty over animals. This sovereignty is committed to absolute continuing violence against animals that is almost completely unchecked by law. From that perspective, it's probably rational for us to argue that we should provide minimal welfare protections for the ways that we use animals. In line with the thesis I've put forward in the book, sovereignty in some ways here precedes ethics. So we have already declared that we are superior and we have a right to exercise violence towards animals and therefore probably the most rational response is well, can we at least talk about how do we mitigate the worst excesses that we do? The challenge of course with welfare is that in some respects I think welfare has led to the intensification of the use of animals in a variety of different systems. So one reason I think we should be careful around welfare is that there is evidence that successful forms of welfare provision work hand in hand with the intensification of animal production. Earlier in the interview I gave the example of curved corrals used in slaughterhouses which tried to deal with the problems of having a straight shoot where animals would slow up or start leading to slaughter and this would obviously slow production. curved corrals served two functions. One was to reduce the suffering or trauma of animals as they approach the stun gun but it also led to the speeding up for production processes. In some respects I'd say that many of the most successful forms of welfare provision have also worked hand in hand with intense fine production and this is because welfare largely does not say anything about whether we should use animals or not and does not stipulate that we should reduce the number of animals that we use, not in a direct or necessary sense. So here I want to just flag that there are some dangers around welfare. I want to firstly just say I don't want to have reproduced the framing of animal rights first welfare because I don't know whether it's helpful. I do want to say that in many respects given the totality of violence that animals experience and the structural nature of that welfare is in some way the kind of rational response to that the limits of what we can do. That said lots of welfare risk provisions in my view work hand in hand with the intensification of production. So in the kind of global scale of things although they might reduce suffering for individual animals they probably helped to make to massify the production of animals and speed up the utilization of those beings. All of that said I would also say that maybe it is conceivable that some forms of welfare can work to countering the war against animals. So let me give you one example. Globally there is a race to intensify production within intensive production systems. And one of the ways that this has done is through increasing line speeds. So if you can speed up the process of stainless slaughterhouse moving the animal through to slaughter and then processing their bodies then this will lead to increased production. This is actually a side of tension for a range of different constituencies human social movements. So one is in relation to human laborers. So typically when you speed up production then the rights of workers goes down there. And that's because you have increased rates of injury in production lines because workers are having to keep up with an inhuman place of production. It also leads to of course the intensive sites of production the continuing environmental disaster that is unfolding around and like a culture. So the more you speed up production the more those environmental harms will happen. But to me there's actually this curious opportunity I think for welfare is performed which is about slowing down production processes. Now this in saying that in slowing down in a campaign for slowing down line speeds. I'm not at all saying that this will end animal production. So it's it's distinctly a welfare is claim. But in my view putting forward a view that we should slow down line speeds in intensive animal agriculture. To me this is actually a welfare is proposal that works directly against the capitalist production processes that would that's that producing a nightmare in relation to our treatment of animals. So this that's what example of something that to me highlights that a welfare is performed isn't by isn't by definition necessarily incapable of standing in the way of human domination of animals. Potentially their forms of welfare is claims that take us along the road towards trying to get rid of these horrific bonds in production. And that to me seems to be an opportunity that we should expose our inhabitants. Thank you so much. I just want to borrow that example of for temple grandins curve Coral and perhaps it's an unfair comparison the one that I'm about to make but much like how grandins curve Coral is is is in many ways considered to be such a humane form of technology but essentially leading the animal animals to a willful death. I feel more contemporary um like there's a rise in intersection of different etologists and conservation scientists and animal communication research coming together. And there are these projects like project setty which is studying situation communication and then there's the elephant acoustics project in India which is trying to document what different elephants are trying to communicate with each other and I'm sure that like globally there must be a range of such other things. I want to ask you what is your reading of this on one hand it it seems exciting to understand when we will be finally be able to understand in some more detail and will that change our response. On the other hand at least I am filled with the sense of dread still because what if much like the curved Coral we we feel like they are not feeling pain like how human beings are feeling pain so not only can we continue our our present relationship but we can almost exacerbate it. But what is your reading of these developments do you think these possibilities of learning more about animals will change our response or do you think they will end up doing much of the harm in a much more dreadful way. This is a great question and I wish I had a crystal ball so I could say what the effect of this research will be in. I would say that For the reasons you've named, there are lots of dangers around this race mode. So firstly, as you point out, lots of sometimes well-meaning research, I think, has led to forms of intensification in our domination of animals. So to give you an example, at the moment, there's lots of research happening around trying to determine animal emotion, including use of smart technologies and AI to try and work out what do animals feel, and can we use this knowledge to improve the way that animals are treated within animal agriculture? The danger, of course, is that all that will happen is that we'll find the most efficient forms of environmental enrichment, or food technology, or lighting, or whatever it is, that allows for production processes to continue doing what they're doing, which is intensifying and speed up. And I don't see any evidence to the contrary. So that's to me one danger. The second challenge, I think, in all of this, is that we also have this political problem that we apparently need more evidence that animals feel they suffer, they don't like what we do to them in order for us to prompt political change. And often the justification for doing more research with animals is to try and understand and produce evidence so we can make change. But I also have to ask, why do we need more evidence for this? So this to me seems strange, right? So already we have this structure of politics that we need to continually prove that animals feel that they have worlds, that they have a capacity for suffering, they have intelligence, they have emotional bonds with others, when surely it should be self-evident by now. And certainly for lots of the animals we use in a direct sense in animal agriculture or in zoos, we know enough to know that we are probably in a safe space to say these beings do not want to be in the places we put them in. So this is one concern I have about the research, leaving aside, of course, that whenever we do research with animals, we're largely talking about interventionist forms of research, including research that causes harm, in order for us to find out the thing that we probably already know. So that to me seems one constraint. That all said though, again, I want to just point out that this is a complex story and certainly there's lots of cases where we've seen changes in the way that the public perceives and animals as a result of research that is emerging. And so to give you an example in the last five to ten years, there's been a lot of interest in the lives of the octopus. And that's been largely driven by new discoveries in science, which has helped to highlight and create a public imagination around these beings that maybe has been useful protection. So again, I don't want to write off all of this research, but I do feel like there's firstly, this problem of power and the question of why do we need more research? And secondly, this historical relationship between research and the intensification of production, which to me, we need to take seriously because that has been the history. Thank you for that, Dr. Wadiweil. And I totally agree with that question that rhetoric that you've asked about why do we need more research? And I know that some of the previous guests that we have had at this podcast have precisely asked the same question. And I think the chapter on the live hand in your book also basically talks about that, right? In the many ways in which chickens whom we or like the popular imagination considers as unintelligent and easily dispensable, having no life in that way, really talks about how resistance happens and how they are perceiving the live hand. So I know that you have taken some powerful examples during this conversation, but also in your writings. If you could leave listeners with one powerful or haunting image or story about animals, which they could really carry with them beyond this conversation, I'd love to know what it is. I was recently in a small corner store near where I lived, so I lived in Sydney, Australia. And this corner store is a small convenience store. In the counter, mounted up near the ceiling was a small cage, about 30 centimeters cubed. And in it was a small bird, I presume a finch. The cage was positioned in such a way that this bird had no direct eye to eye contact with any humans in the shop. And as far as I could see, the birds spent their days and their lifetime in this cage up above the shop of near the ceiling. What struck me about this whole scene was firstly its pointlessness. I still don't understand what putting this bird in a cage contributed to the shop owners or the customers who came in, and obviously for the bird themselves, this lifetime of solitary, pointless confinement didn't contribute anything to their flourishing. And to me, I think this just highlights what I consider the kind of banality or every day in us of our war against animals. It just highlights the way that it is so every day that we almost render it out of sight. And we accept, even the minimal contributions that animal suffering makes to our own welfare, we accept this in a way that's almost unspoken, we don't celebrate it, we don't even acknowledge it, we just take it for granted. For me, although we could point to lots of horrific ways that we impose cruelty on animals, I guess I would like to remind people that lots of this conflict is every day, it's right in front of us and we almost discount it, we don't see it, it's just there and it's taken for granted, but also it's violence and suffering that doesn't really contribute to our welfare. It doesn't, we could imagine living without it, and I think there's an important project for all of us in imagining that, in imagining how could we spare animals, they're suffering this destruction of the mains of their own flourishing, for what is actually minimal contribution to our own well-being and flourishing, and can we just imagine lives, economies, societies without these farms? Thank you so much for that story, Dr. Varivail, and I think that really speaks to the grief that you've written about and you have kind of indicated towards in some of your other work when you refer to your vegan practice as well. So I really want to thank you for taking all the time for this podcast recording and really appreciate the responses that you've given, it's been quite an honour to have this conversation with you, thank you so much. Thank you so much for both of you, it's been a really lovely conversation and I appreciate for the focus on the work that been done.