>> one research team in sweden came up and designed these really deluxe cages to keep their head propped and have the cell phone go into the brain. you're right. if you're doing full body exposure, you can fry the tail

of the rat because the tail doesn't have much tish to it. that's one of the other things. our hands and ears are cart lig. you don't get tumors developing in your hand because there's not as much soft tsh issue. we study rats because we're trying to prevent harm in people, that's why we do it, and the fact is it's an imperfect approach, but it's been delayed already a decade. we need to get going with it. i know the investigators there will come up with an appropriate way to model what cell phone exposure would be, and whole body exposure is not going to get you that. now, i brought this for a reason because this is part of our -- my discussion ongoing about

mechanism. we don't know the mechanism by which tobacco causes cancer yet. we have ideas, but the mechanism by which cell phones may affect us may be us. listen for a moment. [ringing] that's what our bodies do all the time. you're riding in an airplane or a car or a bus and you're resinating and the bus is resinating and you can read or work on your laptop or write. if the bus suddenly stops and starts, you can't read. you lose your place. if your normal resonance is disrupted by on and off signals all the time, that's how our dna is getting damaged. i think it's the theory of resonance that needs to be

pursued seriously. i don't know if they can do that at nhis, but it struck me as a good indication. when you have this kind of resonance and you stop it and start it, you're interfering with normal healthy cells, the conditions of life out of which we evolved. we came from a microwave world, and i'll leave you with one other passage that i thought really struck me as amazing. how much microwave radiation we had at the beginning of the world so to speak. microwave radiation was around in the big bang. we know that because the scientists who received the nobel prize in 1978 got it for discovering the cosmic microcafes in other signals that supported the big bang that occurred 15 billion meres ago.

this explosion of radiation, matter, and energy, gave rise to all nature and civilization that we have today. it is sobering to think the microwaves in the world now that spilled from that explosion are billions of times less frequent than those emitted by the planets cell phones and other devices today. i think it's something to think about. thank you. >> debra davis is a visiting lecture at harvard and georgetown universities and a senior advisor to the secretary of health in the department of health and human services. visit debradavis.com for more information. >> in his book, "some we love, some we hate, some we eat," questions why people have

certain reactions to different annals. it's an hour long talk hosted in south carolina. [applause] >> well, thank you so much. it's a privilege to be here, and i've been a fan for a long time and living in this area to know what it was like and what an impact this community has. it's just enormous. i'm happy to be here because i know some unbelievably great writers have stood here including my colleague, ron rash. the book i'm going to talk about is my new book which is "some yes love, some we hate, some we eat." the title says what the book is about, about the koa none drums

and paradoxes we have with other species. i've been surprised at the attention the book has got. i knew the book would appeal to some people, but i'm surprised at the number of people who have enjoyed it. anybody that is conflicted about the relationships with other species, and that just about everybody, so i stumbled on to a large demographic of which i am a member, so one level this book is about our relationships with annals and how confused they are and we can make sense about them. in another way to bat other issues as well, and i really, one the best interviews recently is with a guy named frank at wunc from raleigh.

i heard him for years on npr, but he said your book really isn't about ams. i said yeah, you got it. on one level it is about annals, but it deals with the source how people deal with moral difficult issues in the world. if you read this book, it will make you think differently or more deeply hopefully about meat and how you treat your cat and it's also about how people wake up in the morning and get through their day and be a good person. that's what it's about. what i'll do here is read a short passenger -- passage to give a flavor of the book. it's a nonfiction book, so there's no short clever story. i'll talk about some of the issues of how i came to write the book and to the issues i think it raises. i'll read a short passage and open it up for questions. the passage i'll read is from the chapter on dogs.

one of the things i wanted the book to have is a sense of place, and the place that i know the best that i've been living more my whole adult life is western north carolina. i wanted to have the book rooted in western north carolina. the section i'll read is about a dog park south of black mountain, and the name of the title is french frozen fashion statements. for every chapter there's a little quote from different people. want first one is by a woman named ruby benjamin. she's 78 years old, and i met her at best friends animal society in the middle of nowhere in arizona. that's where michael vicks dogs

live now. maybe you heard about that. this lady goes there every summer and works. she wants to be buried there in the dog cemetery. they have agreed to do this for her. her ashes will be buried in the dog cemetery at black mountain. i interviewed her and she told me i love playing with dogs. as we age many people lose the capacity to play and have fun and enjoy the moment. i'm 78 and dogs remind me to stay in the moment and enjoy it through smiles and wagging tails and kisses that say it all. you all know bob die lain who said if dogs could talk, it would take all the fun out of owning one. [laughter] here's a couple pages from this chapter. he bites and moves away from the french.

here's maverick, his character is 98% wolf and 2% dog. he was on a 16 acre farm for wolf dogs. she never called them wolves. some were rescued from abusive homes and others brought to her by animal control officers and one was given to her from a family. it's ten miles to highway 9, a two lane black top that runs through the valley. it's by the church and follow rock creek past the falling down barn in the volunteer fire department. take the left fork. ignore the dead end signs, go a couple more miles and turn only a rough dirt drive.

you know you're at the right place when you see a sign that says this private property is maintained for the comfort and security of our annals. if you don't like that, then please go away. [laughter] on the quarter mile from the sang ware when they hear my car and howl, it's eerie like a movie, but they are intermixed with a woof woof, the sound you hear from golden retrievers, but not from free range wolves. when i turn off my enji, i'm escorted by 70 annals that are skiddish shouting danger in various languages that led them from the wild to the tame. nancy comes out, cup of coffee in hand and introduces herself. she can tell the dogs apart from their voices. hear that? that's an argument.

that one is aries. shut up, autumn. some of the wolf dogs sit up and pay attention when she hollers at them, but most keep pacing, nervous around a strangeer. they are paranoid. at first glance they look like wolves to me. they are black and gray and intensity that gets your attention. she shows me the differences between them, between the high in the content annals. animals. they have stockier legs and bog more. they are a sign that dog blood is in animals vains and they have the james dean look that

the groupies love. they don't make good companions, but the low content pups are good to deal with and if you train it right you might be able to play with it or be on the lookout or kill your neighbor's cat. your wolf dog might make a good pet, but she cautions me against stereotyping her babies. even a good high content animal makes a good pet. there's maverick who is 98% wolf and his pal mike. the big animals turn pup pi and playing with nancy. with these, her favorites, nancy has rules and never get in a position above her head and never plays tug of war with them. how many of animals can be rehabbed? she thought for a moment and

said, four. that's not good odds out of six dozen animals. the status of wolf dogs is murky. in north carolina anyone can own a wolf dog, but in some states, they are outlawed. some in pennsylvania thought of her wolf dogs as pets, and she treated them like her children. a few weeks after she told a neighbor that her wolf dog gave her unqualified love, sandra's body was found mulled to death by her pets. this was not an isolated accident. 19 people were killed by wolf dogs in 1982 and 2002 in north america compared to nine by german shepherds. editor of animal people, and

independent newspaper that covers animal issues says that wolf dog is 60 times more likely than a shepherd to maim or kill a child. wolf dog fans, of course, they don't buy it. they are just misunderstood and their reputation completely undeserved. driving home i was keyed up. the animals were great, and i add meyered nancy's commitment to them. their lives are good as it gets for creatures have a bad reputation. their edginess rubbed off on me. the dog looked at me expectingly and was scratched behind the ears, and i felt relaxed.

in the rest of the chapter i talk about sort of what we have done to wolves and for example the next section deals with the ventures that i had at akc dog shows which if you want to see the best and the worst in human animal interactions, i highly recommend that you go to an akc show. one is what we've done to the world of animals and you have animals that often there's a couple hundred years we have an animal that has been morphed into a creature that ranges from a teacup yorky to a mastif that weighs 200 pounds.

i had many adventures at the dog shows and it's hilarious. i can't read it because i'll start laughing. one the most interesting isives watching a -- i was watching a woman who was very distinguished and a professional handler. she was sitting at a table next to the great dane that was huge and he's sitting at the table too stretched out, and for a moment there's a plate of gummy bears, the candies that kids eat, and i'm watching this. she picks up a gummy bear and chews it and eats them for awhile. i'm watching like what is going to happen with this. she mast kateed a wad of sugar and spit into a slimy hunk.

she looks at the dog and says here, boy, her, boy, and takes that stuff and sticks it in the dog's mouth. i talked to other handlers about that. she said we do that all the time. one lady says i use raw liver and waves it in front of the dogs nose. one of the things i've done over the years is i studied lots of people in different contexts with animals and some have been great and others not great and others have been weird. let me talk about why i wrote the book. one of the things i wanted to do is introduce people to the little branch of science i'm in which is an through --

anthrozooology. it's a new field of science. they identified about 100 heart attack victims and asked them a series of questions of who your social support system or how often do you go out with people. then was the question do you have a pet? she followed these people for a year and went back and found them all. what she found is that in the people that were the nonpet owners, 24% of them had died, but among the pet owners, only 6% had died. this was the first report reported in a major medical journal that suggested there's something about the idea that pets are good for people. it not only jump started this field of science, but anthrozooology atracks attracts

people. what we all have in common is an idea that human interactions are very, very important, but they have been neglected by mainstream social sciences. for example, in my own field of psychology if i were to ask you how many of you is your pet very, very important to you, and perhaps one of the most important beings in your life, i imagine half of you would raise your hand. however, there's not a single psychology textbook or a social psychology textbook that has a paragraph, let alone a chapter on the importance of animals in our lives. one of the things i wanted to do is say this is important, and as people who are studying this stuff, and we deserve, you know, our place in the sciences, and give us research money to explore this.

another goal that i had was to write a book that worked at two levelsment one is i wanted to have scientific chops. i wanted it to be rigorous enough scientifically that my colleagues in my field would read it and they would have to take a seriously. when i was writing the book, i had a thousand footnotes in the book. i told the editor, by the way, don't be surprised with the thousand foot newts in there. there was a long clause saying we can't do that. get it to 500. i cheated and combined some stuff and got it down to 500, but i wanted enough data in there to be scientific. i wanted the back to appeal -- the book to appeal to a popular audience. as far as i can tell, for the most part they've had almost no impact at all. [laughter] like most college professor

research. they had little impact. a few people read them and study them occasionally, but i thought, you know, i like the occasional column for the paper and some are picked up in national things, and i was compared to adolf hitler because of the column i wrote in the paper. i thought, well, at least people are reading my stuff, you know. [laughter] i like the challenge of writing for the public. i guess one the most gratifying things about the book for the last two days is in a some way i feel successful at that because yesterday the book was reviewed in "nature." it's so great that my article was rejected four hours later, but they had a nice review of my book. it's in "people" magazine today

and that's a great shock to me. my mom reads that magazine. [laughter] the idea that nature reader and people magazine readers both enjoy this book i find amazing. my literary muses are in part the great science writers that you have probably heard of, but even more so it's the books i really like to read which are detective novels. when i was at a stand point in terms, man, i can't write this sentence, i read books by elmor leonard, and guys that write and know how to capture the human spirit in a sentence. also, i wanted to deal with my own perm obsessions. --

personal obsessions. one of the best quotations i heard in an interview on the radio and he was asked why he wrote a book. he said, great books are written about the things that the authors can't get out of their heads. that completely resinated with me because of things that i can't get out of my head and still can't get out of my head is the relationships that people have with other species, and this originally started -- i'm particularly interested how every day people work out real life moral dilemmas. i started this when we moved to the rural area, and a bunch of my neighbors were nice guys. i didn't know these people still fought chickens in this day and age. it's more illegal now.

these were nice people. they were middle class families with job and some were policemen and others were religious voting republican mostly. they were nice people, but they had one little quirk. saturday night they put gas on the heels of roosters and fight them to the death. he invited me to go to this fight, and i finally went in the rural mountains want to be of the people and i found myself at a rooster fight, and i wound up for the next two years taking some of you with me actually. i was interested in how these guys made sense of that? how did they justify this? one i understood their justification for fighting rooster was not much different

than my justification for eating them. i shifted out of animal behavior and studying morality. my next study was with the animal rights activists, people with a different frame. in a way activists in roosters have a surprising amount in common. they both love animals. i thought that was a paradox and i started to see those all over the place. i'm interested in animals and people and studied people like slaughterhouse crews, live animal technician, and circus animal trainers, a group i find fascinateing at every level. a second goal of mine in dealing with the book in terms # of obsessions is how every day

people they about animals and why it's so inconsistent. for example, gallop polls show that more americans favor the right to hunt animals for recreation because it's fun to kill them than favor animal research. to me, this is a no brainer. animal research, like it or not, at least there's the pee -- petina that saves lives. with hunting, i don't see the justification. more americans are in favor of hunting than animal research. even people who think deeply about the issues are conflicted about it. i've been studying exvegetarians which will -- are a lot because three of four vegetarians eventually go back to eating meat, and probably some of you are those people.

i won't make you raise your hand, but the other thing about vegetarians is -- i made the mistake of reading a couple days ago asking them how many are you are vegetarians in the room? they raised their hand and then i called them liars. i said i would never do that again because i felt the hostility from the crowd. [laughter] most self-described vegetarians eat meat. i know this from the study that the u.s. department of agriculture did where they called 30,000 people up randomly on the phone and asked them how do you describe your diet? about 5% of the people said they were vegetarian, and then about four weeks later, the department of agriculture called the same people back and said, we want to know what you ate in the last 24

hours, not the last month or year, but the last 24 hours. 70% of the vegetarians had eaten animal flesh in the last 24 hours, so we get to these paradoxes that people who think deeply about the issues are in fact up consistent. . we talk about the way aapproach in writing the book, and i approach it the same way i approach my teaching, and my teaching philosophy is really very simple, and it has two principles. principle number one is students learn only if they are interested. i go to ridiculous lengths in order to make my classes as interesting as i can to make students want to come.

that's my job. my job is to make people want to come to my class. similarly in writing this book, i felt i wanted a book that somebody could get on an airplane and make the time go by faster. what that meant was that when reading a techbook they have to read it because there's a quiz on it. you can always stop reading books. half the books i start reading i'm on page 250, i'll stop reading it. i wanted to write a book where i wanted people to finish a book and turn the pages to get to the next. the second principle to the book is the questions are more important than the answers. the stuff i teach my students will be out of date probably by the time the semester is over.

the fat they are fill -- the fact they are filled with facts is not important. what is important 1 that they think about things differently. if they leave my class and say, hey, did you talk about this? have you thought about that? then i've done my job. similarly what i tried to do in the book is hope that if not on every page at least regularly the reader would say, you know, i don't agree with this guy, but i never thought of it like that, and that really was my goal. i'm going to give away the ending of the book right now, so i would like you to buy it, but if you don't want to, here's the ending. [laughter] basically i conclude that the reasons why humans are so miranda morally inconsistent is that moral decisions on many things, but especially with animals is there's an uncomfortable mix between

biology, culture, and rationality. species with a big heart and a big brain and that creates problems. a moral decision is determined by two rival operating systems. one is logic. this is what philosophers emphasize is logic. i've come to conclude that philosophers are unimportant in our moral decisions because nobody listens to them, and we're not that logical because we have a second operating system that is emotion. logic can inform emotion, but our moral decisions are often sort of like looking at a painting. you sort of know why you -- if you like the painting and if you don't like it intuitively, and then you come up with a reason for it. the other idea that i sort of

push at the end of this book is that consistency is vastly overrated as a moral principle that leads to paralysis. i have talked to a lot of animal activists over the yearings, and the search for miranda moral consistency can make you crazy. i talked to a woman when was a business executive at ibm in the research try angle and she was very nice and bright and took animals seriously to the point she picked the flees off her dog one by one and the ticks and took those critters outside and let them loose. [laughter] i talked to other people who didn't like riding in their car because it killed animals. i met one guy who had a favorite sport that was baseball and they had a vinyl glove, but couldn't

find a ball that was made from that so they quit their favorite past time. many women gave up men because going out for dinner is an or deal. you can make yourself crazy about these things, but you don't have to because inconsistency is part of the human condition. i want to finish up by reading two short zeks from the -- sections from the last chapter of the book, and what i was meeting with the publishers about the book, i met a number of them. i decided to go with harper because the the head of harper was a hunter in england. he liked the proposal i had, but he looked at me and said, would

you think about writing an additional chapter? i knew i didn't have an ending, and i knew it needed an ending. what i decided to do ultimately is not deal with ethical principles, but kind a couple really moral people and talk about them. the people that i located were one was a guy named michael mountain working with animals just on a global scale. he's worked with the president of best friends animal society and that has a $35 million operation bigger than pita. we spent a week with the guy and i'm involved with a thing that gets together animal people from all over the world to get together in common interest. it's amazing. the other is a woman who we met in a bar down in south carolina.

a woman named judy. she is a hairdresser, and she runs a thing called cut and curl i think, beachcombers cut and curl. she loves sea turtles. she gets up at five o'clock in the morning to save one turtle at a time. there's two people working at two levels. this is deals with moral consistency and begins with a quote from my favorite writer. the fact you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing. the search of character in the novel is a visiting scholar a a university who delivers a serious of lectures on the moral status of animals. after one of the public talks, an audience member raises their

hand and asks, are you not expecting too much of human kind when you ask us to live without specie exploitation or cruelty? isn't it more human to accept our own humanity even if it means embracing the carnivorous yahoo within ourselves? [laughter] i love that. it's a good question. coping with our inner yahoos is a theme of ethics, psychology, and religion. it goes by different names. when jesus warned that the flesh is weak, he was warning about the yahoo. george jones sang about it. evolutionary psychologies traces his origins and scientists says it's divided time. a psychologist that explored the moral ramifications of the yahoo

compares it to an elmor faint drove by -- elephant driven by an emotional rider. the elephant usually calls the shot, but the rider is smarter and with practice they can exert control over the elmor fanned. elephant. it's the result of war between the rational part of us and the yahoo within. what are the implications of living in a world that morally con vo lewded? we throw our hands up in dispair? does moral inconsistency mean more paralysis? no. i met many people who came to terms with their yahoo and work with animals in different ways in different scales and do small things to make them feel good

about themselves. some adopt a shelter dog or cut their meat diet or return a box turtle from the highway to safety. michael mountain is one of these. i talk about our trip to utah to visit michael mountain and we talked about michael vicks's dogs. the bookends, i'll just read the last page and a half. the bookends with a section i called anthrozooology of every day life. most people feel the need to connect with animals and nature, but we have a need to varying degrees. there's no many michael mountains, people who don't kill ants invading their kitchens. there's not many judies, people who have jobs and families, people who do what they can in small ways to connect with

animals, and are not bothered with inconsistencies with other species and don't organize whether would throws a switch that endangers monkeys or correct whether the ruth of libber ration. they don't feel guilty about eating beef or wearing let every shoes. i have come to accept my yahoo. they say it's better to let the cat outside than keep her in the house all day even though i know she kills a chipmunk. the yahoo in me who likes bbq pork justifies the killing of the pig. i quit fishing when i no longer

found satisfaction in yanking a fish out of the mountain stream. we buy local eggs and pay more for farm chicken. i said no thank last time i was asked to go to a changen fight. i was trowb led -- troubled by the incoherence in the pages and vegetarians who admitted they ate meat, purebred dog enthusiasts who created generations of animals. i come to believe these sources of contradictions are inevitable and they show that we are

human. director of the center of human values at princeton is asked what he does for a living. when he replies that he's a philosopher, he's asked, so, what's your philosophy? in my opinion everything is more complicated than what you thought. our attitudes and believers and relationships with the animals in our lives, the ones we love, hate, and eat, are like wise more complicated than we thought. thanks. [applause] okay. yes? >> i see that finding embracing our inconsistency is important for mental health. i'm concerned that's an excuse

for inaction. >> yeah. >> coming from that standpoint, i just want your response on a view that i have that, you know, in the first world in most of the first world, i believe they had to eat meat. there's so many other alternatives and heatier alternatives and consider the environmental damage that the meat industry does. i want your comment on that. >> yeah, i would love to. one, a absolutely agree with you. i think the argument for eating meat boils down to its natural and it tastes good which is no real argument at all, and the arguments against eating meat are profound at all the levels you talked about involving suffering and killing and environmental problems. he's the problem. here's the problem, that argument hasn't made a lick of difference to anyone. one of the things that surprised me in writing this book the most

is that peter sanger wrote libber ration, a very, very important book, a brilliant philosophy in 1975. at that time americans ate 170 pounds of meat a year. now we eat 240 pounds of meat. in 1978 we killed 3 billion animals a year in the united states. now we kill 10 million animals. the fact is that the campaign to moralize meat shows you're right, but it's been a fame -- failure. it's the biggest failures of the animal rights movement. this is why i came to the logic of human life. the fact it's so logical to not do it, but even most vegetarians eat meat and most who give up meat go back to it. let me go ahead and take other questions, and if we have time we'll come back okay? >> okay. >> i'll be happy to talk with

you later about it. >> why do you think it's totally ignored, the relationships between humans and animals and psychology studies? >> that's a great question. i think there's other aspects of important psychology that have also been ignored, for example, the psychology of religion is ignored, the sigh cog of food is ignored. we pay attention to big issues like learning and memory and stuff like that, that we forget about things that every day people care about that are important in peoples' lives. one person told me it's a career killer to study the psychology of religion. i'm able to do my research because i work at north carolina university. if i worked at harvard is too far out of the mainstream. i think sciences are very

conservative and very -- people don't think outside of their little box. i'm hoping my book will change that a little bit. >> yeah? >> do you think the fact it's published by harper instead of a university press -- >> certainly. i made a decision from the get-go that -- my feelings is that most academic books make no impact other than on some scholars. i thought this was is a high-risk game, but i'm going to try it, and i've really enjoyed the ride. i mean, i really -- it was tough writing this book because i had to be more concerned about making the sentences zing than i did about the scholarship or as -- because i wanted it to be a book that people read, that, yeah, i was very lucky to get a major publisher and find a publisher

that has been extraordinarily supportive. >> the fact it's a popular press can make it easy to dismiss by scientists? >> i don't think so. i don't think so because for one thing i'm a pretty well known guy in my field. i got in the field when it was first starting, and so i wrote a lot of stuff. i'm fairly prolific. i think people will say i have sold out. there's no question about that. on the other hand, i'm thinking there's going to be people who will benefit because i'm thinking people will know what anthrozooology is. does that answer your question? yeah. yes? >> did you learn anything through the process that changed your mind abouten issue or anything -- on an issue or anything through your research? >> yeah. two things. one of the things was i just changed my mind in really big

ways on moral decision making, and what i used to think is it's important to be logical so that if you had a moral decision, and if you had a moral stance on something ranging all the way from capital punishment to abortion, it was important to be morally consistent. however, i no longer feel that way. i feel like it's okay that moral consistency is really impossible and it's okay to take a middle ground. i think philosophers who have taken this route -- i think the approach that is argued that you're morality can be affected by emotions is good one. it changed my mind on human nature in many ways. i've been a strong advocate of

evolutionary psychology and a lot of our human nature is built into us. the more i studied about interactions with animals, the more i understood that culture plays a role from the animals we eat to the types of dogs we keep in our house and how attitudes change quickly. i've become to like sociology, fields i used to dismiss. i feel they are right about things. it's really changed my views of human nature in profound ways. other questions. yes? >> have you thought about phobias and fears of animals? >> yeah, # i write about that. it's interesting. the most common fear of animals in the united states is by far the fear of snakes. well, how many people in the united states die from snakebites? in a year, it's about ten people. the most dangerous animal by far

in your life is a dog. your twice as likely to get killed by a dog than a snake. your 100 times more likely to be seriously injured or maimed by a dog than a snake, and 5 million people are bit by dogs a year, and 400,000 have to go to a hospital emergency room. this affects our attitudes towards animals, and what we have is a stone-age attitudes towards snakes which in reality the worst thing to be scared of is a dog. that's where evolution informs us. >> i was thinking more in terms of ire rational fear of dogs. >> they are not necessarily irrational given the death, mayhem, and destruction that

dogs can have. for example, 80,000 people a year are taken to hospital emergency rooms because they trip over their dog. [laughter] it's the biggest injury in older americans is tripping over your dog. [laughter] true fact. [laughter] other questions? yes. >> this is sort of something i've been thinking about since i only read the first 50 pages of your book, but it seems like there's no bottom line to moral decision, and not to be very articulate, but okay, for example, i will eat -- i will feel better eating a cow that was farm fed, organic because of what you said of the better life, but the thing is still killed, and i'm still eating him and causing death, but i can take that further and say it's helping my body, or it

seems like the rational or thinking or the choices can go in a million directions, and there's really no finite. >> it can go a million directions, and philosophers have a term for this by the way, and it's called caught in the grip of the theory. there's a woman that i used in the book caught in the grip of the theory says there's some reason that high marks from philosophers. okay, thinking about animal ethics there's two things to think aboutment one is that if you can feel pleasure and pain, that gives you moral status, and we shouldn't kill you. i agree with that. the second is an ma'ams with a nervous system can feel. okay. i agree with that. she has a sentence in her book that i could read, but won't. she says doesn't that mean a

spider has as much right to live as a human being? yes. she then concluded that termites can eat your house, and if you're in a fire and you have to choose between a puppy or a baby, you have to flip a coin. [laughter] some are so out in space that you can't tell if it's not okay, the termites don't have the right to eat your house? [laughter] you know, that maybe you should save the kid instead of a puppy? come on, give me a break. she paints herself into a corner which is okay for her, but what surprised me is so many animal activists said, yeah, you go, girl. she got in a debate with peter singer over the great tragedy of 9/11 of which -- and peter said the great tragedy

of 9/11 was the death of 3,000 humans in the world trade center. she says, no. that's not the great tragedy. the great tragedy was that 35 million chickens that were killed in american slaughter houses that day. if peter followed his logic, she said, he would say the same thing. he's not an idiot and made the right call saying the death of 3,000 humans is more important than 35 million chickens even if he is a big animal liberations person. how, you know, i've read 3 # 00 pages of your book, and you don't tell me how to live. [laughter] yep. you'll get your money's worth. you know, i don't tell you how to live. it's not that simple. i think good people make that decision differently in their own way.

other questions? yes, yeah -- >> i wanted to respond to what you said and comment on hers in the sense of why there's no bottom line. i see it as the same excuse we use for racism is the excuse that animals, you know, why some animals are less than other animals. if you consider what we do to humans at the lowest levels, there no way -- >> let me say something about that. l logic of animal liberation is so strong exactly for the reason that you said. to me, this is the interesting thing. i'm at a hotel bar 20 years ago with a psychologist who is animal rights mall rights guy. i'm a psychologist and i study animal rights guys. we're having a beer in the bar and he says, how -- i don't get you. you read our stuff and know more

about the issues than we do, why aren't you like us? why haven't you -- why aren't you like us? in the view of some philosophers are, i heard one say all we need to do is show people that meat a cruel and it's bad for them and stuff like that, and everybody will stop eating meat. that's sheer fantasy. the fact i was asked that question why am i not animal rights mall activist haunted me. it's why i wrote this book. yeah, why am i not one? i probably ought to be like logic dictates i should be, but i'm not. my moral intuition is different. i've been doing research lately on mori intuition, and i think the central moral intuition that fuel us, by the way, is disgust. i think more people are more disgustble to others that transforms into morality. i have enormous respect for

animal activists because unlike most people including me, they have the guts to try to bring their lives into this. that makes them miserable much of the time, but it's the price you pay for the moral high ground. [laughter] other questions? yeah? >> i'd like to respond what you said to my comment initially. just that, you know, the vegetarian eating meat is a real paradox, but as far as the amount of meat consumption don't read everything into that in terms of it a rejection of the moral aspect in the sense if you look at our obesity epidemic and everything, the amount, you know, of accessibility and the cheapness of mass produced food in the sense of fast food, you know, you get five burgers for

$5 or broccoli, the burgers win. >> that's right. it's dismal. what people do when they get money is buy meat. may consumption in china went up 15-fold per capita. 30 years ago the average chinese person was eating this much meat a year. now they eat a room full of meat a year and making more and more money. what they want to do is eat more meat. the fact is that in terms of meat which is the greatest source of animal suffering, everything else pealed -- pails with that. we're going backwards like a train because of changes in the world economy, and you're exactly right that meat is cheaper. i've talked for over an hour, and you guys have been great. i'll be happy to answer any

questions you have, and we have one more q