tv Book TV CSPAN October 31, 2010 10:00pm-11:00pm EDT
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to the heart of the matter and in most of my studying, includes a lot of science. so you really learn to think like a scientist as well as an engineer. one of the things i will talk about is albert einstein to show you can be both. he is a classic example but it is not widely known. is widely known he worked on patents when he was young because he couldn't get a job as a scientist. but in the 1920s he began to be an inventor in his own right. after he won the nobel prize he could have sat back and do science but the challenge to invention and engineering. what he did was a very mundane thing. among others but refrigerators in the 1920s were very new. they were subject to weeks and the refrigerant they leak was
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poisonous. so whole families were being killed when they were sleeping because of a leaking refrigerator. einstein said there must be a better way and that is exactly what an inventor says. he went on to inventor refrigeration system that would not leak. he tried to market it. but the timing was not right. refrigerator companies came up with free on which is not poisonous. so they just replaced refrigerant. as we know decades later we discover that freon doesn't poison people but it poisons the atmosphere. that is another one of those examples of unforeseen consequences of. >> we are talking with henry
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[applause] >> thank you so much. it's a privilege to be here and i have been a fan for a long time and living in this area to know what goes like before wall malaprops was here. i am also happy to be here because i know that some on believably great writers have stood here including my colleague, what ron rash and sarah who i think was here just last week reading from her book. the book i'm going to talk about is my new book which is "some we love, some we hate, some we eat why it's hard to think straight
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about animals." the book, the title pretty much says with the book is about. it's about the conundrums and paradox is we all face in our dealing with other species. and i've been quite surprised at the reception in the book has gotten, and i knew the book would appeal to some people. i'm just surprised at the number of people that have come up to me that have enjoyed it and what i realize is the readership of this book is anybody that is a conflict about the relationships with other species, and that is just about everybody. so i inadvertently stumble onto a large demographic of which i remember. so one level of this book is about our relationship with animals and how confused the art and we can make sense about them, but another way of other issues as well, and i really -- negative interviews recently and the best was diane frank
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mustachio out of raleigh and i heard about him from years on npr and i walked in and he looked at me and first thing he said is you know your book really isn't about animals, is it? and i said yeah, you got it. at one level it's about animals but another level it deals with the sort of how people deal with difficult issues in the real world. so hopefully if you read this book will make you think differently or a little -- hopefully a little more deeply about issues like me and how you treat your cat and stuff like that but it's also about other issues about how people wake up in the morning and get through their day and to be a good person. so that's what it's about. what i'm going to do here is i'm going to read a short passage to give a flavor of the book. it's a nonfiction books why don't have a little short story to read or something like that and be clever. but i'm going to talk about some of the issue is how i came to write the book and issues i think it raises. i'm going to read another short
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passage and we will open up for questions. the passage i am going to read is from a chapters on dogs. i wanted the book to have a sense of place, and the place i know the best and i've been living almost like whole adult life is western north carolina, so i wanted to have the book written in western north carolina. so this section i'm going to read is about a doll the sanctuary in black mountain, and the name of the title, the title of this chapter is friend, vose and fashion statement, the human dog relationship. for every chapter i have a little quote from different people and the first i have here is by a woman named robie benjamin, whose manhattan psychotherapist white. she's 78-years-old, and i originally met her out of my best friends animal society. this extraordinary society in the middle of nowhere in the utah desert and that is where michael fix the five dogs live, you may have seen the show dog
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town. i spent a week volunteering and meeting the people there. it's an extraordinary place. robie benjamin, this manhattan psychotherapist goes there every summer, and she cares so much about them. she wants to be buried there in the dog cemetery. [laughter] and they've agreed to do this -- agreed to do this for her. her ashes are going to be buried in the dog cemetery at black mountain. robie road -- i interviewed her and this is what she told me. i love playing with dolls. as we age, people lose the capacity to play, have fun and enjoy the moment. i'm 78, and dogs keep reminding me how to steam amid and enjoy it. their smiles, wagging tails and kisses say it all. and the other quote i have is by someone you all know, bob dylan, who said one day of dogs could talk it would take all the fun and out of owning one. [laughter] the insightful bob dylan as always. secures a couple pages from this chapter. don't get so close to the fence,
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it bites. he moved away from the fence. he was a maverick, an animal whose heritage went to 98% wolf and 2% balk to read the speaker was nancy brown, under a fallen far the 16-acre sanctuary for wolf dogs. she never calls that holds, near black mountain carolina. some were rescued from abusive homes, others brought to nancy by wildlife officials or animal control officers. one was given by a couple after their wolf told puppy grew up and went after $10,000 worth of damage to their condo. full moon is 10 miles down highway nine. a two-lane blacktop that runs through a valley that reminds me with the blue ridge mountains look like 30 years ago before the day to community started popping up. drive by the clear branch baptist church of them follow the rock creek past the fallen down barn and a volunteer fire department. take the left fork. ignore the dead and science, go
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a couple more miles and turn right on the rough dirt drive. you could hardly see from the road. you know your at the right place when you see a sign that says "is private property is maintained for the comfort and security of our animals, if you don't like that and please go away." after climbing quarter mile from the sanctuary with animals here my car and start to hold, like an old western movie. the hulls are intermixed with arf, ard you expect to hear from golden retrievers but not from free wayne wolves. by the time is which of the car insulted by 70 animals, skittish from each one shouting stranger and dialects that reflect the various stations on the twisted evolutionary path bleed them from the wild. nancy comes out. a cup of coffee in hand and introduces herself. the animals are still howling full tilt. she can tell them apart by their
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voices. our conversation is peppered with interruptions. hear that? that's an argument that one is aires, shut up, autumn. some of them sit up and pay attention when nancy haller said them but most of them keep pacing. they are nervous around the church deacon stranger -- around a stranger. there are various degrees of paranoia. at first blush they look like walz to me. their coats range from pure white to brown with black and gray and the have and intensity that gets your attention. but nancy shows me the sell differences between them, but when the high content animals -- and i start to get it. the ones whose genetic heritage leans more towards dogs have wider faces, thicker fourier's and stocky legs and park more vivid blue eyes are sure sign doll blood runs in the annals
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been hit 98% pure artifice of the james dean look the dogs group's bluff. nancy says they really make good companions but the low contant wolves your easy to deal with. if you get a good low content puppy and train it right, you might be able to put on a leash and taken out for a walk and play with it. maybe it won't cost, look on the fence or try to kill your neighbor's cat. in other words, your wolf dog might make a good pet, but nancy questions me against stereotyping her babies. even the high content animal can be good if it is paired with the right person. she makes a point by interfering closure with maverick whose 90% wolf and whose powell. in a flash they turned poppies, the big animals term puppy, going around nancy, playing with her, cuddling. the chemistry to in the three of them is magical but even with these, her favorites, nancy has wolves. she never lets them get in a position of of her head and she never please tug of war with them.
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i asked mazie how many animals have the potential to be free have it for family living. she looks up and fought for a minute, literally taking them off and said four of them. that's not good odds out of six dozen animals. the legal status of wolf dogs is murky. in north carolina, anyone can own a wolf dog but in some states they are banned outright. the classified wild life in pennsylvanians you need a permit to keep one on your property. in salem, pennsylvania she thought of her wolf dogs as pets, rather than exotic animals comes she blistered them as dogs and treated them like children. but a few weeks after she told one of her neighbors at her wolf dogs gave her, quote, unqualified love. sandra's body was found maulled to death. this wasn't an isolated incident. 19 people were killed by wolf dogs between 1982 and 2002. in north america compared to
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nine by german shepherds. there are however a lot more german shepherds than wolf dogs. clifton, editor of animal keeper, the paper that covers animal issues says eight wolf bald is 60 times more likely than a german shepherd to maim or kill a child. wolf dog fans don't buy that. they are misunderstood and their reputation completely is undeserved. driving home from full moon i was keyed up. the animals were magnificent and i admired nancy's, to them. flout fervor these animals would have been utilized. instead of their lives are as good as it gets for creatures whose heritage is an amalgam of predator and pet. but their edginess had rubbed off on outlaw motorcycle gang. on sold i went for a walk the evening and went to my friend and her dog, and will not she had rescued from the animal shelter. he looked up at me expect it to complete and scratched behind her years and suddenly i felt
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relaxed. it was hard to believe the differences between bendie and those i spent the day with boiled down to if you base pairs or dna. and then the rest of this chapter i talk about sort of what we have done to the wolves and for example, the next section deals with dentures 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 a akc confirmation show. one thing is just what we've done to the basic wolf genome where you have an animal and animals that almost a couple thousand often a couple of hundred years we have an animal that has been morphed into this variety of creatures that range from everything from a teacup yorkie which is about this high and weighs 2 pounds gymnastics that can be 250 pounds. this is the difference between
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me and a full-size african elephant. i had many adventures at the dog shows, but it's hilarious. i can't read them because i start laughing when i think about it. but love stories -- one of the incidents that i thought was one of the most interesting was i remember watching a woman who was a professional gambler and was very distinguished and she had a nice suit on and everything and she was sitting at a table next to a great game. the great dane was huge and sitting at the table, to lead. he's sort of stretched out and in front of the woman there is a big plate of gummy bears, you know the candy's kids eat, and i am just sort of watching this. she picks up a dummy their and choose it and picks up another dummy their -- gummy bear, and i'm watching of the corner of my eye was quick to happen. and she masticates this wad of
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sugar and spit into this slimy chunk am thinking she's not going to do this, is she? then she looks at the dog and says here, boy, and takes this mass of stuff and sticks it in the dog's mouth. i went to talk to other dog show handlers about that, is this really the romilly and they said no we do this all the time. one said i used chicken or sometimes roll delivered to the to -- raw liver. so one of the things i have done over the years as i studied lots of people in different context with animals and some of them have been great and some of them not so great and some of them were weird. let me talk a little bit about why i wrote this book. my goals for -- one of the things i wanted to do is introduce people to the little branch of science the line which is called the and throw zoology and it's a field of the basically goes back about 20 years when a woman named eric
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freedman was doing her doctrinal and erica was interested in the sociology of heart attacks, so what she was dominguez she identified about 100 heart attack victims and asked a series of questions about who your social support system is, how many friends do you have, and then she threw in a question about do you have a pet and then she fell with these people out for a year and went back and found them all. but she found was that the people the were the mullen pet owners, 24% of them had died. but the pet owners, only 6% had died and this was the first report in a major medical journal this was the first report that maybe there really is something to the idea that pets are good for people and that is what john started this field of science. and in through zoology trucks people as interdisciplinary and
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why go to the national meetings of there are people there about our veterinarians, animal behavior, people work in the nursing schools, if you psychologists like me. and what we all have in common is this idea that interactions are very, very important but they have been neglected by mainstream social science. so, for example, in my own field, the psychology if i asked my students or if i were to ask you how many of you is your pet very important to you or perhaps one of the most important being is in your life i would venture to say probably half or so at least would raise your hands and george years and probably more and half of you would raise your hands. however, there isn't a single cycle to textbook, general psychology textbook or developmental psychology textbook that has any come evin let alone a chapter on the importance of the animals in our lives. and so one of the things i wanted to do is to say this is important and people better study this stuff, and we deserve
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our place in the science and give us more research so we can exploit this. another goal i had was to write a book that would work on two levels. one is i wanted to have scientific talks. i wanted to be rigorous enough, scientifically that my colleagues in my field would read it and they would have to take it seriously. so i would originally turned in and i had 1,000 footnotes in the book, and i told my editor by the way, there's a thousand footnotes, and notes. there's this long pause and she said i'm not sure we can do that, can you get it down to 500? i got down to 500. i combined a bunch of stuff like that but i really wanted to have enough data that it would be science. on the other hand i wanted the book to appeal to a popular audience. and i've written a lot of scientific papers over the years. as far as i can tell for the
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most part they have had almost no impact at all. like most college professors research, they have had little impact. a few people read them and they are excited occasionally. but i thought i would write the occasional column for the national paper and some of these have been picked up. for example of this compared to a of hitler one time in "the wall street journal" because of the column. i wrote in the paper i'm thinking well, these people are reading my stuff. [laughter] and i like the challenge of writing for the public. and i guess one of the most gratifying in things about this book is how can it last two days and in some ways i feel like i've been successful let that because yesterday the book was reissued in nature which is the world's great scientific magazine. so great it once rejected the manuscript i sent them at for hours after i submitted. i think this is a record. [laughter] four hours later i got my rejection. but they did have a very nice
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review of my book. and on the other hand, it is in people's magazine today. this is a great shock to me. and of course my mother who reads people magazine. but the idea that nature readers and "people" magazine readers would both enjoy this book i find amazing. my literary uses for in part the great science writers, people like richard dawkins, jerry dimond, people like that you've probably heard, but even more so it was the books that i really like to read which are detective novels. i read books by leonard who is one of the greatest writers in this language guys that know how to capture the human spirit in a sense. the reason i wanted to write this book is i wanted to deal with my own personal obsessions, and one of the best quotations
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that i heard about this was like a guy named steve solomon, a writer i am familiar with what i heard on the radio she asked why he wrote his book and he said the great books are written about the things the authors can't get out of their head. and that's completely resonated with me because the things i can't get out of my head and i still can't get out of my head is the relationships people have with other species. and it originally started -- and particularly interested in how everyday people work out real life moral dilemmas and i originally started this when we moved to barbers fill but a bunch of my neighbors were nice guy is and i had no idea of people fought with chickens in this day and age and this was 30 years ago.
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and cockfighting is about as he will was littering and it's more easily will now. but these were nice people. the had middle class families, they had jobs. some of them were policemen, some of them were religious and voted republican. they were very nice people, yet they had this one little quirk. saturday night out there putting gas on the heels of roosters and fighting them to death and the eventually invited me to go to a rooster fight and i sort of himmed and hawed and, in the mountains wanted to be one of those people so i found myself at a rooster fight. [laughter] and i found the next two years going to restore its and taking some of the audience with the actually. what i was interested in is how these guys made sense of that, what for the rationalizations, how do they justify it. and once i understood the
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justifications, we realize is their justification of fighting roosters was in that much different than my justification for eating them. and i began to see a common theme. and so i basically shifted out of animal behavior and more in terms of steadying morality and how people deal with analysts. my first study was the opposite of people fighting, it was animal activists, who have a completely different frame. and in a way, animal rights activists and roosters have a lot in common. they both love animals. then i began to think about the sort of that is so strange, that is a paradox and then i began to realize these paradoxes. so i am interested in animal people and while doing that over the last 30 years listed people liked slaughterhouse one, lab animal technicians. most recently circus animals is a group i find absolutely fascinating at every level.
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the second goal of mine dealing with the book in terms of these obsessions are how everyday people think about animals and why it is so inconsistent, for example a gallup poll consistently show that more americans favor the right to hunt animals for recreation because it is fun to kill them than favor animal research. to me this is a no-brainer. animal research like it or not at least there is the patina that it saves lives. on the other hand, recreational hunting i don't see this same sorts of justification that americans are more in support funding, recreational hunting ban of the animal research. even people that think deeply about these issues are some ways conflicted about it. i've lately been studying the exit vegetarians of which there are a lot of them because three out for vegetarians eventually go back to eating meat. is probably some of you are ex
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vegetarians in here. i want what you make raise your hands on camera. but the other thing about vegetarians but i discovered, i discovered interesting things come and i made the mistake of reading a couple of days ago i said how many of you are vegetarians and a bunch of buhle raised their hands and i said most of your lawyers then i said i wasn't going to do that anymore because i could feel hostility on the crowd and i realized that the saddam but the fact is most self-described vegetarians eat meat. not only do the to meet the eat it regularly and i know this from a study the u.s. department of agriculture did not that long ago where they called 30,000 people randomly on the phone and ask how do you describe your diet? car four, vegetarian, etc.. about 5% of people said they were vegetarian. then about four weeks later the department of agriculture called the same people back and they
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said we would like to know is what you eat in the last 24 hours. not the last month, not the last year but the last 24 hours. almost 70% of the vegetarians had eaten animal flesh in the last 24 hours. so we get to these paradoxes that even people that think deeply about these issues are in fact inconsistent. let me talk a little bit about the way i approach writing the book, and i basically approach writing the book the same way i approach my teaching, and my teaching philosophy is very simple and it has to principles. principal number one is that students will only work if they are interested. and so why go to ridiculous lengths in order to make my
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class is as interesting as i can so people want to come, and it's my job to do that. my job is to make people want to come to my class. and similarly in the book, in writing this book i found like i wanted a book someone could get on an airplane and would make the time go by faster. what that meant was that when students are reading a textbook the sort of have to read it because there's going to be a quiz but he could always stop reading a book. in fact have the books i start reading i get the page 250 and i say this book is boring and i'm not going to read any more so my goal is to write a book people like just like i want my students to come to class i want them to finish the book, turn the page and get to the next page. the second sort of principal of teaching that i applied during the book is that the questions are more important than the answers and the stuff i teach my students is all going to be out
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of date probably by the time they graduate, possibly by the time the semester is over. so the fact they are filled full of facts is not particularly important. what is important is they think about things a little differently. so if they leave my class and they tell their friends have you ever thought about this? we talked about this in such and such class, then i've done my job. and similarly what i have tried to do in this book was i would hope that if not on every page of police regularly the reader would say you know why don't agree with this guy, but i never thought of it like that, and that really was my goal. finally, 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 come here is the ending. basically i conclude the reason why humans are so morally inconsistent is that our moral decisions about many things but
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especially with analysts is an uncomfortable mix between biology, culture and rationality. so a species that has both a big part in a big brain. and that creates problems. we negative putting it lightly is our moral decisions are determined by two rival operating systems and one operating system is logic. this is what philosophers emphasized. i've come to conclude that philosophers are not all that important oftentimes in moral decisions because nobody listens to them. they talk to themselves and furthermore we are not logical because we have a second operating system which is the motion. the logic and form a motion, but our moral decisions are often sort of like looking at a painting. you sort of know why if you like a painting or you don't like intuitively, and then you come
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up with a reason. the other idea that i push at the end of this book is that consistency is vastly overrated as a moral principle. and it can actually lead to paralysis. and i've talked to a lot of animal activists over the years, and the search for moral consistency can miki pretty crazy. for example, i interviewed a woman one time who is a business executive who worked for ibm in the research triangle, which was very nice and very bright. and she took animals very seriously to the point she would take her dog, she would take fleas of her dog, pick them off one by one and the tics and let them loose. and she was really -- i talked to other people that really didn't like driving their car because it killed animals. i met people that their favorite sport was softball, playing softball, but they found a glove there was made out of a final
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writing a and additional chapter? i new-line it needed unending so ultimately i decided not to do to tell people what to do but try to find some moral people and talk about them. the people that i located or those who work on animals on which globally on a global scale has a $35 million operation and bigger than peter up. we spend one week in the desert with him and he tries to get people from all over the world to get together and is quite amazing. we met in a bar in south carolina.
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fifth her name was duty. she is a hairdresser and her thing for animals she loves a sea turtles so she gets up at 5:00 in the morning they try to save sea turtles one turtle at a time. so the last chapter is called the carnivorous yahoo! dealing with consistency. and the fact you can only do little is no excuse for doing nothing. the essential character of the nobel prize winner is a visiting scholar at the university and as the visiting scholar as she raises her hand and asks a
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year not expecting too much of humankind would ask them to live without these exploitations? is a not or human to accept their own humanity even if it means embracing the carnivorous yahoo! within ourselves? some of that phrase. [laughter] good question. coping with the inner yahoo! is like dealing with psychology and religion that goes by different names. george lucas calls it darth trader when it was pretty and the flesh was three he was worried about the yahoo!. evolutionary psychologists traces these origins in say the time between the frontal lobes and olympic system to explorer the yahoo! is the
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emotional of it during -- being driven by a small ration all writer. although unconsciously. the practice they can have control i argue that the paradox has been characterized our relationship with the results of the rational parts of the us and the yahoo! with them. living in a world that is morally convoluted which consistency is elusive and may throw up our hands in despair with the moral consistency with more complexity means more paralysis. no. a lot of real people have come to terms with their carnivorous yahoo! working on different scales mostly are small things that make them feel good about
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themselves. some of them cut back on meat consumption brothers donate money to the world for life fund or to the box turtle will be moved to safety in the middle of the highway. then i talked about our trip to utah to visit michael mountain and it turns out to as i helped with the sea turtles from south carolina, the book ends, i will read the last page and 1/2. it is called are dealing with the last bit of everyday life. and having the call to do with nature, there are not many michael mountains, people who will not kill the ants in their kitchens the people who have jobs and families in doing what they can to connect in a small way that is not
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bothered with their interactions with other species. but two zeroth switched said day hypothetical train going into a group of endangered chimpanzees but most of the correct route to in all liberation. the fact that they refuse to eat beef could wear leather shoes. i have accepted my own hypocrisy is. is it is better to let our cat outside than keeper imprisoned all day even though i know she will kill the occasional jim monaco. also thinking the barbecue somehow justifies the death of those who i will slather. i quit fishing when no
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longer found satisfaction we buy local eggs, by free range chicken because i thinkpad ase better life in when they mr. frieder said of by will go to a five procter bay taster be i said no banks. i was troubled by the flagrant may incoherence i describe vegetarian sushi pressly admitted they eat meat claiming the love for their roosters. with fed desire to improve the breed with genetically defective animals and quarters with the creatures living in filth per cry come to believe these contradictions are not anomalies rather they are inevitable and show that we're human.
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director for the center of human values at princeton asked sometimes what he does for a living. what is your philosophy? my philosophy is everything is more complicated than you thought. what the new science reveals attitudes and behavior and the relationships with the animals and our lives, the ones we love or hate or each is more complicated than we thought. [applause] questions? i can see how you'd find embracing our inconsistencies would be important for mental health but i would be concerned it
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is an excuse for inaction. coming from that standpoint standpoint, i wants your response that in the first world, i believe there are so many other health care alternatives considering environmental damage and i would just like your comment. >> i absolutely agree with you prepare the argument for eating meat boils down that it is natural and taste good which israel -- no real argument at all but it is profound in a ball suffering, killing, environm ental degradation. here is the problem. that argument has not made one lick of difference to anyone. one of the things that surprised me writing this
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book is there is an important book a brilliant philosophy and brilliant trading in 1975 at that time they 8170 pounds of meat per year now 240 then be killed and 3,000,000,002 quote -- chickens animals per year now 10 million for about the campaign to moralize meet, it has been a total failure. the biggest failure of an all rights movement and this is why i came to the logic because the fact it is so logical that even most vegetarians eat meat and those that give the meat go back to it. what the two other questions than we will come back. i will be happy to talk to
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you later. >> why do think it has been totally ignored the relationship between the two? >> other aspects important to psychology that also have been ignored like the psychology of religion and sued and we pay attention too big issues and stuff like that we have forgotten about the stuff that is important in people's lives. with the psychology of religion, people ask me, i can do my research because i work at western carolina university. if i looked at chapel hill or harvard, it is too far out of the mainstream and i think scientists are very
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conservative and people don't think out of the little box. >> the fact that it is published by harvard instead of university or oxford university press? >> totally i made a decision i would not write, most academic books make no impact except on a small group of scholars. this is a high-risk game but i will try it. i really enjoyed the ride it is tough trading this book i had to make as much about the sentences says this scholarship because i wanted to be a book that people read that i was lucky to get a major publisher that that
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was extraordinarily supportive. >> i would think of popular press could make it easy to dismiss. >> dismissed? i don't think so because i got and on the field when it was first starting so i have written a lot of stuff but people will say that i have sold out no question about that. but on either hand i think they will benefit people will know what and throws zoology is. does that answer your question? >> did you learn anything through the process that changes your mind? >> yes. a couple of things but i changed my mind in a big way
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that with the moral decision-making and that it was important to be logical if you have the moral stance from capital punishment to abortion to animals it was important to be morally consistent. however i no longer feel that way that it is okay that moral consistency is profitable so to take the middle ground, so philosophers that have taken this route, she basically says lawsuits are dominated by men it is the women's way to do philosophy but the approach that is argued that your morality could be affected by the motions come also it changes my mind on human nature and for most of my career imus strong
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advocate of evolutionary psychology and a lot of the human nature is built into us. the more i study about our interactions i realize how huge culture plays a role from the animals we eat to what we keep in our house and how it changes quickly. i have come to like anthropology and sociology that i used to dismiss as a field i now feel that they write about a lot of things. [laughter] so it changed my views of human nature in profound ways. >> have you thought about the phobias and the fears? >> guy could do that. the most common fear of animals by far is a fear of snakes. how many people in the united states die from snakebites?
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maybe 10 people the most nine -- dangers animal by far is a dog. you are twice as likely to be killed by a dog and 100 times more likely to be seriously injured or maimed and 5 million people are bitten but at every year and 400,000 1/2 to go to the emergency room. this is a great example of how of pollution does affect our attitude. we have a stone age fear of snakes when in reality the most dangerous is the dog. so phobias are interesting because they take out of the evolutionary heritage. >> but the rational fears come if they are irrational when do they stop? >> given death may have and
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destruction that for example, 80,000 people per year are taken to hospital emergency rooms because they tripped over their dog. [laughter] the biggest source of injuries for older americans is tripping over your dog. [laughter] other questions? >> >> i have only read the first 56 the pages but it seems like there's no bottom line to the moral decision i'm not be very articulate but i will field better 18 i cal because it is far better with a better life but it is still killed and i am still eating and it is still causing death but then i can take that further it is better than eating
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something else the end it seems like the rationale or thinking or choices can go in another direction. >> it can go 1 million directions and philosophers have a term for this call caught in the grip of a theory. [laughter] the woman that i use in the book is another woman named jonah who wrote a book but got high modes for philosophers but they said forget to about animal epics. if you can feel pleasure and pain we should not kill you. also animals with a nervous system are sentient dae i agree so she says in her book does that mean a spider has as much right to live as
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a human being? yes. and also termites have the right to eat your house and includes if you're in a fire and you choose between the puppy for the little kid you should flip a coin. i still get upset because wait a minute. you are so out in space that you cannot tell that it is not okay that there termites don't have the right to eat your house? maybe you should save the kid instead of a puppy? give me a break. she paints herself into a corner that is okay four per but what surprises me is how many activists, you go girl. [laughter] as she got into a debate over the great tragedy of 9/11 peter singer said the
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great tragedy was the death of 3,000 humans in the world. jon says that is not a great tragedy the great tragedy is a 35 million chickens killed in america and slaughterhouses that day. if peter sr. followed his own logic he would say the same thing. he is not an idiot. he made the right call that basically the death with 3,000 humans is more important than 35 million chickens even though he is mr. animal liberation's i have read pages in your book and you don't tell me how to live. [laughter] then you did not get your money's worth. i don't think it is that simple and good people make that decision differently.
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>> that want to respond but also with no bottom line i see it the same excuse for use for racism, why some animals are less than others so if you consider what we do to humans as the lowest level all. >> let me say something about that. the logic of the animal liberation is so strong that is exactly for the reason that you said i was sitting at a hotel bar 20 years ago with day animal-rights guy and a psychologist and i studied animal-rights guys. we have a beer in a bar and he says i don't get you. you have read our stuff and no more about these issues
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than we do why don't you like us? and he is of the u.s. so many philosophers are, all we need to do is show people that it is cruel and bad for them and everybody will stop eating meat. that is sheer fantasy. why am i not an animal activists has haunted me. one reason why i wrote the book. my moral intuition is different and doing research lately with marvell intuition that the central moral and tuition that fuels this is discussed and the idea some are more easily discussed a bold and others that transforms into morality but i give the animal activists respect
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because i'd like most people, they have the debts to bring their lives. that makes them miserable much of the time but that is the pace-- the price that you pay for the moral high ground. >> what you said before initially, that the vegetarians eating the meat is a real paradox but the amount of meat consumption not to read anything into that that as a moral rejection but if you look at our obesity epidemic, the amount of a accessibility of mass-produced food, fast food, fibers $45.
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>> you are totally right. the situation for u.s. dismal. it is horrifying because the one thing people do when they get money is a buy more meat. meat consumption in china has gone up 15 fold. 30 years ago the average chinese person eight this much meat per year now a roomful per year and they make more and more money. so now, in terms of meat, by far the greatest source available suffering everything else pales with that in all research is like nothing compared to that. is that it is backwards meat is also cheaper and now. i have talked for over an hour and you guys having
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great there will answer any questions you will have. one more question? >> what was the most surprising finding? >> the most surprising finding for me, that really got me shocked was the connection between vegetarians and the eating disorders. i discovered this by accident interviewing a woman who was the ex vegetarian for 12 years starting to go downhill she eight meaty and got healthier. i said what did you have for breakfast? she said half of pint of raw liver so no sheets me to three times per day almost all bra but then when she told me how she became a vegetarian i was 17 it was
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tied up with my eight eating disorder. i never heard of that. i went on the internet and i searched around for a correlation there was a pile of it and no question. most vegetarians do not have been eating disorders but there is a connection connection, especially with women and young women women, vegetarianism is linked to have a number of eating disorders including anorexia and bulimia they're much more likely, if you ask them, if you could take up fell to satisfy all of your nutritional needs, would you do that? we would say are you joking? many more of vegetarians say yes. because they don't like food.
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