Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie. Uh,
Speaker 1: you've seen a movie baby, right? You saw that as
Speaker 1: a child. I did, yeahard by that right, Yeah, just
Speaker 1: like everyone else. Um. Looking at Bandy, one can't help
Speaker 1: but think this does not look like a real deer.
Speaker 1: Its eyes are way too big. Like I would hate
Speaker 1: to see the animal like a realistic bandy, you know,
Speaker 1: because its eyes would just be enormous and like, if
Speaker 1: it took actual shape, it would be monstrous and very
Speaker 1: it would be kind of bizarre. It would look like
Speaker 1: a like an alien, like like a little gray alien
Speaker 1: with the giant eyes, except the in dear form, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but illustrated quite cute, right, yeah, in illustrated form, it's
Speaker 1: it's very adorable. Yeah. And some might even argue that
Speaker 1: Bambi was the beginnings of what we know as kawaii,
Speaker 1: which is sort of embracing of all things cute. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in the age of like L O L cats
Speaker 1: and you know, cute puppies sneezing or panda sneezing and
Speaker 1: everything else that we're seeing on the internet. It's undeniable
Speaker 1: that people have a connection to this cuteness that these
Speaker 1: animals um and it kind of brings into question our
Speaker 1: relationship with animals and the way that we treat them
Speaker 1: and we think about them. Right, Like with Bamby, they
Speaker 1: actually started off with real deer, right, they brought in
Speaker 1: real deer. Yeah. Yeah, so so just so everybody knows
Speaker 1: that the reason why we have this babyfied Bamby, this
Speaker 1: this big eyed, doeyide fawn, is because Disney was such
Speaker 1: a stickler for detail that that at first he said, okay,
Speaker 1: you know what, we need to really make sure that
Speaker 1: Bambi is rendered as a realistically as possible. So he
Speaker 1: had a pair of fawns shipped in from Maine and
Speaker 1: then he made his artists wat an autonomoust dissect the
Speaker 1: carcass of a newborn deer that resulted from that pair,
Speaker 1: and the sketches they produced were were really perfect, right,
Speaker 1: they were very realistic. But Disney realized right off the
Speaker 1: bat that this was a mistake. This wasn't gonna sell,
Speaker 1: This was not didn't test well with audiences, right right,
Speaker 1: This reality wasn't really gonna hook audiences the way that
Speaker 1: he wanted them to be emotionally hooked from the storyline.
Speaker 1: So he had his artists go back to the drawing
Speaker 1: board and they made them more cuddly. Um. And this
Speaker 1: is this is actually from how Herzog's really great book
Speaker 1: called Some We Love, Some We Hate, and Some We Eat,
Speaker 1: which looks at our tenuous relationship with animals and um
Speaker 1: he says that Bambi was essentially morphed into a surrogate
Speaker 1: human baby. Wow. Yeah, it's a I mean, and then
Speaker 1: it just had It does make you really think about this,
Speaker 1: this complex relationship that we have with animals, especially like
Speaker 1: in this case where guys are sitting I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: how these cute animals are gonna appeal to two children
Speaker 1: even as they're dissecting their carcasses and planning out Bambi.
Speaker 1: You know, you generally don't think of the various um,
Speaker 1: well not Vivia sections, but dissections involved with with your
Speaker 1: with your beloved Disney films. I'm hoping this was the
Speaker 1: only one they really did that for who knows. You know,
Speaker 1: you have to know, you start to think about all
Speaker 1: the past films that they did and wonder that's where
Speaker 1: that come from. Yeah, got to the bottom of that,
Speaker 1: but I mean from hell Herzog's perspective in his book,
Speaker 1: this is exactly the problem that we have here is that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, here's who's on the one hand, trying to
Speaker 1: to make this animal really connect with people and make
Speaker 1: it look more like a baby. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know that Disney thinks nothing of uh you know,
Speaker 1: taking the life of this little fawn in order to
Speaker 1: create something like this just for our pleasure, right, And
Speaker 1: of course that this this drawls right into the idea
Speaker 1: of that like we're we're attracted to, say a cat
Speaker 1: or a dog because it has been especially a kitten
Speaker 1: where it has oversized eyes, or or a puppy it
Speaker 1: has oversized eyes. And this, uh, this not completely humanlike face,
Speaker 1: but still the snout is less less pronounced than dogs
Speaker 1: generally when they're when they're smaller, and uh so it
Speaker 1: looks a little bit like a baby. Like it calls
Speaker 1: to mind an infant child. And therefore we have this
Speaker 1: paternal instinct that's kicking in when we look at it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've talked about the parental instinct before. In fact, we
Speaker 1: talked about it in Our Dogs podcasts and uh in
Speaker 1: Nova's Dogs Decoded. Psychologists Morton Klingelbach put adults into meg scanners,
Speaker 1: which are these really cool supercharge scanners or neuro imagers,
Speaker 1: and then they showed photos to people while they are
Speaker 1: in the scanner of unfamiliar adult faces, infant faces, and
Speaker 1: puppy faces, and within one seventh of a second, the
Speaker 1: medial orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in emotional responses,
Speaker 1: lit up like a pinball machine when people looked at
Speaker 1: infants and puppy faces. And this is what they were
Speaker 1: calling the parental instinct, like you can't not respond to
Speaker 1: these animals, um, and there's the here's the kicker though,
Speaker 1: which I thought was really interesting. Even in people who
Speaker 1: are blind from birth, they have the same areas activated
Speaker 1: in their brains when they hear the names of animals.
Speaker 1: So so it sort of points to this concept of
Speaker 1: animals or how we've painted them in language, which goes
Speaker 1: far beyond visual processing. Baby seal instantly, like it's sort
Speaker 1: of light up, yeah, certain things. Yeah, And even if
Speaker 1: you don't have a visual of that, if you've been
Speaker 1: blind from birth, you have an idea of what a
Speaker 1: baby seal means in our language into humans of scorpions, Uh, repulsion,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, um kitten kitten on a
Speaker 1: tricycle heart melting right now? Yeah, Um kitten farts erupting
Speaker 1: from the kitten sitting here in the tricycle. Yeah. Uh so,
Speaker 1: I mean it does kind of, you know, make us
Speaker 1: ask this question of why do some animals elicit these
Speaker 1: warm and fuzzy feelings while others illicit repulsion. They're they're
Speaker 1: all beams right right? Yeah, Like how much of it
Speaker 1: is has learned? Like you learned to say hey to
Speaker 1: snake just because you hear people say, oh that's gross,
Speaker 1: or you hear stories about it biting people and housing
Speaker 1: a lot of swelling and death, or is if there's
Speaker 1: something deeper? Is there something ingrained in us to be
Speaker 1: wary of snakes? Right? Yeah? Well, and some scientists would
Speaker 1: say that it's something we learned, and other scientists say
Speaker 1: that we're hardwired to fear snakes. Snakes are a great example.
Speaker 1: Lynn Isabelle of the University of California Davis posits that
Speaker 1: the primate brain specializes in visually detecting snakes, and she
Speaker 1: says that, um, you know our pastix variance shape the
Speaker 1: brains that we have today. And then if you take
Speaker 1: a bunch of kids and you ask them to look
Speaker 1: at pictures, they're far more likely to pick out the
Speaker 1: snake very quickly than say a flower or a caterpillar
Speaker 1: in those pictures. So they're sort of hone in on
Speaker 1: the snakes and that this is an instinct and it
Speaker 1: does kind of, uh, it does bring up an interesting
Speaker 1: question about whether or not you can inherit that. And
Speaker 1: there was a Science Daily article called Epigenetic memory Key
Speaker 1: to Nature Versus Nurture, and it says that organisms can
Speaker 1: create a biological memory of some variable conditions like the
Speaker 1: quality of nutrition or a temperature or something that, um,
Speaker 1: you might need to be scared of, essentially, and that
Speaker 1: this discovery essentially just explains why you would have this
Speaker 1: pass down from daughter cell to the next generation. So
Speaker 1: it's like a switch that's flipped on depending on what
Speaker 1: the conditions are for that certain for that organism. All right,
Speaker 1: So if this organism grows up in snake country, then uh,
Speaker 1: the epogen nake changes will take place to make that
Speaker 1: person be wary of snakes. Where if someone is growing
Speaker 1: up in a northern region or on or An island
Speaker 1: where all the snakes have been driven out by a priest. Yes,
Speaker 1: but again it gets tricky here because hell Herzog again
Speaker 1: in the book, points to New Guinea and tribespeople who
Speaker 1: have a high venomous snake population with further, snakes are venomous,
Speaker 1: So you would think that they would fear snakes, they
Speaker 1: would never touch them, But in fact, they're really good
Speaker 1: at ferreting out the ones that are non venomous, the
Speaker 1: ones that are venomous, and then the ones that are
Speaker 1: non venomous they eat for dinner. Okay, well, I mean
Speaker 1: that makes sense though they're living they're living there there,
Speaker 1: they know the local terrain, they know the local animals
Speaker 1: and uh, and they know exactly which ones they can
Speaker 1: cook for dinner and which one need to be avoided
Speaker 1: like the plague. So they have specifically adapted. But that
Speaker 1: that doesn't explain why people in North America are so
Speaker 1: fearful of snakes. You're far more likely to be killed
Speaker 1: by a dog than from a snake, according to hell
Speaker 1: Hers Well, yeah, but I mean we still have some
Speaker 1: very poisonous snakes, cotton mouths, copper heads, rattlers, right, true, true,
Speaker 1: And there's they're scary, folks, I get it. And dogs
Speaker 1: aren't quite as scary unless they're coojo yeah. Yeah. Or
Speaker 1: my neighbor's dog. My neighbor's dog is quite scary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what kind of dog. I don't know. I think it's
Speaker 1: a pitpole. Sorry. Yeah, they can be a little less scary. Yeah.
Speaker 1: See there, I am. I'm just I'm playing into the
Speaker 1: whole risk thing here about whether or not the risk
Speaker 1: is actually there. Um. But again, going back to this,
Speaker 1: to this relationship with us and animals, hair Zog really
Speaker 1: looks at this uncomfortable relationship with animals we have, and
Speaker 1: it's uncomfortable, not just with snakes, So okay, they can
Speaker 1: be a danger, this uncomfortable relationship and the fact that
Speaker 1: we eat some of them, and we make these deliberate
Speaker 1: choices to eat some of them and to keep others
Speaker 1: as pets or just look at them. Yeah, mine, and
Speaker 1: I guess that, yea. One of the things about about
Speaker 1: this scenario that that fascinates me, of course, is that
Speaker 1: you have you can look at like two extremes, like
Speaker 1: the person who is like a diet in the wool
Speaker 1: meat eater who is just one of those people that
Speaker 1: maybe has like a really kind of annoying extremist attitude
Speaker 1: about it, where it's like, yeah, kind of like everything
Speaker 1: exists for me to potentially grill and eat, and if
Speaker 1: I can't eat it, then don't waste my time with it.
Speaker 1: And then on the other hand, you can you can
Speaker 1: have the the equally annoying, like uber vegan kind of
Speaker 1: stereotype where they fill this deep emotional connection with all
Speaker 1: life forms and therefore aren't going to eat anything in
Speaker 1: there that will fall Yeah, exactly so. But but the
Speaker 1: reality is most people fall somewhere in between, and and
Speaker 1: it ends up being this complex relationship of I mean,
Speaker 1: to a certain extances, kind of pick and choose, and
Speaker 1: then that is grafted into this world view we have
Speaker 1: where it's okay to eat this, but not this this.
Speaker 1: Animals are friends, this one is our ancestral enemy, uh,
Speaker 1: the snake, and then this one, uh, this one's kind
Speaker 1: of in a gray area, and we just don't think
Speaker 1: about them as much. Well. And I think that the
Speaker 1: reason why people are considering the question of eating meat
Speaker 1: so much these days is when are resources right? We
Speaker 1: don't have that much land left to to to raise
Speaker 1: cows and pigs and everything else that's meat oriented as
Speaker 1: we used to. And yet our consumption is at all
Speaker 1: time high, right yeah, I feel like a lot of it.
Speaker 1: You know, there's people reaching the point where they're they're like, whoa, yeah,
Speaker 1: my family really ate a lot of meat. Was that
Speaker 1: really necessary to eat that much meat all the time?
Speaker 1: Because it grows from being a necessity or or or
Speaker 1: something we just have every now and then. I mean,
Speaker 1: studies have shown that as as country's populations become more prosperous,
Speaker 1: they eat more meat. Well you see that in India
Speaker 1: and China, right. Um. In fact, the same sort of
Speaker 1: factory farming practices are beginning to be practiced there, which
Speaker 1: as as a whole other podcast about the ramifications of
Speaker 1: that our environment. But it does sort of drawn to
Speaker 1: question this or actually sort of underscores this problem of Okay,
Speaker 1: well we have so much at our disposal for the
Speaker 1: most part people living in in um in industrialized nations.
Speaker 1: And you have brought this up the other day that
Speaker 1: you saw a chicken biscuit snack and you say, ridiculous thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was on a billboard at like a fast food restaurant,
Speaker 1: and there you know, it's likes chicken biscuit snack, and
Speaker 1: and that made me feel kind of weird because I'm like,
Speaker 1: I really don't need an animal to die for my snack. Like,
Speaker 1: for my snack, I can just do with some fruit
Speaker 1: or some snack mix um, or just some gum and
Speaker 1: some water or something. But but an animal doesn't need
Speaker 1: to die for my for my snack. An animal doesn't
Speaker 1: need to die for my breakfast. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe my brunch on a special occasion, sometimes my lunch
Speaker 1: and dinner, you know, a couple of times a week,
Speaker 1: if it's like a fish or something, I guess yeah.
Speaker 1: And so that's the sort of environment we're living in,
Speaker 1: is that we have so much at our disposal that
Speaker 1: you start to back up and say, do we really
Speaker 1: need to have a chicken skit as a snack? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, back in the day, you should be that
Speaker 1: you would kill a chicken and you would eat it
Speaker 1: from you know, from head to tail right, you would
Speaker 1: use every single part. And although there are some movements
Speaker 1: that are getting back to that, for the most part,
Speaker 1: Americans are getting a bucket of chicken and calling it
Speaker 1: a day. Right. Um, So there's there's that sort of
Speaker 1: looming out there, right, that's just an odd sort of
Speaker 1: circumstance that we find ourselves in. But Hell's Herzog wants
Speaker 1: to look at it even a little bit closer again.
Speaker 1: Why do we have this sort of uncomfortable relationship when
Speaker 1: we're looking at animals for for meat source or even
Speaker 1: just killing animals? Um He writes about a game warden
Speaker 1: in an African village where baboons destroy crops and raise
Speaker 1: the hackles of the local humans because of course that
Speaker 1: the babanians are threatening their food source right, their vegetables
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. It's so annoys them
Speaker 1: that they actually trapped them in pits at night and
Speaker 1: then they kill them in the morning. But they feel
Speaker 1: bad about this and actually have a saying in Swahili
Speaker 1: that is never look a bad boot in the eye.
Speaker 1: It's it's a good idea general, because they're yeah, they're
Speaker 1: I find bad Boom's rather creepy and fearsome, you do
Speaker 1: is the well their hignees are are certainly add to it,
Speaker 1: because it's like, but I mean the front of them,
Speaker 1: they tend to be pretty fearsome, and then their behinds
Speaker 1: are just kind of gross. But it's it's like all
Speaker 1: rainbow in the back and then yeah, you're right, a
Speaker 1: little bit fangy in the front. Yeah, I mean they're
Speaker 1: they're fascinating animals, but yeah there and then you see
Speaker 1: videos of them. I mean I've watched a lot of
Speaker 1: like Discovery, BBC Nature documentaries over the last few years,
Speaker 1: and yeah, like edinburrow hanging out, watching bad boon's like
Speaker 1: run down livestock um and eat things that there. And
Speaker 1: I also with monkeys, I mean, monkeys can often walk
Speaker 1: that that line between the adorable and the grotesque because
Speaker 1: because on one hand, you look at a baby monkey
Speaker 1: and you kind of see a baby infant. You see,
Speaker 1: like some you see some positive spects of humanity wrapped
Speaker 1: up in that child infant. But I mean if you
Speaker 1: see like this ferocious looking monkey with a weird foul
Speaker 1: us chasing down an animal and then ripping into its throat,
Speaker 1: it still calls to mind some some very human qualities,
Speaker 1: but not the ones you want to see magnified. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and to your point too about baboons, they're not
Speaker 1: so cuddly right there. They are a little bit scary,
Speaker 1: and yet they're saying, don't look the baboon in the eye.
Speaker 1: The reason is that the villagers can't help but see
Speaker 1: themselves in the baboon, right and eye kind of something
Speaker 1: that there is that connection. It's and it's one of
Speaker 1: those things like hanging out with our with one's pet.
Speaker 1: There are aspects of it that never get old, like
Speaker 1: you never stopped finding your pet adorable. But but I
Speaker 1: find myself, especially since I only came into that really
Speaker 1: having like an indoor pet in the last few years,
Speaker 1: like I'll look into the cat's eyes and the cat
Speaker 1: will be looking into my eyes and I'm it's, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of an outrageous overstatement of the obvious, but it's
Speaker 1: it's just kind of mind blowing that we're connecting on
Speaker 1: some level. I mean, we can't talk killing a connection
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, well, I mean, but she's connecting with
Speaker 1: me because she's looking at my eyes. She's she's she's
Speaker 1: looking to you know, to my sight center. She's saying,
Speaker 1: give me more tuna. Well, yeah, I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that you know that we're having a deep spiritual
Speaker 1: thing or that we're talking about book, but but yeah,
Speaker 1: so I can totally see why you would want to
Speaker 1: avoid looking into the batman's eyes because then you're there's
Speaker 1: that that brief moment of connection and with this, uh,
Speaker 1: this this thing that looks very human in many ways,
Speaker 1: and then you're about to kill it. All right, we'll
Speaker 1: be back in a moment, and we're going to discuss
Speaker 1: pigs and we're also going to discuss Amazonians in their
Speaker 1: odd relationship to my keys. This podcast is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel.
Speaker 1: At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation.
Speaker 1: Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers
Speaker 1: to life's questions. And we're back. Before we get into
Speaker 1: some more interesting animal relationships, I want to point out
Speaker 1: that that there have been some studies that have shown
Speaker 1: that there are some portions of the brain that light
Speaker 1: up when we see animals, but not human faces or objects.
Speaker 1: So it really underlines that the brain has evolved to
Speaker 1: specialize in processing information about animals. And this is that
Speaker 1: parental instinct we were talking about. We again, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're looking at your cat and you guys are connecting,
Speaker 1: there's something going on there, probably for both of you.
Speaker 1: Because we've talked about this exchange of oxytocin before too,
Speaker 1: particularly with dogs um and oxytocin being that feel good
Speaker 1: hormone that you usually associate between moms and new babies.
Speaker 1: So that's there, there's that's all underlying that. But again,
Speaker 1: why why don't we look at a pig which is
Speaker 1: far smarter than a dog and say, ah, that that
Speaker 1: pig is so smart and um, such a great fella
Speaker 1: or gal. You know, we should spare them the acts,
Speaker 1: you know, why why them? Yeah? Why is there this
Speaker 1: in net bacon phenomenon that refuses to die? Uh? Like,
Speaker 1: why why is that? Okay? Why is that that hip?
Speaker 1: When you know the pig is smarter than the cat
Speaker 1: and and you know, probably smarter than the dog too,
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, we're a lot of us are totally
Speaker 1: fine with that becoming breakfast. Well, because somewhere along the
Speaker 1: way someone discovered bacon, right, and that's it's delicious. That's
Speaker 1: what everybody's thinking right now, and not everybody. They're gonna
Speaker 1: I guarantee this, some people out there that are just
Speaker 1: a little over bacon. Well, I don't know. A full disclosure,
Speaker 1: I'm a vegetarian, and I will say that bacon is delicious.
Speaker 1: I do recall this, and I've actually heard of studies
Speaker 1: before that say that bacon is like the gateway drug
Speaker 1: to meet. Really. Yeah, so you could tempt anyone into
Speaker 1: meet if you were to, I guess put a couple
Speaker 1: of strips before someone's nose. Oh, I don't know about that.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm not as big on bacon these days.
Speaker 1: I mean the interest in here for bacon eaters or
Speaker 1: actually for a former bacon eaters. Former bacon eaters, yes, reformed. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about these amazon Ians. Um, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a tribe in the Amazon. They are the Awa garage
Speaker 1: tribe that they're They were covered in the recent BBC
Speaker 1: Discovery co production Human Planet. If you haven't seen that,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend. It's a fascinating show. The show itself
Speaker 1: goes around the world looks at different human old human
Speaker 1: customs that are still practiced, uh for the not for tourists,
Speaker 1: but for the act itself or the you know, the
Speaker 1: benefit of the act and this particular tribe. They will
Speaker 1: they will go out and they will hunt monkeys like
Speaker 1: monkeys are a huge part of their diet. They will
Speaker 1: catch some monkeys of very species, bring them home, chop
Speaker 1: them up, put them in the stewpot. Everybody's watching. Everybody is,
Speaker 1: you know, dipping into the pot and eating some monkey flesh.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's the most natural thing in the
Speaker 1: world for the great source of protein. But they'll find
Speaker 1: themselves some positions where they've killed a mother monkey. It
Speaker 1: would be these baby monkeys. So they'll bring them back. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they will care for them as pets and uh
Speaker 1: and and even in a way more than pets, because
Speaker 1: if there's an infant monkey that needs needs breastfeeding, a
Speaker 1: human mother will actually breastfeed the monkey. Okay, so that's
Speaker 1: that's just weird. The pet part I kind of understand.
Speaker 1: But the actual like taking the monkey into the family
Speaker 1: and then giving it nourishment from your own breast, well
Speaker 1: they're but they're they're making that connections, that parental connections.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of like the next step, right, But
Speaker 1: how could you have that in this you know, how
Speaker 1: could you have a slaughter of monkeys, but then I
Speaker 1: have the nurturing of monkeys. That's the interesting part about
Speaker 1: it because and it's important to note too that these
Speaker 1: these monkeys they raise, they don't like raise them up
Speaker 1: and then eat them. These monkeys have are once you
Speaker 1: take them home, once they grow up, when they've grown
Speaker 1: up with you, they have sort of privileged status. And
Speaker 1: it's not just monkeys, they're just they're just like an
Speaker 1: animal loving tribe. They they love like their their their villages,
Speaker 1: just like crawling with animals of various descriptions there. They're
Speaker 1: they're like the crazy cat lady, except uh, not limited
Speaker 1: to two felines. All right. There's actually another group that
Speaker 1: they cover on their the bish Bishnoy women. This is
Speaker 1: in India, and they actually breastfeed orphan gazelles and bishnoy
Speaker 1: if I'm saying that correctly. This is a Hindu sect
Speaker 1: of vegetarian vegetarians and really hold nature and high esteem.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a kind of an echo Dharma kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But yeah, the the Amazonian tribe those the
Speaker 1: most interesting one because because they're they're they're not vegetarians.
Speaker 1: They will eat they eat monkeys regularly as part of
Speaker 1: their diet, but then they also raise them as pets.
Speaker 1: They so they on one level they can connect with
Speaker 1: them with with the same they'll have the same species
Speaker 1: of monkey, the same and it will be a pet
Speaker 1: on one side and dinner on the other. So how
Speaker 1: do you end up create creating the world viewing? Well,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe that's the cognitive dissonance. They're right, Okay, it's
Speaker 1: there's there's got to be some sort of tension, right,
Speaker 1: or some sort of friction between these two acts, And
Speaker 1: by becoming a surrogate mother to these orphans, perhaps that's
Speaker 1: neutralizing the fact and that's where that's where you're lessening
Speaker 1: the cognitive dissonance. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I
Speaker 1: know I'm describing a human thing to to a primate,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's it's a It is very interesting
Speaker 1: that they do this. They don't have to do this,
Speaker 1: but it's really it's really not that different from from
Speaker 1: the complex worldviews of the rest of us take on
Speaker 1: to to make sense of their thinking about war. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just thinking about diet in general. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: you could get into the war as well. I mean,
Speaker 1: it basically comes down to heuristic framing, right. In psychology,
Speaker 1: heuristics it's all about efficient rules hard coded into evolutionary process.
Speaker 1: It basically explains how we make decisions, how we come
Speaker 1: to judgments, and well, how our logic is flawed sometimes
Speaker 1: because yeah, yeah, because you end up having flawed logic
Speaker 1: built into the program. Yeah, exactly. We create this framework
Speaker 1: and then we sort of never go outside of the
Speaker 1: framework because once we build it in there, then you
Speaker 1: feel like you've answered your questions. Right. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of an ethical operating system. Some things will work really
Speaker 1: well with it, but then occasionally you'll have a loophole
Speaker 1: that is h exploited by some viral logic. I guess
Speaker 1: if you will, like, for instance, my own framing system
Speaker 1: self analyzing here about my own consumption of meat, because
Speaker 1: I even though I eat less meat than than I
Speaker 1: used to take. Take cephalopods, all right. The cuttlefish is
Speaker 1: an animal that I think is an amazing creature. I
Speaker 1: think they're very adorable. I've never eaten one, and I
Speaker 1: can safely say I will I will probably never eat
Speaker 1: a cuttlefish because they're just they're just too high on
Speaker 1: the on the cute fascinating creature list, and I have
Speaker 1: no experience tasting them and no interest in tasting them.
Speaker 1: All right, didn't take the OCTOPI the octopy is a
Speaker 1: creature that I have eaten before, uh, generally and sushi.
Speaker 1: And then I learned more about the species, and I
Speaker 1: found out that some octopier are as smart as a cat,
Speaker 1: and so I like the cat, I'm not gonna eat
Speaker 1: the cat. And then but then the thought of this
Speaker 1: octopi being the octopus being as smart as the cat,
Speaker 1: I've I've suddenly just really adverse to eating guy. So
Speaker 1: so my esteem for the creature itself and it's intelligence
Speaker 1: is higher. But also I was never really that impressed
Speaker 1: with the taste of octopi, so um did a low returning,
Speaker 1: low returning investment there. Now the squid, however, I haven't
Speaker 1: read that much indicating that the squid is is as
Speaker 1: smart as a cat and the taste of the squid
Speaker 1: is that much better. So it's perfectly fine with me
Speaker 1: to eat squid like I have no ethical and kind
Speaker 1: that makes look a sense really, rather than you're transposing
Speaker 1: a cat face onto an octopus, which is adorable. I
Speaker 1: think my wife had a dream like that once where
Speaker 1: where she had an octopi with a cat with a
Speaker 1: cat's head and it was all fuzzy. Did she really
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool? Yeah, And her brother was trying to
Speaker 1: take it from her something. Of course, he was, he
Speaker 1: wanted it. It was that cool. So a lot of
Speaker 1: this is pointing to this problem of having a theory
Speaker 1: of mind. And this is what haw her Zog says
Speaker 1: in the book, This theory of mind. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the This is the whole human thing where you can't
Speaker 1: look at another person, another animal, etcetera without sort of
Speaker 1: putting yourself in in that creature's shoes to try and
Speaker 1: think as it thinks on on a very human level.
Speaker 1: This is important because it allows us to empathize with people,
Speaker 1: to try and understand where they're coming from and better
Speaker 1: communicate with them, to better work with them. You know,
Speaker 1: it's the whole reason they have that test and blade
Speaker 1: runner for the for the replicants to to see if
Speaker 1: they were a replicant or not, because the tels were
Speaker 1: in their ability to empathize with somebody else. But with animals,
Speaker 1: of course, it's very It's also very useful in hunting
Speaker 1: them and figuring out what they're doing, because you can't
Speaker 1: ask the cat, hey, what are you up to? You
Speaker 1: have to you have to use the theory of mind
Speaker 1: to try and figure out what it's doing, or the
Speaker 1: chicken that you're trying to chase around the yard, or
Speaker 1: the deer that you're hunting in here in the forest.
Speaker 1: This is the crux of the problem though, because in
Speaker 1: order for you to inhabit the mind of another, whether
Speaker 1: it be you know, a saber tooth tiger or your
Speaker 1: next door neighbor, you have to get in think like them,
Speaker 1: try to predict the future, and empathize like you cannot
Speaker 1: take the empathy away from the prediction model, right, because
Speaker 1: it's sort of hardwired in there. So this is what
Speaker 1: I think leads to feelings of conflicts. So if you
Speaker 1: connect with your potential food source and you ascribe some
Speaker 1: of your own attributes to them, because you're going to
Speaker 1: write and it project yourself onto them, You're gonna unconsciously
Speaker 1: be defining this creature in the shadow of yourself. It's
Speaker 1: like a hitman that gets to know the duty he's
Speaker 1: supposed to whack, right, That's right, you could objectifying that
Speaker 1: person um and you are. And so in this case though,
Speaker 1: if you're you're hunting this, you're about to eat this creature.
Speaker 1: And how Herzog would even say that that all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you you might be feeling something like cannibalism,
Speaker 1: which I think is really interesting, and he even talks
Speaker 1: to about how uh this Columbia University. University historian Richard
Speaker 1: Bullyett says that the more distant we've become from the
Speaker 1: creatures that produce food and fiber and hides, the closer
Speaker 1: our relationships with pets have become, and the more meat
Speaker 1: we eat, the more we feel guilty about it, because
Speaker 1: we've come to know animals as less as them and
Speaker 1: more as us. Yeah. But of course, if you're depending
Speaker 1: on on some forms of meat and some markets, for me,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're so far removed from the source that
Speaker 1: you don't even you know, you have kids that that
Speaker 1: that don't know that a hamburger is a cow, you know,
Speaker 1: for for the longest, because you know, how would you know?
Speaker 1: Well this is then that's the interesting point you make,
Speaker 1: because this is when I for myself personally, and this
Speaker 1: is by the way, I am a vegetarian and this
Speaker 1: is a personal choice, and I'm not, you know, foisting
Speaker 1: this onto anyone, but I am going to say that
Speaker 1: that for me, that the weird point the disconnect came
Speaker 1: when I realized that once again I was opening this
Speaker 1: package of chicken boneless chicken, and I was sliding it
Speaker 1: out into the frying pan and and trying my best
Speaker 1: not to touch it. And I would never touch meat,
Speaker 1: and so I started really like, that's ridiculous that I'm
Speaker 1: about to eat this thing. I cannot touch it. I
Speaker 1: cannot get myself to to touch the flesh of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like the act of cooking is like a transformation.
Speaker 1: It transfers it from flesh to food, and eating food
Speaker 1: is no problem. And yeah, and so many of us
Speaker 1: don't really, especially if you if you're not really a
Speaker 1: cook at all, if you, like say, you just depend
Speaker 1: on fast food as you're or or some sort of
Speaker 1: like microwavable type of prepackaged process thing, you're not really
Speaker 1: touching flesh that much. You're always dealing with food. You've
Speaker 1: got the process part of it, right. So anyway, says again,
Speaker 1: you know, here's pointing to this problem at least for me,
Speaker 1: which was okay, if I if I can't, if I
Speaker 1: can't get my head around doing this one act and
Speaker 1: yet I can do this other act, then then somehow
Speaker 1: for me personally, there's a disconnect that I need to
Speaker 1: square myself with um. And I thought it was really
Speaker 1: interesting that hell, Herzog talks about how we do this
Speaker 1: on some level sometimes either we know, make a conscious
Speaker 1: decision stop eating meat, or you know, we try to
Speaker 1: be better about eating responsibly, right, like you know, like
Speaker 1: cutting it down to not think, um, you know, a
Speaker 1: chicken biscuit for a snack, or or of course another
Speaker 1: one is it's I I've heard it put that you
Speaker 1: should only have your meat serving should be about the
Speaker 1: size of a wallet, and and if you're eating more
Speaker 1: than that, then you're being meat arosco. Or if Michael
Speaker 1: Pollan says, I think something along the lines that during
Speaker 1: the day he's a vegetarian, at night he's a carnivore
Speaker 1: along those lines, and that's because he's he's a wearewolf, right,
Speaker 1: you can't help it. That's an inherited genetic condition like
Speaker 1: mild mannard and that button up shirt. But no, U
Speaker 1: beneath that exterior is a werewolf. But then they also
Speaker 1: say that there's something called semantic moral distancing. That's another tactic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where you're getting into this, like the also
Speaker 1: the CycL linguistics, the use of language, and of course
Speaker 1: in the use of meaning, because the way I'm sort
Speaker 1: of looking at it here is you could you have
Speaker 1: like a simple arrangement like the hitman and the duty's
Speaker 1: gonna whack the person. And then the animal kingdom where
Speaker 1: I am human, everything else is other and I can
Speaker 1: eat anything that's other. Other is objectifying things. Right, But
Speaker 1: then when I use that theory of mind, everything that
Speaker 1: is other potentially becomes to varying degrees me yes, or
Speaker 1: or at least my species. Distance yourself then from me
Speaker 1: than me and you and the other god we're going
Speaker 1: to need so the system, you know, just immediately like
Speaker 1: there's just a quantum leap and its complexity, just its
Speaker 1: semantic complexity, and and so suddenly our world view isn't
Speaker 1: one of us and other of me and then potential food.
Speaker 1: But this this multilayered view in which some things are foods,
Speaker 1: some things are not, some things are are pets, some
Speaker 1: things are flesh, some things are food. It's um. And
Speaker 1: in cyclinguistics they would say, you know, is it that
Speaker 1: we are determining uh? Are we determining our reality through language?
Speaker 1: Or are we defining reality through language? Right? Like it
Speaker 1: like it's like the the flesh food thing. Um, if
Speaker 1: you go to go to the fast food restaurant. You're
Speaker 1: not going to order, Hey give me some dead cow?
Speaker 1: Can you? Can you give me some heated dead cow
Speaker 1: on some bread, because that would be great. Now you
Speaker 1: just ask for a hamburger, and I mean that's and
Speaker 1: and to a to a lesser extent, what is the hamburger?
Speaker 1: It's beef, it's not it's yeah, it's like like all
Speaker 1: these different levels of semantics, different different language differences between
Speaker 1: the food and the flesh, between the thing we're consuming
Speaker 1: in the animal. Yeah. And see you see that that
Speaker 1: moral distancing right through language. And you see that you're
Speaker 1: that we're painting our existence through language, right, we're painting
Speaker 1: this particular reality for us. I'm going to eat a
Speaker 1: hamburger through language, as opposed to I'm about to eat
Speaker 1: some cow meat as you say, are a cow dead
Speaker 1: cow meat? Um? And you see this all through. It's
Speaker 1: not just with animals. You see this at the corporate
Speaker 1: level too, right. Um. You here downsizing or elimination instead
Speaker 1: of you know, I just sacked you or something that
Speaker 1: feels a little bit more true, and or you say
Speaker 1: we wish you you're the best in your future endeavors
Speaker 1: as opposed to don't let the door hit you in
Speaker 1: the butt on the way out right, right, um. And
Speaker 1: these are these little niceties, these a little moral distancing.
Speaker 1: And again in the food world, you can see this
Speaker 1: all over the place. I mean, bacon is a great example, right,
Speaker 1: why don't we just call it again? Except the Germans though,
Speaker 1: And that's the really fascinating thing, because in Germany, if
Speaker 1: you're ordering some, if you're talking about pork, you just
Speaker 1: say swine flesh, which is which is pig flesh or
Speaker 1: rain flesh for cow flesh. They're they're a lot more direct.
Speaker 1: They're so hard nosed as Germans. You kind of I
Speaker 1: gotta admire that, you know, because there's there's no uh,
Speaker 1: there's no lifting of the veil there, the veil has
Speaker 1: been lifted. Um. And I thought this was interesting too,
Speaker 1: And hail Herzog's books. He talks about how powerful it is,
Speaker 1: this uh, this language of cycle linguistics, that if you
Speaker 1: look at something like the Patagonian toothfish, that doesn't sound
Speaker 1: to appetizing, right, Yeah, I'm just imagining a fish like
Speaker 1: get embedded with teeth exactly, Sean, just looking eyes, spiny teeth,
Speaker 1: just not something you necessarily want to eat. Um. And
Speaker 1: it really that's what that sounds like, right, patagony and
Speaker 1: toothfish sounds very prehistoric. But behold the Chilean sea bass. Oh,
Speaker 1: now it sounds tasty. Doesn't that sound like a foodie's
Speaker 1: biggest dream there? Well, that's like the dolphin, right, not
Speaker 1: not the dolphin, the mammal, but the dolphin fish to
Speaker 1: better market. I believe that's the one that they now
Speaker 1: call my am I right, yeah, that's right, because that
Speaker 1: sounds delightful, whereas dolphin it sounds particularly problematic because for
Speaker 1: some reason it has the same name as this mammal
Speaker 1: that is uh is you know, crazy smart? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: mean you don't want to eat flipper? Right, um. And
Speaker 1: then they also talked about to the Canadian government describing
Speaker 1: a seal hunt right as a harvest, a coal, a
Speaker 1: management plan. And you've got Peta on the other side
Speaker 1: saying no, it's a massacre, it's a slaughter, it's centrocity.
Speaker 1: So it's very interesting to see how how approaching um
Speaker 1: this reality for each for no matter where you are
Speaker 1: on the side of the issue. Yeah, there's language, you
Speaker 1: can you can summon the appropriate language to to color
Speaker 1: it however you want. Yeah, so I don't know. I
Speaker 1: do think it's interesting too that Peter started using Save
Speaker 1: the Sea Kittens to try to get people a little
Speaker 1: bit more aware of fish as as um you know,
Speaker 1: I guess as as peschetarians might look at them, um like, hey,
Speaker 1: don't we eat the fish the little kittens. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know about sea kitten. Yeah, but I did think
Speaker 1: it was interesting the creative use of language there. So
Speaker 1: there you go. Some some thoughts on this. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's tricky business, this this subject. Yeah, it's um and
Speaker 1: and and I definitely want to reiterate, you know, not
Speaker 1: not being judging about anybody's decisions on what they eat
Speaker 1: and why they eat it. But I guess I can,
Speaker 1: I do tend to to air toward, uh digging the
Speaker 1: idea that that we should be at least a little
Speaker 1: open about about why we eat the things we eat
Speaker 1: and uh and even even if we're not open all
Speaker 1: the time about it, that it will at least have
Speaker 1: those moments of clarity where we we realize that that, well,
Speaker 1: this this thing that I'm eating, it's delicious as heck,
Speaker 1: but it also used to be a thing running around
Speaker 1: on four legs. And that's not necessarily good, not necessarily bad,
Speaker 1: but I think it's an important reality. Um, you've only
Speaker 1: in dealing with the logistics of our current food situation. Well,
Speaker 1: and I think to write now because you say the
Speaker 1: current food food situation. This is not a conversation we'd
Speaker 1: be having a hundred years ago, because probably you or
Speaker 1: I would be out in the backyard ringing a chicken's
Speaker 1: neck and you wouldn't you would understand what it took
Speaker 1: to get that to the plate, and our podcast would
Speaker 1: be Uh, what format would it be on? I guess
Speaker 1: we've been like an old record or what was the tube? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. You see a hundred years ago, well, gosh,
Speaker 1: I don't even think the talkies were in. Maybe it
Speaker 1: would be a newspaper columns it would have yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, make up your reality there. Well cool.
Speaker 1: If any of you have any thoughts, definitely let us know.
Speaker 1: We would love to hear everyone's thoughts about our food situations,
Speaker 1: you know, and we want to hear from you know,
Speaker 1: if you're a hardcore vegan or a nugent esque. If
Speaker 1: you are Ted Nugent, we want to hear from you. Yeah. Maybe,
Speaker 1: and uh in all the places you fall in between.
Speaker 1: Let us know. There are there animals that, uh that
Speaker 1: you're that everyone else seems fine with eating that you
Speaker 1: rule out. Are there animals that no one wants to eat,
Speaker 1: but do you think would be a great thing to
Speaker 1: cook up? Let us know. Yeah, and also Zuckerman, if
Speaker 1: you're out there, we want to hear from you, because
Speaker 1: apparently he's doing this whole thing from from food. He's
Speaker 1: only going to eat animals that he kills personally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is I don't know, that's just kind of creepy.
Speaker 1: It's just and in a little old kind of macho
Speaker 1: for me. I mean, someone who has a lot of
Speaker 1: time on their hands and a lot of money in
Speaker 1: their pockets. Yeah, just applies to animals that now a veggie.
Speaker 1: He's not Upen's not he's not slaughtering egg plants. Yeah alright,
Speaker 1: well yeah, let us know. You can find us on
Speaker 1: Facebook and Twitter. We are blow the Mind on both
Speaker 1: of those, and you can also drop us an email
Speaker 1: at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
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