Find our Sentientist conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism podcast here.
Jonathan Balcombe is an ethologist and author. He was Director of Animal Sentience with the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy and Department Chair for Animal Studies with Humane Society University. He lectures internationally on animal behavior and the human-animal relationship. Jonathan also served as Associate Editor of the journal Animal Sentience from 2015 to 2019.
Jonathan’s books include: The Use of Animals in Higher Education; Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good; Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals; What A Fish Knows and SuperFly.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
00:00 Clips
01:00 Welcome
– Links to previous episodes: Jo-Anne McArthur, Marc Bekoff, Claudia Hirtenfelder, Jordi Casamitjana “people who are really thinking about sentience and its importance in the world”
03:06 Jonathan’s Intro
– “I’m Canadian but I’m also American and British”
– Biology, ethology, animal behaviour, then non-profit animal protection
– “I was always very interested but also concerned about the wellbeing of animals… non-human animals because of course we’re animals as well”
– “Then I discovered I was pretty good at writing books!”
– “Sentience… what animals are thinking, what are they feeling…”
– “It’s a very exciting time to be an ethologist… scientists are asking questions that were considered taboo… the inner lives of animals… The taboo is gone.”
– “There’s a lot going on between the ears of a hedgehog or an elephant or a fish… not just vertebrates… there’s a lot going on in the insides of animals without a backbone… insects, arthropods, crustaceans… octopuses and squids and nautiluses… the darlings of invertebrate sentience”
– “Somebody thinking about thinking in non-humans”
– JW: “Science has had to catch up with common sense”
– Bringing scientific knowledge to the public through popular books like “What a Fish Knows” and “SuperFly”
– “I’m passionate about animals and want the world to change desperately in their favour… there’s a lot of potential… but it’s mostly unrealised potential as yet”
07:35 What’s Real?
– Non-religious parents but mum joined the Quakers when pregnant with Jonathan
– “As my body was forming inside my mum’s womb, religion was coming into her life”
– “I go to a Catholic church, not because I’m Catholic but because I sing… it’s good for me, it’s good for my health and my spirit”
– “It’s a bit ironic that this atheist, me, goes to a Catholic church every Sunday…”
– “My partner is Catholic… when I met her she was a Catholic omnivore and now she’s just a Catholic”
– “I’m not working on her to try to convert her and she’s not trying to convert me… by and large our worldviews are very compatible”
– Quaker principles “Two of them I really like… non-violent and peaceful… open freedom of expression…”
– “In the worship… anyone can get up and speak at any time… I don’t particularly like the idea of a sermon from an expert…”
– “By far the most violent industry in the world is the animal agriculture industry… millions of sentient beings being killed every minute… the numbers are staggering… yet it doesn’t even get mentioned at the mealtime… at a Quaker camp or a Catholic pot-luck lunch… animal products are going to be very much part of that”
– “That desire for peace and non-violence hasn’t translated very far when we continue to eat animals… that includes dairy and eggs.”
– “Most people are compassionate… they believe in helping others… and yet there’s a big blind spot…”
– “Frustrating but also incredibly exciting… the potential… every generation is a blank slate… what they grow up to believe and how they apply those beliefs”
– “The potential for sea change in our relations… to other lifeforms is enormous. It’s just the inertia of changing value systems and behaviours… they are penetrable barriers… never give up.”
– “Atheism… I don’t really like the word… a negation… almost implies somebody doesn’t have beliefs… as an atheist I have very closely held beliefs… [and] I have a very well laid out sense of what’s right and wrong – just as somebody who is religious would have.”
– “I also don’t want to be… them vs. us… we can accept and embrace each other without having to have the same worldview”
– A rich love for nature. Becoming a birder at 8 years old
– “I love nature and I love animals”
– Being asked “If you’re an atheist… don’t you have a great wonder for nature?… He felt that because I was an atheist I was missing so much… on the contrary… having a belief in evolution is no disadvantage in terms of appreciating the splendour and beauty and wonder… it actually helps… to not have a human figure creating everything but rather things springing from the ether and gradually evolving over time.”
– Considering writing a book about fruit “They’ve evolved to be a source of pleasure… fruit is a part of the plant the plant wants you to eat.”
– “They probably aren’t sentient… but that’s no reason to disrespect or malign them or exploit them beyond basic needs.”
– “Sentient creatures rely on plants to be present and healthy… that’s a good secondary reason to protect plants.”
– “That’s the wonderful thing about fruit… an advertisement that says ‘eat me’… and by eating me you move my seeds around”
22:32 What (and Who) Matters?
– “It was almost always in the context… of our interactions with animals… most accessible to my childhood mind and emotions as a grew up… it was intrinsically wrong to harm an insect.”
– The instinct to kill insects “It’s probably learned behaviour, often, from parents”
– “We have such a great responsibility as parents to inculcate our children with respect for life and concern and compassion and yet sometimes parents do the opposite”
– “If there’s a gene for ‘loves animals’… I was born with that gene”
– Parents: “They were always respectful of animals and loved animals… It was decades before they and I became vegetarian and vegan… we were on track to do that”
– Visiting London and Auckland zoos “I’m not advertising zoos… but of course it was a place… children could see animals that they might not otherwise see…”
– “It’s such a natural thing to think as a child… they have interests, they care about their lives, they have pleasures and bad things that happen…”
– “We don’t seem to be very adept as a species at translating that tacit awareness of animal sentience into our behaviour vis a vis what we choose to eat”
– “It’s not like anyone sat me down and said ‘this is what ethics are… this is sentience.’… That became more of an academic thing to learn later in life.
– The role of children’s storybooks “a very powerful conveyor of messages – good and not so good”. Jonathan’s children’s book Jake and Ava
– “Science is ironically often the last ones to realise that something exists like sentience in an animal or the dog is conscious”
– “Scientists are all ‘It’s private, we can’t know, we can’t go there…[consciousness, sentience, emotion, feeling]’”
– Assessing and inferring sentience “None of it is ‘proof’… you don’t prove things in science you simply accumulate evidence… we can absolutely use science to give us great confidence that a dog… can feel pain… or a fish can have a sense of aesthetics.”
– “Science allows us to transcend the struggle of the fact that it’s private experience. It’s dogma to just throw our hands up and say we can’t ask questions about animal questions and thinking… we’ve moved beyond that now… an era where science is finally catching up to what our intuitions have been telling us all along… an octopus can have an emotion and a fish can perhaps have a sense of right or wrong.”
– How some animals have capacities well beyond humans e.g. electrical sensing “We need to be a little more humble… we’re not the be all and end all.”
– JW: Setting a moral baseline like non-maleficence? Not harming, exploiting or killing without a serious justification
– JW: Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach (starts with sentience but thinks some sentients, like fishes, are still OK to kill and eat because they don’t have an interest in living)
– JW: Tom Regan’s rights approach (in some writing restricted, albeit with a ‘line drawn in pencil’, subjects of a life to mammals over one year old “which oddly risks excluding nearly all of the sentient beings on the planet”)
– JW: Peter Singer’s (2x previous guest) uncertainty about whether some sentient beings have an interest in continuing to live
– “Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Tom Regan… great thinkers… such huge contributions to advancing our relations with animals… it doesn’t mean that everything they say is great…”
– Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals “a lot of merit but she concludes that sharks are completely non-sentient… that to me flies in the face of reality. That sounds like dogma…”
– “She [Nussbaum] also happens to quote me as saying that I eat fish… a misquote, she was quoting somebody else… pretty disturbing to be reading a book… suddenly your name comes up… and it quotes you as saying that you eat fish!… I never said that… i became vegetarian in 1985, and have been vegan since 1989. of course her book was already in print by the time i discovered her misquote.”
– “The precautionary principle… we can’t know but we can be pretty confident… if there’s reason to believe that they probably are sentient then we should treat them as though they are sentient”
– “We need to have an ethic of protecting anyone… who appears to be sentient… be respectful and restrained in our interactions with them”
– “Now we have the choice [of what or who to eat]”
– “People say ‘you can’t tell the Eskimos or the Inuit to not eat animals… I’m not telling them not to… We pick the low hanging fruit… Maybe there will come a time when we can actually discuss whether it might be practical to have vegan diets for the Inuit and I’m open to that discussion.”
– “We’ve got a lot of company when it comes to sentience”
– JW: “You’re never going to get a perfect answer [about the sentience of others] and pretending you’re waiting for one is an excuse”
41:35 A Better World?
– Jonathan’s upcoming book: “Noble Life: from cooperation to joy in the wild”
– The catastrophic impact of the Anthropocene “a human dominated world” on the balance of animals on earth (wild vs. farmed)
– How important diet is “Not just for our relationship with animals but for the health of the planet”
– “We have to include food choices as a key element of turning the ship”
– “I’m privileged, I’m lucky… never had to worry about where our next meal came from… it is easy for me to say…”
– “I was raised, like most people in my society, eating animals… didn’t really think about the disconnect until I was in my twenties… It shocks me that it took me so long”
– “Most people in the world today can, and I think should, make those changes”
– “We have to come up with creative ways of encouraging people… making people want to make the change for themselves”
– The challenges of scope sensitivity… realising that all 8 billion humans matter… and now maybe sextillions of sentient beings
– Jonathan’s dedication of his book SuperFly: “To the anonymous quintillions”
– “I’m not the biggest fan of E.O. Wilson… but I love his idea of half earth… something we can aim towards… assigning half the liveable planet… to wild creatures.”
– Troy Vettese’s “Half Earth Socialism” on Sentientism 191
– Anita Krajnc’s Animal Save and Plant Based Treaty work on Sentientism 157 Joining a group in Melbourne “Bearing witness”
– “If people stop eating meat… that shift away from animal agriculture taking up so much land will start to happen… it’s the consumers who drive these industries”
– Our World in Data’s Land Use data
– JW: “People worry about food waste in terms of what supermarkets throw away or what people throw away from their kitchens but they completely ignore the 90-95% food waste that is the feed conversion ratio… nearly all of animal feed crops are wasted… but that’s not counted as food waste.”
– “That’s why eagles are much rarer than Canada geese… The bald eagle eats high on the food chain and the Canada goose eats lower in the food chain… The planet can’t support nearly as many predators or animal eaters… than it can if we eat plants directly”
– Plant-based alternatives, lab-grown cultivated meat alternatives “choices that we have in our privileged societies”
– “It’s not a hardship… a sacrifice… far from it… on the contrary it’s a move… creates discovery and joy and often makes you into a better cook too”
– JW: Topics that even many vegans struggle with: insects, invertebrates and free-ranging or wild animals “Darwinian evolution is amoral and brutal”
– Heather Browning’s work reminding us not to forget the positive aspects of wild-animal experience
– “Sure there’s predation and parasitism and nasty stuff that goes on in nature… but there’s a lot of good too… cooperation, virtue, joy, collaboration”
– “Social behaviour… leads to… rules… clear, you could say ‘ethics’… baboon society, chimpanzees…”
– “Even if it was all horrible… I don’t think it’s our place to interfere or intervene… should be focused on giving them space to live lives that are meaningful and natural to them… a broader joy in life…”
– JW: “One of the things you’re trying to do is to boost that fascination [with non-human animals] but also to convert it into compassion”
– The role of culture in driving compassionate change
– “Scientists are one part of the population who have a deep responsibility to leverage their scientific knowledge… of animals into ethical conduct.”
– “Science has this tradition of being agnostic about that [ethics] ‘don’t ask me ethics questions’… Science inevitably gets into ethics – it informs ethics… I would love it if more scientists were more outspoken… I’m just a delivery boy of what science is showing in my books”
– JW: “Facts aren’t enough to persuade people. We need stories and narratives too.” Sentientism conversations with Eva Hamer, Arran Stibbe, Alex Lockwood
– “The science gets here [the head] for a reader but if you want to engage their emotions you need to go here, to the heart. That’s where we need stories.”
– “If it starts out with a factual narrative it takes a little more discipline to keep reading…” but if there’s a story… “combining the science with stories”
– Human and non-human sentient ethics “I see them very much as linked – it’s all connected… the basic principles of ethics… do no harm to others… the precautionary principle… these basic ethical principles apply broadly”
– “By and large ethical issues I think are universal”
– “The decisions we make in our human societies can inform how we treat other animals… perhaps… how we treat other animals can inform how we treat each other”
– JW: Our most fundamental interests seem the most broadly shared across the evolutionary family tree
– “Sentientism – it’s a great word… Sentience is the bedrock of ethics. The reason that we have ideas of right and wrong and good and bad conduct is a product of the fact that we have others in our midst who have lives that matter to them…”
– “We may argue ‘where do you draw the line?’ but as Tom Regan says ‘draw it in pencil’ because science is continuing to cause us to have to revisit… flies can feel pain and male fruit flies get pleasure from ejaculating… female fruit flies will use alcohol to protect their eggs and they’ll self-medicate…”
– “There’s a lot of connectivity here and we’re not an isolated, different species… we may have some unique properties but we’re just part of the broader pantheon of live on earth”
– “Being pluralistic and inclusive in how we view other life forms is a better way to go than being humanistic and thinking that we’re unique and that we’re at the pinnacle”
– JW: The risks of insect farming “we might be multiplying the number of victims by millions or trillions more.”
– “There’s always new issues to grapple with when you’re a human… but grapple we must… think of solutions and better paths forward because we can do that”
– “We can do better and we’re able to do better”
01:12:00 Follow Jonathan:
– “Super Fly“
– “Jake and Ava“
– jonathanbalcombe.com (sign up for his bi-monthly Noble Beings Bulletin newsletter!)
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop.