Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.
Elizabeth MeLampy is an author and a Harvard-educated lawyer, with experience in animal law and environmental law. While in law school, she worked on issues related to farmed animals, wild animals, and captive animals with Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic. She was also in the inaugural cohort of Emerging Scholar Fellows with the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy, where she worked on animal law scholarship. After two clerkships—with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the Federal District Court in Arizona—Elizabeth litigated with one of the top environmental nonprofits in the country. Her first book, Forget The Camel: The Madcap World of Animal Festivals and What They Say About Being Human, was published in 2025.
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
01:15 Welcome
03:25 Elizabeth”s Intro
– “Sentient creatures matter”
– Forget the Camel “Animal festivals… I study them as microcosms of our relationships to non-human animals”
– “Try to make sense of how we treat so many animals differently”
– The Rattlesnake Roundup “They beheaded and killed rattlesnakes in public… then made bloody handprints”
– A Jumping Frog contest
– The real Groundhog day
– “There’s a lot more that ties those events together than separates them even though you’re killing animals in one context and not in another”
– “The overarching paradigm of human superiority applies to them all”
06:10 What’s Real?
– “I have both backgrounds very strongly… the religious spiritual side and the more scientific, naturalistic side”
– Grandfather and mum church ministers, grandmother a veterinarian and an anthropologist, father a software engineer
– “Core pillars of my upbringing… Thinking about the world really critically, really analytically… on one side… on the other side… a Protestant Christian upbringing in the Church”
– “Core values, more than religious dogmatism, of compassion, of kindness, of generosity, of sacrifice… key Christian values… open hearted, open minded, compassionate lens”
– “I was really lucky to be raised in a version of the Christian church that prioritises those things”
– “The two sides [religion and science] work so closely together… it’s not ‘you believe in god or you believe in science'”
– “The mysteries of the world… things you could explore with a variety of disciplines… read the Bible… do a science experiment… all sorts of ways to figure out what is going on”
– Grandparents lived on an animal farm
– Being scared of a bug and being told “If you learn more about them you won’t be so afraid of them… see the world from their point of view… That’s a story that’s both scientific and spiritual… a lens into this other embodied creature… there’s something really spiritual about that”
– Still Christian but with a scientific world view now “the worlds work really well together for me”
– “Different methods of knowing… some of which are intuitive and spiritual and deep and others… really analytical and learned and practical”
– “Why not use as many tools as we have at our disposal to try to make sense of this world”
– Writing non-fiction and having an interdisciplinary brain “Truth is bigger than any discipline… I could pull in some spiritual stuff… literary theory… historical and cultural analysis… journalism… to say whatever I thought the core truth was”
– “When I think about why I care about animals… there is something really spiritual in my answer… when you look into an animal’s eyes… really try and connect… you can see another soul… you know that it’s there”
– “Those core values… compassion… generosity… kindness… the meek inherit the earth… all of those things… they’re so connected to animals for me”
– Studying religion as a major in college
– The power of stories in religion “The Bible’s literally a long list of parables and stories”
– “The stories that we tell have so much power… Everything that matters in life is a story we tell”
– “We eat cows because there’s a story we tell about cows and their value and how we relate to them”
– “What stories are we drawn to… what’s the truth behind them… should we re-cast them?”
– JW: The risks of harm from poorly founded beliefs. E.g. what if someone claims animals aren’t sentient because they’re not ensouled?
– “My wife… always reminds me that I have a very strange… view of Christianity… when I use those words I don’t think I mean the same things as… other people”
– Dogma, “hard-core beliefs” and interpretations “things that people decide are true based on their readings of certain texts”
– “Those kinds of dogmas [e.g. non-human animals aren’t ensouled] can be really hard to interact with… they give people a lot of meaning which is important…”
– “When people feel like they have an answer that is in some ways easier than living with a lot of questions”
– “It’s something I’ve really wrestled with”
– 22:00 Coming to animal issues “I had this great background… the veterinarian… the minister… it sounds like so self-evident that I would end up caring about animals. But I didn’t… was an omnivore… came to this work through what I would call unlearning”
– Reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer “Huh… is that really how things are happening?… What do I want my role in that to be?”
– Taking an animal law class at law school. Attending talks about “what happens behind closed doors of the animal agriculture system”
– “Things I assumed… because you believe the stories that you hear… humanely raised… I went through this unlearning process… you can’t really trust any of the things these people are saying”
– “Whenever you trust things on face value without investigating them or interrogating them… risks arise”
– “I really had to think hard about questions like halal and kosher slaughter where animals aren’t stunned before they’re killed… there’s a religious reason… but it tangibly does more harm to those animals who I believe are ensouled… I believe they have at least a claim on not being tortured… some claim to bodily autonomy and comfort”
– “Religious dogmatism can become so harmful – I absolutely agree with that. But I also think that only looking at science and ignoring the more emotional, embodied methods of knowing – you’re also missing something”
– The role of religion in animal festivals and sacrifice
25:33 What Matters?
– Divine command theory and obedience / compliance vs. compassion and love
– “As a kid that was a question I had a lot… how do you know?”
– “The church I was raised in was not so rigid… it was not ‘God says do X therefore you must do X’ or ‘God says don’t do this or you’ll go to hell’… I was never given that messaging which I’m grateful for… I think that’s part of why I can still call myself a Christian… a softness… which allowed it to grow with me rather than constrict me”
– Exploring the “what matters?” question while studying religion at college
– “There’s no one Christianity… there’s no ‘this is my church, this is the truth’… that was never something that resonated with me”
– The history of the church “Who was going to decide that? Which books were going to go in the Bible?… People are surprised to find out that that was a choice… a political and a movement building choice”
– Christian arguments about free will vs. determinism
– “Part of my journey with religion has been this zooming out… you zoom even further out and you have these world religions”
– “I was really lucky in being able to learn about other religions… it forces you to answer to yourself… if they think this is how the story of the world that came to be… the book that matters… the prophet that matters… what makes mine different. I think that the answer I have is ‘not a lot’”
– “I think I’m comforted by the stories I was raised with. I found good lessons in them. I think that they taught me good values… But I don’t think that I have the sole claim on truth.”
– “I think I feel my religion really differently from some other people. Some other people feel it as a claim on truth… anyone who is not in their tradition will suffer the consequences… that is just never how I was raised… not what has resonated with me”
– “What feels powerful about religion to me is the stories that connect humans to other humans across time and across spiritual space… there’s something deeply comforting in thinking ‘we don’t know why but we know we matter’… religion gives you a little something to kind of hang your hat on there”
– The roots of morality? “I do think compassion is a really big one… there’s lots of lessons in the Bible but I do think compassion is a core one”
– “I am someone who is always interested and willing and eager to read a text like the Bible as a critical thinker – not so much as someone looking for a rule book… I understand religion often does offer it to you as a rule book”
– “What those core stories mean in the Bible for animals… the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus… re-cast that theology as saving all embodied creatures”
– “Jesus is the word made flesh, he’s not the word made human… flesh is a word that can refer to human and animal flesh… we do not have a monopoly on what that means”
– “I’m really compelled by that… If you do want to say these words are divinely inspired I don’t think that means they exclude animals… we assume it does… that’s a really different thing… I’m really excited and open to the idea of pushing the boundaries of the stories that we’ve always assumed were true and letting our curiosity and our sense of moral justice carry us”
– “Compassion is certainly one of the most over-arching values… There are others… generosity… loving your neighbours… I don’t see any of those values as excluding non-human animals… I see them actually as demanding that we radically include them”#
– “What is our role here on this planet?”
33:06 Who Matters?
– Are the Abrahamic religions inherently hierarchical and anthropocentric?
– The Matthew Halteman episode
– As a kid “I was taught that animals are deserving of our care and compassion… general respect… I just had a relatively speciesist approach to that. Our pets deserved as much love and care as we could give them… Same thing with wildlife… Every seasonal change of the wildlife was really important to my family…”
– “Not only do no harm but think poorly of anyone who did do harm… snare traps… hunting”
– “Speciesism… we still ate meat, we still ate eggs, we still drank milk… we still did a lot of other things that used animals, harmed animals, however indirectly”
– “We just lived in that dissonance. I think a lot of families do… love their pets and eats cows… very normal. It still is.”
– “I don’t have any bad feelings about that. I was raised in a wonderful way and I had all the tools given to me to start on this journey… To think about the animals who are harmed the most… animals farmed for food.”
– “When you are given the right foundation you can take it to a good place. I was given a good foundation”
– Wrestling with the hierarchy question
– The 1925 Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution “The state had made it illegal to teach evolution because it threatened human primacy… this idea that humans were ensouled… the image of god…”
– “Casting humans as just another animal is really threatening to some people but personally I don’t see it as threatening… I see it as miraculous”
– “Dominion doesn’t have to mean domination. Dominion can mean stewardship”
– “What a gift that we’ve been given language and rationality and reason. I just think we should all start looking around and using it”.
– “Care for animals without that speciesist lens. Without the stories we’ve told ourselves over and over again… chickens are for food, pigeons are for city streets and bluebirds are for admiring when they come back in the spring”
– “Those stories are all stories and I think they can change”
– Transitioning towards caring about non-human animals and veganism “It was hard. It was hard and slow. Now looking back it was so much harder and slower than it needed to be… it gives me a lot of empathy and sympathy for people who are at the very beginning of starting to reevaluate their relationship with animals.”
– Omnivore until law school “I was slowly giving up meat… one thing at a time…” Pig, “red meat”, chicken, fishes…
– “I didn’t take the jump to veganism despite knowing everything… it was not a matter of knowledge. I understood about the dairy industry… the egg industry… I knew all the bad things and that dissonance was still so strong”
– COVID hit, shopping for herself then cooking at home: “I just didn’t buy eggs and dairy… it wasn’t something I needed… it was a habit… I decided, kind of casually, I wouldn’t buy them”
– “Because I couldn’t break up the week with a delicious take-out meal I had to learn to make my food taste good… it’s a step a lot of people miss when they try to go vegan”
– “Products that were tested on animals… wool… leather… choosing other options when I could, which was always… it just takes a little more work”
– “Even after all that I still found it socially hard… for about six months or a year… I would call myself a ‘lazy vegan’… if a friend had made something… I would make that sacrifice almost of my values to fit in with people around me and to make people feel less uncomfortable”
– “When you say you’re vegan people do get a little uncomfortable. They say they don’t but I think you can often see it on their faces or hear it in how they start justifying their own choices.”
– “Often people respond with ‘Oh, I wish I could be vegan but here’s my five reasons’… It always made me feel bad… ‘I love you as a person… I don’t mean to make you feel that way’… those social pressures were really hard”
– “It took me almost another year to own it as an identity… I really believe in this actually… I believe in it so much that I’m going to make it my career… this is the biggest problem we’ve perpetrated as a species potentially ever… we can’t keep living like this. It feels really urgent to me now.”
– “It also means facing the fact that you weren’t that way before… ‘I’ve eaten meat for 28 years… how many animals I have killed?… it wasn’t necessary as I know now. It wasn’t kind or humane as I know now. I was a part of this machine of horror.”
– “You have to really reckon with that once you step out of it… I think that’s a really hard process”
– “It’s really a myth… that there’s no sacrifice for this… being vegan is hard… at home is easy, but when you travel?”
– “There are things that I love that I don’t get to eat any more. Some of them are culturally important… for my family. Some of them are just treats I love. I loved going to a coffee shop and getting a scone and they’re often not vegan… I get my oat milk latte and that’s it. That does feel like a loss.”
– “The cost to animals was so high for such a momentary pleasure that that sacrifice feels so worth it”
– “We do a disservice sometimes when we say ‘being vegan is so easy, anyone can do it…’ The truth is that it’s actually a little hard”
– “You do have to make choices over and over again that go against the grain of society, that ask you to give up something that you probably loved… build different habits than you had for your whole life”
– “Those things are really hard – they take time, they take effort and they take commitment”
– “The perfect can be the enemy of the good… Anywhere you can cut it is a place to start.”
– JW: “Making a sacrifice for a good reason… can in itself actually become a joy… a good thing.”
51:32 Forget The Camel – the Book
– Visiting animal festivals as a vegan “I have so many complicated emotions about them”
– “My grandmother, this veterinarian anthropologist, before she died was just starting to conceive of a book that would have been an academic anthology of animal festivals around the world… she died before she finished the book.”
– Going through grandmother’s notes “Wow, these things are still happening… that sounds like something that would have happened a long time ago.”
– “I was doing two things… trying to observe them… thinking about my relationship with my grandparents… my own philosophical journey…”
– Dominance, humour and reverence themes
– Dominance: “Exploiting animals for our purposes, killing them”
– Humour: “Animals are treated as props – we’re very ambivalent about them”
– Reverence: “Some animals… get treated with a lot of respect and love and protection”
– Some festivals are “biggish… 40-60,000 people attend… they gain meaning when you start adding them up… many, many communities around the country do this… around the world”
– “Any one of these festivals you could write a whole book about”
– “How it felt varied based on the category”
– “The Rattlesnake Roundup where they kill these snakes… was really hard… to watch so much death… and pay for it… I gave them my $10 and went in… that was a real moral question I had to answer to myself… Is the good I can do from writing this story worth the $10 dollar admission fee?”
– “The Iditarod dog race in Alaska… it was fun… but at the end of the day I watched those dogs start on this journey and I knew what was ahead of them… I don’t know if they did… so sad that many of them were going to really, really suffer… The year I went no dogs died but the last few years dogs have died…”
– “Is any of this worth it? You hear explanations all the time of why people do these things but the reasons, to me, don’t hold up.”
– A reader journey from dominance, through humour to reverence “something that feels more positive… respect or care or mutual consideration…”
– “One of the hard parts of writing that book… a lot of the festivals, even if they were presented as funny things or honorific things, they still had domination at the core…”
– “When you’re making fun of an animal or using an animal as a prop but then you’re discarding them…”
– “What unites all of these festivals… we’re using these animals, against their will… to say something about ourselves. To tell our own human stories… ‘100 years ago this happened… so now we have to do it every single year’”
– “Tradition and history and rituals are so important to us as a species. But these particular ones have victims.”
– “Using animals as a story-telling technique is ultimately disregarding them as creatures. It’s treating them like disposable props.”
– JW: Other “justifications”… community, entertainment, pest control, managing “invasive” species
– JW: The Rattlesnake Roundup “A canonical, pure example of dominance… the violence is part of the point… the gore, the violence, the destruction and the killing is unashamed and absolutely central and actually celebrated and glorified…”
– Camel and ostrich racing
– The Maine Lobster festival “They are killing animals but they’re doing it for food… where do I put that in this book? It’s actually just the same as the Rattlesnake Roundup… killing them in public, dismantling their bodies in public… eating the flesh… selling souvenirs with the claws and the skins”
– “They’re really very similar events it’s just the tenor of it is different”
– Groundhog day: “Really fun… humorous, good natured event… a distraction from midwinter blues”
– “It’s a very good example of how people… love and revere and take care of a single animal while forgetting about all the rest”
– “…animals who have escaped from slaughterhouses or from factory farms… they’ll get social media followings, go to sanctuary, people will name them… but then go and have a burger.”
– “Don’t connect that every animal could go to sanctuary if we all stopped eating them… or if they do connect it they don’t care”
– “There’s the one that mattered… they changed the paradigm… we care about that one… Caring about that one doesn’t actually ask anything of us – we can just like something on social media then go back to our lives”
– Punxsutawney Phil “Shirts with his face on… people love Phil. But when I was driving to Punxsutawney… my wife and I saw two dead groundhogs on the road… a stark reminder… we say we care about Phil… but we don’t care about anyone else who looks like him…”
– “We don’t care about treating Phil with species-specific respect… letting him hibernate, letting him live his own life on his own terms.”
– “If reverence looks like exploitation of the individual that’s a trickier place to be… starts looking a lot more like dominance… we’re using animals however we want just because we want to and that is enough”
01:08:22 A Better World?
– The California Monarch Butterfly festival “Very sweet… small town energy… the kindergartners in town dress up like Monarchs… they parade down the centre of their town…”
– “In that chapter I tried to offer a different model… we’re still talking about animals, we’re using the symbolism, we’re still relating ourselves to them… but we aren’t taking them out of the wild, we aren’t killing them, we aren’t forcing them to do something for our sake just because we want to.”
– “In their early history they did take Monarchs… ended up killing a lot… it became so unsightly that they stopped… they didn’t want to be killing”
– “It’s’ an opportunity, a possibility… a coda on what might otherwise be a really hard story to read.”
– “I don’t think it’s realistic to say ‘let’s stop doing animal festivals… using animals as symbolic references’”
– “How can we do this… using animals as a way to make sense of the world without harming animals… We are smart enough as a species to do that”
– JW: “the act of reverence still ultimately is about us humans. It’s not about respecting the non-humans for who they are and what they want and who they want to be”
– The Yamini Narayanan episode and “Mother Cow, Mother India”
– JW: “Being worshipped isn’t good for you… it is really just another form of exploitation and objectification… it’s done to other humans… worship an individual that they’ve picked as their new religious leader. Often that isn’t good for the human in the same way being worshipped as a cow often isn’t really good for the cows… it’s about them as an object in the human mind”
– JW: “Punxsutawney Phil is revered but only as a human symbol but not for who, in his various incarnations, Phil actually is”
– JW: Are there just transition paths for all of these festivals?
– “I tried in the book to be really cognizant of the pros of these events… the benefits that they bring… fun… raising money… good causes… community… spending time as a family”
– “It’s not as simple as saying ‘let’s wipe them off the map’… these festivals… are real identity bearers for these communities.”
– “When you say you’re from Punxsutawney everyone thinks about the groundhog. When you say you’re from Sweetwater the Roundup is the central event of the year.”
– “I don’t have perfect answers… some of them are easy… in Georgia… they’ve transitioned to no-kill roundups”
– “There’s much harder questions… the Jumping Frog Jubilee… I don’t know what that transition looks like. You can’t jump frogs without frogs.”
– “Opportunities or a model for transition… It’s going to have to come from the communities…”
– “They become more important because they’ve been put on year after year… we’ve done it for 100 years… even though we all know it’s made up”
– “Those are decisions… every single year… those decisions aren’t inevitable… we all have a chance to evaluate our relationship with animals and say ‘what can we do differently this year?’”
– “It’s going to have to come from the people… maintain the good, the community vibes, the carnivals, the civic fund-raising… without the harm to animals”
– “There’s also opportunities for people in communities to look around and say ‘…that’s not actually the best way to celebrate our history – let’s brainstorm a new way… take charge and make something new out of it”
– “I don’t know that I have a perfect answer but I don’t think that means there isn’t an answer… People have to decide they want to find it.”
– JW: The challenges of animal industry and employment links e.g. The Maine Lobster Festival
– JW: Links to intra-human ethics re: hierarchy, exclusion, discrimination and violence?
– “Many of these festivals have a real strong in-group / out-group dynamic”
– “The narrative… is very much protecting us against the outsiders. Anyone who would complain about these things ‘don’t get it… they’re not from around here’… there’s a clear us vs. them dynamic”
– “Systems and the logic of oppression are always intertwined and resonate across boundaries. Using animals in an exploitative way without really thinking of them as individuals… some level of respect… the respect of not dying… not being tortured”
– “That logic… underlies a lot of social oppressions that we have in intra-human contexts… racial oppression… sexual orientation oppression… treating people as less than… the logic of treating someone differently… as if they don’t matter… it’s all the same”
– “People sometimes bristle when you relate animals to all of that… this idea that there’s always someone or something you can look down on”
– “These animal festivals… It’s not that these people are evil, bad people… very friendly… they looked like good people… out on a Saturday with their families…”
– “It wasn’t like they had evil laughs, maniacally cackling about the harm they were doing”
– “You really have to wrestle with the fact that these are good people who maybe haven’t thought critically about animals or who have other things going on… animals… just falls to the bottom of the pile… it isn’t something they’ve either been trained to think about or that they have the capacity to think about.”
– “The overarching lesson… both human-animal relationships and human-human relationships is how much danger there is in ambivalence… how much power you can give up when you say it doesn’t matter… they resonate with much bigger issues”
– “I understand that the 15 groundhogs… that suffer for Groundhog Day is not a number that makes any sense to get up in arms about… but when you translate that logic of human exceptionalism, of using animals as props, of doing whatever we want to animals in captivity just because we want to look at them… you zoom out… we have massive systems of animal captivity, massive systems of animal agriculture. It’s all the same logic.”
– “Animal festivals… it’s not that I think they are the most important animal topic… but they’re an accessible one… what’s really going on here?… the important step is to then zoom out.”
– “How do these systems of oppression exist in other parts of our society, intra-human or intra-species”
– “So critical and honestly so hopeful… Seeing communities really caring about each other… those are goods… a good instinct… there’s real hope… to start adding animals into that equation”
– “The instincts are all there it’s just who we choose to apply it to… expanding our scope of justice… the creatures we allow into that inner circle of care… it’s the next step and I think it’s totally achievable”
– JW: “I think those people [sadistic, glorifying violence, revelling in pain, will to power, might makes right] are rare in humanity. It’s more about the unthinking ambivalence, going along with social norms… that actually causes much more of the harm than the explicit brutality and sadism”
– JW: “That’s frustrating but it’s also hopeful… most human beings are decent people”
– “Sometimes implicitly but often explicitly they were teaching kids about the stories… these animals… fundamental principles of human exploitation… human exceptionalism”
– “Festivals seem to me to be an interesting place to look… changing those stories… will reverberate”
– “If we start saying ‘Hey maybe we shouldn’t be slaughtering snakes just because?’… then ‘why are we slaughtering lobsters…?’… then ‘why are we slaughtering cows…?’”
– “Because they’re so random they’re in some ways a good place in some ways to start… we don’t have as many preconceived notions… personal feelings…”
– “The goal that I have through this book… if you care about that… and that… and that… here’s the next step. Let’s start zooming out from these festivals.”
– “Law as stories made enforceable”
01:26:20 Follow Elizabeth:
– ElizabethMelampy.com
– @emelampy Insta
– @emelampy TikTok
– Elizabeth’s “Being Animal” Substack
– Elizabeth on LinkedIn
– Forget The Camel: The Madcap World of Animal Festivals and What They Say About Being Human
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.