agriculture Archives - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 48 – Patrick Rose on the Fight to Save Florida’s Manatees

“The first part of a manatee that I saw was a big white scar,” Patrick Rose says. “As I got closer, I could see how that was affecting the manatee itself. That is still imprinted in my mind today. It just really endeared me to them. It strengthened all the thoughts and feelings that I had already: that we need to do more to protect these defenseless animals from this type of cruelty, even though the cruelty is not intended.” Photo by Patrick Rose.

Florida’s waterways are home to beloved and iconic gentle giants, manatees. These half-ton, lumbering mammals – with their wrinkled, whiskered skin and paddle-shaped tails – are believed to have evolved from the same grass-eating land ancestor as elephants over 50 million years ago. Florida manatees are famously playful, sensitive, and inquisitive. They spend much of their lives grazing, cow-like, on meadows of seagrass; congregating in warm-water refuges; expressing emotion through complex chirps, whistles, and squeaks; nursing and caring for their young; nuzzling each other with their noses; hugging with their flippers; and maneuvering slowly at around 3 to 5 miles per hour through the state’s rivers, estuaries, and shallow coastal waters. These remarkably peaceful herbivores have no natural predators and express no aggression towards other creatures. Despite being so gentle and defenseless, they can live more than sixty years in the wild. But, today, few do.

The iconic Florida manatee is facing a multitude of intersecting, human-caused crises. Nearly all of the estimated remaining 7500 Florida manatees have been scarred by boat strikes, while more than half are estimated to have the toxic pesticide glyphosate coursing through their veins. Years of worsening water quality from Florida’s unfettered agricultural pollution and real estate development have resulted in increased toxic algae blooms that block sunlight from reaching the seagrass meadows upon which the manatees depend. Fishing gear entanglement, habitat loss, and climate change are also driving major manatee losses. In 2021, Florida’s manatees died en masse, with a record 1,100 manatees – more than 12 percent of the state’s total manatee population – perishing. Most died of starvation.

“Even though it is a large and strong marine mammal, the manatee is defenseless,” says Patrick Rose, a leading Florida manatee expert and advocate. “They’re not capable of being aggressive. They’re that wonderful animal that just wants to go along and get along with everyone. The problems they have are really all problems that man has caused, and if we fix those problems, we fix them for man, too.” Photo courtesy of Save the Manatee Club.

It’s hard to imagine a more lovable or compelling creature than a manatee, but enthusiasm is not enough to save them. For manatees to have a chance, that love needs to be translated into enforced protections for both these animals and their habitats.

Our guest, Patrick Rose, has devoted the past 45 years to propelling Florida manatees to public prominence and to advocating on their behalf with extraordinary dedication, creativity, and effectiveness. Rose is the executive director of the Save the Manatee Club. An aquatic biologist, he is one of the world’s leading experts on the Florida manatee. He was the first biologist hired by the State of Florida to do work related to protecting manatees, and has advocated on their behalf before the Florida Legislature, governor, and Cabinet, provided policy guidance and direction for state-wide recovery efforts, and served as a member of every federal manatee recovery team. As one of his colleagues once put it, Rose is the ‘MVP of manatee protection.’ Over the past couple years, as manatees have made headlines for the crises they face, he has served as their spokesperson and much needed champion.

Ep. 41 – Ecologist Hugh Warwick on loving your hedgehogs

Ecologist, author, and hedgehog advocate Hugh Warwick is leading a national campaign in the United Kingdom to make “hedgehog highways” — 13 centimeter holes in the bottom of fences that allow hedgehogs to move freely among gardens — a legal requirement for new housing developments. Warwick’s Change.org petition that has garnered almost a million signatures and international attention. Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.

European hedgehogs are perhaps the most beloved mammal in the United Kingdom. When the BBC Wildlife Magazine ran a poll a few years back asking readers which species should be the national icon, hedgehogs triumphed. But these endearing, small, strange, slug-munching, spiky creatures — named for their pig-like noses and the hedgerows in which they thrive — are being destroyed across the country that holds them so dear. It’s estimated that Great Britain’s hedgehog population has dropped by 90 to 95 percent since the second world war. Today, there are less than 1 million.

Industrial agriculture has driven the loss of hedgerow habitat that long characterized the British countryside, while farms’ use of pesticides is wiping out the insects that hedgehogs eat. Meanwhile, housing developments are breaking up habitat into smaller and more fragmented parcels, and motor vehicles every year mow down around 100,000 hedgehogs. That’s about one hedgehog in every five nationwide. There are other, smaller threats too that add up, from drowning in uncovered swimming pools to getting caught in litter rubber-bands and fast food cups. In 2020, hedgehogs were listed as vulnerable to extinction in the next twenty years on the Red List for British Mammals. Tragically, they have a lot of company. More than 40 percent of UK species have seen their populations plummet in recent decades.

But while the future of hedgehogs remains precarious, there is grounds for hope. Across Britain, people are turning their love for these creatures into action to try to save them in significant, surprising, and delightful ways. Take the country’s hedgehog highway, for example. Hedgehogs need up to 30 hectares worth of territory — around the size of an 18-hole golf course — to forage for food and find mates, but the average U.K. garden is a tiny fraction of that size. The Hedgehog Street project was launched ten years ago in an attempt to link these habitats by asking homeowners to put 13 inch diameter holes through their garden fences to give hedgehogs the pathways they need to survive. Nearly 14,000 such holes have since been created, linking entire neighborhoods and towns.

*“We live in a landscape that has been turned into a linescape,”* writes Warwick in Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife. “The hedges, ditches, roads, power lines, canals act as barriers for wildlife. We need to work with the linescapes to reconnect landscapes for wildlife. The habitat fragmentation that these barriers cause is one of the greatest threats to Britain’s wildlife.” Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.

This up-swelling of attention, love, and effort for hedgehogs is thanks in no small part to the contagious enthusiasm, relentless obsession, vision, and passionate career-long commitment of our guest, ecologist and hedgehog expert Hugh Warwick. Warwick has studied, celebrated, written about, and fought to protect hedgehogs and other British wildlife for more than 30 years. He is the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the author of five brilliant books on British fauna, including most recently The Hedgehog Book and Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife, which explores the impacts of manmade lines — including hedges, roads, walls, powerlines, and canals — on the ability of wild animals to thrive.

In this episode, we speak with Warwick about why hedgehogs need our help, his role as the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, the national campaign he is leading to make “hedgehog highways” a legal requirement for new housing, the extraordinary impacts of manmade lines — such as walls, roads, and power lines — on the ability of wild animals to thrive, and the importance of loving your hedgehogs.

Ep. 32 – Gene Baur on changing hearts, minds and laws about farm animals

*“The sanctuary is a place where people can meet these animals, hear their stories, learn where they come from, and learn more about the food system,”* Gene Baur, co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, says. “[People] recognize they can make choices that do not support this violent, cruel system and that they can relate to animals in a more friendly positive way. This is good for the animals and is also good for the people.” Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.

A few weeks before Charlotte’s Web was to be published, author E.B. White’s editor asked him to explain why he wrote the book about a livestock pig, Wilbur, who becomes friends with a heroic spider named Charlotte. In the now beloved novel, Charlotte saves Wilbur from slaughter by weaving messages — “SOME PIG,” “RADIANT,” “TERRIFIC,” and “HUMBLE” — into her web in the doorway of Wilbur’s stall. In doing so, she draws attention to Wilbur as an individual pig full of personality, and ensures that Wilbur is saved and cherished thereafter.

In response to his publisher’s request for explanation, White wrote: “A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals, because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. I have kept several pigs, starting them in spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through summer and fall. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing. I do not like to betray a person or a creature, and I tend to agree … that in these times the duty of a man, above all else, is to be reliable. Anyway, the theme of “Charlotte’s Web” is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.”

That wish is also deep inside our guest today. For over 30 years, Gene Baur has been a heroic, real-life, highly strategic, two-legged “Charlotte” for thousands of farm animals, changing millions of hearts and minds about animals and food. Baur is the co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, one of the nation’s largest animal rescue organizations that provides refuge for animals who had been abused, confined, and commodified as part of the U.S. factory farm system. Compared to Farm Sanctuary’s rescues, Wilbur lived a great life. White published Charlotte’s Web in 1952, just as factory farming was being invented and a decade before it began to rapidly spread – first with poultry, then pigs and cows. Today, 99% of U.S. farm animals spend their lives in large-scale industrial animal factories. Baur has made it his life’s work to try to change this.

Ep. 25 – Doug Kysar and Jon Lovvorn on law in the Anthropocene

“In a very short time period, essentially since the Great Acceleration after World War II, we’ve engineered these vast industrial systems the planet over that are designed to generate food in a particular way for humans, and as a result humans have been more and more distanced from the possibility of right relations with the non-human world,” Kysar says. “How do we recreate those conditions that enable understanding of ourselves as part of a community of communities with intercommunal obligations?” Photo by Harold Shapiro/ Yale Law School.

Our species’ treatment of other animals raises deep questions of conscience, of consciousness, and of the consequences of human actions for other living beings. These are questions of science, but also questions of law and of power. Often, they are questions of who counts and who doesn’t. Throughout their careers, in distinct but related ways, our two guests today have made the case — in writing, in the courtroom, and in the classroom — that harms to other forms of life, including animals, the environment, and future generations, matter profoundly. Rather than accepting that these “other” beings reside outside the scope of law, they have argued that we must work to expand our moral imaginations and strive, be it ever asymptotically, toward the goal of universal recognition and respect for life.

Professors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn are the Faculty Co-Directors of Yale Law School’s new Law, Ethics & Animals Program, also known as LEAP. LEAP is a multidisciplinary think-and-do tank dedicated to inspiring and empowering Yale scholars and students to address industrialized animal cruelty and its impacts, and to advance positive legal and political change for animals, people and the environment upon which they depend. In fall 2017, Lovvorn and Kysar co-taught the first full-credit course on animal law offered in Yale Law School’s history, building on years of growing student interest and reading groups. The class marked the beginning of a creative partnership and a dynamic collaboration between one of the nation’s most distinguished environmental law scholars and one of the nation’s most accomplished animal law practitioners.

“After I figured out the basics of how to be a lawyer, I quickly set about trying to make more animal lawyers because there weren’t enough of them,” Lovvorn says. Photo by Hope-Bigda Peyton.

Ep. 7 – “Eating Animals” film director Christopher Quinn on the hidden costs of factory farming

The award-winning screenwriter, film director and producer Christopher Quinn’s latest film, “Eating Animals,” explores the costs of cheap meat. “It’s not just about losing all these resources, but about losing ourselves,” he says. “Our sense of self. Our spirit.”

For 2.5 million years, humans sustained themselves by eating plants and animals that lived and reproduced without our manipulation. That changed 10,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began to intervene in the lives of a few plant and animal species, sparking what we now call the Agricultural Revolution. The Industrial Revolution followed some 10,000 years later, in the early 1700s, revolutionizing our eating habits yet again. Just as the Humanist religions were defining human beings as the image of god, humans started to view animals as meat machines. Farmers brought the techniques of the factory system into the slaughterhouse, dramatically increasing the number of animals they could raise and kill for food. The industrialization of agriculture has led to the practice now known as “factory farming,” a multibillion dollar industry that controls nearly a third of Earth’s land, is transforming ocean ecosystems, and produces more greenhouse gas emissions than planes, ships, trucks, cars, and all other transport combined.