Bob Fischer
Reel 4215
TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Bob Fischer
INTERVIEWER: David Todd
DATE: January 14, 2025
LOCATION: San Marcos, Texas
SOURCE MEDIA: M4A, MP3 audio files
TRANSCRIPTION: Trint, David Todd
REEL: 4215
FILE: Animals_Fischer_Bob_SanMarcosTX_14January2025_Reel4215.mp3
David Todd [00:00:02] Okay. Well, good morning, David Todd here. I have the privilege of being online with Dr. Bob Fisher. And with his permission, we plan on recording this interview for research and educational work on behalf of a nonprofit group called the Conservation History Association of Texas. And for a book and a website for Texas A&M University Press. And finally, for an archive at the Briscoe Center for American History, which is at the University of Texas in Austin. And I wanted to stress that you would have all equal rights to use the recording as well. And before we went any further, I wanted to make sure that that’s okay with Dr. Fischer.
Bob Fischer [00:00:43] It is indeed.
David Todd [00:00:44] Great. All right. Well, let’s get started then. It is Tuesday, January 14th. It’s about 8:35 a.m. Central Time. My name, as I said, is David Todd. I am representing the Conservation History Association of Texas. I’m in Austin, Texas. We are conducting a remote interview with Dr. Bob Fisher. And I understand that you’re based in San Marcos area, is that right?
Bob Fischer [00:01:12] Yes. Yes. I’m not there right now, but that’s just where I based.
David Todd [00:01:16] Okay. Fair enough. Just by way of a brief introduction, Dr. Fischer is a professor of philosophy at Texas State University. He specializes in epistemology and ethics, particularly animal ethics. And he’s written several books, including The Ethics of Eating Animals and Animal Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction. He contributed to Wildlife Ethics: Animal Ethics in Wildlife Management and Conservation. And he’s also a researcher at Rethink Priorities and a co-director of the Animal Welfare Economics Working Group.
David Todd [00:01:48] That just scratches the surface. But I hope that serves as kind of a flavor of what sort of work he’s been doing.
David Todd [00:01:54] Today, we’ll be talking about Dr. Fischer’s life and career to date. A young guy, much more to come. But but at least we’ll get a sense of where things stand right now and focus on what he might be able to tell us about ethical questions about how we treat, use and and think about wildlife.
David Todd [00:02:13] As a place to start, I just thought we would go kind of chronologically and and ask about his early years. And I was hoping that he might be able to tell us about people or events in his early life that might have gotten him interested in animals and ethics.
Bob Fischer [00:02:29] Yeah, well, the short answer to that is that there weren’t many in the very early stages. I didn’t think about animals at all and was not particularly interested in them really until, you know, after college, after I got married. You know, I was driving down the highway with my wife in my mid-twenties. You know, we passed a truck full of pigs headed off to slaughter. She was upset, you know, started to tear up at the thought of their fate. And I said, “You know, if this bothers you so much, maybe we should just, you know, rethink what we’re doing for a little bit, just see what it’s like to try eating differently for a month or something.”
Bob Fischer [00:03:20] And once I, you know, said that, it sort of took on a life of its own. I started reading around. I learned more about the food system. I learned more about the animal welfare issues associated with contemporary intensive agriculture and started to think, “Boy, there’re just a ton of really uncomfortable issues, just beneath the surface of, you know, the way we, you know, rear and slaughter these animals.” And I didn’t think a whole lot about it on a professional level. I worked in other areas of philosophy. I had other projects that I was pursuing.
Bob Fischer [00:04:04] But then, when I started teaching, it sort of occurred to me that, you know, this is a great topic to talk about – let’s you get at all sorts of fundamental moral questions about, you know, who counts, how much they count, why do they count, which kinds of obligations do we have, how demanding are they, etc., etc. And the next thing you know, my career just completely pivoted from the technical areas of philosophy that I had been working in into these practical issues of animal ethics. And, you know, that was 2011, basically. So the last 13 years have been almost entirely devoted to issues in animal ethics. Initially, I was very interested in questions about, you know, the ethics of food. And then I sort of thought, “Well, I’ve said everything I have to say about that.”
Bob Fischer [00:05:02] And the world expanded. I started thinking about wildlife conservation issues. I started to think about, you know, issues in companion animal ethics. I’ve been thinking a lot about zoos lately. So, you know, just, just working my way around the various puzzles associated with the human, you know, use and sometimes misuse of animals.
David Todd [00:05:28] All right. All right. Well, it sounds like this this truckload of pigs and your wife’s reaction might have been pretty formative. I was wondering if there were any sort of instances of sort of public media, things that you read or watched, that might have also been influential for you to get started on this wildlife ethics and industrial agriculture kind of focus.
Bob Fischer [00:05:55] Yeah. On the industrial ag side, I think it was probably reading Singer and Mason’s “The Ethics of What We Eat”, which looked at three different ways you might, you know, go about eating and looked at some of the pros and cons associated with different ways of rearing animals. And, you know, that book was well-researched and very thoughtful and, you know, contained a lot of the sort of the early formative moral frameworks that I ended up sort of bringing to bear going forward, thinking about, you know, the conditions under which it makes moral sense to use animals in different kinds of ways. So, in terms of public media that was influential, that sort of popular book.
Bob Fischer [00:06:45] But when it comes to wildlife. I don’t think that was the way it worked at all. I mean, to some degree, these were just, well, not to some degree, in fact, and in their entirety, these were just, you know, the scholarly conversations that took their own direction. So, you know, I am a very collaborative person. I really enjoy doing work with others. I much prefer it to writing papers on my own.
Bob Fischer [00:07:15] And so, over the last decade in particular, I’ve just done more and more and more co-authored work. And so, you get introduced to people and they say, you know, this is a really interesting topic. We should work on such and such. And I never thought about working on such and such. That was not the plan. But, you know, scholarly collaborations I think are one of the, or they can be anyway, they are not always, but they can be one of the great joys of academic life just, you know, to brush up against other minds at the top of their game and to see how the world looks from the perspective of a different discipline. And so, I have really leaned into that and have just been delighted at the opportunities to do wildlife-related work with folks who, you know, extended my conception of the range of topics that I could explore.
Bob Fischer [00:08:05] And so, I started doing that, I don’t know, maybe seven years ago or something. And then Clare Palmer, who is at Texas A&M, invited me to be one of the co-authors of “Wildlife Ethics”, and that’s how that project really took shape, where, you know, she had this particular vision and was interested in my input. And the next thing you know, it had taken over a big chunk of a couple of years.
David Todd [00:08:35] Okay.
David Todd [00:08:37] So one other question we often explore, folks is, is whether there are some academic routes, you know, where there are teachers or mentors. And it sounds like a lot of these people are sort of your peers, you know.
Bob Fischer [00:08:49] That’s right. All colleagues.
David Todd [00:08:51] But were there people that, you know, you may have had the conventional sort of teacher / student relationship with, you know, where there was kind of a hierarchy and there was a dynastic thing going on?
Bob Fischer [00:09:05] No, not at all.
Bob Fischer [00:09:07] You know, when I was working. Well, you know, doing my undergraduate work, my graduate work. I didn’t think about ethics. I didn’t take ethics courses. I was not, you know, interested in the topic. I certainly wasn’t thinking about animals at that time. And my mentors were people in epistemology and logic and philosophy of science and things like that. It was a great education. I learned a lot. Those were very valuable and formative relationships, but they were entirely divorced from the work that I do these days. And I think really what I do now is, yeah, unrecognizable to my former self and certainly not the kind of work that my advisors prioritized.
Bob Fischer [00:10:00] Although, you know, one of them now has shifted into more applied issues and has done a bunch of work now that he, you know, has gotten himself into a position where he’s got a lot of flexibility in terms of his research agenda. So, you know, folks do pivot and, you know, find their way. But at that time, we certainly weren’t talking about anything even remotely like this.
David Todd [00:10:26] OK. Well, thank you for giving us a little bit of background and introduction to your, you know, interests and thoughts. I think we might want to get into some of this.
Bob Fischer [00:10:39] Right. Let’s do it.
David Todd [00:10:40] Yes. I really enjoyed reading your book that you worked on with your collaborators – “Wildlife and Ethics: Animal Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation”. And I thought that maybe we could explore various themes that you touched on.
Bob Fischer [00:10:58] Great.
David Todd [00:10:58] That might be relevant to some of the issues that that I’ve bumped into here in Texas. One thing that I thought might be good to talk about is, at the outset, is agriculture and how we think about livestock. And I think that you mentioned this pretty formative study that came out, the Brambell report back in 1965. And, you know, I think it starts to get into these trade-offs between the need to feed people, but also the need to be conscious of how animals are treated in the process of providing food. Can you talk a little bit about your attitude about that?
Bob Fischer [00:11:44] Sure. So I guess the first thing to do is actually, you know, to push back against the framing a little bit. So, when we think about contemporary intensive animal ag, it’s not really a conversation about feeding people in the sense that, “Oh, man, you know, folks are going to starve if they don’t eat lentils”. You know, that’s not the situation in which we find ourselves.
Bob Fischer [00:12:07] The actual situation is that there has been a concerted effort to meet consumer demand for a certain kind of product. We want a lot of meat and we want it cheap. And if you want that, then you have to make certain decisions on the production side. You know, if you want a $5 chicken from Costco, it takes a particular, very complicated, very streamlined system to produce that where anybody who wants one can go spend that amount of money to get that product from a store that is around the country.
Bob Fischer [00:12:48] And so, what is really going on is not that we’re thinking fundamentally about, “Okay, what is the way of rearing animals that sort of best satisfies a range of considerations, meeting, yes, consumer preferences, but also environmental considerations and, you know, animal welfare and thinking about scalability and sustainability and etc., etc., etc.” And what’s really going on is that we are optimizing for a very particular thing. And we’ve done a tremendous job at doing that, at producing huge amounts of inexpensive animal products.
Bob Fischer [00:13:32] And so, you know, when we think about tradeoffs, it’s important to recognize that, you know, all of the discussion about animal welfare, all the discussion about environmental considerations, etc., etc., they’re really subservient to that fundamental objective. And so, that’s, I think that’s the first thing to keep in mind is that consumers want something. Businesses want to provide it and they’re doing it really, really well.
Bob Fischer [00:14:03] And consumers mostly don’t want to think about animal welfare, and they don’t want to think about the environmental issues. They just want to be told that things aren’t that bad, that it’s okay that someone somewhere is thinking about this. It doesn’t really need to be their concern.
Bob Fischer [00:14:20] And so, when you think about animal ag from that perspective, I think, you know, the conversation just takes a different shape. You know, fundamentally, I think the issue is, “Okay, well, yeah, sure. Animal protein is a valuable form of protein. Animal-based foods are, you know, culturally significant. And, you know, meeting consumer preferences is, you know, in a perfectly legitimate goal for a set of businesses to have.”.
Bob Fischer [00:14:57] But, you know, do you need to have chicken twice a day? Every day? You know, do you need to be able to have a steak literally anytime you want it, right? Like would you satisfy your nutritional and cultural and other kinds of needs, if you were eating, say, you know, 75% as much meat, 25% as much meat? Probably could.
Bob Fischer [00:15:22] And if you were to do that, then many of the pressures on the environment due to intensive animal ag and on animal welfare would be reduced.
Bob Fischer [00:15:34] Where are all the major issues coming from? It’s, you know, from really high stocking densities. Right. That’s the fundamental issue. Like go ahead, try to correct issues in animal welfare without going after the elephant in the room, which is stocking density. You can’t do it. Right? Like you just can’t give chickens amazing lives when you want to pack, you know, 30,000 of them into a shed. Right? That’s just not something that any animal welfare scientist really thinks you can do.
Bob Fischer [00:16:06] And so, the larger discussion here has to be about, you know, just how much are consumers going to demand, you know, how much do we really need these products? Can we get by with less? If we can get by with less, not none. No one is saying none, but with less. We can address a whole bunch of these fundamental issues.
Bob Fischer [00:16:30] There aren’t really, there don’t really have to be tensions between meat production and animal welfare, between meat production and the environment, if we are willing to moderate.
Bob Fischer [00:16:42] But, you know, thus far, Americans have not shown themselves to be tremendously willing to moderate.
David Todd [00:16:51] Okay. Thank you. That was very clear.
David Todd [00:16:55] So one other aspect of the animal economy and our food preferences and so on is that many of us like, you know, pork tenders and bacon and so on?
Bob Fischer [00:17:08] Sure.
David Todd [00:17:10] From what appears to be, to me, a very sentient animal. And I just wonder if there are sort of special issues there dealing with an animal that has many marks of intelligence.
Bob Fischer [00:17:23] Yeah. So, there are a couple of core ethical issues that you might want to think about. One is just, you know, under what conditions is it ethically okay to use another sentient being for your purposes? You know, in the case of humans, we’ve got really bright lines. We insist upon, you know, respecting the autonomy of other individuals. And we say, “Well, you know, no use without consent. I don’t get to just decide that I want to use you for any particular purpose.” You know, I have to take your interests into account.
Bob Fischer [00:18:05] And the most fundamental question we always need to ask is, “What’s the reason that there aren’t similar protections for animals? So why is it that it’s just considered okay to use animals even when they don’t want to be used?” Right? Chickens are not lining up around the block to sign up at this big barn. Right? And we might just get like for lots of people, I think when they hear that question, you know, humans and animals are fundamentally different. You know, there’re just these different rules. And that’s fine. You know, you can say that.
Bob Fischer [00:18:44] But if you want to think systematically about ethics, then we want some explanation. We want to know what’s different about animals and why it’s okay to just ignore what they want when we’re not in survival situations. Right? We’re not talking about, you know, you’re lost in the woods and you got to take a deer to survive. You know, we’re talking about do you really like going to Torchy’s and you prefer a particular kind of taco to some other kind of taco. So that’s the first fundamental question. When is it okay to use animals? What are the basic constraints?
Bob Fischer [00:19:18] Setting that issue aside, you know, the issue that I think most everyone will take seriously from, you know, advocates to industry is what does it look like to take animal welfare seriously? Like, what does it look like to actually give animal welfare the consideration it deserves? And that means thinking about designing systems that give animals decent lives before we are going to kill them for food.
Bob Fischer [00:19:53] And when you bring up this issue about sentience, what that means is, you know, very simple. It just means, you know, animals can feel things, right? They can feel pleasure. They can feel pain. You know, they can hurt. They could be bored. They could be stressed. But also they can have positive experiences. Right. They can sun on their back and feel good.
Bob Fischer [00:20:18] And so, taking animals seriously means recognizing that they have those abilities and then thinking about how we design systems that are sensitive to their interests. So, you know, if an animal really wants to be able to spread its wings. If an animal really wants to be able to roll around in the mud, if an animal really wants to be able to stay nearer her calf, well, you know, part of taking animal welfare seriously is trying to design production systems that give animals those opportunities.
Bob Fischer [00:20:56] And, of course, you know, a lot of small producers in Texas make that their mission, and that is what they try to do. But of course, the vast majority of the food we eat does not come from small producers. Right? They are a tiny, tiny portion of total production in the U.S. And by number of individuals, you know, they are rounding error. You know, essentially all chicken, for instance, in the US is produced via intensive practices and chickens are the bulk of the animals reared in the US. So that’s the whole game, right? You’re looking at what, 9.3 billion birds a year in the US alone?
David Todd [00:21:39] Boy? The scale of it is amazing.
David Todd [00:21:43] Let’s talk about just a sort of an unusual niche in the food industry in Texas and the United States, and that’s alligators. I think it’s an interesting example because I’ve heard some people say that one of the reasons that alligators have come back, of course, is because there was good regulation about hunting, but also that there is alligator farming.
Bob Fischer [00:22:07] Right.
David Todd [00:22:07] And I was wondering how you sort of balance the fact that these animals are being bred for slaughter, but it seems to have stabilized the overall population.
Bob Fischer [00:22:19] Yeah. I mean, so there are there are two separate issues here. So, one of them is about … Well, there are more than two. There are several issues. But, you know, one issue is about the degree to which we care about species versus individuals. So, there’s this question of, you know, when people think about animals, they often don’t really think about them as individuals. They think about them as kind of representatives of some archetype. And what we care about is the alligator, not individual alligators. You know, individual alligators are just a resource. Alligator, the sort of the archetype is this thing that we value. And we just want that form of life to exist.
Bob Fischer [00:23:09] Well, you know, if that’s your view, and farming is a way of keeping the archetype around, the species around, then, you know, maybe there’s some value in it. You know, you’re getting the thing that you want.
Bob Fischer [00:23:25] However, you know, archetypes can’t feel pain. Archetypes, you know, aren’t the ones whose interests we have reason to think about when we’re thinking about, you know, welfare. And so, there is this, you know, uncomfortable tradeoff between doing things that are good for the species versus doing things that are good for the individual. So, that that’s one important set of issues to flag, which is that there is a tension.
Bob Fischer [00:23:55] The second thing is when people think about valuing species, you know, there is this question of, well, you know, what’s the point of caring about a species? Like what is it that you’re trying to do in preserving a species? You know, if what you really care about is something like, you know, you want a museum of forms of life, okay, then whether they’re on a farm or in the wild makes no difference to you.
Bob Fischer [00:24:21] But if what you actually care about is something like preserving ecological relationships where species are an important part of that, then like, what good is a farm? I mean, it doesn’t actually meet the fundamental objective, which is ensuring that there is a preservation of this complex web of life that operates independently of human intervention.
Bob Fischer [00:24:47] And so, it’s a bit tricky to look at something like alligator farming and say, “Oh, well, you know, this is this, you know, sort of wonderful case of a conservation success. If what you really cared about was these wild populations existing in this particular sort of way.
Bob Fischer [00:25:13] Now, I mean, it is happening indirectly, in that you’re relieving hunting pressure so people aren’t hunting the wild alligators because they’ve got the farmed ones and it’s easier to harvest the farmed ones than, you know, to go out into the swamp and go after the wild ones. So it is indirectly benefiting the species and the ecological relationships, but it’s doing it in this kind of strange way where what you’re saying is essentially, “Well, humans as a group do not care enough about this species to actually take the steps required to preserve it in its ecological home. So what we’re going to do is basically, you know, undercut the, you know, the price of alligator skin and meat by farming as a strategy for keeping these animals around in the wild.”
Bob Fischer [00:26:14] And, you know, you can consider that a conservation success. It’s a pretty sad conservation success, though. By my lights. It’s where you think, “Oh, well, maybe we don’t really deserve to have alligators around in the wild. These are the only conditions under which we can keep them alive.” But, you know, your mileage may vary.
David Todd [00:26:36] That’s fascinating. That’s very helpful. Thanks for walking me through those steps.
David Todd [00:26:42] I thought that it would be good to talk a little bit about another aspect of where business and animals overlap and that’s in trade. And in your fine book, “Wildlife Ethics”, you bring up this ethical question of parrot capture and trade and that, you know, there are different sides of that. There’s the indigenous folks that are maybe in the sort of intimate part of catching these animals. But then there are really maybe more significant problems with habitat loss that maybe really are benefiting wealthier people at the other end of the income spectrum. And I was wondering how you balance off these two threats to parrots, you know, particularly south of the border. But of course, it’s a global issue.
Bob Fischer [00:27:33] Yeah. I mean, so I think that this is a great question. You know, I think when we approach topics like this, what makes them thorny is that, and this is the case, you know, throughout a huge range of issues in animal ethics. You know, there really are legitimate competing values. And what’s generally not being discussed is what it looks like to try to take all of those values seriously. Often, particular values are sort of brought out as trump cards in the discussion.
Bob Fischer [00:28:19] So, what we do is we say something like, “Well, we care about individual animal welfare. We care about species conservation. But, you know, there’s poverty in this region. And so, you know, poverty alleviation trumps all.” Or we come at it from another way. We say, you know, “There’s poverty alleviation. There’s concern that animal welfare, but, you know, there’s conservation concern. That’s really the decisive thing. And we just need to do whatever it takes to keep the species going.”
Bob Fischer [00:28:59] And, you know, those are not stable solutions. Those are just ways of asserting the dominance of one value in your calculation relative to all others. And what we really want to do is think more systematically about, well, what would it look like to have an approach that gave, you know, very serious due respect to all of the values that are driving people’s thinking about this and what kind of investment would be required to then actually take those values seriously in practice.
Bob Fischer [00:29:41] So, what you are dealing with here is rural poverty and people are in fact going to keep harvesting any animal or capturing any animal if that’s the sort of the best economic opportunity available to them. Well, you know, if you don’t invest seriously in the livelihoods of those individuals, then there’s, there’s no conversation to be had here. You can talk all you want about individual animal welfare or species conservation, but like, the reality is that this is going to take place.
Bob Fischer [00:30:17] And most people are not going to be super comfortable with the, you know, green militarization where you start, you know, being extremely aggressive with poachers as they have in some African countries where, you know, actually people have gotten shot for poaching big game. You know, on the assumption that we don’t want to go down that path and actually take human life to protect animal life, then at some point, you’re going to have to just start investing way more money in conservation and animal welfare by doing economic development so that this is not people’s best option. Like that really is the only serious meaning of taking all of these values seriously.
Bob Fischer [00:31:06] But of course it’s expensive and it requires a major investment. And nobody wants to do that, right? Nobody actually wants to put the money into economic development that would be required to alleviate these pressures on animals.
Bob Fischer [00:31:19] And so, you know, I think a lot of the discussion that we face when we start looking at these, you know, conservation puzzles, in one sense, you know, they’re just tragic discussions. Right? They’re really awful to have because it’s obvious what you should actually do. Like what the actual solution is to this kind of issue is you must change the structure of the situation. You cannot address it in any serious way without actually going after the structural features that are creating it. And everything else that you do is just going to be a major compromise and a disappointment.
Bob Fischer [00:32:02] And so, we can talk about, well, which of the various disappointments should we accept? You know, should we accept the species loss or should we accept the fact that people are going to, you know, not be able to get access to an economic benefit that they would otherwise really value? And that’s fine. You know, I’m a professional ethicist. That’s what I do. But in many ways, it’s really unfortunate to even set up the discussion in that way.
David Todd [00:32:37] Okay. Well, I think that helps us think through a lot of these other animals that, you know, I guess I’ve sort of offered as his examples – the tarpon, the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the white rhino.
Bob Fischer [00:32:49] Right?
David Todd [00:32:51] So let’s, given our limits on time, let’s jump ahead a little bit here and talk about some of the discussions you’ve had in wildlife ethics about a thing called virtue ethics. This, which I guess part of it relates to fair chase, and it plays out in Texas at least, probably differently elsewhere, but here there are questions about canned hunts of the mountain lions and hunts of white-tailed deer that are within high fences. Can you talk about how you think about those fair chase questions?
Bob Fischer [00:33:32] Yeah, So I think there are several things to say that might be helpful. So, there are different ways that you can think about relating to hunted game. And one of them is via this fair chase ethic where the fundamental moral thought is, “I’m framing this animal as a kind of competitor whose dignity requires some preservation. And treating this animal fairly and with respect, with dignity, means giving this animal a genuine shot at getting away from me.” Right? I should not create a situation in which this animal is excessively vulnerable.
Bob Fischer [00:34:25] And that is a virtue on the hunter’s part to provide this level of respect to the animal – sort of one way you can mentally organize the ethics of hunting.
Bob Fischer [00:34:43] The other way you can think about the ethics of hunting is in terms of minimizing stress and suffering. So, it is stressful to be hunted. You know, animals have evolved various mechanisms for detecting, you know, the threat of predators. They work really hard to avoid predation. And, of course, they you know, they, many animals are sentient. They have the capacity to feel pain. And so, you know, a bullet that is not fatal can cause a tremendous amount of suffering. You know, an arrow that doesn’t hit the vitals, you know, can cause an enormous amount of suffering.
Bob Fischer [00:35:31] And so from that perspective, the main moral task is take animal life without causing undue stress and suffering.
Bob Fischer [00:35:44] Well, these two goals pull apart. So fair chase means putting animals in situations where they’re more likely to get away. And situations in which they are more likely to be able to get away are situations in which you’re more likely to miss or have a bad shot, situations in which you’re more likely to wound an animal rather than have a quick kill.
Bob Fischer [00:36:11] By contrast, you know, situations in which you are most likely to protect an animal’s welfare are these canned, you know, put down a bunch of corn for the deer and you’re going to get that deer and you’re probably going to have a clean kill.
Bob Fischer [00:36:27] And so then the question becomes, well, which of these two ways of relating to animals makes the most moral sense? And, of course, you know, there’s division among hunters about this. You know, some of them will tell you that, “Look, you know, treating animals as well as I can means, you know, respecting these fair chase principles.” And some of them will say, “Look, I just don’t want any animal to hurt at all. You know, I don’t want them to suffer. Of course, I’m going to eat these animals, but I try not to cause pain along the way.”
Bob Fischer [00:37:05] And I think to do a serious moral investigation of this, you need to really think about how far you are leaning into the notion of fair chase and what it would really look like to take that seriously. I think the reality is that for most modern hunters, nothing that we do is really fair chase. You know, high-powered rifles, you know, with a scope, you know, a compound bow that allows you to get a range that you would never otherwise be able to get. Hunting from a blind. Right? I mean, it’s, it’s a long way from what a wolf has to do, you know, what a bobcat has to do, what a cougar has to do to get prey.
Bob Fischer [00:37:50] So I think we kind of you know, don’t, we pay lip service to the notion of fair chase. I think it could be a kind of way of pretending that we are paying animals due respect. But actually, I think we’re by and large not following what sort of a true fair chase ethic would require in most cases. And given that, I think the focus on animal welfare makes a lot of sense.
Bob Fischer [00:38:20] And so, you know, do I think canned hunts are, you know, the greatest thing in the world? As you might imagine, I do not. However, I’d much rather see people do canned hunts than do what they perceive to be fair that actually causes far more suffering to free-roaming animals. So I’m not actually anti-canned hunt, given that, I think it’s actually often much better for the individual animals.
David Todd [00:38:59] I’m learning a lot. Thank you.
Bob Fischer [00:39:01] Yeah.
David Todd [00:39:02] So one other aspect of hunting that I think is interesting, and I think you touch on this in Wildlife Ethics is that a lot of these ethical disputes are decided by majority rule, but much of the hunting actually happens on private property and that the landowners have, you know, a much higher vote, you might say, a more heavily weighted vote on how animals and how hunting is is, you know, followed through on.
Bob Fischer [00:39:34] Yes.
David Todd [00:39:34] And I was wondering how you think about this. And I know recently in Texas Parks and Wildlife, there was a long discussion about trying to give some more protection to mountain lions. And I think that a lot of the public comments were super-majority level. Yet among landowners, there was much more reluctance to have any meaningful regulation. And I was wondering how you balance those kind of two pressures.
Bob Fischer [00:40:03] Yeah, it’s actually, it’s an important question because it gets at a really fundamental issue regarding how the nation considers wildlife and thinks about wildlife. So, if you think about wildlife the way you might think about minerals, where, “Well, it’s my property, so I’ve got mineral rights, which is sort of equivalent to and therefore I’ve got animal rights. I can do whatever I want with the animals on my property.”
Bob Fischer [00:40:40] And that framing of animals, of course, you can understand why landowners just think, “Well, this is as bizarre as someone coming in and saying, I get to decide what happens to the minerals on your property.” Right?
Bob Fischer [00:40:57] But there’s a very, very old tradition in the U.S. of wildlife being common property. Right? That all Americans own the animals within the country’s borders. Right? They are part of a public trust. And on that conception. Well, of course, you know, just because the animal happens to be passing through your property or maybe even lives, you know, the animal’s whole life on your property, does not mean you own that animal. Right? It is still a collective good or part of that collective good.
Bob Fischer [00:41:36] And, you know, I think in Texas, because the private property culture is so strong and because other aspects of the law, so privilege private property, it’s been easy for landowners to lean into that conception where animals are a bit like, you know, the minerals on their land. And I think that’s, you know, really a betrayal of this older American ideal and one that we have good reason to value because, you know, just as we want to be very careful with, I mean, think about it as you know, with the analogy to water. Like, forget these are sentient beings. Like just focus on them as environmental features.
Bob Fischer [00:42:26] And you think about the drama regarding water rights in Texas. And it’s in part because, you know, we now understand I can’t just pump as much water as I want without affecting my neighbors. You know, my water choices affect other folks. If I just keep going after whatever’s in the aquifer, other people are affected. And wildlife is the same way, right, where wildlife moves. It is not bound to an individual place in quite the same way. These animals have ranges and biodiversity and species relationships are not limited to very small, you know, micro regions where people own property. And so, thinking about wildlife more like water as, as a thing that we all are affected by and by where individual choices affect the experiences of others can be very valuable.
Bob Fischer [00:43:25] So, you know, separating any questions about, you know, animal welfare or anything else, just recognizing the difference between animals and minerals and thinking about animals as a bit more like water, as a thing that we need to recognize the interdependencies, can help us see why we might want to have an approach to wildlife conservation that doesn’t defer as much to landowners.
David Todd [00:43:58] Okay. Thank you.
David Todd [00:44:02] So I think that a lot of private landowners struggle with feral hogs.
Bob Fischer [00:44:11] Sure.
David Todd [00:44:11] And aoudads and burros and so on that are invasive or, you know, not considered native, and they’ve been introduced. And yet they these animals have sentience and feel pain and experience joy probably. And I was curious how you balance the threat that these invasives might inflict on native wildlife versus their, you know, individual existence and some of the values there.
Bob Fischer [00:44:50] Yeah. So, I think it’s important to distinguish a couple of different kinds of cases. So, one of them is the case where there really are threats to, you know, health, safety, property due to invasive species. So, you know, a farmer who is frustrated because feral hogs are destroying crops is very different from someone who, you know, just doesn’t like the existence of a certain species on their property, but otherwise doesn’t see some clear ecological consequence or property consequence or what have you. So that’s the first distinction to draw. And just about everybody is going to say that, “Look, you got to have sensible management practices when you’re dealing with damage to property or risk to human health, as you would for any species.” Right? Whether invasive or not.
Bob Fischer [00:45:54] So, I think that’s not a very morally complicated case, at least, you know, from the perspective of the average citizen. And it really just comes down to, okay, what are humane … what’s the best way of balancing the humaneness of the method and the effectiveness of the method? So, some very effective methods are not humane, such as blood thinners, you know, anticoagulant poisons. And some very humane methods like reproductive control methods are not very effective because they only work when you’ve got contained populations. So you’ve got to find some balance and you’ve got to figure out, you know, what your best options are.
Bob Fischer [00:46:33] And it could be the case. That actually this is an area where hunting, you know, can be valuable, where if you can get enough hunting to occur (in practice, that’s really hard to do), but in principle, you know, this is an opportunity where you could get some value from having those ecological relationships be managed in part by better management practices via hunting. So that’s one thing to say.
Bob Fischer [00:47:09] The other thing to say is when we start thinking, you know, go back to the other case and we were thinking about where people are just, you know, concerned about invasiveness. You know, often, we’re, you know, we’re now getting at sort of questions about what makes an ecosystem valuable and I think there’s a kind of naive picture that we should push back against, which is, you know, what should this ecosystem be like? The way I remember it when I was seven, you know? Where people basically just want, you know, it’s they value ecosystems out of nostalgia. They like the way things were at one point and they don’t like change. And that’s what they’re really responding to.
Bob Fischer [00:48:00] Well, you know, Earth does not owe you the ecosystem of your youth. That is not, that is not a thing that the environment has any duty to provide. And yes, you might want to bring that about, but it’s not really clear what that is beyond an esthetic preference. It’s just … and it’s not the kind of thing that, you know, enormous federal or state resources should go toward. The mere fact that people happen to like a certain configuration of plants and animals. You know, why should I have to pay for that? Just as a matter of the public disposition of resources.
Bob Fischer [00:48:40] So, then what we want to do, if we get past the it’s just esthetic, I have a preference for the ecosystem that existed when I was seven, now you start thinking about, “Well, okay, well, what are the ecosystem services that are being provided?” In other words, how does this ecosystem filter water? How does it capture carbon? How does it maintain, you know, the health of plants on which humans depend, or what have you. Okay.
Bob Fischer [00:49:13] And there are going to be cases where invasive species compromise those ecosystem services, but not a lot, actually. You know, ecosystems change all the time in ways that don’t affect the fundamental services that they provide. And so I think it gets harder. You know, I’m not, I’m not saying you should never manage for invasive species, but I do think that once you get past the sort of nostalgic, esthetic defense of managing invasiveness, you’re probably just going to do a lot less management because the truth is that, you know, it’s really, really hard to unring bells once you’ve introduced a whole bunch of new species to a region. And it’s not really clear what the core human benefit you are getting from investing all those resources in management.
Bob Fischer [00:50:09] So, I’m, I’m skeptical that there’s a great case to be made for a whole lot of the management of invasive species. Again, once we’ve separated out the property damage cases, right, we’re just focusing on people are looking for particular kinds of spaces. But, you know, maybe, maybe you could convince me otherwise.
David Todd [00:50:38] I think you’re well reasoned. I don’t know if I could.
David Todd [00:50:43] Let’s talk about another sort of category of animals that gets attention, and that’s predators. You helped write this section, I think, on tigers that was in Wildlife Ethics or of course, it appeared in the book. And I wonder if you could sort of play out this, this problem, of how you value predators versus prey, especially where the prey are livestock or where they’re valuable for hunting revenues. That’s been an issue with mountain lions and wolves and so on in Texas. How do you think about predators yourself?
Bob Fischer [00:51:19] Yeah. I mean, I actually think the case of predators and predator reintroductions in particular, it’s really wonderful because, I mean, not wonderful in the sense that, you know, it’s uncomplicated or something, but wonderful in the sense that it brings out just how little we actually care about wildlife and how much we just sort of care about the idea of wildlife. What people actually want is there to be sort of these spaces completely divorced from human interaction where wildlife just exist. And what they don’t want to deal with is the fact that, you know, wildlife are not interested in human rules and there’s going to be conflicts between wildlife interests and human interests.
Bob Fischer [00:52:15] So yeah, we want to live in a world with mountain lions. But, you know, living in a world with mountain lions means that you’re going to lose some cattle, that people’s dogs are going to get eaten periodically, that every once in a great while a runner is going to get mauled. Like that’s part of living in a world where there are big cats who can take down serious prey. And, you know, if we actually care about species preservation and you want these ecological relationships, you know, you want white-tailed deer to be managed by their natural predators, whatever, then, you know, a side effect of that is going to be that you’re going have to learn to live with a lot more risk. And for the most part, actually, people don’t want to do that.
Bob Fischer [00:53:10] I mean, I don’t this is not a criticism. I don’t want to deal with that. It’s not like I want to worry about whether, you know, when I go out for a run. I mean, I’m a trail runner. I really like, you know, being in remote areas and running in, you know spots were that are quite godforsaken. And, you know, I don’t want to have to worry about whether some predator is going to see me as a possible lunch.
Bob Fischer [00:53:42] But I recognize that if we in fact care about this kind of conservation then these are the things that we have to take on and see as acceptable costs to living alongside animals. Now, of course there are ways of mitigating those risks, etc. We can take various steps to make ourselves less vulnerable. But we can’t eliminate the risk entirely.
Bob Fischer [00:54:08] All right. So that’s preface to your actual question, because your actual question is about, you know, livestock competitors. And in some degree, like, look, we’re already doing things to address this, right? We already have insurance for livestock, right? We already have mechanisms by which, you know, farmers can be compensated for losses due to these kinds of predators. And if the compensation is not adequate, well, you know, on one level, we just know what the solution is, right? You just up the compensation, right? And if you really care about this from a wildlife conservation perspective, as the USDA does, they just subsidize. Right? And they are essentially making it possible for farmers to tolerate some of these losses for the sake of protecting big cats, among others. Right?
Bob Fischer [00:54:59] And so, to some degree, I think this is kind of a red herring issue because the mechanisms to, you know, reduce the risk to humans, at least the financial risks, are already in place.
Bob Fischer [00:55:17] And then the interesting question becomes, “Okay, to what degree do we care about the impacts of predators on these animals? To what degree do we actually care about having predators in the first place? You know, out there in these ecosystems, to what degree do we think it’s valuable to have, you know, large herbivore predation taking place?” And those are questions that, you know, scientists cannot answer for you. Right? Those are questions about what the American population sees as valuable in the space because, you know, they’re not necessary. It’s not like, “Gosh, we must have the wolves in Yellowstone. Otherwise, you know, the world will crumble. It will not crumble.” Right? That is just not the way it works. I mean we want a certain set of ecological relationships. We find them to be esthetically appealing. We find them to be scientifically interesting. And so, we are willing to accept certain tradeoffs.
Bob Fischer [00:56:23] But all of that is contingent. It doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to actually lean into it the way we do.
David Todd [00:56:29] So let’s shrink things down a little bit. We talked a bit about mountain lions and livestock and these large herbivores. What if we think a little bit about this instance of a fellow who killed a feral cat that was pursuing one of these rare piping plovers and you have not the mountain lion and the cow, but rather the cat and the bird and the bird is endangered.
Bob Fischer [00:57:04] Right.
David Todd [00:57:04] How do you weigh the welfare interests of the cat with the, you know, ecological values of a very rare bird?
Bob Fischer [00:57:13] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so what I actually think you should do here is, you know, it helps to put numbers on these things. And I think this is something that we’re not inclined to do in a lot of moral decision making, but I think it would be better if there was a bit more of it. So, you know, you’ve asked a perfectly legitimate, great question, David. I don’t, and I don’t want to, you know, dance around it. But in one sense, look, it’s kind of an impossible question. We just have two competing values. Most of us, we really do care about endangered species. We also care about individual animal welfare. We want to respect both and we find ourselves in this impossible choice. And so, the only thing to do really is just start asking, “Okay, well, how do we weigh these things?”.
Bob Fischer [00:58:22] And so, there are different ways we can start to put numbers on it. One is to say, “Okay, look, I’ve got this feral cat, so how many other animals are actually vulnerable? Right? It’s not really a 1 to 1 tradeoff here. That cat’s going to kill a lot of other animals, including a lot of other endangered animals. Right? In fact, there’s a bunch of research on just how many birds, small amphibians, small reptiles are taken annually by free-roaming cats. And once we recognize that, we can start to say, “Well, this isn’t really a 1 to 1 tradeoff. This might be a 1 to 10 or a 1 to 100 or 1 to 1000 write off over the course of a life span.” And so, we really should sort of, in an uncomplicated way, support the taking of the cat, killing of the cat to protect the plover. Because just from the perspective of, you know, protecting individuals, it’s going to come out in that direction. So that’s one way we could go at it.
Bob Fischer [00:59:31] Another way of going at it is to think, “Well, how much of a bump do we think the plover gets in virtue of being endangered?” And, you know, maybe it’s significant, right? Maybe, depending on how endangered the species is. And, again, depending on how painful the method of killing the cat is going to be. Right? So, killing the cat with a quick shot is very different from saying, “Okay, I’m going to put down anti-coagulant poisons to, you know, to kill this animal over the course of a week.” Right? And so, if what you’re considering is a relatively painless death for one animal to spare another, that has some additional conservation value, you know, suddenly the case again for killing that cat looks pretty straightforward.
Bob Fischer [01:00:36] And I think the last thing to say, again, just sort of trying to think about things a bit more numerically is you know, sometimes it would be good for folks to. Put things in monetary terms and to ask themselves, “Okay, well, how much would I really be willing to pay to prevent a feral cat from being killed. And how much will I be willing to pay to put a bit more pressure to prevent this bird from being killed and to prevent there being a bit more pressure on this species?”
Bob Fischer [01:01:21] And, you know, I think that’s not going to produce consensus. Some people are going to … they just love cats so much that, you know, they’re willing to prioritize cats over all else. But I suspect that once you start to actually put some numbers on it and say, “Oh, yeah, well, you know, when I when I factor in the various considerations here, I am willing to spend a bit more to do, you know, A versus B”, and that too can be a way of clarifying what your values are and how you’re weighting them. So, it’s not a foolproof strategy, but it’s a way of forcing a bit of clarity in our values so that we don’t just find ourselves at this paralysis point of saying, “We care about lots of things. And they conflict and there’s, you know, it’s an impossible choice.”
David Todd [01:02:16] Hey, it’s interesting how filthy lucre, money, can sometimes help us crystallize these choices.
David Todd [01:02:26] You know, I see that time marches on, so I wanted to, with your permission, skip forward a little bit and talk about captive breeding issues, which.
Bob Fischer [01:02:36] Sure.
David Todd [01:02:40] are really thorny, and I’d love to get your insights into how to think about these things.
David Todd [01:02:45] And, you know, Mexican wolves and red wolves, which have been native in Texas but no longer are, have gone through captive breeding. And I think you’ve talked about these, some of these tensions between breeding this insurance population to try to keep them on the planet, keep those genetics of, you know, proceeding down and into the future. but on the other hand, some of the constraints of that means for, you know, supporting these individual animals full lives and their, you know, complete behaviors. How do you weigh those two issues?
Bob Fischer [01:03:27] So, to some degree, you know, we’re coming back to foundational questions that we discussed in the very beginning about, you know, under what conditions is it morally acceptable to use animals. But I think we can’t really get at this without having a more full orbit view of what the aim of the breeding program is. So, you know, it’s one thing when you’re doing wildlife rehabilitation and you know that there’s a clear reintroduction plan and there’s a path forward for these animals. And then, yeah, you are using some animals to benefit others, you know, some members of a species to create additional individuals and to go on and see those individuals roam free. But in principle, this could be a lot of individuals helped over the course of the huge journey. And, you know, the numbers will potentially stack in favor of that conservation effort or at least it’s you know, it’s in principle possible that they could. And so, thinking about any compromises made for the breeding population is offset to some degree by thinking about the impacts on future individuals.
Bob Fischer [01:04:59] That’s different in cases where we don’t actually have a clear reintroduction plan and there’s sort of no end in sight for captive breeding. So, you know, there’s this kind of ark mentality sometimes that’s criticized in conservation circles where, “Yeah, we have, we’re just trying to keep animals alive in the ark and we have no idea. Like the floodwaters are rising and we’ve got no idea what we’re going to do in the long run. But we just have to sort of keep these things around.”
Bob Fischer [01:05:33] And, you know, I don’t want to be unduly pessimistic about the future, but it’s not like the trends suggest that habitat loss is about to turn around or that the climate’s about to become more friendly to species preservation, or that, you know, we’re entering a political era that is more environmentally focused or that the human population is about to collapse, you know, in the course of the next hundred years, in a way that would really change the trajectory for, you know, many wildlife populations. And so, in those circumstances, what’s going on is that we’re just, you know, we’re investing a ton of resources in these captive breeding programs without a clear future plan. And we’re potentially compromising the welfare of all the animals in the breeding program along the way. And so then, it just seems much, much harder to justify those practices.
Bob Fischer [01:06:34] And I think, you know, this this, again, is really going to force us to get clear about what we are valuing when we are valuing wildlife. If what you care about is individual animals getting to live flourishing lives of a diverse variety, well, then it’s a bad thing if we’ve got a bunch of animals not living flourishing lives in captivity and they have their welfare compromised because they can’t engage in lots of natural behaviors and they have to be artificially inseminated and so on and so forth.
Bob Fischer [01:07:07] You know, if you had an archetypical picture where what you really care about is just, you know, there being kinds of individuals around – you just want to have, you know, the preservation of these archetypes. Well, okay. I mean, you know, it’s worth asking why you value that so much. But if you value it, then the captive breeding program can make sense as a way of keeping that going.
Bob Fischer [01:07:39] So. You know, any serious veterinarian, all the people who are involved in these conservation programs, breeding programs, like, you know, they’re doing, they’re all concerned about animal welfare. They are making efforts to manage the compromises that are inherent in that work. But when we sort of think, we step back and think of the macro level about, “Well, should we be doing this at all?” We will just get pushed into the now familiar discussions about, “Okay, well, why on earth are we doing this in the first place? What is the value of biodiversity? Should, you know, can we justify this in terms that makes sense given a plurality of values. Or is this just kind of like a somewhat idiosyncratic passion project that some individuals have?”
Bob Fischer [01:08:43] And you know, as someone who spends a lot of time talking with folks in different disciplines, I do think it’s striking how successful conservationists have been at promoting their very particular values in a way that, you know, many disciplines have not. You know, chemists are not as good at getting other people to care about chemistry as conservationists have been at getting other people to care about, you know, wildlife preservation. And, that’s, you know, I’m not saying that there aren’t huge disanalogies. I perfectly well understand that there are. But the point is that there was a concerted effort that, you know, in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s by environmentally minded folks to get the general public to see species preservation and biodiversity preservation as a central public goal. And they really succeeded. They made it something that is considered sort of a standard thing to care about.
Bob Fischer [01:09:58] And, you know, other groups were not nearly as successful at getting their values to become public values. And so, these are sort of like uncritically accepted now. And I think the public has not thought nearly as carefully about, “But why exactly should I care about this? What is the reason? What are the tradeoffs we should be willing to accept for this?” It’s just sort of an unquestioned good.
Bob Fischer [01:10:26] And by that I don’t mean to say it’s not a good. I just mean to say, “Oh, we should really have a serious, thoughtful, hard conversation about how valuable it is relative to other goals and what tradeoffs we should be willing to accept.”
Bob Fischer [01:10:42] Perpetually keeping animals in captivity, where we have no serious, realistic vision for how their wild populations could survive. That may not be a tradeoff worth making.
David Todd [01:10:58] Let’s talk just a little bit more about reintroductions. In this next question I have for you, it’s not so much about animals that existed within our living memory or within the last hundred years, but those that existed here 15,000 years ago. And I’m thinking about the camel. There are many other animals that, you know, have were, you know, “disappeared” for a variety of reasons. And there’s from time to time discussions about possibly reintroducing these animals. Some people think it would be very positive. Others think that it would be a terrible mistake. I’m wondering how you think through this idea of returning animals to a place they haven’t been in thousands and thousands of years.
Bob Fischer [01:11:48] Yeah. I mean, I think, in a sense, this is a different kind of nostalgia. I mean, there’s that worry that that’s what’s going on, that what we’re dealing with is just, “Oh, well, what’s the right way for this ecosystem to be? Not the way it was in 1978 when I was seven, but rather it’s the way it was, pick some arbitrary time in the past – 15,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 3 million years ago, whatever.” All of those choices strike me as equally arbitrary. And I don’t understand why we should care about particular snapshots in the evolution of an ecosystem and hold them up as the way anything ought to be.
Bob Fischer [01:12:43] And as soon as we get past that, like the pure nostalgic, the pure, there was some sacred time when things were right, and we must return to it, the sort of Edenic vision for ecosystems, then the question is about like, “Well, what are we trying to accomplish? Like, what’s the endgame here? You know, do you think your crops are going to be more likely to thrive if we introduced the species? Is the ecosystem going to be more beautiful? Is it the case that we are going to manage some imbalance in the ecosystem more effectively if we reintroduced the species? Like what is the specific goal that we think will be served and why would we think that reintroducing that particular species would serve that goal?”
Bob Fischer [01:13:37] And so there are, of course, cases where people have made those kinds of arguments and said, “Oh, well, you know. If you want, you know, to have, you know, the grasslands recover properly, you need large herbivores traveling around them, fertilizing them, trampling them and dying on them and fertilizing them that way, etc.” And, okay, great.
Bob Fischer [01:14:12] But then you’re just going to face the kinds of questions that we’ve been discussing earlier about, “Well, okay, so to what degree do you really want herds of free-roaming buffalo, you know, running around Iowa?” You know, like is that actually, is that actually what, you know, the vision of the future that people want? And the answer, of course, is “no”, because they want their property respected and they want, you know, this world that they’ve created to be organized and managed and so on and so forth, and not be vulnerable to the preferences of, you know, large groups of wild animals.
Bob Fischer [01:14:47] And so, I think it’s very difficult when we start thinking about these historical reintroduction projects to come up with a argument or an argument for doing the reintroduction that isn’t just based on some kind of Edenic vision that I think we have a good reason to question on philosophical grounds. Or B, isn’t vulnerable to a huge number of practical objections about this not actually being the best way to address whatever the central environmental problem actually is supposed to be.
Bob Fischer [01:15:35] And that’s all before we even begin to talk about the question of animal welfare. Right? So, when you do these kinds of reintroductions, what you’re doing is you’re creating a very small, vulnerable population, often of social animals, and saying, “Best of luck.” Right? And that very well may involve serious compromises to the welfare of those animals. And, you know, I, we, of course, ought to include that in that discussion. Like that just deserves serious consideration.
David Todd [01:16:13] Well, one important thing to consider is that our time is dwindling away, and I think we have about less than ten minutes. And so, I wanted to just conclude by thanking you for obliging me with these questions, answering them. And I wonder if there is anything that you would like to add that we really haven’t treated so far, something I skipped over and that you would like to emphasize, you know, before we have to all leave?
Bob Fischer [01:16:43] Yeah. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for that question.
Bob Fischer [01:16:49] You know, I think the piece to emphasize, which might not be obvious in the discussion that we’ve had so far, is that we really can, I think, make material progress on questions about the ethics of animal use and the ethics of wildlife conservation without being real radicals. Right? And, you know, we don’t have to be completely countercultural or accepting, you know, values that most people don’t share in order to have more thoughtful, clearer or careful discussions and. What instead we need to do is just recognize, “Hey, look, we all value lots of things and we need to get a lot more explicit about how much we value them. And we need to be a lot less vulnerable to falling into traps of just thinking that things ought to be the way they used to be. And we need to be way more explicit about the actual tradeoffs that we face and how much money we’re willing to put into solving them.”
Bob Fischer [01:18:11] And if we do that, then we can get a lot clearer on what makes sense to do. And it doesn’t mean that all the answers are going to come out in super animal-friendly ways. It doesn’t mean that we’re always going to choose the thing that’s best from the perspective of the farmer or the conservationist or, you know, the average suburbanite or, you know, the invasive species. But it does mean that we can get past a lot of the, I think, completely unnecessary heat that goes into these discussions by being transparent, by just putting our cards on the table, by saying, “Okay, is this just nostalgia? Fine, the nostalgia’s a reason. Let’s see how many of us are actually just driven by that and how much money we’re really willing to put behind it.”
Bob Fischer [01:19:06] Okay. “Is this conservation practice happening because we have never really thought about what the alternative would be?” Okay. Let’s just get the alternatives on the table and have a more focused conversation about what they would be and the degree to which we can live with those consequences and so on and so forth.
Bob Fischer [01:19:27] I think, you know, doing ethics well, doing ethics in a way that respects the people who are out there trying to live their lives and trying to make the world better and, you know, trying to live alongside animals just means being honest in this kind of way, you know, being transparent, being willing to have hard, sometimes awkward conversations, being willing to see the idiosyncrasies of our own values, the peculiarities of them, the contingency of them, the moment they occurred in history, how you know much they’re likely to change over the course of the next ten, fifty, a hundred years. And that’s a project we can do. And we’d have better public debate debates about conservation ethics if we did it.
David Todd [01:20:16] Thank you. You know as a person who’s gotten to my grand old age, it’s always nice to rethink some presumptions I’ve got, some assumptions I have that I probably should, should rethink. So thank you for, you know, tickling part of my brain to try to be more transparent and considerate about this. And I hope that this recording does the same for those who listen to it.
David Todd [01:20:43] Thank you so much, Bob, and I appreciate your time today. I guess we’ll need to say goodbye.
Bob Fischer [01:20:51] Absolutely. David, it’s been a pleasure. Really enjoyed your questions. Thank you so much for your interest.
David Todd [01:20:55] You bet. Take care. Bye now.
Bob Fischer [01:20:57] Take care, David. Bye.