Don't Eat The Panda

Its eyes are way too big. Like I would hate to see the animal like a realistic bandy, you know, because its eyes would just be enormous and like, if it took actual shape, it would be monstrous and very it would be kind of bizarre. It would look like a like an alien, like like a little gray alien with the giant eyes, except the in dear form, Yeah, but illustrated quite cute, right, yeah, in illustrated form, it's

it's very adorable. Yeah. And some might even argue that Bambi was the beginnings of what we know as kawaii, which is sort of embracing of all things cute. Yeah. Yeah, and in the age of like L O L cats and you know, cute puppies sneezing or panda sneezing and everything else that we're seeing on the internet. It's undeniable that people have a connection to this cuteness that these animals um and it kind of brings into question our relationship with animals and the way that we treat them

and we think about them. Right, Like with Bamby, they actually started off with real deer, right, they brought in real deer. Yeah. Yeah, so so just so everybody knows that the reason why we have this babyfied Bamby, this this big eyed, doeyide fawn, is because Disney was such a stickler for detail that that at first he said, okay, you know what, we need to really make sure that

Bambi is rendered as a realistically as possible. So he had a pair of fawns shipped in from Maine and then he made his artists wat an autonomoust dissect the carcass of a newborn deer that resulted from that pair, and the sketches they produced were were really perfect, right, they were very realistic. But Disney realized right off the

bat that this was a mistake. This wasn't gonna sell, This was not didn't test well with audiences, right right, This reality wasn't really gonna hook audiences the way that he wanted them to be emotionally hooked from the storyline. So he had his artists go back to the drawing

board and they made them more cuddly. Um. And this is this is actually from how Herzog's really great book called Some We Love, Some We Hate, and Some We Eat, which looks at our tenuous relationship with animals and um he says that Bambi was essentially morphed into a surrogate

human baby. Wow. Yeah, it's a I mean, and then it just had It does make you really think about this, this complex relationship that we have with animals, especially like in this case where guys are sitting I'm thinking about how these cute animals are gonna appeal to two children even as they're dissecting their carcasses and planning out Bambi. You know, you generally don't think of the various um, well not Vivia sections, but dissections involved with with your

with your beloved Disney films. I'm hoping this was the only one they really did that for who knows. You know, you have to know, you start to think about all the past films that they did and wonder that's where that come from. Yeah, got to the bottom of that, but I mean from hell Herzog's perspective in his book, this is exactly the problem that we have here is that, uh, you know, here's who's on the one hand, trying to to make this animal really connect with people and make

it look more like a baby. On the other hand, you know that Disney thinks nothing of uh you know, taking the life of this little fawn in order to create something like this just for our pleasure, right, And of course that this this drawls right into the idea of that like we're we're attracted to, say a cat or a dog because it has been especially a kitten where it has oversized eyes, or or a puppy it

has oversized eyes. And this, uh, this not completely humanlike face, but still the snout is less less pronounced than dogs generally when they're when they're smaller, and uh so it looks a little bit like a baby. Like it calls to mind an infant child. And therefore we have this paternal instinct that's kicking in when we look at it. Yeah. Yeah, we've talked about the parental instinct before. In fact, we talked about it in Our Dogs podcasts and uh in

Nova's Dogs Decoded. Psychologists Morton Klingelbach put adults into meg scanners, which are these really cool supercharge scanners or neuro imagers, and then they showed photos to people while they are in the scanner of unfamiliar adult faces, infant faces, and puppy faces, and within one seventh of a second, the medial orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in emotional responses, lit up like a pinball machine when people looked at

infants and puppy faces. And this is what they were calling the parental instinct, like you can't not respond to these animals, um, and there's the here's the kicker though, which I thought was really interesting. Even in people who are blind from birth, they have the same areas activated in their brains when they hear the names of animals. So so it sort of points to this concept of animals or how we've painted them in language, which goes

far beyond visual processing. Baby seal instantly, like it's sort of light up, yeah, certain things. Yeah, And even if you don't have a visual of that, if you've been blind from birth, you have an idea of what a baby seal means in our language into humans of scorpions, Uh, repulsion, Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, um kitten kitten on a tricycle heart melting right now? Yeah, Um kitten farts erupting

from the kitten sitting here in the tricycle. Yeah. Uh so, I mean it does kind of, you know, make us ask this question of why do some animals elicit these warm and fuzzy feelings while others illicit repulsion. They're they're all beams right right? Yeah, Like how much of it is has learned? Like you learned to say hey to snake just because you hear people say, oh that's gross, or you hear stories about it biting people and housing a lot of swelling and death, or is if there's

something deeper? Is there something ingrained in us to be wary of snakes? Right? Yeah? Well, and some scientists would say that it's something we learned, and other scientists say that we're hardwired to fear snakes. Snakes are a great example. Lynn Isabelle of the University of California Davis posits that the primate brain specializes in visually detecting snakes, and she says that, um, you know our pastix variance shape the

brains that we have today. And then if you take a bunch of kids and you ask them to look at pictures, they're far more likely to pick out the snake very quickly than say a flower or a caterpillar in those pictures. So they're sort of hone in on the snakes and that this is an instinct and it does kind of, uh, it does bring up an interesting

question about whether or not you can inherit that. And there was a Science Daily article called Epigenetic memory Key to Nature Versus Nurture, and it says that organisms can create a biological memory of some variable conditions like the quality of nutrition or a temperature or something that, um, you might need to be scared of, essentially, and that this discovery essentially just explains why you would have this

pass down from daughter cell to the next generation. So it's like a switch that's flipped on depending on what the conditions are for that certain for that organism. All right, So if this organism grows up in snake country, then uh, the epogen nake changes will take place to make that person be wary of snakes. Where if someone is growing up in a northern region or on or An island

where all the snakes have been driven out by a priest. Yes, but again it gets tricky here because hell Herzog again in the book, points to New Guinea and tribespeople who have a high venomous snake population with further, snakes are venomous, So you would think that they would fear snakes, they would never touch them, But in fact, they're really good at ferreting out the ones that are non venomous, the ones that are venomous, and then the ones that are

non venomous they eat for dinner. Okay, well, I mean that makes sense though they're living they're living there there, they know the local terrain, they know the local animals and uh, and they know exactly which ones they can cook for dinner and which one need to be avoided like the plague. So they have specifically adapted. But that that doesn't explain why people in North America are so

fearful of snakes. You're far more likely to be killed by a dog than from a snake, according to hell Hers Well, yeah, but I mean we still have some very poisonous snakes, cotton mouths, copper heads, rattlers, right, true, true, And there's they're scary, folks, I get it. And dogs aren't quite as scary unless they're coojo yeah. Yeah. Or my neighbor's dog. My neighbor's dog is quite scary. Yeah, what kind of dog. I don't know. I think it's

a pitpole. Sorry. Yeah, they can be a little less scary. Yeah. See there, I am. I'm just I'm playing into the whole risk thing here about whether or not the risk

is actually there. Um. But again, going back to this, to this relationship with us and animals, hair Zog really looks at this uncomfortable relationship with animals we have, and it's uncomfortable, not just with snakes, So okay, they can be a danger, this uncomfortable relationship and the fact that we eat some of them, and we make these deliberate choices to eat some of them and to keep others as pets or just look at them. Yeah, mine, and

I guess that, yea. One of the things about about this scenario that that fascinates me, of course, is that you have you can look at like two extremes, like the person who is like a diet in the wool meat eater who is just one of those people that maybe has like a really kind of annoying extremist attitude about it, where it's like, yeah, kind of like everything exists for me to potentially grill and eat, and if I can't eat it, then don't waste my time with it.

And then on the other hand, you can you can have the the equally annoying, like uber vegan kind of stereotype where they fill this deep emotional connection with all life forms and therefore aren't going to eat anything in

there that will fall Yeah, exactly so. But but the reality is most people fall somewhere in between, and and it ends up being this complex relationship of I mean, to a certain extances, kind of pick and choose, and then that is grafted into this world view we have where it's okay to eat this, but not this this. Animals are friends, this one is our ancestral enemy, uh, the snake, and then this one, uh, this one's kind of in a gray area, and we just don't think

about them as much. Well. And I think that the reason why people are considering the question of eating meat so much these days is when are resources right? We don't have that much land left to to to raise cows and pigs and everything else that's meat oriented as we used to. And yet our consumption is at all time high, right yeah, I feel like a lot of it. You know, there's people reaching the point where they're they're like, whoa, yeah,

my family really ate a lot of meat. Was that really necessary to eat that much meat all the time? Because it grows from being a necessity or or or something we just have every now and then. I mean, studies have shown that as as country's populations become more prosperous, they eat more meat. Well you see that in India and China, right. Um. In fact, the same sort of factory farming practices are beginning to be practiced there, which as as a whole other podcast about the ramifications of

that our environment. But it does sort of drawn to question this or actually sort of underscores this problem of Okay, well we have so much at our disposal for the most part people living in in um in industrialized nations. And you have brought this up the other day that

you saw a chicken biscuit snack and you say, ridiculous thing. Yeah, it was on a billboard at like a fast food restaurant, and there you know, it's likes chicken biscuit snack, and and that made me feel kind of weird because I'm like, I really don't need an animal to die for my snack. Like, for my snack, I can just do with some fruit or some snack mix um, or just some gum and some water or something. But but an animal doesn't need to die for my for my snack. An animal doesn't

need to die for my breakfast. I think, you know, maybe my brunch on a special occasion, sometimes my lunch and dinner, you know, a couple of times a week, if it's like a fish or something, I guess yeah. And so that's the sort of environment we're living in, is that we have so much at our disposal that you start to back up and say, do we really need to have a chicken skit as a snack? Um?

You know, back in the day, you should be that you would kill a chicken and you would eat it from you know, from head to tail right, you would use every single part. And although there are some movements that are getting back to that, for the most part, Americans are getting a bucket of chicken and calling it a day. Right. Um, So there's there's that sort of looming out there, right, that's just an odd sort of

circumstance that we find ourselves in. But Hell's Herzog wants to look at it even a little bit closer again. Why do we have this sort of uncomfortable relationship when we're looking at animals for for meat source or even just killing animals? Um He writes about a game warden in an African village where baboons destroy crops and raise the hackles of the local humans because of course that the babanians are threatening their food source right, their vegetables

and so on and so forth. It's so annoys them that they actually trapped them in pits at night and then they kill them in the morning. But they feel bad about this and actually have a saying in Swahili that is never look a bad boot in the eye.

It's it's a good idea general, because they're yeah, they're I find bad Boom's rather creepy and fearsome, you do is the well their hignees are are certainly add to it, because it's like, but I mean the front of them, they tend to be pretty fearsome, and then their behinds are just kind of gross. But it's it's like all rainbow in the back and then yeah, you're right, a little bit fangy in the front. Yeah, I mean they're they're fascinating animals, but yeah there and then you see

videos of them. I mean I've watched a lot of like Discovery, BBC Nature documentaries over the last few years, and yeah, like edinburrow hanging out, watching bad boon's like run down livestock um and eat things that there. And I also with monkeys, I mean, monkeys can often walk that that line between the adorable and the grotesque because because on one hand, you look at a baby monkey and you kind of see a baby infant. You see, like some you see some positive spects of humanity wrapped

up in that child infant. But I mean if you see like this ferocious looking monkey with a weird foul us chasing down an animal and then ripping into its throat, it still calls to mind some some very human qualities, but not the ones you want to see magnified. Oh yeah. Yeah. And and to your point too about baboons, they're not so cuddly right there. They are a little bit scary, and yet they're saying, don't look the baboon in the eye.

The reason is that the villagers can't help but see themselves in the baboon, right and eye kind of something that there is that connection. It's and it's one of those things like hanging out with our with one's pet. There are aspects of it that never get old, like

you never stopped finding your pet adorable. But but I find myself, especially since I only came into that really having like an indoor pet in the last few years, like I'll look into the cat's eyes and the cat will be looking into my eyes and I'm it's, you know, kind of an outrageous overstatement of the obvious, but it's it's just kind of mind blowing that we're connecting on some level. I mean, we can't talk killing a connection for sure. Yeah, well, I mean, but she's connecting with

me because she's looking at my eyes. She's she's she's looking to you know, to my sight center. She's saying, give me more tuna. Well, yeah, I'm not I'm not saying that you know that we're having a deep spiritual thing or that we're talking about book, but but yeah, so I can totally see why you would want to avoid looking into the batman's eyes because then you're there's that that brief moment of connection and with this, uh, this this thing that looks very human in many ways,

and then you're about to kill it. All right, we'll be back in a moment, and we're going to discuss pigs and we're also going to discuss Amazonians in their odd relationship to my keys. This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers

to life's questions. And we're back. Before we get into some more interesting animal relationships, I want to point out that that there have been some studies that have shown that there are some portions of the brain that light up when we see animals, but not human faces or objects. So it really underlines that the brain has evolved to specialize in processing information about animals. And this is that

parental instinct we were talking about. We again, you know, when you're looking at your cat and you guys are connecting, there's something going on there, probably for both of you. Because we've talked about this exchange of oxytocin before too, particularly with dogs um and oxytocin being that feel good hormone that you usually associate between moms and new babies.

So that's there, there's that's all underlying that. But again, why why don't we look at a pig which is far smarter than a dog and say, ah, that that pig is so smart and um, such a great fella or gal. You know, we should spare them the acts, you know, why why them? Yeah? Why is there this in net bacon phenomenon that refuses to die? Uh? Like, why why is that? Okay? Why is that that hip?

When you know the pig is smarter than the cat and and you know, probably smarter than the dog too, and uh yeah, we're a lot of us are totally fine with that becoming breakfast. Well, because somewhere along the way someone discovered bacon, right, and that's it's delicious. That's what everybody's thinking right now, and not everybody. They're gonna I guarantee this, some people out there that are just

a little over bacon. Well, I don't know. A full disclosure, I'm a vegetarian, and I will say that bacon is delicious. I do recall this, and I've actually heard of studies before that say that bacon is like the gateway drug to meet. Really. Yeah, so you could tempt anyone into meet if you were to, I guess put a couple of strips before someone's nose. Oh, I don't know about that. I don't know. I'm not as big on bacon these days. I mean the interest in here for bacon eaters or

actually for a former bacon eaters. Former bacon eaters, yes, reformed. Yeah. So let's talk about these amazon Ians. Um, yeah, there's a tribe in the Amazon. They are the Awa garage tribe that they're They were covered in the recent BBC Discovery co production Human Planet. If you haven't seen that,

I highly recommend. It's a fascinating show. The show itself goes around the world looks at different human old human customs that are still practiced, uh for the not for tourists, but for the act itself or the you know, the benefit of the act and this particular tribe. They will they will go out and they will hunt monkeys like monkeys are a huge part of their diet. They will catch some monkeys of very species, bring them home, chop

them up, put them in the stewpot. Everybody's watching. Everybody is, you know, dipping into the pot and eating some monkey flesh. And you know, there's the most natural thing in the world for the great source of protein. But they'll find themselves some positions where they've killed a mother monkey. It

would be these baby monkeys. So they'll bring them back. Uh, and they will care for them as pets and uh and and even in a way more than pets, because if there's an infant monkey that needs needs breastfeeding, a human mother will actually breastfeed the monkey. Okay, so that's that's just weird. The pet part I kind of understand.

But the actual like taking the monkey into the family and then giving it nourishment from your own breast, well they're but they're they're making that connections, that parental connections. It's just kind of like the next step, right, But how could you have that in this you know, how could you have a slaughter of monkeys, but then I

have the nurturing of monkeys. That's the interesting part about it because and it's important to note too that these these monkeys they raise, they don't like raise them up and then eat them. These monkeys have are once you take them home, once they grow up, when they've grown up with you, they have sort of privileged status. And it's not just monkeys, they're just they're just like an animal loving tribe. They they love like their their their villages,

just like crawling with animals of various descriptions there. They're they're like the crazy cat lady, except uh, not limited to two felines. All right. There's actually another group that they cover on their the bish Bishnoy women. This is in India, and they actually breastfeed orphan gazelles and bishnoy if I'm saying that correctly. This is a Hindu sect of vegetarian vegetarians and really hold nature and high esteem. It's kind of a kind of an echo Dharma kind

of thing. But yeah, the the Amazonian tribe those the most interesting one because because they're they're they're not vegetarians. They will eat they eat monkeys regularly as part of their diet, but then they also raise them as pets. They so they on one level they can connect with them with with the same they'll have the same species of monkey, the same and it will be a pet on one side and dinner on the other. So how do you end up create creating the world viewing? Well,

maybe maybe that's the cognitive dissonance. They're right, Okay, it's there's there's got to be some sort of tension, right, or some sort of friction between these two acts, And by becoming a surrogate mother to these orphans, perhaps that's neutralizing the fact and that's where that's where you're lessening the cognitive dissonance. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I know I'm describing a human thing to to a primate, but you know, it's it's a It is very interesting

that they do this. They don't have to do this, but it's really it's really not that different from from the complex worldviews of the rest of us take on to to make sense of their thinking about war. Well, no, I'm just I'm just thinking about diet in general. I mean, yeah, you could get into the war as well. I mean, it basically comes down to heuristic framing, right. In psychology, heuristics it's all about efficient rules hard coded into evolutionary process.

It basically explains how we make decisions, how we come to judgments, and well, how our logic is flawed sometimes because yeah, yeah, because you end up having flawed logic built into the program. Yeah, exactly. We create this framework and then we sort of never go outside of the framework because once we build it in there, then you feel like you've answered your questions. Right. Yeah, it's kind

of an ethical operating system. Some things will work really well with it, but then occasionally you'll have a loophole that is h exploited by some viral logic. I guess if you will, like, for instance, my own framing system self analyzing here about my own consumption of meat, because I even though I eat less meat than than I used to take. Take cephalopods, all right. The cuttlefish is an animal that I think is an amazing creature. I

think they're very adorable. I've never eaten one, and I can safely say I will I will probably never eat a cuttlefish because they're just they're just too high on the on the cute fascinating creature list, and I have no experience tasting them and no interest in tasting them. All right, didn't take the OCTOPI the octopy is a creature that I have eaten before, uh, generally and sushi.

And then I learned more about the species, and I found out that some octopier are as smart as a cat, and so I like the cat, I'm not gonna eat the cat. And then but then the thought of this octopi being the octopus being as smart as the cat, I've I've suddenly just really adverse to eating guy. So so my esteem for the creature itself and it's intelligence is higher. But also I was never really that impressed with the taste of octopi, so um did a low returning,

low returning investment there. Now the squid, however, I haven't read that much indicating that the squid is is as smart as a cat and the taste of the squid is that much better. So it's perfectly fine with me to eat squid like I have no ethical and kind that makes look a sense really, rather than you're transposing a cat face onto an octopus, which is adorable. I think my wife had a dream like that once where where she had an octopi with a cat with a

cat's head and it was all fuzzy. Did she really that's pretty cool? Yeah, And her brother was trying to take it from her something. Of course, he was, he wanted it. It was that cool. So a lot of this is pointing to this problem of having a theory of mind. And this is what haw her Zog says

in the book, This theory of mind. Yeah, this is the This is the whole human thing where you can't look at another person, another animal, etcetera without sort of putting yourself in in that creature's shoes to try and think as it thinks on on a very human level. This is important because it allows us to empathize with people, to try and understand where they're coming from and better

communicate with them, to better work with them. You know, it's the whole reason they have that test and blade runner for the for the replicants to to see if they were a replicant or not, because the tels were in their ability to empathize with somebody else. But with animals, of course, it's very It's also very useful in hunting them and figuring out what they're doing, because you can't

ask the cat, hey, what are you up to? You have to you have to use the theory of mind to try and figure out what it's doing, or the chicken that you're trying to chase around the yard, or the deer that you're hunting in here in the forest.

This is the crux of the problem though, because in order for you to inhabit the mind of another, whether it be you know, a saber tooth tiger or your next door neighbor, you have to get in think like them, try to predict the future, and empathize like you cannot take the empathy away from the prediction model, right, because it's sort of hardwired in there. So this is what

I think leads to feelings of conflicts. So if you connect with your potential food source and you ascribe some of your own attributes to them, because you're going to write and it project yourself onto them, You're gonna unconsciously be defining this creature in the shadow of yourself. It's like a hitman that gets to know the duty he's supposed to whack, right, That's right, you could objectifying that

person um and you are. And so in this case though, if you're you're hunting this, you're about to eat this creature. And how Herzog would even say that that all of a sudden you you might be feeling something like cannibalism, which I think is really interesting, and he even talks

to about how uh this Columbia University. University historian Richard Bullyett says that the more distant we've become from the creatures that produce food and fiber and hides, the closer our relationships with pets have become, and the more meat we eat, the more we feel guilty about it, because we've come to know animals as less as them and

more as us. Yeah. But of course, if you're depending on on some forms of meat and some markets, for me, you're you're you're so far removed from the source that you don't even you know, you have kids that that that don't know that a hamburger is a cow, you know, for for the longest, because you know, how would you know?

Well this is then that's the interesting point you make, because this is when I for myself personally, and this is by the way, I am a vegetarian and this is a personal choice, and I'm not, you know, foisting this onto anyone, but I am going to say that that for me, that the weird point the disconnect came when I realized that once again I was opening this package of chicken boneless chicken, and I was sliding it out into the frying pan and and trying my best

not to touch it. And I would never touch meat, and so I started really like, that's ridiculous that I'm about to eat this thing. I cannot touch it. I cannot get myself to to touch the flesh of it. Yeah, because like the act of cooking is like a transformation. It transfers it from flesh to food, and eating food

is no problem. And yeah, and so many of us don't really, especially if you if you're not really a cook at all, if you, like say, you just depend on fast food as you're or or some sort of like microwavable type of prepackaged process thing, you're not really touching flesh that much. You're always dealing with food. You've

got the process part of it, right. So anyway, says again, you know, here's pointing to this problem at least for me, which was okay, if I if I can't, if I can't get my head around doing this one act and yet I can do this other act, then then somehow for me personally, there's a disconnect that I need to

square myself with um. And I thought it was really interesting that hell, Herzog talks about how we do this on some level sometimes either we know, make a conscious decision stop eating meat, or you know, we try to be better about eating responsibly, right, like you know, like cutting it down to not think, um, you know, a chicken biscuit for a snack, or or of course another one is it's I I've heard it put that you should only have your meat serving should be about the

size of a wallet, and and if you're eating more than that, then you're being meat arosco. Or if Michael Pollan says, I think something along the lines that during the day he's a vegetarian, at night he's a carnivore along those lines, and that's because he's he's a wearewolf, right, you can't help it. That's an inherited genetic condition like mild mannard and that button up shirt. But no, U beneath that exterior is a werewolf. But then they also

say that there's something called semantic moral distancing. That's another tactic. Yeah, this is where you're getting into this, like the also the CycL linguistics, the use of language, and of course in the use of meaning, because the way I'm sort of looking at it here is you could you have like a simple arrangement like the hitman and the duty's gonna whack the person. And then the animal kingdom where I am human, everything else is other and I can

eat anything that's other. Other is objectifying things. Right, But then when I use that theory of mind, everything that is other potentially becomes to varying degrees me yes, or

or at least my species. Distance yourself then from me than me and you and the other god we're going to need so the system, you know, just immediately like there's just a quantum leap and its complexity, just its semantic complexity, and and so suddenly our world view isn't one of us and other of me and then potential food. But this this multilayered view in which some things are foods, some things are not, some things are are pets, some

things are flesh, some things are food. It's um. And in cyclinguistics they would say, you know, is it that we are determining uh? Are we determining our reality through language? Or are we defining reality through language? Right? Like it like it's like the the flesh food thing. Um, if you go to go to the fast food restaurant. You're not going to order, Hey give me some dead cow? Can you? Can you give me some heated dead cow

on some bread, because that would be great. Now you just ask for a hamburger, and I mean that's and and to a to a lesser extent, what is the hamburger? It's beef, it's not it's yeah, it's like like all these different levels of semantics, different different language differences between the food and the flesh, between the thing we're consuming in the animal. Yeah. And see you see that that

moral distancing right through language. And you see that you're that we're painting our existence through language, right, we're painting this particular reality for us. I'm going to eat a hamburger through language, as opposed to I'm about to eat some cow meat as you say, are a cow dead cow meat? Um? And you see this all through. It's not just with animals. You see this at the corporate

level too, right. Um. You here downsizing or elimination instead of you know, I just sacked you or something that feels a little bit more true, and or you say we wish you you're the best in your future endeavors as opposed to don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out right, right, um. And these are these little niceties, these a little moral distancing. And again in the food world, you can see this all over the place. I mean, bacon is a great example, right,

why don't we just call it again? Except the Germans though, And that's the really fascinating thing, because in Germany, if you're ordering some, if you're talking about pork, you just say swine flesh, which is which is pig flesh or rain flesh for cow flesh. They're they're a lot more direct. They're so hard nosed as Germans. You kind of I gotta admire that, you know, because there's there's no uh, there's no lifting of the veil there, the veil has

been lifted. Um. And I thought this was interesting too, And hail Herzog's books. He talks about how powerful it is, this uh, this language of cycle linguistics, that if you look at something like the Patagonian toothfish, that doesn't sound to appetizing, right, Yeah, I'm just imagining a fish like get embedded with teeth exactly, Sean, just looking eyes, spiny teeth, just not something you necessarily want to eat. Um. And it really that's what that sounds like, right, patagony and

toothfish sounds very prehistoric. But behold the Chilean sea bass. Oh, now it sounds tasty. Doesn't that sound like a foodie's biggest dream there? Well, that's like the dolphin, right, not not the dolphin, the mammal, but the dolphin fish to better market. I believe that's the one that they now call my am I right, yeah, that's right, because that sounds delightful, whereas dolphin it sounds particularly problematic because for some reason it has the same name as this mammal

that is uh is you know, crazy smart? Yeah? I mean you don't want to eat flipper? Right, um. And then they also talked about to the Canadian government describing a seal hunt right as a harvest, a coal, a management plan. And you've got Peta on the other side saying no, it's a massacre, it's a slaughter, it's centrocity. So it's very interesting to see how how approaching um this reality for each for no matter where you are

on the side of the issue. Yeah, there's language, you can you can summon the appropriate language to to color it however you want. Yeah, so I don't know. I do think it's interesting too that Peter started using Save the Sea Kittens to try to get people a little bit more aware of fish as as um you know, I guess as as peschetarians might look at them, um like, hey, don't we eat the fish the little kittens. Yeah, I don't know about sea kitten. Yeah, but I did think

it was interesting the creative use of language there. So there you go. Some some thoughts on this. Um, it's it's tricky business, this this subject. Yeah, it's um and and and I definitely want to reiterate, you know, not not being judging about anybody's decisions on what they eat

and why they eat it. But I guess I can, I do tend to to air toward, uh digging the idea that that we should be at least a little open about about why we eat the things we eat and uh and even even if we're not open all the time about it, that it will at least have those moments of clarity where we we realize that that, well, this this thing that I'm eating, it's delicious as heck, but it also used to be a thing running around on four legs. And that's not necessarily good, not necessarily bad,

but I think it's an important reality. Um, you've only in dealing with the logistics of our current food situation. Well, and I think to write now because you say the current food food situation. This is not a conversation we'd be having a hundred years ago, because probably you or I would be out in the backyard ringing a chicken's neck and you wouldn't you would understand what it took to get that to the plate, and our podcast would be Uh, what format would it be on? I guess

we've been like an old record or what was the tube? Uh? Yeah, I don't know. You see a hundred years ago, well, gosh, I don't even think the talkies were in. Maybe it would be a newspaper columns it would have yeah, yeah, I don't know, make up your reality there. Well cool. If any of you have any thoughts, definitely let us know. We would love to hear everyone's thoughts about our food situations, you know, and we want to hear from you know, if you're a hardcore vegan or a nugent esque. If

you are Ted Nugent, we want to hear from you. Yeah. Maybe, and uh in all the places you fall in between. Let us know. There are there animals that, uh that you're that everyone else seems fine with eating that you rule out. Are there animals that no one wants to eat, but do you think would be a great thing to cook up? Let us know. Yeah, and also Zuckerman, if you're out there, we want to hear from you, because apparently he's doing this whole thing from from food. He's

only going to eat animals that he kills personally. Yeah, which is I don't know, that's just kind of creepy. It's just and in a little old kind of macho for me. I mean, someone who has a lot of time on their hands and a lot of money in their pockets. Yeah, just applies to animals that now a veggie. He's not Upen's not he's not slaughtering egg plants. Yeah alright, well yeah, let us know. You can find us on

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