Reporting on animals, learning about love: One reporter’s journey

Episode transcript

Stephanie Hanes: Rather than seeing other animals as essentially machines that react and do things out of habit that don’t have any sort of inner life, maybe we start trying to do that potentially impossible exercise of imagining what it is to have all of these different perspectives on the world and [to] be a real being.

Clay Collins: That’s Stephanie Hanes, a staff writer at the Monitor. She recently reported a story on the inner lives of animals.

Humans, at least a healthy subset of humans, pay some attention to animal welfare. Often, it’s with an eye toward balancing how we think about protecting animals, our fellow travelers here on Earth, with what we need from them, or what we think we need.

We’ve all read about the problem-solving talent of the octopus, about the African grey parrot with its amazing capacity for speech, about orca that appear to grieve. When you start talking about the notion of animal consciousness or cognition, the human animal relationship gets … really interesting.

This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Stephanie, a repeat guest on this show, joins me today to talk about that. Welcome back, Stephanie.

Hanes: Oh, so nice to be here. Thanks so much.

Collins: We’ll probably also be talking here about bumblebees being playful, but let’s start with an issue that’s really front and center. As a species, we bond with some animals, make them our closely held companions, and we’re okay with others being born, raised, and “processed,” to use the common euphemism, for food.

Now, this is not an episode about demonizing carnivores of any species and your story wasn’t about diet and morality – although you do look at morality as one element – but that’s at least a subliminal backdrop when we start looking at how much animals possess awareness and emotions, right?

Hanes: Yeah. I mean, you’re going in right into the deep end here! Food is tough and animal food is tough, especially when you start talking about animals and consciousness and ethics. And it’s not just tough in all of these big moral/ethical conversations. It’s really hard to write about as a journalist because as soon as you start going into this topic. You can lose people real quickly, because nobody likes being told that they’re wrong for eating what they do.

Collins: And they go to their corners, right?

Hanes: Oh my gosh, food is so divisive and cultural, and almost tribal. People, if they’re vegan, if they’re pescetarian, if they’re, you know, carnivores, people feel very passionate about this. And so one of the goals that I had when I went to report this story is to see whether we could get one level below that.

Can we go deeper? Can we go more thoughtful and in some ways bigger picture? And eating animals is certainly a big topic when you start thinking about the consciousness of animals. And one thing I learned reporting is that , well, you mentioned the parrot and the octopus. One group of animals that has been fairly understudied when it comes to emotion and intelligence and consciousness is farm animals. And so, because it was understudied, it was interesting.

Collins: Now, you point out that behaviorally, animals act differently in settings where they have more agency and more autonomy than they do in what I guess you could call “the system.” There’s been philosophical debate about that for eons, but, is the long term observance of that at the root of the research that you describe in your piece? And how did you tap into the best current thinking around animal cognition?

Hanes: So there’s a lot of work that’s taking place right now on this question of animal consciousness. And I guess I’ll pause to say that when we’re talking about consciousness or cognition, those are terms that we don’t really agree on when we’re talking about humans. People are debating and have debated for generations and generations what that actually means when it comes to human life and human thought. And so applying that to these other creatures that we really can’t fully access, because we’re not chickens, and we’re not dogs, and we’re not cows, you know?

There’s no way to fully understand it. But there’s been a lot of recent science on these animals and studies that kind of give us these different insights into what the experience of other creatures might be.

And there’s been this sea change in the way that scientists are approaching other creatures that I’ve actually seen during the time that I’ve reported. So, this was super interesting for me to delve into these questions of, how do you know what the best research is? That’s hard. There’s a lot of research out there, but one place I started was this declaration last year made by a number of animal behavioralists and ethicists and philosophers that basically said, given all of the science that’s happened over the past couple of decades, we’re ethically safer assuming that animals do have consciousness and feelings and emotions than we are assuming that they don’t. And that sounds kind of basic on the one hand, but on another hand, it represents a really significant shift in science.

Collins: I hear what you’re saying about the new level of difficulty here when we don’t even have these terms fully sorted in terms of humans. So when you get to the animal level, you can’t obviously study them the same way.

Full on anthropomorphizing is kind of an easy trap, right? I mean, you describe researchers taking pains to use language that doesn’t fall into that. But then you also write about things like “theory of mind“ and “metacognition” in animals. So I wonder, and you talk about these assumptions, how do you walk the line between these assumptions and, I guess, necessary ambiguities and the kind of, objective truths that are kind of being borne out by this research?

Hanes: I mean, these are the really big questions that people are grappling with, and it’s why I love writing for the Monitor, right, because we’ve taken this really big complicated issue and said, “you know what, we’re going to try to write a story about this.” We believe our readers have the attention and intelligence and interest levels to delve into some of these big questions.

Collins: We’ll give you more than 800 words!

Hanes: Right, exactly. It was fascinating to get into this and obviously this is something that people have written books and scores of research papers about, but when you look at the shift in thought that’s happening, that’s where I tried to focus. And you mentioned this worry about anthropomorphizing and for listeners, that’s just this idea of assuming that another animal has the same perspectives and emotions as humans do.

And for a long time, I mean, I remember reporting in Southern Africa for the Monitor in the mid-2000s and even at that point, researchers who were tracking elephants and other animals were really careful about not doing this. They worried that by ascribing human emotion to what these animals were doing, they were in some ways cheapening or missing key bits of information about those animals’ experiences, because an elephant is not a human.

But what’s happened over the last couple of decades is that people realized, OK, well, maybe ascribing human thought and understanding is missing a key reality but so is assuming that these animals don’t have thoughts. It will be a particular elephant-y thought, but there’s still something there there underneath and can we try to understand what that is, and assume that potentially it’s more like us than not like us.

And I think that’s where the shift is, is rather than seeing other animals as essentially machines that react and do things out of habit that don’t have any sort of inner life, maybe we start trying to do that potentially impossible exercise of imagining what it is to have all of these different perspectives on the world and [to] be a real being.

Collins: That’s really interesting. When you do get into the ethical considerations and what you call in your story, the “moral inconvenience,” sometimes, for people around how we operate, on this plane of existence as humans who also sit on one version of a food chain. This is all about tradeoffs from the human point of view, it seems like.

You talk about “cognitive dissociation” by meat-eaters as one approach, just kind of, you know, compartmentalize or put it out of your mind. You also talked to a source at a farm sanctuary who said this, he said: “If we can live well without killing and harming other animals, why wouldn’t we?”

I mean, that’s, that’s pretty on the nose, right?

Hanes: It’s hard to not go along with that, right? The dissociation is true in meat-eating. I might argue that the dissociation is true in a lot of what we do in this world. It’s really hard to walk around the world and not cause harm. So one of the biggest philosophical debates I heard when I was reporting this story was over how to minimize harm and factory farming, where you take animals and put them into situations that are, at least according to a number of people who work with animals, unpleasant and harmful to those animals, maybe people don’t want to be part of that system. Maybe eating meat at all is harmful to other animals.

But then, you know, so is driving and building a road and wearing clothes and mowing fields. It’s really hard to avoid harm to other parts of the natural world. And so there is a philosophical school of thought that says, can we just start to notice what our impact is and notice how integrated we are into this larger system and then try to find the right ways to minimize harm where we can.

Collins: It just goes so deep. And we talked early on about people kind of going to their corners and reaching for justifications for whatever their decision is, as far as the relationship with animals. And I came across the idea, that for some, the biblical text about humans having dominion over animals could really be defined as stewardship.I thought that was really interesting. It’s sort of inherently less of an exploitative relationship if you think of it that way.

Hanes: Absolutely. There is a large movement of Earth stewardship that is forming a significant part of the environmental world right now and it’s a little bit different than what people might think of as the, you know, traditional crunchy environmentalists and it’s really people who are doing what we’re talking about.

It’s this idea of how do you steward and protect the natural world around you. And again, you can debate what that means, but I think what scientists are finding is that it is important to recognize that when humans are making those decisions, that the cow, for instance, is a conscious, feeling creature.

And what we do with that, That is up for debate, but it’s important according to many of these scientists and ethicists to realize that all of the information that we’re getting is showing that these other animals, whether they’re “food animals” or animals whose habitats we’re taking, [or] our own pets, all of these other creatures have a complexity of being that is far more than what many people recognized in the past. And so any decisions that we make should take that in mind.

Collins: I think what I hear you saying is [that] this is an empathy story. And having reported on other really contentious stories around stewardship, like climate action, what’s your takeaway about the prospects for a brand of humanity that normalizes empathy?

Hanes: It’s a great question, and I have to say that my reporting makes me feel more hopeful about this. There are an awful lot of people who care and so, even with animals, we talk about this culturally contentious issue about what to eat and what not to eat.

There aren’t that many people out there who don’t love animals and who aren’t willing to be delighted by new information about how bumblebees play or how chickens like to figure out puzzles or how cows actually work really well as babysitters for their own calves. People are delighted by the natural world, and I do see this trend as I’m reporting of people wanting to integrate into it in a more holistic way. And that’s this win-win, because the more we understand this amazing, diverse, sparkling world that exists around us, the more people are willing to change their own behavior to benefit and be part of that. And so I think it’s this wonderful empathy cycle that is building love throughout the world as opposed to the other way around.

Collins: Yeah, that’s a really amazing note to come all the way back around to. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for coming back on the show. Another remarkable area of study, and a really good story.

Hanes: Oh, thank you so much.

Collins: And thanks also to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the story we just discussed, along with links to more of Stephanie’s work at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineer was Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2025.