INTERVIEW: In an age of fraught politics, environmental degradation, the threat of pandemics and other public health crises, Claire Hamlett speaks to author and academic Jeff Sebo about how saving animals is vital to saving ourselves.

The world is beset by several existential and overlapping crises right now. In many ways, they are being fuelled by how humans actively exploit or disregard the lives of nonhuman animals, who are in turn further harmed by those crises, particularly climate change, pollution, and the pandemic. A new book by NYU professor Jeff Sebo lays this all out and makes the case for how we could start to solve the problem by addressing “human, nonhuman, and environmental needs in an integrated manner.” Reducing the use of animals must be part of mitigating threats from climate change, and so on, while adapting to make our systems and infrastructure more sustainable should include increasing support for animals.

Talking to Surge from his apartment in New York, with his dog Smoky on the couch beside him, Sebo explains how in the book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves, he tries “to point out some moderate incremental reforms that we could make now to our food systems and our impact assessments and policies” across various sectors such as research, education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, “to get the ball rolling.” But these solutions, he notes, aren’t sufficient on their own. “If we want to really address the issue in the medium- to long-term, then we also need to explore more transformative changes to our basic social and political and economic and ecological structures.”

He is realistic about the difficulty of achieving this sort of change, both because of the internal work on our beliefs and values needed to widen our moral and political circle to include animals, and because of the “limits of our human perspective” when it comes to decision-making about animals. But by including animals in policy and advocacy on health and the environment, we can go quite some way towards reducing direct and indirect harms to humans and other species simultaneously. One example is factory farming which, Sebo writes, “contributes to human suffering, nonhuman suffering, pandemics, and climate change all at once. If we think about only some of these harms, then we might pursue solutions that reduce some harms while increasing others. But if we think about all of them, then we can pursue solutions that reduce harms across the board.” 

Sebo suggests One Health and the Green New Deal as policy frameworks which it makes sense to extend to animals, in order to help us look at health and environmental issues that impact humans and nonhumans holistically. One Health already exists in the US and is a policy approach that recognises the close connections between the health of people and animals and their shared environments. But in Sebo’s view, “Current interpretations and applications of One Health are very anthropocentric. And we really mainly, at the moment, look for opportunities to learn about animal health when we think we can learn about human health as a result, or improve animal health when we think we can improve human health as a result, and we ignore opportunities to learn about or improve animal health for the sake of the animals themselves.”

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Indeed, the tendency for industries and politicians to view animal health and well-being in terms of how they benefit humans is giving rise to false climate solutions within animal agriculture. But even the idea of the benefits these ‘solutions’ provide to humans is wrong-headed since their main goal is actually to maintain the status quo and enable people to keep eating as much meat as they want, at the expense of a sustainable future. “We need to be caring about animals for their own sakes,” says Sebo, otherwise “these types of changes are going to be tempting, just genetically modifying animals to emit a little bit less methane or transmit a little bit fewer zoonotic diseases, but really, we need to be seeking changes that are better for them and us and the environment at the same time.”

It often seems that, still, not enough people have made the connection between animal exploitation and climate change or the pandemic, or at least that too few have really taken on board what that connection means for how we live and what needs to change. But Sebo thinks there is far more awareness than there used to be. “On one hand people over the past few years, ever since the Australia bushfires [in 2020], and then of course COVID-19, people have been talking about these issues more than they previously did, about how our use of animals in factory farming and the wildlife trade especially contribute to these health threats and also environmental threats,” he says. “And some countries have taken action. For example, China did, in 2020, ban the wildlife trade in important respects. And many countries have now banned fur farming or mink farming in light of the risk that these activities pose for human health, and I might not have expected that. And so I see that as encouraging.” 

But he is also aware that we haven’t made enough progress. “On the other hand, even over the past few years, we haven't talked about these issues nearly as much as we should have done. And we haven't taken nearly as much action as we should have taken. And we can expect that as people try to push past the pandemic, as people try to move on from the pandemic, they are going to be talking about these issues less. And so we do have, I think, a special opportunity and responsibility right now to try to keep that conversation going for as long as we can before people insist on ending it.”

Sebo and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at NYU try to “produce academic research that can be useful for advocates and policymakers.” He also sits on the board of several animal advocacy organisations trying to advance the interests of animals politically, legally, and publicly. We can see from developments like the Animal Sentience Bill making its way through the UK parliament that politically we’re getting better at saying the right things about animals, but acting in their interests is still lagging. “Right now is the time to try to make sure that countries and states and cities and advocates and philanthropists, that everybody … is thinking about animal health and welfare and the relevance of animals when making mitigation and adaptation plans,” says Sebo.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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