Animal-Minded
(Part I)
An interview with Dr. Liv Baker on animal wellbeing, individual value, and the importance of other-than-human perspectives in conservation
Dr. Liv Baker is a conservation behaviorist and an expert in wild animal wellbeing and compassionate conservation. She is chair of the board of PAN Works and teaches in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College, CUNY in the USA. During her masters and PhD programs, she focused on bridging the ideologies of animal behavior, conservation and animal welfare science into a sensibility that decenters humans by centering the lives of individual animals as members of diverse and complex mixed communities. In this vein, Dr. Baker was part of an early group of researchers and practitioners formulating the concepts of compassionate conservation. Dr. Baker is also a principal champion of animal wellbeing, which she promotes as a crucial progression of animal welfare. She is the research director for the Mahouts Elephant Foundation and founding board member of the Compassionate Conservation Society, as well as scientific advisor for the Whale Sanctuary Project and Elephant Aid International. Dr. Baker also works with farmed animal sanctuaries to explore the lives of species outside of the sphere of industry. Dr. Baker is dedicated to both understanding the perspectives of nonhumans and emphasizing the critical collective needed for a moral sense of human responsibility in actively caring for the lives of all animals.
This is Part I of a two-part series. Part II will follow next week. This interview has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.
Kim Hightower: What were your interests related to animals growing up?
Dr. Liv Baker: Interestingly, I did not grow up in a household that had companion animals — or even had immediate family members that were, what you’d call “animal-loving.” But, my affection for — and perhaps affinity with — animals was just in my DNA. It’s just who I was. As a kid, I was desperate to have a dog, but I didn’t have the model of growing up in a household with parents who were, for example, dog lovers. To be honest, later on I became kind of grateful that my parents never relented because they had no experience [with animals], and I worried in retrospect how well any dog may have been cared for.
But the affection and concern for other animals (hereafter, animals) was always there. I can recall a few formative and profound events from my childhood. One was coming across a squirrel that had been hit by a car. I remember stopping and I just felt such a sadness about the loss — not just of the [dead] squirrel, but of feeling the loss of life. I remember crouching down to get closer, perhaps to help me come to terms with that notion of death. I would say that was probably around age eight or nine.
Thinking about my childhood and not growing up in a house with animals, I nonetheless knew there was something latent within me in terms of that interest in other animals — then, later, not so latent. Around 12 years of age, I fell deeply in love with pigs. At the same time, I realized I couldn’t feel this way about animals and also eat them. I immediately stopped eating pigs, but hadn’t yet made the leap to other animals. About a year later, I stopped eating all animals. This was the easiest decision I’ve ever made in my life, and I’ve never looked back.
KH: It sounds like both curiosity and feeling connected to other animals have been foundational for you. In terms of your trajectory, what was your path to this work — to being an expert in animal behavior and conservation and, now, a leader in our understandings of animal wellbeing and compassionate conservation?
LB: I actually started out thinking I would be a journalist. This will date me, but I had a Fisher-Price tape recorder — the one with a mic, which was a real prestige item, and all the rage when I was a kid. My best friend and I would go around interviewing people at recess, pushing “journalistic boundaries” until we got into trouble one day because we did “undercover reporting.” We were asking questions and not letting people know that they were being recorded. So recess got shut down and an assembly was quickly scheduled to discuss the ethics of recess activities!
KH: It seems there was always this curiosity in wanting to both uncover new things and to help others.
LB: Yes, I think you’re right. After my journalism phase, my interests started to veer toward biology and psychology… trying to understand how people work and what interests them and why they feel and behave in certain ways. Then I came to the understanding that I didn’t really want to work with humans as much. While I’m interested in those deeper questions, it wasn’t so much in terms of humans. When I eventually went to college, I went for pre-med but quickly shifted the focus and thought I would be a veterinarian. I think it’s very common for people to think veterinary science is the only avenue for working with and for animals.
I studied biology and chemistry as an undergraduate, but as a student of a liberal arts education, I had the privilege of exploring many disciplines, including art history and poetry. I believe this helped develop my holistic approach to my scientific practice. By junior year, my fascination with animal behavior was forming, but I was realizing pre-vet wasn’t right. Despite this growing awareness, I became fearful of what it would it mean for my own wellbeing to pursue a life of helping animals. I thought about all of the ways humans harm animals and I got a bit scared, to be honest. And feeling this interest in animal behavior and conservation… I felt a tightening, as in: What am I going to expose my heart to? I got scared and so… since I’ve always loved plants, and I was already taking botany and plant development and evolution, I thought then that I would be a plant biologist. I love that world, but the animal world kept pulling me in.
By the end of college, I knew I loved animal behavior and wanted to do something with wild animals. I was working at an animal shelter as an adoption coordinator, and wanted to figure out how to bring all of my worlds together. Eventually, I decided to pursue a Master of Science to help me bring together the worlds of animal behavior and conservation — at the time, this wasn’t really happening in conservation practice.
So, in pursuing my master’s research question, I was interested in how movement behavior of animals was affected in a fragmented habitat. I happily worked with jumping spiders to explore this question. And in getting to know individual spiders, the thinking for what would be my PhD work began to stir. After finishing this degree, I was still working at the shelter — and still wondering how I could bridge this welfare world with the worlds of animal behavior and conservation. For my PhD, the goal was to answer: How do I bring all of these worlds together? I was interested in the infrastructure of that. There were really good animal behavior programs out there, but I didn’t want a conventional animal behavior program. I wanted one where I thought the animal was really elevated, and that’s why I ended up in the Animal Welfare Science program at the University of British Columbia, investigating animal personality and individual variation in the context of conservation translocations. So that was a way to bring together the worlds of animal behavior, conservation, and — at the point — my thinking of animal welfare.
KH: I’m curious if there was a project early on during your PhD — or a specific species — that really lit the fire for a lot of the work that you are doing now.
LB: A couple of things come to mind. When I was doing my master’s, I was working with jumping spiders. At that point I was approaching it as we conventionally approach that sort of data collection — which is averaging responses of the animals and individuals, and getting a general response to this experimental treatment. While clear patterns across the spiders emerged, what also became clear to me was that they were individuals; they were responding individually. I made a little note in the back of my mind: While the generalized response was important and of interest, it wasn’t everything. And that really informed my PhD and the work I do now, which is thinking about individuals — in and of themselves and as members of their mixed communities.
The other thing, when I was doing my PhD, that transformed my thinking was the way things played out regarding the campaign to end horse slaughter in the US. I was completely on board and agreed that they shouldn’t be rounded up, and they shouldn’t be sent to slaughter. But then, when you realize this is just a part of the picture, there is always more to consider. What became apparent was, while they may not be sent to slaughter, what about the rest of their lives? What was not being accounted for in this campaign? What quickly happened was that many horses were kept in corrals and were not being taken care of. All of these other harms to them became apparent. This is not to say that they should have been sent to slaughter; the issue more broadly became about, even within animal advocacy groups, the ways in which we do and do not think through the full implications of the lives of animals. So, the complexity became very apparent. It’s not that there is a single issue and, if we resolve that issue, it will lead to better lives for these animals. That’s obviously not typically the case, and the horse issue was a clear example of that.
I share that story because it was a moment early on in my PhD when I started to really press, and not shy away from, complexity — because, as I tell my students to this day: Truth lies in the complexity. We are never going to seek anything close to the truth if we are blinkered and plane out the complexity of issues. So, I’ve been striving to really grapple with that complexity… to grapple with it and embrace it.
KH: You’re a key proponent of shifting our thinking away from welfare and to that of wellbeing. Can you explain more about this?
LB: This is a big topic, but let me see if I can speak to this fairly concisely. As with most things, it requires a bit of historical contextualization. Okay — so the animal welfare movement largely developed from concerns over the quality of life of domesticated and captive animals, focusing on reducing pain and suffering. Rooted in these interests, in the 1960s animal welfare science emerged as an ethically driven, multidisciplinary field of research to tackle societal concerns for animals. This said, it’s important to keep in mind that this concern primarily extended to those animals under our direct care and management. This ultimately served to perpetuate a culture of animal use, and to the exclusion of certain animals from the sphere of concern, such as free-living wild animals. Consequently, the historical position of animal welfare science has been to focus its scientific efforts on mitigating negative states and conditions in which animals are afforded little agency. In the last few years, there has been a turn (to some extent) in the animal welfare science literature toward “positive welfare.” In general, positive welfare — and similar concepts — has occurred to redress the focus that historically has been placed on the alleviation from suffering, by widening the field of view to include the benefits of positive experiences. While the improvements are undeniable, these approaches remain constrained, to varying degrees, by the conventional practices and precedent of animal welfare science that were born of animal use and to mitigation of harms.
While the scientific position of animal welfare science has been to acknowledge animals and their physiological and cognitive needs, alongside their capacities (largely focused on their capacities for pain, suffering, and frustration with more limited integration of complex phenomena, such as emotional valences), it has often denied this for animals and situations where the “science is not yet in”. Instead, for non-human animals, we should be advancing beyond a welfarist approach that has come to focus almost exclusively on mitigating conditions in which animals are afforded little agency. Rather, we could be practicing a “science of animal wellbeing” that sees animal health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Thus, in my estimation, wellbeing is conceptually and operationally something significantly more than welfare. As such, animal wellbeing science actively privileges autonomy and agency. And in the service of understanding and achieving high degrees of autonomy and agency for the animals, I’ve aggregated a constellation of meaningful factors — that I’ve named the spheres of wellbeing — that we may use to assess states of wellbeing. These include the animal’s eco-social environment; environmental engagement; behavioral repertoire; expression of privileged behaviors, such as play; self-expression; culture; opportunities for reasonable challenges; access to shelter, safety, and proper nutrition; physical health; knowledge acquisition via learning and exploration; expression of emotional valence/positive affect; and, of course, lived experience. Crucially, this is situated within the evolutionary legacy of the animals and their species.
Part II of this interview series will be published on our column next week.
Kim Hightower is a humane educator and the communications specialist for PAN Works.
PAN Works is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to animal wellbeing. Please visit us for more about our work.
