Animal-Minded
(Part II)
An interview with Dr. Liv Baker on animal wellbeing, individual value, and the importance of other-than-human perspectives in conservation
This is Part II of an interview with Dr. Liv Baker, a conservation behaviorist with expertise in animal wellbeing and compassionate conservation.
Kim Hightower: It’s interesting to hear how that sense of the individual and complexity was stirred, for you, and where it led. To switch gears a bit toward what you have been working on currently… You traveled around the world during an ongoing pandemic and the worst air travel season in living memory. What was that like?
Dr. Liv Baker: Prior to the pandemic, I traveled at least once a year to Thailand because we run a behavioral ecology program with the Mahouts Elephant Foundation, a UK and Thai nonprofit dedicated to creating a better world for Asian elephants. I got involved in 2017 when a former student, Becca Winkler, who is now completing her PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, asked me to consult on the development of a research program as part of their eco-tourism project. They were interested in getting Asian elephants out of the tourist camps, and also preventing others from ever going into the tourist camps to begin with.
We wanted to see if we could develop a field-based research program to better understand these elephants in this new context of either being returned to the forest or — if they didn’t go into a tourist camp — being reunited with family members. All the elephants have different histories, but they all have had some type of disruption in their lives. We are interested in seeing if we can better understand them and their needs. I went out there in 2017, and we’ve never looked back. We started, essentially, an applied animal behavior research program, including a summer field course.
I have been going back to Thailand every year since 2017, and usually my time there coincides with the field course — along with having other researchers on site. This last summer was the first time since the pandemic we had been able to go back, and we were running the field course and starting up the research program again. We look at things like how the elephants spend their days, how they engage with their ecological communities, the nuances of foraging behaviors. The complexity of these behaviors helps to expand our understanding of these elephants and their psycho-ecological needs.
In addition to going to Thailand for the field course, I went to Spain to assist one of my graduate students, Ashley Bruno, on her field work. We’ve been collaborating with Rewilding Europe and their team in Spain on the rewilding of Serrano horses. Because of her and my interest in rewilding, we developed this collaboration. She is collecting behavioral data on the reintroduction — or introduction — of these horses to the highlands outside of Madrid. So, traveling from New York to Spain to Thailand and back to New York took me fully around the globe and was quite the wakeup call after three years of no air travel. That ten-flight journey got me back into it quickly!
KH: What an exciting year. Zooming out a bit, many readers won’t know about compassionate conservation or rewilding. Might you describe them?
LB: Even though it’s a short history, there’s a history to the emergence of compassionate conservation. Again, as someone who thinks holistically about how to bring disciplines together… I was reading the conservation literature at the time, and it’s still true to an extent, but it was surprising that animal behavior and behavioral ecological knowledge weren’t — and aren’t still — deeply embedded in the world of conservation. But, at that time, it was really uncommon. My master’s was driven by bringing these worlds together — and, like I’ve said, for my PhD it was bringing together the worlds of animal behavior and conservation and animal welfare science. Up until then, none of this richer thinking had happened in any of these natural scientific disciplines. There were people in other areas… in ecofeminism, animal geography, for example… that had been grappling with these topics in different ways, but it wasn’t happening to any real extent in the natural sciences. The bringing together of these allied fields was just not occurring.
Part of my PhD was to push the community to think more holistically and appropriately about the lives of animals, and how humans relate to other animals. I was very focused on wild animals — not just freely living, but animals that we would consider wild species. Early discussions involved bringing together practitioners from animal welfare science, behavioral ecology/animal behavior and conservation. Compassionate conservation emerged from these early discussions about the interface of animal welfare science and conservation biology.
At the time, animal welfare science was still quite focused on animals “under our direct care and management.” So, there’s a presupposition of use, of instrumentalization. It’s thinking about improving their lives, but under the assumption that they are going to be used in some way — whether the use is as food, for experimentation, for entertainment, or even for companionship. [Animal welfare science] still comes down to: How do we mitigate largely negative states? There was also a lack of attention paid to wild animals outside of consumptive activities or captivity.
On the flip side, in conservation, the thinking was still mainly stuck in a residual notion of wilderness — that there is somehow pristine habitat out there, and we were not seeing how our impact on wild animals had welfare implications. It was still focused on population, species, and biodiversity — on larger collectives. Some of us who were part of those early conversations weren’t satisfied with the original idea that we could just apply animal welfare science methodologies to conservation problems. We were envisioning something greater than the sum of its parts in compassionate conservation. There are people who identify as conservation welfarists who are content to sit at that interface and might even be critical of compassionate conservation. But this really doesn’t push our responsibility towards other beings.
Compassionate conservation emerged from pushing beyond the interface to dig deeper into our understanding of the more-than-human world. I was responsible, then, for helping to formulate the initial four principles of compassionate conversation. These are, in brief summary: 1) help or do no harm; 2) individuals matter; 3) good labels or no labels; and 4) promote coexistence.
“Help or do no harm” is this idea that, as a practitioner of conservation, we should be benefiting the animals — the individuals and the whole population of animals. If we are not, we should be actively avoiding harming them. This does not apply just to the target species or population, but rather to all animals in a mixed community.
“Individuals matter” is kind of the pushback against the world of conservation that effectively neglected individuals. They were seen as a means toward an end goal of a healthy population. Individuals were not viewed as having agency or intrinsic value, and were sort of pitted against the idea of the health of their greater populations. The way I envisioned that principle when I helped formulate it is that individuals matter both in and of themselves — to themselves — and to and for their communities.
“Good labels or no labels” is important because we ascribe these categories to other animals that have real-world consequences for how we view them and how we treat them. Labels tend to undermine all of the things I just said about why individuals matter, and in many cases undermine the actual conservation work that we’re doing. For example, labeling someone or a group as an invasive species is an oversimplification and — in many cases — a dangerous, erroneous statement. There is always going to be flux or some disruption with a migrant or introduced species, but to attribute “invasive” to a whole species and who they are intrinsically is ecologically incorrect. From an ethical perspective, such a label leads to real harms for those animals. Overall, it takes out any ecological or ethical nuance of our understanding of them, and leads to really harmful practices in terms of how we treat those animals. When we vilify, it makes it easier to mistreat. That’s true for how we treat humans, and it’s absolutely true for how we treat nonhumans.
“Promoting coexistence” is not saying necessarily that we all have to live together. I envisioned it more in terms of this idea about human responsibility and who is bearing the burden — and who we expect to bear the burden — of human action. In terms of human behavior, disruption and chaos, it’s often other animals that have to bear that burden of our impact on the world. It’s about thinking through the burden of responsibility.
Those four principles are the early formulations of our thinking, and we are planning to augment them. But I hold those as really important guides for how we think about conservation and our relationality with other animals.
KH: What is the relationship between compassionate conservation and rewilding?
LB: Rewilding is a concept that I came to in my work with Asian elephants. My experiences spending time with them, in their homes, really got me thinking about: What does it mean to be wild? There are these “legally owned elephants” and elephants “born into a free-living life.” I started to grapple with that human construct of division… because I’m interested in thinking about animals through their lives, through who they are. I was thinking about: What does wild even mean? Going back to those labels… we say: That’s a wild elephant; that’s not a wild elephant… But they’re the same, right? it’s undeniable that we are denying them their life imperatives by forcing them into these categories, and forcing them into certain types of life and living. So, I wanted to start to deconstruct that, and I thought: From the animal’s perspective, what does it mean to be wild? And why do we privilege “wild” in the world of conservation? Part of my work with the elephants and the behavioral work I do is to understand what it means to be wild for animals and, thus, what rewilding means from their perspectives. I received a grant from World Animal Protection to explore how we can understand an animal’s life through that lens of wildness, regardless of the life they’re born into.
So, I developed a model I call the Wildness Index of Wellbeing to help see if we could use behavioral data as an insight into a psycho-ecological state of wildness, and how we can then link aspects of wildness to states of wellbeing. That’s at the root of how I got into the world of rewilding. What does it mean to be wild for any animal? Whether it’s an animal in a zoo, or my cat in the house, or an elephant in the forest — what is their state of wildness and why? I started to think about the elephants in these terms and the language being used around them — such as that they are in a “semi-wild environment.” And I started to think of the elephants, who were owned, and who were in human-elephant relationships, and wondered: Could these “owned” elephants be rewilded and experience rewilding? This is different from how rewilding historically has been approached, which is as an ecological concept. I approach it, and think of it, as a psycho-ecological phenomenon. This seems to be a revolutionary approach, and one that I think centers the animals in their own lives.
KH: The UN’s International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is the less well-known twin to the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change). This IPBES is slated to produce a report and plan on protecting biodiversity into the future. How does rewilding with compassion speak to this effort?
LB: This buzzword, biodiversity, has really taken over the world of ecology and conservation. Looking for biodiversity hotspots and protecting biodiversity — that’s the [goal]. It sort of is what gets privileged above anything else. In the conservation psychology/biology course that I teach every year, one of the first things we talk about is: What is biodiversity? I want them to define biodiversity and ask: Why do we privilege biodiversity in conservation? I push back on the students to think through their presuppositions. They walk in thinking that, of course, biodiversity is important. It’s part of that central dogma of conservation. It’s: “Get rid of invasive species and protect biodiversity.”
We think of biodiversity as abundance and numbers, something that’s easily quantifiable. There have [certainly] been some important suggestions about how we can better evaluate biodiversity, such as functional trait ecology, but again it’s thinking about the traits or characteristics that species possess that might allow them to function in a certain way in an ecosystem. It’s still largely through an anthropocentric lens and one of instrumentalization. When I’m thinking about biological diversity, I think about who the animals are: their cognitive diversity, their personalities, their interests and motivations, and what this type of diversity brings to a community of life. Diversity is certainly important and adds to the resilience of a web of life… but it’s not this type of biological diversity that is usually thought of in the world of traditional conservation, which I think is really anemic and really flies in the face of true ecological functioning and true ecological knowledge.
So, when I think about the UN’s IPBES, I think there needs to be a real shake up in how biodiversity is conceptualized and operationalized. We must be better at grappling with the vastness, depth and richness of diversity; thinking about animals as individuals, as participants engaging with their environment; and seeing, long term, all of the amazing facets that individual variation brings to the web of life.
KH: What insights or lessons did you learn from this time in the field?
LB: This goes back to the lesson of complexity. If I ever start to lose sight of the complexity, I feel like I’ve strayed. Or if I’m starting to embrace an overly-simplified perspective, I’ve gone astray… So, I definitely strive to continue to push — or to encourage myself to contend with that. A key insight is that it’s always more complicated. And not just more complicated — it’s the complexity. This is harder and those simple solutions, those platitudes, are satisfying in the short term. And you can see why a lot of people embrace them. It’s because it’s a lot of work to fight against that and to tell yourself over and over that truth is in the complexity. Another important thing is to embrace the reflexivity. We should always be reevaluating our presuppositions, our practices, and others’ practices. We should be constantly reflecting, constantly reevaluating. Those are the lessons, and that’s hard work. And it means we are not always the favorite person in the room. That’s another hard thing when you are striving to be part of a community. If you’re often the one to ruffle feathers (and to mix a metaphor, I’ve often been described as a pot-stirrer), it’s hard, too, because it’s easier to go with the flow most of the time. Sometimes you can make allies more easily if you do. But that doesn’t feel good, to be part of a community where you feel like you got there because you’ve been disingenuous, and you’ve been lost within yourself, and where you’ve landed is not where you actually want to be because of it.
KH: What are the next steps in these research projects?
LB: Our work with the elephants continues, and that’s exciting. Our first paper on the Wildness Index of Wellbeing model that I developed will be coming out shortly. That’s been years of hard work for our team, and the pandemic certainly sidelined things. It is good to be getting back to that, to the elephants. I’m continuing to work on a range of projects, including the horse rewilding. I have graduate students that have a range of really wonderful, interesting projects. So, I’m continuing to explore who animals are, and hopefully find meaningful, sustained ways to help them live the lives they want to live.
KH: Where can readers find you and follow your work?
LB: I am not on social media, but they can find me around the web — and through PAN Works. (email: lbaker@panworks.io). I look forward to people reaching out.
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.
