Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: María Victoria Cucchiaro
I've been told that it's a bad taste
to start a TED talk by introducing oneself,
and yet, my name is Sandris Ādminis and there is something weird about it.
Firstly, Google doesn't let me register an account with such a name.
I've tried several times, and they just would not allow it.
And I guess the reason
is that part of my last name consists of the English word "admin,"
so probably, it's just for safety, so that I don't start scamming people
as if I was one of the administrators of Google.
But there is something else.
"Ādminis" is a Latvian word meaning "tanner,"
and tanner is a person that works with animal skins.
So probably,
one of my great-great-great-great grandfathers was a tanner
and that's how I got this surname.
A while ago, I found a book about forgotten crafts,
and there was a chapter about tanners, so, of course, I was intrigued to read it.
And what struck me there was a tip from a professional tanner
who said that if you want to make a high-quality leather bag,
you should buy skins from meat cows, from beef cows,
and you should never buy skins from milk cows, from dairy cows
because they have been pregnant several times,
their skin is stretched, not as flexible anymore,
so it's not a good quality.
That's quite a practical tip, right?
But for me, it was rather awkward.
And why so?
Because you are not very likely to find me
buying somebody's skin or taking somebody's skin.
You are much more likely to see me advocating against killing animals.
Here I am in a silent protest against fur farming;
interviewing people at a circus protest against exploiting animals in circus.
I'm also doing a radio show
about animal rights and veganism, and science discoveries.
And I enjoy doing school talks for kids.
And here are some Latvian activists
bringing the petition to ban fur farming to the Parliament.
Coming back to my last name, "tanner,"
I guess if there was such a thing as an intergenerational karma,
I might be the living proof of it.
Yeah, in those years, basically for 10 years,
I've been involved in animal advocacy
and working with people who know a lot about animals,
and in this time, one of the main things I've noticed
is that our understanding about them is incomplete and superficial, even wrong.
And even in cases when we consider them, the animals,
the focus tends to be on the benefit for humans, right,
because humans are the most significant entities in the universe.
Everything is regarded in terms of human values and human experiences.
But is such an exclusively human-centered perspective justified?
Did you know that sheep can remember many faces?
Or that apes can remember hundreds of hand signs and communicate with them?
Or, did you know that pigs are so similar to us
that their internal organs could be used, like, for donation,
for transplants?
Speaking of pigs, all pigs are equal, but some pigs are much more equal.
And what I mean by that is that depending on the context,
they are treated very differently by humans.
Have you heard about Esther, the Wonder Pig?
Because you should,
she's the most famous pig in the world at the moment.
She even has her own [TEDx] talk.
She was adopted as a mini-pig,
so the family took her in thinking that she will grow to the size of a cat.
But they were wrong.
(Laughter)
Now she's huge and she weighs more than the rest of her family together.
And what would you do
with a family member that keeps on growing?
I hope it's not selling them.
Yeah, you make more space for it.
(Laughter)
Or, should I say, for her.
She is a part of that family, just like that cat and that dog is.
They eat together, play together, sleep together,
they have distinct personalities.
And is there a morally relevant difference
between a cat and a pig, or a dog and a pig?
If not, why should pigs be treated worse than they?
Isn't it a form of racism, I mean, speciesism?
But unfortunately, this is not a typical life story of a pig.
This is a typical modern farm
where typical pigs spend their typical lives
without enjoying sunshine or grass under their feet,
never digging for tasty roots or never rolling in the mud.
And to me, the mind-itching question is:
why?
Why do we treat some animals as individuals and even as our friends
while at the same time, we treat others as replaceable units, and even things?
What do you see in this picture?
It's lots of pigs, right? It's a successful business.
But what if you knew that one of them was Esther,
a curious being that once lived in a family,
was close friends with the dog Ruben and the cat Finnegan?
Would you perceive this photo the same way?
What I'm saying is that seeing or imagining animals, or humans,
as a part of a faceless crowd
makes it easy to normalize all kinds of bad things, atrocities done to them,
things that we wouldn't accept otherwise.
We could also eliminate all the traces
that lead us to perceive them as individuals:
no face, no name, no skin, no context at all,
just a product with a date of expiration and a price.
It makes it easy, right?
When I was in high school, I was staying with my grandma,
and one night, I was really hungry.
I went to the fridge, there was a piece of bacon,
I cut a slice of it, enjoyed it, wanted to have some more,
but then I noticed that there was a nipple on it,
just like in this photo.
Can you eat something that has a nipple?
I managed to swallow that bite that I already had,
but that was a life-transforming experience.
So, the way we treat animals
depends on how we see them and what we know about them.
Over time, humanity has also changed its perception of animals.
For example, I still can't believe
that the superstar of the Western philosophy,
one of the brightest minds, René Descartes,
once argued that animals are merely biological machines,
not thinking, not being conscious, not even feeling.
Or Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher.
He saw nature organized in a clear hierarchy,
humans being the most perfect ones on the top,
then mammals far below, birds, reptiles, and so on,
and each of the levels on the lower side
were supposedly meant for the upper levels.
And by the way, according to Aristotle, he thought that also women were below men
and at least a little higher than slaves who were also a natural part of the world,
at least in his times.
The biblical view was pretty similar:
man had God's given rights to rule over everything else, everyone else.
It's only since Charles Darwin published his influential book
"On the Origin of Species,"
only since then,
we are starting to accept our connection with other beings, other species.
So modern biology doesn't see nature as a simple hierarchy,
as Aristotle or the Bible did.
To the contrary, it's rather organized
in an incredibly complex way, but still a unified way.
Even illustrations like this one, made by the Tree of Life Web Project,
are a simplification of the complexity of earthlings,
the family network of life forms on our planet.
Almost every day, scientists uncover new data on animals,
and there is an awkward amount of new knowledge.
In the recent century alone, we have developed so many things,
technology that helps us understand them better, animals,
both for scientists and for us.
We have been learning about life under water, deep in the oceans.
Millions of people recently watched
a live-stream video about a giraffe baby being born.
I imagine that at least some of you in this audience
enjoy spying on birds via video streams from their nests;
these videos are very popular in Latvia.
We have also learned that there are many other humanoids,
not just Homo sapiens.
And genetics as a science is opening our eyes
about the relatedness on a stunning micro level.
So, inevitably, new data and discoveries
are pushing us to rethink our place in the universe
and also our relation to other animals.
It's a part of an already existing trend of dethroning, of decrowning ourselves
and getting rid of the sweet illusion of being the center of everything.
Major scientific breakthroughs
again and again have pushed us to humble self-perception.
Like, once we believed that we were created,
that our planet was the center of the universe,
and now we know we aren't.
We thought that at least we are in the center of the solar system
and everything is circling around us,
but that's also not true.
Also, there was no doubt that we are fundamentally different from those beasts,
that we are rather godlike creatures, right?
But now, there is more and more evidence
that Homo sapiens, humans, are just one of the many species,
sharing all kinds of traits and capabilities that we value highly
with other animals who have those too.
And humanity has already started to take this message on-board.
Animals are more and more taking space in our imagination,
on the political agenda;
and environmental awareness and animal protection standards
are higher than ever.
There are more and more alternatives for animal products,
and their well-being is mentioned
even in the credits of movies and on shampoo bottles.
In other words, animals are entering the human-centered world
in unprecedented ways.
But where do we go from here?
Should we envision times
when the golden rule of ethics to treat others as you would wish to be treated
applies not just to humans, but also to at least some other species?
We might even go much further, envisioning times
when the wolf and the lamb would peacefully dwell together
like in the biblical scene of paradise.
Our imagination is boundless, and it can bring us quite far.
Did you know that once, at least once, humans even tried animals in courts?
In 1457, a pig and her piglets were accused of a murder of a child.
The mother pig was found guilty, but her babies innocent.
It really happened, a serious court case.
Or, consider the story sometimes told to children,
especially when they ask too many questions
about our treatment of animals.
They are told that in exchange for food, safety and shelter,
cows agree to give us their milk, chickens agree to give us their eggs,
and pigs agree to give us their flesh and their babies, and so on.
Even as adults,
we keep saying sometimes that animals are giving us all those things,
although it's clear that we are the ones who make those choices.
So, surely, this story should be in the same book of historic curiosities
as the story about the pig in the court.
But on the other hand, we have also been, historically, really successful
at denying animal emotions and animal sentience, mental skills,
so we need to find a balance between those extremes
with the best new evidence that we have.
Of course, there will be serious dilemmas.
Suppose that a driverless car
is programmed to estimate various risks of collisions.
It is driving, and suddenly, a piglet is crossing the road:
What should the car's programming be in such a case?
Should it try not to hit the piglet at any cost,
even to the humans in the car,
or should it run over the piglet only as a last resort to save humans?
Or should this piglet be sacrificed even if the car is empty
to avoid the damage costs?
What is the value of a pig's life?
Actually, such decisions are made every day already now.
Because it's not animals who make those choices and decisions, it's us;
it's not them who rule the world, we kind of do,
and we decide which animals exist and in what conditions.
So I guess with such great power also comes great responsibility.
I believe in humanity, I believe in humankind, in human kindness.
I believe that we can exercise this great power that we have
in an intelligent and kind way.
Otherwise, I wouldn't come and stand up here.
Many animal-related issues
are already becoming less and less controversial.
They are based upon the simple value of kindness,
the simple idea of not harming unnecessarily.
And I see human kind already mobilizing.
Like, we know that we will not die of cold just because we are not wearing fur coats,
so the fur farms are slowly closing down.
We found ways of making safe cosmetics,
so there is no need to test them on animals.
We learned that we can enjoy circus shows without exploiting and caging animals,
so the circus is changing right in front of our eyes, right?
But still, there is a huge problem, the biggest problem,
the elephant in the room, or should we say, the pig in the room.
Why are we still treating animals - cows, pigs, chickens and so many others -
as if they were not individuals, but things for consumption?
They are sentient beings who can feel joy, feel fear, pain and many other things.
If we know all that,
why are we still sticking forks in their bodies?
Is it still a matter of survival for us in the 21st century?
I think there are already ways to live well
with nothing taken away from animals,
and in less than a hundred years,
eating animals might be just as unimaginable
as cannibalism or slavery or witch burning is right now.
Even today,
I believe if humanity, each one of us, would notice and accept
that each animal is someone, not something,
we would stop making excuses.
And knowing how kindly many of us treat cats and dogs,
it's obvious that we already have it inside of us.
So let's allow kindness, this essence of being a human,
to guide us,
let's embrace it fully
without discriminating dogs, cats, pigs, cows.
Kindness will lead us away
from causing suffering and causing pain and harm,
and not just to humans, but also to other animals.
Thank you.
(Applause)