It's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Today's talk asks us to think more deeply about our relationships with animals. The rather arbitrary buckets we put them into, whether there are pets or food or considered wildlife. In her talk for a TED membership event in 2021, environmental writer Emma Maris

makes a case for humanity's responsibility to animals and their full happiness, followed by a Q&A

session with Ted's science curator, David Beello. You can become a founding TED member at TED.com

slash membership.

So human relationships with animals can be pretty weird.

We put them in categories based on how we see them.

So there's pets, and they're like members of the family.

And then there's farm animals, and they're often very similar to pets in terms of their

cognitive abilities and their emotional abilities. But of course, we eat them. And then there's wild

animals. And I've been wondering what wild animals even are anymore. Like, you can get a

degree in wildlife management. But if you're managing them, are they really wild?

I started thinking about this in the context of wolf-free introduction.

So when wolves were first brought back to the American West in the 1990s,

they were pretty heavily managed, and they still are today.

A lot of them wear callers, they have GPS trackers, they have their DNA on file,

they have names and numbers. And if they get a

taste for livestock, then we haze them with rubber bullets or air horns, or sometimes those like

floaty guys that you see in use car lots. And of course, if they don't get the message, they can be shot.

So how wild are they really, if they're

being this carefully managed? It's occurred to me that a ground squirrel or a city robin is in some

ways wilder than these wolves, because although they might live in a city, no one is managing their

day-to-day life. But of course, they are living in a human world,

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