Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of May. I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's Political GabFest, and I'm here with Bill Wasek and Monica Murphy, who are the authors of the new book, Our Kindred Creatures, How Americans Came to Feel the way they do about animals.

Bill and Monica, welcome. Hi there. Thanks for having us. So Bill is the editorial

director of the New York Times Magazine and a colleague of mine. And Monica is a veterinarian and a

writer. This is their second book they've written together. And it's about what you call a

transformative 30-year period for animal rights and animal welfare in the United States,

beginning in 1866. And I think that's the founding of the first animal welfare society.

It's the time you say that created our current attitude toward animals, our love of pets,

our reverence for certain kinds of wildlife, and then

the distant ignorance of food animals who live and die at a remove from us. So you say that if we

want to understand why we have the complicated feelings we now have animals that we have

to understand this period, what is so formative about it? Well, at the beginning

of this time period, you just have a very different economy. You have a very different use of

animals. I mean, horses in particular are everywhere. The horses are the major drivers of not

only rural America during this time period or coming into this time period, but also urban America.

The Industrial Revolution sort of, you know, counterintuitively or contrary to our expectations from where we are now, the machines didn't sweep the horses off

the streets immediately. They actually brought a lot more horses onto the streets, bringing,

in addition to the supplies and dry goods and wet goods and everything else they always carried,

the coal that ran the machines that was carried by horse wagon too. So animals were very much

living in and amongst the people of this era. And so the way the animals were treated by

people was also on display. Yeah. And the other thing that you, you had in those sort of urbanizing cities was kind of all the uses of animals were right there for, for everybody to see.

And so coming back to your question about sort of what is it we mean when we say that this is the era when our sort of current attitudes

towards animals developed?

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