Conversation with Dr. Paul Waldau (vegan): Animal-People Studies in Religion, Science, Ethics, and Law, Part 2 of 2

Dr. Waldau explains that treating other animal-citizens better creates a win-win situation for everyone. “I think animality is a beautiful experience full of possibility. What saddens me greatly is that in the modern world, we no longer pay attention to what other animals are actually like. That decreases and harms not only non-human animals; it demeans us.” “I think if we fail to treat other animals well, we’re only strengthening our muscles for not treating humans well.” “In elephant groups, females are the leaders. And elephants communicate in what is referred to in our technical jargon as ‘infrasonic.’ But that was not discovered by modern science until 1984. It was considered a great discovery, when indigenous peoples knew it all along.”

“Education needs to open up with good science, good ethics, or just good religion and spiritual awareness of the world. My sense is that if you take on personal habits like vegetarianism or veganism, it helps you explore the world, and that’s not a world that education brings to us as well as it could.” “One of the really successful domains of animal studies is animal law. Not having much public policy success, however. The contemporary leaders seem not to have taken seriously that we are spiritually capable, ethically capable, scientifically powerful, and that our legal systems could really be at the forefront. Religion can help imbue people with the fact that by being full-hearted, you create possibilities that cannot be created in law unless you have some very, very generous impulse guiding it.”