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Infectious disease is tied to the health of animals, humans and non-human animals,

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and it would be rather silly to imagine you could create a healthy system filled with sick animals surrounded by humans you're trying to protect.

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In the same way, it would be silly to imagine, you know,

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having a bunch of people with coronavirus walking around and then trying to put a group right in the middle of that and protect them from it.

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You need to worry about everyone.

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About a year ago, the Guardian published an opinion article by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and Professor Aaron Gross entitled We Have to Wake Up.

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Factory farms are breeding grounds for pandemics. Can we really remain healthy when we know that around us, there are billions of animals,

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genetically uniform and healthy animals crammed together in factory farms and cattle in the

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folded from the Oxford You Hero Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.

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In this interview, I talk to one of the authors of the Guardian opinion article, Aaron Gross,

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who is a professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego and the founder of Farm Forward,

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a non-profit organisation which works to improve animal welfare on farms and to end factory farming.

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How worried should we be? I often find myself previously discussing this two years ago in the position, saying it's time to get alarmed,

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but now I think we are alarmed, which is great, but we have to understand what we're facing.

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And I think the challenges we're being alarmed in the wrong direction.

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We're not recognising how much our farming system, our agricultural system really determines the kind of overall scale of our risk for four pandemics.

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The data from the Centres for Disease Control is that three out of four emerging and new infectious diseases are what they call Zoo Nordic,

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which means they're related to the illnesses that animals get.

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So what this is really telling us to interpret that in a really simple way is infectious disease is tied to the health of animals,

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humans and non-human animals.

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And it would be rather silly to imagine you could create a healthy system filled with sick animals surrounded by humans you're trying to protect.

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In the same way, it would be silly to imagine, you know,

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having a bunch of people with coronavirus walking around and then trying to put a group right in the middle of that and protect them from it.

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You need to worry about everyone.

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And when we look at where new, dangerous viruses that didn't quite make it to the scale of coronavirus are coming from.

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It's completely unambiguous. You know, it's like there is a variety of idiosyncratic places they emerge.

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And then there's like the Silicon Valley of virus emergence, which is industrial, poultry and pig farming in particular.

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It turns out that birds and humans have immune systems that are related in intricate ways, going way back.

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So the thing is that birds get sick with we often get sick with and we pass diseases between each other more than other kinds of species do.

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So, especially the poultry industry, is a concern.

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So what's going on in the poultry industry? That might make it more worrisome than, you know, the way we eat chickens.

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A hundred years ago, scale the quantity of animals in the U.S. context.

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We now eat more than 100 times per capita, more than 100 times as much chicken as we did a century ago.

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It doesn't take a lot of analysis to figure well if those chickens get sick.

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And now in the US, we're dealing with nine billion far outweighs the human population.

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Your opportunity for that virus to multiply know have grown accordingly.

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I went to a coffee shop this afternoon and the person serving me was wearing her mask under her nose and I was like,

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Oh no, it's not proper social distancing. So we're so worried about social distancing amongst each other, and rightly so.

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Yeah, in time, like near us,

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our billions of animals crammed together in these factory farms close to each other and close to the humans handling them.

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And we and it's not on our radar, it's not on our radar because there's very powerful,

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long standing political forces that do not want to see that discussion in the media.

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And that's not that didn't occur all of a sudden, you know, there's a lot of problems associated with industrial agriculture.

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We're talking about one of them the way it increases endemic risk.

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But we're also dealing with an industry implicated in climate change, ecological pollution of all different kinds,

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probably the greatest source of worker exploitation, at least in the US context.

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So this is an industry under fire for lots of different reasons, and it has developed means of distraction.

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This is why I'm emphasising some of these real basic human facts so that, you know you can just reason out for yourself.

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I'm so worried about somebody's mask being a little bit more exposed.

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Maybe a billion animals that, you know, are within a couple hundred miles of you,

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if you're living where I live, you might want to also be on your radar.

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So yeah, we've got this access to huge numbers of animals. And then as you alluded, we have created a system which packs them in greater densities.

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So this is another risk factor. We've modified their genetics so that they are more genetically uniform.

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Imagine if we bred everyone so that, you know, if one of us got coronavirus instantly, we all got it.

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That's essentially what we've done with these birds and the pigs to a lesser extent and then to really, you know, make this a perfect dystopia.

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We have methods that pretty much guarantee these animals are chronically sick.

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I think most of us have some kind of vague awareness that the animals are eating today are not the robust,

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healthy animals that we might imagine on a kind of traditional farm.

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We really have a system that has made sick animals more profitable to sell than healthy animals.

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It's a it really is a a perfect kind of petri dish to create pandemics.

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I think many people who would want to get rid of factory farms just think, Well, this industry is so powerful.

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I mean, how do we even start to change it?

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Is there something that we, as individuals can do? I mean, if I become a vegetarian or a vegan,

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but this these factory farms and keep on receiving the subsidies that their country receives that are paid with my tax money,

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I don't even want to support them, but I'm doing it. I mean, does it even make sense for me to become?

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I mean, I am a vegetarian, but suppose I wasn't going to become a vegetarian or is it?

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No, I'll I mean, I think it's a very powerful statement for someone to say, I'm going to go vegetarian or I'm going to go vegan,

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or I'm not going to eat from a poultry industry to make these kind of, you know,

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broad commitments is something everyone around you will hear and know.

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It has a certain kind of power that's hard to measure, but it's certainly independent of whatever outward influence it has.

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It might be the way you need to live in the world to be kind of not contributing to the problem for for many of us, even if we can't,

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even if I can't end racism, I'm pretty sure I don't want to be the one who's, you know, the white guy aggravating it.

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All right. So that might be a reason not to support the current, you know, animal agriculture industry.

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But but I agree that doesn't necessarily mean we have a political solution to ending the industry.

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But that's the that's the basis for it in some ways, a critical mass of consumers saying, you know, I'm not going to support this industry.

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It seems like it's going to be a precondition for more radical change.

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This industry isn't like nebulous, powerful for some sort of mysterious reason.

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You've got most people three times a day sending it funds.

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And it's true that they get even more than that because there's a subsidy structure

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there so that even if you withdraw your income from buying those products,

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we haven't totally solved the problem, but we've definitely moved in that direction.

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And companies pay careful attention to these numbers.

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You know, increasing numbers of vegetarian and the population mean all of a sudden there becomes a market for,

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you know, maybe something like, let's invent a burger that tastes like a burger, but it's made from plants, obviously.

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You know, everyone knows this has been really big, big business.

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You know, largest IPO in 2018 was, you know, beyond meat.

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So those changes in consumer behaviour, those changes that you as an individual make don't sit and stay with you.

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People are paying attention and those things, you know, RAM A.

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But the second piece we need is not just kind of divesting ourself from, you know,

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whatever we decide is beyond the pale, but communicating this politically that this has to be an issue.

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So it's a matter of being unsatisfied with the politician who seems to address climate

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change but won't talk about the substantial role that industrial agriculture plays in it.

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And certainly, if we're talking about pandemics for all the reason, we've said,

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if this is a political issue for you, as I think it should be for most of us.

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Don't take seriously the politicians that are unwilling to go to animal agriculture,

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what that will do is empower the politicians who are there right now who are trying to talk about this in the US for the first time,

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we do have a piece of legislation proposing a moratorium on factory farming. It has no chance of passing right now.

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This is the first time it even exists,

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and it exists as a piece of federal legislation that when the political climate allows it to be possible to pass it, you know it will move forward.

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You're saying, like for individuals, when they adapt their food choices, they should do what seems like the right thing to them.

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And so I did two other interviews with a philosophers who are specialised in animal ethics and asked them, You know,

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can you give some advice to people who want to do good with their food choices when it comes to preventing them?

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That makes and is it said, well, you know, the first thing they should do is becoming a vegan.

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And I think like, well, yeah, OK. But that's very demanding for many people.

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What you said was like, Well, people should decide for themselves,

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for themselves what what they think is reasonable to change more a step by step approach.

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Maybe the truth is we can only really do what we're very committed to.

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You know, so in some ways, it's just a fantasy.

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If I think you should move in a certain way just to kind of imagine that that's going to be even if I have a great logical arguments behind me.

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It's certainly not the way we make our, you know, our food choices. So I think it's good to listen to folks who are challenging us.

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Why? Why does Peter Singer think I need to become a vegan to be basically ethical?

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But even if we decide that even if we find upon thinking of it,

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we agree in principle that our values are such that we really want to have nothing to do with

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the current animal agriculture industry that doesn't extricate us from those human challenges.

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You know, the way in which we are physiologically and culturally and socially tied to food, it's hard to give up.

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And if we imagine that we have to, you know, immediately realise this kind of perfect ethical ideal, it will paralyse us.

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And I think what most people experience is if you if you would, if you attend to these issues,

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if you keep coming back to them with your own existing heart and your own existing values,

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a lot of times it will provide motivation for you to give up animal products, you know.

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And that can be a somewhat natural process.

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There might be a little time you're like, OK, you know, for this week, I'm just going to make a decision, I'm going to do this.

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And those kind of promises can be very helpful.

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The premises I worry about when people are like, I must do X for the rest of my life or I will betray all of my values.

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That seems like it tends to lead us in the wrong direction.

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It becomes like an either or and you can't be in the in the middle somewhere or you're a hypocrites, or I'm quite sure I'm a hypocrite.

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I mean, this is, it seems to me, the human, the human condition. We really try to minimise that minimisation is is a scale.

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And I don't think we have to. I feel like by acknowledging that complexity of human decision making,

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we are in any way diminishing the clarity of the fact that the current, you know,

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the currently available animal products almost certainly violate your values,

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almost whoever is watching this and that should give us pause and be a reason for reflection.

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But that, you know, can manifest in different,

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really different ways in terms of our different decision making and in terms of then how society decides to change the whole, the whole system.

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A lot of people find it's really hard to make individual changes, but they can participate in communal changes quite easily.

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That is, they just don't have the discipline to not eat that favourite food.

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But if they're sitting there with their church group deciding whether they're going to make the next collective meal vegetarian or not,

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they're ready to sign up with a meal that would be more value based.

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Other other people find it very easy to be very strict personally,

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but have no patience for the compromises and debates that you have to have in community.

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So I think there's really space for all the different kinds of human dispositions.

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If you could give some advice to individuals who are watching and who want to do something,

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some change to their food choices to help prevent future pandemics.

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What would you say to them? Yeah. I mean, being an ambassador for the connexion between animal agriculture and pandemics,

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knowing that and being, you know, communicative about it would be my number one suggestion.

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And then, yeah, if reducing animal products is the most straightforward way to divest yourself from those systems to asking yourself,

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Where can I change my defaults? Do I really prefer cows milk to soy milk?

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Or maybe that's an easy switch. And, you know, focussing on what you can do easily at first and then, you know, have a conversation with yourself.

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But I think kind of in some ways, I guess my final suggestion, we recognise that the question of what you eat and what your community eats is a great,

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you know, moral adventure and can be a great culinary adventure.

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At the same time, it's really a powerful place. We can become the people we want to be and create the world we we want to create.

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And almost whatever you do, once you realise that is likely to be, you're making the world a better place.

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