Tag: ethics

Ep. 25 – Doug Kysar and Jon Lovvorn on law in the Anthropocene

Ep. 25 – Doug Kysar and Jon Lovvorn on law in the Anthropocene

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Professors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn are the Faculty Co-Directors of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School. Launched in fall 2019, LEAP is a multidisciplinary “think-and-do” tank dedicated to empowering Yale scholars and students to produce positive legal and political change for animals, people and the environment upon which they depend.

Kysar is Deputy Dean and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a leading scholar in the fields of environmental law, torts, climate change, products liability, and risk regulation. In addition to his roles at Yale Law School, Lovvorn is Chief Counsel and Senior Vice President for Animal Protection Litigation at the Humane Society of the United States, where he built and manages the nation’s largest animal protection litigation program.

In this episode, Kysar and Lovvorn speak about how animal law, industrialized cruelty, and climate change are inextricably entwined; why advocates and academics must focus on “animal destruction” laws in addition to “animal protection” laws; the deep questions animals raise about our country’s larger legal structure; and the profundity of the Monsters of Folk song, “The Right Place.”

Ep. 20 – Gabriela Cowperthwaite on the legacy of “Blackfish”

Ep. 20 – Gabriela Cowperthwaite on the legacy of “Blackfish”

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Film director and producer Gabriela Cowperthwaite did not set out to make a film that would force a national moral reckoning over how we keep whales in captivity, slash the profits of Sea World, and make her the unexpected enemy number one of a multi-billion dollar industry. But that’s what happened. Her acclaimed film Blackfish tells the thrilling and heartbreaking story of Tilikum, an orca whale who killed three people while in captivity. Shot on a budget of just $76,000 and released in 2010, Blackfish has been viewed by more than 60 million people and has become one of the most impactful documentary films of all time. In the six years since its release, Sea World has ended its orca breeding program and pledged to phase out orca shows all together by the end of 2019. We speak with Gabriela about the making of Blackfish, the hazards of keeping cetaceans captive, and how her film catapulted her to the frontier of marine animal activism.

Ep. 8 – Charles Siebert on translating nature’s symphony

Ep. 8 – Charles Siebert on translating nature’s symphony

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During his travels in South America at the close of the 18th century, the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt came upon a parrot speaking the words of a lost Indian tribe. The encounter inspired our guest, acclaimed author and New York Times Magazine writer Charles Siebert, to imagine the echoes of human language that might persist, in nonhuman voices, once we are gone. We speak with Siebert about his reporting on humans’ wonder for and wounding of animals, the reach of metaphor, and what he discovered in the gaze of a chimpanzee named Roger.

Ep. 7 – “Eating Animals” film director Christopher Quinn on the hidden costs of factory farming

Ep. 7 – “Eating Animals” film director Christopher Quinn on the hidden costs of factory farming

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Award-winning film director, writer, and producer Christopher Quinn’s new film, “Eating Animals,” based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed nonfiction book, traces the environmental, economic and personal consequences — on human and nonhuman animals — of the rise of industrialized animal agriculture and of our country’s departure from local, sustainable farming. With bracing intelligence, empathy and imagination, the film explores the practical and ethical costs of cheap meat and profiles farmers and whistleblowers who have refused to do so. Quinn takes us behind the scenes of the film, shares his approach to storytelling and discusses why he believes the story of animal agriculture in America is important to tell.