NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program
spring 2024
The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness
Friday, April 19, 2024
This event was recorded. Videos will be available soon on The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness website.
About the event
Which other animals have the capacity for conscious experience? For a long time this question was neglected in science, but a new interdisciplinary field is now emerging to tackle it, drawing on expertise from neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare/veterinary science, the social sciences, and the humanities. While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged. In this public-facing event, experts from across the field will meet to discuss the progress that has been made, the key points of agreement and disagreement, the most promising directions for the future, and what recognizing other animals as conscious beings means in practice for ethics and policy.
Panels
Scientific Methodology
Kristin Andrews: The history of the science of animal consciousness
Jonathan Birch: The marker method for studying animal consciousness
Moderated by David Chalmers
Vertebrate Consciousness
Noam Miller: Evidence regarding consciousness in reptiles
Anna Wilkinson: Evidence regarding consciousness in amphibians
Becca Franks: Evidence regarding consciousness in fishes
Moderated by Kristin Andrews
Invertebrate Consciousness
Alexandra Schnell: Evidence regarding consciousness in cephalopod mollusks
Robert Elwood: Evidence regarding consciousness in decapod crustaceans
Lars Chittka: Evidence regarding consciousness in insects
Moderated by Jonathan Birch
Public Policy
Cleo Verkuijl: Public policy at the global level
Katrina Wyman: Public policy at the local level
Moderated by Jeff Sebo
Thank you to our co-sponsors for supporting this event
NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program
NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
NYU Center for Bioethics
NYU Animal Studies
WILD ANIMALS IN URBAN SPACES: HOW CITIES CAN PROMOTE WILD ANIMAL WELFARE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Alisa White, Alexandra Silver, Cecil Scheib, Mal Graham, and Jeff Sebo
April 3, 2024 | 11:00am-12:15pm ET
Lester Pollack Colloquium Room | Furman Hall, 9th Floor
New York University School of Law | 245 Sullivan St | New York, NY
About the event
Cities are often thought of as distinctly human environments. Yet, a wide variety of wild animals continue to make their homes in and around dense urban areas. Experts increasingly accept that human, animal, and environmental health are intrinsically linked. In this vein, cities have the opportunity to consider how they can adapt their built infrastructure to promote the wellbeing of the human as well as nonhuman residents that share these spaces.
This panel will bring together experts in local policy, building sustainability, and wild animal welfare to discuss how cities and other local actors can shape their policies for land use and the built environment to better promote the welfare of wild animals. As part of the discussion, researchers from NYU will present findings from a newly-released report that identifies promising policy options for cities to consider, ranging from bird-friendly building materials to green infrastructure design and prohibitions on gas leaf blowers.
About the speakers
Alisa White, Legal Fellow, NYU Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy, and Land Use Law
Alisa is a Legal Fellow at the Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy, and Land Use Law at New York University School of Law. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, Yale School of the Environment, and Dartmouth College. During law school, she co-founded Law Students for Climate Accountability. Her research on environmental law, policy, and economics has been published or is forthcoming in Ecology Law Quarterly, Environmental Law Reporter, Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, Energy, and PLOS One.
Alexandra Silver, Director, Mayor's Office of Animal Welfare
Alexandra Silver was appointed director of the Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare by Mayor Eric Adams in July 2022. She previously worked at Animal Care Centers of NYC (ACC), the city’s animal shelter provider, where she connected with other organizations, stakeholders, and elected officials, working to raise awareness about how all New Yorkers can make a difference for animals. Alexandra originally came to ACC as a volunteer, after working as a reporter at TIME. Passionate about animal welfare since childhood and a vegan since 2016, she shares her home with cats Lucas and Freddie Mercury, both adopted from ACC’s Manhattan center, as well as the occasional foster animal. Alexandra received her Bachelor of Arts degree in comparative literature from Princeton University.
Cecil Scheib, Chief Sustainability Officer, NYU Office of Sustainability
Cecil returned to NYU as Chief Sustainability Officer in 2018, after five years as Chief Program Officer at Urban Green Council and Managing Director of the Building Resiliency Task Force for the City of New York. As Director of Energy and Sustainability at NYU from 2007 to 2012, Cecil was intimately involved in guiding NYU towards environmental excellence, leading efforts related to the co-gen plant, the Green Grants Program, 30% emissions reductions, greater solid waste diversion rates, weaving sustainability into procurement, and drafting NYU's Climate Action Plan.
Dr. Mal Graham, Strategy Director, Wild Animal Initiative
Mal is the strategy director at Wild Animal Initiative, a nonprofit working to accelerate science that helps wild animals. They have worked with animals in shelter, veterinary, farm, and zoo environments, but it wasn't until pursuing a doctorate focused on gap-crossing in flying snakes that they realized how little we know about the welfare of wild animals. Now, Mal works on helping other scientists interested in studying wild animal welfare get into the field.
Moderator
Jeff Sebo, Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program & Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, New York University
Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program, and Deputy Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at New York University. He is the author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Thank you to the NYU Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy, and Land Use Law for co-sponsoring this event
symposium on Wild Animal Welfare
Lori Marino, Rajesh K. Reddy, and Dale Jamieson
February 16, 2024 | 4:00-6:00pm
Jurow Hall | Silver Center for Arts and Science | 31 Washington Pl
Vegan reception to follow
About the event
This symposium will explore new directions and connections for wild animal welfare. There will be talks on issues related to wild aquatic animals, wild invertebrates, and the links between animal and environmental protection. In addition to the presentations, there will also be opportunities for audience Q&A.
About the talks and speakers
Marine Mammals in Entertainment Parks
Lori Marino
Lori Marino is a neuroscientist and adjunct professor of Animal Studies at New York University. She is the founder and President of the Whale Sanctuary Project and Executive Director of The Kimmela Center for Scholarship-based Animal Advocacy. Lori’s scientific work focuses on the evolution of the brain and intelligence in dolphins and whales (as well as primates and farmed animals), and on the effects of captivity on wild animals. She has published over 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers, book chapters, and magazine articles in these areas. Lori also works at the intersection of science and animal law and policy and is the co-director (with Professor Kathy Hessler) of the Animal Law and Science Project at George Washington University.
The Emergence of Insect Law and Ethics
Rajesh K. Reddy
Rajesh K. Reddy directs the Animal Law Program at the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School, where he teaches International Animal Law, Animal Legal Philosophy, and an Emerging Topics in Animal Law course focused on the protection of insects. Outside of Lewis & Clark, Raj co-chairs the International subcommittee of the American Bar Association's Animal Law Section and sits on the boards of World Animal Protection, Minding Animals International, and the International Coalition for Animal Protection.
How to Think About Wild Animal Welfare
Dale Jamieson
Dale Jamieson is Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, Affiliated Professor of Law, Medical Ethics and Professor Emeritus at NYU where he was founding Director of the Environmental Studies Program, and Professor of Philosophy. His work centers on how to live ethical lives in the Anthropocene, both as an individual actor and as a political agent. The second edition of his book, Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Fall 2023
NYU Workshop on Wild Animal Welfare
Award winners and presenters: Hira Jaleel, Caitlin Cunningham, Kristy Ferraro, Amelia Brackett Hogstad, and Andrew Sharo
Keynote address by Catia Faria
November 2023 | Silver Center for Arts and Science
About the event
The NYU Workshop on Wild Animal Welfare will feature five award-winning presentations from early-career scholars working on topics related to wild animal welfare from multidisciplinary perspectives, as well as a keynote address by Catia Faria.
About the award winners
Hira Jaleel is a lawyer from Pakistan and is currently a teaching fellow and adjunct professor at the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School, where she teaches food law and aquatic animal law. Prior to joining Lewis & Clark, Hira practiced law in Lahore, Pakistan, where she litigated extensively to protect the interests of nonhuman animals, and helped draft animal welfare legislation at the federal and provincial levels. Hira’s research and scholarship focuses on international and comparative animal law issues, especially in Pakistan.
Caitlin Cunningham is a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary PhD program at Dalhousie University. A conservation biologist by training, her research takes an interdisciplinary look at how wildlife interact with the urban environment to work towards a better understanding of how it might be better constructed to support human-wildlife coexistence.
Kristy Ferraro is a PhD candidate at the Yale School of the Environment, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and a fellow at the Law, Animals, and Ethics Program at Yale Law School. She is interested in exploring all the ways in which animals matter: from their role in ecosystem function to how we consider them in conservation. She is also interested in bridging the gap between conservation biology and environmental ethics, helping to develop rigorous ethical frameworks that can be used by practicing conservationists and interrogating the norms that underly conservation biology and ecology. She has taught conservation ethics at the Yale School of the Environment and has given lectures on the topic to philosophers and scientists throughout North America. She received her masters degree from Vanderbilt University, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Berne, and received her bachelors degree from Boston College.
Amelia Brackett Hogstad is a senior planner at the City of Louisville, Colorado. She graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2023 with a PhD in history. Her dissertation investigated the history of Canada lynx in Colorado, a small population of cats on the edge of lynxes’ global range whose marginal status made them vulnerable and intriguing in turn, and whose story confronts the limitations of historical sources, scientific knowledge, and species-level protections. Prior to working as a land use planner, Amelia worked as a public historian on projects that allowed her to study the history of urban apple trees, develop oral history projects on the histories of agriculture and science, and enact community-based research and curation practices. She moved to Boulder from New York City, where she graduated from NYU and worked at the Museum of the City of New York.
Andrew Sharo is an NSF postdoctoral research fellow in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned his PhD from UC Berkeley, where he studied computational genomics. His current research centers on using genomics to inform management strategies for threatened species. Andrew is enthusiastic about the field of wild animal welfare and is actively planning several research projects in this area.
Anne Clay received her PhD in Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University. Her doctoral research centered on the application of compassionate conservation principles to address tradeoffs in conservation and animal welfare priorities in US, French, and South Korean zoological parks. She also earned an MS and BS in Biology and Society from Arizona State University. She is located in Fairfax, Virginia.
About the keynote speaker
Catia Faria is a PhD in Moral Philosophy from Pompeu Fabra University and a founding member of the Center for Animal Ethics at the same university. She is a professor of moral philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Society at the Complutense University of Madrid. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. She works in normative and applied ethics, in particular, on issues of animal ethics, feminist ethics, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Her book Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature has recently been published by Cambridge University Press.
Justice for Animals: Practical Progress Through Philosophical Theory
Martha C. Nussbaum
October 2023 | Recording
About the talk
Animals suffer injustice at our hands: the cruelties of the factory farming industry, poaching and trophy hunting, assaults on the habitats of many creatures, and innumerable other instances of cruelty and neglect. Human domination is everywhere: in the seas, where marine mammals die from ingesting plastic; in the skies, where migratory birds die in large numbers from air pollution; and, obviously, on the land, where the habitats of many large mammals have been destroyed almost beyond repair. Addressing these large problems requires dedicated work and effort. But it also requires a good normative theory to direct our efforts. Nussbaum will argue that an approach based on her version of the Capabilities Approach is the one we need, and will show how it directs our efforts better than rival approaches.
About the speaker
Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Law School and Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. She is an Associate in the Classics Department, the Divinity School, and the Political Science Department, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She has also taught at Harvard University, Brown University, and Oxford University. While teaching at Brown, Nussbaum was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. She has chaired the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on International Cooperation, the Committee on the Status of Women, and the Committee for Public Philosophy. Martha has received honorary degrees from 66 colleges and universities in the US, Canada, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. She is an Academician in the Academy of Finland, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and the recipient of numerous awards. Her latest book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, appeared in January 2023.
DOING POLITICS WITH WILD ANIMALS
Will Kymlicka
September 2023 | Recording
About the talk
An increasing number of theorists are challenging the idea that only humans can engage in politics, and propose that humans must learn how to do politics with animals. But what does it mean to do politics with animals, particularly wild animals? Will began with two recent proposals in the literature. The first focused on the institutional representation of animals’ interests in human political decision-making processes. The second focused on the growing ethological evidence that wild animals have their own sophisticated capacities for collective decision making, and proposes that they should be seen as forming their own self-determining communities. While both of these proposals are important, neither offers an account of politics as something that humans and animals do together, of how humans and animals can co-author shared norms about shared spaces. Will concluded with some speculations about what joint human-animal politics might look like, including ideas about how humans and other animals can jointly govern an interspecies commons.
About the speaker
Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, where he has taught since 1998. He is the co-author with Sue Donaldson of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, published by Oxford University Press in 2011.
Spring 2023
How can humans improve our interactions with wild animals at scale?
January 2023 | Recording
About the event
The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program launched with a roundtable discussion between program directors Becca Franks and Jeff Sebo and program affiliates Christine Webb, Colin Jerolmack, and Dale Jamieson. The discussion covered an array of topics including: Why does wild animal welfare matter more than ever? What are the most urgent and actionable issues confronting wild animals? and How does wild animal welfare relate to conservation biology and other fields?
About the panelists
Becca Franks is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU. She was previously a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow with the Animal Welfare Program at UBC, where she was awarded the Killam Research Prize. Her research and teaching lie at the intersection of environmental and animal protection, specializing in animal behavior, aquatic animal welfare, quantitative methods, and human-animal relationships. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, commentaries, and book chapters, she co-edited a special issue for the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science and is an Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Jeff Sebo is Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at NYU. Jeff is author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also an executive committee member at the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Christine Webb is a lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in Harvard University's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. A broadly trained primatologist with expertise in social behavior, motivation, and emotion, her recent work centers on consolation and empathy in our close primate cousins across several sanctuary and wild settings. Her research and teaching also engage critically with questions in animal and environmental ethics, particularly in deconstructing anthropocentric biases that affect the way we approach primatology, science, and our relationship with the natural world more broadly.
Colin Jerolmack is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at NYU. He is also the current Chair of Environmental Studies there. His research examines how relationships with animals and nature shape social life in the city, among other topics. He is author of Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town (2021) and The Global Pigeon (2013). He is also author of many articles on sociology, animals, and the environment, and he is editor of the Animals in Context series for NYU Press and an executive committee member of the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection.
Dale Jamieson is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at NYU. He has published more than 100 articles and chapters, including Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed—and What It Means For Our Future (2014), Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (2008), and Morality's Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (2002). He is also on the boards of several journals and has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and more.