Click on NOTE CATEGORIES to browse by topic, read through the entire archives, or type a topic in the search box.Dr. Andrea Graves, an animal behavior expert, illuminates the profound significance of movement for animals and humans alike. Through personal anecdotes and scientific insights, Katy and Andrea delve into the essential role of providing enriching environments for animals to express their natural behaviors authentically. From discussing innovative approaches like creating "chicken jungle gyms" to exploring the ethical considerations surrounding AI integration in animal welfare, the conversation underscores the interconnectedness between movement, animal welfare, and environmental enrichment.
OVERVIEW
(time codes are approximate)
00:02:43 - What Katy's chickens want her to know (Jump to section)
00:15:12 - Animal Welfare and Movement (Jump to section)
00:29:55 - The Parallels between human and animal movement (Jump to section)
00:47:08 - Addressing Animal needs (Jump to section)
00:55:27 - Increasing your fluency in "animal" (Jump to section)
01:02:00 - AI and animals and book recommendations (Jump to section)
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW
Andrea Graves Book What Your Chickens Want You To Know
Preorder Katy’s Movement Plan Workbook
A Day in the Life of Katy article
David Attenborough Life of Birds Book
Jon Young What the Robin Knows book
Research paper by Peter Singer—AI ethics: The case for including animals
Why skipping your dog’s walk is a bigger deal than you think
Podcast Transcript
(Music)
This is the Move Your DNA Podcast, the show where movement science meets your everyday life. I'm Katy Bowman, biomechanist, author, and animal. All bodies are welcome here. Let's get moving.
(Music fades)
Friends, you may or may not know this about me but I spend almost all my time thinking about movement. It’s not exercise or even human movement that I’m often focusing on, but rather how the movement of everything is connected. Humans are an animal that has had a tremendous impact on all other animals—all other living things, really.
Biomechanics is a cool field because it’s the study of the way mechanical forces impact all living things—it’s not just sports and bicep curl or squat exercise form. The interaction of forces is why all living things have evolved to the ultimate shape they have. It’s why vertebrates—whales, humans, snakes—all have similar skeletons, even if there are nuances that relate to environment and locomotion. I find biomechanics—the way living things move and are affected by movement—beautiful and broad, and today for the first time on the Move Your DNA podcast we are going to talk about non-human animal movement.
But my guest today is Dr. Andrea Graves. She has a Ph .D. in animal behavior and welfare with a focus on stress in chickens. She wrote the book, "What Your Chickens Want You to Know," to help backyard chicken keepers understand their chicken's behavioral needs, which aren't always obvious. She works as a science journalist and editor, and the columns and features she writes are mostly about environmental health and animal welfare. She's also a regular science editor for my most recent books, Grow Wild, Rethink Your Position, and the upcoming workbook for building your perfect movement plan.
I was very excited to have this conversation with her. Whether you like animals, are interested in animal welfare or you just like to hear the concept of nutritious movement applied more broadly, that is beyond humans, there’s something for you in this episode.
KATY: Dr. Andrea Graves, welcome to Move Your DNA.
ANDREA: Hi, thank you, Katy. It's really good to be here.
KATY: It's good to talk with you. So I'm a chicken mother. I think many people who listen to this podcast might have gleaned that at some point. What do my chickens want me to know?
ANDREA: Well, I think that they are very happy with what you know from what I heard from your last podcast. They want you to know that they get bored. They want to really explore and interact with their environment. The last thing they want to do is to be kept in a box with a whole lot of food they can eat that's ready mixed and ready provided for them. They love to be interested and stimulated.
KATY: Yeah, you know, I have your book. I refer to it regularly. Both my children have read your book. Because it was beautifully written. It's easy to interact with. And the way that I feel about my chickens is the way I feel about my children and kind of all living things, which is this recognition that there's a sentience and a need for ... a quality life, you know, for everything, whether they're my chickens. I have a hard time - like I don't like locking up animals. I don't find that to be the experience that I would want for myself or my children or any other thing. And so when I was talking earlier about how I think about movement, I think about animals as ... and I'm going to say animals ... I'm not going to keep saying non-human animals. I'm just going to meet the word animal for right now, be non-human animals. I think of them often as needing a quality of life that really requires sort of the same things. You know, adequate movement, diverse movement, community, nature. All these things that I've laid out in my work. And before we get into that, like, how did you come to specialize in chickens? Why chickens? And why did you write the book?
ANDREA: My first interest in animal behavior and welfare wasn't even chickens. And I didn't really grow up with what I'd call particularly nature-rich childhood, any more than any other urban child in New Zealand did. I mean, yes, we could. go out to great nature, but it wasn't something my family did regularly. It was more school trips and things. I watched a documentary on television and it showed a pig with her piglets in a farrowing crate. You know, there are bars around these pig mothers so that they can't - they can stand up and lie down, but that's pretty much all they can do. They can't turn around for weeks on end. And this upset me just deeply - really, really deeply. I ran out of the room and cried and stopped eating bacon or pork or anything from a pig. And in fact, I really enjoyed animal behavior when I studied biology and I worked on shorebirds to start with, a shorebird that lives on the coast near here. And then when I did my PhD, in fact, it was just my supervisor who worked closely with chickens and so I wanted to work with her and so I worked with them. And that was that was all it was. But yeah straight away I realized these are such interesting creatures. They are so interesting.
KATY: Chicken TV is my favorite show.
ANDREA: I need to check it out - actually I haven't seen chicken TV.
KATY: That's just my word for watching them. That's just what I say you know.
ANDREA: OH!
KATY: We would say "Let's go watch chicken TV." And you know to go watch them first thing in the morning and to watch - There's complex things happening you know and from that you could pick up - you know you can see where the nests are hidden. You could - you know they talk about pecking order. You can see all of these things play out. And so yeah that's what I mean by Chicken TV. There's probably a TikTok or YouTube video that is chicken TV. But I just mean stepping outside and observing, you know, for hours of amusement.
ANDREA: Yeah yeah. I should have known that you wouldn't watch actual TV, Katy.
KATY: I watch TV fine. But yes, it wouldn't be my favorite thing. But chicken TV - it is my favorite thing.
ANDREA: And it is amazing how when you actually kind of hang out and watch them and whether you're just staying still doing that or whether you're gardening around them or whatever, how you see so much more and notice so much more that you wouldn't if you were just throwing them scraps and collecting eggs and moving away. But yeah, these are super interesting creatures. They're hilarious. They can be, you know, a little bit aggressive, very dexterous, very athletic, very curious. And the sounds, you know, the sounds are just so wonderful.
KATY: Yes, I love chicken language, you know, I took a class on bird language, which I wrote to not too long after I had taken it. And I think I might have talked about this class a while ago, but what was great about that class is I'm more of a, I would say, visually dominant person, you know, I learned through reading, reading books, observing with my eyes. But I'm not a particularly good listener. You know, like the spoken word is not how I would tend to take in information. So when I went to this bird language class, it was a week-long intensive in the art and practice of listening. And it involved a large group of people of people sort of canvassing an area and jotting down notes in a particular time period of all the different birds - alarms and songs and watching some of their behaviors. And they have ditching behaviors like when they - if a predator is coming in, if it's a lower predator they tend to move one way as opposed to it to be a sky predator. Some birds sentinel, they set up a top and they sort of take one for the team and communicate what's happening. And learning all of that, and then coming together as a group and painting a picture of what was happening over a larger area. And it's a very similar way to different bush people, you know, how they are able to tune in to animal language as a way for their own safety. To know when snakes are moving. And just like that was very transformational for me. And I began to listen to my chickens and pick out the word - I'll say the word,the sound for - someone's in my yard. It's not threatening. Someone is in my yard. It is threatening. The all-clear sign. And finding these words and being able to duplicate them when I wanted to let them know everything was fine. You know, I've been (makes a bird sound). You know, which was the, which is the sound. And then they immediately calmed down. You know, so like that's been a hobby of mine and it really, it's made my life so much better.
ANDREA: I think it makes life richer, doesn't it?
KATY: Yes.
ANDREA: It makes life richer. And I am really interested in how hunter-gatherers - incredibly attuned to their environment. So you hear little snippets on documentaries and in books. They will be able to see an eagle two kilometers away and know what's happening on the ground under the eagle. Or if - and you've done some tracking work - or if there's a new ... if they wake up in the morning and they look at the ground and they know who's walked from whose hut to the other hut because the footprint is different in the sand. The social life is written in the sand. And the truth is that we've got those same brains, just the way we've got those same bodies. But we don't grow up learning all that stuff and it's not our ... so we're watching television and reading nursery rhymes and those are the parts of our brain that get trained up. And the part that was trained up in your brain when you did your bird course and that's - it lies dormant - but it's still there and we can develop it and it's it's thrilling.
KATY: It is thrilling especially you know going into it at 45 years old or however old I was to be like "Now I can't turn it off". It's it's sort of like the power of reading you know once you can read it's hard to be passing road signs and not pick up on the symbology, because it's just available for - it's in your sensory fields, and it goes in. And so now, you know, I can be hiking. I can do anything, and I will just - you know, I just know the direction, and like, oh, there's something happening over here. If I'm with a big group, and I can't figure out where they are, you can always listen to the birds to kind of get a sense of, "Oh, they're cutting across this section of the forest over here: because I can hear the birds suddenly becoming conversational, passing along that information. So it's just for people who like tracking or just even learning I have just found bird behavior, and then with a special caveat on bird language for sounds, as a substrate to be read. It's the same as a book. If you open a book and you put it in front of your eyes and you can take in this information, well, the outside world is always similar: a canvas for your ears and tuning in. It's been really great to be "all this was going on around me the whole time". It's like becoming suddenly literate, you know, and all the doors of that open. It's similar.
ANDREA: A different type of literacy, yeah, a broader type of literacy.
KATY: Yeah, I call it nature literacy, you know. It's just this idea of tracking the moon and seasons. And to recognize, oh, that plant coming up means this. It's not particularly complex other than there's a sheer number of details that go into it. And I imagine every landscape is really, you could become fluent in one landscape and not be fluent at all in a completely different place. So it is also very place-dependent.
ANDREA: Although I think the more similarities than you might think. Like an alarm call on your continent is going to be similar. You're going to recognize it in New Zealand or in Africa.
KATY: Right.
ANDREA: Postures of animals - you know, they kind of translate all over the place as well. So we may be a little bit more literate in foreign countries than we expect.
KATY: Yeah, it's not like I have no idea what's going on. There's some definite awarenesses that will carry over. So I heard your story of how you went into animal welfare. What are your thoughts on - and it's interesting that really what you saw was a lack of movement for that animal, right? The idea of looking at an animal that can't move and feeling traumatized ... horrified by looking at this situation. So to me, that means that maybe instinctively, you had a feeling that an animal needs to be able to have access to movement. As you went through your training, what did you learn about an animal's need to move? It could be chickens or it could be just animals in general. How was that taught as far as what sort of patterned movements or movement needs animals have?
ANDREA: Animal welfare is really, really connected to movement because ... I should start by saying that even though we keep animals in cell crates or, you know, chickens in cages or in densely packed factory farms. And that's - you'd think that's all they know. So, you think, well, maybe, you know, they're fine. They don't care because that's all they know. But so there's been really rigorous experiments done to make it absolutely clear that that is not the case. So they still have in them as really strong needs, the needs that represent the environment they evolved in. So for pigs and chickens, they really love to have stuff to sort through and scratch through on the ground. So this is part of their movement. And for chickens, in general actually, so perhaps we tend to think that animals need as much room as possible. The chickens perhaps the quality of the environment that they can search through and move across is more important than the space. That is not an excuse to keep them crammed in as much as they're crammed. I don't mean to say that that's okay. It's clearly not. So for animals, the movements they can do and the environments they can physically interact with are deeply connected to their welfare. That said, yeah, there's these extreme confinements that we put them in, whether it's a cage or a crate where they really don't have enough room to move. Or whether it's just a really densely packed shed. It might not be densely packed when the animals are small But they generally have been bred to grow very fast. So by the time they're getting close to being slaughtered, they are incredibly densely packed. Their need to move is very connected to what you might think of as their psychological well-being or lack of it. There's also physical ramifications of the way we, I guess, bred them for a start that they, ... You can see a sausage dog, perhaps, you know, we know that we've bred dogs really extremely. They've got little legs and they're not gonna go on the same kind of hike that other dogs might. But we've also bred pigs to have extremely fast growth rates and far more muscle than they naturally would have. Because then they're worth more because they make more meat for us to eat and they can get joint and bone problems. Broiler chickens, which are the meat chickens that we eat, again - a table roast chicken is actually only 35 days old. So it hatched...
KATY: Wow.
ANDREA: 30-35 days is about the weight of slaughter. It might go to 40. That's the same pretty much all over the world. Yeah, it's so extreme. So these animals actually, when they're in the latter part of their very short lives, they can't walk very well, and all they're staggering under their weight. So we've kind of stopped them being able to even physically move with our really really clever selection, genetic selection for breeding. That's not the same as genetic modification, I should say. They know what genes underlie these growth rates and they choose those ones to be the breeding birds. So yeah, I mean, we physically stopped them moving by wanting a really, really tasty, cheap table roast.
KATY: Right. So those are two different ways. One is physically creating a barrier to movement. They don't have space to turn around or space to take a step. And then the other way is affecting their structure through the genes that have been selected so that maybe their legs won't hold their weight. So they could be in a giant amount of acreage, but they still would not be able to walk because of the genes that they have. And I think that's interesting to know that there's multiple ways of affecting the movement.
ANDREA: It was kind of a third way. Yes, there are. And in fact, free-range broiler chickens, they may be considered free-range because there's doors where they can go outside. but they actually can't get outside.
KATY: That's right.
ANDREA: But there's also that third way that was subtly tucked in amongst what I said is that yes they could have even an adequate amount of space but if it's just like slats or a bare concrete floor and they can't do the movement within that space that they want to do, that's also a way of not letting them move. And I guess that was one of the main reasons I wrote my book. Because I didn't really answer that question very well earlier, is that I'd see people thinking that the ideal way to keep chickens was in kind of a field, a grassy field. All tidy with fences at the side and probably a little bit of weed control, as if they were sheep or cows. And that is not what chickens want. And it just got to frustrating me that there wasn't more knowledge of this. And they live near the jungles. Sorry, Katy, I should point that out. Chickens evolved in Southeast Asia on the edges of jungles. So think about the complexity of a jungle habitat really messy floor, branches, leaves, insects under the leaves, lots of low shrubbery, little streams to drink at the edge of. So yeah very very different to how a lot of people will keep the chickens.
KATY: And I appreciated that about your book because we, all of our chickens that we have had are very old, very old lines that have come from our family that have been, you know... So we get basically these large groups of the males and the females. And all of the chicks had been mothered and they had all been raised - they have a very strong - they're banties. They're an old, you know, it's probably like a 30 - at least 30 years - of chickens being parented, where a lot of the parenting skill has been, I think, bred out of some chickens in that way. So, you know, they're excellent free rangers and they are strong 'cause they're taught from a young age to climb and hop and they developed or at least maintained that skill set. But recently after we had we had moved away for a while and then we came back and we're ready to basically need to get chickens for one of my children. And we picked, which we had never done before, chickens from the feed store, you know, that just are in a box and you just pick peeps. And we end up taking the lot because we weren't going to leave just a few. So we took them all so they had been together for a while at the end of the season. We start them where they're they have lots of space but it's covered from aerial predators. Because they had you know no rooster adult. But I was just watching them and all of my same sort of personal training instincts - like there's no way for them to figure out how to jump up to the next level. Because I had been observing banties in this familial context and watching you know roosters parent and sometimes sit and nest and like all sorts of things that you don't really see when you look at these. When you look at sort of this different society of chicken I learned a lot more about chickens compared to if I had just looked at sort of the factory chicken, you know where you're just passing out a single generation and there's high turnover. Because we don't eat our chickens. they're just for eggs and TV. And I realized that there would be no way that their legs could possibly ever go from zero to a top roost bar. And they had no supplements. So I created a chicken jungle gym. And I was telling the kids, just like if I was trying to personal train a person. It's like they're gonna need some medium step between this and the next place. And so we were you know creating sticks and and creating levels of height. And then they would need to be shown that they could be taken up. So you know again I have a daughter who will you know act like a chicken and she'll climb up to the top thing and then they'll be like "Oh, we go up there". And then one goes. We spent probably - and I - it's all documented because I love filming these things to sort of teach people about movement and role modeling of movement and the role of movement even in the human child eventually learning these skills. But I can do with my chicken so much faster because it's such a short generation, you know, if you will. And I really think that your book is important. because I don't think that people consider the enjoyment of the animal. Why they have them. The fact that they want to be hopping and jumping up and they want to pull things and turn things over and discover new things. Everything that you think of your child needing, a chicken child and eventually a full ground chicken needs that too.
ANDREA: Yeah, they absolutely do. They can survive without it. Yes, they can live life without it and you know so can people but it's kind of a miserable one.
KATY: Well sure. Well, I think that's sort of where we are with people right now You know, I mean not to say that all people are miserable in this way, but I think that we've gotten to a point in our collective level of sedentaryism. There's always outliers of people. But I'm talking about in general. We're at the point where people aren't really moving outside of flat and level, uninspired concrete. You are saying, "No, this chicken, that that in itself, it's a void." The fact that it's void of complexity is another way to reduce movement.
ANDREA: Yeah.
KATY: That's what I hear you saying. It's the same thing that I'm saying about the way we're walking, right? Flat and level terrain; there's no vitamin texture. And animals need texture and they need complexity that mimics the environment in which they involve, not only for their hips and knees and wings and all these other parts, but for their psychological well-being.
ANDREA: Because the two are completely wrapped up. I mean we can stop ourselves being bored walking along a flat concrete path by listening to a podcast or whatever. But they can't you know the movement is their thing. The movement is and the exploration is their mental stimulation.
KATY: Yeah they're not doing anything else.
ANDREA: Another likeness is the issue of osteoporosis. So hens are really prone to osteoporosis.
KATY: Mm-hmm.
ANDREA: And in some ways, it's almost - the caged ones really are because they don't get in the movement. And in general, they are so bred to lay so many eggs. So I picked out a statistic that I found earlier from a very reputable source and that said that in 1970 now I've lost the year, I've written it down. Yeah, okay, in 1975, the laying heads would produce about 130 eggs a year. And now, thanks to the breeding, they produce 312. Actually, maybe it's more now because that was in 2008 and 312 eggs a year. So even though their diet, so you know, is highly supplemented with everything possible to keep their mineral balance healthy they still get osteoporosis particularly if they can't move properly. So the ones in cages are getting osteoporosis. But they don't get so many fractures because actually they're not falling on anything or bashing against anything hard enough. Because they can't get enough velocity going. And the really free-range ones will have stronger bones because they are able to have the force that builds up bones. But there's also a lot of them are kept in these barns inside and they tend to climb. They get to climb really high to lay their eggs That's where the nest boxes are, because there's perches, there's a series of perches. So they do get the climbing high, but it's getting down again and they fly from very tall heights. I don't know, twice my height, three times. These are high, things when they want to come down to the ground. And they just crash down. But of course, there's such a stocking density below them that there's no gap for them to land on so they'd land on other birds. And at slaughter, there's quite a high rate that they can see that the keel bone of the birds are fractured And leg fractures are a problem as well. So yeah, these birds are not getting the right forces to keep their bones healthy.
KATY: That's interesting because when I was in graduate school, I feel like we used a lot of data. A lot of jumping and bone data came from sensors that had been inserted into chicken's legs.
ANDREA: Aaaah.
KATY: I remember, you know, to look at things like strain rate. So it was - I never thought if that data had actually come from animal welfare practice research to try to get a sense of it. Or it wouldn't make sense to me that it would be purely for humans because I'm not sure how much a human would benefit in terms of knowing about bone from chickens. But perhaps it's similar enough where they could do different things to get a sense of what stimulates bone generation. What stimulates bone degeneration was from chickens. I just remembered that right now. Four sensors in the legs.
ANDREA: Mm-hmm.
KATY: So how do you feel about, I mean, do you feel like there are parallels between what you've learned from human movement and animal movement? You know my work pretty well at this, point. I mean, do you see similarities between what I'm trying to do and trying to create a framework for people to recognize? These are essential inputs that come - that are very old. They're not really based on what's happening in the culture. They're not really based on the deeds of the industrial complex. They're just these old ... maybe there are hindrances to us, but they remain as a need. And what animals need, whether they're wild or whether they are captive.
ANDREA: I think that there are there are huge parallels. I think some of these needs that are in chickens. And when we're talking saying old, Katy, we're not just meaning, "Oh, when the ladies wore long dresses and corsets", we're meaning that millennia.
KATY: Yeah.
ANDREA: 50,000 years ago, because that's the kind of timescale that evolution operates on. Yeah, what a hindrance. What a hindrance for a pig to have a brain.
KATY: (laughs)
ANDREA: How much easier for everyone if there wasn't the sentient brain messing things up, you know. Because it does mess things up for farmers and things as well because the pigs will chew on each other and the chickens pluck each other and they go a little nutty. But yeah, when I found your work, Katy, I was kind of shocked. I totally got it, because yes, what you are talking about and that these kind of ancient needs that are inside our bodies and hello, the way we're living is not satisfying them. Even the way we're going to the gym is not satisfying them. I thought of myself at the time. I said, "You know I've got an active fit person who's been to lots of aerobics classes and gone running." But because I understood this framework of ... and I should say done all those things and yet still had a terrible bad back and kept getting really sore necks and had plantar fasciitis and had to wear orthotics. I'm thinking, oh my goodness, I'm 40 and my body's breaking down. I don't understand it. And then when I started to read your blog posts, which they were in those days, and it was called "What Katy Says" or "Katy Says", the "Katy Says" blog, I suddenly realized that all this stuff I understood from evolutionary biology with animals and the kind of needs of animals that were ancient in are still inside them, was exactly the same in me, you know? And then from the way you describe things, I suddenly realized how crazy this life was that my body had evolved in life. But hey, you have a hunter-gatherer body too. And here I was just sitting all the time and lying in a really soft bed and wearing these built-up shoes. And yeah, so it was quite transformational for me. And I don't have a bad back and I don't wear orthotics and my neck never hurts. Thank you, Katy.
KATY: You're welcome. Thank you. And then also, yeah, like I think in one of my books I had written out, if you were trying to set up a habitat, you know, for yourself, consider a primate habitat like the way a zoologist would think about: "Well, you know I've got to put this animal here in - in space in a confined space not like a crate." But a habitat that they'll be dwelling in for some time. Which is similar to our houses, you know. So many people rarely ... they spend most of their time in their habitat, You're creating - creating a primate habitat would be as you know, a close to ideal as far as the movement parts were concerned. Because you are a primate. It's very similar. It's not identical, but it's quite similar if you wanna make sure that you're hitting all the notes. If you're hitting all the diverse notes of movement that you need. And that makes me wanna kind of jump to, I know you don't. don't perhaps know dogs, as well as you, know chickens. But when I do talk about animals and movement, so many people will bring up a dog, you know, for a couple of reasons. One is the idea that "I will get a dog to help me move." Okay, that's one way that it tends to show up. And there's been actually quite a bit of research looking at dog walking as what this called purposeful movement. And purposeful movement for people is much easier for them to adhere to than non-purposeful movement. Non -purposeful movement would be exercise. Non-purpose is - it's the term that's used in research. But it may be more like where the exclusive benefit is just for your individual health. So much harder for people to do non-purposeful movements. Where they could sort of muster, like, "Well, my dog does need a walk." That all being said, I don't usually recommend that people get an animal to help them with their fitness journey. Because other research has shown that a lot of people just don't walk their dog. Many people have these sort of pack animals often, whether it's a horse or a dog, living in situations where there is no pack, right? So they're isolated, they're not really brought into all of the elements of family goings on. So they're often live these sort of isolated bored, bored life, you know? And I hear this for dogs and I hear this for children too. It's like, well, they have a big backyard. With the idea meaning if they want to just like just go run around in circles - That movement is something that you need to exhaust. Like that if you just run in place and sort of make the physical agitations of your body that that that suffices to bleed off this primitive inconvenience that we've been saddled with, which is the need to move our body. But humans don't do that. And dogs don't really do it either. I mean, certainly, a dog with space to run is better than a dog without space to run. But you're not really hitting those community notes, and you're not hitting the complexity and randomness and curiosity that shows up in more what I would just call nature, you know. Which is the idea of getting to go into a novel environment, move through it. I think of my dog as always reading all the notes of all the other animals that have been there, you know, and so constantly mixing up a route. Just thinking about these animals. Even something that's ingrained in your family. Probably most people, unlike us, probably don't have chickens regularly in the living room because I have a kid that won't stop bringing them. She asked Taylor Dukes, "Can I bring all my chickens into my room if I shut the door?" And, you know, I've gone in and found cornbread all over her floor because she had the chickens over for, you know, a couple-hour play date with her friends all in the chickens. And we've got a couple chickens that just love her and coming into the house and they want to explore it. So I imagine more people do that with their dogs - bring them into the house with regularity. But it still doesn't meet that movement need. We need a word for that curious novel exploration multi-dimensional... playground is the word that I think comes to mind. They need a playground, but it kind of needs to shift.
ANDREA: It is a playground. And I think I use that word for how to set up your chickens kind of the rough area they can live in. But it almost demeans them to call it a playground, doesn't it?
KATY: That's right.
ANDREA: But it's not just about that. It's like saying to the child, "You can't play with that, it's not a toy." Children don't just play. They don't see things as toys and not toys. This is real life for them. This is interacting and learning. So to call it a playground or a toy, I think it doesn't respect that this is how important it is to them.
KATY: Yeah.
ANDREA: And of course, it's also considering, again - and you've done it really well when you talk about the way dogs have evolved as pack animals. They're on the move a lot. I'm certainly not a dog specialist. I've never actually owned a dog. But, you know, obviously, smell is incredibly important to them and you can see you walk with any dog and they're just constantly checking out all the signals. So we have no awareness of whatsoever. So it's also about respecting that, you know, we've got this perception of life and what's necessary and theirs is completely different. And in some way, theirs is so much more advanced than ours. So with dogs, it's obviously their smell. With cats, it's their vision. And senses that we can't comprehend. So give them credit. But I agree. My neighbor who actually introduced me to your work has got a new dog. He's maybe three or four months old. And she wants it to be an outdoor dog and there's room for it to run around. And this dog is just so bored. My husband's called it Arr Arr. Because it's just Arr Arr. You know, in a distressed way all day. That's not how dogs evolve. She does walk it. If you're keeping an animal that's really outside of what it's evolved to expect, that dog might give up eventually. But I don't really think it's fair on the animal. Well, it's not fair on the animal.
KATY: Yeah, and I think in terms of moving as I opened this, I think about this all the time. So, because I do spend time - I'm interested in tracking wild animals and spend a lot of time getting too fortunate enough to have a lot of friends who are wildlife biologists. And so I've gotten to be out and do things with wild animals quite often. I think about even something as simple as, you know, a dog being taken out on a walk. Now, a walk is an amazing thing. But also, the rate that a dog walks is completely different than the rate that the person walks. And the idea that you're sort of tethered and being forced to be not on their baseline rhythm of moving. And so when I think about all of these pieces in us trying to - we're trying to put together a life in these - just to be aware of the movement of all of these layers. I can't stop seeing the movement. I guess must have come born paying attention to. But to look at like what's the movement diet of the dog. You know and if we put together a movement diet of the dog is there you know time for wrestling? If you look at all the behaviors of wolves or coyotes in this pack, what do they do? And to think, "Oh, how do I facilitate that? And the good news is when you facilitate that with your animals you're usually also getting some of the novel movements that you yourself needed. Because in the case of the wolf and the person, that was also a similar environment. These behaviors are sort of intertwined. And so I think about dogs and then I think about horses. Horses is another one where I think many people maybe don't recognize the need of the horse, for example. I was looking at like what is recommended for a happy healthy horse. It'd be shelter and keeping their feet clean and general health things. Making sure they have adequate nutrition. Of course all the things. But it was stumbling on to another veterinarian that had a different view than just the nutrients. Just making sure, like you said, you could put out all the premixed food for a foraging species and that's actually not going to make them psychologically ... you might prevent nutritional issues, but psychologically, and then other other things might be failing. And she had said similarly with the horse, there needs to be other animals. And it's not enough, it's not that there's food, that there's grazing space, you know, to actively be looking for food and finding it and grazing is part of their baseline need for movement. And I'm just wanting to introduce people to that idea. That movement for animals really falls under a similar framework that we're talking about for movement for people, right? That there's a diverse movement diet. It considers where we've come from thousands and thousands and thousands of years and acknowledging that it's an inconvenience. But maybe it helps people make a choice. Maybe it helps people affect their behavior in some ways, I think is important to me at this point.
ANDREA: Yeah, that's a really good point that when you look at animal care, especially - and I've talked to a veterinarian in an animal welfare group at a university here and had just recently talked to an older veterinarian about free-range chickens - and all he could talk about was that they are more prone to disease because they are foraging in wet areas and eating slugs or whatever that might have a virus. And it was all about the physical health. And when I tried to push more it just wasn't going there. And then I talked to this younger veterinarian and she said "Yeah they are now trained in it". They are now trained in this idea of this extra layer of need, it's not just about having enough food, enough water, being free of disease, that kind of thing. So that's an interesting concept, but that higher level of just keeping them in kind of raw physical health in terms of being fed and watered and free of disease is still really dominant. Because the inconvenience, as you say, if we don't understand what we need in their context of what we evolved to need, you know, we end up with things like sore backs, plantar fasciitis, and sore necks. and with animals, you get those inconveniences as well. So my father used to keep horses. I actually wasn't really into them, but there was a thing they did called wind-sucking. I was against a post. Basically, animals can develop these things called stereotypes, stereotypes and these stereotypes are a reflection of frustrated needs. Not a symptom of not enough food and enough water, ill physical health. This is like a mental thing. And so you'll see people will be familiar, I mean for stereotypes we think of in terms of, perhaps, someone with Tourette's that has a facial tick or say something over and over again. This is a human stereotype. But stereotypical behavior also manifests in animals. So when you go to a zoo perhaps, if you look at big cats. Obviously, they are evolved to have these huge territories and to patrol them. So although often when you go to the zoo, you might only see a bit of fur lying behind a rock. But if you look at the perimeter of the animal's enclosure, there's often a worn track.
KATY: Yeah, absolutely.
ANDREA: These animals just, they'll just go around and around. and around and around and around. They really need more room and they're just pushing the edges of this tiny, relatively tiny compared to what they need, you know, zoos do their best. Elephants will sway their trunks. Chickens can feather peck. They pluck each other in a brutal ... it's not even an aggressive way. It's just actually repeated plucking, repeated plucking until perhaps there's some blood and then they do get a bit aggressive. They can kill each other. It's pretty ugly. And that's a massive problem in laying hens. That's why the beaks of those...
KATY: ...are trimmed.
ANDREA: ...are trimmed. Pigs will chew each other's tails. And that's why they cut their tails off. They clip their teeth. And this is the reflection again of their needs not being met. And so instead of meeting their needs, we mutilate them.
KATY: Yeah. So signs of stress. I just feel like overall, collectively needs are being met less and less. The needs that things have are not being met as we're meeting more wants and desires and extra things. So we're still busy meeting things all day long but they're not the needs. If we just talk about sleep and fresh water, fresh air, fresh food, the basic foundational ... rest. Those are things that people are just struggling with every day all day long and to trim away from the not necessary to meet the need is tricky. And to not really acknowledge the signs of not meeting the needs. As you're talking about, you know, these behaviors that are indicators. To me, they're indicators of how the environment is doing. How the animals or the people are doing with an environment and, you know, they're going off. So my question would be, what are ways that you are addressing it? You wrote a book. You've written a book to sort of help people recognize what the chickens are saying in this case. And I love that you brought this - you wrote this book at a time where there's food insecurity. Food prices are going up. More people are perhaps - I know this was an issue in New Zealand where more people were perhaps - going to keeping backyard chickens for food security or food prices and you wanted to make sure if they were going to do it that they did it in a way that worked for the chickens as well. What else have you done to address this thing that triggered you to go into this whole field so many years ago?
ANDREA: Well, for many years I did eat meat actually. I don't know, I just put things into two compartments. (laughs) What I knew about animals, I thought, and what I ate. And then I write about animal welfare. So there's not many people around the world that really understand animal welfare science, take the time to look at what's happening in the industry, and put the two together and try and explain "this is really wrong." So in those I think are widely read within New Zealand, those articles. But in the process of doing that, yeah, I read very closely some of the things that were happening in New Zealand, which is said to have the best animal welfare legislation in the world. But I can tell you it's not saying very much. So what was being pushed back against by industry in terms of the changes that the scientists wanted to see made, just little things that should seem so obvious. And it just made me realize the full, kind of ... I just became horrified. In fact, it was just one night in particular, I was reading about what's happening with dairy cows. And there are a few things. And it just, I was just overcome with nausea. And just, that was it. I am out. I am out. I am out. And from that night, I was out. So what do I eat? I don't eat meat. I eat, I do eat eggs from my own chickens. And I will eat fish that my husband or his friends have caught because they go fishing. Although, actually had less and less of that. Those things are really important to me to start with, but less and less of even those now. So yeah, big journey, big journey to change what you eat. Also, I was very really concerned about the health effects. So I did spend quite a lot of time like, oh my goodness, am I going to compromise my health if I do this? And in fact, all the evidence - and I am really used to reading scientific papers. Yeah, now all the evidence just pointed out, either I'm going to do, depending on what kind of realm you look at, either I'm going to make no, there'll be no problem for my health or it'll be way better. So I felt really confident that that was a good way to go. But yeah, recipes, cooking, satisfying other people in the family hasn't been particularly easy. But I love these kinds of challenging adventures.
KATY: Of course. And then what else is there to do? I think a lot about animals and AI, which we can talk about a little bit here in a second. But I had done, I did an interview for a magazine once, and, you know, they just wanted to see a day in my life. And I had put in, you know, some of our chicken care that was there, you know, because we, you know, we eat our eggs, it's a big source of, you know, protein and calories for us that is very ecologically sound. We've got extremely happy animals and they live their life there and we've got this great source. It's perfect. It's a nice exchange. But they wanted to take that section out because they were a vegan publication and didn't want to have anything... and the piece was about how we were doing it. So it made me think, what, where do the chickens go? Where do we, where do we want the animals to go? I definitely can see needing to change this idea that animals are here to serve us in some way. That could count as a life, right? Is to be entirely, simply for your consumption. That there's no other point to you as a being. But I do wonder where do they go. Would we distribute the animals that have been created, you know, that have been bred? They've been made. They didn't exist, and now they have exist. Should they become extinct? Should they be distributed and not produce anymore? I'm just always interested in the philosophical. And I don't expect you to answer it, but I do wonder if you have thought about that at all.
ANDREA: It wouldn't take very long to stop producing them because they have really short lives, the ones we eat. Really short. The chickens are 35 days, right?
KATY: Yeah.
ANDREA: And these animals that we eat all have wild ancestors. There might not be many left. So it's not like if we stopped breeding them ... we'd be sending things extinct. I don't think there's any situation where there are no wild ancestors remaining. The wild ancestors aren't the ones that have been bred to be ... with pigs now there's more piglets than there are teats on the mother. So in fact you'd actually be taking them back to a kind of more balanced physical presence.
KATY: Right.
ANDREA: I don't know the answer with pets. I really struggle with it. Because I really love my cat. I love my cat. And I know people feel the same about their dogs. I mean obviously, you don't need to keep breeding these animals. Mostly these breed these animals are really kind of controlled way. So it wouldn't take very long for that to stop. Some vegans love their pets some vegans think people shouldn't even have pets because, in fact, you're keeping them for your own pleasure and gratification. And I see both sides of it.
KATY: Yeah.
ANDREA: But I know the pull we have on our pets. There's plenty of people would rather go vegan than lose their pet. It's a really strong pull. Yeah.
KATY: Well, and I think there's many different ways that we can make alterations to so many of our behaviors in a way that is comfortable to take - to remove some of the tremendous burden that we've placed on everything. There's going to be an acceptable level for you, whether it's reducing how many, how often you eat meat or how many animals you're eating from or where you're getting it. There's so many different ways. Or maybe you're not gonna touch your diet but you would go out and become more aware of animals in general. That is one of the things that I think I'd also like to put a question forth to you would be, I do think that we're sort of not fluent in animal. We're not fluent in animals and what they are. They're sort of objectified. They are a commodity in many cases. How would you recommend that people listening to this ... you know I went to that bird language class and sort of the secret lives of birds became more aware to me. And then I became more aware of them. And then it changes the relationship that I am in with them. What would you suggest people do to increase their fluency in animal?
ANDREA: I think the best way really is to do the kind of slightly formal thing you've done and, in fact, go on a course. But also the slightly less formal thing is just hanging out with people that do really understand them. Because you know if you go for a walk with someone for example who's really passionate about spiders and knows a lot about spiders, especially a teenager or child. Because if they're excited about the spider they find they're gonna tell you stop and tell you all about it. Or as an adult might think oh you know that's not socially acceptable and I'll just keep walking and we'll talk about the local gossip or whatever. But being with people who really understand any aspect of animals or insects or fish or whatever, and asking them. Overtly giving them permission to tell you more and more about them is a really great way. I'm not sure if we really do get it just by going for walks through a forest and not have it ... It's like we need someone else with the key to open that up.
KATY: A translator. We need a translator.
ANDREA: We need a translator and then once you've got it you've kind of got it but it's I think that's a really fantastic way. I don't know whether, obviously when you live with a pet or you work with animals you do get to understand a lot about that species. You won't get to understand everything, without, again, a translator. But what I do notice is that there's a lot of people that adore their cats and dogs, but think nothing of eating factory farm pigs. So I don't necessarily think that understanding and adoring animals that we've put in the category of lovely, friendly pets. We're absolutely horrible at transferring that to other animals, which will have, you know, where we're talking big things like fear and pain. A pig feels it the same as your child. Neurologically, the nerve pathways are all the same. Well, my cat's got bad teeth, I'll spend lots of money and I'll take him to the vet to fix his teeth. But that cat's distress is no worse overall than the chicken's distress or the calf's distress taken away from its mother. So yeah, I don't think that learning about one animal necessarily opens your mind to other animals. A little bit, but perhaps if you let it, if you open that doorway.
KATY: Yeah, well, we have a hard time doing that for even people, you know what I mean, let alone an animal. It's a very, it's the same. sort of phenomenon. It's like, "I love this person. These people over here, I can't really make the leap." I do like that point. I think for many people, you will have access to animal biologists, experts, translators, if you will, of all different types where you live. You just have to seek them out. You know, there are probably conservation projects happening wherever you live. And to reach out and see if there's an education night. If there's a night where, or there's special situations where you get to ... we've been able to do things with mountain lions and bears here, just because they're here. I live in a very particularly wild area. But I know that there are people everywhere trying to get people interested in the problems that are being created by the people who live in the area sometimes too. This is not necessarily factory-farmed animals. But this could even be wild animals that similarly - because like where we live traffic and cars have become, have created basically a physical barrier that is preventing the animals from moving off of the peninsula to their eventual total demise. Because there's no way for them to meet their breeding needs, you know, and it just, and it seems like, well, they've got, they've got a really huge backyard. They've got a 3 million acre backyard. But it's not enough because it's not as easy as saying you could get your life's worth of movement in a backyard. There are some things like migrations. You can't put all the whales and you know you can't put them in a pond and create a cubic feet equivalent of water because it's the thing with natural movement is it's nuanced. And sometimes it evolves long-distance traversing for example.
ANDREA: I think can I just jump in there Katy and say there's also that kind of issue that with animal movement, that sometimes we're forcing too much of it.
KATY: That's right.
ANDREA: We don't have wild native mammals in New Zealand. The only ones that live on land are little bats, and then we have marine mammals, but there's no native mammals. No land mammals apart from the little bats that fly. But because we've cleared so much of our land to make farms, it's just little pockets of habitat that are suitable for these bats. They're now being forced to fly really long distances perhaps to find enough food to find their mates. We have these godwits - birds that spend our summer in New Zealand - so they're here now and they'll be getting ready to fly to the Arctic. They do this enormous flight to the Arctic. They're kind of wading birds and they nest in the Arctic. Then when they've nested, they fly all the way back to New Zealand. But they stop and they have little feeding patches on the way. But in some places, the estuaries that they stop and feed on to refuel are being destroyed so they can't stop. So we're forcing too much movement in some cases.
KATY: We're just messing with the right movement. I guess there's a pressure for the ones that can survive that change, but then there's always the chance that none of them survive, which is always what the concern is.
ANDREA: And a lot of species have gone extinct already.
KATY: Right.
ANDREA: This is what happens, yeah.
KATY: Regularly. Regularly. The one thing I wanted to add in about AI - I had mentioned it to you was I'm a big fan of the science fiction writer, Ted Chiang. And he has this - he's not a very prolific writer. He writes very few pieces, but they're superb, and that he's worked on them for years. He has one short story that was about the development of AI and how people could interact with their AI. They would raise their AI from infants. And in this story, the AI is sort of developing, just in the same way that a child would, you know, you come with not as deep of an understanding of what's going on, but then you, you know, you learn more context and you're becoming more aware and understanding and you're interacting with more people and they treat you in different ways. And so you're just learning. This AI goes through its phase of being cherished and then eventually objectified and then more terrible things along the way as people are able to utilize something that they see as less for their own desires or whims or whatever that human thing is that we have. And in an interview, he had written about this piece where he really felt that we shouldn't create AI because we had yet to create anything that we hadn't completely just eventually treated as irrelevant. To bring another new thing and then just to sort of cast it aside as being less and then now you've got another giant pool of mistreated ... He was talking about animals. It's sort of the same thing making these things for ourselves. But we don't have - we have no track record yet of honoring anything that we've created in this way. So anyway, I just think about animals and AI a lot.
ANDREA: Peter Singer is a philosopher. I don't know if you've come across him. He's Australian, but he's been taught at Princeton for a long time and he's very interested in animal ethics and animal welfare and writes beautifully. And he's just written a piece on AI with another author and animals. And he made three ... He did make that point actually. That AI could, you know, if we were treating these AI creatures or robots, badly, what are the ethical implications of that, which is exactly what you've just been talking about. He talked about a couple of, well, two or three positive possibilities with AI. One was that perhaps some of the animal testing that goes on could be replaced by AI. Perhaps self-driving cars could be trained to avoid wildlife on roads. Perhaps, I believe this is happening, AI has been used to explore plants and seeds, lots of plant parts. Perhaps even stuff that's currently considered to be waste that could create meaty tasting foods to satisfy people who didn't want to eat, but love the flavor. So those all are positive. But yeah, I think I got the sense that his overwhelming concern was that AI will be used to surveil factory farms instead of the human carers can become very good at picking up the signs of disease and things like that, thereby enabling even more animals to be packed together. And that it all would depend what you programmed into the AI. Yes, you could actually program in signs of psychological distress and all that. But given how hard it is to get decent animal welfare rules now, how easy, really, is it going to be to get those things put in there realistically? You think about who's controlling the ... who's lobbying for the regulations. Who's paying for the stuff? And so the likelihood is that it's going to be all about, you know, more profit, more profit, more profit from a smaller piece of land probably. So yeah, I would share his concerns on that.
KATY: Well, I like the balance. I always appreciate it a well -surveiled argument. So I'll look into that. All right, well, anything else that you wanted to add? I really appreciate everything that you've got done so far. So many needs. So little time. so little space. Okay, well, did you have a book? I'm trying to start - I get so many questions about like, "What's a good book to keep reading?" So I thought I would start summing up some of these interviews with a book that you suggest.
ANDREA: Well I don't think I have a book that exactly hits the nail on the head of what you want. Peter Singer has a book called Animal Liberation and he's just re-released it called Animal Liberation Now. It was very old, very famous, beautifully written. It's not just about vegan activism. He's a very serious intellectual. philosopher but writes in such an accessible way. I'd really recommend anything by him really. David Attenborough's The Life of Birds really inspired me recently. David Attenborough has inspired so many of us over the years so that's a fantastic book. Just from the nesting behaviour to the migration and yeah lots of movement there tucked into it. Stories that just make you marvel at nature.
KATY: Yes, all of that. I've got one. One is What the Robin Knows by Jon Young. And that was some of the source material I think for that bird language class that I had mentioned previously. And then another one of my favorite books, they brought it to show it to you. I know no one else is able to see, but it's called Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture. And when my kids were young, I had bought them this really beautiful children's book. It was probably more of an older, like a book for 10 or 11-year-olds. And it showed all the different nest types of all the different birds. And when my kids were a little bit older, some of their schooling required that children. learn that, you know, the kids of the class learn house-building techniques of the world that had sort of come up in different traditions of people. And what are the styles of the houses that they make? And they made models of all of them. So, for example, we had my daughter had chosen the housing structure of the early people people coming from Ireland, where her family line is from. And it was weaving wood and then covering it with mud. And she harvested all the materials and made a small model, but it was like a way of connecting. But one of the things that's really beautiful in, it wasn't in this book, but it was in some other research that I read is that the animal houses that persist are very simple and made by these simple repetitive movements. That this is sort of the characteristic of an animal that persists with its housing. And I'm always thinking about how far we've come as people technologically, but as our houses move away, as our dwellings move away, for most of the people living on the planet, from very simple designs that you're constantly working on like animals are constantly working on building their shelters, how challenging it would be for someone to be able to make their own home now with the simple repetitive movements. This is why I study animals and non-human animals sort of at the same time to keep that bigger picture in mind. It's like, what would it be like to create a simple shelter? Camping is always a fun way of, you know, throwing up a simple shelter. But there are many people who live in houses that are, we would call them rudimentary, but they're just simple repetitive motions using available materials that are close. And anyway, I'll send you this book if you want to read it.
ANDREA: I can find it here, Katy. The postage between America and New Zealand now is absolutely crazy, far too expensive.
KATY: True.
ANDREA: But thank you. I can, I've written it down and I will find it. Yeah, I heard something recently in these, again, these people had got some, they're talking to some hunter-gatherers. And they're like, "So how long did it take you to build your house?" And they said, "Well, you know, everyone helped me and it was done in two weeks."
KATY: Yeah.
ANDREA: And this person living in England, I think, and he was like, "Well, you know, it's gonna take me 30 years to pay off my mortgage." I was like, "What would you rather have, actually?" I think I'd rather have the former."
KATY: Yeah, I mean, it just is, it fits well into the model of that's what you're doing is sort of your work of living. I was just listening to some interviews about what's the best ways to help communities that need income/money around the globe. And is it better to give small payments or one big payment? And actually replacing the grass roof with a corrugated metal roof was a good investment in the sense of... if you have to constantly be replacing your grass roof, there's no way to ever start participating in this global economy that's slowly taking... you know, so it's just, just to throw that out there to balance it all out. As our work, you know, for chickens, who are still just only being chickens, you know, and not having to also have a job and then do their chicken work on the side. These are complex philosophical discussions. I just appreciate you starting with me a little bit.
ANDREA: It has been a really great pleasure, Katy. Thank you for having me.
KATY: Yes, thank you so much.
That was Dr. Andrea Graves, author of What Your Chickens Want You to Know. You can order a copy from her New Zealand publisher. If you're keen, you can find a link in the show notes. And thanks everyone for listening. Now, go. Get going. Go outside. Go. Go. Get down. Go on. Go on.
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Hi, my name is Hannah from St. Louis. This has been Move Your DNA with Katy Bowman, a podcast about movement. We hope you find the general information in this podcast informative and helpful, but it is not meant to replace medical advice and should not be used as such. Our theme music was performed by Dan MacCormack. This podcast was produced by Brock Armstrong and is transcribed by Annette Yen. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to audio. And find out more about Katy, her books, and her movement programs at NutritiousMovement.com.
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