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The Current Transcript for July 28, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

So when you put a lure, Pokémon get attracted to the area and so do people. So everyone right now is in this park because there’s three lures going off at once.

LAURA LYNCH: This summer’s craze features cartoon characters, smartphones and crowds of people roaming the streets staring at their phone screens. Pokémon Go is a game and a popular one. But some critics say it really isn’t just fun and games. We take a look at race, class and Pokémon. And then…

SOUNDCLIP

It’s really important that we respect these animals’ unique qualities and allow them to express them.

[pigs squealing and snorting]

LL: Julia Smith is talking about pigs. The BC pig farmer believes in giving her hogs a good life before the slaughter – the paradox of being compassionate to animals but also eating them. I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Pokemon Go shows how technology reflects real-world biases, says prof

Guests: Renee Sieber, Suresh Venkatasubramanian

SOUNDCLIP

So… this is one of the most common Pokémon in the game. It’s called a Rattata and he generally kind of pops up everywhere. Right now, he’s kind of standing right in front of us so you can turn on the augmented reality so it actually shows you your surrounding and it pops up on the screen. So when you toss your Pokéball at him, you try to catch him. That’s how you catch a Rattata. [laughs] So, essentially the point of the game, to me, is—there is a 150 Pokémon that you have to catch. You’ve got to catch every single one of them, at least that’s the goal. And basically, yeah. It uses like a GPS map, like a Google Map sort of, and then they kind of plot all the pieces on the map. And then Pokéstops are little locations on the map that are, whether they’re historic sites, whether they’re graffiti, different cool art pieces, whatever it may be, basically they’re different spots on the map where you can pick up different items, so like a potion or a Pokéball, or certain things that help you assist through the game. Honestly, it’s great. I just got a puppy actually, and I’m pretty sure she’s gotten more exercise than she ever thought she would. [laughs] And all in the name of the game, which is great. So, no complaints.

LL: Okay, that was Courtney Mendez, a Pokémon Go enthusiast here in Toronto. And he’s just one of many around the world who have downloaded the game. Despite its popularity and that explanation we just got, there are likely a lot of people still confused about Pokémon Go and honestly, that includes me. [laughs] But I'm still going to try to fill in the blanks. So imagine opening on your smartphone an app with a digital map of your hometown. At certain spots on the map, you'll see little animated characters or in the parlance, Pokémon. So you head out in the real world to try and find and capture the characters plotted on the map. Capture them on your phone. So once you find a character, don't forget, character’s only an animation you see on your phone screen. You then use the buttons on your phone and video game style play to try to capture the character. As Pokémon Go player Courtney Mendez just said, he's got no complaints. To him, it's a bit of fun and incidentally a bit of exercise. But some people see racial, cultural and socio-economic bias, even in this world of cute animated creatures. So to better understand how this is playing out in Pokémon Go and why it matters beyond the game, I'm joined by Renee Sieber. She is a professor of geography at McGill University and jointly appointed with the School of Environment and affiliated with the School of Computer Science. Renee Sieber is in our Montreal studio. Hello.

RENEE SIEBER: Hi there.

LL: What is your take on the Pokémon Go phenomenon?

RENEE SIEBER: Well first of all, my field is computational geography so I both build maps and I also socially critique maps. So this is like, better than sliced bread for me because it's about mapping, it's about something called location based services and it's something about, something called augmented reality. So first of all, it's wonderful.

LL: I hear a but there. [laughing] But?

RENEE SIEBER: But… These games are built by humans and therefore, they contain all the biases of humans. So for example, Pokémon Go, the modern iteration from Niantic—

LL: Niantic is a company that runs it.

RENEE SIEBER: Correct.

LL: Yes.

RENEE SIEBER: It is and by the way, Niantic is headed by John Hanke, who brought Google—brought us Google Earth. So hence the enthusiasm about mapping.

LL: Right.

RENEE SIEBER: So. But… It is seeded with a prior game from Google, in which thousands and thousands of people identified good places to put characters. They obviously would travel only to certain places at certain times of day. The characters—this is a game called Google Ingress. They were largely white guys of you know, around 20 years old. So the biases of these players is built inevitably into the locations of some of these characters.

LL: Okay, let me make sure I understand. So the previous iteration of this game had certain stops already set up on these maps and you're saying that these were all decided by a certain race and a certain group.

RENEE SIEBER: Yes. So, they had stops already put into the map and people added places.

LL: Okay. So, earlier this week, a writer from New Jersey named Kendra James observed there were fewer Pokémon in her primarily black neighbourhood compared to the majority white neighbourhood beside it. Does that surprise you?

RENEE SIEBER: Hardly.

LL: Okay. How does something like that come to be?

RENEE SIEBER: Well, we talk about a lot of parts of computers as though they're neutral, as though they're objective. And they come from data and that data has biases built into them. So if you have a bunch of white guys—no disrespect to white guys—playing this game, then they're going to go to places where they're comfortable.

LL: What—do you see other biases reflected in the game?

RENEE SIEBER: Well, there are obvious biases like… We think it's OK for white guys, white people to be standing in one place at one time, studiously looking at a location, holding their phone up. So the way the game works is, in the augmented reality portion, is that you let your camera lens be open so you’re seeing what you would normally see without the phone but the phone is front of your face and then the characters appear on top of what you're seeing. Well, you know, if a white person is looking like he or she is photographing a place for a long period of time, we probably don't think twice about it unless a person is in the middle of an intersection, a street. If it's a minority, because of our built-in biases, maybe we're going to think twice about that individual.

LL: Well that's interesting because that's biases in the real world being brought into the biases that you're seeing in a game. I want to talk about how though the game has touched a nerve here in Canada too. Kym Gouchie was visiting her father's grave in a First Nations burial ground in Prince George, BC, last weekend when she came across someone there playing Pokémon Go. And she told CBC's Betsy Trumpener what happened when she approached the men. Have a listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

My first question was are you playing Pokémon Go? And he said yeah. I said you realize this is a burial site? And he said yeah it says it right here on my phone. And so he turned his phone to me and he pointed over at the—there’s like an altar, like a circular cement structure and there’s an altar in it, and it has some scriptures and such, and some carvings of the clan and such. And he says this is actually what's called a Pokéstop. And I'm like you've got to be kidding me. I said do you know why this is so sacred? Do you know why this is so wrong? It's because this land right here where we're standing was once my ancestral land. This is the one little piece of land, which happens to be our burial grounds, inside Prince George that is ours. And you guys are disgracing it, disrespecting it I should say. But they don't know.

LL: And we've seen sort of similar consternation playing out in places like Auschwitz in the Holocaust Museum, at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, people being offended by the fact that these Pokémon stops are in those places. I'm wondering how you think it came to be the Pokéstops were designed into these kinds of areas.

RENEE SIEBER: Oh, they're deliberately designed into these areas because many Pokémon are associated with spiritual sites. So part of what fascinates me about Pokémon Go is the amount of spatial analysis that went into locating the creatures. So a number of them show up at churches and synagogues and cemeteries. Unfortunately, that could be a big problem at the places you just mentioned. Spiritual sites for Indigenous people, Holocaust site. So in addition to Pokémon showing up in the Holocaust Museum, at the Smithsonian, they showed up at the gates of Auschwitz.

LL: But who thought this was a good idea? [chuckles] I guess that's what we're trying to get at. Who thought it was a good idea to put them there?

RENEE SIEBER: Well, you know, I’m a bit ambivalent about this because on the one hand, there is great value in a game that gets you out of your house and away from your game and experience the real world and meet other people. But on the other hand, if you're going to associate characters with specific features that can be a problem. And this is one of the great things about the game. If you have water related Pokémon, they are next to rivers and streams. So they have been specifically located next to these geographic features. One of the big problems with Niantic is that they're very reluctant to remove locations from the game.

LL: Right. But I guess what the problem that some people see is that the people who decided to put them in these sensitive spots maybe didn't have the sensitivity built into them as human beings that they probably should have had when they picked them.

RENEE SIEBER: You're absolutely right. They should have thought of that. [chuckles]

LL: [chuckles] Renee. Renee, I want to—I have someone else I want to bring into the conversation now because the issues that we're talking about here aren't unique to Pokémon Go. My next guest says bias exists within big data and algorithms and technology and that bias has an impact on people every day. Suresh Venkatasubramanian is an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and he is in Salt Lake City. Hello.

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: Hi.

LL: I'm wondering—first of all Suresh, can you explain because it's what behind, this is something called an algorithm. What is an algorithm?

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: So, an algorithm, of course in the most generic term, is a sequence of instructions for performing a task. A well sequence of well-defined instructions. The algorithms that get used in most big data contexts are a subclass called machine learning algorithms, typically. These are algorithms that try to learn from data and build a model to predict what’s going to happen in the future. So they’re really meta-algorithms, they’re algorithms for learning algorithms, really.

LL: But behind all of that is human beings.

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: In the sense that it is humans who provide the training data for the algorithms. It’s humans who conceive of—who designed the various choices that go into building such a model. And it's—and yes. So they're part of the process.

LL: [chuckles] Can you give us a few examples of how algorithms play out in our everyday lives?

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: Sure. So one of the most talked about examples right now in the US is in criminal justice. So there are models that will—given the results of a survey with someone who's coming up for parole say, 135-question survey will put it, will plug into a model and spit out a 10—on a 10-point scale—a risk of recidivism. For example, the risk of re-committing a crime within six months or the risk of re-committing a crime within two years. This 10-point scale is then converted into a low, medium or high risk of recidivism and is provided to a judge who will then use that as part of the decision making as to whether this person should get parole or not.

LL: And okay. So those people who are in jail. How about someone who's trying to find a job?

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: Oh yes. So in hiring for example, because of the volume of applicants for a job, a company might choose to use a resume processing service, a CV processing service, that will scan your CV, do some automatic analysis on it based on some predictive model and then decide which CVs might be appropriate to push up to the next level or rank all the CVs based on their seeming appropriateness for the job. That's hiring. And of course if you're applying to go to college, college admissions [unintelligible] use a lot of metrics to figure out the likelihood of success in college and then use that to build a model for who's going to do well. Getting a credit—getting a loan and then building a credit score, that's of course been around for a long time. So there's many many examples like this.

LL: Renee, what do you think the public needs to understand about algorithms? And I'm not talking just about the ones that underlie a game like Pokémon, but these other algorithms that inform other parts of our lives.

RENEE SIEBER: Well, I'd say two things. One is algorithms are not a new thing. So algorithms: A equals B plus C—an algorithm. We have had algorithms, for example, to decide where to put the ATM machines and where not to put them. So we have lived with them for a long time. And the second thing is that technology is not neutral, it's not objective. The data is not objective, the algorithms are not objective. They're built by humans and they embed the biases of humans and it's always important for us to understand that. And third, it's important for at least somebody to understand the entirety of the algorithm. And my concern is that we're going to be building algorithms that nobody understands the outcomes of.

LL: Suresh, I’m wondering if you agree with Rene's assessment about whether algorithms are in fact not neutral.

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: I think that generally speaking, it's—I would say it's not that they're not neutral by default, is that it's very easy to introduce biases without thinking about them. So it’s more or less I agree with what Renee is saying here. And I think one of the things that people don't often realize is that many of the models that we use to make predictions—and I want to distinguish models from algorithms because there is an algorithm used to build a model and the model itself is a kind of algorithm used to make predictions—is that these models are very complicated and they're just by design. They're effective because in many cases they're very complicated and that complexity makes it very hard to understand exactly why they make the predictions they're predicting. I mean, you can actually look at the code of the algorithm but that doesn't really tell you why a certain prediction is being made and that's where some of the challenges in doing research in this topic come in.

LL: It sounds like a lack of transparency.

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: That's one aspect of it. So you could—definitely and people have argued if you could look at the code being used, for example, to make such a predictive decision, that would help. It's not the whole story though because if I have an algorithm that says well, I took all your information and I took, you know, 3.2 times the number of words in a name plus 4.7 times the location, the latitude of where you live and the number is greater than 53 and therefore you should be given a loan. Now, this algorithm might work but you have no idea why it's working even if I told you what it's doing. So it's not enough merely to have information about what the predictive model is doing. You have to understand, as Renee mentioned, a sort of an end to end understanding of what exactly was used to build the model.

LL: So I'm wondering, Suresh—just a bit of a challenge for you to help us all understand things better. When it comes to the way an algorithm is built, for example, about what you said about jobs, what is going into that algorithm that might disadvantage certain people?

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: Okay. So the way these algorithms typically work—the way these models are trained—is that you collect a bunch of training data, which means you have a collection of CVs, maybe from past applicants—

LL: A collection of what, sorry?

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: A collection of resumes.

LL: Thank you. Okay.

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: From people who maybe you've hired in the past and you've tagged each of these resumes with some information saying how well they did at their job. Okay? So you have this data already given to you. This is what is called your training data. Now you put this into a machine learning system that will learn a rule for mapping the resume to a prediction about how well they will do, again based on this training data. And then you will use that model you have learned to apply to someone new who you've not seen before. And so the challenge here is that the problem is that in the training data, right, you, for example, have collected data on people you've hired for the job. So in particular, anyone you have not hired for the job is not there in your sample and they may have been a very good applicant, you may have made a mistake on them but you will never know because you don't have the data. And for people whom you have hired for the job and you’ve labeled as being productive or not, maybe that label of productivity itself comes at some past historical biases and that all your algorithm is going to do is learn that rule, let bias rule for determining productivity.

LL: So what you're suggesting is that the algorithm would screen out a lot of potential candidates and only select from a very narrow field.

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: If it's given data in a certain way, yes.

LL: Okay. So, Renee Sieber, given all of this context now, how surprised should we be that Pokémon reflects biases like race, class and gender?

RENEE SIEBER: We shouldn’t. We should still enjoy the game but we should be cognizant that first of all, there are biases and second of all, look around you. [chuckles] Learn something about where you are more than what the game is showing you.

LL: And in fact, I think that that is one of—cited as one of the benefits—is that people are seeing parts of the world that they wouldn't have even known about before.

RENEE SIEBER: Yes. There are a lot of people searching for Pokémon a couple nights ago at Cabot Square in Montreal and you know, there are a lot of Indigenous homeless people who are in Cabot Square at night. You know, it’d be kind of nice not to push those people out and to talk to them, say hello and get to know a little bit of their story.

LL: Okay. So then we get to this very critical point and we only have about a minute left. Can anything be done to take the bias out of the algorithms? Most of these are in the hands of private enterprise. So I don't know. Can regulation help? What do you do?

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: So there are a number of ways in which this can be done and in fact, there is a lot of active research happening in the community, in the computer science and other communities right now. Regulation is one aspect of this but I think before we even have regulation, we're trying to investigate how to build algorithms that themselves encode some ideas of you know, compensating for bias and discrimination of data. There are ways of trying to strip old bias from the data being used to train the models. There are ways to audit algorithms to make them more accountable to understand how they're making the decisions they are. So there's a whole constellation of ideas being pushed forward now, to try and understand some of these things. And I do have a funny anecdote. I was just at a workshop where we're talking about all of these issues and this was in a small village in the middle of nowhere and we discovered that old castle where we were working at had become a Pokégym. [chuckles]

LL: [chuckles] Oh my. Alright, well, listen. Thank you to both of you for helping to eliminate this part of the world a little bit more. It certainly helped me understand it. Thank you.

RENEE SIEBER: Thank you.

SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN: Thank you very much.

LL: Bye-bye. Suresh Venkatasubramanian is an associate professor of computing at the University of Utah. He was in Salt Lake City. Renee Sieber is a professor at McGill University and she was in Montreal. We reached out to Niantic Incorporated, the company that created Pokémon Go and asked for comment but we did not hear back from the company. Well, coming up next, the dilemma of the compassionate carnivore. I'm Laura Lynch and you are listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Is 'ethical meat' helping pigs or salving consciences?

LL: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current. Coming up, what it really means to be humane in the meat industry.

[Music: Theme]

LL: When it comes to eating meat, it wasn't so long ago that the biggest moral dilemma it posed was whether to include it in your diet. Eating meat or choosing not to was more or less a black and white issue. But for meat eaters among us, it's been getting increasingly gray. Today, many people who consume meat have questions about what kind of life the animal led, how it was treated before reaching their plate. They are questions that omnivores can no longer ignore and they are forcing some producers to draw a line in the sand. The CBC’s Elaine Chau has been biting into these questions for her documentary, The Pig Eater’s Dilemma, which first aired on The Current on January the 27^th. And just a word of warning, what follows contains material some listeners may find disturbing.

SOUNDCLIP

Oh goodness, who wants some clean sheets? Oh yeah. Come on kids!

[Pigs oinking]

ELAINE CHAU: Julia carries bundles of hay into the barn for her pigs to play in. About 15 of them sidle right up, crowding around her. She gets on her knees and meets them face to snout. Two of them plopped down, one pink, the other brown with black spots, offering up their bellies for a rub.

JULIA SMITH: I’m the best pig belly rubber in Burnaby.

ELAINE CHAU: As I watch them, I'm pretty sure the one below my feet is actually smiling.

JULIA SMITH: Our boar is probably about 800 pounds and he will still climb up on my lap if I let him. Right?

ELAINE CHAU: Julie bought her first pig a few years ago to help with the weeds on her vegetable farm.

JULIA SMITH: We like the snuggles. [pig snorts]

ELAINE CHAU: But there came a time when she had an epiphany of sorts, the moment she decided she would like to be a pig farmer.

JULIA SMITH: Maybe the day I taught Bacon and Chop to sit.

ELAINE CHAU: This is not what I expected.

[Pigs oinking]

JULIA SMITH: They're getting really big and belligerent and I mean, even two pigs can be hard to manage. You know, you’re trying to feed them and so, I thought it would be helpful to be able to give them some commands so that I could move around and you know, get the food into the trough without being trampled. And it literally took about 20 seconds. Just the same way I taught my dog how to sit. You take the treat and you move it back until their bum plunks down and you do that a couple times and I had these two pigs that sat on command and they come when they're called and it was just so much fun.

ELAINE CHAU: You might have thought teaching pigs pet tricks would motivate a person to up her veggie intake, not to begin raising animals for meat. But for Julia, there's no conflict here. Loving the pigs and sending them to slaughter. In part, she says she's a different breed of pig farmer. Julia belongs to a movement of farmers, chefs, and consumers who share the belief that there's a moral imperative to ensure before slaughter. Livestock has the best life possible.

JULIA SMITH: I want my animals to be living in an environment that allows them to do the things that they were built to do, the things that meet their emotional needs, whether it's a chicken being able to scratch in the ground for worms and bugs or a pig being able to root and scratch up against things. It's really important that we respect these animals’ unique qualities and allow them to express them.

ELAINE CHAU: It's why Julia gives her hogs about 10 times the space recommended by Canada's National Farm Care Council. She insists on providing them with organic food like veggie scraps and worries about her pigs’ emotional well-being, which means offering cuddling time.

[Pig squeals loudly]

JULIA SMITH: Pigs love eating but they also like to play.

ELAINE CHAU: Julia, and others like her, is vowing to up the ethical standards for the meat we eat.

JULIA SMITH: We don't have to wait for legislation and new laws to come around and change the system. We just have to stop buying things that aren't in line with our personal values.

ELAINE CHAU: There are different names for Julia's approach. Slow meat, ethical meat, cruelty-free meat, humanely raised meat, even happy meat. It's not new, but, right now, this desire to put animal rights on the table appears to be at a peak. Butchers, restaurants, farms, and grocers are increasingly providing details regarding where their meat came from, how the animals were treated and what they were fed. Grass fed, free-range, organic, antibiotic-free. There are even apps available to help people with so-called humane eating, an oxymoron to some. For a farmer like Julia, it means satisfying work.

JULIA SMITH: Especially during the summer, we can go out and run around in the fields with them and play with them. It's just really enjoyable.

ELAINE CHAU: And as much as it is about helping her animals have a good life, albeit a short one, it's also obviously about their death. After all, there are limitations for the well-being of livestock. What's crucial, Julia says, is giving the pigs a peaceful death. Something that wasn't that easy the first time when her first two pigs, Bacon and Chop, became bacon and pork chop.

JULIA SMITH: I mean, I'd really prepared myself for it. Like I said, I had taken the time to deal with my own emotional process in a way that didn't impose it on the pigs. I had my little cry out in the sunset and you know, I guess I was more just apprehensive. I wasn't feeling sad particularly or guilty. I mean, I was sad that my pigs that I've been playing with all summer were going to be gone, but I mean, let's not kid ourselves. I knew that was going to happen from the very beginning. I had become very attached to them but this was all part of the deal.

ELAINE CHAU: After all, D-Day is still D-Day. Julia describes that day with a mix of wistfulness and pride.

JULIA SMITH: That day I was there just for my pigs. It was really important to me that they were having a day like any other day. Took them their favourite breakfast and gave them a good scratch and then it was over. And I mean, it was only hard on the people that knew what was happening. It wasn't hard on the pigs.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, that’s stockmanship and the scientific research is very clear. Good stockmanship makes a more productive animal.

ELAINE CHAU: That's Temple Grandin, one of the world's leading experts on animal behaviour and a heroic figure for Julia.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Animals are not things. Pieces of steel and cars and stuff are things, but animals are not things.

ELAINE CHAU: By tenaciously working for decades with the American meat industry to improve standards, Temple has become so well-respected by animal rights activists, farmers and people in the meat industry. She's a bit of a legend, even inspiring books and films.

SOUNDCLIP

[MOVIE]

Mooing. You want to do research and write your Masters on mooing.

[movie dialogue running in background]

ELAINE CHAU: All because back in the day, this woman with autism, a condition she believes helps her to understand how animals think, confronted serious problems inside slaughterhouses.

SOUNDCLIP

[MOVIE]

Miss Grandin, this is a masterpiece.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, the handling of cattle in the seventies, you know, rough cowboy stuff, electric prods multiple times to get them going as fast as they could run, slamming into gates and you know, just horrible rough handling. Sometimes I just would put my hands on the animals and you could feel that they were scared. I think a lot of people today don't realize how bad things were in the bad old days.

ELAINE CHAU: Temple famously created the serpentine ramp, a curved cattle shoot that allows cows to wander naturally into a slaughterhouse, rather than being pushed through, dramatically lowering stress on the animals. The system’s design is used widely in North America. Another design she's proud of is a scoring system she created for the US government, one that tracked things like—

TEMPLE GRANDIN: How many cattle did you shoot on the first shot? How many cattle fell down during handling? How many pigs fell down during handling? How many animals were squealing in the stunning area? How many animals did you put an electric prod on? And we could put numbers on it and the advantage of putting numbers on it, is then you can tell am I getting better, am I getting worse? It worked like magic to have a big customer insisting on standards.

ELAINE CHAU: The slaughterhouse industry had begun to shift.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: And in 1999 and 2000, I saw more change, more improvement than I had seen in my career for 25 years prior that.

ELAINE CHAU: In fact, so much has changed that today, Temple is confident the industry is slaughtering animals humanely.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: The big companies right now are doing that.

ELAINE CHAU: So, this is where Julia and her hero part ways. Unlike Temple, Julia refuses to eat meat from fast food joints or from any big industry producers. She's fearful of abuses like those alleged last year at a Red Deer, Alberta hog facility.

SOUNDCLIP

Animals who are too sick or injured to walk are often ruthlessly killed.

ELAINE CHAU: Hidden surveillance footage released by the non-profit, Mercy for Animals Canada, showed pigs being beaten and kicked allegedly at the facility.

SOUNDCLIP

In plain view of government inspectors.

JULIA SMITH: I mean we see these videos, these horrible videos that are released of animals being really badly abused.

[animals squealing loudly]

ELAINE CHAU: The Canadian Food Inspection Agency launched an investigation after this video surfaced. The CFIA has “registered a review of the Western hog exchange situation with the agency's Inspection Verification Office and the Office of the Inspector General”.

JULIA SMITH: It’s one thing to point fingers at the guy with the bat that was caught on camera but we really need to take this back a few steps and wonder what he is doing there in the first place? How did this happen? You know, take it back from the slaughterhouse where the video was shot to the farm where all of these animals were loaded. So many animals loaded up into a truck and taken to this facility where too many animals are being moved through the system and to—why is this farmer raising this many animals in the first place? And if you take it back far enough it always comes back to consumer demand for cheap meat.

ELAINE CHAU: Having heard her share of abuse stories on animal farms, Temple Grandin believes it's not fair to blame everything on big industry.

TEMPLE GRANDIN: You get into a whole big-is-bad thing and what's bad is badly managed.

TERESA VAN RAAY: The pictures or the words again on the news are not always the good news stories and if we don't answer back to that then it becomes the assumption that that is the way that we raise our pigs. I’m Teresa Van Raay, and my husband and our two sons, we pig farm just outside of Dashwood and we've been doing this now for 33 years.

ELAINE CHAU: Teresa's Ontario farm is a big operation. They have thousands of hogs.

TERESA VAN RAAY: You have to raise your pigs properly, with care, with enough space, with good food, good air, otherwise you're not growing a safe product. When you're talking with other farmers, it's just a natural thing that you care for the animals. It's in your DNA, I guess? [laughs]

ELAINE CHAU: Working with an animal nutritionist, Teresa’s pigs are fed things like corn and soy, a healthy diet, she says.

SOUNDCLIP

TERESA VAN RAAY: He's feeding these little guys a special diet because they just arrived last week.

TERESA VAN RAAY: When you go into a pen and you see the pigs just scurry around and their skin is healthy, their bodies look—their ears are perky, it's—you know that they are happy. Happy, I guess is the word, content and being well cared for.

ELAINE CHAU: Yes, they don't get the same play time or the 80 square feet each that Julia provides, but in a country where Canadians eat an estimated 15 kg of pork per year, Teresa argues providing that kind of one on one time would make the meat too pricey.

TERESA VAN RAAY: With 3,500 pigs well, 6,000 on the farm a time, that would be so labour intensive and what that would do to add the cost to our consumer, is not the market that we are going to.

ELAINE CHAU: The point being, an average 500g package of bacon is nearly seven dollars. From Julia’s farm, that same quantity is 18 bucks.

TERESA VAN RAAY: In one year, we produce 954,000 kg of pork, so that feeds a lot of people and I'm very proud to say that I can guarantee that's healthy, nutritious and really easy to cook, in case you're wondering.

JULIA SMITH: We are enjoying a very, very delicious smoked pork loin chop here, topped with beautiful barbecue sauce.

ELAINE CHAU: Julia knows not all farmers or consumers are prepared to do what she does. And she admits her commitment to how she eats does have consequences.

JULIA SMITH: [laughs] We’re kind of obnoxious to have over for dinner right? We don't get invited to that many parties anymore. We couldn't do this if we weren't all in and the problem with being all in is you alienate people.

ELAINE CHAU: About a year ago, she was invited to speak at a sustainability conference and as soon as she glanced at the spread of food at the reception, she knew she didn't fit in.

JULIA SMITH: It was so meat-centric. I was surprised because you know, meat is expensive and usually at these things where there's free food, they pad it with a lot of vegetables and bread. And because I don't eat meat if I don't understand its provenance, I started asking questions. It was my turn to speak and I just kind of tossed what I was going to say and yeah, I had to say something, and so I had to say you know, making these choices is difficult and sometimes it's awkward. Like when you're at a sustainability event and it turns out you can't eat any of the food that's provided because it was all produced on factory farms. It just shows how far we still have to come. So, that was a little awkward I probably won't be invited back to speak at that.

JOHN SARNECKI: We are in this moral moment where I think we are expanding our concern.

ELAINE CHAU: John Sarnecki teaches philosophy at the University of Toledo. He studies how humans think, including how we think about animals and the ethics of eating them.

JOHN SARNECKI: Well, we're evolving in a moral sense. In a weird way, we are, as time goes on, we're increasing the circle of beings that we consider capable of moral consideration.

ELAINE CHAU: And the more we empathize with animals, he reasons, the more we begin to see them like us and the better the argument gets for vegetarianism. And that's tough because he's a meat eater.

JOHN SARNECKI: [chuckles] You know, one of the jokes I have with my students is that in teaching vegetarianism, I've created so many vegetarians over the years that karmically, I'm fine. I think that's a pretty bad argument but I'm hanging on to it for the short term.

ELAINE CHAU: For Sarnecki, while the efforts of the so-called ethical meat movement may be morally laudable, it may be in part more about solving one's conscience.

JOHN SARNECKI: I'm sure you know, things like making organic feed is probably not something a pig cares a great deal about. Moreover, it's probably not something that's going to have any impact on the pig, except as meat. These pigs aren't going to live a long time. They're going to die prematurely.

ELAINE CHAU: Having heard all this before, Julia knows she has critics. From those who suggest ethical meat may just be good marketing, the kind of makes people feel less guilty about their meat consumption, to those who balk at the price, uneasy with the idea such pork may only be for the well off. And of course, food dubbed happy meat has become fodder for satire, as in this opposite of the TV show, Portlandia.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: So, here is the chicken you'll be joined with tonight. His name was Colin.

VOICE 2: My friends had other chickens as friends.

ELAINE CHAU: Most of this doesn't bother Julia but there has been criticism that is much darker.

JULIA SMITH: Yeah, it was the first time we got protested. It was about three years ago I guess, and the phone calls just kept coming.

ELAINE CHAU: Messages saying things such as—

JULIA SMITH: You should die the way your animals do.

ELAINE CHAU: She filed a police report after getting four death threats.

JULIA SMITH: It's scary and really frustrating because I really believe in what I'm doing and I work really, really hard to really do right by these animals.

[footsteps]

MIKE DOWNEY: Vishnu. Athena. I’ve got a good way to bring you out—with chips, wild onion, and vegan chips. Come on out, guys, and get the good stuff. [pigs oinking] I can appreciate people that suggest that they love their pets, but when they kill them, that's not really love. It’s not love when you kill anything. Sorry.

[pigs eating]

ELAINE CHAU: Mike Downey, all six feet of him, broad shoulders and all is squeezed between his two pet pigs on a bed of hay in a backyard shed. Yes, you heard that right, these are pet pigs.

MIKE DOWNEY: These guys were supposed to be no bigger than 40 pounds when I first got them and now I have a beast with tusks.

ELAINE CHAU: Being so committed to these two pigs, Mike has doled out $7,000 worth of renovations to his home to accommodate them, building everything from a piggy urinal inside, to a tunnel outside. Mike is actually fighting for the right to keep Athena and Vishnu in his Victoria home but that's another story. He is, as you might have guessed, a vegan. But his views on so-called ethical meat might surprise you.

MIKE DOWNEY: So I tell them if they're going to eat that then thumbs up from me because obviously they've begun the stages of wanting to better themselves as people and consumers.

ELAINE CHAU: He figures if a consumer buys meat from producers who are as compassionate as they can be for hog farmers, this is the first step down an evolutionary road. Because, he says, the more you empathize with the animals you eat, the tougher it gets to be a carnivore, shades of our philosopher.

MIKE DOWNEY: I think there's been a point in a lot of our lives where we’ve been taught out of feeling empathy and this is something that I had to discover by getting two pets of my own that were considered agriculture animals. And through that, I've regained my empathy and all I'm here to do is try to inspire bringing back that empathy in others.

ELAINE CHAU: Mike used to be a meat eater.

MIKE DOWNEY: Well, I always told myself that one of these days I'm going to stop eating meat, but I was travelling all over the world fighting as a competitive fighter and I was raised to believe that meat consumption was necessary in order for me to achieve my goals in fitness. Three years ago I retired as a Canadian Muay Thai kickboxing champion and I kept thinking to myself what kind of a dog would I want? And then I found a picture on Facebook that said pigs are the fourth smartest animal on the planet. I'm like well, I always wanted the smartest dog, but if pigs are smarter than dogs, I’ll just get some pigs.

SOUNDCLIP

MIKE DOWNEY: Athena, do a figure-8. Yeah, Athena, do a figure-8. Yeah, figure-8. Good girl. [pig oinks] I taught them how to spin around and the first trick took me a day and it was super easy, taught them how to shake a hoof. Can you give me four?

ELAINE CHAU: My visit with Mike is a bit surreal as I can't help but note the similarities between his fondness for his pigs and Julia's. Our philosopher, John Sarnecki, acknowledges some farmers might be blurring the lines between pets and livestock and in doing so, neglect one particular perspective.

JOHN SARNECKI: And I think if we sort of take into account what’s a pig's natural inclinations, what do they want, what would make a pig happy, it might be very different than what Julia is imagining. I think we really have to treat animals with regard to what the animal wants or what the animal needs, rather than what we think the animal wants or the animal needs. Particularly, if we sort of map on our desires or we anthropomorphize their interests.

SOUNDCLIP

MIKE DOWNEY: Okay, what I want you to do is, I want you guys to do synchronize spinning. He’s spinning, yeah.

ELAINE CHAU: Mike Downey would never consider eating Athena and Vishnu. He can barely contain his enthusiasm for their willingness to do figure-8s.

SOUNDCLIP

MIKE DOWNEY: [laughs] And how about a kiss? Ah, come on, you missed. Ah, you got me.

ELAINE CHAU: There’s some licking action there.

MIKE DOWNEY: [chuckles] Yeah.

ELAINE CHAU: And as much as he applauds people for considering the welfare of animals they go on to eat, he hopes they will keep empathizing and empathizing and empathizing.

MIKE DOWNEY: There are a lot of people that do want to create change but they don't want to give up their meat. Then I highly suggest going to these farmers that are definitely more respectful to animals, yet I would suggest to them, [whispers] start growing some vegetables. [laughs]

[pigs oinking]

JULIA SMITH: This is spent brewery grains. That's what's left after the brewing process.

ELAINE CHAU: Julia doesn’t have any plans to only grow vegetables again. She's an unapologetic pig farmer and in for the long haul.

JULIA SMITH: It's not their most favorite thing, so to sweeten the deal, I will add some whey.

[slop being dumped in trough]

ELAINE CHAU: She dumps the feed in the trough for her pigs and they scurry towards the food.

SOUNDCLIP

[chickens squawking]

JULIA SMITH: They all want to eat out of this one trough. This is the best trough ever.

JULIA SMITH: I'm not trying to change the world. Personally, I think it's probably too late to change the world. This is just how I want to go down and so, if this is how you want to go down too, come over to my farm and join the farm-ily.

ELAINE CHAU: And that farm-ily is expanding. Julia just bought a 21-acre property and hopes to grow 200 pigs for market next year.

JULIA CHAU: I'm just doing things in a way that allows me to sleep really well at night. I mean, I fully accept that what we've done looks a little crazy. You know, giving up everything. You know, we've been living in a 200 square foot trailer for four years to make this work and it is definitely not for everyone. But I don’t know. I guess I'd like to think of it as you need a few crazy people like us to keep things moving forward, right?

[pigs snorting and chewing]

LL: And that was the CBC’s Elaine Chau bringing us her documentary, The Pig Eater’s Dilemma. Our documentary editor is Joan Webber. Now as you heard earlier in the show, Pokémon is causing a bit of controversy these days but it’s not the first time the Japanese animated characters have stirred things up in an American election year. During the 2012 US campaign to become the Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain looked to Pokémon for spiritual and moral guidance. Here is Herman Cain at a Republican candidates’ debate, quoting from the theme song of Pokemon: The Movie 2000. I’m Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

It is clear from the discussion tonight that America needs a leader and a uniter. I present growth. All of the issues that we talk about, if we don’t get this economic engine moving by putting fuel in the engine, all of the rest of it won’t matter. A poet once said life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line. We have a lot on the line. Send Washington a message and send a business problem solver to Washington, DC.

[Music: Ending theme]

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July 28, 2016 full episode transcript

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