Knowing Animals

Knowing Animals is an interview-driven series about animal studies scholarship and the moral, political, legal, and cultural questions that follow from it. It is serious without becoming theatrical. Each episode centers on a scholar or advocate and a defined piece of work, giving the guest room to build an argument rather than forcing every idea into a sound bite. The result is slower than most issue podcasts, but that patience is part of the point. Recent conversations ask what happens when liberal theories of justice move from cooperation to coexistence. They consider animals as possible subjects of political concern, not merely objects of human kindness. The show is especially interested in the difficult middle ground where humans still make decisions for animals but must answer to evidence, restraint, and moral responsibility. It also spends time with culture. Film, documentary, horror fiction, and Kafka become ways of thinking about activism, spectatorship, violence, and the unstable boundary between human and animal life. The range is wider than a single advocacy lane. One episode examines whether the environmental benefits of insect farming have been overstated. Another asks how animal consciousness should be studied as science and philosophy. Others bring animal ethics into DEI, future rights declarations, cultivated meat, education, laboratory testing, factory farming, and the effects of war in Gaza on human and non-human victims. The show can be demanding. It assumes listeners are willing to follow distinctions as they are made, revised, and tested. It is also unusually clear about why those distinctions matter. Knowing Animals works best for people who want academic ideas translated without being flattened, and who are prepared for animal ethics to touch politics, media, food, law, and grief.