August 17, 2025 • 15 mins
Original Air Date: August 17, 2025
Elizabeth Melampy is the author of “Forget The Camel: The Madcap World Of Animal Festivals & What They Say About Being Human”.
Elizabeth Melampy is the author of “Forget The Camel: The Madcap World Of Animal Festivals & What They Say About Being Human”.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio, Conversations about issues that matter.
Here's your host, three time Grasie Award winner, Shelley Sunstein.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I want to introduce you to Elizabeth mulampe. She's out
with a new book, Forget the Camel. So it's a
look at all these bizarre animal festivals we have all
over the country. Of course, the biggest one is in
punk Satawny, Pennsylvania, you know, on Groundhog Day, right, But
(00:35):
there's also the Rattlesnake Roundup that they have in this
town in Texas. There are just so many and you
think of them and you just think, oh, that's fun,
but you don't think of the animals.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Elizabeth is a lawyer whose work focuses on animal rights
and protection. She's a graduate of Harvard College and the
Harvard Law School and was named an Emerging Scholar Fellow
by the Brooks Institute for.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Animal Rights Law.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And your mom kind of inspired you with this book,
So tell us about that. Let's start with your mom, Elizabeth,
because you know that's one of the biggest influences on
your life.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
So, my grandmother was a veterinarian anthropologist who studied human
animal relationships, and my mom and my parents kept a
bunch of her sort of boxes of materials and things
after she died. Right before she died, she was working
on a book about animal festivals. It would have been
kind of like an academic anthology of festivals around the world,
(01:40):
things like the Running of the Bulls that you know,
kind of big international festivals we might all think of.
And during COVID, I basically, you know, opened a bunch
of these boxes of her materials. She died before she
could finish the book, or before she could even write
chapters or make too much progress. And so it was
a real personal joy to get to go through all
(02:02):
of those materials as a starting point for this book.
I certainly did tons of my own research, and I
added festivals she wasn't thinking about, But it was as
a really meaningful place to think about how these intergenerational
festivals continue to generate. Meaning, you know, here I was
doing my own kind of intergenerational project with my own
family history and my own legacy.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
And you came from a small town yourself, right.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I did.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Yeah, I grew up in rural Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Okay, so you understand the small town pride with these
festivals because it really puts the community on the map. Okay,
let's start with the Rattlesnake Roundup in Texas.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Sure, yeah, the Rattlesnake grownd So you went there. You
went there right with your wife?
Speaker 5 (02:48):
Yes, Yes, we did all of these trips together. We
went to every festival in the book.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
The Rattlesnake Roundup is an event in Sweetwater, Texas. Rattlesnake
groundups actually happened all across the South, but the one
that we went to was in Texas, and it's self
advertised as the world's largest rattlesnake round up. So it's
a really kind of seminal event that I think has
been around for over sixty years and sort of captures
what these events are generally like, which involves hunting rattlesnakes
(03:15):
from the wild in the sort of weeks leading up
to the round up and then killing them in public
during the round up weekend, typically by beheading the snakes,
although you know, it sort of depends and yeah, so
it's a really kind of it's a big event. There's
like a carnival outside, there's a big fare outside, there's
a lot else going on, but the sort of central
(03:36):
focus of the event, the reason for doing it is
to kill kind of as many rounds as many rattlesnakes
as possible during the round up weekend.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Explain how you've felt when you saw what was going
on with the rattlesnakes. They stunned them first, so that
they're really.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Tommy, No, the rattlesnakes are basically kept in this giant
pit or like a big enclosure where kind of one
by one they're grabbed with sort of like a tool
and brought up to the stump basically like literally a
wood stump, and then they're beheaded with machete, is what
I saw the year that I went.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
And so it's not a humane way to kill an animal.
It's not.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
It does not take the humanity of that snake's experience
into account almost at all. If the snakes are sort
of kept in an enclosure without food or water for
quite a period of time and then killed pretty kind
of brutally in front of people, So as an event,
that's really it's not about making the animals comfortable. I
think a lot of people think snakes don't feel pain
or fear in the same way that we do, so
(04:38):
they're not it's not justified by those same kind of
norms of welfare that we might see with other animals,
where we really want to take care of them and
make sure they're comfortable and all of that. It's not
attending to those concerns almost at all.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
But the rattlesnake is not a friend of a human.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I mean, I don't know many people who would feel
bad about a rattlesnake being killed. And does I mean,
does this whole roundup protect the community from rattlesnakes?
Speaker 5 (05:08):
That's what they say.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
That's definitely the justification for the event, is that these
you know, if they didn't do the roundup, rattlesnakes would
encroach the communities sort of unchecked, and you'd see rattlesnakes
on every street corner. That's just not really borne out
by the science that I researched by the people the
sort of experts in rattlesnake conservation and sort of rattlesnake
ethology that I talked to. They I think, say that
you know, rattlesnakes, like all populations of animals, are essentially
(05:32):
self correcting. You know, there's only so much food, there's
only there's so many predators, like, there's only so many
ways that they.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Can grow and expand.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
And even if killing rattlesnakes is necessary as a conservation measure,
which I think, you know it might be in certain places,
there's just more humane ways to do it than this
sort of very kind of spectacle of violence that the
round up weekend creates. And so it's it's sort of
a two pronged response. I think one, the facts are
not I don't think would encroach sort of unchecked. And
(06:02):
then too, even if they would, there's better ways to
sort of manage populations of wild animals.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
But the Rattlesnake round Up puts Sweetwater, Texas on the map, right,
and it's a big money maker for the community.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
So what do you say about that?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Exactly, Yeah, it's a I mean, this town is probably
ten thousand people in a normal day, and then you know,
up to forty or fifty thousand people come to this
event over this weekend. So it's a.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
Huge boon for local tourism.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Local hotels and restaurants and shops and everything get a
huge boost. It's a really important part of the town's identity.
So like the roundup weekend is sort of like the
central event of the year, which is obviously important just
to feel like everyone wants to be proud of where
they come from and you know, whatever that thing is
that is where you come from. I think that brings
meaning to people, and that's a theme throughout my whole book.
(06:50):
That I struggle with a lot is sort of how
do you balance the benefits to humans, which are real
tangible benefits, financial, you know, sort of identity based, it's
community based benefits, all of that. How do you balance
those benefits with the harm that you're causing to animals
and to not only the individual animals who are being killed.
So each year, you know you're killing a few hundred snakes,
(07:11):
but how do you balance that with the harm that
we're doing to sort of how we think about animals,
which is a little more like complicated, little more woo wooy.
But I think if we're trained to see animals as disposable,
we can kill them, we can murder them, we can
do whatever we want with their bodies, just because it's
important to us. That has bigger ramifications to how we
relate to animals kind of more generally in society. So
I think Balancing those things is sort of the question
(07:34):
of the book. I try not to, you know, I'm
not ignoring the good to humans that certainly it's there
and it's present, and you see it in people's faces
when they're proud to share something exciting about the weekend
with you. It was absolutely a huge part of the
research was engaging with the joy of these events.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
I'm speaking with Elizabeth Mulampey.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
She is the author of Forget the Camel, The Madcap
World of Animal Festivals and what they say about being human.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
And you gave me.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Pun intended I guess food for thought when you talked
about the big Lobster Festival in Massachusetts.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
In me because I love lobsters.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I've always felt this guilt about putting them in a
pot of boiling water or in a steam pot, because
clearly they're struggling, you know, and that's but they're delicious.
Tell us about the festival, and tell us about there
(08:32):
is a humane way of killing lobsters. Although I have
to say, you may have turned me off to lobsters forever.
You may have done that, Elizabeth, Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
The Lobster Festival in May, it's on the coast of Maine.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Man.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, it's sort of a week at five day I
think long festival that sort of celebrates the main lobster industry.
So Maine is the epicenter of the lobster industry in America.
You know, huge percentage of the lobster that you can
find in our country is from off the coast of Maine,
and so it's a huge part of the local economy.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
It's a really big part of the local identity.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
You know, lobsters are all over license plates and storefronts
and every I mean lobster is king in Maine. The
main lobster festival is celebrating all of that history, that heritage,
that culture, that economic importance, all of that. And so
the five day festival, similar to the round up in Texas,
has sort of it has fares, it has you know,
artisan craft booths, it has a bunch of food, It
(09:29):
has sort of like a big fairground full of stuff
kids can do, rides, games, et cetera. But the centerpiece
again of the festival, the reason you're all there is
to eat a lobster. So in the middle of the
fair grounds is the world's largest lobster cooker. That's what
they call it, and it's sort of these I think
it's like eight big vats of boiling water that they
load full crates of live lobsters into, close the lid.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
A few minutes later, they're bright.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Red and dead and cooked and they get carted over
to the food tent, which is you know, there's always
a massive line of tourists and visitors waiting to buy
their lobster fresh from the food tend So it's an
event that, again, just like the round Up, has a
lot of fun to it. It's a beautiful, sort of
like spot on the coast of Maine. It's very community oriented.
(10:15):
Volunteers spend a lot of time and energy putting this
event on. But at the end of the day, you know,
they're killing thousands and thousands of lobsters for the course
of five days.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
And I think, you know, there's.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Real questions out there about whether lobsters feel pain, how
they feel pain, what that sensation and sort of experience
of pain is like. And in my book, I sort
of talk about all of that research, and I think
that you know, there may not be a humane way
to kill a lobster there, you know, I think there's
there might be better ways and worse ways, but certainly
in the United States right now anyway, by far, in
(10:47):
a way, the most common use of killing or the
most common way of killing a lobster is by boiling
or steaming it alive. And so that just involves, you know,
a level of again balancing these benefits and harm. So, yes,
a lobster tastes good, it tastes delicious. I grew up
eating them.
Speaker 5 (11:00):
I miss them. They're good.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
It's good, especially like with butter in the summer. I mean,
it's a great it's a great meal. So that benefit,
it's sort of that temporary enjoyment and the sort of
cultural engagement of having this meal balanced with the potentially
excruciating death that this creature feels. And so I think
those questions become really present in this type of festival.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Didn't you talk about in the book though, stunning them first,
like a hit with a hammer, so that they may
not be, you know, feeling pain if they do feel pain, some.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
People try to do stuff like that. I think it's
not clear that that there is sort of a perfect
way to kill a lobster. I think if there were
more people would be doing it. But yes, Stunning animals
in general is considered to be the most humane way
to kill them.
Speaker 5 (11:44):
It's true with snakes too.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
You can you can hit a snake in the middle
of their head and sort of stun them so that
they're not basically knock them on conscience, and then that
again is sort of we've decided as humans, is the
most human way to kill animals. That's what we require
in the United States for land animals we kill for
so cows and pigs have to be stunned before we
kill them. It's we treat that as as a human
(12:05):
way in America.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Let's talk about Punk Satawani, phil If it wasn't for
a Groundhog Day, Punk Satani, Pennsylvania would just be another
tiny little town. So what is the problem with Groundhog
Day and Punk Satani Pa.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Yeah, I mean this festival was so much fun to
go to. It was I mean this like wild pre
dawn party. You know, at three am, everyone's dancing and
having a good time and it's just sort of this
massive party.
Speaker 5 (12:37):
It's hard to describe.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
It sounds so crazy, but it's true, Like three to
seven am, it's just like fireworks and live music and
dancing and photo taking and souvenirs.
Speaker 5 (12:45):
At all of it, and it was really fun. We
had a great time.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
And I think with Punk Satani Pennsylvani, with groundhog Day,
it's not so much like lobsters and rattlesnakes, where it's
about the amount of animals are being killed, or it's
at this like paradigm of dominance we're pushing on to
these animals where we assume it's okay to kill them
for our pleasure, for our interests, et cetera. With groundhog Day,
it's much more complicated because I think what's the problem
(13:12):
with groundhog Day is I think that it just it
trains generations of people to basically not think about the animals.
So just sort of say, it doesn't matter that this
animal lives in captivity. It doesn't get to sort of
exercise as normal biological behaviors, It doesn't get to have
its own experiences of joy, pain, and sorrow, whatever those
might be in a groundhog brain, because we're sort of
(13:34):
keeping it in this little plexiglass tube so that a
bunch of people can take a photo with it on
groundhog Day. And so I think those the benefits and
harms are more complicated. They're not as obvious as when
you're killing an animal, but I think they're still there,
and so I use it as a way to push
the reader to think kind of like a test case,
like an edge case.
Speaker 5 (13:53):
You know, how far can we take these things?
Speaker 3 (13:55):
How much does it matter if we're just using animals
for our own benefits? And then what does that do
for the rest of our life? You know, if we
don't think twice about harming phil for our joy and
our enjoyment once a year, you know, that matters. That
has some kind of tangible impact on how we relate
to animals more generally. Maybe we don't care about the
animals we eat for food, Maybe we never think about
(14:17):
wearing leather because you know whatever. And so I think
it's those it's the way the lessons that we learn
about animals in these in these festivals that sometimes is
to me the most dangerous part.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
They have about thirty seconds. What have we not said
that you need to say, Elizabeth MALAMPI, I think that.
Speaker 5 (14:34):
My book is about animal festivals.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
It's sort of as I use them as examples of
how we relate to animals more broadly. So every festival
is just you know, a tidbit of an example of Okay,
here we kill them, here we erase them, here we
put them in a tube and sing their songs and
love them. And I think when you look at all
of those examples across the spectrum of how we treat animals,
these really complicated patterns emerge. And to me, that was
(14:58):
the fun part of writing this book is no t
festivals were the same. Every festival had its own sort
of quirks and interests and additions to the story of
how humans relate to animals, but that they're all They
all kind of add together when you zoom out into
a bigger picture of animals in our world. It's a
complicated thing to be an animal in our world, and
I think festivals are an interesting way to start to
(15:21):
explore them.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Lots of food for thought and forget the camel. Thank
you so much to Elizabeth, and thank you so much
for listening.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
You've been listening to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio, a production
of New York's classic rock Q one O four point
three
Welcome to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio, Conversations about issues that matter.
Here's your host, three time Grasie Award winner, Shelley Sunstein.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I want to introduce you to Elizabeth mulampe. She's out
with a new book, Forget the Camel. So it's a
look at all these bizarre animal festivals we have all
over the country. Of course, the biggest one is in
punk Satawny, Pennsylvania, you know, on Groundhog Day, right, But
(00:35):
there's also the Rattlesnake Roundup that they have in this
town in Texas. There are just so many and you
think of them and you just think, oh, that's fun,
but you don't think of the animals.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Elizabeth is a lawyer whose work focuses on animal rights
and protection. She's a graduate of Harvard College and the
Harvard Law School and was named an Emerging Scholar Fellow
by the Brooks Institute for.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Animal Rights Law.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And your mom kind of inspired you with this book,
So tell us about that. Let's start with your mom, Elizabeth,
because you know that's one of the biggest influences on
your life.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
So, my grandmother was a veterinarian anthropologist who studied human
animal relationships, and my mom and my parents kept a
bunch of her sort of boxes of materials and things
after she died. Right before she died, she was working
on a book about animal festivals. It would have been
kind of like an academic anthology of festivals around the world,
(01:40):
things like the Running of the Bulls that you know,
kind of big international festivals we might all think of.
And during COVID, I basically, you know, opened a bunch
of these boxes of her materials. She died before she
could finish the book, or before she could even write
chapters or make too much progress. And so it was
a real personal joy to get to go through all
(02:02):
of those materials as a starting point for this book.
I certainly did tons of my own research, and I
added festivals she wasn't thinking about, But it was as
a really meaningful place to think about how these intergenerational
festivals continue to generate. Meaning, you know, here I was
doing my own kind of intergenerational project with my own
family history and my own legacy.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
And you came from a small town yourself, right.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I did.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Yeah, I grew up in rural Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Okay, so you understand the small town pride with these
festivals because it really puts the community on the map. Okay,
let's start with the Rattlesnake Roundup in Texas.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Sure, yeah, the Rattlesnake grownd So you went there. You
went there right with your wife?
Speaker 5 (02:48):
Yes, Yes, we did all of these trips together. We
went to every festival in the book.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
The Rattlesnake Roundup is an event in Sweetwater, Texas. Rattlesnake
groundups actually happened all across the South, but the one
that we went to was in Texas, and it's self
advertised as the world's largest rattlesnake round up. So it's
a really kind of seminal event that I think has
been around for over sixty years and sort of captures
what these events are generally like, which involves hunting rattlesnakes
(03:15):
from the wild in the sort of weeks leading up
to the round up and then killing them in public
during the round up weekend, typically by beheading the snakes,
although you know, it sort of depends and yeah, so
it's a really kind of it's a big event. There's
like a carnival outside, there's a big fare outside, there's
a lot else going on, but the sort of central
(03:36):
focus of the event, the reason for doing it is
to kill kind of as many rounds as many rattlesnakes
as possible during the round up weekend.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Explain how you've felt when you saw what was going
on with the rattlesnakes. They stunned them first, so that
they're really.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Tommy, No, the rattlesnakes are basically kept in this giant
pit or like a big enclosure where kind of one
by one they're grabbed with sort of like a tool
and brought up to the stump basically like literally a
wood stump, and then they're beheaded with machete, is what
I saw the year that I went.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
And so it's not a humane way to kill an animal.
It's not.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
It does not take the humanity of that snake's experience
into account almost at all. If the snakes are sort
of kept in an enclosure without food or water for
quite a period of time and then killed pretty kind
of brutally in front of people, So as an event,
that's really it's not about making the animals comfortable. I
think a lot of people think snakes don't feel pain
or fear in the same way that we do, so
(04:38):
they're not it's not justified by those same kind of
norms of welfare that we might see with other animals,
where we really want to take care of them and
make sure they're comfortable and all of that. It's not
attending to those concerns almost at all.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
But the rattlesnake is not a friend of a human.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I mean, I don't know many people who would feel
bad about a rattlesnake being killed. And does I mean,
does this whole roundup protect the community from rattlesnakes?
Speaker 5 (05:08):
That's what they say.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
That's definitely the justification for the event, is that these
you know, if they didn't do the roundup, rattlesnakes would
encroach the communities sort of unchecked, and you'd see rattlesnakes
on every street corner. That's just not really borne out
by the science that I researched by the people the
sort of experts in rattlesnake conservation and sort of rattlesnake
ethology that I talked to. They I think, say that
you know, rattlesnakes, like all populations of animals, are essentially
(05:32):
self correcting. You know, there's only so much food, there's
only there's so many predators, like, there's only so many
ways that they.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Can grow and expand.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
And even if killing rattlesnakes is necessary as a conservation measure,
which I think, you know it might be in certain places,
there's just more humane ways to do it than this
sort of very kind of spectacle of violence that the
round up weekend creates. And so it's it's sort of
a two pronged response. I think one, the facts are
not I don't think would encroach sort of unchecked. And
(06:02):
then too, even if they would, there's better ways to
sort of manage populations of wild animals.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
But the Rattlesnake round Up puts Sweetwater, Texas on the map, right,
and it's a big money maker for the community.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
So what do you say about that?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Exactly, Yeah, it's a I mean, this town is probably
ten thousand people in a normal day, and then you know,
up to forty or fifty thousand people come to this
event over this weekend. So it's a.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
Huge boon for local tourism.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Local hotels and restaurants and shops and everything get a
huge boost. It's a really important part of the town's identity.
So like the roundup weekend is sort of like the
central event of the year, which is obviously important just
to feel like everyone wants to be proud of where
they come from and you know, whatever that thing is
that is where you come from. I think that brings
meaning to people, and that's a theme throughout my whole book.
(06:50):
That I struggle with a lot is sort of how
do you balance the benefits to humans, which are real
tangible benefits, financial, you know, sort of identity based, it's
community based benefits, all of that. How do you balance
those benefits with the harm that you're causing to animals
and to not only the individual animals who are being killed.
So each year, you know you're killing a few hundred snakes,
(07:11):
but how do you balance that with the harm that
we're doing to sort of how we think about animals,
which is a little more like complicated, little more woo wooy.
But I think if we're trained to see animals as disposable,
we can kill them, we can murder them, we can
do whatever we want with their bodies, just because it's
important to us. That has bigger ramifications to how we
relate to animals kind of more generally in society. So
I think Balancing those things is sort of the question
(07:34):
of the book. I try not to, you know, I'm
not ignoring the good to humans that certainly it's there
and it's present, and you see it in people's faces
when they're proud to share something exciting about the weekend
with you. It was absolutely a huge part of the
research was engaging with the joy of these events.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
I'm speaking with Elizabeth Mulampey.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
She is the author of Forget the Camel, The Madcap
World of Animal Festivals and what they say about being human.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
And you gave me.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Pun intended I guess food for thought when you talked
about the big Lobster Festival in Massachusetts.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
In me because I love lobsters.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I've always felt this guilt about putting them in a
pot of boiling water or in a steam pot, because
clearly they're struggling, you know, and that's but they're delicious.
Tell us about the festival, and tell us about there
(08:32):
is a humane way of killing lobsters. Although I have
to say, you may have turned me off to lobsters forever.
You may have done that, Elizabeth, Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
The Lobster Festival in May, it's on the coast of Maine.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Man.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, it's sort of a week at five day I
think long festival that sort of celebrates the main lobster industry.
So Maine is the epicenter of the lobster industry in America.
You know, huge percentage of the lobster that you can
find in our country is from off the coast of Maine,
and so it's a huge part of the local economy.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
It's a really big part of the local identity.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
You know, lobsters are all over license plates and storefronts
and every I mean lobster is king in Maine. The
main lobster festival is celebrating all of that history, that heritage,
that culture, that economic importance, all of that. And so
the five day festival, similar to the round up in Texas,
has sort of it has fares, it has you know,
artisan craft booths, it has a bunch of food, It
(09:29):
has sort of like a big fairground full of stuff
kids can do, rides, games, et cetera. But the centerpiece
again of the festival, the reason you're all there is
to eat a lobster. So in the middle of the
fair grounds is the world's largest lobster cooker. That's what
they call it, and it's sort of these I think
it's like eight big vats of boiling water that they
load full crates of live lobsters into, close the lid.
Speaker 5 (09:52):
A few minutes later, they're bright.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Red and dead and cooked and they get carted over
to the food tent, which is you know, there's always
a massive line of tourists and visitors waiting to buy
their lobster fresh from the food tend So it's an
event that, again, just like the round Up, has a
lot of fun to it. It's a beautiful, sort of
like spot on the coast of Maine. It's very community oriented.
(10:15):
Volunteers spend a lot of time and energy putting this
event on. But at the end of the day, you know,
they're killing thousands and thousands of lobsters for the course
of five days.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
And I think, you know, there's.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Real questions out there about whether lobsters feel pain, how
they feel pain, what that sensation and sort of experience
of pain is like. And in my book, I sort
of talk about all of that research, and I think
that you know, there may not be a humane way
to kill a lobster there, you know, I think there's
there might be better ways and worse ways, but certainly
in the United States right now anyway, by far, in
(10:47):
a way, the most common use of killing or the
most common way of killing a lobster is by boiling
or steaming it alive. And so that just involves, you know,
a level of again balancing these benefits and harm. So, yes,
a lobster tastes good, it tastes delicious. I grew up
eating them.
Speaker 5 (11:00):
I miss them. They're good.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
It's good, especially like with butter in the summer. I mean,
it's a great it's a great meal. So that benefit,
it's sort of that temporary enjoyment and the sort of
cultural engagement of having this meal balanced with the potentially
excruciating death that this creature feels. And so I think
those questions become really present in this type of festival.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Didn't you talk about in the book though, stunning them first,
like a hit with a hammer, so that they may
not be, you know, feeling pain if they do feel pain, some.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
People try to do stuff like that. I think it's
not clear that that there is sort of a perfect
way to kill a lobster. I think if there were
more people would be doing it. But yes, Stunning animals
in general is considered to be the most humane way
to kill them.
Speaker 5 (11:44):
It's true with snakes too.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
You can you can hit a snake in the middle
of their head and sort of stun them so that
they're not basically knock them on conscience, and then that
again is sort of we've decided as humans, is the
most human way to kill animals. That's what we require
in the United States for land animals we kill for
so cows and pigs have to be stunned before we
kill them. It's we treat that as as a human
(12:05):
way in America.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Let's talk about Punk Satawani, phil If it wasn't for
a Groundhog Day, Punk Satani, Pennsylvania would just be another
tiny little town. So what is the problem with Groundhog
Day and Punk Satani Pa.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Yeah, I mean this festival was so much fun to
go to. It was I mean this like wild pre
dawn party. You know, at three am, everyone's dancing and
having a good time and it's just sort of this
massive party.
Speaker 5 (12:37):
It's hard to describe.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
It sounds so crazy, but it's true, Like three to
seven am, it's just like fireworks and live music and
dancing and photo taking and souvenirs.
Speaker 5 (12:45):
At all of it, and it was really fun. We
had a great time.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
And I think with Punk Satani Pennsylvani, with groundhog Day,
it's not so much like lobsters and rattlesnakes, where it's
about the amount of animals are being killed, or it's
at this like paradigm of dominance we're pushing on to
these animals where we assume it's okay to kill them
for our pleasure, for our interests, et cetera. With groundhog Day,
it's much more complicated because I think what's the problem
(13:12):
with groundhog Day is I think that it just it
trains generations of people to basically not think about the animals.
So just sort of say, it doesn't matter that this
animal lives in captivity. It doesn't get to sort of
exercise as normal biological behaviors, It doesn't get to have
its own experiences of joy, pain, and sorrow, whatever those
might be in a groundhog brain, because we're sort of
(13:34):
keeping it in this little plexiglass tube so that a
bunch of people can take a photo with it on
groundhog Day. And so I think those the benefits and
harms are more complicated. They're not as obvious as when
you're killing an animal, but I think they're still there,
and so I use it as a way to push
the reader to think kind of like a test case,
like an edge case.
Speaker 5 (13:53):
You know, how far can we take these things?
Speaker 3 (13:55):
How much does it matter if we're just using animals
for our own benefits? And then what does that do
for the rest of our life? You know, if we
don't think twice about harming phil for our joy and
our enjoyment once a year, you know, that matters. That
has some kind of tangible impact on how we relate
to animals more generally. Maybe we don't care about the
animals we eat for food, Maybe we never think about
(14:17):
wearing leather because you know whatever. And so I think
it's those it's the way the lessons that we learn
about animals in these in these festivals that sometimes is
to me the most dangerous part.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
They have about thirty seconds. What have we not said
that you need to say, Elizabeth MALAMPI, I think that.
Speaker 5 (14:34):
My book is about animal festivals.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
It's sort of as I use them as examples of
how we relate to animals more broadly. So every festival
is just you know, a tidbit of an example of Okay,
here we kill them, here we erase them, here we
put them in a tube and sing their songs and
love them. And I think when you look at all
of those examples across the spectrum of how we treat animals,
these really complicated patterns emerge. And to me, that was
(14:58):
the fun part of writing this book is no t
festivals were the same. Every festival had its own sort
of quirks and interests and additions to the story of
how humans relate to animals, but that they're all They
all kind of add together when you zoom out into
a bigger picture of animals in our world. It's a
complicated thing to be an animal in our world, and
I think festivals are an interesting way to start to
(15:21):
explore them.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Lots of food for thought and forget the camel. Thank
you so much to Elizabeth, and thank you so much
for listening.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
You've been listening to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio, a production
of New York's classic rock Q one O four point
three
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