The Animals and Us

For millennia we’ve shared our shelters, our journeys, our struggles, our hunger and our fears with animals. They’ve protected us, warmed us, fed us with their milk and their meat, ensuring their survival on a planet that is theirs as much as it is ours. Animals and human beings belong to the same kingdom: we are animals too, but modernity has separated us. Industrialization has transformed animal farming into an economic arrangement in which there’s no space for the idea of a true relationship with the animals. Instead we lock them up in sheds where their lives are short and full of suffering.

The time has come for a radical rethink of the social, environmental and health implications of this relationship. It’s time to ask ourselves what existence we afford the animals, and what that says about us. Only by considering their importance for our own lives, for the conservation of pastures, for the production of nutritious and healthy food, can we rediscover that sense of humanity which the industrial and post-industrial ages have eroded.

Speakers:

Andrea Gavinelli, European Commission, DG for Health

Simone Pollo, Professor of Moral Philosophy at La Sapienza University in Rome

Fred Provenza, Emeritus Professor of Behavioral Ecology at the Wildland Resources Department, Utah State University, USA

Piero Sardo, President of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity

Moderator: Jacopo Goracci, farmer and collaborator with the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity