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Michael Bond

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2026-03-22

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2026-03-22

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1. “Sense that we do actually share the same fate as them. So I guess I would hope people will just think at another level about why they treat animals that way. And remember that other animals, aside from the differences in intelligence and thinking abilities, they are generally mostly sentient. They are trying to survive in the world just like we are. And that's the level I think that we should determine our behavior towards them, not on the kind of illusory arguments that have been used so often in history.”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “By modern biology very clearly. So what's left? And it seems clearer that our attitudes towards other animals are largely influenced by our attempts to try and establish a sense of meaning for ourselves for humans in the world. And that's the sort of level at which we're motivated to think about animals as a separate to us, as inferior. And it can be frightening to consider our own physicality, our own sort of animal nature and to focus more on our bodies and the things that we actually share with animals because it reinforces, as we've been saying, that”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “That's quite a hard, hard question because as we've been talking, the relationship with our relationship with animals is so conflicted and contradictory. And different people have different attitudes. But I suppose I would hope that people that the book would encourage people to think more deeply about how we think about animals, the historical idea that we're different because animals are less intelligent or less rational. I mean, that's now is being undermined by”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “The animal's behavior often often a wolf, so they will adopt the sort of roaming behavior of a wolf and The wolf's attitude towards humans and this is highly dysfunctional and it's not clear why people or why their brain sort of fill the gap in their pathology with a sort of sense that they are a different animal. That's been recorded throughout history. There's definitely a sense, I think we seem to be sort of attuned to other animals, even though day to day we may. Not experience them aside from our pets, but that ancestral closeness, if you like, is still a part of our unconscious and plays a part in a lot of our sort of unconscious state of mind”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “I think it is. And there's an interesting contrast between a sort of conscious experience of animals and our unconscious experience. So animals appear in our dreams. Disproportionately, given how little interaction we have with them now, also in hallucinations, people with forms of dementia and visual impairment that come with Visual hallucinations, animals appear in those hallucinations a huge amount and distorted animals and human animal hybrids. And then there are, yes, lots of pathologies, lots of people who have this sort of instinctual fear of birds. Spide is more obvious and snakes. There are then more serious mental illnesses, psychoses such as lycanthropy, a rare disease, but an alarming one. The patient has the feeling that they are another animal. I mean, they fully believe it and adopt.”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Domesticated from wolves 20, 25,000 years ago because the two lifestyles were similar. It is thought that they hunted together. And so dogs became part of human communities. It's not clear how cats became domesticated. They kind of probably domesticated us as much as we did them. example of just how conflicted our attitudes towards animals animals are we we adore we adore our pets but we are very anxious about the parts of ourselves that we share with other species and the attitude of other animals being inferior is Very dominant throughout many cultures.”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Wow, I'd never been asked that before Maybe this guy I find Katz interesting just because it's impossible to know. They're thinking, and they're very independent, and yet they are in some way socialized. I think if I had to be a different species, I might choose something that had quite a sort of non-human experience, a different experience of the world like a Swallow or some kind of migratory bird which has That ability to navigate using aspects of the environment that we can't sense. But I mean, that point about our domestic animals, I mean, we do treat them like they're part of the family. And we grieve deeply for their loss. And dogs.”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “So we sort of treat them, it's back to that idea of they are in some ways part of the same moral community. We judge them as if they have a moral responsibility for their own behavior. And so we don't like it when they kill their prey with a parent what looks like cruelty. We judge them on human. Human terms. And they also, of course, remind us that we are animals ourselves. And I think that's the sort of subtext for why they've been so persecuted rather than just the apparent threat they cause.”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “I mean, the persecution or persecution of wolves is, we always argue that it's because they take livestock. Also that they're a threat to humans, there's this persistent idea that wolves will... Kill humans, but there are very, very few cases of that happening. I mean, one study found between 2020, I think, there has been nine cases worldwide of wolves killing humans without rabies. given the number of interactions is very, very small. And I think it is so interesting how similar wolves are to Humans in their behavior Wolves have a similar social dynamic. I mean, they look after their young until adulthood. They're extremely adaptable. They can survive in almost every environment, every landscape.”

   2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “But the use of that kind of language is very prominent. I mean, people describe others as animals or vermin or bestial. And that's always an insult. So we've sort of used that Kind of attitude or attitude towards animals to denigrate. Members of our own species And that's been the case all through history as if I mean, it was the philosopher Marian Mishley who Observed how people Treat members of other cultures as if they were members of other species. I think that's a very, very pertinent. It's a very easy outgroup to use in our own attitudes towards each other.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Think a lot of our attitudes towards other species are an attempt to sort of deny that common ground. Animals are less intelligent, less rational, less moral than us, and therefore we can claim this sort of higher ground, this higher purpose. But there is so much flux within all that because different communities have always had different attitudes depending on their own relationship with animals, their own closeness to nature. But a lot of it, I think, does come back to this idea that animals, it's easy to treat them as a married group in order to establish some sense of purpose or meaning for ourselves.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “I think it does. It was really impossible to find a real thesis through all this because the, I mean, one thing you can say is that through history, since the Neolithic, there seems to be always have been a sort of discomfort or an anxiety associated with the idea that humans are a kind of animal. And that's perhaps where a lot of our norms and customs of so-called civilized behavior come from, the ways we eat and how nudity is often unacceptable. Bestiality, as you say. A lot of these practices, they induce discomfort because they emphasize the aspects of ourselves that we share with animals. And of course that reminds us that we also share a fate with them, that we will die and we will return to the earth.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “The monk, the lawyer tried to argue that they were perfectly permissible for them. They needed to eat and that they were clearly industrious, more industrious than the monks. And what happened there was that the Termites were guilty and they had to be moved from their side. But I don't think these trials were any kind of joke. They were just a reflection of how a lot of people viewed. Feed animals and the sort of moral equivalents animals and humans being part of the same moral community.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “And the pig was convicted and condemned to death and was hung like a human would be. And there's another case actually where a pig was hung dressed in the clothes of a man, which suggests that the pig was looked on as a creature that had some kind of moral responsibility for its own actions. But in all these cases and in the one of the termites and the monks that you mention, the animals were given a lawyer, you know, who would defend their case. And in terms of the termites who had been accused of eating the furniture and the food in this monastery in Brazil.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “There's a historian who collected accounts of these animal trials a couple of hundred years ago. And so he was a good source of this very, very strange episode in medieval history. But it sort of demonstrates that a lot of people, particularly people who were close to animals who worked with animals. They didn't recognize this grand difference between humans and non-humans. And they considered animals to be responsible for their own actions. One of the most famous animal trials is of a pig who killed and partially devoured a child. This is in southern France in 15th, 16th century.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “See humans and animals are sharing a common origin so humans are seen as formerly animal and animals as formerly human. And there's a sense of kinship and codependency. And you see that in many Eastern religions. So it's not a homogenous picture. Throughout human history, but certainly the sort of dominant attitude in Western civilizations has been one that animals are there for something that humans can use.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “And you see that in Middle Eastern art all the way through the later Neolithic, and then that develops into the philosophy of early Greek and Roman civilizations, Aristotle, and then into the Middle Ages and through to today that sense of animals being something that humans can use and being inferior. used that as a way of trying to establish human superiority and give us a reason for seeing ourselves as having some higher purpose and not simply the physical fate that we see animals enduring, dying, decaying, returning to the earth. But as you mentioned, there are plenty of, I mean, that is a particularly sort of Western dynamic. There are plenty of... Communities who have never recognized that strict boundary between human and animal. I mean, there are, for example, many Native American communities, the animalistic beliefs there.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “You actually see it in the art, which starts to take on a different form in the early Neolithic. There's a Neolithic settlement in Turkey, Chattelhoyuk, where there are murals of animals. But the animals appear with humans, and there's one particular miro that stands out where there's a red deer stag in the middle of a group of men who appear to be teasing it or baiting it, and there's someone's hanging on to its nose, another figure on its tail. People started to ban the hunter gatherer lifestyle of their ancestors and settle and develop crops and domesticate animals. And from there on in. The art presents a picture of animal human relationships that is more one of sort of domination, people using animals.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “Helping or accompanying people into their journey, into the afterlife, who knows. But you get a pretty clear sense looking at this kind of evidence, both the burials and the art, that that relationship between animals and humans, it lacked the kind of stiff boundaries that you see today, the interspecies boundaries that you see today. started to change in the Neolithic when people started to settle down and develop agriculture and domesticate animals.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “A young woman with her newborn child, and the child had been laid on the wing of a hooper swan, and there are many cases of people being buried with their Hands next to the wings of birds or parts of the wings of birds It's hard to say exactly what's going on in those cases, but clearly the animals played some kind of ritualistic role in these people's lives and likely a spiritual role possibly a religious role. Perhaps these animals were...”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “Some of what we imply about religion and spirituality at that time comes from the apparent reverence with which they painted animals. The animals in the cave art are rarely sort of generic figures. They appear to be portraits of individual animals. And there was clearly a kind of reverence and perhaps awe that they felt towards them. But there's another set of evidence that tells us something about the people of that time, which is the burials, how they were often people were buried with animals in their graves. There's a famous archaeological find in the Middle East of a child who was buried around 80,000 Years ago with the antlers of a fallow deer on On their chest, and then a little later they”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “Paid close attention because some of the details of the anatomy and the shape of the animals is they would only have sort of known that by close observation. It's also strange that there are so few humans in these paintings. I mean, among the tens of thousands of animal paintings in the caves, there are perhaps around a hundred of humans, and the human the paintings of humans are usually not straight humans, they're hybrids or very anthropic figures, a mix of animal and human or their playing. They're involved in some strange ritual. It's impossible to Know really what's going on, but clearly animals dominated the worlds of those people and they were surrounded by them, they depended on them for their food, but also they had to avoid them for their own survival. So that sort of sense of immersion comes across in the art.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Yes, I mean, it was extraordinary going into these caves and just looking at this artwork, imagining. They were painted, imagining the artists going back. 35,000 years the caves that I was looking at. The things that really stand out about it, well, firstly, it's just the quality of the art. Obvious skills of the artist they had a Obvious knowledge of perspective and form. Use of color. It's also the detail with which they painted these animals Clearly observed.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “So these Cave paintings they date back to around 40,000, in some cases 45,000 years old. They appear all the way through into the early Neolithics, so up to about eight, nine, ten thousand years ago. So we're talking about from the period when humans first started to set, Homo sapiens first started to settle in Europe. It's really these paintings are the only evidence we have just about of the culture of those early humans and the paintings consist almost entirely of animals on the walls of these caves.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “So previously, I've written about human psychology, particularly the dynamics of different groups and how people behave towards others who are different to them. And animals are, you could say, the ultimate outgroup, if you like, and our behavior towards them reflects some of the behavior that you see in the dynamics between human groups. So I was starting from that angle, but there's also been a lot of research in biology lately on the cognitive abilities of other animals. On consciousness and intelligence and emotions and that kind of thing, which suggests that they have qualities that we had underestimated. So it was really a combination of my previous interest in human psychology and the recent research in animal science that seemed to be a good reason to dive in.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorenti. Humans have long believed themselves separate from and superior to the animal world. This new science revealing that the animals we have lived alongside for millennia have helped shape the way our minds work today. On today's episode, science writer Michael Bond joins host Dr. Ganesh Taylor to argue that our relationship with animals has influenced human thought, culture and cognition. And what this means the way we understand ourselves. Let's join our host, Dr Ganesh Taylor now, with more Welcome to Intelligence.”

    2026-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Living With Animals Shaped Our Brains? With Michael Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT