Getting Animal Ethics into Science Education

The Potential of Animal Perspective-Taking

Originally hosted and recorded by Dr. Kathrin Herrmann of The Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT).

PAN Works’ own Dr. Adam Cardilini recently joined Dr. Kathrin Herrmann as a guest speaker for the CAAT’s webinar series “Animals, Ethics, and Justice: Beyond the Human: Sharing the Planet with Nonhuman Animals.”

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In this presentation, Dr. Cardilini traces his own path from ecologist to social scientist, describing how a formative moment during his PhD, realizing he’d been excusing serious harm to animals simply because it was done “in the name of science,” pushed him to question the unexamined assumptions embedded in scientific training. From human supremacy to uncritical faith in science’s authority, Dr. Cardilini resolved to examine these latent values and work towards a better world for animals.

Dr. Cardilini briefly touches upon all of his current research, but spends the majority of this presentation centered on a workshop he developed inspired by the work of Joanna Macy and John Seed, The Council of All Beings. Embedding the course across an entire semester, students choose an animal affected by Victoria’s animal care and protection laws, research their lived experience, and then represent that animal’s perspective in a three-hour council, ultimately proposing legal reforms grounded in what the animal themselves might want rather than in conventional welfare thinking. Dr. Cardilini emphasizes how much preparatory scaffolding this requires ; students need weeks of grounding in reflexivity and animal perspective-taking before they’re able to set aside anthropocentric assumptions and speak meaningfully from an animal’s point of view. He also underscores the importance of both science and ethics in creating good policy.

We hope you enjoy this truly compelling presentation by Dr. Cardilini. His work has produced a real shift in his student’s ability to think, reason, and act from an individual animal’s point of view, and we’re excited to see the sort of real-word changes that can result from his work.

European Starlings. Joshua J. Cotten (2021), Unsplash.

*Adam Cardilini is an ecologist and conservation social scientist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, focused on properly accounting for animals’ subjective experiences in science and society. His PhD in ecological genetics led him to question conservation’s traditional treatment of animals as objects, a shift shaped by compassionate conservation and similar ethical frameworks. He now uses systematic review and social science methods to study animal use in biomedical research, conservation biology, and animal agriculture, collaborating across disciplines to challenge conventional scientific thinking. As a Lecturer of Environmental Science at Deakin, he teaches science communication and builds accessible, animal-centered learning experiences.*

*Nicole Roberts is the Associate Editor for PAN Works.*

Please visit PAN Works for more about our work on ethics and animal wellbeing.

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