I think you could probably go back and track the stages of grief, probably that is what I went through. But I think if you do it right, you end up at acceptance. And that's where I ended up. And that's not to say that I've fully accepted the idea that the golden toad is extinct. Personally, I do still hold out hope that it could still be out there in those forests." - Trevor Ritland This conversation is with Trevor Ritland, who—along with his twin brother Kyle—authored The Golden Toad . The book...
Jun 24, 2025•34 min•Season 12Ep. 20
"72 juveniles is 28% of the current population of sunflower stars under human care in California. More than a quarter of them are at our facility. If you had asked us that question about a year and a half ago. The answer would be zero at our facility, and the answer across California would be six total." - Andrew Kim In 2013, one of the largest marine disease outbreaks on record, sea star wasting syndrome swept through echinoderm populations, laying waste to sunflower stars across their historic...
Jun 12, 2025•31 min
“We don't actually know how many animals we're testing on in this country, because most of them are not protected by any laws. There's not even a requirement that you track their numbers.” – Delcianna Winders Today, I have the pleasure of sharing some genuinely promising news. For decades, the FDA and NIH have required or relied on animal testing as the gold standard for drug development and biomedical research. But that's beginning to change. Both agencies have just announced significant steps ...
Jun 06, 2025•40 min•Season 12Ep. 18
"It is a scientific fact that these macaques, like all other primates, including humans, are communicating. They communicate in much the same way we do - facial expressions, vocalizations, body postures, those kinds of things." - Jeff Kerr Jeff Kerr is PETA foundations Chief Legal Officer. I asked him to come on the show to talk about one of PETA’s current lawsuits against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Nathional Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). PETA is arguing that the monkeys be...
May 29, 2025•30 min•Season 12Ep. 17
"The one that really surprised me was the organic humane Certified Egg Farm. I thought Humane Certified would at least mean that I would see some chickens running around somewhere, but it looked exactly the [00:00:30] same as any other egg facility. They were just big warehouses. You don't see a chicken anywhere in sight. And then I learned, of course, that, um, you know, the this whole free range, pasture raised terminology doesn't really mean anything." - Isabella La Rocca Gonzalez Isabella La...
May 20, 2025•32 min•Season 12Ep. 16
John Kinder is the director of American studies and a professor of history at Oklahoma State University. And he is an author. His most recent book is called World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age . John’s book tells a story most of us have never heard: what happened to the world’s zoos—and the animals inside them—during World War II. It’s a sweeping, deeply researched look at how zoos became sites of propaganda, patriotism, and survival, often at the...
May 16, 2025•43 min•Season 12Ep. 15
“I used to be the largest dairy consumer on the planet. I used to eat so much dairy and meat. The more that I looked into the dairy industry, the more that I saw that it was the singular, most inhumane industry on the planet, that we've all been lied to, including myself, for years. I always believed that the picture on the milk carton, the cow standing next to her calf in the green field with the red barn in the back was true. It’s certainly the complete opposite.” – Richard (Kudo) Couto Richar...
Apr 30, 2025•42 min•Season 12Ep. 14
“There's a drug called vioxx that was found to be safe and effective in animal trials, so they moved it on to preclinical trials in humans. Once on the market, that drug caused 88,000 people to have heart attacks and killed 38,000 people.” Meredith Blanchard We have some big news at Species Unite. In January and February, our team traveled to Bainbridge, Georgia to begin filming our first documentary. Bainbridge is a small Southern town facing a truly chilling threat: a company called Safer Huma...
Apr 23, 2025•55 min•Season 12Ep. 13
“One year, we actually offered the Faroe Islanders One million pounds to stop the hunts. 1 million pounds, which would go to promoting whale and dolphin tourism to the islands and marine conservation education to Faroese kids in schools. And the Faroese response to our offer was the most emphatic no you've ever had in your life. They actually held a hunt on the 1st of January. On the first day of that offer, they went out and deliberately killed pilot whales as their official no to us.” – Rob Re...
Apr 17, 2025•49 min•Season 12Ep. 12
“If we march into that village and we start trying to persecute people for using poison, something that's very illegal, nobody's going to talk to us. We're not going to find out where the poison came from. We're not going to be able to shut anything down. We should take the approach that people are using poison because they're desperate, because they see no other alternative.” – Andrew Stein Andrew Stein is a wildlife ecologist who spent the past 25 years studying human carnivore conflict from A...
Apr 10, 2025•47 min•Season 12Ep. 11
"But it makes a lot of sense especially when you think about how traditional healers and shamans have worked, they haven't felt that separation from nature like Western medics do. And so to rely on the knowledge of other species actually makes a lot of sense. It's probably a lot more than we know at the moment." - Jaap de Roode Jaap de Roode is a biology professor at Emory University, and he is the author of an astonishing new book called Doctors by Nature How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal ...
Mar 31, 2025•43 min•Season 12Ep. 10
“I mean, organoids in general are very exciting replacements for animal research because you could model a kidney or a liver or a or a heart without taking them from a real animal, which it’s very important to support that kind of thing. But yes, when it's the brain, there's this fear that you might end up creating another sentient being. And then and then you've just replaced one sentient being with another and maybe not made things better at all. So it seems really, really important to guard a...
Mar 19, 2025•31 min•Season 12Ep. 9
"The basic premise of the event is that hunters hunt rattlesnakes from the surrounding environment all across West Texas, and bring them into the roundup for the weekend. And during the roundup, these snakes are kept in a pit and then, one by one, beheaded and skinned in front of in front of audiences." - Elizabeth MeLampy Elizabeth MeLampy is a lawyer dedicated to animal rights and protection, and her passion for this work shines through in her latest book, Forget the Camel, the Madcap World of...
Mar 12, 2025•40 min•Season 12Ep. 8
"When we arrived, we had no records, we had nothing. We had no documentation. And one of one of the first things that you have to actually prove to all of these international government parties and so on, you need to you need to say, where did you get this elephant? And we had no idea. We were actually government officials, and we had this elephant, and we had no real idea of where this elephant came from." -Tom Sciolla In 2012, during a scorching heatwave in Buenos Aires, a polar bear named Win...
Mar 05, 2025•51 min•Season 12Ep. 7
“That's taxpayer’s money that is going to support research and development and pilot projects to develop a food system that is based on environmental destruction and greed and disregard for animals, fish, and any of the other marine mammals that might be around it.” - Andrianna Natsoulas Andrianna Natsoulas is the campaign director for Don't Cage Our Oceans, an organization that exists to keep our oceans free from industrial fish farms. Offshore finfish farming is the mass cultivation of finfish...
Feb 26, 2025•41 min•Season 12Ep. 6
“It is a little bit terrifying, because it means that AI systems are going to be entering this uncanny valley where we are not sure how to experience them in five or ten years. You might be talking to Siri on your phone, or ChatGPT on your laptop, or your Roomba, vacuuming your floor. You might be talking to these beings and genuinely be unsure whether they think and feel things when they talk back to you, and that is going to be an uncomfortable place to be.” Jeff Sebo Jeff Sebo works primarily...
Feb 19, 2025•46 min•Season 12Ep. 5
“I think it's really the amounts of money that they're able to offer people paired with the violence that they're willing to put on people. It's very much like the drug cartels in Mexico, just more focused on poaching of wildlife.” – John Jurko John Jurko is a director and producer of the film, Rhino Man , an award winning documentary which highlights the courageous field rangers who risk their lives every day to protect rhinos and our natural world. The film follows Anton Mzimba , the head rang...
Feb 12, 2025•25 min•Season 12Ep. 4
“I know that one day for me in Antarctica, one morning for me in Antarctica is a dream for someone who will never get there. Because it's hard to get to. So, I don't waste those opportunities. I don't sit there and go, ‘I'm in Antarctica again.’ No, my brain will not go to that space because I know that people would kill [to be there]. I am the portal sometimes, through which some people will experience different parts of the world.” Jason Edwards Jason Edwards is an award-winning photographer, ...
Feb 05, 2025•31 min•Season 12Ep. 3
“We don't want Idaho to have a bad reputation. This is our home state. We love our home state. It's beautiful. We pride ourselves on our nature. We pride ourselves on our wildlife. And instead, we are continuing to do things that are… that are sickening.” - Ella Driever In 1995, wolves were reintroduced to central Idaho, and in 2003 a Boise High school called Timberline officially adopted a local wolf pack. Throughout the 2000, students went on wolf tracking trips and in their wolf packs range. ...
Jan 29, 2025•26 min•Season 12Ep. 2
“I know that veganism can be a little daunting for some, and they feel like it's either you go fully vegan or you're not allowed in the club.” – Cheryl Martinez Because it's January and because a lot of people may have made some big resolutions a few weeks ago, we are going to talk about one of them – plant-based eating. Because, well I think it’s a really good resolution to do all year long. I think one of the big resistance points for even trying plant-based for a month, is that many people se...
Jan 22, 2025•35 min•Season 12Ep. 1
Text “Do people even want to know about some of these issues? Because I think some of the meat production concerns, it's kind of like people would rather in some cases, I think some people might not really want to know all the nitty gritty. They don't want to know how the sausage is made. That poses an interesting question and challenge about how you communicate about some of these issues, when maybe there's a resistance among a subset of people who don't want to know more.” - Patti Truant Ander...
Jan 15, 2025•25 min•Season 11Ep. 33
“People in the animal welfare world, I think, should broaden their purview to the human parts of it and sort of work in coalition. Like if you can really expose the labor conditions, you're weakening the industry, and if you can increase labor regulations, if you can make it to where workers don't routinely get repetitive stress injuries and they're not breathing in harsh chemicals, and if you slow the kill line down, that hits their profits and you are weakening the industry. And, also remember...
Dec 25, 2024•46 min•Season 11Ep. 32
“I remember during my training having professors tell me, ‘one day you might do something important and you'll tick off a vested interest, and they're going to come into a meeting with you, and they're going to bring a copy of your dissertation and slam it on the table and start challenging you.’ And that is exactly what happened.” – Keeve Nachman This is the 2nd episode in a special four-part series about where we go deep into the food system with some of the brightest minds at the Johns Hopkin...
Dec 18, 2024•35 min•Season 11Ep. 31
“My colleague and I went out to Arizona because there was a community that was concerned about the expansion of an egg laying operation, essentially in their backyard. At full capacity, that operation was slated to house 12 million birds. 12 million birds. It's like New York City, but with chickens.” – Brent Kim We know that what we eat has an enormous impact on billions of animals, our health and the health of the planet. If we fail to change our diets and the food system, the planet will face ...
Dec 11, 2024•34 min•Season 11Ep. 30
"In the case of lions, they're not easy neighbors. They're also not the worst neighbors. I think in in most cases, it's a matter of learning how to live next to nature, next to other animals and animals that can potentially be dangerous." - JG Collomb JG Collomb is the CEO of Wildlife Conservation Network, an organization that connects global donors with community based conservationists, and they're changing the way the world finds and funds often overlooked projects in the field and helps foste...
Dec 03, 2024•18 min•Season 11Ep. 29
“I think there's a lot of people out there who feel the way I felt for many years, which is, ‘look, I feel a bit guilty, I know in some sense that having the diet I have makes me complicit in some things that I don't like. It makes me a bit uncomfortable, but it doesn't feel like there’s anything I can do about it right now. I have this guilt. I'd like to do something about it, but just all the options I'm presented with seem a bit shit.’ So, when we present people with something else that they ...
Nov 30, 2024•35 min•Season 11Ep. 28
"We may think that we're just eating our dinner tonight, but when you multiply it by all of that food every day, every day of the year, everyone in the country, everybody in the world, it's a tremendous production. Just to give you a sense, in the US, we slaughter about 18,000 animals every minute for food just in the United States." - Peter Lehner Agriculture and our food system are responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions. That is an enormous amount. Yet, the food system is al...
Nov 24, 2024•50 min•Season 11Ep. 27
"Why do we need large carnivores? Obviously as a scientist, I like talk about the biological roles that they play and the ecological roles, but I will drift and say that I think they're important for spirit and sort of human health more broadly, whether that be mental health, spiritual health, whatever, that sense of wildness that they bring to a landscape, that they force you to listen when you're in the woods, that you hear sticks break around you, that you hear what the birds are doing so tha...
Nov 13, 2024•36 min•Season 11Ep. 26
“And so I've been doing this for about 40 years, and I still don’t get tired of seeing parrots. I see a parrot or I see a bird and I go, I belong. There is such beauty in the world. Oh my gosh. It's like everything is okay for a minute you're intrigued, you're curious, you're seeing beauty, you're seeing flight. But at the same time, you've trained yourself to hold the tragedy because there aren't nearly as many as there used to be and there's all kinds of complex threats against them, and there...
Oct 30, 2024•37 min•Season 11Ep. 25
“In terms of specialized AI within these industries. They're years and years ahead of where the animal movement currently is. Factory farms are increasingly using AI as well to do things like predicting the growth rate of chickens so that they can set the environmental variables up perfectly to exploit these animals as efficiently as possible.” – Sam Tucker Sam Tucker is the founder of Open Paws , a nonprofit aimed at creating ethically aligned AI systems and he’s the creator of Veg 3 , an AI ch...
Oct 17, 2024•28 min•Season 11Ep. 24
