“I mean this is the crazy thing about it, in 35 years of doing animal protection investigations I didn't know this existed. It wasn't even a thing, because it sounds it sounds too crazy to actually believe - that you'd get blood from pregnant horses and then it helps productivity in pigs.” – Gemunu de Silva Gemunu de Silva is the co-founder of Tracks Investigations . He is a filmmaker and an activist who's been investigating and documenting animal rights abuses since the 1980s. Tracks has comple...
Jun 02, 2022•43 min•Season 8Ep. 1
Species Unite will be back next week, June 2nd, with a brand new season. Until then, we are re-sharing some of our favorite episodes. Today's is a conversation with Jo-Anne McArthur. Jo-Anne McArthur is an award winning photojournalist and the founder of We Animals Media . For 20 years she has been photographing and bearing witness to our complex relationship with animals. She’s worked in over 60 countries in just about every industry one can imagine - including: fur farms, factory farms, bear b...
May 26, 2022•37 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Species Unite will be back on June 2nd with a brand new season. Until then, we are re-sharing some of our favorite episodes. This week’s is a conversation with Lori Marino. “In a natural setting, these animals would be swimming maybe a hundred miles a day, diving deep. They have their social lives, their social networks, roles to play in very tightly-knit family groups. They raise their children. They have cultures, different ways of doing things in different populations. They can explore and pl...
May 18, 2022•42 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Species Unite will be back on June 2nd with a new season. Until then, we are re-sharing some of our favorite episodes. This week’s is a conversation with Aaron Gross. We all have a food story; the story that we tell ourselves about what we eat and why we eat it. It’s that story that runs the show when it comes to how we shop, cook, and feed our children. It was most often taught to us by our parents and their parents, most who thought they were passing on good values and deep traditions and were...
May 11, 2022•43 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Species Unite will return in a few weeks with Season 8. Until then, we are re-sharing some of our favorite episodes. Today's is a conversation with Melanie Joy. Melanie Joy is a Harvard-educated psychologist, specializing in the psychology of eating animals, social transformation, and relationships. She is the award-winning author of six books, including the best-selling, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows . She is the founder of the non-profit, Beyond Carnism, dedicated to exposing and t...
May 05, 2022•36 min•Season 5Ep. 6
“It's funny because with art, with literature, with music, we are all connected. It's emotion. You know, like if I say, “have you read this or that,” or… “do you know Alice Coltrane? Do you know John Coltrane?” Whatever it is you've got a language and there's a connection going on. And, we should have that with the world. We should have that feeling of like an artistic sensibility to the world. We do have that with other things. People can talk about movies and they feel connected in a way. Reli...
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 7Ep. 23
Damien Mander is the founder and CEO of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF). He is a former Australian Royal Navy clearance diver and a special operations military sniper who became an anti-poaching crusader and an environmental and animal welfare activist. In 2009, while traveling through Africa, he was inspired by the work of rangers and the plight of wildlife. He liquidated his life savings and established the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. Over the past decade, the IAP...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 14
“This is their second chance. They were rendered extinct in the wild. And so now this is our second chance to get it right. We killed them off and hopefully they have enough of what they need that they can take the second chance and run with it.” – Maggie Howell This is the last episode in a series that we are doing on wolves. It's probably not the final episode because I'm not going to shut up about wolves until they're all back on the endangered species list. But for the moment, it's the last....
Apr 14, 2022•54 min•Season 7Ep. 22
“Packs that are continuously trapped and snared and hunted, the packs are smaller and things are a lot more chaotic in the pack because you're killing uncle, you're killing dad, you're killing mom. The pups may get good leadership training and learn how to hunt or the family could be broken up and the puppies never fully learn how to hunt. And so all this hunting and trapping lowers the pack size, fragments them often and might cause a pack to break up, and those broken packs can actually send o...
Apr 07, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 7Ep. 21
“ The alpha female dug a den and had puppies. And we got there as they were squealing in the pack. And what was just amazing is to see how the pack reacted to this. They were so excited. Even when she started digging the den, the other wolves start digging other holes… they weren't helping at all, they were just caught up in it.” – Jim Dutcher I've talked about this before and I'm going to talk about it a whole lot more, there is a mass slaughter of wolves taking place in Idaho, Montana and Wyom...
Mar 31, 2022•40 min•Season 7Ep. 20
Today we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Alexandra Horowitz. “I can drive my car off a cliff and just leave it where it lay, the most I'll get is a littering fine, and if you throw your dog off the cliff the punishment is actually pretty similar. That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So, unless you change that status, and you have people of course, who are thinking that there should be a status of kind of living property that might give them m...
Mar 24, 2022•43 min•Season 7Ep. 19
“Let's say I own a gun shop, and I want to drum up business, right? I can host a coyote killing contest, which they'll call predator hunting, where cash prizes of let's say $1000 goes to whomever kills the most coyotes in a 24 hour period. You might have 500 people show up from my state and out of state, and through any means necessary thermal scopes at night, any technology, electronic game calls to lure them in, hunting over bait... The competitive killing of coyotes happens for cash prizes al...
Mar 17, 2022•34 min•Season 7Ep. 19
“Our entire food supply is completely dependent on chemicals and completely dependent on four to eight companies around the world to produce all these products.” – Shely Aronov Shelly Aronov is the founder and CEO of InnerPlant . InnerPlant is kind of like Google Translate for plants. They’re bioengineering plant genes so that crops can send messages to farmers, and the farmers will literally be able to understand what's going wrong with the crops. So that when they're under attack, the farmers ...
Mar 10, 2022•25 min•Season 7Ep. 18
“ I put on the coat, I looked at myself in the mirror, I was going to a party in Brooklyn and I just thought, ‘you cannot go to this party like this, you will be shunned and you don't want to be this person.” And I took off the coat and I never looked back.” – Kym Canter Kym Canter is the founder and creative director at House of Fluff , a New York City-based, animal free, material innovation studio and outerwear brand. They also happen to make some of my favorite faux fur coats on the planet. A...
Mar 03, 2022•31 min•Season 7Ep. 17
This week we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Jonathan Balcombe. “…gazing up to the night sky saying, ‘are we alone?’ …well, wait a minute, look around, there's tons of fascinating life forms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet. I get the question… are there other humanoids out there? Or, are there other conscious beings? But we ought to be pretty grateful for what we have on this planet… there's a lot of amazing creatures and ph...
Feb 24, 2022•40 min•Season 7Ep. 16
“We make everything from a vegan rib, so we got a rib that'll blow your mind. Looks like a rib, tastes like a rib, but guess what? It ain't a rib… it can go on the grill, you can smoke it, you can literally barbecue it and it comes out like mama's ribs that you ate when you grew up.” – Chef Chew GW Chew, aka Chef Chew, is a vegan food inventor and restaurateur on a mission is to change lives and to bring holistic solutions to urban communities. He’s developed a of plant protein called Better Che...
Feb 17, 2022•34 min•Season 7Ep. 16
“One percent of the U.S. is vegan, about five percent is vegetarian… And so if I'm thinking about where can I make the most money, it's not going after the vegans. And if I'm thinking about where can I make the greatest impact, getting a plant based person to switch from one plant based burger to another does zip. And so our focus is how can we help people move the needle with those who aren't on board yet?” David Benzaquen is one of the world’s leading experts in the plant-based food industry a...
Feb 10, 2022•50 min•Season 7Ep. 15
“ As we were driving from Jackson, Wyoming, towards the entrance of the park, I was in the passenger seat, Charlie was driving and I saw a bison and I'll never forget it. I grabbed him so hard on the arm and I screeched, “BISON!” It was the first bison I'd ever seen in the wild. We stopped the car and we were a good distance from the bison. But we could see it unimpeded with the windshield and just let it walk and do what he was doing. And I don't know, something in my heart turned over.” – Barb...
Feb 03, 2022•50 min•Season 7Ep. 14
Today we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Helena Husseini. I usually live day by day. I always live every day like it's going to be the last day. We learned that during the war. We don't know when we're going to die. So, you live every day like it's going to be the last day. That's what I do.” – Helena Husseini Helena Husseini is the vice-president of BETA, Beirut Ethical Treatment for Animals. BETA is the first and largest shelter in Lebanon with 850 dogs, many c...
Jan 27, 2022•42 min•Season 5Ep. 21
Rich Hardy is a former undercover investigator. He spent 20 years doing over 100 assignments in 30 countries. He's been on the podcast before to talk about his time undercover. If you haven't heard that episode, you should go back and listen . He is back today to talk about his latest adventure. After a couple of decades of incredibly intense investigative work, and living a double life, Rich decided that he needed a massive change. Instead of campaigning against the horrors of animal agricultur...
Jan 20, 2022•32 min•Season 7Ep. 13
“The reason that you should accept our client as having rights is because we're showing what an extraordinary being she is. These beings have mirror self-recognition, they know that they are elephants. In fact, we listed 42 different, highly complex cognitive abilities that elephants have. If you didn't know it was an elephant, you’d think [I was] talking about what a human being does.” - Steven Wise There is an elephant who lives all by herself in a small enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Her name is...
Jan 13, 2022•28 min•Season 7Ep. 12
“Vegan 1.0 Didn't get us where we needed to go. It didn't turn enough of the country on, it didn't turn enough young people on, didn't make it into… the mainstream in the way they wanted it to. …it was kind of pushed to the edge and marginalized and it was weird, the food was good, but not great and not accessible or kid-friendly. … I didn't think that was the way to capture the 97% of the world or the country that doesn't identify as vegan who would otherwise, maybe try it once in a while, but ...
Jan 06, 2022•36 min•Season 7Ep. 11
“Historically some of the leading airlines in the world were responsible for transporting these monkeys. So, you had national flag carrier airlines, such as such as British Airways, American Airlines - all of these big airlines were involved in transporting these monkeys in the hundreds and thousands every year on commercial passenger airlines. And, rightly the public were very concerned, there was a growing swell of, public opinion that was opposed to not just non-human primates being transport...
Dec 30, 2021•32 min•Season 7Ep. 10
“It’s really about bringing the skills and the tools and the techniques that we've already developed and addressing other forms of transnational or international crimes - and applying them to this area that had long been forgotten.” – Olivia Swaat-Goldman Olivia Swaak-Goldman is the executive director of the Wildlife Justice Commission , an organization that goes around the world fighting transnational organized crime against wildlife — like an animal-focused justice league, with a mission to di...
Dec 23, 2021•42 min•Season 7Ep. 9
“I think we we've prioritized certain things in education and in culture, but we're really deprioritizing curiosity. The joy of going into a research hole and just digging… I still do that every day.” – Sonalie Figueiras Sonalie Figueiras is the founder and chief of Green Queen , the award-winning media impact platform advocating for social and environmental change. Green Queen started as a blog in 2011 and now it's Asia's largest plant-based media platform. She is also creating a marketplace to...
Dec 16, 2021•33 min•Season 7Ep. 8
“… a lot of the platform technologies do not make sense from a food perspective, and there's just never been a reason to do things a different way. So, for example, cell culture is very expensive and very resource intensive because the medical field doesn't really need those things to be done in a very cost-effective manner - because people, have a high cost thresh hold when it comes to paying for their own healthcare and drugs… But it's totally different when we're thinking about food.” – Natal...
Dec 09, 2021•39 min•Season 7Ep. 7
“When you talk to the vegan community, you know, it's people who know exactly why they should or shouldn't purchase something. But being able to reach people through design… like why couldn't someone test veganism through fashion before they started with their diet? That's kind of my story.” - Casey Dworkin Casey Dworkin is the founder and designer of plant-based luxury footwear brand Sylven NY . When I first discovered Casey's boots and shoes, they were half vegan and half animal leather, meani...
Dec 02, 2021•28 min•Season 7Ep. 6
“So, you really want the kids to drink the cow's milk because that's the liquid that's available to them if they're thirsty. And we were also told that yeah, you really should be having the kids open up their cow’s milk. I went down through all the tables and said, “open up your milk, open up your milk.” Or, I was told, we just won't get our funding because this was a school that was a turnaround school, all the kids are on free lunch. And, so this is how we got our funding as a school. – Monica...
Nov 25, 2021•34 min•Season 4Ep. 4
“Within a month of our investigation’s release, we had some amazing news. The French government passed legislation to ban fur farms in France. In 2017, it was an issue which was not really on the public agenda, but within four years we have stopped an industry in France. Hundreds of thousands of animals don't have to be killed each year, don’t have to live in these small cages going crazy each year. It's a success and it's something that we feel proud to have been part of.” - Gemunu de Silva Gem...
Nov 18, 2021•49 min•Season 7Ep. 4
“I think every time we release a story, there's this sense of like almost like legal danger, the legal implications that can come from releasing stories. We've had times wherea story has been released and we haven't slept that night because we're scared of what the repercussions are going to be.” - Amy Jones, Moving Animals Amy Jones and Paul Healey are the founders of Moving Animals , a photojournalism and media project that connects the world to animals stories through photography, film, and j...
Nov 11, 2021•50 min•Season 7Ep. 3
