“We enacted what's called the Beagle Freedom Project Bill. Basically, what it said was, if you're a facility that tests on dogs and cats, when the testing is over, you are mandated to release those animals to give them a second chance at life to a 501C3 charity like Beagle Freedom Project or any other type of facility like that, like a rescue facility. You wouldn't believe how hard that was to pass.” – Shannon Keith The story sounds like a dream: hundreds of animals used for research and testing...
Oct 09, 2024•43 min•Season 11Ep. 23
"And the thing that really makes me sad is that we humanize them when they're little, by putting them in diapers and feeding them bottles and dressing them in clothes. And then we demonize them when they grow up and act like the wild animal that they are, because people think if they neuter them, if they get their teeth removed - not my chimp, my chimp is not going to act like that." - Angela Scott Last week we released an episode with Brittany Peet, PETA's general counsel for captive animal law...
Sep 25, 2024•35 min•Season 11Ep. 22
“I mean, it's an addiction, an obsession, a sickness that these people seem to have that they don't think that it could happen to them. And even when it does, they are still in denial about it.” - Brittany Peet There's a new docuseries on HBO called, Chimp Crazy. If you haven't seen it, see it. It's made by Eric Goode, the guy who made Tiger King, and it is equally shocking . Chimp Crazy focuses on chimpanzee owners, private owners that buy cute baby chimps, dress them up and treat them like hum...
Sep 18, 2024•34 min•Season 11Ep. 21
"So this relationship to ourselves, to other people, to other animals - whether farm animals or wild animals, it's very bizarre how we have gotten it so twisted in what we expect and what we feel entitled to over here in the the Global North." - Katherine Baxter Katherine Baxter is the CEO of the Africa Network for Animal Welfare-USA (ANAW). ANAW-USA works to advance the welfare of animals, humans and the environment by facilitating mutually beneficial and reciprocal exchanges between the United...
Sep 04, 2024•41 min•Season 11Ep. 20
“There are more native crocodiles living in cages and concrete pens that are owned by Hermes or supplying Louis Vuitton than live in their natural habitat. So, that is so clearly not conservation. And we're talking like hundreds of thousands of crocodiles.” – Emma Hakansson We are destroying the planet, killing billions of animals and making life insufferable for humans all over the world, all in the name of fashion. But, Emma Hakansson is on a mission to change all of it. She is the founding di...
Aug 21, 2024•36 min•Season 11Ep. 19
"I cannot put enough emphasis on this. I have seen so many things that are so weird that even when I would show it to law enforcement at first, before there were like a lot of these cases coming out, law enforcement would look and they'd be like, “what? Why would someone do this?” Right? As if what I'm showing them wasn't real. And what I learned to say to get past that is, I would say to cops, “how many times have you seen someone do something for reasons they can't even explain to themselves?"...
Aug 07, 2024•49 min•Season 11Ep. 18
“You asked what kind of army we are. Cleveland Amory once said it. He said, “the army of the kind.” And that's it. If there's anything going on, we find it irresistible not to speak out, to do something, to say something, to enlist other people to help because we're not some superhuman force, we're a collection of humans.” Ingrid Newkirk Ingrid Newkirk co-founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1980, and since then, I don’t think there has been a single day that she has not...
Jul 22, 2024•36 min•Season 11Ep. 17
“50% of clothing that gets created ends up in a landfill in the first year. When we're using way too much resource in the first place, the fact that half of that is going directly to landfill in the first year is insane. And then, what actually makes it into our closets, we wear about 20% of on a trailing 12 month basis. So if you think about just the actual amount of utility that we get out of this massive system is insane. And that's just the waste part of it.” – Vanessa Barboni Hallik Vanessa...
Jul 10, 2024•35 min•Season 11Ep. 16
“I think one of the reasons dignity matters to animals is that they are objectified. They are stripped of their agency very often, and they're also caught up in power relations with human beings that do not go in their favor in, in the overwhelming number of cases. But it's also grounds why they have a right to be subjects of justice, doesn't it? So, it is the fact that they are subjects, that they are agents, that they their voices matter in a political sense.” – Melanie Challenger Melanie Chal...
Jun 25, 2024•42 min•Season 11Ep. 15
“Anybody with half a heart could understand that this is a very bad deal for these feeling beings. Waking up every day at the same place where these horrible things happened, it's not right.” – Gene Grant It’s been almost a decade since the National Institutes of Health ended the use of chimpanzees for biomedical research. But today we still have scores of chimpanzees sitting in labs. They’re not being tested on, but they are still waiting to be moved into a sanctuary. This is happening even tho...
Jun 12, 2024•37 min•Season 11Ep. 14
“There was a farmer who I met. He had the craziest [story], but not crazy because it's happening everywhere. A hog horn rammed into him and he got a disease. No one had any idea what it was. He went septic. He almost died. And he figured out that his herd had gotten an antibiotic resistant bug because of the way he was farming.” – Chloe Sorvino Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer at Forbes. She writes the newsletter, Mind Feeder , and founded the Forbes newslet...
May 27, 2024•38 min•Season 11Ep. 13
“We want to know that we're not separate from all beings - because most of our grief, our fear, our anger comes from feeling separate, not feeling connected, we're constantly finding ways to connect.” – Nina Rao Nina Rao runs an organization called Saving Wild Tigers , a project that raises funds and supports conservation efforts for tigers throughout India. Three of the eight tiger subspecies that roamed Asia only 50 years ago are gone. And the remaining population is under severe threats from ...
May 08, 2024•47 min•Season 11Ep. 12
"I think that's often the solution when feeling sort of bogged down in the issues of our day is when you zoom out and you look at sort of the whole arc of change, you can sort of get inspired that, yeah, we've come a long way." - Monica Murphy Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine and Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and writer. Their latest book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, comes out today, April 23rd. It's a book...
Apr 24, 2024•37 min•Season 11Ep. 11
“Wouldn't it be amazing if you went into Nike Town and the same pair of shoes or the same style [but]each pair was different because it had been grown and was not the result of a plastic, you know, a plastic polymer or an animal that had been so heavily finished that they all look the same. That, or me, would be mind blowing, where you and I could have the same handbag, but they're from the same brand, in the same shape, it's the exact same model, but the material is slightly different on every ...
Apr 10, 2024•42 min•Season 11Ep. 10
“He called me into his office and he said, ‘you see that picture above my desk?’ I said, ‘yes.’ It kind of looked like an animal that reminded me of a squirrel. He said, ‘that is a lemur that we think is extinct in the wild. If you can, please go to Madagascar and find out if it's extinct or not.’” – Patricia Wright Dr. Patricia Wright is an anthropologist, a conservationist, and a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and she's probably the world's leading expert on lemurs. There are...
Apr 04, 2024•55 min•Season 11Ep. 9
“When those fires happened, it was about 8 o’clock in the morning. It goes completely black, so the sky is completely black. There's no light. The sound is like being under a train. It's unbelievably loud. And of course, the heat. You are right in the heat of the fire and the smell and the taste. So, every one of his senses was taken from one world. A world where it was light, where he could move around to another world without the meta narrative that human beings have, that we're in an age of c...
Mar 27, 2024•41 min•Season 11Ep. 8
“There's this hidden curriculum, right? With dissection you're supposed to be learning the anatomy, the physiology of a particular animal. But really, what students are learning is that these animals are meaningless. They're basically just a tool for you to cut into and then discard after you're done with your so-called learning.” – Nicole Green In US schools, kids dissect on millions of animals - frogs, dogs, cats, pigs and many other species and none of it is necessary. We have solutions and a...
Mar 15, 2024•36 min•Season 11Ep. 7
“We live so disconnected from the natural world, and many people live much more disconnected than I am because I've made the natural world my life, my work. But if it's still surprising me and we live so disconnectedly, why is that? Because these owls have been here, all these other creatures have been here since before we got here. They're a normal part of the world. And yet what they do and what they can do, what they're capable of, is so surprising. Why is it so surprising? Why don't we know?...
Mar 05, 2024•47 min•Season 11Ep. 6
“One after another, citizens came up. And they just hammered that council with additional concerns. You know, one of the guys, his place is 500ft from there. He's like, ‘what do you think this is going to do to me, to my family? How dare you expose me and my family and this community! None of you all live around there. How could you have not brought this to a vote?’ A woman got up and started talking about the research modernization deal. Another woman got up and started talking about land value...
Feb 21, 2024•49 min•Season 11Ep. 5
Dr. Faraz Harsini has been advocating for animal rights for over a decade. He is the CEO and founder of Allied Scholars for Animal Protection (ASAP), a non-profit organization that supports students who are interested in advocating for animal protection and pursuing careers that can make a difference. He is also a Bioprocessing Senior Scientist at the Good Food Institute , where he works on advancing scientific and technological methods to produce alternative proteins on a large scale. Dr. Harsi...
Feb 07, 2024•29 min•Season 11Ep. 4
“…but what's happening lately is that mink on fur farms have been starting to be infected with H5n1 bird flu. So, the World Health Organization is worried that this disease is now changing to better infect mammals. Of course, we are mammals. And of course, if it's on fur farms, there's human mammals on the fur farms who can be infected by the bird flu, just the same way that COVID kept pinging back and forth between animals and fur farms and the humans who work there. And so this is a real conce...
Feb 02, 2024•49 min•Season 11Ep. 3
"The stonefish is the most toxic, venomous fish on the planet. The stonefish is one of the only fish stings that has been known to kill people. Now, I knew this going in, right? I did my homework. So that was one where I went on a limb, perhaps? Maybe too far." - Mark Vins Mark Vins is an Emmy Award winning wildlife and adventure filmmaker, and the co-founder of the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel. Mark and his co-founder, Coyote Peterson, created the Brave Wilderness Channel to bring people cl...
Jan 17, 2024•50 min•Season 11Ep. 2
“You're seeing young men going to prison or getting buried in the ground because they're out there poaching rhinos. And, it just drove a bigger wedge between conservation efforts and the communities. There’s only so many times you can look into the eyes of a woman who’s lost a brother or a husband or a father or an uncle and expect that we’re going to have some sort of relationship with that community. It was the same as Iraq, you've got an occupying force there, which is what we were as a conse...
Jan 11, 2024•54 min•Season 11Ep. 1
"In Montana they allow using dogs to chase down wolves, which essentially becomes like state sanctioned dog fighting. You have this horrible scenario where the packs of dogs are surrounding the wolf pack, and it just comes to a bloody end. These are blood sports. This is something that we should be way beyond as a society." - Collette Adkins Collette Adkins is the carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. She focuses on combating the exploitation and cruel treatment...
Dec 23, 2023•31 min•Season 10Ep. 20
“In the US alone, there are 100 million people with prediabetes or diabetes, 33 million people with some kind of chronic or various stages of kidney disease, 122 million people with cardiovascular disease, 10 million with GI issues, and 50 million people have food allergies. And, as you know, the food insecurity and malnourishment in the country is growing, unfortunately, particularly with our kiddos.” – Brett Matthews Brett Matthews is the CEO of Kate Farms , organic plant-based nutrition shake...
Dec 04, 2023•27 min•Season 10Ep. 19
“I was at a restaurant and the veil dropped in an instant. The curse broke and I could see for the first time. ‘Oh, wow, I'm eating body parts.’ And I turned around and I saw my bag and it was an expensive Fendi bag. And I looked at it and I'm like, ‘this is not leather. This is the skin of an individual. This is a scam.’” – Rebecca Cappelli Rebecca Cappelli is an award-winning filmmaker and an animal rights activist. Her most recent film, SLAY is a hugely powerful documentary that follows Rebec...
Nov 15, 2023•55 min•Season 10Ep. 18
“I call the act a poison pill, because really, what it is, is if it ever gets inserted into the farm bill or if it gets passed on its own, it prevents all of the animal centered organizations, all the environmental organizations, all the family farm and rural community organizations that push back against factory farming. It wipes out all of the progress that they've made.” Aaron Cohen is the senior director of advocacy at Farm Sanctuary . I asked Aaron to come on the show because I wanted to ta...
Nov 01, 2023•34 min•Season 10Ep. 17
“ I really felt like I turned into a bird. The way I was playing was changed. Like I played the way nobody would play a clarinet unless they had spent weeks listening to nightingales.” – David Rothenberg David Rothenberg is, amongst many other things, an interspecies musician. That means he makes music with whales and birds and insects and even with many plants and animals that reside in ponds. He's also a writer, he's written many books, including Why Birds Sing , Whale Music and Nightingales i...
Oct 25, 2023•44 min•Season 10Ep. 16
“Fashion is a really easy way to get in because it doesn't really involve any sacrifice, does it? I think for a lot of people, the thought of going vegan food-wise just seems like a really big deal. Whereas buying a vegan handbag, you get to buy a beautiful handbag and it's vegan.” Annick Ireland Even though it’s 2023 and it feels like much of the world is at least dipping their toes into all things plant-based, it can still be a challenge to navigate the world of vegan fashion. Shoes, boots, ba...
Oct 18, 2023•31 min•Season 10Ep. 15
“Ultimately, this is a dumping ground. The industry is not going to be spending money on horses that are going to be killed for human consumption, so ultimately, in their last six months, they suffer. They suffer terribly.” – Gemunu de Silva In the United States we do not eat horse meat and we do not slaughter our horses, but we seem to be fine with letting other countries slaughter and eat our horses. We send our live horses to Mexico and Canada to be slaughtered and their meat is then sent to ...
Oct 10, 2023•33 min•Season 10Ep. 14
