Species Unite (Species Unite)

“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 director of Collective Fashion Justice, an organization dedicated to creating a total ethics fashion system which prioritizes the wellbeing of people, our fellow animals and the planet, before profit.

And some of the bags are even like Nile crocodile and crocodiles from different parts of the world and the level of exclusivity is based on like how rare that skin is. And it seems to not even connect in their mind that, like, maybe if an animal is rare, it means that they should be being protected rather than made into a bag that you think is special. And I think that's where a disconnect from nature comes into play. Like if we really connected with nature and saw the beauty of it, we would want to protect it more in its natural state, and we would see higher value in fashion that appreciates nature and takes inspiration from nature, but that doesn't take from it and destroy it or kill it.  – Emma Hakansson

Emma has consulted on passed progressive fashion legislation in New York City, spoken at the European Parliament, been invited to provide expertise in Parliament inquiries in Australia, and offered her expertise to global brands and fashion councils seeking to improve their ethics and sustainability.

Her latest book, Total Ethics Fashion, explores the namesake term that she coined to guide the fashion industry forward.

Please listen and share and if you do purchase something this week, please shop consciously. 

"What's sad about it is… a lot of people think it's the norm… that's what I thought. Diabetes was something my grandmother had and my mom was pre-diabetic so I thought, oh diabetes and clogged arteries and high cholesterol, they’re just my destiny - that's a normal part of life because that's what I saw happening to everyone around me.”

-Jasmine Leyva

Heart disease, diabetes, and obesity have been rising at alarming rates all across the country, but the numbers are disproportionately higher in African American communities. There are many reasons that factor into why that is, but the fact that we have an unjust food system is a big one. Food desserts, regions in urban areas where it is difficult to obtain affordable and fresh foods, make it impossible for the people living in those areas to eat healthy and prevent diseases like those mentioned above.

Jasmine Leyva is an actress, a filmmaker, and the creator and director of The Invisible Vegan, a full-length independent documentary that delves into the complex issues surrounding the unhealthy dietary patterns in the African American community. The film shows how increased dependence on meat and fast food is rooted in the history of slavery, 20th century socioeconomic inequalities, and the rise of big food. And it explores on the health and wellness possibilities that can be achieved through a plant based diet. 

The film is packed with information, history, stories of transformation, and interviews with African American vegans ranging from NBA legend, John Salley to Cedric the Entertainer to Stic of Dead Prez. If you haven’t already seen it, watch it.

Jasmine is a force of a human being – she’s inspiring, wise, and incredibly thoughtful. I learned a ton from her film and from our conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Jasmine’s website https://jasmineleyva.com/

Jasmine's instagram https://www.instagram.com/jasmine_c_leyva/?hl=es

Jasmine's Twitter https://twitter.com/jasmine_c_leyva

The Invisible Vegan https://www.theinvisiblevegan.com/

The Invisible Vegan on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Vegan-Cedric-Entertainer/dp/B07WF9L1JM

“I said, ‘let's go on Zappos and look up Zappos and vegan.’ And so I searched it… and I said, ‘let's see what you get when you search that.’ And they had gardening clogs, they had like a croc shoe. And I said, ‘why don't you guys go look at how many people opt out after they see that and then you might buy my shoes.’ That was a Friday and Monday they bought 18 styles.” Rebecca Mink

Rebecca Mink is the founder of the very first vegan luxury shoe brand, Mink Shoes. Mink Shoes have been around since the year 2000, way before anybody was making anything luxury vegan. She started the brand because for the years leading up to it, she’d been a celebrity wardrobe stylist and there was nothing vegan out there to put on their feet.

“I was buying 25 or 30 thousand dollars of leather shoes a month for these clients, and I was sick over it. I was walking into the shoe department of Neiman Marcus and getting the best of this and that… shopping and buying things that I didn't believe in. I could do [vegan] everything except for the shoes, everything. I could even get away with certain belts, metal belts, different things. But I could not put someone on the red carpet in what we had at that time, which was Payless.” – Rebecca Mink

Over the years, she has made custom shoes for celebs like Miley Cyrus, Natalie Portman, Madonna, Pamela Anderson, and Jennifer Lopez.

Rebecca’s next big thing is the launch of Mink Vegan Leather, a bio-based leather made from upcycled plants, coming to the world in 2023.

LINKS:

https://minkshoes.com/

https://minkshoes.com/pages/vegan-leather

https://www.instagram.com/minkshoes/

“We're not even talking about the barriers of having a plant-based company. There are still so many countries that they don't even support plant-based innovation, for every Israel and Singapore that’s making leaps and bounds, there's a France that's trying to push a meat diet. So, to be in an industry that is here to disrupt the mainstream and is here to disrupt a lot of what people hold dear, that’s a lonely journey.

We need to make the effort to drive the conversation in the direction that we want it to go, because if we're not actually making the effort to build this path in this direction, it's going to default to the status quo and we know what the status quo is. So, we need to push against that.” – Jennifer Stojkavic

Jennifer Stojkovic is the founder of Vegan Women’s Summit (VWS).

Jennifer built her career as a community relations leader for the world’s largest tech companies in San Francisco. During her career in tech, Jennifer became increasingly interested in blending her passion for change in the food system with her experience and network in Silicon Valley. In early 2018, Jennifer launched a “Future of Food” series of partnerships bringing together CEOs and founders from leading tech brands, including WeWork and Airbnb, with emerging CEOs from the burgeoning food tech industry to establish food as the “Tech 2.0”. 

Quickly, Jennifer became aware of the inequities facing female founders in the food tech industry — and the unfortunate parallels drawn from the same experiences she has combatted in her career as a woman at the intersection of tech and politics in the Valley. 

Drawing on these experiences, Jennifer launched VWS in early 2020 with a sold-out global conference, the Vegan Women Summit. Focused on building equitable and diverse representation of women leaders from around the world and partnering with major tech brands, VWS is the world’s first events and media organization dedicated to empowering, educating, and inspiring women to bring compassion to their careers. With a thriving, fast-growing community of energetic female leaders around the world, VWS features programming with the world’s leading vegan CEOs, celebrities, investors, Olympians, and more.

In December, VWS launched  VWS Pathfinder, the world’s first female founder summit and pitch competition dedicated exclusively to plant-based innovation.

“If you saw a celiac bowl on a menu, you would never order that unless you have celiac disease and you're gluten free. But if you see a Thai peanut rice noodle bowl, that sounds delicious. You're not even thinking about the fact that it's gluten free. It’s the same thing with vegan for a lot of people. They think, “oh, that is only for vegans, if I'm not a vegan, that's not for me.’”  - Katie Cantrell

Katie Cantrell is the Director of Corporate Outreach for the Better Food Foundation and Co-Director of Greener by Default.

Greener by Default makes plant-based food the default option in businesses, universities, conferences, and many other places where people eat, while it still gives people the choice to opt into meat or dairy. It's seriously one of the smartest projects that I've ever heard of.

Katie also founded the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition where she spent a decade leading food policy workshops at universities, government agencies, and Fortune 500 corporations.

If you want Greener by Default to come to your business, contact Katie: katie@betterfoodfoundation.org

Greener by Default: www.greenerbydefault.com 

Better Food Foundation: https://www.betterfoodfoundation.org/

Factory Farming Awareness Coalition https://ffacoalition.org/

“… it was quite a big change… when I was growing up, I even used to like hunt and fish, to be honest. I mean, that was part of our family tradition through generations, I made friends through those sorts of activities. My father and I used to do those things and my grandfather [too]. So, growing up around animal cruelty… it was very natural for me.

…saying, “no, I'm not going to continue to participate in those sorts of things,” was actually quite a big transition and a scarry one. I didn't know what that meant for my relationship with my family.” - Frohman Anderson

“You know, he's a very wise young man and he knew exactly how to get us, which was through education…  for Christmas, he actually said, “I don't want any gifts. I don't want any presents. I just want you to watch these movies and give me the time to talk about them.” …my husband and I watched Forks over Knives and Cowspiracy. And if you told me that morning that I would have been vegetarian, I probably would have said no. And then the next morning it was, it was just so obvious.” - Kim Anderson

Kim and Frohman Anderson are partners in Everhope Capitol, a fund that invests in entrepreneurs and businesses that replace animals in the supply chain. Kim is also the creator and co-founder of Plant City, the world’s first and largest vegan food hall. It’s located in Providence, Rhode Island.

Kim is Frohman’s mother.

Frohman went vegan in college and his family soon followed suit. Soon after, the family business became a plant-based investment fund, and Kim founded Plant City with Matthew Kenney, one of the top plant-based chefs in the world. In their first year they served 450 thousand guests.

This is the story of the power of one family, and how that one family is changing the future around how and what we eat.

“There are written documents that talk about how the same wolf follows a flock of sheep for 300 miles and they come back again with that flock of sheep. And those shepherds can identify those wolves. And within the group, they've even given the names to those wolves…

And they have this saying: Don't do something wrong, the Wolf God is watching you.” - Prabhat Sinha

Prabhat Sinha grew up swimming after ducks and fish in a rural farming village in Mhaswad, India. At 13, he left for the US, learned English, became a competitive high school athlete and then went on to Georgetown University.

He became a sports agent for NBA players and Olympians and he was really good at it. But, he knew it wasn’t enough. He knew that sports had given him the opportunities that changed his life and he wanted the same thing for other kids from rural India.

So, he made his way home and set up Mann Deshi Champions, a sports academy that has developed over 8000 athletes from rural India.

Since his return, he’s noticed that many of the animals that he frequently saw in his youth are increasingly rare to spot. Animals like wolves, jackals and hyenas are disappearing from the landscape, and that disheartening observation has led to Prabhat’s latest endeavor, a farmer led Wolf Sanctuary project.  And, like everything else Prabhat does, it is astonishing.

Please listen and share.

LINKS:

https://manndeshichampions.org/ 

Reshma's video: Buffalo harder to a marathon runner: https://youtu.be/FLt81c7I3VM

Mann Deshi Youth Development Center: https://youtu.be/sBVD27bzep8

Plant a tree play sports program: https://youtu.be/4Eb6plDCzfQ

Reshma: https://youtu.be/apmfmWr1qJE

Travel Coach Program: https://youtu.be/GHjMFogkhI8

Paradhi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43r1tUB6jm0&t=4s

Mumtaj: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLPN3M1_1ag&t=1s

NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/12/31/949601710/why-a-field-hockey-champ-in-india-is-now-harvesting-onions-and-herding-goats 

Mann Deshi Champions: https://www.delawarepublic.org/npr-headlines/2020-12-31/why-a-field-hockey-champ-in-india-is-now-harvesting-onions-and-herding-goats

Mann Deshi Champions BBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIueiPWBufU

Amjad the Hanuman wire: https://thewire.in/communalism/go-amjad-hanuman-hindu-muslim-unity

Prabhat Sinha Apollo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFEXs-uSXS8

Prabhat Sinha TEDX 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoI-QxNHvNg

Prabhat Sinha TEDX 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0g48QBQwGU

“So, the irony is that meat that people are so obsessed about their cat needing… Yeah, in the wild cats needs meat because in the wild, that meat is a source of the nutrients that a cat needs. But on a commercial bag of pet food, those nutrients, those core key nutrients that the cat needs, they're not coming from the meat, they're coming from the pre-mix that is largely a synthetic mix of vitamins and minerals that have been lost from the meat.” – Shannon Falconer

Shannon Falconer is the CEO and co-founder of Because, Animals,  a pet food company that is making cultured meat for our cats and dogs. Their first cultured meat product, Harmless Hunt Mouse Cookies for Cats, will be on the market in 2022. They are made with real mouse meat that is grown in a lab. No mice are hurt in the process. In fact, the cells that were used to make these cookies and all mouse treats at Because, Animals going forward are the only cells that they will ever need. The original mice are happily living as pets with one of the Because, Animal’s scientists.

Cats and dogs eat more than 25 percent of the meat consumed in the US; which also means that petfood is responsible for more than quarter of the environmental impact caused by animal agriculture.

There are plant-based pets foods but most American pets eat commercial dog and cat food, which often and mostly uses byproduct - meaning the parts of animals that people don’t want, the heads, the bones, the blood or they use the meat that can’t legally be sold for human consumption because the animal was dying or diseased.

Because, Animals is going to change all of that one product at a time. Their mouse cookies are just the beginning.

Nothing excites me more than cellular agriculture. And, it might take longer than most of us would like, but it’s happening… Eat Just’s chicken nuggets are being sold in Singapore and now, here comes the pet food. It’s the very beginning of a whole new food system, one that will eventually take down every last factory farm and slaughterhouse on Earth. Here we go…

Barbara King is emerita professor of anthropology at William & Mary and a freelance science writer and public speaker and the author of seven books. She is an expert on animal cognition and emotion.

Barbara has been on the podcast before to talk about how animals grieve and love. If you haven’t heard that episode, take a listen.  

She is back to talk about her 7^th book, Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild.

There are many reasons that I love this book, but mostly because Barbara delves into and shares how we can be better humans to all other animals on this planet. Her work helps us better understand and advocate for the rights of animals. The more that humans know about animal’s intelligence and emotional lives, the harder it becomes to harm them. 

Barbara is a storyteller and through the stories of the individual animals as well as her own personal accounts, she makes us care.

Ellie Phipps Price is the president of the American Wild Horse Campaign, an organization that has been fighting for years to save America's wild horses. If you didn’t know that our wild horses needed saving, or even that we had any wild horses, here is some back story:

We do, we have 30,000 of them. They roam freely in 10 western states. They need saving because they are threatened, pretty much single day of their lives by our government. The BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, doesn’t like these horses and they would much rather lease that land to ranchers for cattle. They already do lease most of it for cattle. It's 50 to 1, so for every 50 cows on public lands in those states, there's one horse, but that's still too many for the BLM. And so, they organize roundups, which means they go after these horses with low-flying helicopters and chase them, sometimes for over 20 miles. The horses run at full speed, breaking legs, falling down, some die, mothers get separated from foals, they’re terrorized and terrified, and then rounded up, loaded onto trucks and put in government holding like prisoners. 

Until I met Ellie and Suzanne Roy, who’s the executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign, I didn’t know big this fight was. It’s huge, and it’s really complex and there are many smaller battles that happen within it constantly. The crazy part is, well there’s a lot of crazy parts to this story, but one of them is that when polled, the American public wants these horses free. 75% of the USA says keep them free. Between the helicopters and the holding, there are millions of dollars spent on getting rid of these horses.

The rounded up horses  live the rest of their lives either in government holding or in some sort of captivity, or they end up in the slaughter pipeline, which means they end up going to slaughter houses in Canada or Mexico.

These horses were supposed to be protected. In 1971, Nixon signed a law called The Wild Free and Roaming Horses and Burro Act. The law states that the BLM is supposed to manage these herds, but no management has happening at all. Instead, it's inhumane, it's unsustainable, and it makes no financial sense whatsoever.

Right now, we have 30,000 horses on public lands, and 50,000 in government holding. Most of them will never leave. Very few of them are adopted and the rest of them stay in holding or end up on their way to Canada or Mexico, and there’s just no reason for any of this.

There's a birth control vaccine called PZP, which is a perfect solution to this entire issue. It’s used in wildlife populations all the time. The horses would get darted once a year and they would not get pregnant, but the BLM would rather spend their money on helicopters and government holding. PZP costs $30 a year per horse. 

I met Ellie this summer in northern California. She has been involved with the American Wild Horse Campaign for the past 12 years. The way that she got involved is pretty amazing. She read a book about mustangs and shortly after, read an article in Vanity Fair. I don't think she planned in that moment that she was going to be changing her entire life, dedicating it to saving our horses, but that’s what happened. She put the article down and started making calls. She hasn’t stopped protecting these horses since. We are so lucky to have people like Ellie on this planet. Without them, I don't know if we'd have any wild horses left.

“We see 84% of moms in the U S convert to infant formula partially or entirely in that first six months of life before the recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding ends. We see two thirds of moms express extreme shame and guilt and stigma for the way they feed their children. And, we continue to see that the infant formula industry in general has really pillaged and plundered in a lot of ways on parents wanting to do what's best for their child, but really not having better options and having very little innovation to really think about how to better nourish a child.” Michelle Egger

Michelle Egger is a food scientist and the CEO and co-founder of BIOMILQ, a woman-owned, science-led, mother-centered startup that is creating human breast milk in a lab, by culturing mammary cells. This has the potential for disrupting the infant formula industry forever; and will give families a more nutritious option for feeding their babies.

Michelle founded BIOMILQ with cell biologist Lelia Strickland in January 2020, and soon after they received $3.5 million in funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates' investment firm.

I’m beyond excited that BIOMILQ exists. They are creating a revolutionary product that will one day be on grocery store shelves across the world. It will be a game changer for mothers who struggle with breastfeeding, for the planet and for a whole lot of cows.

“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 Wyoming.

This is the first episode in a series that will hopefully get a whole lot more of us to care and then do something to stop this madness before it's too late.

And, as you will hear in this conversation, there are real things that we can do. But first, wolves need as many of us as they can get on their team, and they need us to fight like crazy for them, or in the very near future, they'll be gone.

This conversation is with the two people that have made humans care about wolves more than anyone that I know of. Jim and Jamie Dutcher spent six years in the nineties living with and filming a pack of wolves called the Sawtooth. And since then, they've focused their lives on the study and documentation of wolf social behavior, their photographs, books, and Emmy Award winning films Documenting the lives of these remarkable animals have changed the way that many people see these deeply social and family oriented animals.

Links:

https://www.livingwithwolves.org/

https://www.livingwithwolves.org/wolf-issues/how-you-can-help/

https://www.instagram.com/living_w_wolves/

https://www.facebook.com/LwWolves/

https://twitter.com/LWWolves

“Despite all the information that we see promoting dairy [in school], you cannot promote plant-based milk unless you also promote dairy even more. It just goes to show that there's something more to it.” – Marielle Williamson

Mariel Williamson recently graduated from high in Los Angeles.

This past spring, while still a student, she was told by her school that she couldn't share information about plant-based milk or be critical of the dairy industry unless she provided pro dairy content as well.

So, Marielle is suing - both the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Unites States Department of Agriculture, for violating her First Amendment right.

“It's almost like the Animal Welfare Act is like a safety, a security blanket, because it's like, ‘Oh, we have the Animal Welfare Act to protect the animals, they're okay.’ And they don't realize that it's actually not very strong and that it's not being very aggressively enforced.” – Rachel Fobar

In February, Eric Kleinman from the Animal Welfare Institute was on the podcast. He came on to talk about the Envigo Dogs - the 4000 beagles that were rescued last summer from a breeding facility for lab animals, and trafficked monkeys, and the many many failures of the USDA to enforce the Animal Welfare Act.

Before Eric and I met, he sent me a ton of articles on much of the above, and many of them were National Geographic stories written by Rachel Fobar. Rachel is a National Geographic reporter who covers wildlife crime and exploitation, everything from the USDA’s failures to roadside zoos to monkeys being forced to work in Thailand’s coconut trade.

I asked Rachel to come on the show because I want to better understand why it is that we are allowing the USDA, who almost never does their job, to be in charge of the Animal Welfare Act.

LINKS: 

Rachel Fobar: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/meet-the-team-wildlife-watch?loggedin=true&rnd=1677336327384

Rachel’s Articles for National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com /author/rachel-fobar

“There is this long history, and what's important about history is history informs the present. History shows this is how we got here. Fred Colston was like a villain out of central casting. I mean… it's almost like he was twirling his mustache… And he blamed me. He blamed me for bankrupting his lab. I mean, that's in documents from the federal government, not me by name, but In Defense of Animals. The thing is, at least he was honest about his viewpoints. At least he was honest to say, ‘these chimpanzees, I want to raise them like cattle.’ Whereas today you've got these slick PR people like Inotiv or Envigo, ‘Oh, animal welfare is our highest priority.’ It's the same mindset. At least he was honest about it. They're not honest anymore.” – Eric Kleiman

You've probably heard of Envigo. They were the ones who owned the 4000 beagles that were rescued in Virginia last summer. The Beagles were living at a breeding facility, a breeding facility for research animals, and their conditions were so abusive and horrific that they got rescued. That doesn't happen very often. It was a big deal.

And more recently, federal prosecutors charged eight members of an international monkey smuggling ring that allegedly supplied trafficked and endangered monkeys to Envigo, Orient and Worldwide Primates. 

The USDA are the people who are supposed to be at least somewhat on the side of animals in all of this. They are supposed to be doing inspections and shutting places like these down. But they’re not. They're not the people who shut down Envigo and rescued all those dogs, because they're not doing their job. They've rarely done their job. And this job needs to go to someone else because animals need someone who's actually on their team.

Today’s episode is about the people who are doing the work.

This conversation is with Eric Kleinman. Eric is a researcher at the Animal Welfare Institute and he knows more about this stuff than I think anyone. I'm going to warn you in advance, it's complicated and there are a lot of acronyms (one that you need to know is APHIS – Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, a part of the USDA). It’s also extremely important.

Links: 

AWI: https://awionline.org/

To learn more:

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2022/06/what-do-we-owe-former-lab-chimps

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/toothless-and-paltry-critics-slam-usda-fines-for-animal-welfare-violations

https://www.science.org/content/article/indictment-monkey-importers-could-disrupt-u-s-drug-and-vaccine-research

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/what-do-we-owe-former-lab-chimps

https://www.science.org/content/article/research-animals-mistreated-leading-supplier-animal-welfare-group-alleges

https://www.science.org/content/article/leading-breeder-beagles-research-slammed-animal-welfare-inspectors

https://www.science.org/content/article/beleaguered-beagle-facility-closes-under-government-pressure-fate-3000-dogs-unclear

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/hundreds-of-beagles-have-died-at-a-major-research-animal-breeding-facility

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/usda-accused-of-ignoring-animal-welfare-for-business-interests

“…people were treating us like two crazy guys from Spain that were trying to change something in a country that loves meat... And now we see in these supermarkets, our product there… it’s crazy.  

I get very emotional when I think about that day that with Marc. We were working in a library for free because we did not have money to pay for an office. We just had this idea. We had these first prototypes for a product… let's try to sell it in few shops and let's see the feedback. And now we are in more than 3000 points of sale, more than 10 countries. And, what's coming is big. It's huge.” – Bernat Añaños

Bernat Añaños is the co-founder of the Spanish plant-based startup, Heura by Foods for Tomorrow.

Bernat and Marc Coloma founded Heura in 2017 with the goal of disrupting the unsustainable food system by bringing a solution that will accelerate the shift to a world where the animals are out of the meat production equation. Since they launched, Heura has become the fastest growing European startup in the plant-based industry, with 450% growth this year despite the pandemic.  

4 years ago, Bernat and Marc could not get their products into supermarkets. That’s because people were unwilling to believe that meat loving Spain would ever embrace plant-based products. But, like in every other country where it was assumed that the public would be resistant to plant-based foods, especially in chain restaurants and grocery stores, the assumptions were wrong. Heura’s products are now sold at over 3000 locations (grocery stores, restaurants, and online) and they’ve expanded into ten other countries with many more coming.

“I'm seeing a huge change. And the good thing is that it's not just in Barcelona and Madrid. It's also happening in villages and small cities. …my grandma, for example, she does not even eat meat anymore and she is using Facebook to introduce Heura to her 80 year old friends… and the response of these 80 year old friends of my grandma, it's crazy… I think we are on the right path…  We were and we still are a meat lover’s country, but maybe… it's a plant-based meat lover’s country in very few years. “ - Bernat Añaños

"I have often asked myself, ‘why is it that wolves don't kill people?’ Every year there are records of lions, tigers, bears and other large carnivores killing people. For wolves it very rarely ever happens. They are certainly quite capable of hauling down much larger prey than ourselves such as moose and bison. I think it has a lot to do with the dramatically different way that wolves raise their young compared to most other large carnivores." - Paul Joslin

Dr. Paul Joslin is a wildlife biologist who has spent decades with wolves and other predators in the US, Canada, India and Iran. His wolf research began in Ontario in the 1960s at a time when we did not know a lot about the daily lives of wolves. His is stories are extraordinary. He lived alone in the wilderness for months at a time, tracking wolves to gain a deeper understanding of their lives. He did this before google maps, before there were even trails in many of these places, so he created his own. His knowledge and wisdom on wolves go deep, while his work took him all over the world.

I have been on a quest to understand the wolf hatred that seems to permeate the United States, especially Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, where we are currently slaughtering all of our wolves, but it’s not just here, wolf hatred is global – as humans everywhere seem to abhor these remarkable animals.

So, I asked Paul to come on the show and give his two cents as to why so many humans fear and hate an animal that does almost zero harm to us.

Tuesday, August 10th is World Lion Day, so we are re-sharing this conversation with Beverly and Derek Joubert.

"When we were born, there were 450,000 lions, and today there are 20,000 lines. So that's a ninety-five percent decline. There were 750,000 leopards, and now maybe 45,000 leopards left. Cheetah numbers have dropped below 7,000. Tigers have had a little bit of a resurgence, but still under 5,000 and that's really worrying.

We could lose a lot of these animals in the next 10 or 15 years"   - Derek Joubert 

Are we being the best version of ourselves? That’s a question that Beverly and Dereck Joubert asked quite often during this conversation and also one that they seem to live by. It’s embedded into their work, their lives, their relationships - with each other, the wilderness, and the planet; as if the question floats above their heads as a gentle reminder of who they want to be in the world. And, the continual asking of that question shows in everything that they do, fight for, love, and are actively trying to save.

They are award-winning filmmakers, National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, and wildlife conservationists who have made over 30 films while researching, exploring, and doing vital conservation work throughout Africa for nearly four decades.

They also happen to have what could possibly be the best love story of our time. They have been together for nearly 40 years and the great majority of it has been spent living in the bush in Botswana, making films, doing research, and fighting to save what’s left of the African wilderness and the large predators who inhabit it. For months and years at a time they’ve lived without electricity, without much human interaction, without many comforts, nor personal space – things that most couples have a difficult time managing over a week long glamping trip. They’ve been doing it for 38 years.

Living in the bush for decades has included many death defying close calls, including what they simply refer to as the “incident” with a wounded (therefore angry) cape buffalo that nearly ended it all. Fortunately, everyone survived and after an 8 month stint in the hospital for Beverly, they returned to the bush and began filming again – at the exact place where the attack occurred. Did I mention that they are a little tougher than most of us?

Their love story, like all of the good ones, is about something much bigger than themselves. It’s a story about Africa, the wilderness, the wild animals who live there, and it’s about fighting the biggest fight of our time, to save what’s left of this majestic planet.

In the last 50 years, Africa has lost 90 to 95 percent of its large predators. We could very well witness the end of wild lions, cheetahs and other big cats in a decade or two. It’s that urgent and we are in that much trouble. If we want to live in a world with lions and leopards and elephants and rhinos, then we’ve got to get behind those who are out there on the front lines.

Beverly and Dereck are not only out there, but they’ve documented it for decades, so that we can see and understand the African wilderness in all of its magnificent glory and so that we know exactly what’s at stake, what we are about to lose.

Their most recent film was released in October. It’s a three part series called: Okavango, A River of Dreams. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful journey through the place they’ve called home since the beginning.

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 cats, a few horses, and a couple of monkeys.

Helena is also an architect. She has been with BETA since 2006, a few months before the Lebanon War started. As bombs dropped nearby, she drove around in her Jeep saving the injured and abandoned dogs that had been left behind.  

Since then, she has been rescuing animals during the too many crises and catastrophes that have plagued Lebanon, including the 2019 financial collapse, the riots, COVID-19, and the blast that decimated Beirut.  

This conversation is really one that's about resilience, about grit, about what it means to show up every day, even when bombs are dropping, when there's no access to money, when people are starving, and no one knows what tomorrow will look like. 

It's a conversation about what it means to choose the meaningful life. I hope that you are as completely floored by Helena and her stories as I was. 

Learn More About BETA 

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Support BETA’s "Surviving in Lebanon" fundraiser to provide shelter to their hundreds of rescue animals before they are left without a refuge.

“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 talk about some important things happening in our government right now. Starting with the delayed passage of the Farm Bill.

The Farm Bill covers laws that govern food and farming and has a tremendous impact on farming livlihoods, how food is grown, and what kinds of food are grown. 

A group of Congressional lawmakers are pushing to include the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act as part of the 2023 Farm Bill. If passed, the EATS Act would have serious implications for animal welfare and every ounce of progress that the animal protection movement has made against factory farming. It could also have a huge effect on farmer well-being, worker safety, the spread of zoonotic diseases and pollution. It’d be disastrous.

“The truth is that in between all of those wonderful events was huge debt, maxing out 20 different credit cards and absolutely annihilating my credit, moving from that little half acre backyard into where we are now in Santa Clarita, refinancing the house five times, having people show up in the middle of the night to repo our cars, the bank trying to take the house, my parents doing literal intervention, saying, ‘Ellie, stop your nonsense.’” – Ellie Laks

Ellie Laks is the founder of The Gentle Barn, a sanctuary that houses and heals some of the most traumatized animals around. And in turn, those animals heal the humans who come there. It's a pretty remarkable place.

It started out on half an acre in Ellie's backyard, and it grew to many many acres and multiple locations. There's one in California, one in Tennessee and a third in Missouri. Since its inception, The Gentle Barn has saved thousands of animals and been host to over 500,000 people.

“As children, we learnt respect for our elders and for authority, we learnt etiquette too, but rarely was it suggested that we extend any feelings towards animals, or indeed that animals have feelings. And because of this, many children in Asia grow up assuming animals exist to serve us, feed us, entertain us and clothe us; animals are useful ‘moving objects’, a literal translation of the Chinese word for animal.” - Pei Su

Pei Su is truly a pioneer. In the early 90s, she was involved with the forming of Taiwan’s very first animal right’s organization. 30 years later, it still exists and Taiwan’s animal right’s movement is one of the fastest growing in Asia. 

In 2011, Pei co-founded ACTAsia – an organization that’s dedicated to creating change in China through humane education. What that means is that they go into schools and train the teachers to teach a 6-year program called Caring for Life Education. The kids are in the program from ages 6 -12 and they learn animal welfare, empathy toward animals, environmental issues, social welfare, and citizenship. To date, 80,000 kids have gone through Caring For Life and 2,000 teachers have been trained. Pei believes that things won’t really change for animals in China until people start to view them differently – and, the best people for that job are the children – as they will create change for generations to come. 

“…I just remember walking around this room in total shock and then backing into a cage and feeling something touch my shoulder and realizing, ‘Oh my gosh, you know, I’ve come too close,’ and thinking I was going to be hurt. Then, as I turned around [I saw] what had touched me was the bears paw through the bars of the cage.

She just had her paw there and was holding it out. And I did something ridiculously stupid. I took her paw, because it was there, reaching out and she just squeezed my fingers. That's all she did. She just rhythmically squeezed my fingers. And I just looked into her eyes and I just knew it was one of those amazing moments that you can hardly describe.
Because you just know at that point, everything in your life is going to change. Well, indeed, that’s exactly what happened.” - Jill Robinson

Jill Robinson has spent nearly 30 years of her life fighting to end bear bile farming, one of the world’s darkest industries that most people have never heard of.

She is widely recognized as the world’s leading authority on bear bile farming and is the founder and CEO of Animals Asia, an organization that has been rescuing bears since 1994 and is devoted to ending the entire bear bile industry. They are one of the few organizations in the world that is close to reaching the goal that they originally set out to achieve.

“I think the thing revolves around the control of nature. You know, I mean, you get way back to that. Some people are really uncomfortable around nature existing as it should, and they feel that we need to fix things." - Dr. Chistopher Servheen  

Grizzly bears are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. But Republican lawmakers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming are trying to change that. They are pressing the Biden administration to turn management of grizzly bears back over to the states, which would mean there would be a hunting season for grizzly bears, which would probably look something like what we're doing to wolves in those same states, which is nothing short of a massacre.  

Dr. Christoph Servheen spent 35 years, from 1981 until 2016, fighting to bring back grizzly bears. In 1981, they were on their way out. There were only 30 breeding females in the greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Most people thought that there was no way to save them. 

But, because of Chris and people like him and because of The Federal Endangered Species Act, a conservation miracle occurred. They brought the bears back, an act that many consider to be one of conservations biggest success stories. 

But now, in 2023, because of politicians in the Northern Rockies, the future for grizzly bears could be very bleak.

“…This is not a surprise in many ways and, for decades, not just animal rights activists, but public health experts have been sounding the alarm bells about this kind of risk. And you know, my concern is in many ways people are referring to this as a once in a century event or the black swan or something, but it's like rolling dice and rolling snake eyes once doesn't have any effect on rolling. And in fact, we're rolling the dice even faster now.

The main reason is because we are in so much contact with animals through factory farms. So the way to think about pandemics is that we know that emerging zoonotic infections come from places where animals and humans are in close contact. Well, where is that? Live animal markets, we know that. And the other place is industrial animal farms and slaughterhouses. That is the most obvious place for that connection to happen.” – Leah Garces

The New Coronavirus has done a superb job at exposing the numerous vulnerabilities and holes in many of our systems and industries, but none are as gaping or dangerous as the chasms in our food system.

Our food system is in crisis. We are seeing it right now – meat shortages, mass killings of animals because of shut downs and overflow, workers are getting sick and dying. It’s a fragile system that needs (and has needed for decades) a complete overhaul. By exposing these vulnerabilities, the pandemic is also giving us an opportunity to demand that the system change and, while we are at it, to think about changing the way that we eat.

If we don’t, if we ignore the scores of red flags waving from the factory farms and slaughterhouses across the country, then not only will the crisis deepen, but we are also putting the entire globe at risk for another pandemic that could and probably will be much worse than the one we are currently experiencing.

Factory farms are breeding grounds for viruses and bacterial resistance. We cram thousands of animals into filthy, confined spaces. Their immune systems are stressed because of their living conditions. This is the perfect environment for viruses to grow and to mutate. And, to transmit to humans – it’s happened before and next time, and, yes, it will happen again, and next time could be much worse.

Leah Garcés mission is to end factory farming. She is the President of Mercy for Animals and has spent much of her life leading the animal protection movement in exposing the hidden and horrible worlds of factory farming - and, changing them.

Her approach has been usual and it’s created change in a system that in many ways seemed unchangeable. She has worked with whistleblowing farmers to expose industrial chicken farms and has partnered with some of the world's largest food companies to improve conditions for factory-farmed animals.

Leah learned that she could make considerable progress by working with her adversaries in the meat industry instead of battling against them, something I think that all of us can learn from. Her story is one that makes us rethink how we change broken systems and repair destructive industries. She wrote a book about it called, Grilled, Turning Adversaries Into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry. It's an incredible read – not only does it expose the horrors of our food system, it’s also a book on how to make change happen, how to fight for justice, and how to remain empathic, optimistic, and hopeful in a fight for a much better world.

Leah is a hero to millions of animals, to humans across the planet, and to me. She thinks big, she get’s things done, and creates massive impact in the process.

Marc Ching has all of the makings of a superhero. He is the founder of the Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation, which is an organization that’s dedicated to rescuing abused and neglected animals. In 2015 he expanded that outreach to include rescuing dog from the horrific Asian dog meat trade - where it’s estimated that 30 million dogs a year are killed for their meat. What makes it especially horrific though, is that many of those dogs are brutally tortured first. Between 2015, when he first he learned of the trade and 2018, Marc has made close to twenty trips going undercover into multiple dog slaughterhouses. When he’s been inside, posed as a wealthy meat buyer, he has filmed hundreds of videos that show some of the worst things that human beings are capable of: dogs being nail gunned to walls, being beaten with lead pipes and bats, being blowtorched, having their limbs chopped off while they bleed out, all while the dogs are fully conscious and alive. This is done because of the myth that dogs that die in terror and agony taste better.

I think that until Marc started risking his life to go inside and make these videos, very few people in the US at least had any idea that the dog meat trade even existed and far fewer knew of the torture that often goes hand and hand within it.

Marc is a huge hero of mine but I would guess that he’s a huge hero of anyone who has ever met him. He’s tough, he’s brave, he’s relentless, and he is as compassionate as they come. He is one of those people who - the minute that he heard about something terrible happening jumped on a plane, and then he figured out how he could help. He hasn’t stopped helping since, not only with dogs from the meat trade but also in the US, taking on some of the hardest rescue and abuse cases there are, running clinics and doing rescue in Mexico, and working on legislation and changing laws to give the animals here better lives.

I interviewed Marc right after one of these trips. He’d just returned from China, Cambodia, and South Korea. Our conversation will give you some insight as to what he’s faced, what these dogs go through and just how incredibly difficult the work he’s done and is doing is.

Just a warning, some of what we discuss is tough to hear: details on some of what he’s seen, filmed and bared witness to inside the slaughterhouses. I think our minds often want to skip through the terrible parts because it’s so hard to hear about, but I also think that’s part of our responsibility as humans on this planet, to bear witness to see or hear about what we are doing to other species. If Marc can be in it, and see it first hand and film it and if these animals have to actually endure it, then I think that the least we can do is allow ourselves to hear about it, to become aware of it. 

“Bearing witness is difficult. It does hit your emotions... I think you've got to remember, these images that you take are not yours to keep… it's your duty to put them out there or let organizations get them out there. I think that's how you cope - it’s thinking, okay these aren't going to stay in my head. These are actually going to go out into the world and are going to create change.”  - Gemunu de Silva

Today’s episode is a special one.

It’s with Gemunu de Silva. Gem is a filmmaker and an activist who has been investigating and documenting animal rights abuses since the eighties, before there was even such a thing as a camcorder, instead he covertly filmed inside of factory farms with a video camera and a VHS recorder attached to his back. He was the first person in the UK to film in and expose the atrocities that happen every day on industrial farms.

He directed and produced programs for UK national television, including the documentary, Meathead. Watch it – it’s absolutely spectacular.

He left the film and television world to set up and run the Investigations Unit at Compassion in World Farming. Gem also lead the unit’s pioneering work on long distance animal transport.

In the early 2000’s, Gem went to work as the Director of Research and Investigations at Cruelty Free International, where he specialized in exposing the vile international trade of primates for research.

In 2006, Gem co-founded Tracks Investigations. They have just completed their 250th investigative film project. That is an enormous number of investigations. 35 animal rights and protection organizations have benefited from their work in 57 countries.

The work that Gem has done for the past three and a half decades has changed laws, minds and the world for millions of animals. For most of that time, he has laid low and stayed under the radar and has not done any media in decades.

It was an absolute honor to have Gem on the show to tell his story.

"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 of wolves and other rare wildlife.

I wanted to talk to Collette because it's been a while since we've talked about wolves on here, and unfortunately their situation is as dire as ever. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are killing them as fast as they can and in more horrific ways. One of those ways is that in Idaho, they're shooting wolves from helicopters. And Collette is the primary author of a petition to get this banned. 

Please listen and share.

In gratitude,

Elizabeth Novogratz

“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 are now free and the former prison that they were forced to call home has been torn down to become a safe and loving animal sanctuary. 

This conversation was done as a live interview a few weeks ago. It's with me and Shannon Keith, the president and founder of the Beagle Freedom Project. I invited her on to discuss the shutdown of a massive dog and cat testing laboratory in Nowata, Oklahoma. Not only did the Beagle Freedom Project and Shannon shut down this laboratory, but they rescued all of the dogs and cats that were being tested on there, and they took over the laboratory and it's grounds and are in the process of transforming it into a 30-acre sanctuary called Freedom Fields.  

The closure of this laboratory ends one-third of the toxic flea and tick testing industry in the United States, sparing the lives of thousands of dogs and cats.

Beagle Freedom Project is the world’s leading organization for rescuing and rehoming animals used in experimental research. Since 2010, they have liberated thousands of animals while working to end their abuse through education, advocacy, and legislation.

We talk about the shutdown, the rescue of hundreds of animals that were being tested on, and the magic of transforming a dark and terrifying animal research lab into a beautiful sanctuary. And, we discuss not only how to help these former research animals, but also the more than one hundred million still being used for testing and research in the United States.

“If we fast forward, let's say to 2025, I think you're going to see a lot of companies in the marketplace using mushroom-based products to create alternatives to things like meat and chicken and within food. And then also alternatives within textiles to things like silk, leather and packaging for things like Styrofoam and plastic and so on.

So, I’m very much a… what do you call it? Maybe, a fungo fanatic. I don’t know if there’s a phrase for that, but I am totally a believer in all things fungi.”

-Michael Pellman Rowland

Michael Pellman Rowland is a financial advisor. He’s made many appearances on Species Unite - this was his fourth time coming on the show. He and I spoke about the Oatley IPO - amongst many other enormous wins in the plant, cell, and mushroom-based worlds.

Swedish vegan company, Oatly went public on May 20th. The company’s initial public offering (IPO) raised $1.4 billion and its share prices (which were initially set at $17 per share) spiked by 30 percent on the first day of trading. This is the second milestone for plant-based companies going public, after Beyond Meat a few years ago.

The future of food is already here and fortunately, it’s happening much faster than many predicted.

Michael is our go-to guru when it comes to the big wins for meat and dairy alternatives. He’s a wealth of knowledge and information and he’s a stellar human being. I learned a ton in this conversation, I hope that you do too.

Rachel Nuwer has spent a decade writing about, reporting on, investigating, and going undercover in the illegal wildlife trade. She is a freelance journalist whose work often focuses on wildlife trafficking and poaching and appears in publications like the New York Times and National Geographic.

She also wrote the book Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking. It’s a book for anyone who is interested in a planet that still has tigers, elephants, rhinos and thousands of other species living on it a couple generations from now. Rachel takes the reader to trafficking hotspots in twelve countries shares an in person account from the frontlines of the trade.

Rachel and I met in Brooklyn in January, pre-pandemic, to talk about her book and her time spent reporting on the wildlife trade. She is a wealth of knowledge with a deep understanding of the incredibly complex world of wildlife trafficking.

“We don't know one case where a lion which was hand fed or bottle fed was released successfully in the wild. Of course, if they see humans and they understand that humans is the connection to food, it will be always a danger to put those lions back in the wild. And many of those companies use that as an excuse why this conservation project is important, but we don't think so and we don't believe that of course. It's in my opinion, nonsense.” – Daniel Kaul

Daniel Kaul is the founder of Natucate, an environmental travel company that works to build a safer, more sustainable eco-tourism industry. Unfortunately, the eco-tourism industry has been hijacked by a lot of bad players who are taking advantage of animal lovers. And, some of the animals that are suffering the most because of these bad players, are lions.

 Please listen, share and don’t participate in tourism that involves interacting with wild animals.

Natucate: https://www.natucate.com/en

“…From everything that I'd learned and from everything that I'd seen, I came to realize that our food and how we produce it, particularly products of industrial animal agriculture links to almost every issue I'd worked on from biodiversity loss to climate change to food insecurity.” – Thomas King

Thomas King is the founder and CEO of Food Frontier, a food innovation think tank dedicated to diversifying the world's food supply through the development of alternatives proteins.

For the last decade Thomas has driven food systems and environmental and poverty alleviation initiatives across five continents.

Thomas is 24 years old.

At 13, he launched an awareness campaign about deforestation caused by unsustainable palm oil production, which catapulted him right into the deep end of advocacy where he has lived ever since.

At 18, he was named Victoria's Young Australian of the year for his environmental and humanitarian work.

Species Unite will be back with a brand new season next Thursday the 28th. Until then, we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Josh Balk.

“The time to begin phasing out the intensive confinement systems in which we raise billions of animals is now. We need to accelerate society’s direction of reducing demand for meat from animal factory farms and shift instead to more of an emphasis on healthier — and safer — plant-based foods. As our population grows, plant-based foods are also more sustainable and affordable for societies globally.

Unless we — especially legislators and the food industry — make changes immediately, the concerning practices in animal agribusiness will remain. Only in transforming our food system can we eliminate the tinderbox ready to explode in our country. We can’t afford to wait.”

- Josh Balk and Dr. Shivam Yoshi, Pandemic on Our Plates

Social distancing is the key to slowing the spread of COVID-19. We know this. It has worked and is still working. But, we also know that in this unsettling time, a time where we are fully aware that staying apart does indeed save lives, just the opposite is taking place at factory farms and meat processing plants all across America. Slaughterhouses are being forced to stay open and their workers must remain in close proximity to one another to be able to get their jobs done. And, they are getting sick and they are dying.

And, on factory farms, billions of animals are “living” in cramped, filthy, overcrowded spaces with almost no room to move their antibiotic-fueled bodies - conditions that are creating a perfect storm for the next zoonotic disease to emerge and spread. This threat is nothing new, as diseases have already come from factory farms - we’ve just gotten lucky in terms of their spread. But the clock is ticking.

Josh Balk has been a global leader in animal protection for the past 20 years. He is the Vice President of Farm Animal Protection for the Humane Society of the United States, and he’s the co-founder of plant-based, food manufacturing company, JUST, as in JUST Mayo and my favorite invention of the 21st century, JUST Egg.

Josh has spent a couple of decades focusing on and fighting against extreme confinement on America’s factory farms: confinement practices like cramming many chickens into small battery cages for their entire lives, and days old calves in tiny veal crates where they can barely move, and keeping mother pigs in gestation crates (small metal cages that fit around their bodies like steel coffins). These are some of the cruelest practices on the planet and they are the status quo at factory farms in most American states.

Josh and his team have scored huge victories on changing animal welfare policies at some of the world’s largest companies and by changing legislation in many states. But there's still a long way and a lot of states to go. And, there are still billions of animals suffering.

And, right now, while we are in the midst of a public health crisis that started because of how we treat animals, we need to demand that our food industry change; otherwise we're setting ourselves up for a much larger crisis.

Josh is a hero and a world changer, and many humans and millions of animals are lucky to have this guy in their corner.

“I think that when the animal protection movement really started gaining hold in the seventies... in the United States at least, I think there was a lot of harm done in the ways that we messaged the connections between humans in marginalized communities and animals. And I think that there's also a dynamic where… communities of color are often struggling for basic rights, basic needs to be met. And so, fighting for others is kind of a nice to have.” - Aryenish Birdie

Aryenish Birdie is founder and Executive Director of Encompass, an organization that is fighting to increase effectiveness in the animal protection movement by fostering greater racial diversity, equity, and inclusion while empowering advocates of color.

Before founding Encompass, Aryenish was a federal lobbyist at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. She was part of a four-woman team instrumental in reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act to ensure that animal protection language was integrated into the law.

Thank you,

Elizabeth Novogratz

“It’s like comparing hells - it's a different type of hell, right? It's just like one hideous place where you're neglected and you have all manner of suffering to another place where it's a different set of conditions of suffering and misery.” – Dr. Alka Chandna

This conversation took place a couple of weeks ago as a live event. It's with me and Dr. Alka Chandna, PETA's Vice President of Laboratory Investigations. At the time I called it, The Realities of Animal Testing, which is a pretty horrible name as nobody really wants to know the realities of animal testing. But I think it's so important that we do know, because the more we know, the more we can change.

Alka has spent the past two decades at PETA fighting to end cruelty towards animals. She is an expert on animal experimentation. She has submitted dozens of complaints to highlight violations of US federal animal welfare laws, guidelines, and policies. And, she's has worked on numerous campaigns to end animal testing and has had original research published in peer-reviewed journals on policies pertaining to problems with oversight of animal experimentation. 

Please listen and gain a deeper understanding of why testing on animals needs to be a thing of the past and why it's crucial to move towards human relevant methods. 

LINKS:

PETA: https://www.peta.org/

Alka Chandna Twitter: https://twitter.com/alkac1?lang=en

“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 in marine waters, in underwater or floating net pens, pods, and cages. Offshore finfish farms are factory farms that harm public health, the environment, and local communities and economies that rely on the ocean and its resources. 

Don’t Cage Our Oceans are a coalition of diverse organizations working together to stop the development of offshore finfish farming in the United States through federal law, policies, and coalition building. And, although it is not yet happening, right now the US Administration and Congress are promoting this kind of farming, which would be nothing short of disastrous for the oceans, the planet and the people and animals who live here.

dontcageouroceans.org

We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago.

• James Arbib and Tony Seba, Rethinking Humanity

James Arbib is co-founder of RethinkX, a nonprofit think tank that explores how technology will shape the future and disrupt all levels of society, including information energy, materials, transportation, and my favorite, food – food that will not come from slaughtered animals.

Jamie and RethinkX cofounder, Tony Seba are the authors of Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom. They predict that new technologies could wipe out poverty and solve climate change in the next 10-15 years, and bring in a new "Age of Freedom.” Which sounds pretty phenomenal, but they also warn that it could pose huge challenges for a a world that still clings to outdated concepts such as democracy, capitalism and the nation state.

“…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 concern because it’s a 60% mortality rate, I mean, that can wipe out most of humanity.” – Poorva Joshipura

On Sunday, June 23rd the winter racing season at Santa Anita racetrack in Southern California finally came to a close. And on Saturday June 22nd the 30th horse died in racing or training at Santa Anita this year. That’s a lot of horse deaths. But there are a lot of horse deaths every year. In 2018, 493 thoroughbreds died in racing or training.

And so, there’s been a lot of talk about reforming horse racing. But the reforms that have been put in place aren’t really working: horses are still dying every week.

Patrick Battuello has been reporting on animal rights issues since he launched the Animal Rights blog for the Times Union (Albany, NY) in 2009. In 2013, he founded the organization, Horse Racing Wrongs. They aren’t interested in reforms. Instead, they are dedicated to a a complete abolition of horse racing, period. And with all these deaths, I can’t see how more people aren’t going to get behind them.

Jane Velez Mitchell the founder of Jane Unchained, a media platform for vegan and animal rights news. Her decades long career as a broadcast journalist has focused on bringing animal rights issues to the forefront.

For six years she hosted her own show on CNN Headline News, where she ran a weekly segment on animal issues. Previously, Velez-Mitchell reported for the nationally syndicated Warner Brothers/Telepictures show Celebrity Justice, where she did numerous stories on animal issues championed by celebrities.

Jane’s also an author of four books and a producer of the award-winning documentary Countdown to Year Zero and the vegan cooking series New Day, New Chef.

Mainstream media has always skirted around animal rights issues and I wanted to hear how Jane brought them mainstream at a time when it wasn’t as popular to do so. And I wanted to know what she thinks about where we’re headed in the future.

“These animals are being held captive in a laboratory. They have none of what they need for their own physical and mental well-being. And there is an enormous amount of research suggesting that the biology and the behavior of animals in laboratories is nothing like even those animals in the wild. I mean, right down to their heart rate and their core temperature and their microbiome. So basically, you can't trust data from a mouse in a laboratory to reflect on a mouse in a field. So it really has no chance of being related to us.”  - Dr. Katherine Roe

Dr. Roe is a neuroscientist and PETA's chief of science advancement and outreach. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University and had an impressive eight-year stint as a clinical neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health.

Today, she’s working to end cruel animal experiments, including the recently exposed maternal-and sensory-deprivation experiments being conducted on infant monkeys at Harvard Medical School.

“You would expect Harvard University and, in this case, this is at Harvard Medical School to be conducting the most cutting edge, the most human relevant, the most ethical research on the planet. That is not the case with these experiments.” – Dr. Katherine Roe

LINKS:

https://headlines.peta.org/research-modernization-new-deal/?utm_source=PETA::Vanity%20URL&utm_medium=Promo&utm_campaign=0720::viv::PETA::Vanity%20URL::PETAorg-RMD

https://headlines.peta.org/harvard-baby-monkeys/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/monkey-study-harvard-reignites-debate-animal-testing/

“The fear factor is probably one of the worst. I mean, if you've ever been deeply afraid, or had a near accident or had somebody pursuing you, if you've ever been really afraid, that's their life 24 hours a day, except when they are able to sleep. And, how they are able to sleep on metal slats with nothing that's comforting, no ability to control the temperature ever, whether it's very hot to very cold, no freedom. And studies show that when the knob on the door turns in the room they're in or the door starts to open, their blood pressure goes through the roof, their hearts start pounding in their chests, their adrenaline soars. So, here's your research subject who is in a state of absolute catatonic fear.”  -Ingrid Newkirk

“The fear factor is probably one of the worst. I mean, if you've ever been deeply afraid, or had a near accident or had somebody pursuing you, if you've ever been really afraid, that's their life 24 hours a day, except when they are able to sleep. And, how they are able to sleep on metal slats with nothing that's comforting, no ability to control the temperature ever, whether it's very hot to very cold, no freedom. And studies show that when the knob on the door turns in the room they're in or the door starts to open, their blood pressure goes through the roof, their hearts start pounding in their chests, their adrenaline soars. So, here's your research subject who is in a state of absolute catatonic fear.”  -Ingrid Newkirk

Ingrid Newkirk cofounded PETA in1980. I don’t there has been a single day in the past 40 years that she has not fought against injustice toward animals. She is a hero for animals, for people, and for showing all of us how to make change happen.

Ingrid came on the show to talk about her book, Free the Animals. She wrote it in 1992 and it was just rereleased for its 30-year anniversary. It's about the beginnings of the Animal Liberation Front in America and it’s about animal testing.

There is a chapter in the book that starts with a quote by Nicholas Chamfort, “Do you think that revolutions are made with rosewater?”

That quote makes me think about everything that Ingrid and PETA and the ALF have accomplished in the past 40 years. It also makes me think about what's happening in this country right now. The fight against injustice toward animals only becomes more difficult as people in this country lose more rights. It’s all connected. We’re all connected. How we treat animals is very much connected to how we treat humans and at the moment, we’re not treating anyone very well.

So, please listen, share and then go start a revolution.

LINKS:

Free the Animals: https://www.amazon.com/Free-Animals-Amazing-Liberation-Anniversary/dp/159056670X

PETA: https://www.peta.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peta/?hl=en

Twitter: https://twitter.com/peta/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/official.peta/

“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 shakes and formulas that have helped hundreds of thousands of children and adults along their journeys towards health. 

Brett’s son had severe health issues in high school, and proper nutrition was critical in his healing. Brett learned about the power of food to heal and invested in Kate Farms in 2014, became Chairman and later CEO.

There are thousands of stories of children and adults whose lives have been dramatically improved because of Kate Farms. They are a game-changer for bringing healthy nutrition into our hospitals and our homes.

katefarms.com

Dr. Andrew Halloran is the director of chimpanzee care at Save the Chimps in Fort Pierce, Florida. Andrew has spent the past 20 years working to improve and save the lives of chimpanzees, not only chimps in captivity here in the U.S. with, but chimps in the wild as well in Sierra Leone. He has truly dedicated his life to these apes, and he's got incredible stories, a wealth of knowledge and a huge heart.

20 years ago, Andrew was right out of college, living in New York City in a little apartment with a bunch of roommates, working at a bookstore, not really knowing what he was going to do with his life.

He’d had a life long fascination with apes, but never thought it was something he'd end up doing until one night when there was an AOL chat room, which was a thing in the 90s  - where you could write in and talk to Koko the gorilla. Koko was the famous gorilla that spoke sign language. People would write in and Koko’s interpreter would respond with whatever Koko had signed. The responses were somewhat inane and nonsensical, but Koko’s caretaker would then link them to something else and explain why that answer made sense. Except to Andrew it didn't make sense. He thought why are we trying to teach apes how to be more human instead of getting a better understanding of apes?

Right then and there he decided that's it. He knew what he wanted to do and shortly after the Koko debacle, he moved to Florida, started a Masters program and got a job at an animal park working with chimpanzees. Eventually, he earned his PhD, became a primatologist, and spent 10 years at that animal park before moving on to academia as well as a decade long project in Sierra Leone, focused on chimps in the wild and the loss of habitat.

He’s been at Save the Chimps for the past few years. It’s an incredible sanctuary, founded by Dr. Carol Noon in 1997.  At the time, our space program was still using chimps for research and in '97 they decided they were going to finally retire the chimps and gave them to a lab in New Mexico, called the Coulston Foundation; which had more animal welfare violations than any lab in the country and was a living hell for animals.

Dr. Noon sued the Air Force on behalf of the chimpanzees and got permanent custody of the 21 chimps, she saved them from Coulston and Save the Chimps was born. A few years later, when the Coulston Foundation was on the verge of bankruptcy, they offered to sell their laboratory lands and their buildings to Save the Chimps and they donated their remaining 266 chimpanzees as well. Save the Chimps then built the 200-acre sanctuary in Fort Pierce.  

The chimps live on 12 large (2 to 3 acres) islands with each island housing around 20 chimps. All of the chimps that live at Save the Chimps came from laboratory research, the pet trade, the entertainment industry and the original space chimps. Most spent years or decades living in horrific conditions, in confined metal cages. Many of them never saw other chimps, and were tested on for decades. There are a few cages on display on the property, they are set up so that people can see where these chimps came from. They look like exactly what they are - tiny metal prison cells.

In 2015, the U.S. department official wildlife made chimps endangered which meant that the NIH would no longer fund research done on chimpanzees; which shut down all the biomedical research, but because of lack of sanctuary space and just overall slowness with how all of this works, there's still 700 chimps sitting in labs just languishing. They are waiting for homes or waiting to be moved or at least, that’s the hope.

The other chimpanzees at Save the Chimps come from either the entertainment industry or the pet trade and in both cases, the chimps are purchased from pet dealers when they're babies. They're two or three months old, and they're tiny and they're adorable. But as soon as the chimps turn four or five years old, they are too much for the owner to handle. They get big, and can be aggressive and destructive - because they are chimps, not humans.  Sadly, many of them don't end up in incredible places like Save the Chimps. They end up in terrible places like road side zoos, breeder facilities, and metal cages.

I went down to Save the Chimps and spent the afternoon with Andrew.  It was magical. To see these chimps who had gone from living in isolation in tiny horrible metal cages to now living in communities on these islands, in nature and having friends and families and communities to share their days with was absolutely incredible. Andrew is a wealth of information and knowledge and wisdom and every single chimp here and in the wild is lucky to have this man on their side.

“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? Is it a limitation of our human intelligence and our human emotional capacity, or are we taught our disconnection?” - Carl Safina

Carl Safina is an ecologist and author who writes extensively about our human relationship with the natural world and what we can do to make it better. 

His most recent book is called, Alife and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. It’s about rescuing a baby owl, watching her grow up, and what he learned from her and himself in the process. And, it's about our relationship with nature and the beauty and the magic that surrounds us. 

His writing has won several awards, including a MacArthur Genius Prize, Pew and Guggenheim fellowships, and the John Burrows, James Beard, and George Rabb metals.

He is the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and the founding president of the not for profit, The Safina Center.

“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, meaning half their shoes were made from animal leather and then the exact same pairs were available in apple leather.

A couple of years after that, I noticed that all the animal leather shoes and boots were gone, Sylven was now a straight vegan brand. Not only did I want to know what happened and how it happened, but I also really love Sylvan's boots. So I called Casey and asked her to share her story.

“For me, it started with vegan for the environment… I was already working with these plant-based, vegan leathers and wanting to make sure I can lessen my environmental impact through my shoe production. And so I was like, well, why don't I try to reduce the amount of meat and dairy that I consume?

And then through that process, I was like, well, why am I consuming any meat or dairy? Why am I producing with anything leather? And, it brought me down this very positive rabbit hole.”

– Casey Dworkin

“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 Europe and Japan for consumption.  

This makes zero sense for a horse loving country. What are we doing? Why are we letting other countries torture, kill and eat our horses?

There's a way to stop this madness. A bipartisan bill called the Save Americans Forgotten Equines Act (SAFE) that has been introduced to Congress. If it passes, it will not only ban horse slaughter in the US by law, but it would also prohibit the exportation of our horses for slaughter.

This conversation is with Gemunu DeSilva. Gem’s been on the podcast before, this is his fourth appearance. I asked him to come on the show this time because his organization, Tracks Investigations, recently conducted their fourth investigation into Canada’s largest horse slaughter plant. Gem explains what happens to these US horses once they arrive in Canada. It’s worse than you can imagine.

LINKS:

Tracks Investigations: https://www.tracksinvestigations.org/

SAFE Act petition https://www.speciesunite.com/save-american-horses-from-slaughter

SAFE Act https://www.safe-act.org/

SpeciesUnite.com

"We kept going through this logical exercise of how do we help more and more animals. And every single time the logical end point was - it's not dogs and cats, it's animals in the food system. It’s not a matter of tens of millions of animals. It's a matter of tens of billions of animals and hundreds of billions of fish."

- Nate Salpeter

What do you get when two tech geniuses start an animal sanctuary? The first non-profit sanctuary in the world to address the global impacts of factory farming across animals, the plants and the planet.

Nate Salpeter and Anna Sweet are the founders of Sweet Farm, an animal sanctuary in Half Moon Bay, California, that links veganic agriculture, farm-animal rescue, and technology that is revolutionizing food and agriculture production. The technology initiatives that are happening at Sweet Farm are going to change the way that we eat forever. It’s the future of food.

Everything that is going on at Sweet Farm is pretty astounding, but not terribly surprising when you learn that by day, Nate is a nuclear engineer and Anna is a computer scientist and the CEO of Bad Robot, JJ Abrams gaming company.

Sweet Farm is also the home of Goat-2-Meeting, which Nate and Anna started when the sanctuary had to close to visitors because of the pandemic. Instead of going in person, people can invite the farm animals into their video conferences. Llamas, goats, cows, and others are still making appearances at meetings all over the planet.

“We sat down and we ordered omakase, which is essentially the chef's specialties, and they just keep bringing food out until you say I'm done. So we ate and ate and ate everything you can imagine for the better part of 3 hours before we even dared to do order whale” – Heather Rally

Dr. Heather Rally spent the last decade at the PETA Foundation as a supervising veterinarian for captive animal law enforcement. What that means is she's led investigative and enforcement actions in cases of abuse of animals in roadside zoos, circuses and pretty much anywhere captive animal are on exhibit in the US. And, sadly, there are a lot of these places.

Heather’s training is in marine mammals. For seven years, she worked with the Oceanic Preservation Society to document and expose environmental crimes and animal welfare violations across the world by doing undercover investigations for the documentary film, Racing Extinction.

In that time, she helped expose and put an end to the illegal sale of endangered species and brought global attention to the exponential rate of extinction that’s happening all over the planet.

Heather truly is a superhero. Listen to her episode and I think you’ll agree.

Links:

PETA Prime:  https://prime.peta.org/news/dr-heather-rally-my-adventures-as-petas-chief-veterinarian/

Whale Sanctuary Project: https://whalesanctuaryproject.org/people/heather-rally/

Racing Extinction: https://www.opsociety.org/our-work/films/racing-extinction/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwkt6aBhDKARIsAAyeLJ3Q4AjM5RfUfeNdHMiYvKyiquwzOk-lW0LceMku-O5H6ChjT03tmjgaArrMEALw_wcB

“There was a law on the books [in New York], even back in 1917, that required that every publicly funded elementary school needs to provide instruction in the humane treatment and protection of animals.”  - Meena Alagappan

Meena Alagappan runs an organization called, Humane Education Advocates Reaching Teachers, otherwise known as HEART. Heart is a full service, humane education provider in New York City, Chicago and Indianapolis. 

I met Meena because we, Species Unite are doing a wolf education program, so I asked her for some help and for some resources. She was beyond generous with both, and in the process I learned a lot about the work that HEART is doing - and what they're doing is changing thousands upon thousands of students lives and should be required in every classroom in this country.

LINKS: 

HEART: https://teachheart.org/

HEART Educator Resources: https://teachheart.org/library/

“When I moved my mom in, I certainly felt, okay, now I'm off the market. I've got a broken-down house, a crazy mother, a high-pressure job being a vegan activist at PETA… this is not really a good resume for finding Mr. Right.” – Dan Mathews

Dan Mathews is the Director of Campaigns at PETA. He’s been there since the 80s when he was hired as a receptionist right after college. Dan’s responsible for PETAs most controversial and outlandish campaigns including the "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" ads.  He’s been arrested more than 20 times, but all for good reason - having changed the world for millions of animals.

He is also the author of two books, Committed and most recently, Like Crazy: Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends, a darkly funny memoir about the hardships and rewards of taking in a mentally and physically fragile parent. It shows the spectacular amount of expansion and growth that result from to choosing to do the right thing over the easy thing, from choosing the more beautiful life. Dan is brilliant, extremely funny, and a gift to humans and animals everywhere.

Edwina Von Gal is a landscape designer and an indomitable steward of the planet. 

She spent her career designing landscapes for the rich and famous and collaborating with architects and artists like Maya Lin, Richard Serra, and Frank Gehry.

A little over a decade ago, Edwina had an epiphany about the chemicals that we are pouring into our lawns, landscapes, and backyards. She decided right then that it would become her life’s mission to change the way that we treat our land and founded the Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit that promotes toxin-free lawns and landscapes.

A few years ago, she expanded the mission. We are losing our birds at an alarming rate. Since the seventies, the United States has lost a third of our bird population. So, to combat the great bird decline, Edwina started Two-Thirds for the Birds, a campaign to bring our birds back. And the way to do that is to dedicate two thirds of all plantings to native plants and to commit to going toxin free.

This conversation took place at Edwina’s spectacular home that sits on stilts atop a salt marsh. It was a gift to speak with Edwina about her mission, to learn about the history of chemicals and what we’ve done to our land, and to hear her remarkable stories, all while being surrounded by many many birds.

Brown Bear, Germany, 2008

I'm aware of what you are

and I'm also aware of what you're

thinking. You're a human being

I'm aware of what you are

and I'm also aware of what you're

thinking. You're a human being

and you are thinking I am something else

I'm aware of what you are

and I'm also aware of what you're

thinking. You're a human being

and you are thinking I am something else

put here for your entertainment.

I'm aware of what you are

and I'm also aware of what you're

thinking. You're a human being

and you are thinking I am something else

put here for your entertainment,

that makes it easier for you to ignore me.

I'm aware of what you are

and I'm also aware of what you're

thinking. You're a human being

and you are thinking I am something else

put here for your entertainment,

that makes it easier for you to ignore me

and the wire mesh that surrounds me.

I'm aware of what you are

and I'm also aware of what you're

thinking. You're a human being

and you are thinking I am something else

put here for your entertainment,

that makes it easier for you to ignore me

and the wire mesh that surrounds me;

the wire mesh that separates us.

I'm aware of what you are

and I'm also aware of what you're

thinking. You're a human being

and you are thinking I am something else

put here for your entertainment,

that makes it easier for you to ignore me

and the wire mesh that surrounds me;

the wire mesh that separates us,

and your way of thinking from mine.

Gordon Meade

Gordon Meade is a Scottish poet and animal advocate. His 10th book of poetry is called Zoo Speak. It’s about the inhumane and appalling conditions for animal who live in zoos and other terrible places. He wrote it to accompany the photographs in Jo-Anne McArthur’s, Captive a haunting book of photographs featuring animals in captivity.  

If you are unfamiliar with Jo-Anne’s work, go to We Animals Media and take a look. It will change you. I read/looked at Captive years ago and I truly did not think it could get more powerful or feel more devastating then it felt right then, and then I came across Gordon’s poetry. It offers an entirely new dimension to the photos, one that makes you look at the animals and really see and feel their perspective on the situation. It floored me.

Please listen and share and then, read Gordon’s poems.

LINKS 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnrR1DWog7Y&t=6s

https://www.etsy.com/listing/778801047/zoospeak-gordon-meade-with-jo-anne

Captive: https://joannemcarthur.com/captive/

We're creating a new system. When you look at it in that way, that's activism in itself. And that's actually fighting against a system that has billions of dollars, that has been spending billions of dollars, and not even asking people what they like to eat. They're not even considering the health.

We're in the middle of a pandemic and who gets hit the hardest, black and brown communities with underlying conditions. Those underlying conditions stem from what they're eating. I get to go into these people's apartments, look in their fridge and then look at their medicine cabinet and see all of these drugs that they're taking because of ailments that they got from food. Meanwhile, if they were to change up how they eat, we were able to reintroduce that in a public sense, because with the fridge it’s like we're telling people, listen you deserve to have access to this.”

-Power Malu

Power Malu and Eloísa Trinidad are the team behind Overthrow Community Fridge, New York City's first plant-based community fridge that sits outside of Overthrow Boxing Club.

A community fridge is a form of mutual aid to address food insecurity. They supply food to people who have limited access to fresh groceries, and since the pandemic began, people have even less access – especially to nutritious food.

In addition to being a longtime community organizer and activist, Power is also the Director of Community Affairs & Special Events at the Overthrow Boxing Club. Eloísa is the executive director of Chillis on Wheels, a nonprofit that focus on making veganism accessible to communities in need. She’s also the executive director of the Vegan Activist Alliance, a New York organization that fights to end animal exploitation.

"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 about moral change and a moral revolution, one that took place from the 1860s to the 1890s in the United States. Over those three decades, the way we treated animals completely changed. It was the time of the birth of the ASPCA, of many SPCAs, of the anti-vivisection movement, and of the first animal shelters.

It was a time of massive change.

Even though I think most people who listen to this podcast know that we need a much larger moral revolution in terms of how we treat animals, this book gave me so much hope that it can actually be done.

Please listen, share and read Our Kindred Creatures. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634494/our-kindred-creatures-by-bill-wasik-and-monica-murphy/

"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 closer to animals and nature and crazy encounters all over the world. Some of them include things like watching Mark and Coyote get stung and bitten by some of the most painful stings and bites out there.

Brave Wilderness has 21 million subscribers and their videos have had more than 4 billion views.

Mark is also one of the leading ambassadors for Leonardo DiCaprio's organization Re:wild. Mark made a documentary with Re:wild called Brave Mission. It's about Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the mountain gorillas who live there and the women and men who protect them. This single video has raised over $700,000 to help the rangers in Virunga.

Please listen, share and watch Brave Wilderness but don’t attempt any of those bites or stings at home.

Brave Wilderness: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6E2mP01ZLH_kbAyeazCNdg

Brave Mission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gynj76XsUQ&list=PLbfmhGxamZ80F53Ezr5CPifRPmiSzm_a7&index=1

Mark Vins:  https://www.youtube.com/@BraveMarkVins

“Our cultures are built around stories, right? We connect through stories, we learn through stories and stories are often stronger when they have characters, characters we can connect with. And I think that that been a struggle for many, many animals, all kinds of animals, that they don’t have a face or a character that people can connect with.” – Mark Elbroch

Before I met Mark Elbroch and read his book, The Cougar Conundrum: Sharing the World with a Successful Predator, I thought I knew at least a little bit about mountain lions. After meeting him and reading his book, I realized that I had actually known very little and much of what I thought I knew was wrong. Mark on the other hand, knows a lot about mountain lions, more than just about anyone on the planet.

Mark is an ecologist, author, storyteller and the Director of the Puma Program for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization. He’s also an animal tracker working to preserve ancient skills and elevate their applications in our modern world. His research has challenged everything we thought we knew about the social lives of mountain lions.

Maybe you know a thing or two about them, but I would bet that just about anyone who listens to this conversation learns a great deal about these mysterious and extraordinary animals.

LINKS: 

Mark Elbroch 

Panthera 

Mark’s Books

Cougar Connundrum 

"…when I say people had no idea, these were investors, right? These were people who thought they had a crystal ball on the future. And I was like, look, our world has to change for so many reasons. The fact that we're slaughtering animals and doing so in really horrific ways, that is not the future.

And so, if that is not the future, what is? It's embracing biotech, it's embracing food science, it's embracing the things that will remove these animals and the environmental impact of this out of the system."  - Ryan Bethencourt

30 percent of the meat consumed in the United States is eaten by our pets.

That is a staggering number. Ryan Bethencourt thought so too, which is why is doing something about it.

Ryan is the founder and CEO of Wild Earth, a sustainable, meat-free alternative to dog food. It’s the Beyond Meat for dogs. You may have seen Ryan pitch it on Shark Tank – not only did the Sharks taste his dog treats, Mark Cuban invested.

Ryan is a scientist, entrepreneur, and a biotech investor. He has led, built and advised more than 80 companies, including: Shiok Meats, Memphis Meats, Geltor, New Wave Foods, Clara Foods, and Finless Foods.

He co-founded IndieBio, the world's leading biotech accelerator and was head of Sciences for the XPRIZE Foundation. He's currently a partner at Babel Ventures, a consumer biotech fund.

Ryan believes that using biology as technology will solve some of the world's most intractable problems.

“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, TV host, and conservationist. His image portfolio ranks among the largest of any photographer in the National Geographic Society's long history, and he has a new book out called, From Icebergs to Iguanas. It's a large format series of books illustrating his National Geographic imagery and his behind-the-scenes tales. It's stunning and it makes you feel very lucky to live on this planet.

Through his commissioned assignments and as the face of National Geographic Channel's Pure Photography, Jason has taken his storytelling to televisions and streaming networks in dozens of countries and to every continent. His imagery has appeared in hundreds of publications including National Geographic Magazine, BBC Wildlife, Australian Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New Yorker.

“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.

It's a conversation with Maggie Howell. Maggie is the executive director of the Wolf Conservation Center, an organization that is working to protect and preserve wolves in North America. And they do it through science-based education, advocacy, and they participate in the federal recovery and release program for two critically endangered wolf species, the Mexican gray wolf and red wolves.

Maggie is also a founding member of Relist Wolves, a campaign to put all wolves back on the endangered species list. 

Please listen and share and quickly go to Relist Wolves to help get ALL of these remarkable animals back on the endangered species list.

Wolf Conservation Center https://nywolf.org/

Relist Wolves https://www.relistwolves.org/

“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 values. A man got up and started talking about malaria. I mean, it's just one after another. They came up and I just, I don't know… I could have just started levitating because I was so buoyed by what this community was doing. And it has not stopped since then.” – Lisa Jones-Engel

There's a small town in Georgia called Bainbridge. It has 15,000 residents, and recently those 15,000 residents were duped by their city and county officials. What happened was that some people came in and proposed a deal to build a $400 million monkey breeding facility, and city and county officials not only agreed to do it, but they gave them almost $60 million in handouts, a 20-year tax abatement, and hundreds of acres of public land.

And when the people of Bainbridge found out, they reached out to PETA’s Senior Science Advisor, Dr. Lisa Jones Engel.

Lisa spent many years working with primates in biomedical laboratories. She knows more about the industry than just about anyone. In 2019, when she couldn't take it anymore, she left the biomedical world and joined forces with PETA with the aim to take the primate testing industry down. And that is exactly what she’s doing.

“The pets tend to be the most behaviorally disturbed, I would say. They have the hardest transition most of the time into kind of sanctuary life, because with the pet trade, infants are usually taken from their mothers within a few days or a few weeks after they're born. And most primate species in the wild will stay with their mothers for at least a couple of years, if not for most of their life. So that's incredibly damaging right off the bat, because that separation is very traumatizing.” – Devan Schowe

Devan Schowe is the Campaigns Associate for Born Free USA, a nonprofit wildlife organization with the largest primate sanctuary in the country. Born Free recently release and report on the extensive suffering of giraffe in zoos. I read the report and wanted to talk to Devan about giraffes but also to get her expert perspective on captivity and why it’s so harmful to all animals, particularly in zoos.

It completely baffles me that in 2022, most people have no issue with zoos. Maybe they don’t know that no matter how “nice” the zoo is, it’s still a prison for animals.

Born Free USA https://www.bornfreeusa.org/

“I also heard the sounds of killer whales. They were calling to each other loud and clear. these melodious whistles and calls which went right into my ear pieces. I realized that even if I couldn't see them, they were there somewhere beneath me in the ocean. They were communicating with each other. They were staying in contact. It was like a big family.” - Hanne Strager

Hanne Strager is a biologist, whale researcher, and author. She is the co-founder of the Andenes Whale Centre in Norway and she has served as the Director of Exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. She's written many books. Her most recent, The Killer Whale Journals, was released on April 3rd. It's a compilation about killer whales, killer whales in Hannah's life and killer whales throughout history. And it is extraordinary.

Links:

Hanne Strager 

The Killer Whale Journals 

“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 habitat loss, hunting of its prey and poaching. The future is uncertain for tigers.

Saving Wild Tiger’s supports the immediate needs of the wild tigers: protecting the tiger, its habitat, its prey and its protectors; supporting the surrounding villages (community-based conservation), scientific studies to understand the needs of the tigers and control of poaching and international trade of tiger parts.

Nina also is a chantress. She learned traditional chants (bhajans) from her grandfather in a village in south India when she was nine years old. The chants quietly stayed with her until she rediscovered chanting with Krishna Das, in New York in 1996. Krishna Das is a singer/chanter  known globally or his performances of Hindu devotional music called kirtan. Nina is Krishna Das' business manager and accompanist as well as a chant leader on her own.

Nina is also a podcast host on the widely-heard Be Here Now Network, exploring spirituality, practice, and conservation of wilderness and Nature. 

Links:

https://www.savingwildtigers.org/

https://www.ninaraochant.com/

“It is not hyperbole to say that livestock grazing on Western public lands is the single biggest and most important environmental impact that does the most damage. And, also causes the most widespread impact of any of the things that damage public lands, including oil and gas development, including strip mining and mountaintop removal, including, damming, the rivers. Livestock raising is the most pervasive and the most ecologically harmful - and it's everywhere.”  - Erik Molvar

In the United States, we have around 80,000 wild horses living on Western public lands. For decades, there's been a battle between the people who want these horses to stay and roam freely and the people who want them gone. Many of the people who want them gone are either a part of, or connected to the cattle industry.And, the agency that makes these decisions, whether the horses stay or go, is the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM.

There are herds living on public lands throughout the Western United States. And one of, or maybe the most, beloved herd is the Onaqui. They live in Utah, around 60 miles from Salt Lake City. Because they're close to a city, people visit them often. The horses have become accustomed to a human audience, so they don't flee when they see humans. They trust them. Or at least they did until a couple of weeks ago when 435 of these majestic and very free horses were rounded up with helicopters by the BLM.

124 of them will become part of a birth control program and be released to the wild. But the other 300 will be put in a government holding facility. Eventually some might get adopted, but many will remain and holding for years. These roundups happen all the time, but the Onaqui roundup got a lot of publicity because these horses were so adored.

The BLM’s reason for rounding up our horses is that they degrade public lands when the herds get too large. Now these same lands are rented for use for millions and millions of cattle and sheep. The horses are a teeny tiny fraction of animals that live on that land.

Today's conversation is with Eric Molvar. He is not a wild horse advocate. He's a wildlife biologist and the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting and restoring wildlife and watersheds across the American West. I asked Eric to come onto the show so that I could better understand how and why these roundups continue to happen.

“There's $5 billion of debt collectively from contract chicken farmers. It's enormous. You're just treading water. You're just paying the bills and it starts off great, in the sense that you think you're going to make enough money. But you end up just paying bills and never getting ahead. And that's very typical.” – Leah Garcés

Over the past few decades, people have become increasingly aware of the that factory farming is destroying the planet and most know that its abhorrently cruel and inhumane for animals. But most people still don’t realize that many farmers are also exploited, in massive debt and living far below the poverty line because of it.

The Transfarmation Project aims to change that by freeing farmers from the confines of factory farming and the cycle of debt by helping them transition to plant-based farming.

“The project is about creating constructive solutions, where we come in and work with communities, with farmers, finding alternatives. Especially alternative economies or alternative ways of farming that move farmers away from factory farming to something that's regenerative and sustainable and is creating a compassionate food system.” – Leah Garces

Leah Garcés, the President of Mercy for Animals and Michael Pellman Rowland, a financial advisor and a Mercy for Animals Board Member spoke with me about Transfarmation at a live event in December. Please listen and share - this project is going to change the world for millions of animals and for farmers across the planet.

"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?" - Pete Paxton 

For the past 23 years, Pete Paxton has been working undercover in puppy mills, factory farms, slaughterhouses, pet stores, and on-board commercial fishing boats to document horrific cruelty. Some of these high-stress, horror show jobs last for weeks while others go on for months at a time - months of ten-hour days, doing hard, heavy labor, witnessing animals being abused or killed and watching your co-workers hurt the already abused animals even more. 

Pete does it because he is good at it, because he loves animals and because his work has often resulted in big change for animals.

 What perplexes me the most about Pete, is that after 23 years of working in hellish places like slaughterhouses and factory farms, he hasn’t become dark and dour. Instead, he is the opposite. He's extremely funny, super engaging and seriously joyful. He doesn’t allow this work to take him down. Most people I know, me included, would be a shell of a human being after a couple of hours in his world.

Pete is also the author of Rescue Dogs and has had two HBO documentaries made about him and his work, Dealing Dogs and Death on a Factory Farm.

“…based on my personal experience and having worked with scientists and researchers most of my life, I would say that it's not too late. There are some things that are probably gone. There are places where only pockets of biodiversity may remain in the time ahead, but that doesn't mean we can't still have a healthy future. It may not be what it once was, but it's like the old saying - when's the best day to quit smoking cigarettes? Today - if you don’t quit today, when's the next best day? Tomorrow. 

So, it's not too late. We may have lost 50% of the world's coral reefs, but that means there's 50% left. We may have taken 90% of the big fish in the ocean, but maybe there's 10% left. We don't have to kill 100 million sharks every year. We don't have to rollback legislation that determines how much carbon we pump into the atmosphere. We can speak out against that and tell our elected leaders that we care. The ocean doesn't have to turn acidic because we're dumping so much carbon into it that its chemistry is changing.

These are things that we can change and can control. So, I do remain cautiously optimistic. I realize that the battle lines are drawn and we have to fight hard, but I do think that it's worth fighting for. It's not too late. And we can see a reversal in the places that have been protected. You do see that resilience. The ocean does know how to take care of itself. We just need to leave it alone…”

-Brian Skerry

Brian Skerry is one of the world's greatest and most accomplished underwater and marine wildlife photographers. He’s also one of the most prolific: he’s been a contract photographer for National Geographic since 1998, his work has been featured in scores of publications including Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and BBC Wildlife, and he’s the author of 11 books including the acclaimed monographs Ocean Soul and Shark.

In that time he’s won so many awards that it would take a second email to list them all, but particular highpoints include Brian becoming an 11-time award winner in the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and when National Geographic magazine named one of his images among their 50 Greatest Photographs Of All Time.

In his four decades exploring the world's oceans, Brian has experienced things that very few humans will ever get to experience, like diving with a population of southern right whales who had never before encountered human beings dropping down into their underwater universe. 

Brian dives eight months of the year, often in extreme conditions - beneath Arctic ice or in shark-infested waters.

His work brings us the beauty and the majesty of our oceans, but it also shows us the devastation and the destruction that we've caused them. His stories raise awareness, promote conservation, and ultimately create change.

Today, June 8th, is World Oceans Day, the day to celebrate the world's combined efforts to protect the one ocean that we all share. And that ocean is in bad shape - between dead zones, loss of apex predators, rising sea levels affecting tidal ecosystems, the bleaching of coral reefs, oil spills polluting the waters and decimating habitats, overfishing and hunting of marine species, climate change, rising acidity levels, and plastic, plastic and more plastic - the ocean’s future seems extremely bleak. But, as I learned from Brian, there’s still time. Our ocean is resilient and there is so much left that we can save, but we have to act now.

And, I can’t imagine a better day to begin than World Oceans Day. So, start by listening to Brian, one of the best tellers of ocean stories out there.

“The idea is that we take and take and take from the planet. And we've been taking and there's all this talk about how can we get to neutral? And our company wanted to do something a little bit differently. We wanted to give back more than we were taking.” – Tina Bhojwani

Tina Bhojwani is the co-founder and CEO of AERA, a luxury vegan footwear brand. In a past life, she held key leadership roles at global brands including Donna Karan, Theory and was President of Dolce & Gabbana North America.

Having spent over two decades in the fashion world, Tina's had front row seats to fashion's impact on the planet as well as on people and animals.

AERA is her answer to how the fashion world (and those of us who frequent it) can do better. All of AERA’s components are made from non-animal ingredients, they use as many eco-friendly materials as possible, ensuring that the end result is of the highest quality, and are committed to evolving their materials, with the ultimate goal to one day be able to create a shoe with zero environmental impact.

“Our shoes are certified Vegan. We went to great lengths to ensure that all components are made from non-animal ingredients, yet still maintain the quality and style expected from a luxury shoe.” - Tina Bhojwani

They’re also stunning, insanely comfortable and, as Tina likes to point out, "they don’t look vegan."

Please listen and share and check out AERA’s shoes.

AERA https://aeranewyork.com/

Instagram  https://www.instagram.com/aeranewyork/

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/aeranewyork

Planted. Not Buried. That is how Eric Adams has chosen to see himself through the darkest moments of his life.

The first occurred at age 15, when he and his brother were beaten by the police. Four years later he became a police officer and spent the next 22 years on the force, working to help reform NYC policing from the inside. He retired as a captain and now he serves as the President of the Borough that I call home - Brooklyn.

Yes, Brooklyn has a President, an incredibly busy and very much in demand President. Eric has spent most of 2020 on the frontlines; most recently the frontlines of the protests against police brutality and systemic racism and, during the months that Brooklyn was a COVID-19 hotspot, he spent his days handing out PPE to hospital workers and plant based meals to residents in need of a meal.

Plant based because he has personally experienced the health benefits of a vegan diet. In 2016, he cured his own diabetes and partial blindness by making the switch. Since then he's been on a mission to implement plant based diets and nutrition in hospitals, schools, prisons, and communities all over New York City.

Eric is a man who gives much more to the world than he takes from it. After my brief time with him, I found myself wanting to be and do much better. His graciousness, generosity, and desire to look for the opportunities are qualities that this world could use a whole lot more of. As a resident of Brooklyn, I feel extremely lucky and proud to have Eric running the show around here.

“We have this this sort of human exceptionalism or human supremacy that that is used as the kind of baseline foundational justification for exploiting animals, that humans are just more important and we're more special in some way.” – Dr. Syd Johnson

Dr. Hope Ferdowsian and Dr. Syd Johnson  recently published an essay in the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum called, Primates and Medical Research A Matter of Convenience, Not Sound Science. I read the essay and quickly realized how much there was that I didn’t know about animal testing and research (and I thought I knew a lot).

The essay begins with one rhesus macaque who will spend her life in a cage as part of an Alzheimer's disease experiment. They tell the story not only of this individual primate, but of animal research as whole, how and when it started all the way up to where we are now, and also what an enormous failure most of it has been.

Around 90 percent of drugs that pass in animal testing fail on humans. With numbers like that, in any other industry I’m pretty sure that we’d have given up by now. Not only is animal testing insanely cruel, but it's incredibly ineffective.  So, why are we still testing on tens of millions of animals and spending billions of dollars on mostly bad research year after year? Money and because we’ve “always done it this way,” (and we have, since 6 BCE).

All systems that exploit, torture and abuse animals desperately need to change and the thing is, all of these systems can change. We have solutions. They exist and are getting bigger and better by the day. There are solutions to replace animals in the food system, in fashion, in entertainment and in medical research.

But the money train that goes into using animals in research isn’t slowing down, and not enough of us are demanding otherwise (and we are who is paying for it). I think in part, because not enough of us are aware of the cruelty and the inefficiency that is animal testing. We are paying the bill simply because this is how it’s always been done.

But it’s not how it should be done.

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 play and come together. 

None of that is available in the concrete tank. None of it. They don't have any place to go. They don't have any place to dive… what you see is a lot of mortality, a lot of sickness, a lot of behavioral abnormalities. Everything that makes life worth living for a dolphin or whale is absent in marine parks and concrete tanks. None of it is available.”

– Lori Marino  

Lori Marino is a neuroscientist and an expert in animal behavior and intelligence. Much of her work is focused on whales and dolphins. She's currently the president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, which will be a seaside sanctuary for former performing orcas and belugas that have spent their entire lives in concrete tanks.

Lori is also the founder and Executive Director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, an organization that bridges the gap between academic research and on the ground animal advocacy efforts. 

She has appeared in several films and television programs, including the documentaries Blackfish, Unlocking the Cage, and Long Gone Wild, which is a 2019 documentary that picks up where Black Fish left off, and is also where the Whale Sanctuary Project begins.

The Whale Sanctuary Project is going to change the world for the lucky orcas and belugas that will end up there. They will also be a model for future sanctuaries for cetaceans – as we need a ton of them, there are way too many of these animals living in captivity. 

It stuns me that even after documentaries like Blackfish, people all over the world (including many in the US) still visit marine mammal parks. Mostly, people go because they don’t know. They don’t know how miserable life is for the whales and dolphins and they don’t know how intelligent and emotionally complex these animals are. Keeping them in tanks is cruel, inhumane, unjust, and it needs to stop. 

Lori has made it her life’s work to not only study their intelligence but to advocate and fight for their lives. This conversation is an important one, after listening to Lori, I think it’d be very difficult for anyone to give another dollar to a marine park anywhere on Earth. 

I hope that you learn as much as I did.

Learn More About The Whale Sanctuary Project

Like The Whale Sanctuary Project on Facebook

Follow The Whale Sanctuary Project on Twitter

Learn More About The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy

“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 single one, like the leaves on a tree.” – Suzanne Lee

Suzanne Lee is the Founder & CEO of BIOFABRICATE, a global network that serves the needs of bio innovators, which are material makers, consumer brands and investors. BIOFABRICATE is where design meets biology.

Suzanne is a pioneer in this space. She started growing materials from microbes for the fashion industry in 2022, coining the term 'Biocouture™'.

She is also the author of Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe. She is a special advisor to Parley For The Oceans, The Mills Fabrica and Fashion for Good on biomaterials, a TED Senior Fellow, and a Launch Material Innovator - an initiative of NASA, Nike, USAID and the US State Department. Formerly Suzanne was the Chief Creative Officer of Modern Meadow, a biomaterials start-up in New York (2014-2019).

“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 and he’s the founder of Mission: Plant, a holding company advancing the plant-based sector with strategic investments and consulting services.

He has been a part of the plant-based food scene since it really started to take off, and a few months ago he launched an entirely vegan online grocery store called Plant Belly – its stocked with all of his (and my) favorite plant-based foods. It’s absolutely awesome.

David is one of the stars of the plant-based movement and I’m extremely grateful to him for making it grow.

www.missionplant.com

www.moonshotcollaborative.com

www.plantbelly.com

“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 over 100 species of lemurs, which are prosimians - a type of primate and they only exist on the island of Madagascar.

Patricia spends half her time, six months a year in Madagascar studying lemurs, and has done so since the 80s, when she discovered a new species of lemur, the Golden Bamboo Lemur, and she also established Ranomafana National Park. It is almost an understatement to say that Patricia is a trailblazer— she has done the impossible again and again.

Her story is will astound you.  

“Even the first morning we saw a toughness, a certain toughness that I hadn't been experienced to. What we didn't realize with selection criteria that we're putting out there, is that we're actually getting the toughest in those communities. Not only in these communities, I mean, you're talking about one of our poorest places in one of the harshest areas on the planet, The Zambezi Valley and the life of a woman in rural Zimbabwe in the Zambezi Valley is it's not an easy one.

And so we thought, with all this military selection, we were going to put them through what we perceived to be torture - putting them through the, what we in the military term, the four pillars of misery: to be hungry, cold, tired, and wet for extended periods of time and physical and mental strain.

The thing is, the harder we pushed these women the more they smiled.” Damien Mander

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 IAPF has scaled to train and support rangers which now help protect over 20 million acres of African wilderness. 

In 2017 Damien founded ‘Akashinga - Nature Protected by Women,’ an IAPF program that has already grown to over 240 employees with 7 nature reserves in the portfolio. They are the only group of nature reserves in the world to be protected by women. And, these women are changing the game in terms of what it means to fight poaching.

Damien was featured in the James Cameron documentary The Game Changers and has now released another documentary with James Cameron and National Geographic about his work with the women of Akashinga – “The Brave One’s.”

He is a resident on the National Geographic Speakers Bureau, has spoken at the United Nations, featured in June 2019’s National Geographic Magazine, and has been featured three times on 60 Minutes. And, if you haven’t seen it, watch his TEDx Talk at the Sidney Oprah House, it’s just awesome.

It was an honor to spend time with Damien. He is a warrior, a hero and a man who understands what it means to never stop evolving

“A friend of mine in Germany is called Dr. Tofu. He was the first who did tofu on a commercial scale, in the eighties. They arrested him… for cooking something suspicious… He was arrested a couple of times.

So, when it started in Nigeria and we opened the first vegan restaurant and there were also no vegetarian restaurants, people were saying, that's crazy. Why do you do that? But I knew kind of that time was on our side. - Hakeem Jimo

Hakeem Jimo is the co-founder of Veggie Victory, Nigeria’s first plant-based food tech company. Hakeem and his partner, Bola Adeyanju also founded V Café, Nigeria’s first vegan restaurant in 2013. V Café is in Lagos and serves veganized Nigerian culinary delicacies to vegans, meat eaters and everyone in between.

A few years after opening the restaurant, Hakeem and Bola began producing VChunks, a seitan-based meat alternative that was created to pair beautifully with most Nigerian cuisine.

VChunks are dehydrated so that they can be kept on shelves for months and do not need refrigeration, which is not an option for many in parts of Nigeria.

Hakeem is Nigerian-German, was born and raised in Germany and has lived in West Africa for the past 27 years. Before becoming a vegan food and tech entrepreneur, he worked in journalism and public relations.

Are we being the best version of ourselves? That’s a question that Beverly and Dereck Joubert asked quite often during this conversation and also one that they seem to live by. It’s embedded into their work, their lives, their relationships - with each other, the wilderness, and the planet; as if the question floats above their heads as a gentle reminder of who they want to be in the world. And, the continual asking of that question shows in everything that they do, fight for, love, and are actively trying to save.

They are award-winning filmmakers, National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, and wildlife conservationists who have made over 30 films while researching, exploring, and doing vital conservation work throughout Africa for nearly four decades.

They also happen to have what could possibly be the best love story of our time. They have been together for nearly 40 years and the great majority of it has been spent living in the bush in Botswana, making films, doing research, and fighting to save what’s left of the African wilderness and the large predators who inhabit it. For months and years at a time they’ve lived without electricity, without much human interaction, without many comforts, nor personal space – things that most couples have a difficult time managing over a week long glamping trip. They’ve been doing it for 38 years.

Living in the bush for decades has included many death defying close calls, including what they simply refer to as the “incident” with a wounded (therefore angry) cape buffalo that nearly ended it all. Fortunately, everyone survived and after an 8 month stint in the hospital for Beverly, they returned to the bush and began filming again – at the exact place where the attack occurred. Did I mention that they are a little tougher than most of us?

Their love story, like all of the good ones, is about something much bigger than themselves. It’s a story about Africa, the wilderness, the wild animals who live there, and it’s about fighting the biggest fight of our time, to save what’s left of this majestic planet.

In the last 50 years, Africa has lost 90 to 95 percent of its large predators. We could very well witness the end of wild lions, cheetahs and other big cats in a decade or two. It’s that urgent and we are in that much trouble. If we want to live in a world with lions and leopards and elephants and rhinos, then we’ve got to get behind those who are out there on the front lines.

Beverly and Dereck are not only out there, but they’ve documented it for decades, so that we can see and understand the African wilderness in all of its magnificent glory and so that we know exactly what’s at stake, what we are about to lose.

Their most recent film was released in October. It’s a three part series called: Okavango, A River of Dreams. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful journey through the place they’ve called home since the beginning.

 “I think we are at the point where so many of these methods have shown in studies to be more predictive for humans that it really is an issue of human health. We need to do better for patients. We know we can and that these methods exist, so we need to use them.” -Elizabeth Baker 

 This past season, we’ve focused quite a bit on animal research and experimentation, and a lot of our focus has been really on just how bad it is, how bad it is for the animals, how bad it is for science, and how bad it is for taxpayers who are spending so much money on this stuff. What we haven't focused enough on are solutions. And there are solutions. There are many many human relevant methods that are here to replace animal testing and there are many more on the way.

Elizabeth is the director of research policy for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. They're a nationwide organization of physicians and laypersons that promote preventative medicine. They conduct clinical research, and they advocate for more effective, efficient and ethical medical research, product testing and training.

pcrm.org

“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 climate catastrophe.” – Danielle Celermajer

Danielle Celermajer a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Sydney. She's deputy director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project. Her research focus is on Multispecies Justice, or how the concepts, practices and institutionalization of justice needs to be transformed to take into account ecological realities and the ethical standing of all earth beings.

Danielle lives on a multi-species community in rural Australia. She lived through Australia’s Black Summer fires in 2019/2020 and wrote a book about them called, Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future. It’s a book that should be required reading for the entire world.

Please listen, share and read Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future.

To learn more go to speciesunite.com

“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 not really make a change. Where Vegan 2.0 is specifically designed to expand the tent to the 97%..” – Adam Weiss

Adam Weiss is the CEO and director of Honeybee Burger, a plant-based fast-food restaurant with locations in Southern California, and more coming soon to other parts of the country, including New York City (hooray!).

Honeybee’s mission is to promote the benefits of plant-based food on the environment, the planet, and the animals with the most delicious food and the best plant-based proteins on the market. And, it’s working - they were just named the best vegan burger in Los Angeles by Veg News.

Before entering the plant-based space, Adam had a long career in finance, and I was very curious to know how he went from hedge fund guy to vegan restaurant guy.

“When people come in and they're going to get a cheeseburger, fries and a shake, which is our most common order, it’s not so much that they don't care about their health, but they know, “okay I'm about to indulge here.”

We just give them a tiny bit of good feeling, like, you know what, “you're indulging, you’re going to pack on some calories, but no animals will die, you're making an impact on the future, and ultimately it's probably better for the environment than if you didn't do it…” And that resonates with consumers today unlike any time in history.” – Adam Weiss

Links:

Honeybee Burger https://honeybeeburger.com/

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/honeybeeburger/

“If a bill has been passed in another state, then you know who the opposition was, you know who the supporters were. And it really helps grease the skids for another state to get something through. It builds and then eventually you get a critical mass. And then hopefully at that point, Congress takes a look at it and passes something nationwide.” – Roland Halpern

Last week, Allie Taylor was on the podcast. She runs New York Voters for Animal Rights. Allie and I spoke about how real change happens for animals in the US and that much of it happens at the local level.

The problem is that many people just don't know where to start or how to get involved so that they can actually affect said change. So, Allie and I agreed that it’d be a good idea to bring on some other people running organizations that are similar to hers from other states.

So that is what we did. This conversation is again with Allie Taylor from Voters for Animal Rights of New York, Roy Afflerbach of Pennsylvania, Roland Halpern from Colorado, and Jo-Anne Basile of Connecticut.

It's a conversation about how and where change happens.

LINKS: 

New York: https://vfar.org/

Colorado: https://covotersforanimals.org/

Connecticut: https://www.ctvotesforanimals.org/

Pennsylvania: https://humane-pa.org/about-us/about/senator-roy-afflerbach-ret/

”We’re already starting to see this happening, like there's a leather tannery in Vietnam called Isa TanTeck, where leather runs through the blood. That's what they specialize at. They came out with their own mycelium material. A leather tannery has come out with their own mycelium material. Are they in it? Are they in it for the passion of saving animals and the vegan kind of philosophies? No, they're in it because they're smart people and they've got good scientists and they've been able to create a new a new product line.” – Joey Pringle 

Joey Pringle is the founder and co-owner of Veshin Factory, an original equipment and design manufacturer specializing in luxury bags and accessories made from leather alternatives.

They work with brands during product design and manufacturing stages to help them make the switch to next gen materials. 

Veshin was founded with the goal of helping brands go animal free, but because of a partnership with Natural Fiber Welding, maker of Mirum, it’s fast become a leader in plastic-free manufacturing too.

Currently, Joey lives in Colombia where he is piloting Veshin Factory's second factory.

“We're all just participating in a culture that really isn't of our choice… we just grew up in this culture, but we can start questioning things and just not be afraid to say that we love other animals that they're astounding, and that we care about the environment and we want to be less impactful…  you just have to be willing to say things that maybe other people haven't heard you say yet.”

-Carrie P. Freeman

Carrie Packwood Freeman is an associate professor of communications at Georgia State University. She's a critical cultural studies media researcher and has published in over 20 scholarly books and journals.

She's also the co-author of Animals and Media, a style guideline web resource for media professionals.

Animals and Media and In Defense of Animals recently partnered to call for an update to the Associated Press Stylebook’s recommendation on the use of personal pronouns for nonhuman animals, so that animals in news stories would be identified as, "she/her/hers and he/him/his when their sex is known, regardless of species, and the gender-neutral they, or he/she, or his/hers when their sex is unknown."

The letter is signed by Jane Goodall as well as 80 other leaders, scholars, and advocates fighting for a better world for animals.

Carrie is here to talk about why it's so important that we change the way that we talk about animals in the media, in entertainment and in regular everyday conversation.

“My family was really suffering from all types of diet related health issues. I had an aunt who had multiple amputations before it took her life because of type two diabetes. I had a 40-year-old uncle who had a heart attack. My grandpa, who helped raise me, died of complications in a triple bypass surgery.

All over the place there was suffering and it's really hard to, not feel like you have not the answer, but the direction to go in to reclaim your health, and not be taken seriously.” – Toni Okamoto

Species unite is starting our 30 Day Vegan Challenge tomorrow. So, if you haven't signed up for it, sign up (you can actually sign up any time during October and it will start you at day one). It's 30 days of recipes, tips, information on all things plant-based and if you're already vegan sign up anyway, because there’s really good information and recipe ideas. If you have no interest in ever being vegan, sign up and do it for 10 days. See what it's like.

To kick off the 30 Day Vegan Challenge, we couldn’t think of a better guest than Toni Okamoto. She is the founder of Plant-Based on a Budget, the website and meal plan that shows you how to save money while eating plant-based. Check it out, there are close to a thousand incredible recipes and delicious weekly meal-plans that will make the Vegan Challenge a whole lot less challenging.

Toni is also the author of the Plant-Based on a Budget cookbook and the coauthor of the Friendly Vegan Cookbook with Michelle Kane. She and Michelle also hosts the Plant Powered People Podcast.

Toni is a regular on local and national morning shows across the country, where she teaches viewers how to break their meat habit without breaking their budget. She was also featured in the popular documentary What the Health.

Catalina Lopez is the director of the Aquatic Animal Alliance at the Aquatic Life Institute. They're a nonprofit focused on improving the lives of aquatic animals, specifically in the food system.

I wanted to talk to Catalina about octopuses. This year, we're set to see the world's first octopus factory farm open in the Canary Islands. Just when it seemed humans could not get worse, we decide to farm octopuses? This is a terrible idea for so many reasons, from animal welfare to environmental concerns. It’s cruel and it’s unethical and it’s an enormous step in the wrong direction. We should be shutting down factory farms, not looking for new sentient and intelligent species to torture inside of them. 

https://ali.fish/

Justin Goodman is the Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a two and a half million member, taxpayer watchdog group that is working to end twenty billion dollars in taxpayer funded animal experiments.

Justin and I met in D C in February, pre-social distancing. And, it just so happened that on the very morning that we met, White Coat had released footage of National Institute of Health experiments that had been going on for decades. It was a gift for me to be with Justin before and after this interview, and to watch his phone blow up from half of Capitol Hill in reaction to the horrifying footage. I felt like I had front row seats to seeing how effective and powerful White Coat Waste Project is.

And since we met, they’ve had another huge victory: A couple of weeks ago, White Coat exposed how the National Institutes for Health has spent millions of tax dollars funding dangerous coronavirus animal tests at the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology and just one week after they released their international exposé–Trump promised he’d end the government’s funding of dangerous, cruel and wasteful animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology!

And, today is World Day for Laboratory Animals – so, please think about them during this (relatively) short stint in quarantine. They are in it for life, in tiny cages, being tested on and tortured, and almost all of them will never know the sun, the wind, the grass, what it feels like to run, explore, adventure, and discover; nor will they experience life with other animals, to be a part of a herd, a troop, a flock, or a family. Count your blessings and please, stop paying for their abuse.

“…but why do we treat animals like “animals”? We shouldn't be treating animals like animals, by which that means devalued under appreciated beings.” – Lori Gruen 

Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University and the Coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies.  She is also the author and editor of 11 books, most recently Critical Terms for Animal Studies and Animaladies. Her work in practical ethics and political philosophy focuses on issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, incarcerated people, and non-human animals. 

“What I did not expect to see from farmed monkeys being bought and transported into the US,  were monkeys who were coming in with things like Ebola like viruses, malaria, tuberculosis, simian retrovirus, herpes viruses, salmonella, Yersinia, Campylobacter, unnamed deadly diarrheal diseases. They were coming in with Tier 1 Select agents. I mean, we're talking pathogens so deadly that the government has identified them as potential bioterrorism threats.” – Lisa Jones-Engel

In 2022, 1000 long-tailed macaques were stolen from the wild in Cambodia. They were then illegally imported to Charles River Laboratories in Texas. Illegal because they were wild caught and not born in captivity, which is the law for importing primates into the US for research and experimentation, they are required to be captive bred. 

These macaques are now caught in the middle of an ongoing federal investigation into primate importers. Charles River wants to send them back to Cambodia, which means that from there they’ll go to labs in other countries. PETA is fighting hard to get them sent to Born Free’s Primate Sanctuary in Texas.

One of the leaders in this battle is Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. A couple of weeks ago, Lisa came on the show for a live episode to talk about the fate of these monkeys and what could be the beginning of the end of importing primates for experimentation. 

Because we did this interview as a webinar and Lisa was in a remote part of Alaska, the sound isn’t the best, but this is a super important episode. 

Lisa spent many years working in biomedical laboratories with primates. She knows everything that goes on on the inside of these facilities and knows first-hand that no one in there is looking out for these animals. 

In 2019, when she couldn't take it anymore, Lisa left the biomedical world and joined forces with PETA. She's PETA's Senior Science Advisor, and not only leading the fight to save these 1000 monkeys, but also to end all imports and then, to end the use of primates in animal research and experimentation period. I think that she can do it.

Links:

PETA Petition https://support.peta.org/page/50306/action/1?locale=en-US

PETA https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/trafficked-monkeys-still-stateside-peta-pledges-1-million-for-sanctuary-placement/

PETA: https://headlines.peta.org/primatologist-perspective-monkey-experiments/

Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/31/primates-monkeys-scientific-experiments-peta-stop-testing

“We didn't want to start a Chimp sanctuary. I mean, it's the most extreme really… they're the most, at least in my mind, they're just so socially complex and their needs are so complex and they don't really go back to the wild - ever. And they live, to 50 or 60 years old and they have very complicated social groups. It's a lot. It's a lifetime… So, we were like, that's not what we want to do. So here we are. That's what we did.”

Jenny Desmond

Jenny’s interest in wildlife rescue and protection was sparked during a trip around the world at an orangutan sanctuary in Indonesia. Since then, she and Jimmy have lived in many countries throughout Africa and Asia and have worked with monkeys, gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees. And, until they lost her this past year, their dog, Princess worked right alongside them.

In 2015, the Desmonds got a call from the Humane Society of the US, that 66 former laboratory research chimps had been abandoned on some islands in Liberia — could they help? Soon after they arrived (and helped), it became very clear to them that there was a much bigger chimpanzee problem happening throughout Liberia.

Currently the Liberia Chimp Rescue and Protection is home to 73 orphaned chimps and not only are the Desmonds and their incredible team mothering and caring for 73 babies, they are also working to end the bushmeat and pet trades that are creating so many orphans in the first place.

Western Chimpanzees are on the critically endangered list. Their population has declined by 80 percent is the past 24 years. At this rate, they will soon be gone. And, it’s not just the bushmeat and pet trades pushing the chimps toward the extinction list – it’s the fact that their habitat is getting smaller by the day.

With much grace and humor, Jenny shares what it means to ensure that the chimpanzees in her care thrive, and what we need to do to get behind her so that these animals don’t disappear.

“We'd never worked in this industry. We'd not got any prior experience in fashion ourselves. But we thought, how hard could it be? Famous last words. How hard could it be to design a handbag? Turns out very hard, very hard.” – Natalie Deana

Natalie Deanna is the co-founder of Frida Rome, a conscious luxury brand that makes stunning vegan handbags, handbags inspired by and designed for, “bad girls who do good things.”

“’Bad Girls Who Do Good Things,’ was a tagline we came up with even before the brand really started to flourish… And it was, I guess the cheekier side, the more kind of out there arm to what we want to grow as a big empire. Essentially, we want to take over the world with cruelty free brands.” – Natalie Deana

Please listen, share and check out FridaRome.com

“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 conservation body, and there were no hearts and minds. So, we started doing a lot of research into, what was the most effective tool in community development in Africa. And what we found was an overwhelming body of evidence that said empowering women was the single greatest force for positive change, not only in Africa but across the world.” - Damien Mander 

Damien Mander is the founder and CEO of Akashinga, an organization that is changing everything we ever thought we knew about how conservation works. Formerly known as the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF), Akashinga is a nature conservation organization that creates resilient ecosystems where nature, wildlife and communities will thrive together for years to come.

Akashinga Rangers are Africa's first plant-based all women anti-poaching unit, and they are revolutionizing the ways that animals are protected, the communities are supported and that wilderness landscapes are restored and safeguarded.

Damien is an Iraq war veteran who served as a Naval clearance diver and special operations sniper for the Australian Defense Force. In 2009 he founded the IAPF which later became Akashinga.

Damien is the winner of the 2019 Winsome Constance Kindness Gold Medal. He was featured in the James Cameron documentaries “The Game Changers” and National Geographic’s “Akashinga – The Brave One’s’” about his work with the women of Akashinga. 

LINKS: 

AKASHINGA.org

https://www.instagram.com/weareakashinga/

https://twitter.com/weareakashinga

https://www.facebook.com/weareakashinga

"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 that you know whether there's something coming around the next bend. These are all, in my opinion, truly enriching moments and necessary for human spirit and really for human health." - Mark Elbroch 

Mark: [00:12:23] These are all, in my opinion, truly enriching moments and necessary for human spirit and [00:12:30] really for human health

Mark Elbroch is an ecologist and author, storyteller and the director of the Puma Program for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.

Mark has been on the podcast before to talk about cougars, but something has changed since the last time he was on. For years, many people in the scientific community, and this is backed by research, have claimed that cougars would return to their historic range in the eastern US in the next 10 to 20 years.

But there's a new study from Panthera that says that this is not true, that they won’t make it to the East Coast even by 2100, which means, if we want cougars in the east we're going to have to help them.

This is a big deal because we do want cougars in the east. Large predators make fragile ecosystems strong. Mountain lions interact with nearly 500 other species and their reintroduction could lead to healthier forests, less zoonotic disease, and many other benefits. 

Let’s bring cougars home!

“It's very disappointing when I see these menus that are from starter to main courses, all animal proteins… How can you not have like 30% of the menu be plant based? For what reason? Do you need to have animal proteins in every single dish? There's no need for it… People don't need that. The planet doesn’t need that.” - Verde Camilla Parmigiani

Verde Camilla Parmigiani is the founder of Vegan Set. She helps hotels create successful plant-based experiences. She founded Vegan Set in 2016 with the aim of showing that a vegan lifestyle can be synonymous with luxury. 

Camilla and I met a couple of months ago. Before I met her, it just didn't really occur to me that I could and should be asking way more from hotels when it comes to not only vegan food, but the whole package.

veganset.com

 “It made me feel like I wished that I had some sort of a super power, so that I could just picked them up and take them somewhere safe. But unfortunately, I'm not strong enough to have done that. So what I did was decide, at 11 years old, that I was going to commit my life to safeguarding the species… that I'll do everything in my power.” – Jamal Galves

Jamal Galves grew up in a small village in Belize that's famous for its Manatee population. When he was 11 years old, he saw a research boat near his home and got curious. He asked the scientists if he could tag along on their expedition, and for some reason they said yes. And, they let him come back the next day and again and again for next five years, until finally, when he was 16, they gave him a job.

Now, 20 years later, he is the program coordinator for the Belize Manatee Conservation Program at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute.  

Jamal sees it as his life's mission to protect and save these gentle giants. Antillean manatees are a vulnerable species and their population is dwindling. They face numerous threats, from habitat loss, hunting, boat collisions, fishing gear, and natural disasters. Jamal’s work provides science and education to conserve them and provides the data for establishing sanctuaries, reducing watercraft speed limits, and fighting poaching.

Jamal made a promise to the manatees when he was a little kid and not a day has passed since that he hasn’t lived up to it.

“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.

But in 2021, Idaho's legislature passed Senate Bill 1211, 1211 allows Idaho hunters to obtain an unlimited number of wolf tags, and it also allows Idaho's Department of Fish and Game to use taxpayer dollars to pay private contractors to kill wolves. That means bounties on wolves, including on public lands.

And in 2021, the Idaho Fish and Game Commission expanded the wolf hunting season and hunting and trapping methods. So it's not too surprising to learn that also in 2021, the Timberline pack disappeared.

The students, the ones that cared about wolves, at least, were devastated.

Last summer I went to D.C. with some of the Species Unite team for a wolf rally on Capitol Hill. While I was there, two young women gave a talk about what happened at Timberline in 2021. Their names are Ella Driver and Sneha Sharma. They both graduated from Timberline High School and were there when their wolf pack disappeared.

Please, listen and share.

“And it's true that as much as online makes things much more accessible in so many ways, sometimes it's the feeling and seeing that actually really gets people over the line, because they're like, ‘Oh, wow, that feels really… that looks really good. Oh, look at it on me. Oh, you can style it like this as well. And oh, you can go over the shoulder like, yeah…’ the touch is really important for consumer goods” – Jessica Kruger

Jessica Kruger is the founder of a vegan handbag company called Shaker. They had a rebrand in June, they were originally founded as LUXTRA in 2018. With the rebrand, came new design and new material.

Shaker’s handbags are made with MIRUM® - the first high-end leather alternative that is 100% plastic-free, which is a HUGE deal.

I spent time with Jessica in London and saw Shaker’s bags in person. And they are absolutely stunning.

Jessica originally started her journey of building cruelty-free businesses in 2014 when she opened ETHOS – one of London’s best loved meat-free restaurants - after her mother volunteered at Farm Sanctuary in California.

speciesunite.com

https://shakerlondon.com/

https://mirum.naturalfiberwelding.com/

There’s not much that we can be certain about in such uncertain times but there are a few things. One is that unless we change the way that that we treat animals, the next pandemic is most definitely coming. Only next time, it could be much worse, much more infectious and even more fatal than the current crisis we’re now facing. 

COVID-19 most likely started at a wild animal market in Wuhan, China and was transmitted to a human from an animal, probably a pangolin. Wild animal markets are breeding grounds for diseases - and in order to stop the transmission of the diseases to humans, we need to shut down the markets, end the global wildlife trade, and change the way that we treat animals across the board. 

If there’s one upside coming from this pandemic  (I certainly hope there’s more than one), it’s that wild animal markets have shut down in China (at least they are closed right now) and hopefully, many other countries will soon follow suit. There’s still much confusion surrounding the wild animal markets in China and elsewhere in terms of what's shut down and what hasn’t. So, I asked Peter Knights the Executive Director of WildAid to explain.

Peter has been investigating and working to end illegal wildlife trafficking for the past thirty years. WildAid is different from other conservation organizations, because instead of focusing on fighting the supply side of the illegal wildlife trade, they work to reduce demand and to increase local support for conservation efforts. They’ve been a massive force in the reduction of the demand for ivory, rhino horn, shark fins, and much other illegal wildlife for decades. 

Their campaigns have changed the world. If you haven’t seen them (although, you probably have and just didn’t know it) take a look at their website. There are two incredible campaigns for pangolins on there, one with Jay Chou and the other with Jackie Chan. 

Peter and I spoke on Friday from our respective quarantines. He graciously explained the current situation with what’s happening with wild animal markets across the planet. And, he shared what the future looks like if we don’t put an end to these markets and the wild life trade. I hope you learn as much as I did.