Species Unite
Society & Culture
About
Stories that change the way the world treats animals.
Episodes
- Cameron Meyer Shorb: Nature Was Never Eden
Cameron Meyer Shorb joins Species Unite to discuss wild animal welfare, a field focused on the well-being of individual animals. Shorb suggests that humans may have the capacity to improve conditions for wild animals, moving beyond simply…
- Dr. Melanie Joy: Why good people don't want to know
Dr. Melanie Joy, a psychologist, introduces the concept of carnism, the invisible belief system that influences which animals humans eat. The episode examines how carnism functions, why individuals may resist information related to it, and…
- Rose Patterson: What are we willing to risk when we know suffering is happening?
Rose Patterson, co-director of Animal Rising, shares her experiences with open animal rescue and direct action, discussing the motivations and risks involved, including facing potential prison time for activism. The episode explores the ev…
- Todd Friedman: The Pig Who Changed Everything
Todd Friedman recounts finding an abandoned pig named Arthur, which inspired the creation of Arthur's Acres, a sanctuary for pigs. The sanctuary aims to change perceptions by showcasing pigs as individuals with feelings and social bonds, l…
- Dan Shannon: How Change Happens
Dan Shannon of The Humane League discusses factory farming, calling it a moral atrocity. He outlines the work needed to end the suffering of billions of animals and dismantle cruel agricultural practices like battery cages.
- Dax Dasilva: Echoes from Eden
"I really think it's a story is about the heroes, the conservation heroes. It's each one of their stories and then it's about my personal growth story of being absolutely useless in the jungle and how I got decent by the end of it." – Dax…
- Rebecca Bose: Undoing an American Extinction
"I don't know of another animal mammal that does not protect their young. Everybody protects their young. A wolf does too if another predator came. Of course they would protect their young. But with humans, they are that afraid of us, that…
- Gemunu de Silva: Industry Standard
"I grew up and I became vegetarian listening to punk albums because there was a real punk scene which talked about vegetarianism, which talked about veganism, which talked about the peace movement. And that really influenced me. And there…
- Gail Eisnitz: Out of Sight
"These workers were so courageous to go on camera to talk about what they were being forced to do, and we had a whistleblower attorney there to protect them. And then Dateline just killed the story. What I heard through the grapevine was t…
- Melissa Hoffman: Eat Your Ethics
A lot of people think that kosher means that animals were treated significantly better than animals that enter the non-kosher market. And largely, this is just not true, because kosher is very much now a part of the same systems that produ…
- Brett Mitchell: The Man Who Freed the Elephants
"It just makes everything worthwhile with what we did. It just highlights how flexible elephants are and how adaptable they are from captivity to wild, and that when given the chance, they will choose freedom. And they will choose autonomy…
- Nina Jackel and Blake Moynes: The Cruelty Behind the Selfie
"You look at these animals, and they're just so far removed from the life that I want them to have, that they should have that, we would hope that wild animals have. And they're just humiliated and degraded and they're so utterly powerless…
- Amy Jones: Skin and Bones
"It was a really surreal experience because I didn't know what to expect from a tiger farm. I've been in a lot of industrial farms of other animals. I sort of thought to myself, 'surely it can't be, it can't be actually a farm like what we…
- Thom Norman: How $23 a Month Could Dismantle Factory Farming
"Because we're kind of lowering the stakes. We're saying it's okay to admit to yourself that you care about factory farming and you care about animals because we're not going to try and trick you into going vegan or whatever. And so it all…
- 30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard
This week, we're doing something a little different. Instead of a conversation, we're sharing something we've been working on for the past year — our new short documentary, 30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard. It tells the unbelievable true sto…
- Melanie Kaplan: Lab Dog
"Maybe when we started doing this with animals, researching on them and studying them for human benefit hundreds of years ago, we didn't know about their sentience. We didn't know that they had emotions and feelings and felt pain. And we k…
- Annick Ireland: The Future is Immaculate
"All those kinds of brands in food and in fashion helped pave the way for where we are now. So, on the one hand, it's crushing that they no longer exist, but on the other hand, part of the reason they don't exist is because it has also bec…
- Suzanne Lee: Grown, not Extracted
"You know, you walk through a forest. Every leaf on every tree is unique. And that's what biology does. We are all unique, right? Everything about us that biology does, it's so magical. It's so special. And we now have the ability to harne…
- Alex Woodard: Ordinary Soil
"Now more than ever, a lot of farmers are caught in between this kind of industrial complex that that is difficult to pay the bills with - so you got to get subsidies, and the very real problem of being exposed to all the chemicals that th…
- Amber Canavan: The Labels That Lie
"That is no life for these birds and it is definitely not what the consumer is thinking or assuming. When they see these nice labels and they think, 'oh, I'm paying so much more for this, that change must be going for the animals, right?'…
- Christine Mott: Free Bird
"How could this owl, who was born in captivity, lived his whole life in a cage, how could he possibly survive? He's going to be dead in a few days. That's what everybody thought." – Christine Mott In February 2023, a Eurasian eagle-owl nam…
- Edita Birnkrant and Tracy Winston: The Horse Who Collapsed in the Street
"I could be walking in Central Park and come up on one of these horse and buggies. I don't think twice about it because I see it as part of the New York attraction. You know, you have the Statue of Liberty, you have Times Square, and you h…
- Mari Andrew: How To Be A Living Thing
"It was just this love I developed of life, all life and how much life can be a joy to witness and experience if we're not severing ourselves or severing other lives from our own. And then you start to see all the connectedness and it's li…
- Dr. Shirley Strum: The Echoes of Our Origins
"So I think this whole idea of cumulative culture is a way to make humans exceptional. But it's clear to me that humans are exceptional, and seeing it through baboon glasses, I can understand in a different way why they're exceptional. But…
- Jeffrey Reed: Cry Wolf: Decoding the Language of the Wild
"I sit in the camp that is going to defend wildlife, and I will live and die in that space. Even though what I see is in the West, wolves have a bad reputation. It's still there…" -Jeffrey Reed What if we could understand wolves? How they…
- Trevor Ritland: The Golden Toad
I think you could probably go back and track the stages of grief, probably that is what I went through. But I think if you do it right, you end up at acceptance. And that's where I ended up. And that's not to say that I've fully accepted t…
- Reuven Bank and Andrew Kim: When the Ocean Lost Its Stars
"72 juveniles is 28% of the current population of sunflower stars under human care in California. More than a quarter of them are at our facility. If you had asked us that question about a year and a half ago. The answer would be zero at o…
- Delcianna Winders: The Beginning of the End of Animal Testing
"We don't actually know how many animals we're testing on in this country, because most of them are not protected by any laws. There's not even a requirement that you track their numbers." – Delcianna Winders Today, I have the pleasure of…
- Jeff Kerr: Our First Amendment Right to Receive Communications (from Monkeys)
"It is a scientific fact that these macaques, like all other primates, including humans, are communicating. They communicate in much the same way we do - facial expressions, vocalizations, body postures, those kinds of things." - Jeff Kerr…
- Isabella La Rocca Gonzalez: Censored Landscapes
"The one that really surprised me was the organic humane Certified Egg Farm. I thought Humane Certified would at least mean that I would see some chickens running around somewhere, but it looked exactly the [00:00:30] same as any other egg…
- John Kinder: World War Zoos
John Kinder is the director of American studies and a professor of history at Oklahoma State University. And he is an author. His most recent book is called World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern A…
- Richard (Kudo) Couto: The Hidden Horror Behind a Billion-Dollar Brand
"I used to be the largest dairy consumer on the planet. I used to eat so much dairy and meat. The more that I looked into the dairy industry, the more that I saw that it was the singular, most inhumane industry on the planet, that we've al…
- Meredith Blanchard: We've Cured Cancer in Mice for Decades
"There's a drug called vioxx that was found to be safe and effective in animal trials, so they moved it on to preclinical trials in humans. Once on the market, that drug caused 88,000 people to have heart attacks and killed 38,000 people."…
- Rob Read: When the Ocean Bleeds
"One year, we actually offered the Faroe Islanders One million pounds to stop the hunts. 1 million pounds, which would go to promoting whale and dolphin tourism to the islands and marine conservation education to Faroese kids in schools. A…
- Andrew Stein: Living with Lions
"If we march into that village and we start trying to persecute people for using poison, something that's very illegal, nobody's going to talk to us. We're not going to find out where the poison came from. We're not going to be able to shu…
- Jaap de Roode: Doctors by Nature
"But it makes a lot of sense especially when you think about how traditional healers and shamans have worked, they haven't felt that separation from nature like Western medics do. And so to rely on the knowledge of other species actually m…
- Jonathan Birch: The Edge of Sentience
"I mean, organoids in general are very exciting replacements for animal research because you could model a kidney or a liver or a or a heart without taking them from a real animal, which it's very important to support that kind of thing. B…
- Elizabeth MeLampy: Forget the Camel
"The basic premise of the event is that hunters hunt rattlesnakes from the surrounding environment all across West Texas, and bring them into the roundup for the weekend. And during the roundup, these snakes are kept in a pit and then, one…
- Tom Sciolla: Free the Animals
"When we arrived, we had no records, we had nothing. We had no documentation. And one of one of the first things that you have to actually prove to all of these international government parties and so on, you need to you need to say, where…
- Andrianna Natsoulas: Don't Cage Our Oceans
"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 mammal…
- Jeff Sebo: The Moral Circle
"It is a little bit terrifying, because it means that AI systems are going to be entering this uncanny valley where we are not sure how to experience them in five or ten years. You might be talking to Siri on your phone, or ChatGPT on your…
- John Jurko: Rhino Man
"I think it's really the amounts of money that they're able to offer people paired with the violence that they're willing to put on people. It's very much like the drug cartels in Mexico, just more focused on poaching of wildlife." – John…
- Jason Edwards: From Icebergs to Iguanas
"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 a…
- Ella Driever and Sneha Sharma: The Timberline Pack
"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…
- Cheryl Martinez: Veginner Cooking
"I know that veganism can be a little daunting for some, and they feel like it's either you go fully vegan or you're not allowed in the club." – Cheryl Martinez Because it's January and because a lot of people may have made some big resolu…
- Patti Truant Anderson: Polling and the Surprising Results Around What People Really Think About the Food System
Text "Do people even want to know about some of these issues? Because I think some of the meat production concerns, it's kind of like people would rather in some cases, I think some people might not really want to know all the nitty gritty…
- Tom Philpott: The Human Cost of Meatpacking
"People in the animal welfare world, I think, should broaden their purview to the human parts of it and sort of work in coalition. Like if you can really expose the labor conditions, you're weakening the industry, and if you can increase l…
- Keeve Nachman: A Masterclass in Persistence
"I remember during my training having professors tell me, 'one day you might do something important and you'll tick off a vested interest, and they're going to come into a meeting with you, and they're going to bring a copy of your dissert…
- Brent Kim: From Farm to Fork and Beyond
"My colleague and I went out to Arizona because there was a community that was concerned about the expansion of an egg laying operation, essentially in their backyard. At full capacity, that operation was slated to house 12 million birds.…
- JG Collomb: Wildlife Conservation Network
"In the case of lions, they're not easy neighbors. They're also not the worst neighbors. I think in in most cases, it's a matter of learning how to live next to nature, next to other animals and animals that can potentially be dangerous."…