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PODCAST · society

Species Unite

by Species Unite

Stories that change the way the world treats animals.

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Episodes

  1. Dominick Thompson: Beyond the Walls

    "That transformation from a guy from the Midwest that was really into a lot of meat and potatoes, like a lot of us are. That transformation and experience was the closest experience that I had to feeling like a real life superhero." - Dominick Thompson Dominick Thompson is a man who has lived the...

  2. Arash Yomtobian: The Problem with All or Nothing

    "Everything is a story. Every belief that we have, every entity or institution is a story that we've told ourselves and each other. And so really identifying ways on how companies that have grown to be so large and successful, how they have taken storytelling and been able to apply it to building...

  3. Ana Paula Tavares: Save the Chimps

    "As I stood about six feet away from him, looking at his beautiful little brown eyes, and Tuffy looked right back into my eyes and actually through my soul. And at that moment, I felt like it was quite emotional, and it really felt like he knew what was going on and understood everything that was...

  4. Michael Schneider: Pilots to the Rescue

    "We do own and operate aircraft, but we also put a lot of energy into telling the story and that's really important because that's what's going to provide transformation in this space, because people will hear about what we do think it's a cool mission. We inspire people. They'll think twice…

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  5. Kevin Sherwin: How do you Milk an Almond?

    "His argument against almond milk is that you can't call almond milk milk because you can't physically milk an almond." – Kevin Sherwin Kevin Sherwin is a composer, musician, and filmmaker who decided that the best way to expose Big Dairy's war on the word milk was through a courtroom puppet...

  6. Jamie Logan and Justina Adorno: Green Goddesses Take New York

    "We had to start asking how are we sustainable with the activism in the long run? I think that using humor, using confrontation will get people to look at the things that they normally wouldn't." - Jamie Logan Whether they are dressed as fish on the streets of New York, speaking to college…

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  7. Cameron Meyer Shorb: Nature Was Never Eden

    "So before I encountered these ideas, whenever I thought about human's relationship to animals, I only thought about the negative parts. I thought the best we could ever achieve would be to maybe erase the impacts we cause and atone for our sins and get back to neutral and be less of a cancer on...

  8. Dr. Melanie Joy: Why good people don't want to know

    "Let's say that you eat meat and you're sitting down and you're biting into a juicy hamburger, and your dining companion turns to you and says, 'Elizabeth, you know that hamburger is actually not made from beef. It's made from golden retrievers.'" – Melanie Joy Melanie Joy is a psychologist,...

  9. Rose Patterson: What are we willing to risk when we know suffering is happening?

    "I think something that I learned from doing that was that this is all in our heads, like it's all for show just because there's a security guard that even if he's right in front of you, it doesn't mean you can't just run past him and carry on. Just because there's a fence doesn't mean you can't...

  10. Todd Friedman: The Pig Who Changed Everything

    "You want people to stop eating these animals and the only way to do it is to showcase them in a light where people see them as individuals, and not just a sandwich in the morning, or breakfast, or a dinner at Christmas holidays. These are individuals that feel pain, that feel happiness, that…

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  11. Dan Shannon: How Change Happens

    "There will come a time in the future where historians look back on this era of history and sort of see it as this moment of historical atrocity, which is what I think it is today. I do think that factory farming and the suffering caused to billions and billions of animals every single year is a...

  12. 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 Dasilva There are moments when you look at the world — at...

  13. 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 they will leave their den. They will leave." – Rebecca…

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  14. 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 was one record specifically by a band called, Conflict…

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  15. 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 they were afraid that people would change the channel. It's...

  16. 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 produce 99% of the animal products that get into our grocery...

  17. 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." - Brett Mitchell For nearly thirty years, Brett…

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  18. 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." - Nina Jackel Today, we're taking you inside one of the...

  19. 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 see, how we raise pigs and chickens and cows.' But it was...

  20. 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 allows them to engage with the issue, maybe for the first…

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  21. 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 story of how a small town in Georgia became ground zero for a...

  22. 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 know all that now. We can't ignore that." – Melanie Kaplan...

  23. 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 become a bit more mainstream, you know? So, you know where we...

  24. 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 harness biology in the way that nature does." – Suzanne Lee...

  25. 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 they have to use to make anything grow in soil that's been...

  26. 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?' No, it's lining the pockets and it's keeping that status…

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  27. 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 named Flaco made headlines—and captured hearts—when he…

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  28. 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 have these romantic horse and buggy things where people get...

  29. 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 like a drug." - Mari Andrew What if healing wasn't about...

  30. 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 many of the things that we think are uniquely human are...

  31. 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 communicate, what they might be saying? Jeffrey Reed, is a...

  32. 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 the idea that the golden toad is extinct. Personally, I do...

  33. 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 our facility, and the answer across California would be six...

  34. 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 sharing some genuinely promising news. For decades, the…

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  35. 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 Jeff Kerr is PETA foundations Chief Legal Officer. I…

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  36. 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 facility. They were just big warehouses. You don't see a...

  37. 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 Age. John's book tells a story most of us have never heard:...

  38. 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 all been lied to, including myself, for years. I always...

  39. 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." Meredith Blanchard We have some big news at Species…

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  40. 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. And the Faroese response to our offer was the most emphatic...

  41. 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 shut anything down. We should take the approach that people…

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  42. 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 makes a lot of sense. It's probably a lot more than we know...

  43. 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. But yes, when it's the brain, there's this fear that you...

  44. 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 by one, beheaded and skinned in front of in front of...

  45. 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 did you get this elephant? And we had no idea. We were...

  46. 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 mammals that might be around it." - Andrianna Natsoulas…

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  47. 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 laptop, or your Roomba, vacuuming your floor. You might…

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  48. 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 Jurko John Jurko is a director and producer of the film,...

  49. 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 again.' No, my brain will not go to that space because I…

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  50. 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 are sickening." - Ella Driever In 1995, wolves were...

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ABOUT THIS SHOW

Stories that change the way the world treats animals.

HOSTED BY

Species Unite

Produced by elizabeth novogratz

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes does Species Unite have?

Species Unite currently has 282 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.

What is Species Unite about?

Stories that change the way the world treats animals.

How often does Species Unite release new episodes?

Species Unite publishes regularly with 282 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.

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You can listen to Species Unite on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.

Who hosts Species Unite?

Species Unite is created and hosted by Species Unite.
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