PODCAST

Species Unite

Stories that change the way the world treats animals.

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

02:48

30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard

Species Unite ·

2025/10/29

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 proposed facility that would have housed 30,000 monkeys for laboratory testing — and how a group of everyday people stood up, fought back, and changed the course of their town's future. The film is a story

40:01

Melanie Kaplan: Lab Dog

Species Unite ·

2025/10/22

“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 When journalist Melanie Kaplan agreed to foster a beagle named Hammy, she knew he’d just been released from a research lab. What she didn’t know was how profoundly his story — and the world he came from —

33:53

Annick Ireland: The Future is Immaculate

Species Unite ·

2025/10/15

“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 are right now in East London, there used to be an amazing vegan food market, and it went on for a number of years and then it died. But actually the founder of that vegan market said, ‘guys, it's not a bad

39:39

Suzanne Lee: Grown, not Extracted

Species Unite ·

2025/10/08

“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 Suzanne Lee is the founder of Biofabricate and for more than two decades she’s been uniting scientists, designers, artists, and dreamers to prove that biology isn’t just inspiration — it’s the next frontier of

27:17

Alex Woodard: Ordinary Soil

Species Unite ·

2025/10/01

"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 hammered and depleted." - Alex Woodard This episode isn’t about animals. It’s about the ground beneath our feet — and what happens when we forget that our own health, our food, and our future are all rooted

30:34

Amber Canavan: The Labels That Lie

Species Unite ·

2025/09/17

“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 quo of that factory farm going.” Amber Canavan Most of us want to make choices that are kinder—to animals, to the planet, to ourselves. But in today’s food system, kindness is often buried under labels

29:54

Christine Mott: Free Bird

Species Unite ·

2025/08/19

“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 escaped from his small enclosure at the Central Park Zoo. Born in captivity and unable to fly or hunt, Flaco defied every expectation. In just weeks, he taught himself to soar across the Manhattan skyline,

37:03

Edita Birnkrant and Tracy Winston: The Horse Who...

Species Unite ·

2025/08/13

“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 married in the park and they ride these carriages. And tourists, they take these rides in Central Park. It's romantic, it's something beautiful to see. But I never thought for one second that these horses

41:18

Mari Andrew: How To Be A Living Thing

Species Unite ·

2025/08/06

“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 fixing yourself—but about remembering what it means to be alive? This conversation is with writer artist, speaker, teacher, and deep feeler Mari Andrew about her new book, How to Be a Living Thing— an

39:06

Dr. Shirley Strum: The Echoes of Our Origins

Species Unite ·

2025/07/30

"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 actually present in other animals." - Dr. Shirley Strum Dr. Shirley Strum is a groundbreaking anthropologist who has spent over five decades living alongside wild baboons in Kenya. Her work has transformed

46:59

Jeffrey Reed: Cry Wolf: Decoding the Language of the...

Species Unite ·

2025/07/23

“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 computational linguist, naturalist, and technologist who’s doing just that—using artificial intelligence to decode the wild. Jeff is the founder of the Cry Wolf Project, a groundbreaking bio acoustic

34:01

Trevor Ritland: The Golden Toad

Species Unite ·

2025/06/24

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 still hold out hope that it could still be out there in those forests." - Trevor Ritland This conversation is with Trevor Ritland, who—along with his twin brother Kyle—authored The Golden Toad. The book

30:57

Reuven Banks and Andrew Lee: When the Ocean Lost Its...

Species Unite ·

2025/06/11

"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 total." - Andrew Lee In 2013, one of the largest marine disease outbreaks on record, sea star wasting syndrome swept through echinoderm populations, laying waste to sunflower stars across their historic

40:08

Delcianna Winders: The Beginning of the End of Animal...

Species Unite ·

2025/06/06

“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 FDA and NIH have required or relied on animal testing as the gold standard for drug development and biomedical research. But that's beginning to change. Both agencies have just announced significant steps to

30:14

Jeff Kerr: Our First Amendment Right to Receive...

Species Unite ·

2025/05/29

"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 asked him to come on the show to talk about one of PETA’s current lawsuits against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Nathional Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). PETA is arguing that the monkeys being

31:41

Isabella La Rocca Gonzalez: Censored Landscapes

Species Unite ·

2025/05/20

"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 chicken anywhere in sight. And then I learned, of course, that, um, you know, the this whole free range, pasture raised terminology doesn't really mean anything." - Isabella La Rocca Gonzalez Isabella

42:33

John Kinder: World War Zoos

Species Unite ·

2025/05/16

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: what happened to the world’s zoos—and the animals inside them—during World War II. It’s a sweeping, deeply researched look at how zoos became sites of propaganda, patriotism, and survival, often at the

42:18

Richard (Kudo) Couto: The Hidden Horror Behind a...

Species Unite ·

2025/04/30

“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 believed that the picture on the milk carton, the cow standing next to her calf in the green field with the red barn in the back was true. It’s certainly the complete opposite.” – Richard (Kudo) Couto

54:41

Meredith Blanchard: We’ve Cured Cancer in Mice for...

Species Unite ·

2025/04/23

“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 Unite. In January and February, our team traveled to Bainbridge, Georgia to begin filming our first documentary. Bainbridge is a small Southern town facing a truly chilling threat: a company called Safer Human

48:55

Rob Read: When the Ocean Bleeds

Species Unite ·

2025/04/17

“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 no you've ever had in your life. They actually held a hunt on the 1st of January. On the first day of that offer, they went out and deliberately killed pilot whales as their official no to us.” – Rob

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