Species Unite

Species Unite will be back on June 2nd with a new season. Until then, we are re-sharing some of our favorite episodes. This week's is a conversation with Aaron Gross.    We all have a food story; the story that we tell ourselves about what we eat and why we eat it. It's that story that runs the show when it comes to how we shop, cook, and feed our children.  It was most often taught to us by our p...

Species Unite will return in a few weeks with Season 8. Until then, we are re-sharing some of our favorite episodes. Today's is a conversation with Melanie Joy.  Melanie Joy is a Harvard-educated psychologist, specializing in the psychology of eating animals, social transformation, and relationships. She is the award-winning author of six books, including the best-selling, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pi...

"It's funny because with art, with literature, with music, we are all connected. It's emotion. You know, like if I say, "have you read this or that," or… "do you know Alice Coltrane? Do you know John Coltrane?" Whatever it is you've got a language and there's a connection going on. And, we should have that with the world. We should have that feeling of like an artistic sensibility to the world. We...

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 l...

"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...

"Packs that are continuously trapped and snared and hunted, the packs are smaller and things are a lot more chaotic in the pack because you're killing uncle, you're killing dad, you're killing mom. The pups may get good leadership training and learn how to hunt or the family could be broken up and the puppies never fully learn how to hunt.   And so all this hunting and trapping  lowers the pack si...

" 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...

Today we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Alexandra Horowitz.    "I can drive my car off a cliff and just leave it where it lay, the most I'll get is a littering fine, and if you throw your dog off the cliff the punishment is actually pretty similar. That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So, unless you change that status, and you have people of c...

"Let's say I own a gun shop, and I want to drum up business, right? I can host a coyote killing contest, which they'll call predator hunting, where cash prizes of let's say $1000 goes to whomever kills the most coyotes in a 24 hour period. You might have 500 people show up from my state and out of state, and through any means  necessary thermal scopes at night,  any technology, electronic game cal...

"Our entire food supply is completely dependent on chemicals and completely dependent on four to eight companies around the world to produce all these products." – Shely Aronov     Shelly Aronov is the founder and CEO of InnerPlant . InnerPlant is kind of like Google Translate for plants. They're bioengineering plant genes so that crops can send messages to farmers, and the farmers will literally...

" I put on the coat, I looked at myself in the mirror, I was going to a party in Brooklyn and I just thought, 'you cannot go to this party like this, you will be shunned and you don't want to be this person."  And I took off the coat and I never looked back." – Kym Canter   Kym Canter is the founder and creative director at House of Fluff , a New York City-based, animal free, material innovation s...

This week we are re-sharing one of our favorite episodes, a conversation with Jonathan Balcombe.    "…gazing up to the night sky saying, 'are we alone?' …well, wait a minute, look around, there's tons of fascinating life forms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet.  I get the question… are there other humanoids out there? Or, are there other conscious beings? But w...

"We make everything from a vegan rib, so we got a rib that'll blow your mind. Looks like a rib, tastes like a rib, but guess what? It ain't a rib… it can go on the grill, you can smoke it, you can literally barbecue it and it comes out like mama's ribs that you ate when you grew up." – Chef Chew     GW Chew, aka Chef Chew, is a vegan food inventor and restaurateur on a mission is to change lives a...

  "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 o...

" As we were driving from Jackson, Wyoming, towards the entrance of the park, I was in the passenger seat, Charlie was driving and I saw a bison and I'll never forget it. I grabbed him so hard on the arm and I screeched, "BISON!" It was the first bison I'd ever seen in the wild. We stopped the car and we were a good distance from the bison. But we could see it unimpeded with the windshield and jus...

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...

Rich Hardy is a former undercover investigator. He spent 20 years doing over 100 assignments in 30 countries. He's been on the podcast before to talk about his time undercover. If you haven't heard that episode, you should go back and listen .   He is back today to talk about his latest adventure.   After a couple of decades of incredibly intense investigative work, and living a double life, Rich...

"The reason that you should accept our client as having rights is because we're showing what an extraordinary being she is. These beings have mirror self-recognition, they know that they are elephants. In fact, we listed 42 different, highly complex cognitive abilities that elephants have. If you didn't know it was an elephant, you'd think [I was] talking about what a human being does." - Steven W...

"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 o...

"Historically some of the leading airlines in the world were responsible for transporting these monkeys. So, you had national flag carrier airlines, such as such as British Airways, American Airlines - all of these big airlines were involved in transporting these monkeys in the hundreds and thousands every year on commercial passenger airlines. And, rightly the public were very concerned, there wa...

"It's really about bringing the skills and the tools and the techniques that we've already developed and addressing other forms of transnational or international crimes - and applying them to this area that had long been forgotten." – Olivia Swaat-Goldman   Olivia Swaak-Goldman is the executive director of the Wildlife Justice Commission , an organization that goes around the world fighting transn...

"I think we we've prioritized certain things in education and in culture, but we're really deprioritizing curiosity. The joy of going into a research hole and just digging… I still do that every day." – Sonalie Figueiras   Sonalie Figueiras is the founder and chief of Green Queen , the award-winning media impact platform advocating for social and environmental change. Green Queen started as a blog...

"… a lot of the platform technologies do not make sense from a food perspective, and there's just never been a reason to do things a different way. So, for example, cell culture is very expensive and very resource intensive because the medical field doesn't really need those things to be done in a very cost-effective manner - because people, have a high cost thresh hold when it comes to paying for...

"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...

 "So, you really want the kids to drink the cow's milk because that's the liquid that's available to them if they're thirsty. And we were also told that yeah, you really should be having the kids open up their cow's milk. I went down through all the tables and said, "open up your milk, open up your milk." Or, I was told, we just won't get our funding because this was a school that was a turnaround...