The Animal Wellness Podcast

Many of our shows deal with complex legislative and veterinary issues, so every once in a while we like to meet up with people on the ground, deep in day-to-day work with animals. This is one of those episodes. In it, we talk to:   Paul Collins, the Wisconsin state director for Animal Wellness Action. In his free time, he volunteers at a local rescue sanctuary, where he has befriended emus and bec...

The past year was busy on the animal-wellness front. Not only did Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy see some major wins outside of Congress, we worked to set up major legislative victories for when the 118th Congress returns for its second and final year. In this podcast, Wayne Pacelle, president of the groups, and Jennifer Skiff, director of international, review those wi...

About 1.5 million kangaroos a year are shot, bludgeoned or left to starve to death or die of their injuries. This occurs because companies like Adidas and New Balance still pay hunters to head into the Australian wilderness to hunt the animals. The hunters make the kills, the kangaroos are skinned, and the skins are made into soccer shoes for affluent customers across the United States and other p...

Last May, Marielle Williamson was an anonymous teenager doing anonymous teenager things. Like her classmates at Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, California, she was busy preparing to graduate and to leap across the threshold into adulthood. The last thing on her mind was becoming the subject of countless news stories and being thrust into a debate about nutrition, animal welfare and the Firs...

Don’t be a Dick’s. That’s the message of a new campaign initiative by Animal Wellness Action and its sister organization, the Center for a Humane Economy . It’s targeted at Dick’s Sporting Goods, the largest sporting-goods retailer in the United States, and intends to call attention to the chain’s role in the largest commercial slaughter of land-based wildlife in the world. Dick’s Sporting Goods r...

Animal Wellness Action is one of many organizations pushing for Congress to pass the ADD SOY Act, a bill that would require the USDA to make soy milk available as a beverage alternative to the 30 million children who are part of the National School Lunch Program.   Every year, about $300 million in cow milk is tossed into the garbage—much of it still in unopened containers—by children who don’t li...

For decades, a wide range of man-made and environmental threats have endangered Southern Resident Orca—thinning the population in the Pacific Northwest to only 73. Today, they’re looking directly at extinction.   The urgency of the orcas’ plight cannot be overstated. While many agencies and organizations are working to save our orca through scientific research, mitigation programs, public policy i...

After the horse, no animal better represents the frontier heritage and pastoral expanse of the United States than does the wolf. Revered by some, demonized by others, enthralling to all—it’s also the case that no other wild animal brings such strong emotions to Americans.   No wonder, then, they are the subject of such complex legal and political battles. A byzantine web of state and federal regul...

After numerous battles in lower courts, the National Pork Producers Council and others finally convinced the Supreme Court to hear their challenge to California’s Proposition 12. That state initiative, passed by a powerful majority of California voters, mandates that no producer may sell products sourced from pigs or chickens into the state unless the producers ensure certain humane standards are...

Our special guest is filmmaker Ashley Avis, whose new WILD BEAUTY: MUSTANG SPIRIT OF THE WEST is available for pre-order on iTunes after earning multiple awards from film festivals across the country. The release date is May 12, 2023. You can watch the trailer here . The Winterstone Pictures production has been called "a sweeping, immersive journey into the world of wild horses that illuminates bo...

Jewel Johnson joins our podcast to talk about the emotional lives of fighting roosters, whom she rescues from seizures at busted cockfights and other surrenders. She does this through her 30-acre sanctuary in Colorado called Danzig's Roost. Contrary to expectations, the animals are incredibly docile with people and even exhibit bonding behaviors with humans more typically associated with dogs and...

In this episode, author Julie Marshall and host Joseph Grove talk with Ursula Goodenough about her new release, the second edition of "The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved." The book provides a brief but powerful commingling of science and spirituality to help readers more deeply connect with animals, plants and the earth herself. The book is available here: https://bit.ly...

How far is too far when it comes to animal advocacy? In this episode of the Animal Wellness Podcast, two veteran activists with somewhat different approaches discuss the best tactics to effect change for animals. Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy , often works quietly and behind the scenes, nudging the levers of government and commerce to create...

In this episode of the Animal Wellness Podcast, the team says farewell to Marty Irby, executive director of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. Marty has been a guest on virtually every show and served the organizations and the podcast since their inceptions. One of Marty’s greatest passions is improving the lives of horses—Tennessee Walkers, Thoroughbreds, wild horses and...

While the Corona virus has largely receded from the daily consciousness of most folks, it's not gone away completely. Just the other day, someone told reported that some hospitals are beginning to enact new masking policies. Regional and national hotspots remain across the globe. Countless people are grieving the almost 6.8 million people the virus has killed so far. The question remains, What hav...

Australia has its kangaroos. China, its beloved pandas. In the United States, we have horses. We love them. We revere them. Children delight in seeing them. We cheer them on when they race around tracks from sea to shining sea. But there’s a rancid underbelly to our treatment of horses, and a new investigative report , “U.S. Live Exports Fade as Foreign Demand Abates | An Investigative Report on H...

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation is less a structured paradigm of how Americans and their neighbor animals can co-exist than a set of tenets that benefits "sportsmen," who take advantage of the model to hunt, trap and poison their way through much of our wildlife population, and ranchers, who hope to acquire and maintain land for private profit. There is little about it that consi...

2022 was extraordinarily successful for Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. But Wayne Pacelle  , president, and Marty Irby , executive director, tell host Joseph Grove they have even bigger plans for 2023.   In this episode of the Animal Wellness Podcast, the animal-welfare leaders recap some of their successes in the now-concluded 117th Congress, including: Passing the Big...

Wayne Pacelle  and  Marty Irby  from  Animal Wellness Action  join host  Joseph Grove to discuss accomplishments for animals this year, including the Big Cat Public Safety Act and the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, as well as progress toward modernizing the FDA. Recorded December 21, 2022.   Music from  https://filmmusic.io:  "Fearless First" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com); License:...

Thanksgiving turkeys. Christmas hams. The holiday season is inextricably linked to these staples of holiday indulgence. While we amble through the darkening days of the year, however, the animals whose lives will be sacrificed to feed us are far worse than they need to be. And that is so because of unnecessarily inhumane conditions on the factory farms where the majority of them are bred, live sho...

On August 10, 2022, a carriage horse named Ryder collapsed on a hot New York City street and instantly became the symbol for a growing movement. Ryder was found to be a decade older than he should have been according to regulations, when he dropped to his side, requiring a spray of cold water to revivify him. He was emaciated and, it was later discovered, ill with cancer. Liberated at last from ha...

Dan Buettner is a prolific writer, traveler and advocate for the human species. His work with National Geographic led to an interest in areas of the world where people live the longest and most healthy–areas he dubbed Blue Zones. Since then, one of his missions has been to understand the commonalities among those areas and how people in other parts of the world could adopt them and reap their bene...

American horse racing has been in peril for quite some time. As a member of the Coalition for Horseracing Integrity, we’ve been working to stamp out doping and whipping in the sport, and bring an end to horse slaughter as well. With the enactment of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act in 2020 that took effect July 1st of this year, we’re finally on the right track. Unfortunately, rogue operat...

In the latest but perhaps most appalling subversion of animal welfare since assuming control of the executive branch, the Biden Administration has targeted the nation’s most important farm animal welfare law. In an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Department of Justice sided with the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and the American Farm Bureau Federation (Farm Bureau) in the...

One of the critical campaigns of Animal Wellness Action is to ensure the modernization of FDA drug-testing standards, which currently require the suffering and entail the deaths of countless thousands of animals each year. Key to this modernization--and the alleviation of this toll on animals--is to eliminate the requirement in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938 for animal testing as...