The Animal Wellness Podcast

Carl Safina is a pioneer when it comes to understanding the hidden—and instructive—lives of animals. In this interview about his latest book, “ Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace ,” he talks about what we can learn about being human from chimpanzees, parrots, pigeons and whales, much of it relevant to today’s headlines.   Safina’s other works includ...

Wildlife killing contests are orgies of wanton killing and waste, sponsored by gun-manufacturers and even mom-and-pop businesses, that result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of animals a year. Prizes awarded to participants as young as 10 years old go to the killers who bring the most of certain animals, including the heaviest of them and even the youngest or smallest. Growing attention to...

While Americans are struggling to keep beef, poultry and pork in their refrigerators, exports of those products to China have quadrupled, and hundreds of thousands of animals are being killed and wasted on factory farms. In this episode, we talk to cattleman Will Harris of White Oak Pastures and Wayne Pacelle and Marty Irby from Animal Wellness Action to learn how severely our current system is br...

In this special Derby Day edition, we update and share our 2018 interview with Priscilla Presley. She and the King shared a love of horses, and it was through their beloved Tennessee Walker they were first exposed to the world of soaring. She was horrified by the cruel training tactics and has spent much of her life fighting for the well-being of animals of all kinds. Plus: Marty Irby, the executi...

GREY2K USA is a husband-and-wife advocacy team that grew through time, smarts and a lot of help to reduce the number of dog-racing tracks in the U.S. from 50 or more to now just four. This is the story of how they did it and what other animal-welfare groups can learn from their incredible success. Also: Wayne Pacelle and Marty Irby from Animal Wellness Action update us on how the Netflix sensation...

COVID-19 has exposed again that our government's testing requirements for new drugs and vaccines are inefficient, slow, cruel to animals and deadly to humans. Guest Tami Drake ( Center for Responsible Science ) says that the 90-year-old requirement for in vivo trials is one reason we may be several years from developing a vaccine against this virus, if we are able to develop one at all.  The solut...

Acclaimed wildlife writer and outdoorsman Ted Williams joins us to talk about caged hunts, where people pay up to five-figure sums to shoot grotesquely overbred animals in confined areas, all for an interesting story and a display on a wall. Not only do these operations—banned now in 20 states—represent the antithesis of hunting as a "sport," they are contributing to the spread of CWD, a brain-eat...

While the pandemic wreaks havoc for humans, our pets are so far immune to it. We visit with Dr. Annie Harvilicz, DVM, president of the Animal Wellness Foundation and secretary of Animal Wellness Action, to dispel rumors about pet-human/human-pet transmission of the disease and to learn what's being done to help pets when human companions lose their jobs and can't afford a trip to the vet. Also: Wa...

"Sport" trapping—an exercise in barbaric cruelty with no modern justification—remains a pernicious vestige of a by-gone era across much of the United States. Its horrors are well-documented: Animals who chew off their own appendages to escape. Slow, excruciating deaths. Orphaned younglings. The inadvertent triggering by protected species, family pets and even children. In this episode, we speak wi...

The coronavirus now making headlines across the world is, like the SARS epidemic in 2002-2003, an example of a disease originating in a non-human animal and ending up in the human-animal population. The zoonotic virus likely crossed the interspecies boundary at a "wet market" in Wuhan, where live exotic animals are sold as delicacies to affluent citizens. The outbreak, says Animal Wellness Action...

About 1,000 racehorses a year die in contests they never asked to join. Doping and the overuse of therapeutic drugs are largely to blame, along with harmful overbreeding, making the vaunted Sport of Kings too often a spectacle of suffering and death. About 12 percent of the horses slaughtered for human consumption are former racehorses. Guests for this episode are Arthur Hancock III and Staci Hand...

The government requires most farmers to contribute to funds that are often used against their better interests. The results hurt family farms and lead to the increasingly brutal, mechanized treatment of animals. Legislation is pending that would require more transparency and purity of purpose for the use of what amounts to an $800 million yearly tax on agriculture. Joining Wayne Pacelle and Marty...

Thousands of wild horses each year are rounded up in a terrifying assault of helicopters and relocated to feeder farms, many of which are in habitats that are foreign to the animals. Why? So ranchers can have cheap access to public lands--your lands--to graze their cattle and then better profit from the beef they sell. Suzanne Roy, head of American Wild Horse Campaign , joins host Joseph Grove and...

Wayne Pacelle, founder of Animal Wellness Action, and Marty Irby, the non-profit's executive director, talk with host Joseph Grove and special guest Carole Baskin about the need for the Big Cat Public Safety Act. Baskin operates Big Cat Rescue: An Educational Sanctuary in Tampa, Fla., and is an expert on the challenges confronting these coveted creatures when people try to monetize their cubs and...

Wayne Pacelle, founder of Animal Wellness Action, and Marty Irby, the non-profit's executive director, talk with host Joseph Grove and special guest Ana Maria Hernandez about the renewed attention on convicted dog-figther and NFL player Michael Vick as well as the December 20, 2019, deadlines for U.S. territories to be in compliance with federal anti-cock-fighting law. To learn more and to sign up...

  Wayne Pacelle, founder of Animal Wellness Action, and Marty Irby, the non-profit's executive director, talk with host Joseph Grove about the key role of committee chairman in expediting or halting the progress of federal animal-welfare legislation. Plus: Lawmakers take aim at shark-finning, and the battle intensifies against Thoroughbred deaths on racetracks. To learn more and to sign up for ema...

Wayne Pacelle, founder of Animal Wellness Action, and Marty Irby, the non-profit's executive director, talk with host Joseph Grove about legislative victories for animals in 2019. They include the PAST Act and the PACT Act. To learn more and to sign up for email updates about animal wellness, visit https://animalwellnessaction.org/ .     Theme music from https://filmmusic.io . "Fearless First" by...