Species Unite

"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 so interesting to me that you can have stabbings and starvation and murders and all sorts of stuff on TV, but if it happens to animals, they won't do it." – Gail Eisnitz Most of what happens to animals in this country is designed to stay hidden. The violence, the speed, the scale — all of it kept out of sight, behind doors the public is never meant to open. For more than forty years, Gail Eisnitz has documented some of the worst abuses in industrial agriculture: animals skinned alive, pigs entering scalding tanks fully conscious, workers forced to brutalize animals at speeds no living being could withstand. Her investigations exposed a system built on secrecy, protected by powerful industries, and ignored by institutions charged with enforcing the law. Her work has forced congressional action, shut down factory farms, held corporations accountable, and revealed to the world what really happens on the kill floor — not in rare moments, but every single day. And now, in her new book Out of Sight, Gail shows us the full story: the whistleblowers the industry tried to silence, the media outlets that backed away because the truth was "too disturbing," and the personal toll she carried while uncovering evidence no one else had the courage to gather. This conversation is about a system that harms billions of animals and dangerous workers, misleads the public, and operates with almost no meaningful oversight. Gail's work makes one thing undeniable we can't fix what we refuse to see.

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 stores, and therefore could be categorized as factory farmed." Rabbi Melissa Hoffman Rabbi Melissa Hoffman is the director of the Center for Jewish Food Ethics, an organization bringing ancient Jewish values about land, animals, and nourishment into the realities of today's food system. At the Center, Melissa works with synagogues, schools, summer camps, and community institutions to shift their food practices through plant-based defaults and culturally rooted changes that align with Jewish values of compassion, sustainability, and justice. She also tackles widespread misconceptions — like the belief held by half of American Jews that kosher automatically means humane. In this conversation, we talk about how Jewish communities can rethink food in ways that are joyful, practical, and deeply values-driven — and why these small shifts can bring people together while transforming the food system from the inside out. https://www.jewishfoodethics.org/

"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 Mitchell has lived alongside elephants — first in captivity, then, eventually, in the wild. His story begins in the mid-1990s, when he managed elephant-back safaris in Zimbabwe and South Africa. But as the captive industry grew more commercialized — and cruel — Brett found himself on the front lines, witnessing wild elephants being taken from their herds and funneled into tourism and entertainment. It was a tipping point. Instead of accepting that reality, Brett made a decision that no one in South Africa had ever attempted at scale: he would return a full group of long-captive elephants back to the wild. What followed was a decade-long experiment in patience, trust, and determination. Brett developed a gentle, step-by-step "soft release" process — walking with the elephants each day, letting them choose their waterholes, teaching them how to be wild again, and slowly removing himself from their world until one morning… they simply walked away.

"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 darkest corners of the animal tourism industry — places where wild animals are stolen, broken, and paraded for human amusement. Nina Jackel, founder of Lady Freethinker, an organization exposing and ending animal cruelty worldwide, and Blake Moynes, wildlife conservationist and founder of The Save Our Species Alliance, who recently went undercover in Thailand to document the hidden realities behind elephant rides, tiger selfies, and orangutan "shows." What they found is heartbreaking — and it's happening far more often than most of us realize. Together, they're shining a light on the cruelty behind "cute" tourist attractions and building a movement to change what people see — and share — online. Links: https://ladyfreethinker.org/ https://thesosa.com/

"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 it was literally a factory farm - a prison, essentially just row after row after row of tiger." - Amy Jones There are moments when a single photograph can change how we see the world. For photojournalist Amy Jones that moment came inside a dark, airless building on the border of Thailand at a tiger farm. That's where she met Salamas, a 20-year-old tiger who had spent her entire life in a concrete cell. Bred over and over again for the tourist and medicine trades. Amy's photograph of Salamas, a tiger who was skin and bones pressing her head against a cold wall, has gone on to win some of the most prestigious awards in photography, and brought international attention to an industry that almost no one knew existed, the factory farming of tigers. This conversation is about the rescue of that tiger, about the power of visual storytelling and what it means to bear witness even when it breaks your heart.

"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 time in a really serious way. I think what we want to do is, just try and make it easier for more people to really engage with their values, and be an invitation to people to say, I know you care about this. I know when you see factory farming on you know, those annoying ads on your Instagram that show you what's going on, that you feel sad and you feel horrible about it. Let us help you do something about that in a way that fits your life and fits your lifestyle." – Thom Norman Most of us agree that factory farming is one of the greatest sources of suffering on Earth. We hate it. We don't want to support it. And yet — it persists. Today's guest, Thom Norman, is trying to change that. He's the co-founder of FarmKind, an organization that's asking a radical question: What if we stopped making compassion so hard? Instead of telling people what not to eat, FarmKind is inviting everyone to help dismantle factory farming — not by guilt or purity tests, but through collective action. With their Compassion Calculator, just $23 a month has massive impact for animals. It's simple, inclusive, and it's working. In this conversation, Thom and I talk about how factory farming got so bad, why lifestyle change alone isn't enough, and how shifting from shame to solidarity could open the biggest door yet — for animals, for people, and for real change. Tom and his cofounder Aidan Alexander were on the show a year ago shortly after farm kind launched. A lot has happened in a year.

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 about courage, community, and what happens when people refuse to stay silent. 30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard premieres November 1st on YouTube — and you can watch it, share it, and take action at speciesunite.com/30000monkeys

"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 — would change her own. In her new book, Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research, Melanie takes readers deep inside the hidden world of animal testing — one that quietly breeds and experiments on tens of thousands of dogs each year, mostly beagles, chosen for their size and gentle nature. Through her journey with Hammy, she unravels how these animals end up in labs, what happens to them there, and what it takes to help them heal once they're free. Our conversation explores the long and often secretive history of animal testing in the U.S., the shocking revelations behind the Envigo case — where 4,000 beagles were rescued from a breeding facility in Virginia — and the growing movement toward humane, non-animal alternatives. Links: Melanie Kaplan: https://melaniedgkaplan.com/index.html Lab Dog: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/melanie-d-g-kaplan/lab-dog/9781541604988/

"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 thing. The reason we don't exist anymore is because it's easy to find vegan food everywhere now. And it wasn't when we started, right?' That need is being met by way more people. It's becoming mainstream." – Annick Ireland Today's conversation is with Annick Ireland, founder of Immaculate Vegan—the world's leading destination for ethical, sustainable, and cruelty-free fashion. What started in 2019 with women's shoes and handbags has grown into a global platform featuring over 140 brands across categories from clothing to kids, pets, and even homeware. Annick and her team are proving that style and ethics not only can go hand in hand—they're reshaping the mainstream fashion industry itself. In this episode, we talk about the rise of vegan fashion, the power of conscious consumers, the exciting new wave of bio-based materials, and how inclusivity—not perfection—is what drives real change.

"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 design. She's leading a movement to replace plastics, leather, and petrochemicals with materials born from life itself — brewed, cultivated, and created in harmony with nature. I just spent a few days in London at Biofabricate's Biofab Fair, a celebration of biology-based technologies and the innovators behind them. These weren't the usual alternatives to leather or plastic. Imagine a world where textiles aren't manufactured from fossil fuels, animal skins, or even plants — but grown from microbes, mycelium, algae, and engineered proteins. There were fabrics brewed in vats, colors grown by living microbes, perfumes made with the DNA of extinct flowers, and leather-like sheets made from banana waste and mycelium. Each innovation not only reimagines what we wear and use, but also reshapes how we think about design, beauty, and even culture. After the fair, Suzanne and I sat down to debrief — to talk about how far this movement has come, what's next for biofabrication, and how growing the materials of the future might just change everything. Links: Biofab Fair Website https://www.biofab.world/ Biofabricate Website https://www.biofabricate.co/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/biofabricate/ Materials and brands mentioned in episode: Ephea https://ephea.bio/ Polybion https://www.polybion.bio/ Uncaged Innovations: https://uncagedinnovations.com/ Spyber: https://spiber.inc/en Holon Bionics https://holonbionics.com/ Banofee https://www.banofileather.com/ AB In Bev https://www.ab-inbev.com/ MM Limited https://www.mm-greentech.com/aboutus