Species Unite

"I think something that I learned from doing that was that this is all in our heads, like it's all for show just because there's a security guard that even if he's right in front of you, it doesn't mean you can't just run past him and carry on. Just because there's a fence doesn't mean you can't climb over or cut through it. And CCTV like it doesn't matter. We're doing this openly anyway. We're not hiding anything. So that's like, that's kind of irrelevant." - Rose Patterson Rose Patterson is co-director of Animal Rising, one of the UK's most visible and disruptive animal advocacy movements. Over the years, she's helped lead open rescues, mass direct actions and investigations that have forced national conversations about factory farming, animal testing and the systems designed to keep animal suffering out of public view. Animal rising has blockaded distribution centers, exposed RSPCA certified factory farms and rescued animals from facilities that most people didn't even know existed. This episode centers on something more immediate. In 2022, Rose and other Animal Rising activists openly rescued beagles from the UK's last beagle breeding facility for animal testing, fully aware that they could face prison for doing so. Rose and I talk about what it means to choose open rescue over covert action, how Animal Rising has evolved from headline grabbing moments to sustained, high impact campaigns, and why Rose, facing a potential prison sentence, describes her situation as a win either way. Underneath all of it runs a question at the heart of every justice movement what are we willing to risk when we know suffering is happening? Since this interview was recorded, Rose's verdict has come in — she and the four Animal Rising campaigners she was accused alongside were all found not guilty. I am very happy to share that news with you! https://www.animalrising.org/

"You want people to stop eating these animals and the only way to do it is to showcase them in a light where people see them as individuals, and not just a sandwich in the morning, or breakfast, or a dinner at Christmas holidays. These are individuals that feel pain, that feel happiness, that feel sadness and have friends and have families and have these big, beautiful units and they love each other. And when we showcase that, we get messages on a daily basis and people stop eating meat because of the animals at Arthur's Acres." - Todd Friedman In 2018, Todd Friedman walked onto a property he was told was empty, and instead he found a pig - abandoned, starving and alone. Todd named him Arthur, and that moment changed everything. It led to the creation of Arthur's Acres, a sanctuary built on land that once functioned as a backyard slaughterhouse. What followed was seven years of hard work and a commitment to doing right by animals who are almost always treated as expendable - pigs used in laboratories, pigs bred and discarded, pigs sold under the myth of being teacup pets, pigs so neglected or obese that they're on the brink of death. Today, Arthur's Acres is home to 50 pigs, each one known by name. Each treated as an individual. It's become a place where people don't just learn about pigs, they fall in love with them. This conversation is about what happens when you really see who pigs are, and why sanctuaries matter. https://www.arthursacresanimalsanctuary.org/

"There will come a time in the future where historians look back on this era of history and sort of see it as this moment of historical atrocity, which is what I think it is today. I do think that factory farming and the suffering caused to billions and billions of animals every single year is a moral atrocity of historic proportions. I think we see it that way today, and I am very confident it will be seen that way by a kind of broad consensus in the future. But that's not inevitable. We have to do the work get to get there. And that's exactly what we're trying to do at the Humane League, is kind of take the steps that we think are the steps to be taken today, to ultimately bring about the end of factory farming in the long run." - Dan Shannon Factory farming is one of the greatest moral atrocities of our time. Yet it's treated like background noise. Tens of billions of animals are raised in systems designed to keep suffering efficient and invisible. The cages, the confinement, the speed, and the cruelty are all hidden behind corporate branding and grocery store shelves. And even though awareness is growing, the numbers of animals in our food system keeps rising. This conversation is with Dan Shannon, the CEO of The Humane League, one of the most effective organizations in the world when it comes to forcing the food industry to change. Dan is helping lead the fight to eliminate one of the most atrocious practices in agriculture - battery cages, where chickens live in tiny, cramped cages for their entirety of their lives. This is a conversation about strategy, momentum, and what it really looks like to dismantle cruelty.

"I really think it's a story is about the heroes, the conservation heroes. It's each one of their stories and then it's about my personal growth story of being absolutely useless in the jungle and how I got decent by the end of it." – Dax Dasilva There are moments when you look at the world — at forests collapsing, oceans warming, species disappearing — and you feel a kind of disbelief that we've allowed this to become normal. Because what's happening to the living world isn't abstract. It's ancient ecosystems being stripped bare. It's entire islands scarred by erosion. It's extinction unfolding in real time — while most of us go about our lives as if the natural world will somehow survive without us changing anything. This conversation not about doom. It's about what happens when someone decides: Not on my watch. It's with Dax Dasilva — founder of Lightspeed — who, after seventeen years as CEO, stepped back for two years and poured $40 million into frontline conservation projects around the world. Dax returned to Lightspeed in 2024. He went where most people will never go — deep into the Amazon, into Haiti and Madagascar where deforestation has pushed ecosystems to the brink… onto beaches where leatherback turtles, older than the dinosaurs, are still fighting to survive. His new book is called Echoes from Eden, a tribute to the people doing everything they can to save the planet - the local conservation heroes quietly holding the line for all of us.

"I don't know of another animal mammal that does not protect their young. Everybody protects their young. A wolf does too if another predator came. Of course they would protect their young. But with humans, they are that afraid of us, that they will leave their den. They will leave." – Rebecca Bose At a moment when gray wolves in the United States are once again under serious threat, with the House just voting to delist them, it's worth asking a question that we seem determined to forget Once we remove protections and populations collapse. Do we really think history won't repeat itself? This conversation is with Rebecca Bose, curator at the Wolf Conservation Center, where she has spent the last 25 years working at the intersection of recovery and survival for some of the most endangered wolves on the planet. Rebecca is deeply involved in the painstaking effort to undo past mistakes, helping recover Mexican gray wolves and red wolves, two species that were nearly wiped out entirely by government sanctioned killing. Rebecca walks us through what bringing wolves back actually means - decades of captive breeding, genetic management, pup fostering operations that involve private pilots, biologists hiking for hours into remote wilderness, and an enormous amount of human labor all to give a handful of animals a chance to survive in a world that is still deeply hostile to them. And we talk about who wolves actually are: parents, teachers, sentient beings with relationships and roles that shape entire ecosystems. This is a conversation about memory, responsibility, and what happens when we repeat history instead of learning from it. *Correction from the interview: the current Mexican wolf population is at a minimum of 286 animals on the landscape, not 386.