Species Unite

"So before I encountered these ideas, whenever I thought about human's relationship to animals, I only thought about the negative parts. I thought the best we could ever achieve would be to maybe erase the impacts we cause and atone for our sins and get back to neutral and be less of a cancer on the Earth. And that was my highest hope was to be a smaller cancer. But then the wild animal welfare perspective says, well, actually humans have made life much better for ourselves over the last couple centuries. We've drastically decreased child mortality and the prevalence of all sorts of diseases. And stuff actually has been getting better for us. Maybe we could make things better for some wild animals." - Cameron Meyer Shorb Most of us who care about animals have been focused on one thing, stopping what humans are doing to them. And it makes sense. The harm is enormous and it's ours to fix. But Cameron Meyer Shorb is asking a different question, "what if even without us, wild animals were already suffering? And what if we had the capacity to actually help them?" Cameron is the executive director of Wild Animal Initiative, a non-profit building the scientific foundations for a field that barely exists yet. Wild animal welfare. Not conservation in the traditional sense. Not just preserving species or protecting biodiversity, but actually asking what individual wild animals experience. Whether they're in pain, whether they're okay. We talk about why nature was never quite the Eden we imagined, what it would mean to study suffering in a fish or a grouse or a pine marten, and why Cameron believes that humans, for all the damage we've done, might actually be capable of making things better. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/

"Let's say that you eat meat and you're sitting down and you're biting into a juicy hamburger, and your dining companion turns to you and says, 'Elizabeth, you know that hamburger is actually not made from beef. It's made from golden retrievers.'" – Melanie Joy Melanie Joy is a psychologist, author, and the person who gave a name to something that most of us have been living with our whole lives without noticing. She coined the term carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals but not others. And her best selling book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows, has been asking people to question that conditioning for over a decade. We talk about how Carnism works, why even compassionate people resist the information and what it actually takes to change not just what we eat, but how we relate to each other and ourselves. It's a conversation that starts with food and ends with something much bigger.

"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.