"I think that's often the solution when feeling sort of bogged down in the issues of our day is when you zoom out and you look at sort of the whole arc of change, you can sort of get inspired that, yeah, we've come a long way." - Monica Murphy  Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine and Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and writer. Their latest book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, comes out today, April 23rd. It's...

“Wouldn't it be amazing if you went into Nike Town and the same pair of shoes or the same style [but]each pair was different because it had been grown and was not the result of a plastic, you know, a plastic polymer or an animal that had been so heavily finished that they all look the same. That, or me, would be mind blowing, where you and I could have the same handbag, but they're from the same brand, in the same shape, it's the exact same model, but the material is slightly different on...

“He called me into his office and he said, ‘you see that picture above my desk?’ I said, ‘yes.’ It kind of looked like an animal that reminded me of a squirrel. He said, ‘that is a lemur that we think is extinct in the wild. If you can, please go to Madagascar and find out if it's extinct or not.’” – Patricia Wright   Dr. Patricia Wright is an anthropologist, a conservationist, and a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and she's probably the world's leading expert on...

“When those fires happened, it was about 8 o’clock in the morning. It goes completely black, so the sky is completely black. There's no light. The sound is like being under a train. It's unbelievably loud. And of course, the heat. You are right in the heat of the fire and the smell and the taste. So, every one of his senses was taken from one world. A world where it was light, where he could move around to another world without the meta narrative that human beings have, that we're in an age...

“There's this hidden curriculum, right? With dissection you're supposed to be learning the anatomy, the physiology of a particular animal. But really, what students are learning is that these animals are meaningless. They're basically just a tool for you to cut into and then discard after you're done with your so-called learning.” – Nicole Green    In US schools, kids dissect on millions of animals - frogs, dogs, cats, pigs and many other species and none of it is necessary. We have...

“We live so disconnected from the natural world, and many people live much more disconnected than I am because I've made the natural world my life, my work. But if it's still surprising me and we live so disconnectedly, why is that? Because these owls have been here, all these other creatures have been here since before we got here. They're a normal part of the world. And yet what they do and what they can do, what they're capable of, is so surprising. Why is it so surprising? Why don't we...

“One after another, citizens came up. And they just hammered that council with additional concerns. You know, one of the guys, his place is 500ft from there. He's like, ‘what do you think this is going to do to me, to my family? How dare you expose me and my family and this community! None of you all live around there. How could you have not brought this to a vote?’ A woman got up and started talking about the research modernization deal. Another woman got up and started talking about land...

Dr. Faraz Harsini has been advocating for animal rights for over a decade. He is the CEO and founder of Allied Scholars for Animal Protection (ASAP), a non-profit organization that supports students who are interested in advocating for animal protection and pursuing careers that can make a difference.   He is also a Bioprocessing Senior Scientist at the Good Food Institute, where he works on advancing scientific and technological methods to produce alternative proteins on a large scale. ...

“…but what's happening lately is that mink on fur farms have been starting to be infected with H5n1 bird flu. So, the World Health Organization is worried that this disease is now changing to better infect mammals. Of course, we are mammals. And of course, if it's on fur farms, there's human mammals on the fur farms who can be infected by the bird flu, just the same way that COVID kept pinging back and forth between animals and fur farms and the humans who work there. And so this is a real...

"The stonefish is the most toxic, venomous fish on the planet. The stonefish is one of the only fish stings that has been known to kill people. Now, I knew this going in, right? I did my homework. So that was one where I went on a limb, perhaps? Maybe too far." - Mark Vins  Mark Vins is an Emmy Award winning wildlife and adventure filmmaker, and the co-founder of the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel. Mark and his co-founder, Coyote Peterson, created the Brave Wilderness Channel to bring...

“You're seeing young men going to prison or getting buried in the ground because they're out there poaching rhinos. And, it just drove a bigger wedge between conservation efforts and the communities. There’s only so many times you can look into the eyes of a woman who’s lost a brother or a husband or a father or an uncle and expect that we’re going to have some sort of relationship with that community.  It was the same as Iraq, you've got an occupying force there, which is what we were as a...

"In Montana they allow using dogs to chase down wolves, which essentially becomes like state sanctioned dog fighting. You have this horrible scenario where the packs of dogs are surrounding the wolf pack, and it just comes to a bloody end. These are blood sports. This is something that we should be way beyond as a society." - Collette Adkins Collette Adkins is the carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. She focuses on combating the exploitation and cruel...

“In the US alone, there are 100 million people with prediabetes or diabetes, 33 million people with some kind of chronic or various stages of kidney disease, 122 million people with cardiovascular disease, 10 million with GI issues, and 50 million people have food allergies. And, as you know, the food insecurity and malnourishment in the country is growing, unfortunately, particularly with our kiddos.” – Brett Matthews   Brett Matthews is the CEO of Kate Farms, organic plant-based nutrition...

“I was at a restaurant and the veil dropped in an instant. The curse broke and I could see for the first time. ‘Oh, wow, I'm eating body parts.’ And I turned around and I saw my bag and it was an expensive Fendi bag. And I looked at it and I'm like, ‘this is not leather. This is the skin of an individual. This is a scam.’” – Rebecca Cappelli    Rebecca Cappelli is an award-winning filmmaker and an animal rights activist. Her most recent film, SLAY is a hugely powerful documentary that...

“I call the act a poison pill, because really, what it is, is if it ever gets inserted into the farm bill or if it gets passed on its own, it prevents all of the animal centered organizations, all the environmental organizations, all the family farm and rural community organizations that push back against factory farming. It wipes out all of the progress that they've made.”   Aaron Cohen is the senior director of advocacy at Farm Sanctuary. I asked Aaron to come on the show because I wanted...

“I really felt like I turned into a bird. The way I was playing was changed. Like I played the way nobody would play a clarinet unless they had spent weeks listening to nightingales.” – David Rothenberg   David Rothenberg is, amongst many other things, an interspecies musician. That means he makes music with whales and birds and insects and even with many plants and animals that reside in ponds.   He's also a writer, he's written many books, including Why Birds Sing, Whale Music and...

“Fashion is a really easy way to get in because it doesn't really involve any sacrifice, does it? I think for a lot of people, the thought of going vegan food-wise just seems like a really big deal. Whereas buying a vegan handbag, you get to buy a beautiful handbag and it's vegan.” Annick Ireland   Even though it’s 2023 and it feels like much of the world is at least dipping their toes into all things plant-based, it can still be a challenge to navigate the world of vegan fashion.   ...

“Ultimately, this is a dumping ground. The industry is not going to be spending money on horses that are going to be killed for human consumption, so ultimately, in their last six months, they suffer. They suffer terribly.” – Gemunu de Silva     In the United States we do not eat horse meat and we do not slaughter our horses, but we seem to be fine with letting other countries slaughter and eat our horses. We send our live horses to Mexico and Canada to be slaughtered and their meat is...

“When we do polls on this, we've got all political parties high support for ending cosmetics animal testing, from Republicans, Independents, Democrats - age gaps between the boomers and the zoomers, everybody is in agreement. You know, it's one of those issues that you cannot get more unity on a single issue.” – Monica Engebretson   Monica Engebretson is the North American head of public affairs for Cruelty Free International, the leading organization working to end animal testing...

“I understand that when you have been [going to] a restaurant for many years, for some customers, it's normal to think that somehow you own it a little bit, like, ‘Oh, this is my table, this is my restaurant.’ And, then when the restaurant changes completely, you feel really betrayed… I invited them. I invited a lot of people, a lot of my regular customers. I said, ‘don't worry, we have changed. But nothing has changed, you know, just come. I invite you and your family. You come and eat just...

“The truth is that in between all of those wonderful events was huge debt, maxing out 20 different credit cards and absolutely annihilating my credit, moving from that little half acre backyard into where we are now in Santa Clarita, refinancing the house five times, having people show up in the middle of the night to repo our cars, the bank trying to take the house, my parents doing literal intervention, saying, ‘Ellie, stop your nonsense.’” – Ellie Laks   Ellie Laks is the founder of The...

“I think the thing revolves around the control of nature. You know, I mean, you get way back to that. Some people are really uncomfortable around nature existing as it should, and they feel that we need to fix things." - Dr. Chistopher Servheen   Grizzly bears are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. But Republican lawmakers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming are trying to change that. They are pressing the Biden administration to turn management of grizzly bears back over to the...

“…people say, okay, recycle, and then somebody sees you throwing out a little candy wrapper. Nobody's going to point at you say, ‘Huh, I saw you threw away a recyclable piece” Right? But if I say I'm vegan and then I eat a slice of halal and halal is made with eggs, somebody will say, ‘Oh, it has eggs, you're not really vegan.’ And so that's just kind of weird. – Galina Hale    Galina is a professor of economics at UC Santa Cruz. She's also the co-founder and Chief Research Officer of FSI—...

”We’re already starting to see this happening, like there's a leather tannery in Vietnam called Isa TanTeck, where leather runs through the blood. That's what they specialize at. They came out with their own mycelium material. A leather tannery has come out with their own mycelium material. Are they in it? Are they in it for the passion of saving animals and the vegan kind of philosophies? No, they're in it because they're smart people and they've got good scientists and they've been able to...