“We enacted what's called the Beagle Freedom Project Bill. Basically, what it said was, if you're a facility that tests on dogs and cats, when the testing is over, you are mandated to release those animals to give them a second chance at life to a 501C3 charity like Beagle Freedom Project or any other type of facility like that, like a rescue facility. You wouldn't believe how hard that was to pass.” – Shannon Keith

The story sounds like a dream: hundreds of animals used for research and testing are now free and the former prison that they were forced to call home has been torn down to become a safe and loving animal sanctuary. 

This conversation was done as a live interview a few weeks ago. It's with me and Shannon Keith, the president and founder of the Beagle Freedom Project. I invited her on to discuss the shutdown of a massive dog and cat testing laboratory in Nowata, Oklahoma. Not only did the Beagle Freedom Project and Shannon shut down this laboratory, but they rescued all of the dogs and cats that were being tested on there, and they took over the laboratory and it's grounds and are in the process of transforming it into a 30-acre sanctuary called Freedom Fields.  

The closure of this laboratory ends one-third of the toxic flea and tick testing industry in the United States, sparing the lives of thousands of dogs and cats.

Beagle Freedom Project is the world’s leading organization for rescuing and rehoming animals used in experimental research. Since 2010, they have liberated thousands of animals while working to end their abuse through education, advocacy, and legislation.

We talk about the shutdown, the rescue of hundreds of animals that were being tested on, and the magic of transforming a dark and terrifying animal research lab into a beautiful sanctuary. And, we discuss not only how to help these former research animals, but also the more than one hundred million still being used for testing and research in the United States.

"And the thing that really makes me sad is that we humanize them when they're little, by putting them in diapers and feeding them bottles and dressing them in clothes. And then we demonize them when they grow up and act like the wild animal that they are, because people think if they neuter them, if they get their teeth removed - not my chimp, my chimp is not going to act like that." - Angela Scott 

Last week we released an episode with Brittany Peet, PETA's general counsel for captive animal law enforcement, who is featured in the HBO docuseries, Chimp Crazy. If you haven't seen it, please see it. It's made by Eric Goode, the guy who made Tiger King, and it is equally shocking.  It also shines a light on the need to pass the Captive Primate Safety Act and there are many high hopes that that act could get passed this year because of Chimp Crazy. 

Chimp Crazy focuses on chimpanzee owners, private owners that buy cute baby chimps, dress them up and treat them like human children until they are 5 or 6 years old, when the chimps become large, and very strong wild animals. This part usually ends badly. Well, it always ends badly for the chimps but quite often it does for the humans too.

This conversation is with Angela Scott, the whistleblower in Chimp Crazy, and for this entire case.

A little background: Angela volunteered at a place called Chimp Party for a woman named Connie Casey. Connie and her husband Mike bred and sold chimpanzees and other primates for decades.

PETA got involved because of the horrific conditions these chimps were living in. Angela was the whistleblower who worked with PETA. But before the case could fully go through, Connie gave her chimps to a woman named Tonya Haddix. And the chimps were in Tanya’s care when they were rescued, all except for one, a chimp named Tonka. Tanya tried to keep Tonka for herself and she hid him from PETA for months in a cage in her basement.

All of the chimps, including Tonka, were eventually saved because of Angela’s willingness to go back to Connies and film what she saw. Angela’s stories of what these chimps went through are astonishing and I am so grateful to her for sharing them with us. 

“I mean, it's an addiction, an obsession, a sickness that these people seem to have that they don't think that it could happen to them. And even when it does, they are still in denial about it.” - Brittany Peet

There's a new docuseries on HBO called, Chimp Crazy. If you haven't seen it, see it. It's made by Eric Goode, the guy who made Tiger King, and it is equally shocking .  

Chimp Crazy focuses on chimpanzee owners, private owners that buy cute baby chimps, dress them up and treat them like human children until they are 5 or 6 years old, when the chimps become large, and very strong wild animals. This part usually ends badly. Well, it always ends badly for the chimps but quite often it does for the humans too.

This conversation is with Brittany Peet, PETA's general counsel for captive animal law enforcement. Brittany makes quite a few appearances in Chimp Crazy - she is one of the PETA lawyers who freed the captive chimps in the show, and has spent her career working to free many other captive, chimps, primates and other wild animals throughout the US.

Please listen, share and if you haven’t seen it, please watch Chimp Crazy.

"So this relationship to ourselves, to other people, to other animals - whether farm animals or wild animals, it's very bizarre how we have gotten it so twisted in what we expect and what we feel entitled to over here in the the Global North." - Katherine Baxter 

Katherine Baxter is the CEO of the Africa Network for Animal Welfare-USA (ANAW). ANAW-USA works to advance the welfare of animals, humans and the environment by facilitating mutually beneficial and reciprocal exchanges between the United States and Africa.

Their mission is to work with their sister organization in Kenya, ANAW, and other partners, to advance the inseparable welfare of animals, humans, and the environment by facilitating mutually beneficial exchanges of resources and knowledge between the United States and Africa. I asked Katherine to come on the show to talk about ANAW and some of ANAW's coexistence programs in Kenya, including an incredible sunflower project has solved huge problems with human-elephant conflict.

It makes me crazy that we in the US are incredibly resistant to many (or most) coexistence programs yet our stakes are pretty low. In the US, if a wolf kills a sheep, the rancher is reimbursed and except for the poor sheep, life goes on. Whereas in villages close to Tsavo National Park in Kenya, people lose entire crops to elephant herds, are financially ruined, and some even lose their lives - yet they are much more willing to explore and try coexistence programs that benefit all - the crops, the people and the elephants. 

If we want to live in a country where wildlife and predators still roam, then we need to put the guns down and start paying attention to ideas and initiatives like the ones that Katherine talks about here. We have much to learn. 

“There are more native crocodiles living in cages and concrete pens that are owned by Hermes or supplying Louis Vuitton than live in their natural habitat. So, that is so clearly not conservation. And we're talking like hundreds of thousands of crocodiles.” – Emma Hakansson

We are destroying the planet, killing billions of animals and making life insufferable for humans all over the world, all in the name of fashion. But, Emma Hakansson is on a mission to change all of it. She is the founding director of Collective Fashion Justice, an organization dedicated to creating a total ethics fashion system which prioritizes the wellbeing of people, our fellow animals and the planet, before profit.

And some of the bags are even like Nile crocodile and crocodiles from different parts of the world and the level of exclusivity is based on like how rare that skin is. And it seems to not even connect in their mind that, like, maybe if an animal is rare, it means that they should be being protected rather than made into a bag that you think is special. And I think that's where a disconnect from nature comes into play. Like if we really connected with nature and saw the beauty of it, we would want to protect it more in its natural state, and we would see higher value in fashion that appreciates nature and takes inspiration from nature, but that doesn't take from it and destroy it or kill it.  – Emma Hakansson

Emma has consulted on passed progressive fashion legislation in New York City, spoken at the European Parliament, been invited to provide expertise in Parliament inquiries in Australia, and offered her expertise to global brands and fashion councils seeking to improve their ethics and sustainability. Her latest book, Total Ethics Fashion, explores the namesake term that she coined to guide the fashion industry forward.

Please listen and share and if you do purchase something this week, please shop consciously. 

"I cannot put enough emphasis on this. I have seen so many things that are so weird that even when I would show it to law enforcement at first, before there were like a lot of these cases coming out, law enforcement would look and they'd be like, “what? Why would someone do this?” Right? As if what I'm showing them wasn't real. And what I learned to say to get past that is, I would say to cops, “how many times have you seen someone do something for reasons they can't even explain to themselves?" - Pete Paxton 

For the past 23 years, Pete Paxton has been working undercover in puppy mills, factory farms, slaughterhouses, pet stores, and on-board commercial fishing boats to document horrific cruelty. Some of these high-stress, horror show jobs last for weeks while others go on for months at a time - months of ten-hour days, doing hard, heavy labor, witnessing animals being abused or killed and watching your co-workers hurt the already abused animals even more. 

Pete does it because he is good at it, because he loves animals and because his work has often resulted in big change for animals.

 What perplexes me the most about Pete, is that after 23 years of working in hellish places like slaughterhouses and factory farms, he hasn’t become dark and dour. Instead, he is the opposite. He's extremely funny, super engaging and seriously joyful. He doesn’t allow this work to take him down. Most people I know, me included, would be a shell of a human being after a couple of hours in his world.

Pete is also the author of Rescue Dogs and has had two HBO documentaries made about him and his work, Dealing Dogs and Death on a Factory Farm.

“You asked what kind of army we are. Cleveland Amory once said it. He said, “the army of the kind.”  And that's it. If there's anything going on, we find it irresistible not to speak out, to do something, to say something, to enlist other people to help because we're not some superhuman force, we're a collection of humans.” Ingrid Newkirk

Ingrid Newkirk co-founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1980, and since then, I don’t think there has been a single day that she has not fought against injustice toward animals. She is not only a hero for millions of animals but also for humans, for showing all of us how to make change happen and for inspiring us to do it.

Since it was founded, PETA has exposed horrific animal abuse in laboratories, leading to many firsts, including canceled funding, closed facilities, seizure of animals, and charges filed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. PETA has also closed the largest horse-slaughter operation in North America, convinced dozens of major designers and hundreds of companies to stop using fur, ended all car-crash tests on animals, helped schools switch to innovative animal-free dissection tools, and provided millions of people with information on being vegan, companion animal care, and countless other issues.

Ingrid just celebrated her 75th birthday, so we got together to take a look back at her life and the life of PETA.

Happy Birthday, Ingrid!

“50% of clothing that gets created ends up in a landfill in the first year. When we're using way too much resource in the first place, the fact that half of that is going directly to landfill in the first year is insane. And then, what actually makes it into our closets, we wear about 20% of on a trailing 12 month basis. So if you think about just the actual amount of utility that we get out of this massive system is insane. And that's just the waste part of it.” – Vanessa Barboni Hallik

Vanessa Barboni Hallik is the founder and CEO of Another Tomorrow, a luxury brand that is doing fashion better. Much much better. They’re a B Corp Certified end-to-end sustainable design company with a mission to model a new future for fashion with a fully digitized product eco-system delivering technology-enabled transparency and authenticated recommerce. If other brands would follow Another Tomorrow's lead, humans, the planet and billions of animals would benefit enormously.  

Vanessa is also an investor in early-stage companies positioned to catalyze systemic change. And she serves on the Advisory Board for Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where current work focuses on the ethics of AI. Prior to founding Another Tomorrow, Vanessa was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, where she held several leadership roles in the emerging markets institutional securities business. Throughout her career she has worked across global markets and managed culturally diverse and cross-border teams.   Vanessa is an active speaker on innovation, digitalization and new business models built for resilience. She has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Bloomberg, Forbes and Vogue for her work, and is one of Wallpaper* Magazine’s USA300 and Worth Magazine’s Worthy100.

Please listen and share.

In gratitude,

Elizabeth Novogratz

“I think one of the reasons dignity matters to animals is that they are objectified. They are stripped of their agency very often, and they're also caught up in power relations with human beings that do not go in their favor in, in the overwhelming number of cases. But it's also grounds why they have a right to be subjects of justice, doesn't it? So, it is the fact that they are subjects, that they are agents, that they their voices matter in a political sense.” – Melanie Challenger

Melanie Challenger wears a lot of hats— she’s an artist, philosopher, poet and writer, deputy co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and a Vice President of the RSPCA UK. She is the author of On Extinction: How we became estranged from nature (2011), How to Be Animal: What it means to be human (2021), and anthology editor of Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Non-human Existence (2023).

Melanie is bringing her decades of experience in both science and the arts to come up with a solution to a big question: how can non-human animals be represented in the process of making crucial decisions that affect their lives? This project is called Animals in the Room. It began during the pandemic and is an international collaboration of philosophers, scientists and animal welfare specialists who are working together to devise and test models for representing non-human. 

Links:

Melanie Challenger: https://www.melaniechallenger.com/about/

Animals in the Room: https://animalsintheroom.org/

“Anybody with half a heart could understand that this is a very bad deal for these feeling beings. Waking up every day at the same place where these horrible things happened, it's not right.” – Gene Grant

It’s been almost a decade since the National Institutes of Health ended the use of chimpanzees for biomedical research. But today we still have scores of chimpanzees sitting in labs. They’re not being tested on, but they are still waiting to be moved into a sanctuary.

This is happening even though there is a law in place that established a federal sanctuary system to provide lifetime care for chimpanzees retired from medical research.

26 of these former research chimpanzees live in the Alamogordo Primate Facility on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. I asked Gene Grant, the chief program and policy officer for Animal Protection New Mexico, to come on the show and talk about why all these years later, these chimps have still not been moved to a sanctuary. And how that changes.

LINKS

Animal Protection New Mexico https://apnm.org/

Chimp Haven https://chimphaven.org/donate/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/science/chimpanzees-research-retirement.html

“There was a farmer who I met. He had the craziest [story], but not crazy because it's happening everywhere. A hog horn rammed into him and he got a disease. No one had any idea what it was. He went septic. He almost died. And he figured out that his herd had gotten an antibiotic resistant bug because of the way he was farming.” – Chloe Sorvino

Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer at Forbes. She writes the newsletter, Mind Feeder, and founded the Forbes newsletter Fresh Take.

Chloe is also the author of Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, an exposé into the power and corruption of America’s meat industry.

Nearly a decade of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, and Costco's rotisserie chicken slaughterhouse in Nebraska. Sorvino serves as a steward on the Forbes Union unit council. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Fast Company, the Financial Times, the New York Times, New York Magazine, Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, Salon and many more.

Chloe Sorvino: https://www.chloesorvino.com/