Reporting the Truth about Animal Agriculture w/ Marina Bolotnikova

For award-winning journalist Marina Bolotnikova, animal activism and journalism are intertwined. We’re thrilled to welcome her to the podcast this week for a conversation about her eye-opening work to alert people to the horrifying reality of animal agriculture. Marina discusses her thoughts on objectivity and integrity within journalism and why she chooses to free-lance with a focus on the animal ethics beat, despite the occasional struggle with the differing viewpoints of commissioning editors and mainstream publications. She dives into how investigative journalism can play a large part in uncovering essential animal rights issues that are in danger of being swept under the rug. We also highlight some of the stories she has recently covered, including the use of ventilation shutdown as the primary method used to mass murder chickens during the current avian flu outbreak, as well as to exterminate pigs en masse at the height of the COVID pandemic. 

Marina Bolotnikova is a journalist focusing on factory farming, animal ethics, and the criminalization of activism targeting the meat industry. She's written for publications including The Guardian, The Intercept, Vox, The New York Times, and many others. She's covered many different subjects over the years, and her work has been taught in university curricula. 

Earlier this year, she was awarded an animal law media fellowship at Vermont Law School, where she got to think deeply about the legal implications of undercover investigations and present her work on how ventilation shutdown, a gruesome method used to mass exterminate animals via heatstroke, became meat industry standard. She's obsessed with Bollywood films and long-distance running. 

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