“How could this owl, who was born in captivity, lived his whole life in a cage, how could he possibly survive? He's going to be dead in a few days. That's what everybody thought.” – Christine Mott

 

In February 2023, a Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco made headlines—and captured hearts—when he escaped from his small enclosure at the Central Park Zoo. Born in captivity and unable to fly or hunt, Flaco defied every expectation. In just weeks, he taught himself to soar across the Manhattan skyline, hunt for his own food, and live as freely as an owl could in a city of concrete and glass. For more than a year, New Yorkers spotted him perched in Central Park, on high-rises, even outside apartment windows—cheering him on as a symbol of resilience and freedom.

Today’s guest, attorney and lifelong animal advocate Christine Mott, has immortalized Flaco’s story in her new children’s book, Free Bird: Flaco the Owl’s Dreams Take Flight. Told from Flaco’s perspective, the book celebrates courage, hope, and the right of all animals to live free—without cages or confinement—while gently encouraging young readers to see captivity through an animal’s eyes.

This conversation is about Flaco’s extraordinary journey, the lessons he left behind, and how one small owl sparked big changes for animals in New York and beyond.

 

Links:

https://lanternpm.org/book/free-bird/

“I could be walking in Central Park and come up on one of these horse and buggies. I don't think twice about it because I see it as part of the New York attraction. You know, you have the Statue of Liberty, you have Times Square, and you have these romantic horse and buggy things where people get married in the park and they ride these carriages. And tourists, they take these rides in Central Park. It's romantic, it's something beautiful to see. But I never thought for one second that these horses are abused.” – Tracy Winston, juror from Ryder’s trial

New York City has a big, visible animal cruelty issue: horses forced to pull carriages, carrying heavy loads for long hours in all types of weather in the middle of chaotic traffic.

Three years ago, a carriage horse named Ryder was a victim of this cruelty. He collapsed on a Manhattan street after being worked for hours in the summer heat.

Two months later, he was euthanized. His story sparked global outrage. Ryder’s driver, Ian McKeever, was charged with animal cruelty

The trial took place a few weeks ago, but McKeever was ultimately acquitted. This conversation is with Edita Birnkrant, the Executive Director of NYCLASS and Tracy Winston, one of the jurors from Ryder's trial.

New York’s weak and outdated animal protection laws have not changed since Ryder died— and because of this, another avoidable death that occurred just a week after we recorded this interview. On August 5th, a horse named Lady died while pulling a carriage in Manhattan.

This conversation is about accountability, about corruption and about what happens when justice fails the most vulnerable.

It's too late for Ryder and Lady. But it is not too late to act. If you live in New York, please call your City Council members and tell them it’s time to bring Ryder’s Law, Intro 967, up for a vote and pass this vital bill to protect carriage horses from suffering and death on the city’s streets.

To find your council member, go to: https://www.speciesunite.com/ny-horse-carriage-petition

NYCLASS: https://nyclass.org/

“It was just this love I developed of life, all life and how much life can be a joy to witness and experience if we're not severing ourselves or severing other lives from our own. And then you start to see all the connectedness and it's like a drug.” - Mari Andrew

What if healing wasn’t about fixing yourself—but about remembering what it means to be alive?

This conversation is with  writer artist, speaker, teacher, and deep feeler Mari Andrew about her new book, How to Be a Living Thing— an exploration on animals, embodiment, and the wild, wondrous mess of being human.

Through stories of rats and oysters, cardinals and bears, Mari explores the quiet wisdom of creatures who live without apology, who don’t shrink themselves to be loved, who remind us what it is to be curious, connected, and enough.

Links:

Mari Andrew: 

https://bymariandrew.com/

How To Be A Living Thing: 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593831667?tag=randohouseinc7986-20

"So I think this whole idea of cumulative culture is a way to make humans exceptional. But it's clear to me that humans are exceptional, and seeing it through baboon glasses, I can understand in a different way why they're exceptional. But many of the things that we think are uniquely human are actually present in other animals." - Dr. Shirley Strum

Dr. Shirley Strum is a groundbreaking anthropologist who has spent over five decades living alongside wild baboons in Kenya. Her work has transformed our understanding of these intelligent, socially complex animals — their relationships, their adaptability, and the intricate societies they create.

In her new book, Echoes of Our Origins, Shirley challenges long-held beliefs about evolution, the human-animal divide, and what it truly means to coexist. This conversation is about science — but it’s also about humility, hope, and the messy, beautiful complexity of life on Earth.

Links: 

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53757/echoes-our-origins

https://anthropology.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/faculty-profiles/shirley-strum.html

 “I sit in the camp that is going to defend wildlife, and I will live and die in that space. Even though what I see is in the West, wolves have a bad reputation. It's still there…" -Jeffrey Reed  

 What if we could understand wolves? How they communicate, what they might be saying? Jeffrey Reed, is a computational linguist, naturalist, and technologist who’s doing just that—using artificial intelligence to decode the wild.

Jeff is the founder of the Cry Wolf Project, a groundbreaking bio acoustic study capturing hundreds of thousands of hours of wolf vocalization across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

From howls and chorus howls to teeth clacking and whines, Jeff's work is uncovering the complex ways wolves and many other animals communicate with one another. His company, Grizzly Systems, is creating cutting edge tools to help people and wildlife share the land more peacefully and intelligently.

This conversation is about wolves, language, the future of wild soundscapes, and how technology might help us become better neighbors to the beings that we've long misunderstood.

LINKS: 

https://www.thecrywolfproject.com/

How individuals can donate to Yellowstone National Park's Wolf Project via this link: https://www.thecrywolfproject.com/donate 

Grizzly System's conservation technology: https://www.grizcam.com ​

Jeff's forthcoming (2026) book on wolf communication, via this link: https://www.thelanguagesoflife.com/excerpt

Jeff's TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeffrey_t_reed_can_ai_help_us_speak_with_wolves

Jeff's social presence: https://www.facebook.com/jefftreed, https://www.instagram.com/thecrywolfproject, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefftreed, and https://www.youtube.com/@crywolfproject

I think you could probably go back and track the stages of grief, probably that is what I went through. But I think if you do it right, you end up at acceptance. And that's where I ended up. And that's not to say that I've fully accepted the idea that the golden toad is extinct. Personally, I do still hold out hope that it could still be out there in those forests." - Trevor Ritland 

 

This conversation is with Trevor Ritland, who—along with his twin brother Kyle—authored The Golden Toad. The book chronicles their remarkable journey into Costa Rica’s cloud forest, once home to hundreds of brilliant golden toads that would emerge for just a few weeks each year—until, one day, they vanished without a trace.

What began as a search for a lost species soon became something much more profound: a confrontation with ecological grief, a meditation on hope, and a powerful call to protect the natural world while we still can.

 

Links:

SpeciesUnite.com

Kyle and Trevor: https://kyleandtrevor.com/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adventureterm/

Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222249677-the-golden-toad

Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Toad-Ecological-Mystery-Species/dp/163576996

"72 juveniles is 28% of the current population of sunflower stars under human care in California. More than a quarter of them are at our facility. If you had asked us that question about a year and a half ago. The answer would be zero at our facility, and the answer across California would be six total." - Andrew Kim

In 2013, one of the largest marine disease outbreaks on record, sea star wasting syndrome swept through echinoderm populations, laying waste to sunflower stars across their historic range. Once common in California, sunflower stars are now functionally extinct there.

This devastating population crash is one of the leading drivers of the 96% decline in kelp forest cover in Northern California in the last decade, as sunflower stars are no longer prowling rocky reefs and scaring purple urchins, who graze on kelp.   Sunflower Star Laboratory was founded by a group of concerned citizens who watched California's kelp disappear before their eyes and were inspired to take action.   This conversation is with Reuven Bank and Andrew Kim from Sunflower Star Laboratory, where they are actively growing sunflower stars with the aim to bring the stars and the kelp forests back to the ocean. 

 

“We don't actually know how many animals we're testing on in this country, because most of them are not protected by any laws. There's not even a requirement that you track their numbers.” – Delcianna Winders

Today, I have the pleasure of sharing some genuinely promising news. For decades, the FDA and NIH have required or relied on animal testing as the gold standard for drug development and biomedical research. But that's beginning to change.

Both agencies have just announced significant steps to reduce animal testing—moves that could mark a turning point in how science is done. The FDA is beginning to phase out animal testing requirements for certain new drug applications, starting with monoclonal antibody therapies, and is pushing forward the use of more ethical, human-relevant technologies—like organ-on-a-chip systems and advanced computer modeling. At the same time, the NIH is prioritizing human-based approaches and creating a new office dedicated to accelerating the development and adoption of these new methods across biomedical research.

To help us understand what all of this means, what led to these changes, and what still needs to happen, I’m joined by Delci Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Delci is one of the leading voices at the intersection of law, science, and animal protection—and she’s here to walk us through this historic shift.

 

"It is a scientific fact that these macaques, like all other primates, including humans, are communicating. They communicate in much the same way we do - facial expressions, vocalizations, body postures, those kinds of things." - Jeff Kerr

Jeff Kerr is PETA foundations Chief Legal Officer. I asked him to come on the show to talk about one of PETA’s current lawsuits against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Nathional Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

PETA is arguing that the monkeys being tested on in a government run facility are capable of communication (or “are communicating”). And that we have a constitutional right under the First Amendment to receive their communications. This could be a game changer in allowing us to see what’s really going on in labs that are funded by taxpayer money, and which have so far been censored from public view.

PETA’s lawsuit follows years of NIH’s attempts to deny Freedom of Information requests banning PETA executives from its campus and illegally censoring animal advocates’ speech on NIH’s public social media pages. Through the lawsuit, PETA is seeking a live audio-visual feed to see and hear real-time communications from the macaques who have been kept isolated, used in fear experiments, and had posts cemented into their heads.

Anthropologists and other scientists have studied macaque and other primate communications for decades and know that the monkeys communicate effectively and intentionally through lip smacking, fear grimaces, body language, and various cries and sounds—all of which constitute speech under the law. Primatologists can analyze that speech on a deeper level to share their stories with the world.

"The one that really surprised me was the organic humane Certified Egg Farm. I thought Humane Certified would at least mean that I would see some chickens running around somewhere, but it looked exactly the [00:00:30] same as any other egg facility. They were just big warehouses. You don't see a chicken anywhere in sight. And then I learned, of course, that, um, you know, the this whole free range, pasture raised terminology doesn't really mean anything." - Isabella La Rocca Gonzalez

Isabella LaRocca Gonzalez is an artist, author, and activist. Her work is part of a long tradition in art and photography to bring to light and find beauty in the hidden, unconscious or disregarded. Her most recent book is called Censored Landscapes. It's a long term photographic project that unveils the hidden reality of animal agriculture.