Species Unite

"That transformation from a guy from the Midwest that was really into a lot of meat and potatoes, like a lot of us are. That transformation and experience was the closest experience that I had to feeling like a real life superhero." - Dominick Thompson

Dominick Thompson is a man who has lived the kind of life that has now being made into a movie.

He grew up on the West side of Chicago, started hustling at a young age, and eventually ended up in federal prison. What came after was a complete reimagining of his life. Today, Dominic is an author, endurance athlete, entrepreneur, and animal advocate.

And now his life is a subject of the upcoming film Beyond the Walls, directed by Shaun Monson and starring Tyler Lepley as Dominic and Tabitha Brown as his mother. Dominick's story is one of transformation, but it's also about strength, masculinity, compassion, and the choices thatwho shape who we become.

Links:

https://beyondthewallsmovie.com/

https://www.instagram.com/beyondthewallsfilm/

https://www.instagram.com/domzthompson/

"Everything is a story. Every belief that we have, every entity or institution is a story that we've told ourselves and each other. And so really identifying ways on how companies that have grown to be so large and successful, how they have taken storytelling and been able to apply it to building out their awareness, consideration and lead generation and conversions, ultimately to have lifetime value of their customers. We're not necessarily selling a product by any means, but we are giving people an opportunity to, what I feel is, be given the same gift I felt like I was given, which was an awareness and a set of values around aligning how I show up in the world and aligning them to the values that I have on a day to day basis." – Arash Yomtobian

Most people don't change the way they eat overnight. It usually starts with something small. They see something they can't quite forget. They start wondering where their food comes from. They switch the milk in their coffee, eat a little less meat, or learn something about factory farming that makes it hard to look at dinner in quite the same way again.

Arash Yomtobian believes those moments matter. He is the CEO of Mercy for Animals, and after years of working in technology, he thinks a lot about how we reach people, not just the people who already agree with us, but everyone else.

Because if we want to change a food system that causes suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, we need a movement big enough to change it. And that means meeting people where they are, telling better stories and moving beyond the idea that you have to be all in before you're welcome.

In this conversation. Arash and I talk about what it actually takes to change people and systems.

https://mercyforanimals.org/

"As I stood about six feet away from him, looking at his beautiful little brown eyes, and Tuffy looked right back into my eyes and actually through my soul. And at that moment, I felt like it was quite emotional, and it really felt like he knew what was going on and understood everything that was going on." – Ana Paula Tavares

For decades, chimpanzees in the United States were used in biomedical research, sent into space, kept as pets, and made to perform for our entertainment. Many spent years, some most of their lives, in cages, separated from other chimpanzees, and denied almost everything that would have made their lives their own.

Save the Chimps exist to give some of those lives back. On 150 acres in Florida, more than 200 rescued chimpanzees live in large family groups on island habitats. Some arrive knowing exactly what to do with grass and open sky. Others have spent so long on concrete and behind bars that it can take months or even years before they feel safe enough to step outside.

Ana Paula Tavares is the CEO of Save the Chimps. She came to the sanctuary after a career that took her from studying dance in New York to working in conservation around the world. But until Save the Chimps, she had never even met a chimpanzee.

In this conversation, we talk about Taffy, Tonka, Vanilla, and some of the other extraordinary chimpanzees at the sanctuary. What happens when an animal has spent decades in captivity and sees open sky or feels grass for the first time. And what chimpanzees can teach us about friendship, forgiveness, family, and second chances.

As Ana Paula says, "for many of the chimpanzees at Save the Chimps, the greatest gift we can give them isn't the islands or the open space. It's each other."

"We do own and operate aircraft, but we also put a lot of energy into telling the story and that's really important because that's what's going to provide transformation in this space, because people will hear about what we do think it's a cool mission. We inspire people. They'll think twice about buying an animal. They'll open up their homes and hearts to foster. And that's really what we are. We're change agents. We're creating transformation for alternatives to euthanizing animals." – Michael Schneider

Every year in the United States, nearly a million dogs and cats are euthanized, and many of them could be saved but aren't because they're in the wrong place. Shelters in some parts of the country are overflowing, while others have families waiting to adopt. Sometimes the difference between life and death is simply getting an animal from one place to another.

That's where Michael Schneider comes in. Michael is the founder and CEO of Pilots to the Rescue, a nonprofit that combines pilots, specially equipped aircraft and ground transport to move animals from overcrowded shelters, disaster zones and emergency situations to places where they have a second chance.

Since launching the organization in 2015, they have transported more than 7000 animals, built a network of more than 1000 volunteer pilots, and expanded their work beyond dogs and cats to include endangered wolves, sea turtles, disaster response and even the occasional federally protected rescue mission.

Michael shares what he's learned after a decade of witnessing the shelter crisis firsthand and explains why storytelling saves more lives than any single flight.

https://www.pilotstotherescue.org/

"His argument against almond milk is that you can't call almond milk milk because you can't physically milk an almond." – Kevin Sherwin

Kevin Sherwin is a composer, musician, and filmmaker who decided that the best way to expose Big Dairy's war on the word milk was through a courtroom puppet musical.

The film is called How Do You Milk an Almond? It has stick puppets, original songs, a very villainous dairy lawyer and an FDA official who argues on the record that an almond can't lactate.

It's absurd and weird and funny, and then it slips in about 90 seconds of real undercover dairy footage, and that's when the whole thing shifts, which is the point.

The film has screened at film festivals and law schools across the country, and is now available online, and Kevin has made the live musical version free for anyone who wants to put it on.

https://howdoyoumilkanalmond.com/

"We had to start asking how are we sustainable with the activism in the long run? I think that using humor, using confrontation will get people to look at the things that they normally wouldn't." - Jamie Logan

Whether they are dressed as fish on the streets of New York, speaking to college students or creating award winning media, Jamie Logan and Justina Adorno are finding new ways to spark conversations about animals.

Jamie is an animal rights activist, filmmaker, podcaster and Yogi, whose work spans everything from open rescues to street outreach and media campaigns that have reached millions, all in service of getting people to see animals differently. Justina is an actress, storyteller, podcaster, and animal advocate known for bringing creativity, humor, and heart to conversations about compassion and justice.

Together, they have created Green Goddesses Take New York, an award winning show that follows their adventures through New York City as they tackle animal issues in ways that are unexpected, very funny, and impossible to ignore. The show recently won seven Telly awards.

In this conversation, we talk about activism, storytelling, humor, yoga, the art of changing someone's mind without putting them on the defensive, and why they both believe that building a more compassionate world requires you to show up fully with your whole, joyful, ridiculous self.

Links:

https://watch.unchainedtv.com/videos/green-goddesses-take-new-york

https://www.youtube.com/@jsykpodcast

https://www.itsjamiescorner.com/

"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/