Check Out Species Unite's Five Most-Listened To Podcast Episodes Of 2021
A cardiologist-turned cultivated meat entrepreneur, a bear rescuer, and a canine expert are among our most listened-to guests for 2021.
At Species Unite, we bring the brightest people and best non-animal products together on one curated media platform. Our popular podcast uncovers the latest in “future food” (cultivated meat), vegan fashion, and plant-forward meals.
This year, Species Unite has spoken with so many inspiring and incredible individuals who have shown us just how much impact one person can have. Their stories are so important, and by listening to them, together we can help change the narrative for animals.
Here are the episodes our community listened to most during 2021:
S5: E23: Uma Valeti: The Man Who Will Change the World
Uma Valeti is a cardiologist, entrepreneur, and the CEO and co-founder of UPSIDE Foods, the world’s leading clean meat company - meaning they produce meat directly from animal cells. There is no slaughter involved.
Uma’s mission is to feed the world’s growing population with meat that is delicious, affordable, and sustainable. UPSIDE Foods has already pioneered the world’s first multi-species, cell-based meat platform and made history by unveiling chicken, duck, and beef grown directly from animal cells.
In November, the Berkeley food tech company opened its new, $50 million, 53,000-square-foot facility, designed to produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of cultivated meat. This is the largest laboratory dedicated to the production of cultivated meat to date and represents a huge step forward in the mission to create slaughter-free meat from the cells of animals.
Uma is quite possibly going to go down in history as the man who changed the way the world eats forever. As soon as cell-based meat is regulated, scaled, and available in restaurants and grocery stores (which is coming sooner than you think), the demand to slaughter billions of animals year after year will diminish and at some point, it will be gone forever.
If you have any questions for your dog, Alexandra Horowitz is a pretty good place to start. She’s spent much of her life researching and writing about what it’s like to be a dog.
She is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Our Dogs, Ourselves; Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell; and On Looking.
She also teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard.
So, grab your headphones, snuggle up with your canine companion, and prepare to be amazed as you learn about the ins and outs of your best friend.
Jill Robinson is one of the true wildlife heroes of our time. She is the founder and CEO of Animals Asia, an organization that has been rescuing bears since 1994 and is devoted to ending the entire bear bile industry.
All around the world, bears are being targeted for their bile, which has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. Despite Chinese physicians condemning the trade and synthetic, cruelty-free versions being available, the trade is still rife.
On factory farms, bears - or “bile bears” as they’re commonly called - are often kept in cages so small they cannot even turn around. Bears can survive up to 35-years in captivity, meaning they can spend decades trapped in these conditions. Their bodies may contort to fit inside the cage, and many of these animals have few teeth left from chewing desperately on the bars.
Today, it’s estimated that more than 12,000 bears are confined on these factory farms and painfully "milked" for their bile. Bear bile is obtained through surgically implanting a tube in the animal and draining the liquid out. The Humane Society of the United States reports that the bears moan and often chew their paws during the procedure because it is so painful for them.
Jill has spent nearly 30 years of her life fighting to end this dark industry. Animals Asia has rescued more than 600 bears from the trade, all while working to build trust and awareness around the animal welfare issues associated with the trade, highlight the dangers that consumption of wildlife products like bear bile present to humans, and promote the use of synthetic and plant-based substitutes to bear bile as a humane alternative.
In the United States, we have around 80,000 wild horses living on Western public lands. For decades, there's been a battle between the people who want these horses to stay and roam freely and the people who want them gone. Many of the people who want them gone are either a part of, or connected to the cattle industry.
The Bureau of Land Management frequently conducts cruel round-ups of thousands of wild horses across the western states to keep their populations unnaturally low, even though America’s wild horses have been a federally protected species since 1971.
During these population control round-ups, terrified horses running for their lives are often separated from their family groups, many foals die from exhaustion and other horses are injured and euthanized on site. Of the horses that do survive, some are put up for adoption, but the vast majority are either sent to slaughter or kept in barren holding facilities for the rest of their lives.
There are currently around 50,000 wild horses living in crowded, squalid conditions in long-term holding sites around the country.
This conversation is with a wildlife biologist and the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting and restoring wildlife and watersheds across the American West.
In this episode, Eric sheds light on how and why these roundups continue to happen - and the truth will shock you.
Helena Husseini is the vice-president of BETA, Beirut Ethical Treatment for Animals. BETA is the first and largest shelter in Lebanon with 850 dogs, many cats, a few horses, and a couple of monkeys.
Helena is also an architect. She has been with BETA since 2006, a few months before the Lebanon War started. As bombs dropped nearby, she drove around in her Jeep saving the injured and abandoned dogs that had been left behind.
Since then, she has been rescuing animals during the too many crises and catastrophes that have plagued Lebanon, including the 2019 financial collapse, the riots, COVID-19, and the blast that decimated Beirut.
This conversation is really one that's about resilience, about grit, about what it means to show up every day, even when bombs are dropping, when there's no access to money, when people are starving, and no one knows what tomorrow will look like.
More stories:
Species Unite
A collection of stories of those who fight the good fight on behalf of animals.
The footage was reportedly recorded at Marshall BioResources in North Rose, New York, where up to 22,000 dogs - mostly beagles - are being bred for animal experimentation.