Jeff Kerr: Our First Amendment Right to Receive Communications (from Monkeys)
Release Date: 05/29/2025
Dax Dasilva: Echoes from Eden
Species Unite
“I really think it's a story is about the heroes, the conservation heroes. It's each one of their stories and then it's about my personal growth story of being absolutely useless in the jungle and how I got decent by the end of it.” – Dax Dasilva There are moments when you look at the world — at forests collapsing, oceans warming, species disappearing — and you feel a kind of disbelief that we’ve allowed this to become normal. Because what’s happening to the living world isn’t abstract. It’s ancient ecosystems being stripped bare. It’s entire islands scarred by...
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Rebecca Bose: Undoing an American Extinction
Species Unite
“I don't know of another animal mammal that does not protect their young. Everybody protects their young. A wolf does too if another predator came. Of course they would protect their young. But with humans, they are that afraid of us, that they will leave their den. They will leave.” – Rebecca Bose At a moment when gray wolves in the United States are once again under serious threat, with the House just voting to delist them, it's worth asking a question that we seem determined to forget Once we remove protections and populations collapse. Do we really think history won't...
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Gemunu de Silva: Industry Standard
Species Unite
"I grew up and I became vegetarian listening to punk albums because there was a real punk scene which talked about vegetarianism, which talked about veganism, which talked about the peace movement. And that really influenced me. And there was one record specifically by a band called, Conflict that I listened to and I went vegetarian, and that's the power of music. You know, it's not traditional advocacy. So in a way, I'm kind of paying homage to how I got into animal rights. And I want this album not to be a traditional advocacy tool." - Gemunu de Silva For nearly four decades, Gemunu de...
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Gail Eisnitz: Out of Sight
Species Unite
“These workers were so courageous to go on camera to talk about what they were being forced to do, and we had a whistleblower attorney there to protect them. And then Dateline just killed the story. What I heard through the grapevine was they were afraid that people would change the channel. It's so interesting to me that you can have stabbings and starvation and murders and all sorts of stuff on TV, but if it happens to animals, they won't do it.” – Gail Eisnitz Most of what happens to animals in this country is designed to stay hidden. The violence, the speed, the scale — all of...
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Melissa Hoffman: Eat Your Ethics
Species Unite
A lot of people think that kosher means that animals were treated significantly better than animals that enter the non-kosher market. And largely, this is just not true, because kosher is very much now a part of the same systems that produce 99% of the animal products that get into our grocery stores, and therefore could be categorized as factory farmed.” Rabbi Melissa Hoffman Rabbi Melissa Hoffman is the director of the , an organization bringing ancient Jewish values about land, animals, and nourishment into the realities of today’s food system. At the Center, Melissa...
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Brett Mitchell: The Man Who Freed the Elephants
Species Unite
“It just makes everything worthwhile with what we did. It just highlights how flexible elephants are and how adaptable they are from captivity to wild, and that when given the chance, they will choose freedom. And they will choose autonomy.” - Brett Mitchell For nearly thirty years, Brett Mitchell has lived alongside elephants — first in captivity, then, eventually, in the wild. His story begins in the mid-1990s, when he managed elephant-back safaris in Zimbabwe and South Africa. But as the captive industry grew more commercialized — and cruel — Brett found himself on the...
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Nina Jackel and Blake Moynes: The Cruelty Behind the Selfie
Species Unite
“You look at these animals, and they're just so far removed from the life that I want them to have, that they should have that, we would hope that wild animals have. And they're just humiliated and degraded and they're so utterly powerless.” - Nina Jackel Today, we’re taking you inside one of the darkest corners of the animal tourism industry — places where wild animals are stolen, broken, and paraded for human amusement. Nina Jackel, founder of , an organization exposing and ending animal cruelty worldwide, and Blake Moynes, wildlife conservationist and founder of , who recently...
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Amy Jones: Skin and Bones
Species Unite
“It was a really surreal experience because I didn't know what to expect from a tiger farm. I've been in a lot of industrial farms of other animals. I sort of thought to myself, ‘surely it can't be, it can't be actually a farm like what we see, how we raise pigs and chickens and cows.’ But it was it was literally a factory farm - a prison, essentially just row after row after row of tiger.” - Amy Jones There are moments when a single photograph can change how we see the world. For photojournalist Amy Jones that moment came inside a dark, airless building on the border of...
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Thom Norman: How $23 a Month Could Dismantle Factory Farming
Species Unite
“Because we're kind of lowering the stakes. We're saying it's okay to admit to yourself that you care about factory farming and you care about animals because we're not going to try and trick you into going vegan or whatever. And so it allows them to engage with the issue, maybe for the first time in a really serious way. I think what we want to do is, just try and make it easier for more people to really engage with their values, and be an invitation to people to say, I know you care about this. I know when you see factory farming on you know, those annoying ads on your Instagram that...
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30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard
Species Unite
This week, we’re doing something a little different. Instead of a conversation, we’re sharing something we’ve been working on for the past year — our new short documentary, 30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard. It tells the unbelievable true story of how a small town in Georgia became ground zero for a proposed facility that would have housed 30,000 monkeys for laboratory testing — and how a group of everyday people stood up, fought back, and changed the course of their town’s future. The film is a story about courage, community, and what happens when people refuse to stay silent. 30,000...
info_outline"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.