Species Unite

Gail Eisnitz: Out of Sight

"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 it kept out of sight, behind doors the public is never meant to open. For more than forty years, Gail Eisnitz has documented some of the worst abuses in industrial agriculture: animals skinned alive, pigs entering scalding tanks fully conscious, workers forced to brutalize animals at speeds no living being could withstand. Her investigations exposed a system built on secrecy, protected by powerful industries, and ignored by institutions charged with enforcing the law. Her work has forced congressional action, shut down factory farms, held corporations accountable, and revealed to the world what really happens on the kill floor — not in rare moments, but every single day. And now, in her new book Out of Sight, Gail shows us the full story: the whistleblowers the industry tried to silence, the media outlets that backed away because the truth was "too disturbing," and the personal toll she carried while uncovering evidence no one else had the courage to gather. This conversation is about a system that harms billions of animals and dangerous workers, misleads the public, and operates with almost no meaningful oversight. Gail's work makes one thing undeniable we can't fix what we refuse to see.

Melissa Hoffman: Eat Your Ethics

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 Center for Jewish Food Ethics, an organization bringing ancient Jewish values about land, animals, and nourishment into the realities of today's food system. At the Center, Melissa works with synagogues, schools, summer camps, and community institutions to shift their food practices through plant-based defaults and culturally rooted changes that align with Jewish values of compassion, sustainability, and justice. She also tackles widespread misconceptions — like the belief held by half of American Jews that kosher automatically means humane. In this conversation, we talk about how Jewish communities can rethink food in ways that are joyful, practical, and deeply values-driven — and why these small shifts can bring people together while transforming the food system from the inside out.   https://www.jewishfoodethics.org/

Brett Mitchell: The Man Who Freed the Elephants

"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 front lines, witnessing wild elephants being taken from their herds and funneled into tourism and entertainment. It was a tipping point. Instead of accepting that reality, Brett made a decision that no one in South Africa had ever attempted at scale: he would return a full group of long-captive elephants back to the wild. What followed was a decade-long experiment in patience, trust, and determination. Brett developed a gentle, step-by-step "soft release" process — walking with the elephants each day, letting them choose their waterholes, teaching them how to be wild again, and slowly removing himself from their world until one morning… they simply walked away.

Nina Jackel and Blake Moynes: The Cruelty Behind the Selfie

"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 Lady Freethinker, an organization exposing and ending animal cruelty worldwide, and Blake Moynes, wildlife conservationist and founder of The Save Our Species Alliance, who recently went undercover in Thailand to document the hidden realities behind elephant rides, tiger selfies, and orangutan "shows." What they found is heartbreaking — and it's happening far more often than most of us realize. Together, they're shining a light on the cruelty behind "cute" tourist attractions and building a movement to change what people see — and share — online. Links: https://ladyfreethinker.org/ https://thesosa.com/

Amy Jones: Skin and Bones

"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 Thailand at a tiger farm. That's where she met Salamas, a 20-year-old tiger who had spent her entire life in a concrete cell. Bred over and over again for the tourist and medicine trades. Amy's photograph of Salamas, a tiger who was skin and bones pressing her head against a cold wall, has gone on to win some of the most prestigious awards in photography, and brought international attention to an industry that almost no one knew existed, the factory farming of tigers. This conversation is about the rescue of that tiger, about the power of visual storytelling and what it means to bear witness even when it breaks your heart.