In this podcast episode, EWG President and Co-founder Ken Cook and his guests discuss the intersection between animal welfare and environmentalism.
Cook first speaks with veterinarian Crystal Heath, who has been raising the alarm about how her profession, from veterinarian school to factory farms, enables and endorses animal abuse.
Then he talks with Wayne Pacelle, founder of Animal Wellness Action, president of the Center for a Humane Economy, and former CEO of the Humane Society. They discuss Pacelle’s advocacy for animal welfare across many industries, among other topics.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Hey everyone, it's Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. I have them all the time. And today is one that I've really been looking forward to. Today we're discussing the intersection of environmentalism and animal welfare. And we'll be talking with two inspiring people who are making a huge difference in the second part of today's episode.
We'll talk to my good friend, Wayne Peselli, the founder of Animal Wellness Action and the former CEO of the Humane Society. In addition to being a friend of many decades, Wayne is an actual real hero of mine. And someone who has. Not only changed how I approach public interest work, but who has also guided me through examining and changing how I live my life day to day with animal welfare in mind. But before I speak with Wayne I sit down with someone who's recently opened my eyes to a facet of the animal welfare discourse, the debate that I hadn't even thought of before my first guest today is veterinarian and activist Crystal Heath.
Crystal is not just practicing veterinary medicine, she's a person practicing great personal integrity and courage and responsibility and engagement with an important issue, namely how the veterinary profession tacitly and maybe not so tacitly endorses and enables the cruelty at factory farms.
Crystal has been someone who has raised important questions within her profession and she's bringing awareness to the public too. Thank you. This was just something I hadn't even thought about until I read a few stories about Crystal, a great profile in Vox, and I walked away feeling super impressed by your work, Crystal.
So I wanted you on the show. So welcome. I've really been looking forward to spending some time with you.
Crystal: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I follow the Environmental Working Group and I use your website quite frequently for my work. So I'm excited to be here.
Ken: Oh, that's great. I think at some point or another, every kid who's been around animals at some point dreams about or thinks about being a vet.
I know I did. Before I ever thought about going to med school, which I also didn't do, that was natural to me. I had beagles growing up. I was around animals all the time. And so tell me, what was your journey? What was the beginning of your interest in becoming a vet?
Crystal: Well, I grew up in rural Northern California, and we always had animals.
I was in 4H. We had goats and horses, and we had iguanas and turtles and snakes and chickens, and we'd always go to the feed store and rescue the little sick baby chicks and try to nurse them back to health. So all my life, everybody sort of told me, hh, you're going to be a veterinarian. And I resisted that.
I was like, no, I'm not going to be a veterinarian. I wanted to actually be an equestrian and go to the Olympics and train horses. I tried doing that for a while. And I worked with a dressage judge. And then I realized, ah, there was some things about the equestrian industry that just didn't align with me.
Ken: Like what, what were they?
Crystal: You know, I viewed my horses like my family members, and I wanted to maximize their happiness. When I was riding them, I wanted to create this bond where they were excited about doing their work and enjoyed doing it. And there was this push to have me sell my horses to buy better horses and I, that just didn't align with me.
And when I was training horses for other people, I saw this, this ego thing of people wanting to get trophies. And, you know, that was their goal and not to maximize their horse's happiness. I took, you know, some rescue horses and competed at a high level and, you know, horses that people would throw away.
And that's another problem with the equestrian industry. The horse doesn't meet your goals, if they become sick or injured, it's often, well, making the decision of do we end this horse's life? Do we sell the horse? You know, and there's a lot of horses shipped to slaughter across the border.
Ken: Yeah.
Crystal: And I couldn't see me working in this long term.
I loved my horses and I couldn't deal with this, this mentality of just exploiting them for your own human interests and ego and not with the goal of maximizing their happiness. Then I realized, well, I've, I still have this fascination with veterinary medicine. I think I'm going to go to vet school. Then in vet school, I discovered shelter medicine and I discovered we can, a lot of animals, you know, more than you just as a veterinarian, as a shelter vet.
We can, you know, save thousands of animals and I love doing surgery. And so that's kind of where my, my journey led me was to shelter medicine. And then I kind of discovered a whole other way to help. Even more animals, um, through animal advocacy, kind of realized how far behind the veterinary profession was when it came to these issues.
And hopefully we want to move that.
Ken: I would have thought, to go back to something you said, I would have thought that most people who go into veterinary medicine, and if I ever imagined myself going in that direction, it would be because I love being around animals. I have two ridiculous dogs that are right outside my door now.
I know as a vet you have, sometimes have to do things in the treatment of animals, inflict a little pain, give them a shot, you know, whatever. But it would seem to me that most people would be drawn to that profession for many of the reasons that drew you to it. And yet, a lot of those vets in the equestrian world were just fine.
It seems like, right, with the practices where animals were disposable, where they were treated more as commodities or equipment. Did you notice that you were divergent from some of the views of other vets around you? I assume that there were senior vets taking care of these animals. You were learning about it.
Crystal: Yeah. People go into veterinary medicine because they care about animals. But there's this rationalization process that happens in vet school. It's the belief that you have to accept certain things if you want to do this job. And a lot of people who are very empathetic and very compassionate don't want to see animals suffering.
And so they self select against entering the veterinary profession. And I think a lot of people say, I don't want to euthanize animals, or I don't want to see animals suffering. So I'm not going to do that. And our profession, you know, suffers because we don't have those voices in our profession talking about this and imagining another way.
And there's also a lot of very vocal industry interests in the profession who have set forth this narrative that the idea of animal rights is very dangerous to our profession, and it can't be talked about. Animal welfare is what we should be working for, but I now know of many veterinarians who have worked for 30 years trying to advance animal welfare, only to see things get so much worse for animals.
You know, gestation crates for pigs and the mass confinement of animals, gas chambers, all of these things. Things have gotten so much worse for animals now ventilation shut down to control avian influenza. But I do feel the horse vets too, they're very compassionate people, but I don't think that they see a way out of the way things are.
If you're presented with a client who's like, well, we need to win ribbons in order to put food on the table and pay our bills and all of this. And this horse isn't going to do it. We have to end this horse's life. What are you going to do as a vet in that situation? If you say no…
Ken: They'll find another vet
Crystal: Or they'll shoot the horse themselves or something, you know, and so there's not a whole lot you can do and plus we have this whole unwanted horse problem that exists.
We have veterinarians who are advocating against bans on horse slaughter and against the safe act, which would limit the transport of horses across the border to slaughter. Because they believe that if we don't allow that, more horses will suffer. And they, they just don't see another narrative like that other narrative just isn't prevalent in the veterinary profession, unfortunately, and we hope to change that.
We have to tell them actually no, the veterinarian perspective is really important. We have a voice and we can change the system and we don't have to just condone and rationalize horrible treatment of other animals. There is another way.
Ken: Yeah. And, and so when did that begin to really gel into more of an advocacy stance for you?
Crystal: It's always been there. I've always been sort of an advocate. You know, I grew up in the AOL sort of era and I learned about the hunt sobs. Who would do direct action and sabotage the fox hunts, which as an equestrian, like I was very in favor of the hunts. Like, why are we killing foxes? Like, let's just jump our horses over fences.
Why are we having dogs?
Ken: Yeah. What's with the fox killing part of that?
Crystal: And I loved what they were doing. So that was always there. And then I went to vet school and I saw, uh, the conversations that were being had and I also saw just how we were being indoctrinated into this belief system of animal use and nobody was pushing back on it.
And I was a very timid person too, like I'm an introverted person. I like to sit down and think things through and write things. I'm not going to raise my hand and like, argue with a professor and a professor. I remember once asked, does anybody here not agree with horse slaughter and like, not a single hand went up and I'm like, um, I wanted to, but I also didn't want to be that person.
And I wondered how many other people didn't want to be that person. And so like I'm whispering to my classmates, you know, my perspective on this.
Ken: And did some of them share your perspective? They were, had the same reluctance or was it still pretty rare?
Crystal: I think so, but also they didn't have the argument. So like, well, we don't want horses to suffer, but it's like, well, shouldn't people in these horse organizations like the Jockey Club and the American Horse Association be creating funds for unwanted horses to make sure that they don't suffer and don't have to be shipped to slaughter?
Isn't that just bad for our industry that we have unwanted horses that are being slaughtered? This is horrifying. This isn't in line with, with, with, good horsemanship in any means.
Ken: Well, and also obviously someone who's working in a factory farm has a very different relationship with those animals, but with a horse, to be able to make a decision that wasn't about the animals suffering or anything at the moment. It was really just about, they're no longer useful or they're no longer winners.
Crystal: Yeah.
Ken: And we, uh, we dispose of the losers.
Crystal: Yeah. Maybe it's because I always felt like sort of the underdog or the loser. I was always the shy kid everybody picked on.
And it's like, so I feel for those loser horses that are just tossed aside, you know, how unfair that is, but it's hard. Like horses are expensive. And what do you do with a horse that isn't going to do the job that you intended for them? I mean, when my horses got old and sick, I just stopped riding and, you know, and took care of them.
Ken: I guess that's what I'm getting at. It's, you know, the, the horses have a useful life. And when that's over, for whatever reason, an injury or they're just not performing, or you have a better horse on the horizon that you can afford, there's kind of a, a numbness that's required of the human sensibility to enter into that mindset.
Crystal: Well, in a lot of vet schools too, they still have students practice on animals who would be killed for them, like either cadavers that they purchase from biomedical companies or having students practice on disposable animals who will be killed after the end of the surgery. And this was viewed as a humane progress from what they used to do was take dogs and perform one surgery on them and then wake them up and then a week later perform another surgery on them.
And a week later perform another one. So that was viewed as cruel to continually wake up these dogs and perform these unnecessary surgeries. To transition to a system where, well, we have all these unwanted animals anyway. Why not just have a student practice the surgery on them and then kill them before waking up? Like that's viewed as more humane.
But now, luckily, a lot of schools are transitioning to an access to care model where we're not just viewing our patients as disposable and where we're having students learn surgeries on models and then progressing to learning on animals who actually need surgery and can wake up and go home to their people, under the guidance of experienced surgeons.
But the vast majority of vet schools still do kill animals unnecessarily, for student training and students have to either. You're either going to be that 1 outspoken 1 who's like, hey, I have a problem with this. I'm going to be a conscientious objector and you have to create a whole new curriculum for me, which a small minority of students do, but then they're ostracized often, you know, they are looked at as the bad guys.
The other students feel judged by them. And they're often bullied or like looked at as being too, whatever prickly, difficult to work with, or they might lose opportunities, even not get access to research opportunities that might help them advance with their career because they're viewed as like one of those people who are going to be difficult and not just go with the flow.
I remember like my first euthanasia and how hard and traumatic that was. But after you do it awhile, it's not a big deal after a while you realize how many unwanted animals there are.
You can't view them as individuals and you kind of stop arguing back with an owner who wants to euthanize their animal unnecessarily. You realize this is, this is a losing battle. And so you just become complacent to this.
Ken: Well, it's a, it's waking up, right? When I first read about what you were doing, I have to say, I, I woke up and thought, Oh my gosh, there, there are vets out there who are trying to do things differently.
Are there vet schools that are doing kind of doing it? Right. Or opening people up to these new ideas, new ways of thinking.
Crystal: Absolutely. There are some really good ones. Western University is a great new school. They don't kill animals in their training. Midwestern as well. And UC Davis is interesting.
That's where I went to school. Um, because you have some very progressive professors there, but then you also have the primate center and you have, it's an ag. school and all of that. So you have also this other mindset and I think there are schools doing it right, but there's a lot of money from ag. interests and research going into this.
But the human medical profession suffers with the same problem of, like, just how we are training empathy out of our future medical professionals.
Ken: Almost as if you have to train it out. Almost as if empathy will get in your way. It's going to serve no good purpose if you have all these feelings.
Crystal: Yeah.
That's true. It's like, yes, veterinarians, we need to do our job. And sometimes we have to make tough decisions. But when we're talking about policy and systems, there are ways to create systems that embrace empathy and don't incentivize callousness. And I think as a shelter vet, you realize how important systems are in the treatment of animals because there are some shelters that have really bad systems.
Ken: What would be an example of a really bad system?
Crystal: Not communicating well with outside rescue groups. Not having the people on the ground who are treating the animals making decisions about the shelter's policies. Too much priority on metrics of not euthanizing animals because you want to be no kill, but then you have animals languishing in cages for a long period of time, not reaching out to fosters enough, not doing enough to, um, bring in the funds and the fosters and the volunteers needed to take care of the animals that exist.
Bad HR policies that lead to a lot of overturning of staff, those sorts of things. A lot of extra steps in implementing, uh, medical changes and decisions that delay treatment of animals and delay notification of an animal illness to veterinary staff, like just these sorts of things that lead to inefficiencies and poor animal treatment.
I saw how important it is in advocating for policy that incentivizes empathy over callousness. And I think our agricultural system is doing the exact opposite, especially under capitalism and everything. I learned more about the veterinary profession's role in setting policy related to agriculture. And I saw how we are incentivizing those callous practices instead of empathetic practices.
Ken: It made me think that for not just the this topic at hand, but so many others, we get stopped from being creative because of some economic barrier or some norm that seems like it can't be overcome by creativity and invention. And, you know, just taking the time to think through different ways of doing things.
What stops you is the way things have always been done and the norms around what's economically feasible. And so it, it blocks creativity. And really what, what is going on is you need to take on the bigger problem.
Crystal: Yeah, it's that institutional inertia that happens. It's the habits and it's hard to break habits.
It takes energy to break out of that harmful orbit that you've established. And it's easy to just go into work and do everything the exact same way that you've always done it.
And uh, when a problem arises, like avian influenza, oh, let's, uh, just, throw more money at it and bail out these companies for doing this.
It's and it's the same thing with vet school and terminal surgeries that the students have to participate in. It's like, this is our curriculum that we've had for 20 years. It's easy just to submit the paperwork every 3 years to renew that. IACUC protocol for that terminal surgery program, rather than write a whole new curriculum.
That takes a lot of energy.
Ken: But people do challenge it. They stand out. So what, when was your first big kind of break with being a compliant professional veterinarian and, and starting to make trouble for the system?
Crystal: I was very naive and I did not plan on making a big break with the profession, but it just did.
That's what it came to, I guess. And it was during, of course, COVID 19 and, um, the slaughterhouse bottleneck that happened because of the infections of COVID 19 and slaughterhouse workers. A lot of the slaughterhouses closed down, reduced capacity. The pork producers were already overstocking their pigs and then had nowhere to send them.
Ken: And where were these operations located
Crystal: In the Midwest, mostly. It was Iowa, Kansas.
Ken: Yeah.
Crystal: I was working with a local activist group who had asked me about this. They're like, hey, we're hearing from people that what they're planning on doing is sealing up the barns and pumping in heat and waiting for the pigs to die.
Have you heard anything about that in the veterinary profession? And I'm like, I have not heard anything. So I posted on a veterinary message board. Has anybody heard about this practice being done? They're like, no, that's just activist propaganda. Two weeks later, Iowa Select Farms spokesperson, Jen Sorenson took to the media and said, yes, because the activists, you know, then recorded footage of it actually happening at Iowa Select Farms.
Ken: What's the euphemism they use for this practice? There has to be one.
Crystal: They call it ventilation shutdown. And I think they're workshopping new euphemisms as we speak.
Ken: Yeah, of course, yeah. Bring in those crisis management teams.
Crystal: Yeah, this is listed in the AVMA guidelines on for the depopulation of animals as a method to kill large numbers of animals in constrained circumstances.
This document, the AVMA guidelines for the depopulation of animals, came about by a USDA contract. So the USDA contracted the AVMA to develop these guidelines so that they could set their policy and indemnity payments related to these emergency events. And even before this particular thing happened, I posted on a veterinary Facebook group that I was looking to shadow livestock vet because I have been criticizing livestock, the industry, and people said, you know, you really should shadow a livestock vet so you know what you're talking about.
So I posted on a group saying, hey, I'd love to shadow a livestock vet. And then this pile on happened where they were like, this veterinarian, she is an animal rights extremist, she's affiliated with terrorist organizations.
Everybody piled on saying that I was going to secretly record people, which was not my plan at all. And this meme went out about me saying, Dr. Heath means nothing good for our profession. Beware. Many of us were not allowed to go to the AVMAs Humane Ending Symposium, which was sponsored by Cargill.
I was banned from attending the AVMAs Legislative Fly In, and I've been an AVMA member for 12 years now. I'm like, this is nuts.
Ken: This is a lot of money talking here, right? Onto the other side of you, a lot of money.
Crystal: And just like the character assassination that was happening and the smearing and thankfully, like, I was connected with a journalist who was friends with Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald, like, loved the story and wrote about it and had me on his show and everything.
That's kind of what launched our honor. And, you know, there were some veterinarians who reached out to me and were supportive and said that they also felt like they couldn't say what was on their mind, really. Like the meme and the canceling of me happened before ventilation shutdown happened and then ventilation shutdown happened.
Ken: And then they really wanted to cancel you.
Crystal: Yes. And then just all of the, you know, I'm saying this is horrible what we're doing to animals and it's AVMA approved. We got a group together to submit a petition to the AVMA to get them to reclassify this as a not recommended method. And it went to the AVMA's House of Delegates, and they voted to put the question back to the panel on depopulation.
And then we got documents and emails through FOIA requests. The guy who sat on the, who was the chair of the panel on depopulation for the swine group, we got his emails because he's part of the pork board.
Ken: And he was related to the government in such a way that they were subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
That's what FOIA means.
Crystal: It’s a public organization. So we could get their emails and we saw the emails between him and the AVMA, the director of the animal welfare division. And we saw it was really kind of the animal welfare division who was pushing this guy to keep ventilation shut down as a method that could be used in constrained circumstances instead of a not recommended method.
This guy was kind of willing to make it not recommended and had some problems with it. But I think the rest of the industry, the pork industry, went sort of around him and was pushing the AVMA director of the animal welfare division to allow this and to green light this practice. And he actually didn't even think that it could be used during COVID 19 because he's like, this isn't an emergency.
This isn't an infectious disease event. We can't. So those, those emails are really interesting.
Ken: So this was really just, um, here you had overstocking of these animals and these horrific conditions and COVID comes along and it's suddenly like, what are we going to do with all these hogs that we’ve imprisoned. What happens in ventilation shutdown to the animals?
If you don't mind explaining, I think people should know about that, how the duration and what exactly is involved. I'm not sure I want to hear it, but I, but I do want to hear it.
Crystal: It's, it's pretty gruesome. So obviously they seal up barns, pump in heat and wait for the animals to die. So, and this can take, anywhere from an hour to 8 or more hours, depending on how good your system is.
With the case of pigs, they would also pump in steam, which if the system isn't arranged right, you have splattering of hot water on the pigs, too. And their, um, respiratory tracts burn. And all animals experience heat stroke the same way. You have multiple organ failure. Sloughing of the GI tract. So you, like, bloody diarrhea.
Pigs and poultry especially have this brain cooling, uh, anatomy. So they remain conscious for a long period of time while their bodies are dying. So it's not a great way to die. It can take many, many hours depending on the system used, and there are better, less cruel methods to do it.
Ken: Do they cost more money?
What's the issue?
Crystal: I mean, there's nothing cheaper than just putting heaters attached to a barn. Growing up in 4H, we used to have this idea that If you have an animal and you're a steward over an animal, you have to ensure that you can provide food, shelter, water, and a quick and painless death. But with these large factory farms, we did not mandate that they ensure that they could quickly and painlessly end the lives of their animals in emergency situations.
So there's things like high expansion nitrogen foam, big nitrogen foam bubbles that you could spray over the animals and they just pass out in a matter of seconds and die a few minutes later. But yeah, it costs money, but when you have these, these companies are making billions of dollars in profit and paying their CEOs millions of dollars. They can't afford to do this when they're that big.
Ken: And they're not paying the farm workers much either, to say the very least. These kinds of operations shouldn't exist in my view.
Crystal: Exactly.
Ken: At all. Tell us a little bit about your organization and how it formed and how it's going.
Crystal: So really that, Glenn Greenwald story kind of launched our organization and we, more and more veterinarians are reaching out to us saying that we're supportive of this and we realize that there's this need for veterinarians who would be willing to lend legitimacy to activist campaigns in the press.
And so that's a lot of our work. When there is an activist group talking about these issues, historically, journalists would reach out to industry veterinarians to get their take on it. And the industry veterinarians would say either, this is. Activist propaganda, doctored footage. This isn't really how things are. These groups are just trying to get donations for their organizations. This isn't the reality and veterinarians are working with these producers all along the way, doing the best job that we possibly can.
So now we have this opportunity to give the alternate perspective on this, which is so important.
And I think getting this message out there in the media. And getting more people to talk about this is what ultimately will lead to change. We are also working within the AVMA through various mechanisms, hopefully to have them reconsider some of the policies that they are putting forth. I mean, the AVMA has been supportive of the EATS Act language in the Farm Bill, which is section 1207, 12007, which would overturn Prop 12.
Ken: And say a little bit about Prop 12, as it was a ballot measure here in California. And yeah, say a little bit from your perspective, what that would mean, Crystal, because we've been in fighting that too.
Crystal: I mean, California voters wanted to make sure that the meat sold in their state came from pigs that were raised in less cruel ways.
I won't say they're humane ways, but less cruel. They didn't like gestation crates.
Ken: A little more space to turn around in a stall. And yeah, I mean, really. a compromise to say the very least.
Crystal: It would require that the mothers of the pigs who are sold in California, the meat from the pigs that sold in California, those mothers had more space and that the space requirements meant that gestation crates would not be allowed.
Gestation crates are these basically two and a half by seven foot crates where mother pigs are housed for 114 days of their pregnancy. They're basically kept in these stalls where they're not able to turn around or lie down comfortably, even, and this means that it's much easier to take care of thousands of mother pigs because they're all just lined up like items in a factory, cogs in a wheel, and they require less food so they can, um, produce more with less feed, feed efficiency is better, and they're easier to take care of, but there's a lot of a lot of suffering that happens.
Ken: Yeah.
Crystal: More than 90 percent of them exhibit stereotypes, which are these function of lists, repetitive behaviors to cope with the stress of being confined in this way.
Ken: And almost until prop 12 came along, almost all pork in this country that you ate, came to you through a system like that. Just like we tell people, yes, there is such a thing as grass fed beef, but you need to look very carefully at the life of that animal.
They all start on grass but that's not how they end. And I think if people knew more about this system, I want to believe they would find it harder and harder to go through the, the numbing as consumers that we submit ourselves to are those blinders.
Crystal: Yeah. It's incredibly cruel the way that we've decided to raise animals. And it's nothing like what was done a hundred years ago. And legitimized these increasingly cruel practices.
Ken: Yeah, have given structure to it and I suppose created a permission structure as the term is. This is just how pork comes to our plates through this system and our job is to maintain the efficiency of it as opposed to the humanity of it.
Are people starting to find it harder to maintain the facade that this is all normal and perfectly acceptable and just the way things have to be? Is it, do you feel like you're making some headway?
Crystal: Absolutely. There was just a poll on the veterinary information network about ventilation shutdown. And given that the AVMA just adopted their new principles of veterinary medical ethics, which says that depopulation is an ethical veterinary procedure.
Uh, they did this poll to ask veterinarians if they thought ventilation shutdown was ethical or humane, and the vast majority of veterinarians say it is neither ethical nor humane. So that's great. But the decision makers at the AVMA, they're very powerful. They don't have to engage in these discussions.
They can just set their policy and move forward and not communicate. And when, journalists in the media have tried to reach out to them, they just don't respond. What do you do when they just don't respond? And I've encouraged veterinarians to join committees, try to get positions of power. Their new guidelines for depopulation should be out any day now.
It was supposed to be out in spring. I don't know why, maybe it's because of all of these conversations. I don't think that it'll be good. I think the industry still wants ventilation shut down to be a method that they can get taxpayer bailout money for.
Ken: A lot of these interventions are part of our farm subsidy system, cheap grain and the idea that we have a veterinary profession that rationalizes overpopulation and then this horrific euphemism of depopulation. So first you create these conditions that are incredibly and blatantly inhumane, crowding all of these animals together in surplus amounts.
And then you have something that breaks in the system like COVID, where you lose labor, and therefore you just can't run the slaughterhouse. And so then you have to depopulate the overpopulation your profession helped create.
Crystal: Exactly. And I also saw regular veterinarians making this argument of well, if we had them implement less cruel methods, would the cost of food go up?
And I have to explain, no, the cost of food actually would not go up because of all of the systems in place. We're just making sure that the CEOs, the executives of these companies who make millions of dollars are able to continue making millions of dollars and use the lowest animal welfare practices that they want to.
That's the system. And we're just allowing the lowest animal welfare practices.
Ken: Well, Crystal, thank you so much. Learning about what you've done, learning about the veterinary angle here. I've been a vegetarian for years now. It wasn't about the environmental implications. It wasn't about climate change or any of that.
It was It really was about animal welfare. This aspect of it had not occurred to me. I think it hasn't occurred to a lot of people. I'm thrilled that you gave us some time to talk about it. And I'm even more thrilled to know you. I just have to say the people who come on the show, a lot of them are courageous.
They stand up for the moral compass tells them to stand up for. You're a splendid example of that. I'm proud to know you and, uh, keep up the good fight. I have a sense there's nothing that could stop you.
Crystal: Thank you so much.
Ken: Crystal has inspired me to do a deeper dive into the veterinary profession, factory farms, and the political scaffolding that holds them in place and the effects they have on their communities, not to mention the animals. So stay tuned for that.
Our next guest, Wayne Peselli, like Crystal, is committed to animal welfare and animal well being. Wayne was the person who inspired me to examine my own choices and to give up eating meat. Wayne is a founder of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. He's one of the global leaders in this fight and has been for many years.
Wayne has always been at the forefront of the effort to treat animals humanely. Whether those animals are pets, live in factory farms, or are used in drug testing, or the manufacturer of clothing. Wayne is the author of two books, both of which I recommend. The Bond, Our Kinship with Animals. And Our Call to Defend Them.
That book really helped shape my views and maybe decide I'm not going to do this meat thing anymore. And his book, the humane economy, how innovators and enlightened consumers are transforming the lives of animals for the better. Which in my opinion is a must read. Wayne, welcome.
Wayne: Ken, it's, uh, it's truly a pleasure.
And since you gave up meat, I mean, you look 20 years younger, you're glowing, your voice is resonant. I can't believe it. It's just a complete transformation.
I'm so delighted to have the opportunity to talk with you because I want to just send this back to you. What you've done at the Environmental Working Group, with Scott Faber and the rest of the team is incredible.
And one of the things I love about EWG is that you don't treat nature and the planet as some far off thing and a concern that we should just broadly think about nature and the protection of it for its own sake. These matters are not separate spheres from the human condition, that how we treat animals and nature affects us all in very profound ways in ways that we don't sometimes even intuit or see.
And I just want to thank you for your work. And it's a pleasure to have a discussion with you.
Ken: It's just great to have you on. And let me just ask you off the top, tell me a little bit about animal wellness action and say a little bit about the organizations that's sort of named after your book, Center for a Humane Economy.
Wayne: I have been at this work of protecting animals from human acts of cruelty, malice, inattention, indifference for a long time. I started an animal advocacy group in college, and I was just moved once I really learned about the scale of the problems. A concern about animal welfare is not just a concern, although it's certainly inclusive of this, of people's pets.
You know, you want to take care of your cat if you've got one, or your dog. It's great if you can get a rescue animal because you're getting a great companion but you're also alleviating the problem of animal homelessness. But it's broader than that, right? Animals are part of the economy and they're part of food production.
They're part of science, whether it's drug screening or looking at the safety of chemicals and pesticides, and they're used in sport. I mean, we fight dogs, we fight roosters in the United States and in many parts of the world, it's legal to stage animal fights. This fall's election, we at Animal Wellness Action initiated a ballot initiative to stop the trophy hunting of mountain lions and the trophy hunting and commercial trapping of bobcats.
I've worked on just about everything. And I formed Animal Wellness Action and its sister organization, the Center for a Humane Economy, to look at the two main pillars of reform, if you will. One is influencing government, since government sets legal standards that then become moral standards, and then we enforce those standards in society, and those legal standards can become our norms.
The second piece is so many animals are used by private corporations, whether it's an agribusiness company like Smithfield foods or JBS or you name it. I don't want to go through the long list or whether it's pharmaceutical companies, testing on millions of animals a year for drug screening. There's no such thing as cruelty free drugs because for 84 years the federal food drug and cosmetics act required extensive testing on primates, eagles, and other animals to screen new drugs, the terrible aspect of this beyond the suffering of the animals is that it was highly inefficient because 90 to 95 percent of animal studies, when the drug went to human clinical trials, failed to be predictive of the human response to drugs.
So the pharmaceutical companies would have to start over again, which is one reason why we have such high drug prices. I wrote a book that you mentioned at the start of the show called The Bond. And the thesis of that book is we humans are animals and we are drawn to animals. We have always been drawn to animals.
We have hormones that connect us to others. This is part of who we are. It's no accident that two thirds of American households have pets. We bring these animals into our lives because they fulfill something deep within us. And my view is that we should be cognizant that these are choices that we're making.
We also know that we're producing these animals now on factory farms, where we've engineered the animals to have hyper productivity. A cow that was producing milk for a calf produced, you know, a few thousand pounds of milk for that calf. Now because of selective breeding for hyper productivity, some of these cows are producing 25,000 or 27,000 pounds of milk a year, a yield that is four or five times as much as what a normal cow would produce.
This taxes their system. It leads to oversized body parts. It leads to foot problems, lameness, other leg problems. It leads to the cow being spent, sometimes at three, four, five years of age, and then no longer productive, and then shipped to slaughter to make a low grade ground beef product. Now, this is the backstory that we often don't hear of with a marketing campaign by the milk lobby, that tells us that this is nature's perfect food.
Well, it's not perfect food for most of the world's population. It also happens to come at some cost in terms of climate change, in terms of the climate footprint of the cows. And then it comes with the suffering that these animals endure because of our re-engineering of the cow to meet the demands that we create.
Most of the world is lactose intolerant, so 100 percent of Native Americans are lactose intolerant, 75 percent of African Americans, 90 percent of Asian Americans, but we hear that milk is the perfect food. And whereas the government's buying up all this surplus product and feeding it to kids in the school system.
So when you learn the details, it was very difficult for me to turn away.
Ken: That's the difference, right? Some people can't look away and some people can't look and, and my abiding. question, particularly about people who love their pets. How can someone make that strong connection to a dog or a cat and not look at the life cycle of an animal that ends up at the store?
And almost all of which is through these various factory farming systems that are anything but humane. It's just a question that I think a lot of decisions turn on. You mentioned the power of culture and economics are deeply complex questions that make you either not look or actually actively keep you from looking.
Maybe it's hard to make that connection between the dog that you dote over and what you put between hamburger buns. I get the impression from following your work and following the field that there are more opportunities now to get things done deeper and faster. If we approach it from the standpoint of holding companies accountable and using the power of the marketplace and consumers, is that a strategy that's becoming more important?
We like to think at EWG, we pay attention to bipartisan solutions, but man, it's getting hard for both sides to come together. We are looking for opportunities to make change happen by holding these companies accountable. And in the marketplace, you don't need to swing half the market. You just need to swing a fraction of it, and you get this scurrying competitive reaction by the companies to chase after the winner. And I want to believe that the winner can be more humane treatment of animals.
Wayne: Oh, it's, it's, it's crucial. And it's again, the whole essence of the center for humane economy. The notion that I have is that these companies are led by people, right?
I'm not tossing in a, an alien value system. I'm talking about opposition to cruelty to animals. It's embedded in the law. The first anti cruelty statutes were adopted 200 years ago in our society. All states have them. And I make the case that these companies are putting themselves at risk. If you're not aligned with your customers, you're in trouble as a business.
And one of my, you know, very good friends is a libertarian, uh, John Mackey. Uh, the CEO and founder of Whole Foods, he wrote a book called Conscious Capitalism. He believes in capitalism, but it's not unfettered capitalism. It's not capitalism that looks only at profit, that you can't operate with that notion alone.
You have to be concerned about your workers. It's an important moral value that you're not polluting the air and making kids in the community sick.
Ken: Yeah, we often remind people that EWG in particular works in the space between what's legal and what's safe. The high standard for pollution control should be what's safe, but oftentimes through compromise, we're stuck with what's legal.
But people conflate the two. If the food is in the grocery store, if it's all done perfectly legally, that doesn't mean it's done morally.
Wayne: Well said, and let me just say also, government defends a lot of animal use, right? And you have many situations of industry capture of agencies. Right. I mean, the USDA is captured by agribusiness, the state fish and wildlife agencies are captured by the trophy hunting lobby.
I mean, our opponents in Colorado on the ballot measure that was decided on November 5th, were not just the trophy hunting lobby, but the agency, they were doing this. So this work of change that you're talking about is complex stuff. And we're often going against these entrenched interests who have a profit motive. They don't want to change. There's oftentimes not a great deal of leadership in the world and they just hunker down and then they've government oftentimes defending these problems.
I want to have people rethink their relationship to animals and move away from a model or a paradigm that's grounded on exploitation, killing, confinement, and move toward a caring relationship and a custodian relationship.
I think of factory farming. For thousands of years, we had extensive agriculture, and factory farming is a recent innovation, right? The last 60, 70 years where we put animals in giant warehouses, then we put them in cages and it was all driven by a value system. The value system was productivity. And in some ways, you know, this was a very successful model.
You jam 10,000 pigs or 400,000 laying hens into a warehouse. It can be productive in short term, but it's human creativity and ingenuity detached from conscience.
Ken: I'm sure you're familiar with Crystal Heath, the veterinarian who's taken aback by how her own profession was a critical element of maintaining the incredibly cruel system we have of, I don't even want to say raising animals. It's really, it's just manufacturing animals, right?
Wayne: I think animal issues, because animals are part of our economy, they're part of our clothing, our food, this asks something of us, it requires sacrifice, and writing a check is so important, you and I know that none of these thousand points of light, so to speak, uh, you know, could exist without the support of people, but we're also asking people to make choices in their lives because it's in the marketplace that these activities get driven, right?
So when you buy shoes that are made from kangaroos, you are directly supporting that slaughter in Australia. It's tough to say, but it's true. The same is true for factory farming of pigs. I mean, the pig industry is the worst.
Ken: I think so.
Wayne: They fight so much. They have these horrible manure lagoons that you know, pollute the water and they putrefy the air.
They drop property values in, in rural communities for these industrial farms. China controls Smithfield foods. They control 26 percent of US production. Now they're trying to overturn our state laws like prop 12 in California. That was passed in 2018 and 2016. I led a ballot measure in Massachusetts that did the same thing. They're trying to overturn that.
A foreign controlled agricultural company is lobbying the United States government to overturn American elections. I mean, in China they're building high rise factory farms. They're, Ken, they're 30 stories high.
Ken: It's like the Matrix for pigs, huh?
Wayne: Yeah, they never get out of, they never see sunlight, they never step in the mud, they never see a blade of grass, they never go off one of these floors.
Ken: Not surprising. So, it's a world that's not functioning in top form these days, to say the very least, lots of threats on the horizon, domestic and otherwise. When it comes to animal welfare, what gives you hope? If you were to point to a, an especially bright spot in your field, I don't want to pin you down to just one, but what would it be?
Wayne: I mean, I get energized by looking at some of the metrics of progress over time, right? When I started in this field, there were no states that had anti confinement laws, and now it's, you know, 13 or 14 states that have anti confinement policies. When I started this cage free egg campaign, it was, you know, 0.1 percent of all the 92 billion eggs that were produced came from cage free, now it's USDA says it's 41%.
There used to be 7 million mink raised in the United States for fur. And now for the first time, it just dropped below 1 million. There were 60 greyhound tracks that were abusing, you know, these greyhounds. And now there are two.
When I started Ringling Brothers and other circuses were using elephants and tigers and shipping them to 150 you know, cities a year and using coercive training techniques and keeping them in cages and now Ringling's out of the business entirely. And it's very hard to find an animal based circus.
So I led the effort to pass the FDA Modernization Act in the prior Congress, the 117th Congress, 84 years of mandated animal testing for drug screening. Now that mandate is lifted. We can unleash human creativity and use human based biology to be more predictive. So, I am encouraged that we're making progress.
We are not just running into a wall and screaming and hollering. We are gaining yards. I think that human agency is such a powerful force. I mean, I'm not trying to turn this around, but you're a person who's made a difference. You're a leader, you've created a powerful organization that is driving forward on a wide set of issues and making a difference.
I want to be that person in the small little space that I occupy. And I also just see every day there are people in this country, in this world who make a difference. I mean, I love working with these volunteers in Colorado who are working on this big cats measure. And I love working with people who are fighting to protect the wolves.
And I love people who are fighting factory farming. I mean, they are heroes to me and to you. I know, and it's not just people like me and you who are fortunate enough to be in a position to run important organizations. Everybody counts. And I, I think that the work that you and I do protecting the environment, human health, and helping animals. That's the connective tissue of our society.
There are very few politicians in either party who would say, no, I don't care about the environment. I don't care about animal cruelty. And there are a lot of issues where people are lined up. They're not as lined up on this. And I think we need to energize people on the right to be concerned about these issues.
There's nothing, there's nothing good about animal cruelty, there's not a thing good about it, and they need to be convinced that that's the case, and I think most of them intuitively do recognize that.
Ken: Thank you for finding ways to make it hard for people, without feeling necessarily guilty, making it hard for people to look away.
I think once you get over that. And you do start looking with an open mind and an open, even more important, open heart, that's the recipe for success. And I don't know of anyone in public policy, public life who's excelled at that more than you have, Wayne. Just being on a call with you now, I was like, this guy's fired up like he was when he was 26, right?
And I think it's the work that fires us up, right? And it's the sense that we can make progress. And when one approach isn't working, you know, in my case, we don't assault Congress anymore to pass new environmental laws. We find other ways to get it done because for better or worse, mostly for worse right now, we're deadlocked.
We're not making that progress. And you've looked for those creative ways to. Once someone decides, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna notice, I'm not going to look away from this horrendous problem. And then part of your genius, I think a big part of it has been, here's a path to take. And I salute you for it, brother.
I salute you for it.
Wayne: Very generous sentiments. I thank you so much. And it's a mutual admiration society. As I so appreciate, you know, I tell people, Which nonprofits do you give to? And I always say EWG because I, I just think the leadership that you're providing, the team you've built is extraordinary and leadership does matter.
It matters, but we all matter as well. So Ken, I thank you. It's great to see you. Great to listen to you. You're generous to have me on the call.
Ken: Wayne Peselli and Crystal Heath, thank you so much for being on the show. What great examples of personal integrity and commitment to a cause. I think these discussions have shown that as consumers, what we choose to invest in with our dollars can really make a difference.
I also want to thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links for a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram at KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about EWG and our work on factory farms, head over to EWG.
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They just don't know it yet. My ask is that you send it to that person or as many people as you see fit. Today's episode was produced by the incomparable Beth Row and Mary Kelly and our show's theme music. Thank you. Music is by Moby. Thanks again for listening