Species Unite23 Apr 2025

Meredith Blanchard: We've Cured Cancer in Mice for Decades

"There's a drug called vioxx that was found to be safe and effective in animal trials, so they moved it on to preclinical trials in humans. Once on the market, that drug caused 88,000 people to have heart attacks and killed 38,000 people." Meredith Blanchard

We have some big news at Species Unite.

In January and February, our team traveled to Bainbridge, Georgia to begin filming our first documentary. Bainbridge is a small Southern town facing a truly chilling threat: a company called Safer Human Medicine is planning to build the largest monkey breeding facility in the United States right in their backyard.

If approved, this facility would hold up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques at a time—monkeys who would be bred in captivity, then sold to pharmaceutical companies for use in painful and outdated animal experiments. It's a nightmare for the animals. But it's also a nightmare for the people of Bainbridge: from threats to their water and soil, to dangerous zoonotic disease risks, to the loss of wildlife and community health.

The people of Bainbridge are fighting back. And they're not alone.

One of our partners on this film is the National Anti-Vivisection Society, or NAVS—an organization dedicated to ending the exploitation of animals in science.

Today's guest is Meredith Blanchard, the Senior Manager of Advocacy and Policy at NAVS. I spoke with her about what's why animal testing doesn't work and what it will take to finally bring it to an end.

Links:

National Anti-Vivisection Society https://navs.org/

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Episoder(279)

Michael Schneider: Pilots to the Rescue

"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 ...

22 Jul 33min

Kevin Sherwin: How do you Milk an Almond?

"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 decide...

8 Jul 21min

Jamie Logan and Justina Adorno: Green Goddesses Take New York

"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." - Ja...

17 Jun 50min

Cameron Meyer Shorb: Nature Was Never Eden

"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 eras...

21 Apr 38min

Dr. Melanie Joy: Why good people don't want to know

"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...

1 Apr 51min

Rose Patterson: What are we willing to risk when we know suffering is happening?

"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 me...

10 Mar 36min

Todd Friedman: The Pig Who Changed Everything

"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 ...

11 Feb 44min

Dan Shannon: How Change Happens

"There will come a time in the future where historians look back on this era of history and sort of see it as this moment of historical atrocity, which is what I think it is today. I do think that fac...

4 Feb 48min