Venice Pulse

Vegan Warrior & Animal Activist: L.A.'s Jane Velez-Mitchell

• Chuck and Sandy • Season 1 • Episode 25

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"Vegan Warrior & Animal Activist: L.A.'s Jane Velez-Mitchell"; Venice Pulse, Episode 25.

This week Sandy & Chuck have an enlightening conversation with media personality and animal rights advocate Jane Velez-Mitchell. Is Jane the most passionate activist in America? Jane discusses recent animal rescue successes (Ridglan Beagles), climate change, animal testing, and how individuals can make a difference. The trio also discuss the latest breakthroughs in animal advocacy and how media coverage of animal rights is evolving. As ever, Jane brings her unique spirit and energy to the episode - confirming yet again what an inspiration she is for her followers and what a godsend she is for animals. 

Check out the amazing work Jane does at: 
www.unchainedtv.com
Instagram: @unchained_tv

Venice Pulse is a podcast focusing on Venice Beach and beyond. It is hosted by Venice residents Sandy Clark and Chuck Whobrey. Sandy has been on the cutting edge of both written and televised journalism for the last 30 years. Her credits include NHK, CBC, ABC, BBC, AMI (various publications), the Daily Mail and the Westside Current.

Originally from the UK, Chuck was once on the BBC's Newsnight talking about "Ecstasy". Besides that, he has no qualifications whatsoever when it comes to hosting a current affairs type show!

Intro Music: "Trip" by DJ Nick "Feesch" Wilson

You can also watch "Venice Pulse" on YouTube.


#JaneVelezMitchell #AnimalRights #VeganWarrior #VeganActivist #animalactivist

SPEAKER_00

Sandy.

SPEAKER_01

Chucky.

SPEAKER_00

We have a very special guest today. She's a TV journalist, digital journalist, media personality, host and founder of Unchained TV, strong advocate for vegan lifestyle, animal welfare, environmental issues, also a best-selling author, known for her no-nonsense commentary and approach to uh activism. We have Jane Velez Mitchell. Hi.

SPEAKER_02

Hi, how you doing, Charles and Sandy? How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01

Great. And thank you so much for joining us. There's been so much in the news about the Beagles. And Unchained TV was really, you guys were the first to announce the news of the 1,500 dogs that were released, negotiated to release them. You know, I I tell a lot of people about what happened, and I am really surprised at how many people don't know what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you know, they say you have to get naked or get arrested in order to get coverage of animal rights in mainstream media. And that is still true to this day for the most part. So I think this was a really pivotal turning point because uh it got global attention. And while not everybody in the world knows about the Ridgeland Beagles, uh a large percentage of people do a larger percentage that know about all the other horrors that are happening in our world to animals. So I think it's an inflection point because the people who are supporting these beagles to get out of this beagle testing facility are not radicals, extremists in the way that Americans envision them. They're grandmothers, they're people who play pickleball, golfers, uh retired um accountants. I mean, they're just general people because most Americans love their dogs. I've got two little dogs watching me right here. I love them. They're my children. And so this is really an opportunity. I always call dogs the gateway drug to animal rights and animal liberation. If we could learn to expand our circle of compassion beyond dogs and cats and in occasion horses too, pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, goats, and lambs, then we could stop the uh incoming climate crisis uh that threatens to derail us all. And right now, in fact, as I was getting ready to join, I was furiously typing, because I'm gonna do a podcast tomorrow about the Save Our Bacon Act. So the uh people of California passed Proposition 12, which simply says that animals cannot be kept in such tight confinement that they can't turn around. Pigs are kept in gestation crates the size of their bodies, unable to even scratch themselves or turn around. Now, pigs are not that intelligence should be the only uh criterion, but they're smarter than dogs. Okay, they're considered by many the fifth smartest mammal on the planet. They can't even turn around to scratch themselves. And this is a sadistic industrialized torture device that was legal until the great people of California passed Prop 12. Now, Big Meat is trying to undo that. The Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, but they passed the Save Our Bacon Act in the House, and now it goes to the Senate. Now, I was at a party in Beverly Hills, and uh Senator Schiff representing California spoke against the Save Our Bacon Act. So uh everybody in California, especially those who voted for Prop 12, call your senators now. Call all senators, because our our senators, our California senators obviously oppose it. But Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, you know, call, work the phones. This is what we need to do.

SPEAKER_01

So we can call from California, call all the senators on this, not just senators in California.

SPEAKER_02

There's no law saying you can't call a senator, any senator, because this is a California proposition that they're trying to undo. So even it it certainly gives you legitimacy to call because you're defending California's right to pass a proposition. We are either the fifth or the fourth largest economy in the world, depending on what day of the week. Okay. As California goes, so does the rest of the nation in the world. That's why it's so important, because this is such a huge market. And we are also the largest industrial state, people, uh, the largest agricultural state. People have no idea. They think Wisconsin, Vermont, no, we're the largest dairy state in the nation. So California is pivotal in this, in this battle.

SPEAKER_01

So we can make a difference. I think that's what I want people to know. That it it is just gut-wrenching to even know about this. I wish I knew more about it, but now you're talking about it. Um I I I just I can't even fathom that this is happening. It's like legalized torture. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02

And, you know, when you when you mention it to people, don't tell me I don't want to know.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Uh that's the problem. It's the don't look up mentality. But it's not just about compassionate animals, it's really about the approaching climate apocalypse, because the UN Secretary General has already announced, and it's in all the newspapers of the world, that we are barreling through the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal set by the Paris Climate Accords. If it gets to two or three degrees above Celsius, above pre-industrial levels, all scientists are saying it's going to be a catastrophe. I just finished doing a documentary called The Climate Healers, which is available on Unchained TV, our streaming network, which is a nonprofit 501c3 streaming network for the sustainable plant-based cruelty-free lifestyle. And I said to him, Look, what do you mean by climate apocalypse? That sounds very almost like a science fiction movie. And you know what he said to me? And this is a world-renowned systems analyst, engineer, climate uh scientist. And he said, Well, you know those terrible Pacific Palisades Altadena fires that you had recently? I said, Yes. He said, What if there were thousands of those happening simultaneously around the United States and the world? That's what we're headed to if we don't get a handle on climate change. What does that have to do with animals? Well, obviously just focusing on fossil fuels is not working, right? Cop conference after COP conference. What's the big cow in the room is that animal agriculture is a leading contributor to climate change that they won't talk about. All right. So 37% of non-ice land in the world is used for animal agriculture in some way, shape, or form. Either cattle grazing or to grow the commodity crops to feed 80 to 90 billion animals, land animals alone, not including fish, that we kill every year. Okay, 80 to 90 billion land animals we're killing every year for food. They're eating a huge percentage of the food that we produce. Most people don't know. The overwhelming majority of soy produce is fed to farmed animals. Okay, so if A, if we stopped that and reforested that 37%, trees absorb carbon. So we could immediately start beginning to reduce the Earth's temperature back to pre-industrial levels. Not to mention that we could uh significantly reduce or even end world hunger by diverting that massive amount of food fed to farmed animals. For every 100 calories fed to cows, it only produces three calories of food. If we diverted that to people, we could end world hunger on this planet.

SPEAKER_01

Wow.

SPEAKER_03

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

Jane, why do we not know this? How can there be climate deniers? I don't get it.

SPEAKER_02

Well, even the uh climate believers have not wanted to talk about the really inconvenient truth. There's a lot of people, they just want to stay focused on fossil fuels. Don't, I don't want to give up my steak, right? Um, and so we produce a whole bunch of alternatives. I was just at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim. They have chicken, which is the vast majority of animals killed are chickens. In fact, if you stopped eating chicken, the number of animals killed would drop by 95%. So uh they have daring chicken, they have all these different companies that are creating chicken products that are made from plants that you cannot tell the difference. Like there was person after person walking up trying these dishes. You sure this isn't chicken? Tastes just like it. Well, that is very threatening to the incumbent industry. It also the the war on plant-based started in 2019 when Beyond Meat was the most successful initial public offering in decades. It shot up. The mistake they made was the title, Beyond Meat. The meat industry saw that and said, wait a second, people are gonna realize that they can have a hamburger made out of plants that tastes very similar with the ketchup and the tomato and the lettuce, and they we're out of business. We better launch a war against them. And they did. They have something called masters in beef advocacy, where they churn out all these social media at uh influencers to say it's ultra-processed. Do they ever mention that processed meat, which is hot dogs, bacon, deli slices, pastrami, is officially cancer-causing, according to the World Health Organization? No.

SPEAKER_00

Now, that's interesting. I have a question. Do you think the media coverage of animal rights, is it improving or is it still lacking?

SPEAKER_02

It's still lacking terribly, because look at the commercials. It's basically fast food and pharmaceuticals, uh, with a few insurance commercials thrown in. Those are the two uh big industries, trillion-dollar industries that are.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, but if you look at social media as well, that's kind of there's more awareness, I would say, because of social media.

SPEAKER_02

Well, we have many, many, many anal rights, vegan social media influencers out there working around the clock, and we're one of them. Uh Unshade TV, which is our nonprofit streaming network, had 50 million views across all platforms, including social media collaborations in 2025. So we're working around the clock seven days a week. Uh, and so it is a media war. As a matter of fact, I'm going to a big summit, the Animal Vegan Advocacy Summit, and I just suggested a meetup. How are we gonna win the PR war uh on this issue? There's no stopping an idea whose time has come, but uh they're doing their best to try to stop it. Let's put it that way.

SPEAKER_01

Does this just all boil down to money? Yes. It does. I you know it really is up to the individual. I mean, look what happened at Ridgeland Farms. It was a bunch of individuals that came together. So just taking that step and being responsible for what goes in your mouth.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and uh I I would also like to talk about another issue because uh this is on the west side of LA, and um Venice is such a wonderful community, and the surrounding communities are so important. And we're fighting to save the Biona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, which is at the corner of Jefferson and Lincoln from a phony restoration. And talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. 1,700 species of wildlife, including threatened and endangered species, call the wetlands home. And it's one square mile. We've developed everything. And there's just one square mile for these animals, including migratory birds that use it as a crucial landing spot when they're migrating. And now they want to bulldoze the entire thing at a cost of an estimated 400 million public dollars over 10 years with a lot of heavy machinery and hundreds of daily workers. Imagine that at the corner of Lincoln and Jefferson for 10 years. And why are they doing that? They're calling it a restoration. And it is not a restoration. Destruction is not restoration. The truth is that area needs some TLC. And at defendbiona wetlands.org, we've created a 20-point uh gentle restoration plan that achieves all the legitimate goals of restoration. But what it doesn't do is allow the gas company that has a giant gas storage facility deep underneath those wetlands to upgrade their crumbling gas storage uh infrastructure, which is, in our opinion, the real goal of the quote-unquote restoration. So the City Council of Los Angeles and other municipalities have said shut down the gas storage facility. Uh it's uh, I don't know, I'm not a scientist, but I've been told that there are similarities with the Aliso Canyon facility, which infamously was one of the worst ecological disasters in California history when that blew. Um, so uh what we ask everybody to do is if you love the egrets and the cormorants and the pelicans and the white-tailed kites and all the wildlife that we see when we are walking our dogs and exercising, go to defendbionetlands.org and get involved.

SPEAKER_01

Get involved.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we listen, they had, they were moving forward, and uh a couple of years ago, we held a party. James Cromwell, the famous actor, came. We raised about $20,000. We had a great lawyer, went to court, the judge invalidated their environmental impact report, uh basically saying he didn't, they didn't consider the wildlife and the flood planning is terrible and out of date, and we are in a very urban area. If if something were to happen with the rising sea levels and the miscalculations, it could be devastating for everybody, including all of us who live here.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

So we thought, wow, a victory, but no, they're coming back. They say they're gonna submit another EIR. So we have to fight back, and we literally we go out and fundraise. So if there's anybody who wants to get involved, you can reach out to me uh directly. Um I'll give you my email, uh Jane at unshainedv.org. Jane at United below this episode.

SPEAKER_00

Definitely. You know, where do you get your energy from?

SPEAKER_02

I'm I've uh people are always my whole life. Calm down, madam. Could you lower your voice? The the other table is complaining. I'm just a very energetic person. Maybe it's the fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, and legumes that I eat.

SPEAKER_01

I love it. You could bottle it up. I wish you could bottle it up. I I love what you're doing. You're on top of all of the breaking news. It's so important. And I too want to change the narrative that animal rights are just these, you know, violent people with sledgehammers.

SPEAKER_02

Uh, let me jump in. I have to jump in. Nobody has ever been injured by an animal rights action in the history of animal rights, not a single person. Uh so that is the the antithesis of what we're about. We are about nonviolence. That's our mantra. And so uh when you know, one hammer was used to get into a facility to rescue dogs, that's not the same as violence against a sentient being. I just want to clarify. Yes, I agree.

SPEAKER_01

And you know, uh at the core of this, going back to the Richland uh farm dogs, uh, is the animal testing uh getting rid of it entirely. Is that something that can happen, do you think?

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely, and it is happening. That we're in the 21st century. We have artificial intelligence, we have quantum computing, we have organs on a chip. Animal testing is literally even earlier than medieval. They were breaking dog spinal cords before Christ to see what would happen, and they're still doing it. And the the failure rate is so overwhelming that if you applied a 90%, 95% failure rate to any other anything, you'd say, well, that's ridiculous. Why are you doing that? But the trouble is it's a big industry. Follow the money once again. So these grants are given out to a large degree to universities. Universities get a cut. So anytime somebody from a university, a so-called scientist, wants to, I'm gonna torture this many animals to see how long it takes this many animals to die with this substance, the universities get a cut. So they are follow the money, follow the money. And you know, what's so really infuriating is that we're all, I think, everybody, no matter what your political persuasion, we all see that there's government waste, okay, that we need to trim, that we need to modernize, that we need, well, this is so costly. Billions and billions and billions of dollars that could actually go to uh reversing diseases. You know, many, many years ago when I was a local news anchor, a very well-known uh organization asked me to lead the march. And we went to lunch, and I said, I'm just curious, like for the money we raise, where is it going? By the way, do you do animal experimentation? By the time I left that restaurant, I was canceled. You're off the hook, you're not needed. They don't want people asking questions. Okay, so these organizations also have become institutions. Bureaucracy is self-perpetuating. And a lot of the things they're trying to cure could be cured uh by having a healthy lifestyle. Heart disease is a leading killer. Primarily, it's caused by plaque building up in the vessels of the body. Plaque is caused by cholesterol. Animals produce cholesterol. There is no cholesterol in any plant-based product. Go up and down the supermarket aisles. You will see because plants do not produce cholesterol. So heart disease, boom, cancer. We already talked about processed meat being cancer-causing. Red meat is considered a likely carcinogen. And this is, you know, accepted by the National Institutes of Health. Dairy. The National Institutes of Health itself says 68% minimum of individuals are experienced lactose malabsorption. That's another way of saying most people are allergic to dairy. Makes sense because we're not cows. So the idea that we've normalized drinking the breast milk of cows is really bizarre when you think bizarre. Yeah. So all of these things, yes.

SPEAKER_00

Have you always been a vegetarian since you vegan. Vegan. Well, vegan as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yes. Well, it's interesting. I grew up in Midtown Manhattan. Um, my mom was Puerto Rican, my dad was Irish, she was an advertising executive, she was a dancer and a showgirl, and she was very ahead of her time. She was doing yoga before anybody knew what yoga was, and she um shunned meat. So we were kind of uh, we thought we were vegetarians, but we ate fish. It was, it was a little sloppy, right? But at least I knew from childhood that hamburgers didn't fall from trees. You know, most kids are naturally um resistant to eating animals, but their misguided parents force force it on them. Now, given that hot dogs are officially carcinogenic, if you saw a parent giving a child a cigarette on the street, you'd call child services. Exactly. Or you see parents feeding meat hot dogs to kids, and you try to say something about it, and you're you're the problem. It this is a societal disconnect. It's it's a it's really, this is how one uh, I think very brilliant activist described it. It's not just the animals who are being factory farmed. We're all being factory farmed. If they don't get us sick, how are they gonna sell us all those drugs? The statins and the cholesterol loading drugs, and by the way, the erectile dysfunction drugs. Because when plaque goes through the body, it doesn't just hit the arteries to the heart. It's systemic on all the vessels. We have here at Unchained TV, which is right behind me, it's available on all Samsung's LGs or any fire device or Goku device. We have a documentary called How Not to Die, all doctors. And they make a pretty good case that this early onset dementia that we're starting to see is connected to diet because there are vessels in the brain, too. And if those breath vessels get clogged with plaque, guess what's going to happen? You're not going to think as clearly. And they actually, in the documentary, they show how vessels should look and then how they look when they're filled up with plaque. So uh I'm not a doctor, I don't claim to be, but I would urge everybody to watch it. And you can do it, just go to unchained.tv. We also have an app, by the way, that And by the way, all of this is free. It's all free, and I'm a volunteer. I don't take a salary. I worked in the news business for 37 years, and uh I live pretty modestly, but this is my passion. And we just posted Free the Beagles. So there's like 2,000 videos here. And the great thing is you can text them to anyone.

SPEAKER_00

So if somebody Are the videos are the videos put up by contributors, or is it you guys, your own production team?

SPEAKER_02

We have tons that we have our own production team. We've won a lot of awards. We've won taste awards. We were just nominated for Webby Awards and Tele Awards. Yeah, we're gonna find out. Actually, the Teleys are gonna announce. I don't know if we've won or not, but um yeah, but uh we do some of our own cook cooking, like vegan cooking shows and lifestyle shows, but then we also aggregate content like How Not to Die was done by a famous filmmaker, Sean Munson, um, who did Earthlings and uh so we aggregate content from other people. Also films that used to be like on Netflix, uh uh films that were on Amazon Prime that had their run, we give them new life, like forks over knives, uh uh those kinds of films that people know about, but they they were made years ago. So uh we're actually a digital uh square, like a digital town square for this entire movement. If you go to our Unchained TV and look at it, you will you will get an entire history of the animal rights movement as well as um everything you need if you want to transition your life, which I hope I'm not a litmus tester. Everything that we reduce. Last thing I'll say, Oxford University did a study that was published in the New York Times, not very high, it was like all the way down, that said uh heavy meat eaters that were that switch to a plant-based diet can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 75%.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. That's huge. You know, I think that the tide is turning. I asked you earlier, but the fact that going back to the Rudgelin farm, the dogs, yes, it wasn't the New York Times. You know, it's it's kind of like this is a big movement for animals and a long time coming.

SPEAKER_02

Well, it's interesting. If you look at social justice movements, what is the old saying? First they ignore you, then they make fun of you, then they get angry at you, and then they join you. So the New York Times, to its credit, goes back and apologizes for old articles that they wrote about the suffragettes and about the civil rights movement and things where they look in the context of history and go, wow, that was really slanted. I think that they're probably gonna do the same when it comes to animal rights. The question is when. But I'm glad they covered it. Uh, we'll take any coverage we can get.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I uh me as well. And I have, you know, uh the voting's coming up for uh a new mayor, and something very dear and near to me are elephants, Tina and Billy. And I want to just um talk about that because Karen Bass did have uh all authority to send those two elephants to the sanctuary, and she chose not to. And I'm a little frustrated because a lot of uh big donors to Karen Bass said, we will never support her, and lo and behold, they are still supporting her. Uh talk about how important it is who to vote for to move forward.

SPEAKER_02

Well, let me say this. As a 501c nonprofit, we stay out of partisan politics. Uh, we have to. It's very divisive, and uh it's really not in our real house. I always joke, they say, what's your target audience? I say, everybody who eats food. So we want Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, libertarians and anybody to join us. Uh so I try to stay out of it. Uh, I have covered Billy and Tina for decades. We have several videos on UnShane TV. Share came out and did a whole video. Please send these animals to sanctuary. Um, what we say is the system is broken. And the bottom line is that animals are considered property. That's why there's an organization called the Non-Human Rights Project that is attempting to get personhood for animals in the court. And Billy and Tina and other elephants have been one some of the cases that they've fought for. So, as long as animals, sentient beings with eyes and hearts, who experience, we know, we we who have dogs, we see them dream, we see them express all sorts of complex emotions. How do my dogs know that I'm arriving at my dog sitter's house before she does? Oh, but they're but but they're the dumb ones? No. There's a lot of smarts that they've got. It's just not the same kind of smarts. So if we could evolve where um we could see that Billy and Tina and all the dogs at Ridgeland and all the animals trapped in factory farms and all the pigs trapped in gestation crates the size of their bodies, and all the mother cows who are forcibly impregnated, and you know what that call, feminists, take note, you know, uh forcibly impregnated and then have their babies removed from them and uh taken away from them so we can steal the mother's milk and drink it for ourselves and then get all sorts of problems because we're not supposed to be drinking the breast milk of another species. Um, once we wake up from that, we will evolve. In one of my documentaries, a brilliant uh scientist said when the world, when the earth is dying, uh a new breed of people from every race, creed, color, religion, and background will arise to speak for the animals and restore our planet. And that's what we have to find out. Are we part of that new breed of humans? Because what's happening now is not working. And the last thing I'll say is that, you know, follow the money, right? Well, guess what? And we just did a documentary that's on UnShade TV about this called The Climate Healers. When the ecology collapses, the economy will collapse. The economy lives within the ecology, not outside of it. So those who think we are only going to care about the next quarter of earnings, the next quarter, the next quarter, and they don't see the big picture, in their own self-interest, they should look at this. Because if the planet does hit two or three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, we are going to have a completely unlivable planet. If a delivery person is collapsing on the street because it's 125, 130 degrees and he can't deliver that TV set to you, is that good business? But that's what's coming our way if we don't make change. Uh it's not a fantasy. And people think, well, but oh, she's just way out there. Well, guess what? Dinosaurs used to exist. We, in our arrogance as a species, think, well, yeah, humans are gonna exist. I mean no. Species, species can go extinct if the planet gets too hot to support our ecos our internal ecosystem, right? We can go extinct.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And maybe that's why the billionaires are trying to go to Mars. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00

Oh my God. Wow. Are there are there any breakthroughs in animal advocacy that kind of excite you at the moment?

SPEAKER_02

Totally, totally. First of all, there's a lot of technological breakthroughs. We're about to post a video, um, maybe Friday or Monday, uh, about a company here in Los Angeles that is making bioidentical casein. So their mantra is plants can produce dairy. Uh, and what they've done is they've just copied the DNA sequences without a cow, and they have the reason why people can't give up dairy is that dairy is addictive because Mother Nature created something called casein to get the baby cows, the calves, to drink the mother's milk. And it's like a morphine. That's why we cheese is concentrated casein. So it's people say, I can't give up cheese. You've heard that many times, because there's an addictive component there. So what they've done is they've replicated casein, and they're gonna use it not to try to tell people it's different than vegan cheeses, which are improving. They were horrible to start with, but they're getting better and better. Uh uh there's uh Time magazine just uh uh awarded, give a big big award to uh I forget the name of the cheese, but it's it's in my refrigerator right now. Okay. Uh we'll find out. There's a lot of there's a lot of good vegan cheeses, but the point is that this is gonna go in as an ingredient because most dairy is not consumed like just a glass of milk. It's it's in all these ingredients. You can't buy chips without dairy and this without dairy. So that would be a replacer B2B, not to the general public, very different than, for example, like soy milk. But those are the kinds of breakthroughs that are happening. Uh, it's the 21st century, you know, and people say, well, that's processed. Well, you don't think your cheese is processed, that they take they take uh the whey out and they take this out and they take that out and then they put them in different bins, and then do you you know when you eat a fast food hamburger, you could be eating the body parts of hundreds of different cows? Okay, so that's processed too.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's interesting. We read that book, didn't we? Ultra processed people. Did you read that book written by an English guy?

SPEAKER_02

I did not read that, but uh certainly I agree, ultra-processed foods are a problem. However, the meat industry has targeted only uh meat alternatives as ultra-processed. The vast majority, the vast majority of products that are ultra-processed are not vegan products.

SPEAKER_00

But so what do you think of these meat? What do you think of these meats that are being grown or made in labs?

SPEAKER_02

Um, well, uh, I think that if people can put pesticides on their blueberries, okay, and have uh and eat, somebody told me we're eating so much plastic in micro doses that we could eat literally a credit card of plastic a month if we're eating the standard American diet. I'm not so worried about uh lab-grown meat. Uh it's basically cultivated meat. And um if if it's safe, it's safe. I don't have a problem with it. I do have a problem with all the chemicals and the growth hormones and the antibiotics that they're putting into actual meat, which they're marketing as natural because they now we have big meat has actually created the new food pyramid for the United States, encouraging people to eat meat. But think about it. If you have a fat 100 calories into a cow of commodity crops like grain and soybean and corn to produce three calories of actual food, imagine how much concentrated pesticides. Since all of those crops are primarily GMO and covered with pesticides, you're getting concentrations of pesticides. Also, they feed them antibiotics because A, they die in the conditions they're raised in, and B, antibiotics have this interesting way to promote growth. So they want to fatten them up as quickly as possible. Most pigs are sh are killed at six months of age. So uh those growth hormones, which are technically supposed to pass through the animal's body before they're slaughtered, often remain inside the animal's body. And then you wonder, well, the severe obesity that we're experiencing in the United States, two-thirds of Americans overweight are obese. Could that be connected in some way, shape, or form to the growth hormones? Hmm, I don't know. But what I'm saying is there's what I call selective indignation about ultra-processed food. Okay, there is so much ultra-processed food out there, but the meat industry only wants to focus on veggie burgers. Why? Because they know that that is once once people realize they can just eat veggie burgers instead of meat burgers, the whole house of cards crumbles.

SPEAKER_01

Well, well, I have uh another question for you. The average person, when I go and buy products, how can I be sure that it hasn't been tested on an animal? Is there an app or something? Yes, there is.

SPEAKER_02

First of all, PETA has the leaping bunny. So for beauty products, you can always look for that little leaping bunny. Okay. That's a mark. But also, there's an app called the Cruelty Cutter app that was developed by Beagle Freedom Project. And it's a great app. You download it and you just literally you just scan whatever product and it will tell you right here. I got the cruelty cutter app right on my phone. The cruelty apple cutter app. Yeah, yeah. And it'll you scan any product and it tells you whether or not it's uh tested on animals or not.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Wow. We have a lot. We have a lot to watch, we have a lot more to learn, and you're my superhero. Oh it's a team effort. It's a team effort.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Well, is anything else you want to ask?

SPEAKER_00

Well, yeah, I was listening to one of your podcasts earlier, and you kept referring to um watching Britbox, Britbox TV. So I wanted to know, did you did you ever watch all creatures great and small? I grew up in England on the 1970s watching that show on Sunday nights.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, I have to check it out. I've heard about it, but I haven't. I like the Poirot. Okay. For some reason, I don't know why, but I love the old-fashioned polite murder mysteries where people just have a little champagne and then they were poisoned, as opposed to the over-the-top, you know, uh 90-pound girl fighting 15 ninjas or whatever it is that they're.

SPEAKER_00

You should check it out. It was it's set in the 1930s in England, and it's based on the books by James Harriet, the vet. So it's set in the Yorkshire Dales. And it's it's just very charming. It's very English and charming. And you know what? There were 90 episodes, and I reckon there's probably a murder or two in at least one of them.

SPEAKER_02

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I'm not really a murder buff. I just love you know what I really like? I like to see the big mansions and the estates and the capsules. Exactly. It's the architecture that I love.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Yeah, we don't get we don't get enough of that here in Venice or Marina Del Rey, do we? That's the one thing I miss here.

SPEAKER_01

But I again to wrap up, I really appreciate you talking about the Bayona Wetlands because this is in our backyard.

SPEAKER_02

Yes, and you know, sometimes people will purport to be the friends of Bayona, but they're not. If you want to learn the real story, go to defend BionaWetlands.org. Get involved. Together we can stop this monstrosity that really has no justification. Why bulldoze this last remaining wetlands uh and chase off and kill all these animals? They have nowhere else to go.

SPEAKER_01

That absolute meat doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_02

No sense. No sense. It needs a little TLC that can be done without, you know, heavy machinery bulldozers and hundreds of people and $400 million when people are having trouble paying their rent and putting food on the table, and you're gonna take 400 million public dollars and use it to dig this up. Last thing I'll say when I was a reporter at KCal TV, uh, I covered before Playa Vista, the city within a city, over there in the same area, was built, I covered a protest march led by Martin Sheen and Indigenous leaders. And after the protest march, I went across the street to the offices of Playa Vista, and it was still just a, it was like a big fancy, uh, what you'd call futuristic design. And they said, Don't worry, young lady. At the time I was still a young lady, there will always be a place for the wildlife, and we're gonna have an area set aside that the wildlife can thrive. Well, now that area has become a target because when developers and other moneyed interests see an open space, they don't see the wildlife that are not there performing on the street corner like on like they are when they're trapped in a zoo. You might drive by there and not see any wild animals. But the truth is those wild animals are there. In fact, they have a whole team that picks up roadkill uh on the main stretch there. Uh, Jefferson, because there's so much wildlife. They wouldn't have a team to pick up animals that are hit by cars if there was no wildlife. So we're talking foxes and egrets and squirrels and owls. There's various species of owls. They have nowhere else to go. We have to band together to defend Biona wetlands. What makes this area priceless? It's not the Teslas and the ginormous, you know, it's these these beautiful wild animals that we all see. And the last thing I'll say is we're also fighting to stop the fireworks on July 4th at the mouth of the Marina del Rey. Um, it's like dropping a bomb on these animals. I saw on July 2nd hundreds of pelicans at the mouth of the Marina Del Rey, the jetty where the boats come in. Hundreds. And they were having a great time. July 5th, none. Zero. And we've reached out to Supervisor Holly Mitchell. We've reached out to uh, we held a protest. Last, I know I keep saying last thing I'll say, but we on New Year's Eve, I don't know if you remember, New Year's Eve 2025, it was pouring. Yeah. And they were planning on doing a New Year's Eve uh fireworks celebration. So a whole bunch of us said, this is crazy. Nobody's even gonna watch these fireworks. Let's protest. We went to the uh Department of Um Beaches and Harbors, right there near um the Fisherman's Wharf, near Whiskey Reds, and um we protested politely, but we said, no fireworks, cancel the fireworks. It's pouring rain, nobody's gonna see it. Their response was rain or shine, the fireworks will happen. So what did they do? With nobody watching, they dumped all these fireworks, terrorizing the wildlife, poisoning the waters, and you can look Google it. The the number of poisons that are included in fireworks are extraordinary. For what? For what? It makes no sense. We're Hollywood. We can figure out how to entertain people without a medieval fireworks date back to the 11th century, and they are a precursor to gunpowder. They are medieval. It's the 21st century. We have drone shows, we have light shows, we have a million ways to entertain ourselves without terrorizing these animals that then taxpayers have to spend money rehabilitating because they've been injured.

SPEAKER_01

And and people too. I mean, they're just dangerous. And what can I do? How can I join us?

SPEAKER_02

We are actually thinking of having another protest against the fireworks because this is what they put us in a no-win position. If it's too early, they say, well, you know, it's not until July 4th. But then if we try around this time, oh, well, the contracts have already been. So it's kind of a game. They just kick the can down the road. The other thing they say is, well, charities use fireworks to raise money for charity. Like you can't use drone shows to raise money for charity. That's ridiculous. Not to mention that 10, at least, excuse me, seven men were incinerated as a result of fireworks in California back in 2025 because a fireworks warehouse exploded. So people say it's just illegal fireworks. No. And illegal fireworks are legitimized and encouraged by legal fireworks demonstrations. The only time I see illegal fireworks around here is right around July 4th when the kids think, well, there's I'm gonna do it too, right? So it's it's just we've got to move past it. People with PTSD, veterans, people who have pets. Nobody wants these fireworks, and yet it's presented as we all want fireworks, but who are these radicals trying to stop the fireworks? No. This is the society's child. Changing and the governments are always like bringing up the rear.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so much for talking about that. I want to make a bunch of t-shirts, one for the fireworks, one for Bayona Wetlands, and on and on and on. We have a lot of work to do. We do. And again, you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

Yep. And you're definitely part of the solution.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I hope so.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so, so, so, so, so much, Jane, for everything. Thank you.