252 - Controversies, Success Stories and How We Can All Help Animals: Behind the Scenes with PETA's Kathy Guillermo

Episode • Oct 18, 2023 • 1h 11m

Our guest today, Kathy Guillermo, is the Senior Vice President of PETA, and throughout her impressive 30-year career, she’s exposed cruelty to animals in laboratories, the horse racing industry, and major corporations. Some of her many victories include persuading Gillette and Estée Lauder to permanently ban animal testing, getting NASA to call off radiation experiments on monkeys, and pressuring the Coast Guard to stop using goats and pigs for trauma training. Kathy also wrote the book Monkey Business: The Disturbing Case That Launched the Animal Rights Movement, which details the landmark Silver Springs Monkey cruelty case that led to the first conviction of an animal experimenter on cruelty-to-animals charges.

Tune in to this special episode to hear about the important work PETA continues to do and learn how we can all take steps to effect change!

“95% of new drugs that appear effective and safe when they’re tested on animals fail in human clinical trials. We have a 95% failure rate in the development of drugs. And when you look at specific disease areas, you see it’s even higher. You look at neurodegenerative diseases, for example, it’s like 99% failure. The utter failure of drugs for Alzheimer’s and stroke, for a whole host of issues, is not working. So the idea that somehow science will come grinding to a halt is a false narrative put out by people who make their living experimenting on animals and by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. funding agency that pays for more animal experiments than any other agency in the entire world. So you’ve got an endeavor animal testing that fails 90% of the time, but it gets half of the research budget of the National Institutes of Health. It’s utterly ridiculous.” – Kathy Guillermo

What we discuss in this episode:

The transformative power of connecting with animals.
Inside PETA’s fight with the barbaric horse racing industry.
How you can be certain the products you buy are cruelty-free.
Why testing on animals doesn’t actually work.
Proven alternatives to animal testing.
How PETA was able to stop trauma training drills with live animals in the Coast Guard.
What you can do to help animals.