The Reason for Vegan Series
Launched in May 2020, UPC’s Hope for the Animals Podcast has been a great success. We are getting fantastic feedback on the show and reaching new audiences. Supplemental to the full episodes, we created the Reason for Vegan Series, a group of short segments exposing the truth about the animal agriculture industry. In each segment, we delve into specific aspects of the reason to choose a vegan lifestyle and uncover dark secrets the industry doesn’t want you to know.
In our first Reason for Vegan segment, we uncover a hidden horror in the egg industry—the mass killing of millions of baby male chicks.
We expose the chicken meat industry in our second Reason for Vegan Series show with an exploration of chickens’ full emotional intelligence, why it’s important to focus our advocacy on chickens, and the miserable life and brutal death of the “broiler” chicken.
Our third installment of the Reason for Vegan Series focuses on alternative egg labels like “cage-free,” “free-range,” and “pasture-raised.” To understand these labels, we must first look at the standard battery cage system and the multiple cruelties that all hens endure in the egg industry. These labels are gaining in popularity, but does cage-free really mean cruelty-free?
In our fourth Reason for Vegan Series, we talk about turkeys. Hope shares the story of her first amazing encounter with a turkey at a sanctuary and how the encounter affected her perception of the birds. She then exposes the turkey meat industry for its hidden horrors and a painful procedure that is inflicted only on turkeys.
Our fifth installment of the Reason for Vegan Series focusing on ducks and geese exploited for foie gras, feathers, down, and flesh. Ducks and geese are waterfowl who not only desire to be in water, they need water for their health and well-being, including the health and well-being of their eyes. When waterfowl are commodified in the industry, they are kept in filthy dark sheds without sufficient water to submerge themselves in. If they can’t bathe in water, they experience miserable conditions that are unique to their evolutionary need for water.
In our sixth installment of the Reason for Vegan Series, Hope talks about cows who are exploited by the dairy industry and the hidden cruelties inherent in producing milk, yogurt, cheese and other dairy products. She exposes the heartbreaking universal practices of separating calves from their mothers, artificial insemination, and more.
We just released our seventh installment of the Reason for Vegan Series focusing on goat dairy, goat yogurt, sheep cheese and the unfortunate new trend of non-cow animal dairy. Hope explains the rise in popularity of using non-traditional animals for dairy production and how breeding and using lactating mothers for dairy is fundamentally cruel, no matter which animal species is used or the size of the farm.
In the eighth installment of the Reason for Vegan Series, Hope talks about fish: who they are, what their lives are like, and why we should care about them. Hope will reveal the emotional, cognitive, and complex lives of fishes. Science is discovering so much about our underwater cousins and Hope will dive into that research and help us answer questions about pain, parenting, emotions, communication, memory, and more.
In the ninth installment of the Reason for Vegan Series, Hope exposes the fishing industry. Hope explores the different commercial fishing methods and how they affect fishes. She explains how fish farming can be even worse than catching and killing fish in the open ocean for individual fishes and the environment. She also dives into the impacts of fishing on the planet and the state of our oceans.
In the tenth and final segment of the Reason for Vegan Series, Hope talks about the environmental impacts of animal agriculture. Hope exposes the detrimental effects of breeding and raising billions of animals and how this significantly contributes to climate disruption, massive energy and fossil fuels consumption, deforestation, water waste, and water pollution. She also explains why switching from beef to chicken flesh is not a better ecological choice. Hope lays out why a vegan diet is by far the most positive action we can take for the planet.
The Reason for Vegan Series is supplemental to our regular episodes and is perfect for pre-vegans who want to learn more about animal agriculture and veganism, so please share this series with your non-vegan friends. This series is also great for new and existing vegans to get in-depth information about the animal farming industry so they will be excellent advocates for all animals.