Protecting All Animal-People: Interview with Stephanie Maw (vegan), Humane Society International, Part 1 of 2

On today’s program we’ll meet Stephanie Maw, Public Affairs and Campaigns Officer of Humane Society International (HSI), a global animal-people welfare organization based in London, England. The mission of HSI is to protect all types of animal-people, including companion animal-people, farmed animal-people, and wildlife, and to prevent all forms of cruelty toward them. Stephanie describes some of the organization’s current projects.

“We work on a number of campaigns. We've got a successful one on exposing the cruelty of the fur trade and trying to get a ban on fur farming or fur sales and imports in countries where there's already a ban in place. We're also working to end the trophy hunting trade, and then also the dog meat farming in Southeast Asia. So globally, we've got over 1,500 brands that have now agreed to stop using and selling fur.

And our latest victory is one with ELLE Magazine. So, they, at the start of December, announced that they're going to be ditching fur across all of their editorial content and also their advertising content, both in their magazines but also online.”

“Our Forward Food Programme is an international program. We run it across nine different countries, for example that includes the UK, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Mexico. So, it's really a big campaign. And we offer free culinary training programs to chefs and caterers and food service companies, but also to institutions, like schools and universities.

We are now partnering with the second and third-largest catering companies, so Sodexo and Baxter Storey, and we're helping to support them so that they can reach their target, which is to switch to 25% to 30% of plant-based meals on their menus. It's been a great success because we've managed so far to switch 400 million animal-based meals to plant-based meals by working with caterers. And that's meant we've saved the lives to date of over 10 million animals and also the CO2 equivalent of 600,000 tons, which to give that a sense of what that means is as much as 1.4 billion miles driven in an average petrol car.”