Episode 468, original air date February 23rd, 2022, on Unity Online Radio. Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. Please note that the 475 Main Street Vegan Episodes are archived by date behind the newer episodes of the Victoria Moran Podcast. We hope you’ll enjoy both.
I feel as if I’ve been working on the animal-testing-of-cosmetics issue since I was a kid. That’s because I have. And organizations such as Beauty Without Cruelty, the National Anti-Vivisection Society (U.S.), and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, now Cruelty-Free International, have been at it even longer. Great progress has been made: many companies have been vegan from the beginning, and quite a few of the big players are not testing new ingredients or formulations on living animals. Even so, some nations still require that body care products and makeup be animal-tested, and others, like the U.S., do not require but still allow it. This persists despite the fact that alternatives are more efficient, more effective, and customers, even non-vegans, like the idea of using a product with the Leaping Bunny seal of approval. That famous bunny is licensed by CFI, and their head of public affairs for North America, Monica Engebretson, is my guest in the opening segment of this episode, discussing the bill to outlaw animal testing of cosmetics in the U.S. and bring this barbaric practice to an end across the globe.
In segment two, we move from cruelty to animals to cruelty to humans, victims of IPV, “intimate partner violence.” Abbie Sumrall Nelson, a longtime clinical social worker focusing on holistic methodologies to help survivors of trauma, is now a PhD student who has been focusing on holistic healing for vegan survivors of IPV. Abbie, herself a raw vegan and a Main Street Vegan-certified Vegan Lifestyle Coach and Educator, will begin her research later in 2022 on “Holistic Healing for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence.” She is looking for volunteers who are vegan in an IPV situation at the present time or who were in one in the past. For information, please email [email protected].
There’s also a shoutout in this episode to an article about a very quiet kind of violence, shunning. The article, “The Silent Treatment: The Sharpest Arrow in the Quiver,” is on medium.com. Its author is Sande Nosonowitz, also a certified Vegan Lifestyle Coach and Educator from Main Street Vegan Academy.
More about our guests:
Monica Engebretson is Cruelty-Free International’s Head of Public Affairs for 
North America. Cruelty-Free International is headquartered in London and was founded in 1898 (originally knowns as The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection -BUAV). Cruelty-Free International has been working around the world to end animal testing for cosmetics and in the US have been working at the state and federal level and recently welcomed the re-introduction of the federal Humane Cosmetics Act.
Where to find her:
Website: https://www.crueltyfreeinternational.org/
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/CrueltyFreeInternational
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crueltyfreeintl/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrueltyFreeUSA
Abbie Nelson is a PhD student in Social Work at Michigan State University and has 15 years of experience as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. As a therapist, she specializes in treating trauma from a holistic perspective and has spent most of her career working with intimate partner violence and sexual assault survivors in the US, Mexico, and Guatemala. She is a passionate ethical raw vegan and received her Vegan Lifestyle Coach and Educator Certification in 2017.
For information, please email [email protected].
Where to find her:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abbiesumrall30/
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