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When honored with the opportunity to edit our first Special Issue in a media journal, we knew that we would concentrate on the subdiscipline of “critical animal and media studies”(CAMS). This is a term we coined with Matthew Cole (Almiron et al.[2015] 2016) in order to express the convergence of perspectives between critical media studies and critical animal studies, in the name of promoting interspecies justice and anti-speciesist discourse through transformative media. Additionally, in thinking of what type of communication topic might be most valuable and urgent for the focus of this Special Issue, we quickly honed in on the need for communication to protect fellow animals in nature (“wildlife”) who are struggling to live with us in the Anthropocene, where the collective action of our species has created a crisis for all living beings, particularly with anthropogenic climate change and the sixth mass extinction of species. In putting out the call for papers, it was akin to a plea for help in raising the alarm for communicators and media professionals, in order to propose a pathway for transforming our discourse on nonhuman animals and facing our urgent obligations to protect them as inherently valuable individuals. The scholars who responded to our call (from our home countries of Spain and the USA) propose solutions for media-makers and animal advocates to inspire protection of free-living species such as sharks, coyotes, parakeets, fishes, and octopuses, while showing concern for the human animal species as well. To begin, Iri Cermak directs entertainment and documentary film producers in how to defend one of the most maligned animal …