Animal Law Our Hen House Podcasts

Sarah Gold of Legal Impact for Chickens joins us to discuss litigation against giant poultry factory Case Farms. As you may know, I am a big fan of efforts to get anti-cruelty laws to do what they were meant to do, that is, protecting animals from cruelty. What a concept! Those efforts can be extraordinarily difficult to mount, and so I was particularly pleased to see that Legal Impact for Chickens is attempting to use North Carolina’s anti-cruelty law to try to help the poor birds who end up in the hands of Case Farms’ huge hatcheries. North Carolina has an unusual law, unusual in good ways and not-so-good ways, and we will be unpacking that law, what its potential might be for North Carolina chickens, what has happened so far in this case, and what comes next.



Sarah is a litigator with Legal Impact for Chickens. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Prior to law school, Sarah worked as a shelter intern at Farm Sanctuary. During law school, she served as president of the Animal Law Society, and interned at Mercy for Animals. After graduating, Sarah worked as a litigation associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. She also serves as secretary on the board of Sunset Farms Sanctuary, a farmed animal sanctuary in Arkansas.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP106/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

Vanessa Shakib joins me once again, and this time, we will be discussing litigation brought by her client, White Coat Waste Project, about a really extraordinary situation at the National Institutes of Health. As you probably know, the NIH funds massive, massive amounts of research on animals. What you may not know is that much of that research does not take place in the United States but in other countries around the world. And what I certainly did not know until this interview is that the requirements regarding animal care that are imposed on foreign research are actually LESS than those imposed on researchers in the US. Crazy, right?



Vanessa Shakib co-founded and co-directs Advancing Law for Animals, a non-profit law firm, where she develops impact litigation to further the interests of animals exploited in research and industrial food production. Her work has been featured by CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Guardian, Science Magazine, and more. Vanessa is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, and was awarded 2022-2023 SBA Adjunct Professor of the Year. She also continues to consult on a variety of legal matters through her private practice, Shakib Law, PC.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP105/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

Christine Ball-Blakely of the Animal Legal Defense Fund joins us to discuss the work of a coalition of organizations that has filed petitions for rulemaking regarding the unbelievable subsidization, with your tax money, of “biogas,” aka factory farm gas, which, as far as I am concerned, appears to be an out and out scam to prop up factory farming, hide its worst environmental harms and convince people that it is part of a sustainable future, when it is, in fact, one of the worst causes of climate change. It’s all outrageous but also flying way too far under the radar, as so many stories about the harms of factory farming tend to do, as they are science-y, deliberately hidden away and obfuscated, and, perhaps most important, definitely not what people want to hear. Fortunately, WE want to hear it, and Christine makes it all very comprehensible.



As a senior staff attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Christine works to end the exploitation and systemic abuse of farmed animals. She employs environmental laws to hold the factory farming industry—and the government agencies responsible for regulating it—accountable. She believes that, together, we can build a just legal system that prioritizes the protection of animals, the environment, and marginalized communities over private profit.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP104/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

Matthew Strugar joins us, once again, to talk about the many surprising legal issues that arise vis-a-vis bus ads. Specifically, we’ll be discussing White Coat Waste Project v Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, a relatively recent case that involves a rather odd bus ad policy that prohibits “advertising intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions.” In addition, however, we will be talking about several other cases and about how the law has developed regarding advertising in publicly owned spaces, how such advertising intersects with the First Amendment, what animal advocates can expect when they seek to get ads up on buses and in other publicly owned spaces and when they should fight back if they are prevented from getting their message out.



Matthew has been vegan since 1996 and a protest lawyer since 2004. He worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the PETA Foundation before starting his own firm in 2016.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP103/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

Ryan Shannon joins us to talk about Center for Biological Diversity v Haaland. The Center actually brings a lot of cases involving the Endangered Species Act, but this one is different. As you may know, if you pay attention to ESA litigation, a lot of it has to do with the Fish and Wildlife Service’s failure to get around to making decisions about whether to list certain species as threatened or endangered, which triggers the protections the act requires. In this case, rather than going species by species, the Center is trying to get the Service to fix this broken system whereby the Act is rendered ineffective through delay. In fact, if you delay long enough, species will just go extinct! I had no idea how bad this situation is and how important it is to rethink how to approach it, which is what this litigation attempts to do.



Ryan Shannon is a Senior Attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, where he works to defend the Endangered Species Act and protect imperiled species by securing and enforcing safeguards. Before joining the Center in 2017, Ryan was a legal fellow with Earthrise Law Center at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, where he earned his law degree.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP102/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

On this episode, I will be talking once again with Will Lowrey, who is heading up the relatively new legal advocacy organization, Animal Partisan. We will be talking about a Freedom of Information Act request, which has just recently become a lawsuit, regarding the FBI and its relationship to animal agribusiness as well as its attitudes toward animal rights activists. There is a lot to uncover here, and Will is doing his best to get to the bottom of things. In addition to this case, we will be discussing the other types of work Animal Partisan has been taking on, especially, but not limited to, the potential role of private individuals and lawyers in getting cruelty laws better enforced on behalf of animals enmeshed in agriculture. It’s a fascinating, and, I think, ultimately hopeful conversation about possibilities that exist for lawyers to change the world for animals.



Will Lowrey is the founder and Legal Counsel for Animal Partisan, a legal advocacy organization focused on challenging unlawful conduct in animal agriculture and research. Prior to his current role, Will spent three years as Legal Counsel for Animal Outlook, a national nonprofit farmed animal protection organization, where he divided his time between civil litigation and undercover investigations. Will has engaged in numerous lawsuits and enforcement actions against the government and industrial agriculture, including cases involving administrative law, false advertising, public nuisance, and animal cruelty. Previously, Will clerked in the Superior Court of New Jersey and also taught the first Animal Law course at the University of St. Thomas School. Before law school, Will worked for nearly two decades as a process engineer at a large financial corporation and in his free time, helped run several non-profits focused on a variety of animal issues. Will currently resides in central Virginia where he helps operate a micro sanctuary for formerly farmed animals, and writes animal-related fiction novels.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP101/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).