Animal Law Our Hen House Podcasts

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).

Larissa Liebmann, a Senior Staff Attorney with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, joins me to discuss ALDF v Becerra, in which the plaintiffs are suing the Food and Drug Administration regarding its authorization of the use of a drug known as Experior that is being administered to cattle in spite of potential harms to the animals, the environment, and to people who either work at feedlots or eat the flesh of those cows. The purported purpose of this drug is to reduce the impact on the climate of the ammonia found in cow feces. We are likely to be seeing more and more of this type of greenwashing, and it is dangerous for many reasons.



Larissa Liebmann is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, where she challenges cruel and environmentally destructive industrial animal agricultural practices, with an emphasis on the federal government’s subsidization of industrial animal agriculture through loans, lax regulation, or approving new animal drugs that perpetuate extreme confinement. Prior to joining the Animal Legal Defense Fund, she worked for Waterkeeper Alliance, combating the powerful fossil fuel industry, focusing on the destructive impacts that fossil fuels have on water resources.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP100/

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).

Civil rights attorney Matthew Strugar joins me this week to talk about a case in Washington DC involving the rights of animal rights activists protesting the sale of foie gras at two prominent restaurants in that city. Our conversation will involve the controversial use of anti-stalking laws to limit protests as well as the successful use of DC’s anti-SLAPP law to defend the right to protest. Both of these statutes, or ones similar to them, can be found in jurisdictions all over the country, and this is therefore an important topic for anyone interested in the right to protest, as well as, more specifically, anyone interested in the welfare of the ducks and geese who suffer in the production of this gruesome so-called delicacy.



Matthew Strugar 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 Los Angeles in 2016 which specializes in civil rights, prisoners’ rights, police misconduct, and protester defense, while maintaining animal law as an as important aspect of the practice.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP99/

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, we have something a bit different. I will be talking with Kristina Bergsten, who is the owner and founder of The Animal Law Firm, a Colorado law firm with a multi-state practice. For those of you who are graduating from Law School, or just looking to change your career and wondering whether you can make a living doing animal law, Kristina is here to tell you the answer is a resounding yes. Her firm specializes primarily in companion animal issues which, of course, are important and often underserved in and of themselves, but also, in Kristina’s eyes, are part of the process of waking people, and the legal system, up to the idea that animals matter and the people who care about them matter too. This was a fascinating conversation and I’m sure it will be inspiring to many of you.



Kristina Bergsten is the owner and founder of The Animal Law Firm, a Colorado law firm with a multi state practice. She started practicing animal law in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before moving to Colorado and, eventually, founding the firm, which specializes in matters such as dog bite defense, suing police departments when cops shoot dogs, pet custody, veterinary malpractice, and others. She will be joining me, right after this.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP98/

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 of the podcast, I will be talking, once again, with Katherine Meyer, who is the Director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic, about a recent decision in a case handled by the clinic entitled New England Anti Vivisection Society (now known as Rise for Animals v Elizabeth Goldentyre). This case involves the provision of the Animal Welfare Act that requires, or pretends to require, psychological enrichment for primates who are covered by the Act, such as those languishing in laboratories. This is an interesting area of law, but this interview goes from interesting to basically unbelievable as we hear the story of how, under Professor Meyer’s guidance, students at the clinic did some digging and managed to uncover shocking conduct by the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the department within the United States Department of Agriculture that administers the Act. We will also discuss the enormous value of clinical education for law students.



Katherine Meyer is the Director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic, where she teaches students how to become advocates for animals in captivity and the wild. Prior to joining Harvard Law School, for 26 years she was a partner in the public interest law firm Meyer & Glitzenstein, described by the Washingtonian Magazine as “the most effective public interest law firm in Washington, D.C.” She has extensive federal and state court litigation experience in a variety of public interest fields, including Animal, Environmental, Administrative, Public Health, Consumer Protection, and Open Government law.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP97/

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).