The Animal Advocate
Welcome to The Animal Advocate, the podcast for animal lovers who want to become effective animal advocates. Whether you want to start your own nonprofit, inspire your community to adopt more animal-friendly practices, or push for legislative change, this podcast is here to arm you with the knowledge and inspiration you need. With over 20 years of experience in animal law and advocacy, your host, Penny Ellison, is a long-time devoted animal advocate. From teaching Animal Law and Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Law School to serving on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania SPCA and founding the nonprofit Hand2Paw, Penny's mission is to educate animal lovers like you to advocate for greater protections for animals, to inspire individual action to protect habitat, and help you make ethical choices every day. If you're eager to learn and make a meaningful impact, feeling frustrated by the current political climate, and wondering how to make a difference, let The Animal Advocate be your guide. Join us each episode to learn about topics like what makes a strong or weak animal cruelty law, the different types of animal shelters, environmental practices that impact the lives of wild animals, and practical advice on things to consider before starting an animal rescue. Be sure to check out our website, www.animaladvocacyacademy.com, for more resources on how to be a better animal advocate and to learn more about our online courses. Remember – you don't need any credentials to be an advocate. Anyone can be the positive change you want to see! Compassion is great but compassionate action is infinitely better.
Episodes
Does trap-neuter-return (TNR) reduce feral and community cat populations? The research says it can, but only when a program sterilizes enough cats, in a concentrated enough area, for long enough. Sterilize a few cats here and a few there, and new cats keep moving in.
TNR is also where caring about cats and caring about wildlife collide. Cats hunt even when they're well fed, and one bird conservation group ...
Looking for a job helping animals that doesn't require a veterinary degree? Animal law, cruelty investigation, grassroots organizing, and shelter communications are all paid careers in animal advocacy.
Some pay well and some don't, and entry-level animal law jobs are competitive. Knowing who hires, and who's a good fit, makes the search easier.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Wha...
What does it mean to be an animal advocate, and how do you get started in animal advocacy? In this episode, Penny explains how ordinary people can help animals through volunteering, fostering, rescue work, professional skills, community advocacy, and legislative advocacy.
Being an animal advocate doesn't take a law degree, a microphone, or a new nonprofit. It takes 4 moves: pick something specific, figure ...
Ask Kelly Motter what fostering a dog is like and she'll tell you about the moment a dog decides they're safe. Sometimes it's the first tail wag. Once it was a terrified boxer mix who sat with her on the kitchen floor for half an hour before he finally put his whole weight against her and let go. Two years in, she says it happens with every single dog, and she still can't describe the feeling.
Most people ...
A USDA licensed breeder can legally keep a dog in a cage six inches longer than her body, for her entire life.
A puppy mill is a commercial breeding operation where the needs of the dogs aren't met. Size doesn't settle it, which is one reason "just ban puppy mills" fails as legisl...
Somewhere today, a shelter director is going to be told online that she likes killing animals. She doesn't. She runs the one shelter in her city that isn't allowed to say no — to any stray, any surrender, any animal too sick or too dangerous for anyone else to take. And she still gets most of them out alive.
Roughly 5.8 million dogs and cats entered U.S. shelters last year. That number has barely moved in 5 years, and BJ Adkins concluded that what animal welfare is doing about it isn't working.
After years as a foster, she founded Animals Angels and started building a prevention netwo...
On April 25th, a man in Fortuna, California sent a shelter worker a photo of a dog named Zora on a leash, with two words: "Zora adopted." Days later, Zora's body was recovered from a burial site behind Miranda's Rescue. She had never been adopted. She had been shot.
Miranda's Rescue was a registere...
Philadelphia just did something New York still won't: it banned horse-drawn carriages.
Earlier this month, Philadelphia banned horse-drawn carriages for good. Penny helped get that bill passed, and in this episode she tells the inside story of how it got done, then turns to the harder question: why...
We spend a lot of time on this show talking about problems that need to be fixed. This episode does the opposite. It's a roundup of recent wins for animals, most of them from this year, on the issues we come back to again and again, and most of them happening at the city and county level where your voice carries the most weight.
When a dog lives outside 24/7, the first instinct for a lot of animal lovers is to report it as animal cruelty. But what happens when humane law enforcement shows up, finds food, water, and shelter, and determines there's no violation to act on? The dog is still outside. They need more to be comfortable and healthy, mentally and physically. But ...
Most animal welfare organizations are 501(c)(3) nonprofits. But in this episode, we talk about why advocates focused on law and policy should think about starting a 501(c)(4) instead. If you find all those IRS code section references confusing (or boring), this episode will clarify th...
Should rescues and shelters be importing dogs from other states when local shelters are full and dogs here are being euthanized for space? It feels like there should be an obvious answer. Help the dogs already here first.
But the obvious answer misses something important...
When most people decide to get a dog, they start with a picture in their head — a breed, a look, a particular idea of what the dog at the end of the leash should be. That picture is filling America's shelters. Hundreds of thousands of dogs are euthanized for space every year, not because they're sick or dangerous, but because the buyers who coul...
Spay/neuter access is one of the most effective tools for reducing shelter intake, but in most states it's chronically underfunded. Five states have figured out how to change that, and the way they did it is more politically achievable than you might expect.
In this epis...
What really separates humans from other animals? It's one of the oldest questions we've asked — and the answer keeps changing. Tool use was supposed to be uniquely human. Then we watched crows bend wire into hooks and octopuses carry coconut shells as portable shelter. Language was supposed to be uniquely human. Then bonobos, whales and other an...
When animals are dying in shelters, the demand for a law to stop it is completely understandable. But passing legislation that tells shelters when they can and can't euthanize is a lot more complicated than it sounds — and in the wrong conditions, it can hurt the very animals it's meant to help.
Somewhere in your community, someone sees an injured stray dog and dials for help — and there's no one there to answer. Municipal animal control has been structurally underfunded for decades, and the nonprofits quietly filling that gap are reaching a breaking point.
Philadelphia's City Council just voted 15 to 0 to pass a 3-year moratorium on unlicensed dog breeding and puppy sales — a bill that Penny Ellison helped draft and testified in favor of in council hearings. In this episode, she walks through exactly how it happened and what advocates everywhere can learn from it.
For nearly a decade, one Philadelphia advocate has worked to end horse-drawn carriage rides in the city—not with outrage, but with strategy.
In this episode, I speak with Janet White, founder of Carriage Horse Freedom, about how she moved from street protests to drafting legislation, building scientific credibility, and proposing a viable replacement model ...
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