Advocating for the Voiceless: Delcianna Winders on the Evolution of Animal Law

“I went to law school specifically to further my animal advocacy—to become an animal lawyer.”

-Delcianna Winders

Delcianna J. Winders, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, entered the legal field with one focus: animal advocacy. Her career path reflects this purpose. In this interview, she shares her approach to teaching, enforcement, and systemic legal change.

Editor’s Note: This interview contains factual but graphic descriptions of animal treatment in industrial agriculture and other animal-use industries. Reader discretion is advised, especially for those sensitive to topics involving animal suffering or abuse.

Delcianna, thank you for joining us. To begin, could you introduce yourself in your own words—your journey into animal law, what motivates your work, and your current role at Vermont Law and Graduate School?

I went to law school specifically to further my animal advocacy—to become an animal lawyer. I was told, including by well-intended mentors, that this was not a viable career path. I’m grateful to have been able to prove them wrong and I aim to make the path a bit easier for tomorrow’s animal lawyers.

After graduating from law school nearly two decades ago, I clerked for Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Since finishing my clerkship, I have practiced animal law and nothing else. I’ve done this work in a variety of settings, including at an award-winning public interest firm, with Farm Sanctuary, and as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Captive Animal Law Enforcement with the PETA Foundation.

Just a few years after practicing I also began teaching animal law. I’ve now taught animal law more than two dozen times and at six different law schools. At first, teaching was the thing I did on the side, with practice as my more-than-full-time job. Now that’s flipped, with teaching as my more-than-full-time job and practice the thing I do on the side.

Training the next generation of animal law and policy advocates is the best contribution I can make. It’s incredibly rewarding to see my current and former students get legislation passed, win lawsuits, rehome abused and neglected animals in accredited sanctuaries, publish pathbreaking scholarship—and teach and train their own students. I think of the training I do like a coaching tree—I train individuals who then go on to train others, and on and on.

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Your path to animal law has taken you through impressive academic, nonprofit, and legal institutions. What inspired you to focus your career on animal law, and how did that evolve into your leadership at the Animal Law Program?

I loved animals as a kid. That’s not unusual—most kids love animals, though we’re taught early on to disassociate the animals in our storybooks from those on our plates. I was no different. I loved steak, hamburgers, ribs. My wake-up call came when two pigs who I had raised from babies—bottle-fed and kept in my bedroom, then in our backyard—were unexpectedly slaughtered. This sent me to the library to read everything I could about animals, animal welfare, animal rights, factory farming. I became an animal advocate and a vegan in short order.

Ultimately, I concluded that becoming a lawyer was the best way to further my animal advocacy. I like researching, writing, and arguing—the bread and plant-based butter of lawyers’ work. And I think it’s important to pursue a career that you enjoy, if only so that you don’t burn out. It also became increasingly clear to me that law plays an outsized role in the exploitation and suffering of animals. Animals—especially those we raise for food, which are the vast majority of animals under human control—are exempted from many of our laws. What’s more, our laws affirmatively facilitate animal exploitation, including through myriad direct and indirect subsidies. Transforming our legal system’s approach to nonhuman animals became my raison d’être.

By seizing a series of opportunities, I got to spend more and more of my time educating students about animal law and policy and training them in the skills they need to be effective animal advocates. Doing this allows me to exponentially increase my impact, so founding and directing the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, which trains future animal advocacy leaders, is a dream come true.

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You’ve earned several honors throughout your academic life—from the Dean’s Award at UC Santa Cruz to the Vanderbilt Medal at NYU Law. Could you share what those recognitions meant to you, and how they’ve influenced your professional outlook?

More than anything, the awards I’ve received have signaled to me growing support for animal protection. The Dean’s Award from UC Santa Cruz was “for outstanding achievement in Social Sciences,” and I focused my social sciences studies on animal issues including factory farming, the link between cruelty to animals and violence toward humans, and much more. The Vanderbilt Medal from NYU Law was “for outstanding contributions to the Law School,” and virtually all of those contributions were animal-law related. I reinvigorated our Animal Legal Defense Fund student chapter, hosting frequent and well-attended events with leading animal lawyers and scholars. I got the school to add an animal law course to the curriculum, which is still going strong. I organized a symposium, Confronting Barriers to the Courtroom for Animal Advocates, which was subsequently published in Animal Law Review. For my school—which didn’t have a single animal law offering or interested faculty member when I arrived—to recognize these contributions was very affirming.

Receiving the Richard Brooks Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award for significant contributions to the scholarly mission of Vermont Law and Graduate School through work that has helped to develop, enhance, or redirect in a meaningful way the field in which the faculty member works—in my case, animal law—this spring was similarly affirming. The award recognized my national and international scholarly reputation in animal law, contribution to the public understanding of animal law, and, perhaps most important to me, my scholarly impact, including practical impacts resulting in law and policy evolution. This distinction means a lot to me and to the field of animal law more broadly.

Finally, receiving the American Bar Association’s Excellence in the Advancement of Animal Law Award this spring was a career highlight for me. For almost twenty years I’ve worked to advance animal law in many different ways—litigation, regulatory work, legislation, program-building, and, of course, training tomorrow’s animal advocacy leaders. It’s very rewarding for all that work to be recognized, especially my work now at the helm of the fastest growing animal law and policy program in the world.

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You’ve held pivotal roles in organizations and institutions that shaped the modern conversation around animal welfare. How do you approach translating legal theory into real-world impact—particularly for captive wildlife and farmed animals?

It’s all about real-world impact for me. I’m grateful to those scholars who are helping us imagine what a totally different way of relating to nonhuman animals can look like and articulating the contours of a legal system for such a world. That’s important work, but it’s not my work. Vermont Law and Graduate School’s tagline is “Idealists. Realists. Catalysts for Change,” and that very much resonates with me. I am a consummate pragmatist, trying to figure out how I can help animals now, how I can push our law to evolve now.

For captive wildlife that has meant helping rehome well over 100 animals, including bears, chimpanzees, an elephant, lions, tigers, and more, from cruel and neglectful facilities to reputable sanctuaries while simultaneously setting precedent to ban cruel but routine practices. It has also meant helping pass laws to ban various forms of animal exploitation, including retail sales of animals as pets and traveling wild animal acts.

For farmed animals, it has meant challenging U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) policies and regulations that lead to untold suffering. For example, I’ve worked for well over a decade to challenge the USDA’s policy of allowing downed pigs—pigs who are too sick or injured to stand or walk—to enter the food supply so long as they can be forced to walk to their deaths, meaning that these animals are kicked, excessively electroshocked, dragged—whatever it takes—all while fully conscious.

And over the past five years I’ve worked to challenge the USDA’s efforts to accelerate slaughter to facilitate the raising and killing of millions more animals every year while endangering animals, who are more likely to not be stunned before having their throats slit, more likely to miss the blade intended to slit their throats, and thus more likely to be dropped into scald tanks intended to remove hair or feathers from dead animals while still fully conscious.

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You directed the world’s first law school clinic focused on farmed animal advocacy. What were some of the challenges and breakthroughs you encountered in that pioneering effort, and how has it influenced the structure of similar programs today?

Developing and running the Animal Law Litigation Clinic, which focused entirely on farmed animal advocacy, taught me a lot about the value of hands-on, real-world animal law training. Up to that point I’d practiced full-time while teaching on the side. This gave me the opportunity to holistically combine teaching and practice—to teach through practice, which truly is the best way to teach in my view. It’s so rewarding to see things that students learned in their first year of law school in, say, Civil Procedure, finally click into place in the context of a case they themselves are litigating. You can almost see the light bulb go off. And nothing beats facilitating a student’s first oral argument before they’ve even graduated from law school.

I knew from this experience that I wanted the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School to have an emphasis on experiential learning. Thankfully, that’s completely consistent with VLGS’s brand. For example, when I arrived, the school already offered about eight clinics—including five environmental law clinics, most of which have done animal-law-related work—as well as a robust externship program. In fact, VLGS was one of the first law schools to allow students to earn a full semester of academic credit in an off-campus apprenticeship.

One of the first things I did when I arrived here was get to work establishing the Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic, which empowers students to become effective advocates for animals while also developing skills that can be applied in a variety of arenas throughout their careers and gaining hands-on experience with real-world matters—all while providing hundreds of hours of pro bono service and advancing law and policy change for farmed animals. I also worked to expand externship offerings in animal law and policy. VLGS has a robust alumni network of animal advocates, including folks in leadership at virtually all the national animal protection organizations as well as others who have started their own organizations and private practices dedicated to animal advocacy. Connecting current students with these alumni for mentoring, internships, and even jobs is unbelievably powerful.

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Your work spans administrative law, litigation, and regulatory reform. In what ways do you see the Animal Welfare Act evolving—or needing to evolve—in order to meet contemporary ethical and ecological demands?

I can go on and on about ways in which the Animal Welfare Act (AWA)—and the implementation of it—needs to evolve if it is to fulfill its stated purpose of ensuring humane care and treatment of animals used for experimentation, exhibition, and the pet trade. Indeed, I have published extensively on this topic.

Enforcement is probably the single biggest problem with the AWA—and with many animal laws. You can have the most exquisitely crafted animal protection law, but if it isn’t enforced, it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. The situation with the AWA is particularly dire. Congress tasked the USDA with implementing the AWA (over that agency’s objections). Over the course of decades the USDA Office of Inspector General has issued audit report after audit report after audit report condemning the agency’s inadequate enforcement of the AWA, concluding, for example, that enforcement is “too lenient and may not serve as an adequate deterrent for violators, especially in cases involving egregious violations.”

In the shorter term, establishing a specific unit within the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Division that is dedicated to animal welfare would be a huge step in the right direction. Currently the Wildlife & Marine Resources Section within the Environment & Natural Resources Division (ENRD) is tasked with civil AWA enforcement. However, this is a defensive section—meaning its primary mandate is to defend the federal government against lawsuits. Affirmative lawsuits on behalf of animals are brought if and when there is docket capacity—which is rare. In 2020, the Department of Justice brought the first-ever case civilly enforcing the AWA against Jeff Lowe of Tiger King infamy, resulting in more than 100 animals being rehomed. However, the DOJ hasn’t brought a single civil enforcement action since last fall and brought only two in the last seventeen months. In addition, the ENRD’s Counselor for Animal Welfare Matters position has been vacant for over four years.

Longer term, I firmly believe that we should have a dedicated Animal Protection Agency. Currently the USDA is tasked with implementing most animal protection laws, including the Animal Welfare Act, the Horse Protection Act, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, and the Twenty-Eight Hour Law. And it has done a poor job of enforcing all these laws—across administrations, across decades. This perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise. The agency’s primary mandate is to promote and support American agriculture—including, of course, animal agriculture. It describes the community it is supposed to regulate as “customers” to whom it provides “services.” An agency whose sole mandate was animal protection would obviate these conflicts.

In addition, the AWA should be amended to allow for citizen suits. All our key environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, authorize citizens to bring suit to enjoin unlawful activity. The AWA contains no such provision. Allowing citizens to supplement the government’s enforcement could go a long way to getting help to the animals in the worst circumstances. It can’t possibly replace government enforcement—this litigation can be extremely expensive, for starters—but it would at least serve as a check.

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Legal scholarship is a major part of your work. How do your published pieces aim to shift legal and public conversations, and what kinds of systemic change are you hoping to catalyze through your academic writing?

My scholarship—like everything I do—is very practical. I break things down to illuminate systemic failings and then propose solutions to address those failings. For example, one of my first law review articles, Administrative License Renewal and Due Process—A Case Study, critiqued the USDA’s practice of automatically renewing Animal Welfare Act licenses, even in the face of egregious violations. I pointed out why this practice was unlawful, critiqued the USDA’s defense of it, and detailed the animal suffering that it was causing. Following this article and a series of lawsuits that I was involved in, the USDA amended its regulations to condition license renewal on compliance. There is still work to be done—it appears that the USDA isn’t following its own regulations—but this was a step forward. I’ve similarly critiqued the USDA’s efforts to speed up slaughter, demonstrating the harms this inflicts on animals, consumers, environmental justice communities, the environment, and workers. This is an issue that is very much alive, as the USDA recently announced plans to accelerate slaughter and we expect a proposed rule to formalize this any day.

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In your current role, how are you shaping the next generation of animal advocates through experiential learning, curriculum design, and clinic-based approaches?

I focus on training tomorrow’s animal advocacy leaders in substantive law and policy as well as skills. Both are critically important. More and more students want to advocate for animals, which is great, but we must ensure that they go out into the world equipped to do the best possible job. That’s what our robust animal law and policy curriculum aims to do. Students take a range of classes from leading experts—from our broad Animals and the Law survey course to niche classes like Undercover Investigations of Animal Operations to experiential courses like the Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic and the Animal Law and Policy Practicum. Students come to VLGS wanting to work on a wide range of animal protection issues—animals used for experimentation, biodiversity, captive wildlife, companion animals, farmed animals, and more. All of it is important. I see my role as supporting each student individually and helping them craft a path that fulfills their animal advocacy goals. This includes coursework, of course, but also identifying the best externship opportunities for them, facilitating connections to other experts, supporting them in extracurricular activities like moot court competitions, presentations, media interviews, and more. You’re going to graduate from VLGS with the tools and skills needed to fulfill your animal advocacy goals—and with a lifelong community of support. Once I have a student, they are forever in my mentoring circle. I regularly hear from people who I taught five, ten, even fifteen years ago.

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While animal law is often seen as a niche, its implications touch on global sustainability, public health, and ethics. What role do you believe animal law can play in broader legal frameworks that seek to ensure more just, sustainable, and humane systems?

Because animals are everywhere in our lives—even if they’re deliberately hidden away much of the time—virtually every area of the law impacts them. In a way, all law is animal law and animal law is all law. This is especially true in the context of global sustainability, public health, and ethics. The well-being of animals, humans, and the planet is inextricably intertwined.

For example, an estimated 99% of all farmed animals in the U.S. are on factory farms—industrialized facilities that warehouse animals by the thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. These animals are crammed together so tightly that they often can’t even turn around or spread their limbs. To facilitate such crowding, they are subjected to an array of mutilations without any painkillers—their teeth, toes, testicles, tails, and other body parts are cut off, for example. Hundreds of millions of baby animals are killed because they are useless to the industries they are a byproduct of—male chicks hatched in the egg-laying industry, male calves born to dairy cows, “non-viable” (sick, weak, or injured) piglets.

This model is, of course, horrific for the animals who spend their short lives in these conditions. But it’s also environmentally devastating—and devastating for those who live near these facilities, who tend to be Black and brown people.

U.S. factory farms produce more than twice as much manure as the entire human population—and that manure isn’t treated the way human waste is. Instead, it’s stored in massive open-air cesspools that are often unlined. These cesspools sometimes burst or spill, dumping thousands or even millions of gallons of waste into waterbodies, causing algae blooms and sometimes killing tens of thousands of aquatic animals. They also leak into and pollute groundwater, tainting drinking water and contributing to a host of human health issues, some of them fatal.

Factory farms also emit a slew of air pollutants. A peer-reviewed study found that factory farm air pollution causes more than 12,000 deaths every year in the U.S. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 14.5% of all human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions come from livestock supply chains, including emissions of methane, whose global warming effects are twenty times those of carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, whose global warming impacts are 300 times those of carbon dioxide.

Then there’s the zoonotic disease risk. Factory farms are the perfect breeding grounds for zoonoses. Experts have been trying to sound the alarm about the serious zoonotic disease risks intensive agriculture poses for years.

This system also harms workers and consumers. Really, it harms everyone except the small handful of multi-billion-dollar, multinational corporations that control these industries.

Enacting and enforcing laws that force them to internalize the many costs they’ve been allowed to externalize for so long, and that require more sustainable and humane approaches, will improve life for everyone.

These interconnections are the most obvious in the context of factory farming, but they are everywhere—in the fur industry, the wildlife trade, the captive wildlife business, and even the pet trade, to name a few other examples.

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Looking ahead, what are your hopes for the future of animal law—both in legal education and public policy? Are there any emerging areas or initiatives you’re particularly excited about or actively developing?

I’m really optimistic about the future of animal law—and that’s largely because of my students. To see so many passionate, driven, and committed advocates hone their skills and then go out and apply them successfully is tremendously rewarding.

Animal law is growing around the world—one of my former students, for example, taught Pakistan’s first animal law course. And frankly, many countries are far ahead of the U.S. in terms of animal protection policy, having recognized fundamental rights for at least some animals and instituted at least minimal protections for farmed animals.

There’s a lot of work to be done still, but there are more animal advocates—and better trained animal advocates—than ever before. And we’re just getting started.

One emergent issue that we’ve worked on a bit but recently received funding to dive into in earnest is aquaculture. I’ve mentioned factory farming, which impacts more than ten billion land animals in the U.S. every year. But that pales in comparison to the number of fish suffering in what are effectively oceanic factory farms. We don’t even know the number of animals impacted because they are so underregulated—and because when we do measure them, it’s by weight rather than individual animal—but it’s almost certainly in the trillions. Fish factory farms are horrific for the animals they confine, who are unable to move around or engage in their most basic behaviors and are eaten alive by sea lice, and also for wild fish, who are captured by the ton to feed their captive counterparts (with an extremely inefficient protein conversion ratio) and whose populations are also imperiled when farmed fish escape—as they often do.

The Animal Law and Policy Institute will be working in collaboration with the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and other VLGS centers to combat the expansion of this catastrophic industry. As in all of the Animal Law and Policy’s work, the animals will be centered, and we will partner with other animal advocacy organizations.

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If you were to write your bio in your own words, what would you say? What legacy do you hope to leave? 

Delcianna J. Winders is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at VLGS. Professor Winders previously taught at Lewis & Clark Law School, where she directed the world’s first law school clinic dedicated to farmed animal advocacy. She served as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at the PETA Foundation, was the first Academic Fellow of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, and was a visiting scholar at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Her primary interests are in animal law and administrative law. She has also taught animal law at Tulane University School of Law and Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

Her work has appeared in the Denver Law Review, Florida State Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, NYU Law Review, and the Animal Law Review. Winders has also published extensively in the popular press, including The Hill, National Geographic, Newsweek, New York Daily News, Salon, USA Today, and numerous other outlets.

Winders received her B.A. in Legal Studies with highest honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she was named a Regents’ Scholar and received the Dean’s Award for outstanding achievement in Social Sciences, and her J.D. from NYU School of Law, where she was awarded the Vanderbilt Medal for outstanding contributions to the law school, named as a Robert McKay Scholar, and served as the Senior Notes Editor of the NYU Law Review. Following law school, Winders clerked for the Hon. Martha Craig Daughtrey on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and practiced animal law in a variety of settings.

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“I think of the training I do like a coaching tree—I train individuals who then go on to train others, and on and on.”

-Delcianna Winders

Links

• Connect with Delcianna Winders via LinkedIn.
• Visit Delcianna Winders’ profile at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

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• What role should the law play in protecting animals?
• How can legal education better support advocacy work?
• Which areas of animal welfare need stronger enforcement or reform?

Alignment with the UN SDGs

• Promotes sustainable agriculture (SDG 2)
• Advances justice and strong institutions (SDG 16)
• Supports responsible consumption and production (SDG 12)
• Encourages life on land protection (SDG 15)

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