We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joyce Tischler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Joyce thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

Admittedly, I’m different. I’m part of a small, quirky social movement that works to protect the lives and interests of nonhuman animals. Some people assume that I don’t like humans. That’s not true. I like humans just fine, but I see suffering where others look away and I want to help that nonhuman community, precisely because most other humans would never think to.

I’ve spent 45 years trying to serve the needs of animals through the use of the legal system. Starting a few years after I became a lawyer, I co-founded and built a nonprofit organization called the Animal Legal Defense Fund and now, I am on the faculty of the Center for Animal Law Studies, where I teach a full semester course on Industrial Animal Agriculture Law. I teach law students about the meat, dairy and egg industries, which raise and kill 10 billion animals each year in the U.S., and 80 billion worldwide. Most of those animals are raised in massive concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), aka factory farms, and then sent to slaughterhouses. These animals’ lives are filled with suffering and their deaths are violent and terrifying. That is the underserved community that I serve.

I also serve on the Board of Directors of Animal Place, a farmed animal sanctuary in Northern California, and I visit there to spend time with and get to know the animals they have rescued. I call those visits “food for my soul.” On one such visit, I met a large male turkey named Pistachio. We sat together on the floor of his barn for a while and then, Pistachio climbed onto my outstretched legs, perching himself on my lap, seemingly unafraid of me, which is unusual for a commercially raised turkey. I massaged his head and neck, then, under his wings, and then, I rubbed his belly. He closed his eyes and enjoyed all of it. There we were, two very different species, basking in each other’s company. Turkeys have taught me that they are curious, affectionate and delightfully funny beings, and I cringe when I see the bodies of turkeys in the frozen section of a grocery store..

Joyce, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve felt a need to protect other animals. When I was old enough to walk around the block, I was bringing home injured birds, and cats who may or may not have been lost. My family adopted a sheltie (dog), who I named Princess Fox, and she was my constant companion. I loved her dearly and I believe that she loved me back. She was my gateway animal, the one who taught me that animals are individuals with distinct personalities.

The summer of 1968 was transformative for me in a different way. I was 15 years old; the highly controversial Vietnam War was raging, and I spent that summer working for Senator Eugene McCarthy, who campaigned against the war and ran (unsuccessfully) to be the Democratic candidate for President. I stood on street corners, arguing with middle-aged men about the U.S. presence in Vietnam and learning the essentials of how to be a political activist. For the first time, I met lawyers who wanted to change the world and I wanted to be just like them. The two themes: the desire to protect animals and the goal of becoming a social activist lawyer would come together a decade later.

In college, I continued to be a social activist, learning about and working in various movements: feminism, Civil Rights, prison reform, and farm workers’ rights. I volunteered and taught poetry at a local men’s jail, and attended anti-war marches and demonstrations, At the same time, I worked with a small group of people to provide care, treatment and placement for stray cats found on the college campus. In law school, I read Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, and graduated from being an animal lover to becoming an animal rights advocate. I also read an article called “Should Trees Have Standing?” by USC law professor, Christopher Stone, in which he argued that the natural environment (trees, mountains, streams, etc.) should be accorded legal rights in order to protect them from exploitation and destruction. I started thinking more deeply about the new concept of developing legal rights for animals and wrote a law review article describing why and how animals should have legal rights.

In 1979, I was living in San Francisco and working at a law firm. I was introduced to Larry Kessenick, another lawyer interested in animal rights, and the two of us held monthly meetings in which we invited lawyers and law students who shared our interest to meet and discuss the problems that animals faced and the laws that were intended to offer them protections. Eventually, we formed a nonprofit organization, now called the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), and began to take on lawsuits.

In March of 1981, we received a phone call on a Thursday, about the continuing slaughter of feral burros (donkeys) at the Naval Air Weapons Station, located in the Mohave Desert in California. At night, the burros were coming onto the airplane landing strip, seeking water and heat. Burros are gray and hard to detect at night; thus, they could down a plane that was attempting to land. We understood the problem, but questioned the solution: hiring sharp shooters to kill burros each weekend until approximately 5,000 were dead. Why not build a fence around the air strip? Five hundred burros had been killed the prior weekend, so I prepared the necessary pleadings (legal filings) and went into court the next day, securing a temporary restraining order (TRO). This halted the shootings until a full hearing could be held. For the next eight months, we negotiated with the Navy and finally reached a settlement: no more burros were killed. Burros who were moving too close to the airstrip were humanely removed and adopted out. As a result of that lawsuit, ALDF received a grant of $6,000 and I became its first full-time employee. I spent the next 25 years as its executive director, working to build the agency and the nascent animal law movement.

Today, ALDF is a large agency that conducts litigation to protect animals, drafts legislation and does lobbying, runs a program to assist law students who wish to practice animal law, and partners with attorneys who offer pro bono services for animal protection efforts. As the animal law movement has grown in the U.S., there are now other nonprofit groups doing litigation and legal work to protect animals; a basic animal law course is taught at most American Bar Association (ABA) accredited law schools, and there are many books on the subject and law student support groups. Attorneys have formed animal law committees and sections within the national ABA, as well as in state and local bar associations. And, animal law is now being practiced in countries in many other parts of the world. I feel excited and truly humbled to see how this idea has grown and flourished.

I have moved on to the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School, where I teach law students what I have learned and help them to be effective and successful as animal law advocates. I love their passion and am glad that I can be of some help to them in establishing their careers. I’m part of the first generation of animal lawyers and we have laid a foundation for the next generation to build on.

We have learned that trying to change how our society treats other animals is a Sisyphean task, yet there have been victories and progress. We have stopped certain hunting seasons, and placed a moratorium on the hunting of mountain lions in California. We have used the law to rescue scores of animals who have been abused. Along with other activists, we have strengthened all of the state anti-cruelty laws and have encouraged stronger enforcement of those laws, meaning that animals receive greater legal protections. Animal lawyers challenged a slaughterhouse in Southern California that was torturing downed cows (cows too lame or sick to walk into the slaughterhouse), leading to the largest recall of beef in U.S. history and the closure of the slaughterhouse. There are many more stories to tell; they can be found online, and in print books and articles.

There is a concept in Hebrew called “tikkun olam.” It means that the world is broken and it is our job to repair it. I am a really lucky person, because I’ve been able to do the work that I was meant to do and repair what I could. Others will come after me to carry on this work.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

Funding a nonprofit corporation is quite different from funding a for-profit business, and law schools don’t teach us how to do that, so I had to teach myself how to raise the money we needed to build ALDF and hire employees. I lived on credit cards and a very low income for the first few years.
Then, I discovered the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), a national group that teaches people how to raise money for nonprofits. AFP has local chapters all over the U.S. It was a godsend! I attended their conferences and learned about the basics of nonprofit fundraising: direct mail and direct marketing (all of those annoying letters and emails that you get asking you for money), major donor development (making friends with people who can afford to give much larger sums of money), estate planning (asking people to put your nonprofit into their wills), foundation grants, and other sources to build essential income and become a financially stable organization. I was assigned a mentor who worked with me for a year. As I learned about each of the fundraising techniques, I got better at fundraising and was able to bring in more money. Our first annual budget in 1981 was $12,000. By the time I “retired” from being the executive director in 2006, our annual budget was $6 million.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Throughout my career, I’ve been thankful that I am tenacious by nature. Tenacity has carried me through a lot of difficulties. In the earliest years, when I had barely enough money to live on, it never occurred to me to stop doing this animal advocacy work. My attitude was that the animals needed protection and if I didn’t do that work, who would? And, when I would lose a lawsuit, as angry and sad as I felt, I would tell myself to get back to work. Other animals were suffering and it was my job to keep going.

Also, I’m shy and introverted, so speaking in public was daunting at first. I doubted that I was smart enough, that I was articulate enough, or that I could find the right words to convince other humans that animals need and deserve our protection. Once again, my response to myself was that if I didn’t do it, who would? So, I put aside my self doubt (fake it ’till you make it?) and over time, as I spoke in public, I got better at it and became more comfortable with speaking. Today, it’s easy for me to step in front of a mic and assume that the audience will like me and that I can reach them with my message.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://law.lclark.edu/centers/animal_law_studies/about_us/
• Instagram: @calsanimallaw
• Facebook: CALSAnimalLaw
• Linkedin: center-for-animal-law-studies
• Twitter: @CALSAnimalLaw
• Youtube: CALS YouTube Channel
• Other: My Center for Animal Law Studies bio: https://law.lclark.edu/live/profiles/3430-joyce-tischler

  My fabulous daughter, Margeve Horgan, https://canvasrebel.com/meet-margeve-horgan/

Image Credits

Photos with cow and chicken were taken by a friend at Animal Place Sanctuary in Grass Valley, CA. The hen nestled in my arm was named Flame. She was blind and was rescued from a commercial facility.

The professional photos I sent to you separately were taken by In Her Image.