The Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic addresses animal issues in the fight for environmental protection. Listen to Laura Fox chat with host Laura Ireland about the Clinic, which is part of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, and the accomplishments of the year.
Announcer
This podcast is a production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment, a Vermont law and graduate school.
Ireland
Hello and welcome to this episode of Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm Laura Ireland, associate director of the Animal Land Policy Institute here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. I'm excited to be talking with one of our fabulous field professors, Laura Fox, who's also the director of the Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic. The clinic was founded in the fall of 2022, and Laura has already led the clinic and all of the student clinicians to an incredible number of accomplishments.
Welcome to the podcast, Laura.
Fox
Thanks. Thanks for having me. Laura.
Ireland
Can you just tell listeners a little bit about your background and how your professional life led you really back to Fields Yes. And see your graduate.
Fox
Yeah, I'm a proud swan. I graduated VLS with a JD and a Master's in Environmental Law and Policy, and I came in with a Master's in Philosophy that I tailored to the study of animal welfare and rights, ethical theories. So I knew when I came in to law school that I wanted to use the law to advance animal interests. And I saw environmental law as a good tool or mechanism for that. So that's what really drove me to Vermont Law and Graduate School. I sought internships and externship in the field. One of my first jobs with with DOJ in their Environmental Natural Resource Division, challenging wildlife trafficking violations and violations of the Endangered Species Act. Then after law school, I went back to my philosophical roots, where I taught philosophy and again introduced students to concepts of animal rights and animal welfare, ethical theories and in biomedical ethics. Talk about the ethics of testing on animals and the like.
But I also was trying to get a job in a full-time animal advocacy, and I landed at the Humane Society of the United States, worked in their litigation department to develop cases to advance their various missions from shutting down puppy mills to fighting in factory farms. And while there, I got to teach again at George Mason Law School, and when the opportunity arose to merge both of my passions of animal advocacy litigation and legal tools and teaching, and to come here back to Vermont Law Graduate School to direct the Farm to Animal Advocacy Clinic, I jumped on that opportunity. And so here I am.
Ireland
Well, you're back. Yeah, Yeah, I know a lot of people don't realize that. You know, Vermont Law School was actually one of the very first schools to offer an animal rights law class. You know, the animal Society's been active since the mid-nineties, and you were really active as a student. So I think we have a lot of amazing graduates out there, too, just like you kind of we're able to. So we the animal law into your studies and, you know, your professional life. Obviously, being the director of the Farm Demo Advocacy Clinic, you know, pulls in a lot of your interest. Why are you so passionate about advocating for farm animals and what really drew you to this line of work?
Fox
Yeah, thanks for that question, Laura. So in the U.S., we raise roughly 9 billion land animals, and that's not even including aquatic animals. Right? So the scale of suffering is immense and the majority of those animals are grown on what we consider factory farms or CFO's. Concentrated animal feeding operations. And those conditions are just horrendous. Animals are confined in small spaces for the majority of their lives.
Not to set foot on, you know, soil even. And so that immense suffering and the ability to direct my work in a way that helps to alleviate some of that suffering on a massive scale, I think is what really sort of motivates me and makes me passionate about this work and farm to animal advocacy. The other driver is just it's intersectionality.
So addressing animals issues and farmed animals welfare might help mitigate against the environmental harms associated with those practices. Right. So you can imagine raising hundreds of thousands of chickens or thousands of pigs in a very concentrated area, produces a lot of waste. And the environmental harms that happen around those facilities also its impact on climate change freight that we use to produce as much greenhouse gas as well as the animals. And then there's other societal issues that intersect with animal rearing, such as public health and zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance. Even workers rights. The workers in a lot of these facilities and slaughterhouses are immigrants or minority of other marginalized in the society as well. And then there are also some other societal and environmental justice issues. I'm driven by this notion of improving how we treat animals in this system will likely lead to improvements in these other areas. And now in the clinic I get to expose new students to those issues and put them on the path to create that change.
Ireland
Now, that's great. It's great that students get to learn on these real-world issues. And I know the last couple of years you've had a lot of great experiences and led these students on a lot of great cases. What are some of the matters that you work on with the students?
Fox
Yeah, the advocacy tools that we try to avail our students to in the clinic are vast. We try to pull on all the tools in the legal toolbox from litigation legislation, regulation or just general advocacy movement building and coalition building and the like. And so I tried to be pretty intentional in the selecting of matters and picking things that would expose students to that wide array and not just limit them to one particular tool such as litigation. So one of the first things the students worked on was crafting language for a bill that was to be introduced in U.S. Congress and actually was by Senator Cory Booker. And this bill was the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act, and students worked on provisions related to animal transport and slaughter line speed. And I think the students were very excited to see their work be incorporated into federal legislation to be introduced.
Now, it's a long way and a long path for that to actually get passed. And so then the students got to continue working on that by trying to get pieces of that legislation into the farm bill. So, again, it's just an exciting opportunity for students to be involved in real-world work at the state level. Students were involved in fighting the permitting of a massive factory farm gas project in Delaware and that biogas facility would truck in and process 250,000 tons of poultry waste each year, and that amount of waste would require over 3 million birds to produce it.
And this was happening in an already overburdened environmental justice community. So students drafted and submitted comments to the regulatory entity that was in charge of permitting that facility, outlining the deficiencies and failing to involve the community, pointing out access and participation concerns. And so these students got to help community members feel heard.
Ireland
That's so great. If you can explain to listeners kind of what biogas facilities are. And a lot of people think that think that that's might be a great way to utilize the waste from these sort of farms. So what are some of the reasons why it's really not a great idea for the animals and the environment?
Fox
Yeah, So waste from animal production. So you can think of pig manure or dry litter from poultry production generates different types of gases, and those gases like methane or nitrous oxide, can be collected to be piped and burned just like any other combustible gas. And so there's a process through anaerobic digestion that processes these gases and can be utilized as energy. And so it's marketed as renewable energy. One of the biggest problems with it is, like I mentioned, it takes an enormous amount of animals to produce enough waste to generate enough gas to be efficient. And so really it just further entrenches this industrialized system of agriculture. We get more soil depletion and water pollution from very concentrated and highly dense contamination. So ultimately, we see it as a false solution to this problem of industrialized agriculture.
Ireland
You're helping kind of raise the voice of people who don't really have a lot of times don't have a voice in the system and are, you know, really impacted by this. Like, how does this impact the communities that are around these types of facilities?
Fox
Right. So, you know, I mentioned environmental harms happening already. And so you can imagine. So this particular one and they're surrounded with poultry facilities that are already harming the waterways and the soil and the air. But this was actually trucking in waste from other parts of the state to a community that was already overburdened. And again. Right. The waste and its byproducts become more harmful to the environment, causing health problems to the community that breathes in the volatile organic compounds, that has to drink the water that's being contaminated by the runoff associated with the waste. And all of those are concentrated in an area that's already, again, environmentally overburdened.
Ireland
Yeah. And they don't really show or, you know, capture kind of the whole story of no, really what's happening to the animals in the system, the environment and the people that surround it, you know, surround those facilities. So something that a lot of people just don't have to think about.
Fox
Yeah. And I could just pick on one thread that you mentioned there, just about maybe transparency. One of the projects that the clinic students were involved in was also just trying to seek more clarity on government interactions with Big AG and the meat industry. And so this involved litigation and the clinic assisting her client and suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And folks might wonder how the FBI is involved. But the FBI was attending industry trade conferences. Our client, the Animal Partizan, requested those records under the Freedom of Information Act to see about FBI involvement and to meet it industry trade group conferences. And the FBI responded by refusing to release those records, claiming that they were exempt from disclosure because they were compiled for law enforcement purposes and that their release would interfere with those practices.
Where is the law enforcement purpose? Because in our mind, the purpose of producing those records was for your participation in a conference that was theoretically open to the public. Right? It was targeted towards industry groups, but anybody could have registered. So it wasn't even a law enforcement conference. And so the students got to be involved in all aspects of this challenge from filing the complaint and then negotiating with the FBI and releasing these records. And so we had a student draft and sent a letter to the U.S. attorney representing the FBI and point out those deficiencies in the FBI physician, how it didn't seem that there was a law enforcement purpose related to this and that technically, because the information in these records were already disclosed in this public setting and that led to the FBI reversing its stance and they agreed to release the records. And this result was just incredibly important as it provides just an unneeded check on law enforcement overreach. I think it just ties into how transparency is essential, not only right transparency to figure out what's happening on the farm and what's happening to communities being harmed, but also to protect the legal rights of advocates trying to protect animals.
Ireland
It's always exciting when you're like, Oh, we're suing the FBI. That's right. And I just want to circle back a little bit to the farm bill. I know they're still working out the details of trying to get this version passed. Is that correct?
Fox
Yes. So the farm bill is an omnibus bill. So think of it as kind of a package of legislation. And it's a sort of renewed or renegotiated and passed every five years. So many aspects of food policy, crop insurance, food subsidies, consumer protections, even environmental protections might be seen in the farm bill. So it's a really important piece of legislation.
Also. So a lot of opportunities to address farm policy and practices that this industry engages in. And so one of the pieces that the students worked on in the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act, which is trying to now be implemented into the farm bill, was on animal transport. So there's a federal law, it's generally referred to as the 28-hour law that regulates animal transport. And sometimes animals have to be transported very far. There's not that many slaughter facilities in this country. And the law says that animals need to be, you know, given rest and fed and provided water within a given period of time. And that's generally like every 28 hours. And there's some provisions that allow that even to exceed 32 hours. And that wall really hasn't been touched much since its enactment and like the 1880s or something like that, other than to modify the forms of transportation, because back when it was passed, trains were the main focus. And so it was amended to include, you know, trucks and other modes of transportation. Our clients are hoping to have our limit reduced so that animals are fed and watered and given time to unload from their confined transport more often.
Hopefully that will result in fewer animals arriving to slaughter, already injured where animals are loaded on alive but don't reach the slaughterhouse alive. And that happens very often. And so hopefully we'll see improvements on animal transport laws.
Ireland
Yeah, well, I just want to give a little bit of a plug for our summer program. We have a great line up every summer of amazing environmental animal protection classes, but the farm bill is one of those. So if anybody out there is interested in learning more about the farm bill, there's a two-week class that you can sign up for and the courses are now posted online.
So there's animal welfare law, science of animal policy, all sorts of great classes. Take a look at that and definitely reach out if you're interested in learning more. So is there anything else that you want to highlight about the clinic experience?
Fox
Yeah, well, there's much coming down the pipeline for the clinic and the students are actively working on many projects, so we'll be excited to share those once they go public. So we're real new. We're into our second year, so we had our inaugural annual report produced in August when we were one years old, and you'll see summaries of the projects that we discussed today in addition to many others, cute photos of animals as we get students to a farm sanctuary, I think it's important that they connect with those that they're trying to advocate for.
That also helps to provide a bit of a relief from the very strenuous and stressful topics that they're paraded with.
Ireland
Yeah, it's so great talking with you today, Laura and I feel like we could chit-chat all day about the cases that you're working on and the great skills and experiences that the students are getting through the clinic. And next year we can get another annual update of all the great work that you're working on.
Fox
That would be.
Ireland
Great. And thank you listeners for joining us to learn more about the Farm Animal Advocacy Clinic and the animal law happenings here at Vermont Law and Graduate School and of course, hope that you join us for the next episode of the Hothouse Earth Podcast.
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