Katrīna Krīgere

Katrīna Krīgere

by and | Jan 9, 2018 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

“Let’s change the world together”

Katrīna Krīgere. All photos by Jo-Anne McArthur/Unbound Project.

Katrīna Krīgere was hitchhiking through Europe in her 20s when fellow travellers introduced her to veganism. The idea immediately made sense to her. As a child, she’d felt a special kinship with animals, always finding ways to help and be around them.

Upon returning home to her native Latvia, she became a vegetarian, but struggled to go vegan.

“I somehow felt very lonely,” Krīgere recalls, “and at this time in Latvia, being vegetarian was already seen as crazy. I didn’t see any company for me.”

Eventually, she made the jump to veganism, and became more and more involved in animal rights. She was working as a video journalist when she took another huge leap.

“They pushed me to do a lot of commercials, for example, hunting magazines and agriculture magazines. I had to voice them myself and tell these terrible lies.”

Krīgere could hardly bear it. “It really broke my mind,” she says. “I started to get ill very often.”

So with only a little savings to rely on, Krīgere quit to dedicate herself full-time to a two-year-old animal rights organization she’d been running on the side with her partner, Aivars Andersons.

Today, she smiles as she says: “I’m where I want to be.”

Katrīna Krīgere
Katrīna Krīgere

Krīgere’s organization, Dzīvnieku brīvība, or “Animal Freedom,” is one of the only animal rights organizations in Latvia, a tiny post-Soviet country with a population of just two million people. With a focus on industrial animal agriculture, fur farming, and the use of animals in entertainment, Dzīvnieku brīvība has little staff or money. The group has started from scratch in nearly all of its endeavors.

“They’re literally writing the book on this type of work as they go,” Alexandria Beck, with the United States-based Humane League, said in a recent video tribute to Dzīvnieku brīvība.

I’m where I want to be.

Despite its challenges, the organization has made a significant mark. It conducts bold investigations, garners significant Latvian media attention, and has won major policy battles. In June, Latvia’s parliament formally banned the use of wild animals in circuses after a long Dzīvnieku brīvība campaign. In a huge victory for the group in December 2017, one of the largest grocery retailers in the region agreed to go cage-free by 2025 after Dzīvnieku brīvība teamed up with organizations in Lithuania and Estonia to pressure the company to improve conditions for egg hens — a victory that will likely lead to more cage-free commitments. And Krīgere and Andersons recently won the Lisa Shapiro Award, which celebrates unsung heroes in the global animal advocacy movement.

Katrīna Krīgere

Krīgere is brave, humble, and endlessly hardworking. For her, Dzīvnieku brīvība is the realization of a life’s purpose she says she’s long felt. She was in the first or second grade when she undertook a one-girl campaign to help a sick, hungry chained dog who she passed each day on her long walk to school in Salaspils, Latvia.

“I made this poster and I put it on the fence, and of course they removed it,” Krīgere remembers. “But I just continued making these posters and putting them on the fence. I don’t know where I got this idea, but I thought, I have to help this dog.”

Before Dzīvnieku brīvība, Andersons says, there were of course vegans and activists in Latvia, but it wasn’t until he and Krīgere and a handful of friends started the organization that he felt like there was any kind of a local movement. They’d become inspired after attending an animal rights gathering in neighboring Estonia and held Dzīvnieku brīvība’s first meeting in a cafe in 2012.

Katrīna Krīgere
Katrīna Krīgere

The organization began its efforts with vegan outreach, and then investigations and targeted campaigns, including circus protests. When a trainer who’d been caught on video badly abusing elephants came to Latvia, Dzīvnieku brīvība couldn’t miss the chance to protest him.

It’s a small place, but you can really change things here.

“This first protest was really quite huge for our country, and then attendees said, ‘What next?’” Krīgere recalls. So they kept going, demonstrating at each of the circus’ more than two dozen shows.

“It made us visible and helped people to know us, and we got a lot of new supporters,” she says. It was enough to eventually win the national ban.

“It’s a small place,” Krīgere says of Latvia. “But you can really change things here.”

Andersons says it is Krīgere who keeps Dzīvnieku brīvība running.

“She’s very persistent and focused,” he says. “I sometimes think of strategies, but I don’t follow things through to the detail. She takes care of things and brings a lot of administrative stuff to the organization, and friendliness, too. She is definitely the friendly face of the organization.”

Katrīna Krīgere
Katrīna Krīgere

Krīgere says she has gained as much as she has given.

“It’s a great thing,” she says of activism. “It’s one the best things that’s happened in my life. It’s not only that I’m doing something good for animals and for society — because society suffers from being cruel to animals. But it’s also very good for self-development. I learn so much in what I do.”

Let’s change the world together.

She says she’s loved meeting so many brave women through activism; she estimates women make up about 80 percent of the movement here.

“I think we (men and women) are naturally the same,” she says. “But it’s social programming that we get since we’re born, and it’s very powerful. Here, women are very strong. It’s from Soviet times that mostly the leader of the family is female, actually. So it somehow seems very obvious that females are the ones who are trying to make some change and move males to do something. That’s how it works here. I’m not saying 100 percent, but I see it very often, all around.”

Her hope for the future? That more people, regardless of who they are, will join in.

“Let’s change the world together,” Krīgere says. “There are so many problems. This world is so broken. I wish people would become more aware of how each of us is involved in this broken condition, and how each of us has some power to change it.”

Learn more and support Dzīvnieku brīvība.
Text by Corinne Benedict, photos by Jo-Anne McArthur.

The Women of Animals Australia

The Women of Animals Australia

by and | Dec 19, 2017 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

“Every day I feel that I am in the best possible position to make the biggest impact for animals.”

L-R: Lisa Chalk, Shatha Hamade, Karen Nilsen, Lyn White, and Glenys Oogjes. All photos by Jo-Anne McArthur/Unbound Project.

While it is a progressive country in many senses, Australia has had only one female Prime Minister since federation in 1901, and 75 percent of board positions on Australian listed companies are held by men. Animal groups have not been immune to this glass ceiling. While much of the daily toil of animal protection is carried out by women in Australia, senior leadership roles within the animal movement – as in many professional industries – are often held by men.

Not so at Animals Australia. One of the major voices for animals in that country, the group has been female-driven since its inception in 1980. Founded to provide a unified voice for animal protection groups that had begun springing up across Australia, Glenys Oogjes, now CEO, became Animals Australia’s first employee in 1983. Initially working part-time, Oogjes was drawn to the group because she believed “political campaigns were the key to reform for animals.”

Glenys Oogjes
Glenys Oogjes

One of Animals Australia’s co-founders describes Oogjes’ appointment as the best thing he has done for the animal movement – no light praise considering that co-founder is Professor Peter Singer, Australian philosopher and author of the so-called ‘bible’ of the animal protection movement, Animal Liberation.

Animals Australia has worked hard to represent and unify animal protection groups in the country’s growing movement. In her early years on staff, Oogjes performed the often-thankless task of sitting on government committees and working with policymakers to try and bring about change for animals from inside government. That work was predominantly behind the scenes and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Animals Australia remained a little-known organization.

All that changed when Lyn White joined the team in 2003.

Lyn White

A police officer for 20 years, White’s life took a dramatic turn when she learned that bears are farmed for their bile in parts of Asia. That realisation led her to volunteer and then work with Animals Asia and Jill Robinson, whom White describes as an inspiration and her greatest mentor. But White would not remain in Asia forever. As her understanding of animal suffering expanded, she was drawn back to Australia to begin addressing the plight of animals at home. It was White’s skills as an investigator that would lead Animals Australia in a new direction, allowing them to gather the evidence that would be used in the organization’s now-trademark media exposés.

In 2004, Karen Nilsen joined the team as a volunteer. While the organization had an online presence, it was not yet the social media powerhouse it would become, and Nilsen’s graphic design training and experience with tech start-ups gave her the tools to make a big difference with the organization’s online reach. By 2007 she was a full-time member of staff and is now Director of Communications and Creative Services. Nilsen sees her mission as taking what Animals Australia does every day and extending it across the globe via the web. She recalls that Animals Australia “was conducting strategic, critically-needed, ground-breaking investigation work (led by White), but was struggling to scale the impact of that work for animals online. For me, that was the easy part.”

Karen Nilsen
Karen Nilsen

By the early 2000s, the Animals Australia team already had established campaigns on factory farming, and were now setting their sights on Australia’s live animal export trade. Within months of coming on board, White was in the Middle East conducting the first of dozens of investigations into the treatment of animals exported for slaughter.

In 2011, Animals Australia, working in conjunction with RSPCA Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and journalist Sarah Ferguson, revealed the reality of what happens to cows who are live exported from Australia to Indonesia. The award-winning piece aired on the ABC’s flagship current affairs program Four Corners. It shocked the nation and resulted in a temporary ban on live animal exports to Indonesia, as well as finally making Animals Australia a household name.

When I met the team at Animals Australia I felt like I’d arrived home.

After serving as the RSPCA Australia Communications Manager throughout the live animal export campaign, Lisa Chalk joined the Animals Australia team in 2012. Her commitment and talent did not go unnoticed, and when Chalk was invited to join Animals Australia she knew she couldn’t say no. Chalk says that working on the live export campaign was “an equal mix of exhilarating and liberating. When I met the team at Animals Australia I felt like I’d arrived home.”

Lisa Chalk

After bringing Chalk on board, Oogjes and White had not quite finished handpicking their dream team: next on the radar was Shatha Hamade. Having left the corporate world to train as a lawyer in order to stand up for animals, Hamade was already a well-known advocate after being named Australia’s Young Lawyer of the Year in 2012. She left a full-time role with RSPCA South Australia to join the Animals Australia team and hasn’t looked back since. “Every day I feel that I am in the best possible position to make the biggest impact for animals… Animals Australia gets results and operates without fear or favour. The talent and commitment of the team is world class.”

Shatha Hamade
Shatha Hamade

“There is a unity of purpose that shines through every day and we all bring different skills and knowledge to the table. In knowing that this is a difficult field, that is relentless in its demands of you, it is also an incredibly supportive and caring environment,” says White of the team. “It is a rare workplace where colleagues are also dear friends.”

In the last few years, the Animals Australia team has had a profound impact on the animal protection landscape in Australia and around the world.

One of their recent flagship campaigns has exposed the systematic and endemic cruelty that is a routine part of Australia’s greyhound racing industry. They uncovered tourists unwittingly eating dog meat in Bali. They have continually brought to light the hidden suffering of animals on factory farms and in slaughterhouses on Australian soil, and they have demonstrated time and time again the suffering of animals in the live export trade.

The work of the Animals Australia team has not gone unnoticed: in 2014, White was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia. In 2015, Animals Australia became the most ‘liked’ Australian charity on social media. They now have more than 30 employees, including team members in Europe, South America, and Indonesia.

It is a rare workplace where colleagues are also dear friends.

L-R: Shatha Hamade, Lisa Chalk, and Glenys Oogjes.
L-R: Lisa Chalk, Shatha Hamade, Karen Nilsen, Lyn White, and Glenys Oogjes.
L-R: Lisa Chalk, Shatha Hamade, Karen Nilsen, Lyn White, and Glenys Oogjes.

When asked what the most rewarding aspect of working for the organization is, each woman emphasized the privileged role they occupy and the exhilaration they feel to be working with so many other talented animal advocates, both within their own team and beyond.

We’re seeing more progress than ever before, and I’m convinced that trend will continue as smart people in smart organizations continue to work together on behalf of animals.

Oogjes takes pride in the community she has helped build, which “expands its circle of compassion each day.” For White and Hamade, it is the supporters that drives them forward. Nilsen feels keenly the privilege of seeing the animal protection movement flourish, and knowing that she has played a small part in that process. Chalk sums it up perhaps best: “There are campaign wins that invigorate us, like convincing McDonald’s to stop using cage eggs, but I think what’s most fulfilling is the journey itself, and of course the ultimate reward will be the day when there is no need for an organization like ours.”

The team knows that the day they will no longer be needed won’t come anytime soon, and they are in this fight for the long haul. Asked what they would like to achieve in the future, the list was as ambitious as you might expect. White spoke of working towards a large-scale shift in consciousness that “will make societies willing to re-examine what our relationship with our fellow species is meant to be.”

Lyn White
Lyn White

Nilsen is focused on finding ways to help others do the most good they can and building capacity and coordination within the movement. “We’re seeing more progress than ever before, and I’m convinced that trend will continue as smart people in smart organizations continue to work together on behalf of animals.”

What’s most fulfilling is the journey itself, and of course the ultimate reward will be the day when there is no need for an organization like ours.

Hamade has her sights set on working globally to end live animal exports. Chalk is also mindful of problems closer to home, nominating a ban on the use of the battery cage in Australia as one of her priorities. And what are the hopes of Animals Australia’s first staff member, Oogjes? That “community awareness and understanding of animal sentience… will lead to significant changes in the use and treatment of animals that are currently being hunted, displaced, culled,” and exploited in so many other industries. Essentially, Oogjes says that she hopes that we will come to see animals not as bodies to be consumed, but as fellow beings.

Learn more about Animals Australia and support their work.
Text by Siobhan O’Sullivan. Photos by Jo-Anne McArthur.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

by and | Nov 17, 2017 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

Protecting at-risk gorillas and humans in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest

 

Interview and photographs by Jo-Anne McArthur.
Text by Corinne Benedict.

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As soon as the call came in that a gorilla was in trouble, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka was on her way. 

Photo: Dr. Gladys with a park ranger in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

After a long, winding drive from Kampala, Uganda’s capital, she met Kahara, her patient, deep in a red-dirt forest. Kahara had a severe rectal prolapse. Only surgery would save her.

Kalema-Zikusoka had little equipment and no trained help, and the field rangers who’d called her disagreed over whether an operation should be attempted. Rectal prolapses are sometimes caused by inbreeding. Was it right to save a gorilla with bad genes?

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Trekking to find the gorillas in Bwindi forest.
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Dr. Gladys with tourists on an gorilla trek.
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A wild but habituated gorilla in Bwindi Impenetrable forest.

And then it struck Kalema-Zikusoka:

The call was hers alone to make — she was the veterinarian, and she hadn’t become one to euthanize mountain gorillas.

A ranger acted as anesthesiologist, monitoring Kahara’s breathing. Table sugar served as a makeshift remedy for swelling.

“In 45 minutes, I was done and she was waking up,” Kalema-Zikusoka recalls. “And even those who said I shouldn’t do it ended up being happy that I did. When I presented [the case] at the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians meeting, everyone was like, ‘You did that yourself? You should have had a board-certified anesthesiologist, a board-certified surgeon.’ But I didn’t have that.”

Photo: Mist over Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

“You just do what you can. You have to do it.”

Such is life in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Remote and impoverished, the area is one of the world’s last sanctuaries for endangered mountain gorillas, and it is where Kalema-Zikusoka has worked for more than 20 years to protect them. As one of her country’s first wildlife veterinarians, she has been a pioneer in her field. She has also championed a unique brand of conservation that has done as much for people as it has for animals.
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Dr. Gladys on route to finding the habituated gorilla’s night beds, where she and colleagues will collect fecal samples for analysis.

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The main road and community leading to the Bwindi forest entrance.

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The Gorilla Conservation Coffee Plantation.

In 2003, after discovering that humans were the source of a deadly scabies outbreak among Bwindi’s gorillas, Kalema-Zikusoka founded the nonprofit Conservation Through Public Health, or CTPH. Working in Uganda and Virunga National Park in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, CTPH focuses on improving the health of both people and gorillas, and on lifting communities out of poverty.

Photo: Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

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Dr. Gladys driving in Bwindi Impenetrable forest.
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A meeting at the hospital near Bwindi.
While much of the rest of the world worries about diseases passing from animals to humans, Kalema-Zikusoka is acutely aware that zoonosis works both ways, from cryptosporidium to tuberculosis to Ebola. Her beloved gorillas, who share more than 98 percent of their DNA with humans, are especially at risk.

 

“In these fragile areas where wildlife, people, and livestock intersect, a decline in any of them affects the survival of the others,” says Kalema-Zikusoka, who is affectionately known here simply as Dr. Gladys.

 

Today, we realize how wildlife, humans, and ecosystems are all interconnected.

This is the idea that CTPH is built upon. In addition to holding mobile clinics for people, the organization trains community volunteers to deliver public health services in villages near protected forests and to help families improve their nutrition and hygiene and seek care when they’re sick. CTPH also helps communities, such as the local Batwa people, raise their living standards. With local coffee farmers, for example, CTPH recently launched Gorilla Conservation Coffee, a social enterprise that trains growers and connects them to national and international markets so they can sell their crops at higher prices.

Photo: Walking into the forests of the Batwa Pygmy communities.

Gorilla Conservation Coffee

Photos: At the Gorilla Coffee plantation.

“We want them to be able to have this livelihood,” Kalema-Zikusoka says, “because it keeps them provided for and out of the forests.”

CTPH has also added a significant family planning effort to help slow population growth and habitat encroachment and break the cycle of poverty in a place where the refrain about family size says: We have 10 children here. Five are for looking after the house and chasing the wild animals away, and five are for school. (CTPH encourages a maximum of four children.)

CTPH volunteers also provide house-to-house conservation education, changing attitudes by teaching people why it’s important to protect forests and gorillas and to limit contact with them.

 

“People used to kill gorillas in their gardens,” Kalema-Zikusoka says. “Now they don’t.”

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Miriam, teaching family planning to local communities.
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Overlooking the Gorilla Coffee plantation.
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The Batwa Pygmy community in Bwindi.
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The traditional healer in a neighbouring Batwa community.
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A CTPH friend and community member.
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Dr. Gladys Kalema Zikusoka.
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Flora, who works with CTPH on their family planning programs, specifically within her Batwa community.
Other community teams are trained to safely chase gorillas back into forests when they’re found foraging in villages, and to collect dung samples and report any clinical signs they observe — part of CTPH’s disease outbreak early warning system.

Photo: A gorilla in Bwindi Impenetrable forest.

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Dr. Gladys, analyzing gorilla fecal samples.
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Stephen Rubanga, processing gorilla fecal samples.
The samples, along with specimens from farmed animals and people, are tested for cross-species diseases at CTPH’s Gorilla Health and Community Conservation Centre. Set among tea and banana plantations and breathtaking views of deep green mountains, the centre includes a well-equipped clinical lab that supports CTPH’s robust research mission.
Taking on so much hasn’t been easy, Kalema-Zikusoka acknowledges. But her innovative, holistic approach is paying off. Health among humans and gorillas has improved. Families are having fewer children, and incomes are rising. Along with community conservation, law enforcement has gotten markedly better, so fewer animals are being snared.

In the 1990s, the wild mountain gorilla population was estimated to be about 650. Today, it is around 880.

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Gorilla fecal samples.
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Dr. Gladys with a wild but habituated gorilla in Bwindi Impenetrable forest.
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Dr. Gladys collecting gorilla fecal samples from the night beds in Bwindi.
“Sometimes it’s really frustrating,” says Kalema-Zikusoka, who has a wide smile, a calm presence, and a knack for listening and earning trust. “You go, ‘Why am I doing this? I must be crazy. I should just get a regular job.’ And then you hear about something the community did, or that the gorillas are getting better because of your work. It’s worth it.”
Kalema-Zikusoka was born in 1970 into a big, prominent family. A government minister who’d dedicated himself to developing Uganda, her father was murdered when she was 2 by the brutal regime of the country’s then-president, Idi Amin. Her mother, left to raise six children on her own, took years to recover but went on to become one of the first women to serve in Uganda’s parliament.

 

Growing up in Kampala, Kalema-Zikusoka remembers always having animals at home and being deeply concerned about their wellbeing. When one of her dogs or cats was sick, she’d refuse to go to school until she knew the animal was on the mend. By the time she was a teenager, she’d decided she wanted to be a wildlife veterinarian. She trained at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College before establishing the first veterinary unit at the Uganda Wildlife Authority, then earning a master’s degree at North Carolina State University in the US.

 

Why gorillas?

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CTPH staff with friends in the Batwa Pygmy community in Bwindi.
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Dr. Gladys with her two children, Ndhego and Tendo.

“They’re very good mothers,” she says of gorillas. “Always with their babies.”

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Dr. Gladys’ two boys, Ndhego and Tendo.
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Dr. Gladys’ two boys, Ndhego and Tendo.
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Dr. Gladys Kalema Zikusoka.
She admires their playfulness, too, and their curiosity and peacefulness. Yes, she’s been charged by gorillas unaccustomed to people, but she’s never felt truly threatened by one, and she’s never been harmed.

 

“I never get scared when they charge. They’re really nonviolent, the Buddhas of the great ape world. People say the chimp is who we are, and gorillas are who we want to be.”

Kalema-Zikusoka names Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, Wangari Maathai, and her parents as her inspirations. Her work has been featured everywhere from CNN to the BBC, and she has received numerous awards, including the Whitley Gold Award for outstanding leadership in grassroots nature conservation. She was chosen as an Ashoka fellow in 2006 (https://www.ashoka.org/en) and in 2018, became a National Geographic Explorer.
She is known all over southwest Uganda. Driving with her means stopping constantly to chat with waving people who are eager to greet and thank her.
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Gorilla trekking with tourists to the gorillas and their night beds.
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Members of the Batwa community and CTPH staff.

“Helping animals helps people” she explains.

Among her hopes for the future is that CTPH will be able to work more extensively in DRC’s Virunga, where, unlike in Uganda, gorillas are routinely poached and rangers trying to protect them are often killed.

“We really need to extend our program there, but it’s difficult because of security.”

Photo: A park ranger in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

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Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka with Pian, one of two cheetas she rescued, who now live at the zoo in Entebbe.
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The CTPH truck.
She says her biggest accomplishment has been getting even the poorest Ugandans to support conservation, and money that gorillas have helped generate for local communities has played a big part. While much of CTPH’s funding has come from international institutional donors, communities have gained a lot from the growth of responsible gorilla tourism, in which small groups of people are guided on expensive treks to see gorillas who have been gradually habituated to accept visitors.

Kalema-Zikusoka is deliberate about making sure communities understand how gorillas have helped them, and she has helped raise the portion of tourism profits that must go directly to locals.

“Obviously the veterinary work is very important to me, because that’s my passion,” she says. “But then you realize the veterinary work can only help the sick, wild animals, but we’re really trying to save all the gorillas.”

She offers the story of a male gorilla named Ruhondeza who was dying of old age. He knew his time was close, so he’d distanced himself from his group and had settled close to a village.

“We spoke to our volunteers, asking, ‘OK, please educate your community that Ruhondeza is here to stay until he dies. He’s here because he trusts you. He’s seen you for over 20 years. He’s brought you a lot of wealth,’” Kalema-Zikusoka recalls.

Photo: The Gorilla Coffee plantations and agriculture in southern Uganda.

“And they understood. They said, ‘Oh, when one of our own gets old, we look after them.’”

“And they looked after him until he died, and when he died, they called and told me. We came to do the post-mortem and everyone in the community came to look at his grave and pay their last respects.”
Learn more about Conservation Through Public Health and support their work: www.ctph.org

Text by Corinne Benedict. Interview and photographs by Jo-Anne McArthur.

Joyce Tischler

Joyce Tischler

by and | Oct 18, 2017 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

“I could never have imagined how successful
animal law would be.”

Joyce Tischler. All photos by Jo-Anne McArthur except where indicated.

It’s not just because Joyce Tischler co-founded the first and only animal law organization in the United States that she has been called the mother of animal law. (Joyce founded Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) in 1979, well before animal law was a recognized field.) She’s also a mother to her own daughter and a self-described nurturer whose quintessentially female qualities of compassion and inclusivity have been credited by ALDF staffers for much of the organization’s success.  

Liberty Mulkani, ALDF’s events coordinator, says when she first started with the organization, she was away from home for the first time and missing her family. Joyce would take her and her boyfriend to lunch to ensure they felt welcome, introduce them to people and teach them about the animal rights movement. Liberty says Joyce became like a second mother. And Joyce is like that with everyone who comes through the door, Liberty says. Over a decade later, Liberty is still with ALDF because of the welcoming atmosphere she says Joyce created within the organization. 

But Joyce can’t be dismissed as a softie. ALDF’s executive director Stephen Wells describes Joyce as smart and no-nonsense. Indeed, it’s clear that she’s nobody’s fool, a courageous trailblazer who both forges ahead and pulls back when it feels right to her. As ALDF grew into a bigger organization needing more administration, she relinquished control to an executive director—Stephen—so she could continue to focus on what she loved best: developing the field of animal law.  

Carter Dillard, ALDF’s director of litigation, echoes this praise. He credits Joyce not only for founding an organization in an unheard-of field in a male-dominated world, but for also setting her ego aside and recognizing when the organization had outgrown her. She genuinely puts the interests of the animals first, he says.

Jo-Anne from the Unbound Project team sat down with Joyce to chat about the field of animal law, how animal law fits into the broader animal rights movement, and one thing she regrets.  

On the explosive growth of the field of animal law: 

“I could never have imagined how successful animal law would be. If we’d done this 50 years earlier, we might have failed miserably. But the time was right, following the 1960s and 70s, the rise of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, farm workers, the environmental movement—all of those came before us, and so our society was really ready for the animal rights movement and animal law. There’s a culture in the legal field of being open to new, creative, controversial ideas. If you look at the history of social movements in this country, lawyers have always been a part of it. I’m fascinated by social movements and the interplay between a social movement and what’s done outside the courtroom and how that influences what happens in the courtroom because it’s really a close connection.

We can’t get good law until society is ready for that law to happen. The law and how society works are so closely connected. It’s hard to see which comes first.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. With animal law, we’ve had to be conscious of that interplay between society and the legal field. 

Joyce Tischler
Joyce Tischler

On working together and playing the long game:

No matter what you’re doing—whether you’re a photographer, or a lawyer, or a demonstrator, or an academic—nobody is working alone. We ARE part of a greater whole, and it all works together, and we need to be respectful of that. We need to understand that this is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. What we’re doing will create change and we might not live to see it, or a lot of it! If you were an abolitionist in the 1700s, you were dealing with a system that was so entrenched that it wasn’t going to end in your lifetime. Did you keep working? Of course you keep working! We have to think about the long term.

On influencing the next generation of influencers:

“By moving law into the mainstream we can create allies. If you teach animal law at the law school level, you get to people who are going to graduate and go into large law firms, become judges, become prosecutors, become legislators. So if you get ‘em in law school they’ll go out into the world and create change, and that’s been far more successful than we realized when we started doing this.

We are mainstreaming animal law into our own field so that when next generation is in court they won’t get laughed at.

We were laughed at in the old days! You can do so much when you mainstream. And you might say, yeah but you’re compromising… We’re lawyers. It’s a conservative field, but you can get so much done through it.”

Joyce Tischler

On the gendered hierarchy in the U.S. animal protection movement:

“To be crass, when the money starts to show up, the men start to show up. If you look at the leaders of the organizations (including mine!) they are well paid, in positions of power. Men are more comfortable with power than women tend to be. Women tend to be the workers, men tend to be the people who tell the workers what to do. That’s such an ingrained part of culture. I think it has to do with where the money is and where the power is, and men tend to be better at grabbing that than women, and that’s what’s happening and it’s sad, it’s unfortunate.” 

On trying to get farmed animal protected and the role of the consumer:

“When we’re dealing with the biggest single issue, which is farmed animals, consumers are our biggest ally. It’s appalling and shocking that there are no—or very, very few—laws to protect farmed animals.

What do you do when you don’t have laws? It’s like being an actor with no script. You’ve got to figure out a way to get those animals protected and you’re bending yourself into pretzel shapes.

The kinds of cases that we take are consumer protection, labelling, environmental laws, clean water and clean air legislation—they don’t protect animals directly. It’s bizarre! So we have to look to consumers—they are setting the stage for what laws we will get or what case law we can possibly come up with.” 

On what she’d do differently and the value of tenacity:

“I would say to my 25 year old self, get the fuck out of your way and just do the work.

Stop thinking you can’t do it, and set aside your “I’m not good enough” crap. That stuff just got in my way.

When I would just stop worrying about whether what I was doing was good enough, whether I was doing the right thing, whether I was getting enough done, whether I was smart enough, tall enough, male enough… when I just set that aside and just did the work, it got done. You don’t have to be the most brilliant lawyer. You don’t have to be the one who went to Harvard. Just do it. Just get out there, pick your project or pick your focus, dig in. … tenacity is a fabulous quality. I’ve learned that by being tenacious, and by just building, building, building, I could be good enough. We women tend to hold ourselves back and I regret that.”

Image courtesy of Joyce Tischler.

On how to become an animal lawyer:

“Learn about animal law as much as you can, read as much as you can, and seep yourself in what the issues are, then decide what you want to do. What calls to you most? What’s your passion? Is it farmed animals? Is it wildlife? Or are you a generalist? I’m a generalist. And then figure out, okay, how am I going to make this my career? There are very few groups and very few jobs working directly in animal law. So understand that it’s going to be tough.

You’re going to have to be tenacious, you’re going to have to be an entrepreneur, you’re going to have to be creative.

Maybe you work at an agency or you start your own. Or, think outside the box. Maybe you go and work at a county level where you can do all the animal work—and there’s lots, if you look for it. Take all animal cruelty cases. Or if you really have a strong stomach, maybe go work for the USDA—the belly of the beast—and try to make change from within. Wow, that would be hard to do! I couldn’t do it.

Learn more about ALDF and support their work.

This interview has been condensed and edited. Interview and photos by Jo-Anne McArthur. Editing and additional text by Anna Pippus. 

Dobrosława Gogłoza

Dobrosława Gogłoza

by and | Sep 27, 2017 | Contemporary, Photo Interviews

“We are here for an ultra-marathon, not a sprint.”

Dobrosława Gogłoza. All images by Jo-Anne McArthur for the Unbound Project.

It’s a fall day in Poznan, Poland, and Dobrosława Gogłoza is at the local zoo of all places. “It’s my first time in a zoo in many, many years,” says Gogłoza, a feminist and former grade school teacher who now dedicates her life to helping animals. She is here to visit a pair of foxes who were rescued from a fur farm by the national animal rights organization she helped launch in 2012, Otwarte Klatki, or OK (branded as Open Cages internationally).

Gogłoza says she never expected to collaborate with a zoo, but this one has taken an impressive public stance against fur farming, a fight that OK has championed. So when the zoo agreed to house the foxes in a roomy enclosure with plenty of privacy, Gogłoza’s group agreed.

Gogłoza says that one of her favorite things about the animal rights movement in Poland, a country of about 40 million people, is that it’s so new that her organization, which focuses on farmed animals, often finds itself laying new ground. OK has exploded in popularity since its inception just five years ago.

“For me, that’s the whole fun of working in Eastern Europe,” she says. “I feel that in some other countries, many organizations feel like they can’t do some things because people are watching and they expect you to behave in a certain way.”

Here, you can show the way, because there was no one before you.

That isn’t to say that pioneering an animal rights movement here has been easy, and it’s OK’s anti-fur work that has been the hardest.

About two years after the group started, its members learned that spies posing as activists had infiltrated the organization, attending its strategy meetings and feeding information to Poland’s entrenched fur industry, which is among the world’s biggest. The spies—two women—had secretly recorded Gogłoza for months, and although they’d come away with nothing damaging, they used heavily edited audio to personally target Gogłoza to try to intimidate her into quitting as OK’s leader.

The media and public saw through it, but the betrayal still took a toll. Gogłoza felt “paranoid” for a time. She worried about trusting even close friends and about making harmless jokes in case someone was listening.

“I had moments where I felt like I was just going to quit,” she says, tears welling. “I felt that the invasion of privacy was quite a big deal.”

Dobrosława Gogłoza

Others with OK­—now with about 300 core activists driving its work—were deeply affected, too. Some wanted new volunteers to sign pledges as to their intentions and loyalty, but Gogłoza objected.

“Even though I personally had problems with trusting people, I felt that as an organization we should not lose this trust, because trusting made us who we are,” she says. “Year after year, I’ve seen that many of the great things we’ve done have been done by people who are very new to the organization. So I think the fact that we actually trusted them made them motivated to show their best abilities and best ideas.”

Ultimately, she says, the experience made her stronger, which is how many who know her describe her.

“I don’t think I was born that way,” she says, “but many different things made me stronger and stronger. Like after this whole thing, I feel much stronger than before. Even though when it happened I felt on the verge of quitting, I think now they would have to do much more to get me to the same point.”

Growing up in Namysłów, a small town in southwest Poland, Gogłoza was quiet and shy. In college, she studied English philology and became drawn to the hardcore straight edge scene, which espouses abstention from drugs, alcohol and animal products. She went vegan and soon got involved with local feminists. But something was missing.

“It felt like a hobby,” she says, “not activism.”

Then a friend invited her to an international animal rights gathering in Oslo. This was activism, she remembers thinking, and she fell in love.

Nothing like what she’d seen in Norway was happening in Poland, so with a handful of others, she started an informal, grassroots group that became OK. Gogłoza continued to attend animal rights gatherings outside of Poland and then decided to host one at home. It was a turning point.

“The movement in Poland before that and after that were two absolutely different situations,” she says.

Besides fur, OK focuses heavily on egg farming and broiler chickens, carrying out investigations and producing virtual reality videos that it leverages to establish dialogues with corporations. One of Poland’s largest egg producers recently declared bankruptcy as a result, and others have adopted cage-free policies.

OK also promotes plant-based eating, targeting both food businesses and consumers.

Gogłoza and OK are “truly the piston for the animal rights movement in Poland,” says Iga Glazewska, who nominated Gogłoza for the Unbound Project.

And OK is at the center of the Network for Eastern European Animal Rights (NEAR), which Gogłoza helped launch in 2013 to advance the movement regionally. NEAR now includes activists and organizations in Czechia, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Romania, and Bulgaria.

“We are trying to implement our best practices to work in other countries,” Gogłoza says. “Even if we don’t have big resources, we are still very committed to sharing them.”

Animal industry operates internationally, and we have to do it as well.

She also believes the movement must be diverse. She recently spoke at the Conference on Animal Rights in Europe about the challenges of being a female leader, and about the intersection of animal rights and feminism.

“If we really want things to be more equal for female leaders in the animal rights movement or elsewhere in society, we personally have to do more,” she says. “Every time you succeed as a female leader or woman in the movement doing great work, you’re actually making it easier for other women. It makes me angry when I hear people say, ‘I did not invite more female speakers to the conference because there are not enough professional women.’ I feel that if you organize an event, you’re partly responsible for who you are showing as the spokespeople for the movement.”

Dobrosława Gogłoza
Dobrosława Gogłoza

Besides her strength, Gogłoza is often praised for being highly strategic. OK is quick to learn from mistakes and drop what isn’t working. It has stopped giving educational talks in schools, publishing an online magazine and using certain social media sites—all because its activists have deemed other uses of their time more effective.

It has also paid close attention to what works best in sharing investigation results. For example, compared to data, OK found it far more effective to reveal to the public that mother foxes on fur farms were so stressed they were chewing limbs off of their babies. The same went for naming individual rescued fox cubs.

This taught OK that its focus should be on telling a cohesive, relatable story.

Gogłoza credits all of this to OK’s structure and culture—flat, accessible, open, unafraid of failure, and unreliant on someone at the top telling everyone else what to do.

With this organization, I could quit now, and it would survive. I think that’s one of my greatest achievements. I know that we are resilient.

“We are here for an ultra-marathon, not a sprint.”

Learn more about Otwarte Klatki/Open Cages and support their work.
Text by Corinne Benedict. Interview and photographs by Jo-Anne McArthur.