Today, the Unbound Project is releasing a new short film profiling the life and work of the incredible Gill Dalley, co-founder of the Soi Dog Foundation.
In 2003, after moving to Thailand to retire, Gill and her husband John were overwhelmed by the number of street dogs they saw living without proper care. To fight this problem, they founded Soi Dog, which now sterilizes tens of thousands of dogs and cats in Asia each year.
Sadly, Gill passed away earlier this year after a short illness. It gives us chills to see and hear how eloquently and consciously she talked of mortality and the urgency of living––all without knowing that she was living her final months. The film is dedicated to her inspiring legacy.
Meet the wonderful Hazel Zhang! After learning about the suffering of farmed animals in the documentary “Farm to Fridge,” Hazel became vegan. Shocked that there wasn’t much content on the subject of cruelty-free living in Chinese, Hazel started a blog called VegPlanet where she started translating foreign-language articles.
Hazel glows with a warmth and welcoming smile. As Unbound team member Kelly Guerin was setting up for their early morning interview, Hazel took the time to walk around the converted apartment office space to talk to each of her 17 staff personally while her rescue dog Baibai ran underfoot. Hazel said that she had never really had the chance to get to know an animal personally until she found Baibai in a village.
Becoming vegan, launching a blog, and raising a dog in Beijing had its challenges, but today Hazel carries herself with the confidence of a true activist, rooted in her commitment to end animal suffering and help promote the compassionate lifestyle that changed her life.
Today, Hazel’s blog VegPlanet employs a full-time staff and publishes daily original content aimed at promoting veganism in China as a conscious, positive, and happy lifestyle to a following of nearly 300,000 subscribers.
One thing I love about elephants is the positive energy that I receive from them. They forgive. They never forget but they forgive.
Her real name is Sangduen, but for her whole life she has been called “Lek,” Thai slang meaning “tiny.” Upon meeting her, it seems that the name could not fit more perfectly––her thin, five-foot frame makes her appear fragile at first glance. But follow this tiny woman into an open field of 2,000-pound free roaming elephants and she is transformed into one of the giants.The way the elephants move around Lek is hypnotizing. They bring her into their space, their herd as one of their own. She addresses each one by name as they speak to one another in separate languages with complete understanding. When they get naughty and push her jealously away from the crowds with their trunks, she laughs and scolds them affectionately, like a mother. She sits beneath their bellies and hugs their strong legs while she sings to them in Thai, and in turn they harmonize above her with deep belly rumbles. It’s only in this moment of watching them come alive that you realize you’ve probably never seen a real, happy elephant.
The few of us that have been close enough to see them in zoos, circuses, or even ridden on them for elephant trekking, have only seen what Lek calls “zombies,” or the spiritless shell of an elephant. In order to control an animal of this size and train them to pull logs or carry tourists, most young elephants must be torn from their mothers at a young age and go through “phajaan” or “the crush,” a torturous ritual involving restraining, torturing, frightening, and starving that is meant to divorce an elephant from her will to live. After the ritual is complete, she will be forever deprived of a natural life with a family, taking orders from their masters and working as a slave for human industries.
Lek Chailert first witnessed this when she was 16 years old and came upon elephants doing hard labor at a logging operation in the mountains. She had always loved animals and seeing this awoke a fierce resolve to fight to change the world for them. Ever since that day, Lek has devoted her life to rescuing working elephants by investigating their industries, forming relationships with owners, educating tourists, and, since 1996, providing a refuge to over 200 rescued elephants in a place known today as Elephant Nature Park. Although they now live in peace, many still bear the injuries sustained from years of hard work, such as dislocated hips, blindness, bowed spines, and feet destroyed by land mines. Each year, thousands of tourists come to visit these rescues at the park, looking for an elephant interaction not based on exploitation, and leave educated about the realities of those that are.
This rescue model is challenging the traditions of Thai tourism and transforming the industry into a force of good for the environment, animals, and people. Lek employs former mahouts (elephant trainer) from the industries she’s working to end, such as logging or riding camps. In addition to the elephants, the sanctuary is also home to a herd of rescued buffalo, pigs, cows, birds, cats, and over 400 dogs rescued from the Bangkok floods, the dog meat trade, or life threatening injuries in the streets. And even beyond the sanctuary gates, the trees of the surrounding jungle stand tall today because of Lek’s orange Buddhist scarves wrapped around their bases, making them sacred and untouchable by loggers and developers. Actions like these which directly contradict many other, more powerful, industries in Thailand have not been without consequence. Lek lives with the knowledge that there are those actively fighting to ruin her and the sanctuary, and worse, with the memory of the times there have been attempts on her life. And yet every day, she keeps going.
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?
Trekking to find the gorillas in Bwindi forest.
Dr. Gladys with tourists on an gorilla trek.
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.
Dr. Gladys on route to finding the habituated gorilla’s night beds, where she and colleagues will collect fecal samples for analysis.
The main road and community leading to the Bwindi forest entrance.
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.
Dr. Gladys driving in Bwindi Impenetrable forest.
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.”
Miriam, teaching family planning to local communities.
Overlooking the Gorilla Coffee plantation.
The Batwa Pygmy community in Bwindi.
The traditional healer in a neighbouring Batwa community.
A CTPH friend and community member.
Dr. Gladys Kalema Zikusoka.
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.
Dr. Gladys, analyzing gorilla fecal samples.
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.
Gorilla fecal samples.
Dr. Gladys with a wild but habituated gorilla in Bwindi Impenetrable forest.
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?
CTPH staff with friends in the Batwa Pygmy community in Bwindi.
Dr. Gladys with her two children, Ndhego and Tendo.
“They’re very good mothers,” she says of gorillas. “Always with their babies.”
Dr. Gladys’ two boys, Ndhego and Tendo.
Dr. Gladys’ two boys, Ndhego and Tendo.
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.
Gorilla trekking with tourists to the gorillas and their night beds.
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.
Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka with Pian, one of two cheetas she rescued, who now live at the zoo in Entebbe.
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.
“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.
“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.
