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PODCAST

The Animal Advocate

Penny Ellison, Animal Advocacy Academy

Welcome to The Animal Advocate, the podcast for animal lovers who want to become effective animal advocates. Whether you want to start your own nonprofit, inspire your community to adopt more animal-friendly practices, or push for legislative change, this podcast is here to arm you with the knowledge and inspiration you need. With over 20 years of experience in animal law and advocacy, your host, Penny Ellison, is a long-time devoted animal advocate. From teaching Animal Law and Ethics at the

education pets & animals

All Episodes

14:14

Careers in Animal Advocacy: Jobs Helping Animals

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/10/08

Looking for a job helping animals that doesn't require a veterinary degree? Animal law, cruelty investigation, grassroots organizing, and shelter communications are all paid careers in animal advocacy. Some pay well and some don't, and entry-level animal law jobs are competitive. Knowing who hires, and who's a good fit, makes the search easier. In this episode, you'll learn: What grassroots organizers do and which backgrounds transfer Where animal lawyers and paralegals work Animal shelter jobs in

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18:11

What Is Animal Advocacy? How to Become an Animal...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/09/23

Being an animal advocate doesn't take a law degree, a microphone, or a new nonprofit. It takes 4 moves: pick something specific, figure out who controls the outcome, learn enough to be useful, and keep showing up. The first move makes you feel like an advocate. The fourth is what makes you useful. Penny shows what advocacy looks like far beyond the city council podium. That includes weekend fostering, a single transport leg, or taking payroll off the hands of a rescue director doing it at 11 at

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30:36

Is Fostering a Dog Right for Me? A Foster's Honest...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/09/09

Ask Kelly Motter what fostering a dog is like and she'll tell you about the moment a dog decides they're safe. Sometimes it's the first tail wag. Once it was a terrified boxer mix who sat with her on the kitchen floor for half an hour before he finally put his whole weight against her and let go. Two years in, she says it happens with every single dog, and she still can't describe the feeling. Most people who consider fostering worry about a different moment. The goodbye. I'd get too attached. I

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41:03

What Is a Puppy Mill? How to Spot One and Help Shut...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/08/13

A USDA licensed breeder can legally keep a dog in a cage six inches longer than her body, for her entire life. A puppy mill is a commercial breeding operation where the needs of the dogs aren't met. Size doesn't settle it, which is one reason "just ban puppy mills" fails as legislation. And the states where most of them operate are the ones where agribusiness controls the statehouse. So the fight moved to where puppy mills sell. John Goodwin runs the puppy mills program at Humane World for Animals

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17:37

Why Can't Animal Shelters Save Every Animal?

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/08/05

Somewhere today, a shelter director is going to be told online that she likes killing animals. She doesn't. She runs the one shelter in her city that isn't allowed to say no — to any stray, any surrender, any animal too sick or too dangerous for anyone else to take. And she still gets most of them out alive. So why can't she save them all? In this episode, I take the question seriously, because the answer is almost never the one in the comments section and it's not that the shelter staff don't care

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29:47

How to Reduce Shelter Intake: What One Advocate Is...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/07/23

Roughly 5.8 million dogs and cats entered U.S. shelters last year. That number has barely moved in 5 years, and BJ Adkins concluded that what animal welfare is doing about it isn't working. After years as a foster, she founded Animals Angels and started building a prevention network across a 7-county area in the Birmingham metro in Alabama. Not a rescue. A set of programs designed to reach families before they're standing at a shelter counter with a pet they can't keep. She's a disabled veteran and

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31:58

Miranda's Rescue: How 138 Dogs Disappeared After...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/07/18

On April 25th, a man in Fortuna, California sent a shelter worker a photo of a dog named Zora on a leash, with two words: "Zora adopted." Days later, Zora's body was recovered from a burial site behind Miranda's Rescue. She had never been adopted. She had been shot. Miranda's Rescue was a registered nonprofit that called itself a no-kill sanctuary. Shelters across California sent it their hardest dogs, and often paid it to take them. Investigators have since recovered the remains of at least 138

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26:23

Philadelphia Bans Carriage Horses. Will New York?

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/06/19

Philadelphia just did something New York still won't: it banned horse-drawn carriages. Earlier this month, Philadelphia banned horse-drawn carriages for good. Penny helped get that bill passed, and in this episode she tells the inside story of how it got done, then turns to the harder question: why New York, where a young man just died, still hasn't acted, and what advocates there have to do before this moment slips away. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the Philadelphia companies closing was

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14:34

The Win Column: 7 Recent Legislative Wins for Animals

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/06/10

We spend a lot of time on this show talking about problems that need to be fixed. This episode does the opposite. It's a roundup of recent wins for animals, most of them from this year, on the issues we come back to again and again, and most of them happening at the city and county level where your voice carries the most weight. From a statewide pet store ban in Colorado to a spay and neuter program brought back from the dead by the residents of Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the first time New York

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34:00

Outside Dogs and the Law: How Support Keeps Dogs Out...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/05/28

When a dog lives outside 24/7, the first instinct for a lot of animal lovers is to report it as animal cruelty. But what happens when humane law enforcement shows up, finds food, water, and shelter, and determines there's no violation to act on? The dog is still outside. They need more to be comfortable and healthy, mentally and physically. But the law doesn't demand it. That gap, between what the law requires and what a dog needs to live a good life, is where Underdogs of Philly does their work

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23:49

Why Animal Advocates Need a 501(c)(4): Allie Taylor...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/05/20

Most animal welfare organizations are 501(c)(3) nonprofits. But in this episode, we talk about why advocates focused on law and policy should think about starting a 501(c)(4) instead. If you find all those IRS code section references confusing (or boring), this episode will clarify the difference and show you what a 501(c)(4) can accomplish politically that a 501(c)(3) can't. Allie Taylor is the founder and president of Voters for Animal Rights and, under her leadership VFAR has racked up

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18:00

Should Rescues Import Dogs When Local Shelters Are Full?

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/05/07

Should rescues and shelters be importing dogs from other states when local shelters are full and dogs here are being euthanized for space? It feels like there should be an obvious answer. Help the dogs already here first. But the obvious answer misses something important. And the dogs caught in the middle of this debate, including the long-stay pit mixes and the easier-to-place dogs being euthanized in southern shelters, are paying for the fact that nobody is asking the right question. In this

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17:48

Designer Dogs, Shelter Dogs, and the Small Shift That...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/04/24

When most people decide to get a dog, they start with a picture in their head — a breed, a look, a particular idea of what the dog at the end of the leash should be. That picture is filling America's shelters. Hundreds of thousands of dogs are euthanized for space every year, not because they're sick or dangerous, but because the buyers who could have chosen them chose a specific breed of puppy instead. In this episode, Penny Ellison walks through the math of a problem the animal welfare community

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20:15

How to Fund Spay/Neuter Programs: Lessons from States...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/04/15

Spay/neuter access is one of the most effective tools for reducing shelter intake, but in most states it's chronically underfunded. Five states have figured out how to change that, and the way they did it is more politically achievable than you might expect. In this episode, Penny Ellison shares what she learned from her fellow panelists at the Humane World for Animals Animal Care Expo, where advocates from New Mexico and Delaware presented the funding models that are producing real results. In

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14:36

Are Humans Inherently Superior to Other Animals? The...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/03/26

What really separates humans from other animals? It's one of the oldest questions we've asked — and the answer keeps changing. Tool use was supposed to be uniquely human. Then we watched crows bend wire into hooks and octopuses carry coconut shells as portable shelter. Language was supposed to be uniquely human. Then bonobos, whales and other animals taught us differently. The list keeps getting shorter. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the framework we use to define human uniqueness is built

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23:00

Can a Law Make Shelters Go No Kill?

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/03/19

When animals are dying in shelters, the demand for a law to stop it is completely understandable. But passing legislation that tells shelters when they can and can't euthanize is a lot more complicated than it sounds — and in the wrong conditions, it can hurt the very animals it's meant to help. In this episode, Penny Ellison — attorney, animal law professor, and longtime shelter advocate — takes on one of the most contested questions in animal welfare: can we legislate our way to no-kill? Utah

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20:03

Animal Control Funding: Why Shelters Walk Away from...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/03/05

Somewhere in your community, someone sees an injured stray dog and dials for help — and there's no one there to answer. Municipal animal control has been structurally underfunded for decades, and the nonprofits quietly filling that gap are reaching a breaking point. In this episode, host Penny Ellison examines why the contract model between cities and animal shelters keeps collapsing — and what advocates can push for to change it. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the contract model looks

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17:46

How Philadelphia Passed a Breeding Moratorium 15-0: A...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/02/24

Philadelphia's City Council just voted 15 to 0 to pass a 3-year moratorium on unlicensed dog breeding and puppy sales — a bill that Penny Ellison helped draft and testified in favor of in council hearings. In this episode, she walks through exactly how it happened and what advocates everywhere can learn from it. Using Philadelphia's moratorium as a case study, Penny breaks down her Four Cs framework — Common Sense, Collaboration, Communication, and Compromise — and shows how each one played out in

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25:26

From Protest to Policy: Ending Horse-Drawn Carriages...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/02/18

For nearly a decade, one Philadelphia advocate has worked to end horse-drawn carriage rides in the city—not with outrage, but with strategy. In this episode, I speak with Janet White, founder of Carriage Horse Freedom, about how she moved from street protests to drafting legislation, building scientific credibility, and proposing a viable replacement model that changed the political conversation. We examine what it really takes to push for a legislative ban on a long-standing practice—and why

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17:33

Why Public Opinion Is the Most Underrated Tool in...

The Animal Advocate ·

2026/02/12

What kind of advocacy really improves the lives of animals? Is it public education? Is it passing laws? Is it litigation? Host Penny Ellison spent nearly two decades trying to figure out which one mattered most — and the answer she's come to may surprise you: public opinion has to move first. When it moves far enough, everything else follows. Sometimes that makes a law possible. Sometimes it makes a law unnecessary. And that second outcome is often better than people realize — because laws require

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