Animal advocacy often deals with serious, urgent issues. This episode takes a step sideways and talks about…wine!
Animal advocates can learn a lot from winemakers. They’ve successfully built a culture around enjoyment, place, by inviting new people in, keeping them engaged, and letting interest deepen over time.
Using wine as a lens, the episode explores parallels between the two worlds — how people first encounter new ideas, how storytelling pulls people in, and why approaches that work beautifully in one place may need adjusting in another.
The episode also leans into a longer view. Winemakers think in decades, not seasons. They invest in work whose payoff may come long after they’re gone. That mindset offers a refreshing perspective for anyone working on problems that don’t move quickly — and a reminder that slow progress isn’t the same as standing still.
In this episode, we explore:
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Why advocates should consider “approachability” like winemakers do
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How place and context shape what resonates
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Why not every idea needs to be introduced at full intensity
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How stories help people connect before they commit
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What it means to think in decades, not just campaigns
A year-end reflection on stepping back, noticing unexpected connections, and thinking a little differently about how change unfolds.
Key Takeaway
Lasting change tends to grow through invitation, attention to place, and a willingness to think in longer timeframes.
Episode Highlights
01:09 Approachability Matters: Why animal advocates should create “easy entry points” just like winemakers do
02:21 The Danger of Overwhelming Newcomers: How starting with suffering can lead to feelings of guilt and push potential allies away
03:41 Entry-Level Advocacy: The importance of focusing on universally relatable causes (puppy mills, basic veterinary care)
04:38 Context is Everything: Winemakers obsess over terroir; advocates must tailor approaches to local realities
05:45 Messaging for Different Communities: How animal welfare campaigning adapts in cities versus agricultural regions
07:02 The Power of Restraint and Focus: Why trying to solve every animal issue simultaneously is not an effective strategy
08:11 Pick a Lane: Why specializing makes advocates more effective
08:15 Storytelling Over Data: People connect with stories, not just statistics
09:40 Thinking Long-Term: Advocates—and vintners—plant seeds for change that may not bear fruit for years
11:14 What’s Next for the Podcast: A mix of structured, research-heavy episodes and conversational spotlights on real advocates
Transcript
Welcome to the Animal Advocate. And if you’re listening for the first time because someone shared this episode with you, I’m really glad you’re here. Today for the holiday season and the end of the year, we’re doing something a little different. It’s a reflective time of year for a lot of us, and when I’m not teaching animal law or working on policy, that reflection often happens with a glass of wine nearby. Not in a glamorous, influencer way, more in a “why is this so hard and what are we missing? “ way.
Over time, over a couple of glasses of wine, a few ideas started to come into focus for me. The wine world has figured out how to win people over in ways that animal advocates, dealing with far higher stakes, still struggle with. What I’m talking about isn’t wine itself. It’s the way the world of wine thinks about persuasion. How an industry built around something optional learned to invite people in, keep them engaged, and let their interest deepen over time.
So today I want to explore what animal advocacy can learn from that. Yeah, I know it probably sounds like the set up for a really niche TED Talk, but stay with me. By the end of this episode, I think you’ll start noticing advocacy lessons in places you didn’t expect, even if you don’t care about wine at all.
Welcome to the Animal Advocate, where we arm animal lovers with the information and inspiration you need to become effective advocates. I’m your host, Penny Ellison, and I’ve taught animal law and advocacy at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. If you’ve ever thought someone should do something about that, I’m here to guide you on your journey to being that someone. You can find us on the web at animaladvocacyacademy.com and that’s where you’ll find show notes and resources, and you can send us your comments on episodes and ideas for topics you’d like to hear on future shows. So, on to today’s topic.
Let me start with something the wine world understands instinctively, and advocates often get wrong. Imagine you walk into a wine shop. You’re not an expert. You just want something that tastes good with dinner, and the person helping you immediately starts describe a $200 bottle of aged Barolo – “earthy, complex, the kind of wine that really rewards serious knowledge of terroir.” You’d leave. Not because you hate wine, but because that interaction made you feel like you weren’t the right kind of person to be there.
Now, the uncomfortable connection. That’s how animal advocacy often sounds to people encountering it for the first time. We tell people how unbelievably cruel intense confinement of farm animals is. Pigs in gestation crates, hens in battery cages, which can feel like a personal attack if they didn’t know any of this five minutes ago. We open with suffering before we’ve established any trust. It’s like saying, “Hi, nice to meet you. Let me immediately overwhelm you and maybe even judge you” And then we’re surprised when people shut down. That has absolutely happened to me.
Winemakers figured out a long time ago that approachability matters. They create easy entry points, bottles that don’t require expertise, emotional stamina or a background lecture. So what’s our version of that? Maybe fighting puppy mills, keeping animals together with their pets, helping people afford basic veterinary care? Or protecting survivors of domestic violence and their animals. These are issues with immediate moral clarity to most people. People don’t have to revise their identity to care about them. They don’t have to overcome fear or defensiveness first. Animal advocates often confuse seriousness with effectiveness. Wine people figured out long ago that approachability changes behavior. Once people trust you, once they feel invited rather than tested or judged, they’re far more open to deeper conversations later.
There’s a second thing the wine world does better than we do. They’re obsessive about context. They use a word, terroir, to describe how place shapes everything. Soil, climate, rainfall, slope. You don’t grow whatever you want, wherever you want. You grow what can thrive where you are.
Animal advocates, by contrast, often act as if context is optional. We take a law that passed in one city and assume we can transplant it someplace else, unchanged. And when that fails, we blame the community instead of the strategy.
Winemakers don’t fight their land. Burgundy doesn’t waste energy wishing it could produce bold Cabernets. It leans into Pinot Noir and becomes extraordinary because of it.
Your community is your terrain, and that matters in two different ways.
First, it affects how you talk about an issue. Take outdoor housing for dogs in extreme weather. In a city, the messaging is straightforward. No one wants to see a dog chained outside in a snowstorm. But in agricultural areas, you might be talking to people with working dogs who’ve lived outdoors for generations. If you come in sounding like you’re lecturing farmers about how to care for their animals, you’ve already lost. So the messaging has to adjust. Not the goal, the way you talk about it.
But context doesn’t just change the message. Sometimes it changes the law itself. In Arizona, outdoor housing laws focus on shade, access to water and preventing heat stroke. In Minnesota, the same concern shows up as insulation, windbreaks and protection from frostbite. Same goal, protecting dogs from dangerous conditions. But the conversation that works in Phoenix and the ordinance that passes there won’t look the same as what works in rural Minnesota. Different places have different realities. Adapting to them isn’t compromise, it’s competence. Animals don’t benefit when good laws fail because we insisted on a one size fits all approach.
One more thing the wine world gets right is restraint. Walk into a good wine shop and you’ll notice they don’t carry everything – they curate. Now look at the average advocate’s life. We’re fighting puppy mills and factory farming and wildlife trafficking and cosmetic testing and housing discrimination. And it goes on and on. At some point, this stops being commitment and starts being more like chaos. I used to think caring about everything made me more serious. In reality, it can make you scattered. I once laughed out loud when I realized that my life goal, the one I intended to finish before I died, was “end all animal suffering!” Yeah, not exactly a model of do-ability. I’m still working on this. But I’ve learned that curation isn’t indifference to other problems. It’s strategy. When everything is a priority, nothing is. When you try to be an expert in everything, you end up being effective at very little. So pick your lane. Become useful somewhere specific.That’s how change happens.
One more important strategy is storytelling. Wine isn’t sold with spreadsheets. It’s sold with stories about place and failure and resilience and tradition. Because people don’t buy facts, they buy versions of themselves. Animal advocacy often leans heavily on numbers. And numbers matter, for sure. But stories change identity.
“This is Samson.” That’s what Steve Hughes told me when I interviewed him about bringing animal welfare education into schools. Samson was the dog who started it all for him, his reason for dedicating his life to teaching young people about compassion. One dog, one relationship. That’s what made years of work feel necessary. Or “This family had to surrender their dog not because they were irresponsible or the dog did anything wrong, but because their landlord drew an arbitrary line about the maximum weight for dogs.” Tell a story that brings people in. These stories don’t ask people to become someone new. They ask them to live up to who they already believe they are. That’s persuasion.
Finally, there’s another lesson from winemaking that I find harder to accept but it might be the most important. Winemakers think in decades. They plant vines knowing that they may never see them reach full maturity. They invest in work whose payoff may come long after they’re gone.
Advocates have been working for years in many cities, including here in Philadelphia, on ending horse drawn carriage rides. Progress was slow. Sometimes I felt like nothing was happening. But slowly, steadily, carriages are disappearing. And now we’re seeing new alternatives emerge, like carriages powered by electricity that preserve the charm without the animal welfare problems. That kind of change doesn’t happen in a single campaign cycle. It happens because people kept working, adjusting their strategy and showing up even when it felt pointless.
That way of thinking has changed how I approach advocacy, and it’s shaping how I think about this podcast going forward. As we head into 2026, The Animal Advocate will keep its weekly rhythm, which means one episode every week, just not always the same kind. Every other week will be the deeply researched, structured episodes like you’re used to – the long aged vintages. That’s me. Long aged. On the alternating weeks, episodes will be shorter and more conversational reflections on what I’m seeing and what’s shifting for advocates right now. I’ll also share biographical pieces about advocates, past and present to keep you inspired and hopefully spark new ideas. Some episodes need time in the barrel, others are best tasted while they’re still forming.
So here are my lessons from the vineyard:
Lower the barrier to entry
Respect where you are
Curate your focus
Always lead with story and
Think long term.
And at the heart of all this, invite people to the table. I found that conversation, sometimes helped along by a glass of something you love, goes further than confrontation ever does.
As we close out 2025, I want to wish all of you a happy, healthy New Year. Thank you for being part of this community, for caring enough to keep learning, and for doing the quiet, steady work that adds up over time. And, if you know someone who wants to turn their compassion into better laws and policies for animals, share the podcast with them. We’re building something here and we need more voices. Here’s to 2026 cheer.
That’s it for today. The Animal Advocate Podcast is brought to you by the Animal Advocacy Academy. You can find episodes and show notes at animaladvocacyacademy.com along with a link to our Facebook and LinkedIn pages where we discuss our podcasts and we’d love to discuss your thoughts and experiences there.
