After nearly two decades of teaching and practicing animal law, I’ve wrestled with a recurring question: what kind of advocacy most reliably improves the lives of animals? Is it litigation? Legislation? Public education?
Over time, a pattern emerges. In visible animal industries, cultural attitudes often begin to shift before legal reform takes hold. When enough people see a practice differently, industries respond—sometimes before lawmakers act. And when legislation does follow, it often formalizes changes that were already underway.
This episode examines what enforcement gaps reveal about strategy, and what the stories of circuses, SeaWorld, and the fur industry suggest about how durable change unfolds.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
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Why enforcement capacity shapes whether animal protection laws succeed in practice
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What federal inspection data reveals about the limits of regulation
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How shifting public attitudes influenced the end of elephants in American circuses
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The role Blackfish played in reshaping the orca entertainment industry
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Why the fur market declined as cultural norms evolved
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How identity and nostalgia complicate advocacy messaging
Key Takeaway
Shifting public opinion is often the first meaningful step in reducing animal suffering—and in many cases, that shift alone can accomplish more than passing a new law.
Episode Highlights
00:00 – Welcome Back & Central Question
Penny Ellison introduces the show and ponders what kind of advocacy truly improves lives for animals.
01:27 – The Enforcement Gap
Why animal laws often fail in practice due to underfunded, understaffed enforcement.
02:20 – USDA Inspection Realities
The overwhelming ratio of animal welfare inspectors to operations—and why enforcement alone can’t solve everything.
04:37 – When Laws on the Books Don’t Stop Abuse
Explaining how legal victories become hollow when violations go largely unpunished.
05:06 – The Circus Case Study
How shifting public sentiment—not lawsuits or federal bans—removed elephants from American circuses.
08:20 – A New Kind of Circus
Ringling Brothers reimagined the circus without animals because audiences demanded it—and no law required it.
09:12 – Blackfish & SeaWorld
One documentary changes millions of minds about orca captivity, leading to industry-wide transformation.
10:32 – The Decline of Fur
How public pressure and shifting fashion norms—rather than laws—led to the collapse of the fur market.
12:10 – How Change Really Happens
The importance of reframing familiar practices and meeting people where they are without shame or blame.
13:12 – The Limits of Public Opinion
Why laws are still essential for hidden animal abuses, but public advocacy plays a unique and primary role for visible ones.
14:09 – The Pattern of Progress
How shifting public opinion sparks changes in industry practices, then laws follow to lock in gains.
15:59 – Be the Change Challenge
Penny issues a weekly action step: start one non-confrontational conversation about an under-acknowledged animal issue.
Want a practical framework for legislative advocacy?
If this conversation made you think differently about how animal laws are passed—or why some good laws fail in practice—I created a short private audio series called The Four C’s of Legislative Advocacy for Animals. It lays out a clear, practical framework you can apply to your own advocacy work.
You can download it free at AnimalAdvocacyAcademy.com/4Cs.
Transcript
Penny Ellison:
Welcome back to The Animal Advocate. As someone who teaches law students and supervises pro bono legal work for the benefit of animals, I’ve spent the better part of two decades thinking about one question: What kind of advocacy really improves the lives of animals? Is it public education? Is it passing laws? Is it litigation? And for a long time, I kept trying to figure out which one mattered most, which one we should be investing our limited resources in, which one really moved the needle. And the answer I’ve come to, after teaching and working on legislation and sitting on the board of a shelter and watching lots of campaigns play out, is this. Public opinion has to move first, and when it moves far enough, everything else follows. Sometimes that shift in opinion makes the passage of a law possible. Sometimes it makes a law unnecessary because once enough people see something differently, demand changes, industries adapt, and the practice fades on its own.
And that second outcome—change without a law—is often better than people realize. Because laws require enforcement. Enforcement requires money, people, and infrastructure. And when it comes to animal issues, those things have been in short supply.
Welcome to The Animal Advocate, where we arm animal lovers with the information and inspiration you need to become effective advocates. I’m your 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, onto today’s topic.
Let me give you a sense of what I mean about enforcement. The Federal Animal Welfare Act covers more than a million animals in roughly 17,500 facilities across the country: research labs, zoos, breeders, dog dealers, animal exhibitors. The agency responsible for enforcing it is the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS. As of early 2025, APHIS Animal Care had about 115 inspectors to cover all 17,500 of those facilities. That’s one inspector for every 150 or so licensed operations. And keep in mind, these are operations of all different kinds involving all different species.
And that number of inspectors, it’s been dropping. The agency lost about 25% of its overall workforce in early 2025 through the government’s cuts. One expert who has tracked this for over 20 years said the inspector count may now be as low as 77, the lowest she’s ever seen. The USDA’s own inspector general has repeatedly found that enforcement is inadequate. A 2025 audit found that 80% of dog breeders reviewed had at least one violation, and 95% were not being inspected according to the agency’s own schedule. Fines, when they’re issued at all, have historically been discounted by an average of 86% from the maximum allowed, to the point where the inspector general said violators treat them as a cost of doing business. I’m not bringing this up to be discouraging. I’m bringing it up because it tells us something about strategy.
When we pass a law that depends on inspectors going onto private property to check compliance, and we don’t adequately fund the enforcement, the law doesn’t do what we hoped it would. The law is on the books, the violations continue. So when there’s a way to change an industry practice through shifting public opinion and consumer demand rather than relying on an enforcement system that barely functions, that’s worth paying attention to. And we have real examples of exactly that happening.
Let me start with something that, for many of us, was just a normal part of childhood: circuses. For generations, elephants were the centerpiece of American circus culture. They were marketed as majestic, intelligent, almost magical animals. Families took their children to see them, people felt affection for them and awe, and very few people thought about what their lives were actually like. But behind the scenes, concerns were building for decades. Advocates documented the use of painful bull hooks to drag the elephants around. They documented chaining. They documented long hours of confinement and the stress of constant transport.
In the early 2000s, a coalition of groups including the ASPCA and other animal protection organizations brought a lawsuit against Feld Entertainment, the parent company of Ringling Brothers, arguing that the treatment of elephants violated the Endangered Species Act. That case went on for years. It was hard fought, and in the end, it was dismissed, not because the court ruled that Ringling’s treatment of elephants was acceptable, but because the court found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case. That’s often a problem in cases trying to protect animals. So the merits of the argument were never even reached.
If you look at that moment in isolation, you might say the advocacy failed. Only it didn’t. Because at the same time that the litigation was playing out, and in part because of the press it was getting, public awareness of how the elephants and other animals in the circus were being treated was growing. A federal ban on the use of animals in circuses was a long shot, to say the least. But because people were increasingly alarmed at what they’d learned, cities began passing local bans on the use of wild animals in traveling shows. One by one, Boulder, Colorado, Stamford, Connecticut, Hallandale Beach, Florida, San Francisco, Irvine, Pasadena, Santa Monica, city after city in California. And it wasn’t just the coasts. Places like Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Richmond, Missouri, Collinsville, Illinois all passed bans. By 2016, dozens of local jurisdictions had already said, “Not here.” And that mattered for a very practical reason: circuses are traveling operations.
When more and more cities became off-limits, it became harder to plan tours and harder to sell tickets and especially harder to stay profitable. So even though the lawsuit was lost, the pressure didn’t go away. It grew. And in 2016, Ringling Brothers announced that they would retire their elephants from touring performances. They cited changing public attitudes. They cited the difficulty of operating in places that were adopting restrictions. And within a year, the traditional Ringling Brothers Circus with animals shut down entirely.
But that’s not the end of the story. Because the circus didn’t disappear. I saw a commercial just this week. Kids laughing, acrobats, music, that same sense of wonder, but no animals. Today’s version relies on human performers and technology, not elephants. No federal law banning elephants in circuses made that happen. Public opinion made that happen. And once enough people saw it differently, the business model just didn’t work. Since Ringling closed, the momentum has only accelerated. Today, 12 states have passed bans or restrictions on wild animals in traveling shows, and nearly 200 local jurisdictions across 37 states have done the same.But the industry had already changed before most of those laws were on the books. The laws confirmed what the public had already decided.
That same pattern played out with SeaWorld. For years, orca shows were presented as educational, even inspirational. You know, the killer whales? Families felt like they were connecting with something extraordinary. Then, in 2013, The documentary Blackfish came out. Now, you may not have agreed with every aspect of the film, but it changed the conversation. It told a story that people hadn’t heard before. It framed captivity in a new way. Public opinion began to move. Attendance dropped. Celebrities spoke out. And partnerships shifted. And in 2016, SeaWorld announced it would end its orca breeding program. The whales currently in its care would be the last generation there. A few years later, the theatrical orca shows were phased out and replaced with presentations focused on natural behaviors and education.
Are the whales still in captivity? Yes. Did this solve everything? No. But a single documentary changed how millions of people felt about orca shows.. And once that feeling changed, the company changed its practices—not because a law forced it to, but because the market demanded it.
We’ve seen it happen in fashion, too. Go back a couple of decades and fur was still widely accepted in mainstream culture. You saw it on runways, in department stores, in high-end brands. It was framed as luxury. Then advocates focused on how animals were raised and killed. Campaigns became more visible. High-profile designers began announcing they were going fur-free, and a lot of celebrities stopped wearing it. Not enough, but a lot. And over time, consumer attitudes shifted. The global fur market has declined dramatically in the last decade. Many major fashion houses have publicly committed to abandoning fur. Entire countries have begun phasing out fur farming.What used to signal status started to signal something else, and once people stopped buying, the designers pulled back, the retailers stopped stocking it, and the farms started closing.
So what do these three examples have in common? In each case, people consciously or unconsciously connected some aspect of their identity to that use of animals. People loved elephants and whales and the family experience they had seeing them together up close. In the case of fur, many people felt connected to their mothers and grandmothers wearing fur and felt like it made them look glamorous. And that’s what makes this kind of change hard. When something is tied to nostalgia, tradition, or identity, you can’t just attack it. If you tell people they’re bad for liking something, they’ll stop listening. None of these shifts happened because advocates shamed people into caring. They happened because people were given new information and invited to reconsider something familiar: a documentary, a news story, a conversation with someone they trusted invited them to take a second look.
That’s something I talk about in the Four Cs of Animal Advocacy, a free private podcast series I put together about how change really happens for animals. One of those Four Cs is communication: how to talk about issues in ways that open minds instead of closing them. So if you’ve ever wondered how to have those conversations without making people defensive, That’s the— what that part of the series is about. So I’ll put the link in the show notes where you can download that.
Now, I want to be clear about something. I am not saying we don’t need laws. We absolutely do, and I work every day on that. For practices that happen behind closed doors, on private property, like puppy mills, research labs, factory farms, You can’t really rely on public opinion alone because the public can’t see what’s happening. You need laws that give inspectors the authority to go in and check. You need enforcement. The problem, as I described with APHIS, is that we often pass those laws and then don’t fund the enforcement. That’s its own kind of advocacy challenge, and it’s one we need to take seriously.
But for practices that happen in public, circuses, marine mammal shows, horse and carriage rides, photo ops with cubs of big cats. There’s a different path available because the public can see these things, and when they start to see them differently, the demand drops. And when the demand drops, the practice changes. Even if it’s not fully eliminated, there are a lot fewer animals suffering. That doesn’t mean you never need a law for these public-facing practices. Sometimes a law is what gets the ball rolling or what prevents backsliding. But the sequence often goes public opinion shifts first, practices start to change, and the law follows to lock in that progress.
And that brings me to an issue that we’re going to talk about next week: horse-drawn carriages. To many people, carriage rides feel quaint, romantic, family-friendly. You take your kids, you take a photo. What’s the harm? And that’s exactly why this is such a challenging issue. The starting point isn’t cruelty in people’s minds. The starting point is affection. But advocates have spent years raising concerns about the physical strain on horses working in traffic, in extreme weather, on hard pavement. They’ve raised safety concerns, they’ve documented accidents, they’ve asked whether this is something that still makes sense in a modern city. If the other examples teach us anything, it’s that these conversations take time. You’re asking people to reconsider something they associate with happy memories. But it shifted on elephants, it shifted on orcas, it shifted on fur. Not overnight, and we’re still working on it, but over years, and not through shaming, through persistent, patient communication.
Next week, I’m going to share a conversation with someone who has spent many years working on the horse and carriage issue, and someone who’s seen firsthand what that long arc looks like.
So for this week’s Be the Change action, think about an animal issue where public opinion hasn’t caught up yet. Carriage horses, cub photo ops at roadside attractions, maybe something in your own community. Find one article or one short video that tells the story from the animal’s perspective. Then share it with one person. Not in a lecturing way, just in a “I came across this and it surprised me” way. That’s how every one of these shifts started.
One conversation at a time. Thanks for listening. 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 is experiences there. If you’re interested in learning more about protecting animals, subscribe to the show so you get every episode when it comes out. If you have any questions on this or any other topic related to animal law, email them to podcast@animaladvocacyacademy.com and we’ll make sure to get them answered. We’ll either email you back or feature them in a future episode or both.
And remember, compassion is great, but compassionate action is infinitely better. Until next week, live with compassion.
