ANIMAL LAW LECTURE SERIES KEYNOTE ADDRESS

BRUCE WAGMAN SCHIFF HARDIN ANIMAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND (US ) I really cant thank you all enough for coming, and thank Voiceless enough for having me here. Its really my honour and privilege to be here in this room, in this wonderful room filled with so many people. The fact that you are here proves the legitimacy, not only of the movement but of what Justice Kirby said in his opinion and other judges have said in America in their opinions - animal law is a matter of public concern. Its a matter thats on peoples minds. Whether you are somebody who is ready to go and ready to fight for the animals or just interested, merely the fact that youre here demonstrates that this is something that our society is interested in and needs to address. This morning we had a QC, an MP, a judge. This evening we have Justice Kirby and others. It is quite impressive. It is rare, even in America, that we get these many esteemed people showing up. What I have been asked to do is tell you a little bit about my history, how I got to the point where I am today with respect to my practice as an animal lawyer, and then to discuss some particular cases. I am going to lead you through a bunch of cases as we go through. First, were going to look at this nice picture. Two dogs and a woman on a beach. And Im going to tell you that I brought this picture out last night, and Professor Sankoff brought out almost an identical picture. My picture is from Stinson Beach, California; his picture was from some beach in New Zealand. We debated about who had a better beach, but the point is we both had that picture, and I suspect many of you have some similar picture or a picture of an animal. The point is that the things Ill be talking about today are world

wide. Theyre global. Im going to talk about American law, but its not just happening in America; its not just happening in Australia. Its happening everywhere, and I mean both the concern for animals, and the abuse and torture and suffering of animals. I first came to animal law almost by mistake. There was a busy job, one I wanted a break from. There was an American Bar Association conference, it said something about animals. I had dogs and cats, I thought Id go. I walked in, I found out about the way animals were treated in America, and I walked out with a revelation, the only one Ive ever had in my life, and I said I cant participate in this suffering any more, and Im going to do what I can to change. Over the last 17 years, my practice has gone from one pro bono case here and there with respect to animal law to what I describe as a seven day a week, 150 per cent time animal law practice. For the last five years, thats basically all Ive done. So now, were going to run through a bunch of cases and clients, if you will, that Ive had over the years. That was my first client. Hes a Tuli elk. He lives in the Point Reyes National Seashore in California, and he and about 300 of his family were put on this land to get away from a disease called brucellosis (that was not named after me). Over time, they did very well. They got over the disease and they spread, and on that land as well were a bunch of ranchers, who had been given 99 year leases for $1 to continue their use and exploitation of animals in farming situations. So the first case was to try to get them off the land. The first case was a good example of how to be an animal lawyer and how not to be an animal lawyer. Dont take a case that requires Federal statutes, tries to get people who have been on the land for 500 years off it when youve been out of school for three weeks. It doesnt work. So we lost, and thats another point. PETA has said it, Justice Kirby has referred to it. We are trying to change the world here. Were going to lose. Every social justice reform movement, every civil rights movement, has a lot of losing cases before the success finally comes. What we have thats not going to stop is the passion and the heart to continue. When I lost a case pretty badly early on, but it was a total situation of a judge just not acknowledging the interests of animals, I called up Joyce Tischler, the head of the Animal Defense Fund in tears, and she said Bruce, the bad news for them is youre not going away, and thats where we are at today.

Heres a list of many American animal protection organizations, some of which may be familiar to you, some of which arent, but you can sort of tell what they all do and they have all been clients at one time or another. I like sometimes - because Im an animal lover - to list my clients by species, so Ive had chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas, lions, dogs, cats, elephants, seals, dolphins and millions and millions of animals involved in factory farming.

Dolphins we learn a lot as animal lawyers. Thats one of the exciting things about it. Its an intellectually challenging field, because we are trying to take the square peg of animals and put it in the round hole of the law some place its never been before, and try to convince judges to understand that they can do that as well. But we also learn the facts of things that may look okay to us on their face, like a swim with the dolphins program. I thought a swim with the dolphins program Id never been involved in one, but it sounded pretty cool. You get in a pool with a dolphin and they pull you around boy, its every kids dream. It turns out those dolphins are seriously drugged. They are on constant drugs for their digestive system because they have ulcers and they are on antidepressants all the time because they are locked in a situation they can never get out of. We are not supposed to be with dolphins. So my next case was to try to stop a swim with the dolphins program in Reno, Nevada. I know youre from Australia, you may not realize you may have heard of Las Vegas. Its a really horrible place that were usually embarrassed about if were from America. Well, Reno is like the slums of Las Vegas. I hope theres nobody from Reno here. My point really is its not a place for dolphins. They dont belong there and thats what we fought. We talk about companionship a lot. Many of you may have companion animals. Thats what brings many people to animal law, their dogs or their cats. How much would you pay for your dog or your cat? Many people would say Not a million dollars would I give him or her up for, so many of the cases in animal law these days in America are law suits over injuries or deaths of animals. What would you do if

somebody came in and killed one of those animals, who happened to be mine? How do you value them is the question. How do judges take this piece of property and decide what the real value is? We have talked about property, but appreciate this: my dogs and my cats arent worth as much as this bottle of water. I got them from the pound, they were about to kill them. They were worthless in the eyes of the law, and the market the day I got them. They have devalued in price. From a strictly market perspective I should pay somebody who kills them, but thats obviously not the way we value animals. So we try to value what that companionship is; what price do you put on a piece of property whose only value is the benefit that he or she brings you, whether medical, therapeutic or companionship? There has to be a way to value that, and more and more judges are appreciating that, but the law still says property, but there are ways to change it, and thats a whole other lecture. Custody cases are very big. This case is the plaintiff, the dog, versus the cat saying who gets the bed. But seriously, custody cases are big in America these days, and while theyre sometimes just between two couples who are bickering and using the dog as the pawn, just like people use children, we do take on cases in which we are trying to decide the animals best interest. If the animals best interest is at issue that changes everything, because in general again theyre property. You get the Cadillac, she gets the dog, but if we can get a judge to say Wait, Im going to consider where the dog goes based on who treats the dog better, that actually is from the perspective of the dog and that is so important. So that increases the value of animals because it takes that piece of property and turns them into something different. I like to call it quasi-property. Theyre not people were never going to say theyre people but theyre not property. Theyre not this bottle. Another custody case.

Heres where it gets ugly, and by ugly I dont mean really ugly like the dogs arent ugly, but this world is ugly. This is a horrible place for many animals. Many of you have animals who are probably asleep on the pillow right now whether you know it or not, but these animals never left that cage. I do a lot of work on cases that are known as hoarding cases, or collector cases. In the past four years I have had four cases, and those four cases alone involved 1100 animals kept by four people in situations like this.

They never leave the cages; the cages are never cleaned; they live and breathe in their urine and faeces for months and months and months. Many of them are breeders. Theyre breeders and theyre hoarders. The animals suffer badly. Theyre stacked constantly. If youre at the bottom of the stack of four crates, you know what comes down all the time. These people dont change that and the animals suffer very very badly. Number one we have what most of you can appreciate, whether you have companion animals or not confinement; the confinement that were going to talk about even more with pigs and cows. These dogs never get out to do anything. They never get any interaction. We have trained domestic animals to be with us. These animals get no human interaction, get no human connection, nor do they even get time to do anything with themselves.

But even worse than that, if it could be worse, is the physical disease. Heres one of the dogs from the 550 dogs and 21 birds we took from a couple in Sanford, North Carolina. The couple are both 68 going on about 85 and what they did is not take care of 550 dogs. Every once in a while they walked around and threw some food in, but the problems we see in these cases are exhibited by this female Pomeranian here. Almost no teeth, and blind. Eye problems and teeth problems are rampant in hoarding cases. Why is that? Because the nutrition, and the lack of sanitation, is so bad that their teeth literally fall out of their mouths. Their jaws literally rot out. Lets stop a moment here and stop getting clinical and get real about what were talking about. Were talking about mammals. They feel just the same way as we do. The empirical research referred to earlier that weve done is that a dog feels tooth pain just like you or I. These dogs had their teeth rot out of their mouths. You know how quickly you go to the dentist when youve got a little toothache and you cant even see it. Theyve been suffering for six months, nine months, years, and never gotten any treatment. The 550 dogs at this facility had never seen a veterinarian. So again, its really important to bring home to all of us, and especially to the outside world, to judges, that mammals as well as birds feel the same way we do. They may speak a different language about that feeling but its there, and the science is there. We use veterinarians on a regular basis in cases to demonstrate to judges this is not some crazy animal loving, anthropocentric human saying Dusty just doesnt feel good. This is a veterinarian who can say This pain is exactly the same and its worse for animals. We understand if were in pain we may get out of it. Many of you may appreciate that your dog thinks now is forever - like when you go away for 12 hours, you come home and he goes crazy; you go away for two minutes, you come home and he goes crazy. They live in this kind of filthy environment, absolutely deprived of everything. Almost all the hoarding situations are the same. Some of them are much worse, with cannibalism and dead animals around, and I should say I apologise for the graphic

nature but I dont really apologise because I want you to see the reality. But what I should tell you is, Im not showing you the bad pictures, believe it or not. This is really the most graphic picture Ive got to show you about hoarding. In that 550 dog facility, there were ten boxes like this. In each box, there were somewhere between four and eight dogs. This is not a trick. The other two sides of this box are the same as what youre looking at. The tops were in some cases nailed shut. Occasionally every two weeks they threw some food in. That was it. Life in a dark box for these animals. Thats the kind of situations we see on a regular basis. Hoarding is not an erratic situation, it is epidemic in America and, I think, around the world. Its definitely the number one threat to companion animals in America. We have a reported 700 cases a year. Thats just whats reported. Thats like saying how many reports have there been of marijuana smoking this year, and you multiply by how many are not seen. So it is a major problem. Its not limited to companion animals. We had a 700 to 800 exotic animal hoarding situation which included chimpanzees, monkeys, all sorts of cats. Not to mention again the sanitation, they estimated that there were over 200,000 rats in this particular facility, and they werent being kept at the hoarding facility. Mountain lions an American icon. So when they discovered there were 125 mountain lions somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they decided Hey, lets kill them. Lets have a hunt. Well be real careful, and well make sure we dont kill them all, and well also make sure that theres plenty of restraints on whats happening, and besides you really never see a mountain lion. So we sued the State of South Dakota and tried to stop the hunt.

Again, we lost, despite the fact that the testimony from the other side was that the hunting would probably and could likely cause the extinction of the mountain lions despite that, the judge said that the hunt could go on, and one of the big defences was Well never see a mountain lion, youll never kill them. This is 24 hours after we lost. This mountain lion had a cub near her, who was then picked up and taken to a research facility.

Experimentation on animals is constant, and we all know that, and we all hate to look at these pictures and again I apologise, but this is a big issue in animal law. The Animal Welfare Act in America does very little to protect these animals, other than very minimum restraints on exactly how theyre housed. I have been involved in several cases which do our best to provide for these animals when theyre not in research. Whatever you think about research and I understand the controversy, and I understand the desire to cure diseases is this okay?

Another big issue in every population is domestic animals, and too many of them. In America we euthanize four to five million domestic animals every single year. This is a dog being lowered into a cage, which will then be pushed into the gas chamber, where they will be euthanized. Now, dont gasp right away because gassing is legal in 43 states in America, and is an approved method of euthanasia in many areas. If done correctly and properly, its almost as good as euthanasia by injection. But it just so happened the State of Georgia decided they didnt approve of it, because they felt it was too bad. Despite that - and this reflects not so much just in the State of Georgia, but in the state of humanitys feelings about animals - the State of Georgia Department of Agriculture, the commissioner, one of the top officials in the state, had gone around to shelters, and said despite the law that said no gas chambers, You guys should buy a gas chamber. We had documents. They werent even hiding it. It wasnt even really hard, except suing the State of Georgia is not easy, by anybody especially a California lawyer. Despite that, we got the right judge, and that judge ruled that the Department of Agriculture had to stop their practices and so overnight we shut down the illegal gas chambers in Georgia. This is the kind of success that really just makes your day, makes your life. Overnight we stopped the suffering of some 10,000 animals in Georgia - year by year by year, going forward forever, and the evidence was unfortunately that in Georgia gas chamber euthanasia was not done correctly, and animals were suffering in horrible ways. Heres another one of those bubbles that gets burst. Theres a cute little chimpanzee you see on TV or in the movies, right? Well, he is cute, but to get him to put those clothes on hes been beaten with bats and sticks and chains, and kicked and abused in ways that you cant even imagine. Every single chimpanzee that shows up in a movie or television has had that done to him. This is not the animal rights activist talking, this is testimony from Jane Goodall, who many of you have probably heard of; testimony from Roger Fouts, probably the worlds leader in captive chimpanzee training and maybe even more important than the experts we know so well, its testimony from inside the industry. Thats how we get exotic animals to perform for us. Its not funny; its not cute. But we dont see that, and as Justice Kirby mentioned and as Professor Sankoff mentioned, its what we dont know that we need to know that I think will change us.

You folks came here tonight to learn about something, as brutal as it may be to learn, and to walk out with that knowledge, but that knowledge will empower us to change. And as strange as it may be, in the very small niche of animal law that Ive developed this subniche of chimpanzee law partly because of this knowledge, but also chimpanzees have been sort of separated out for us as humans, because as many of you may know they are so close to us. They share 98.7 per cent of our DNA. I never quite understand why were above them in the evolutionary scale, because they seem to have it a lot better down, but nevertheless there they are. But theres that chimp, and heres Taya who we rescued who had her head split open by a lock, like a combination lock, by her trainer and ended up in surgery. So we do our best, and Ive done two or three cases trying to get animals out of entertainment. There are amazing exemptions for the use of animals in entertainment in America, because theyre coupled with the exemptions for the use of animals in research, and chimpanzees were considered at one point in time as the primary research specimen for AIDS research. But setting aside the research issue, would any of you say I would like to see that chimpanzee on TV, and its okay with me if he got beaten with a chain for me to see that. I bet theres nobody wholl come forward and say yes. Also because chimpanzees are so close to us, we have tried to establish some personhood status, and I dont mean just the same as us. Were not advocating that they can vote, or buy cars, or drive cars but something more than property, because there is such a connection. They understand us. They are so curious because they are so intelligent. They also apparently like tattoos, see the tattoos? But the point is they have an intelligence that we understand and that we can recognize, because they look so similar to us, and so we have worked to their increased rights the notion being not for me that

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chimpanzees are any more deserving of rights than chickens, or pigs, or cows, but just that they can be if you will a keystone species. If we can get people to start thinking that somebody other than us deserves some protection, then hopefully it will be a slippery slope, and well be down the bottom of that slope with chickens in enough time. We are also their guardians. We have put them in entertainment; we have put them in research; and now we have to take care of them. They cant go back to the wild, if you didnt know that. They have to stay in cages for the rest of their lives, but we can take on the task of taking care of them. And so we have entered several cases and argued that we should be guardians - guardian ad litem for you lawyers - in a particular case where we can represent the chimpanzee separate and apart from the plaintiff and defendant, and in America thats actually been extended now to dogs in certain cases. Im not sure if the Michael Vick case is as popular here as it was over there, but Mr Vick was a football player who was involved in dog fighting, and as far as I am concerned did more for us than most animal lawyers have done, because he exposed that practice and in that case for the first time ever a Federal Court judge appointed a guardian for the 40 dogs that were saved from his facility, in his compound. And in the great State of Tennessee, a judge also in another case, in a custody case, between the parents and the partner of a deceased man who were arguing over a dog, granted guardianship to the dog. So those are all things I do, and theyre all reasons why I go to work every day. But what happened to me in 1992 when I had that revelation was about this. This picture just demonstrates what Katrina was talking about before. Everybody else is that little dot; everything weve talked about until now, and the large percentage of animals in terms of numbers are farmed animals. Not only that, they undoubtedly suffer the worst cruelty. They suffer cruelty for the most part from the day theyre born to the day they die, and whatever method that death is and however long or short that death may be. Thats the state of the world. Its the state of the world here in Australia, and in America. Animals are commodities; theyre pieces of meat; theyre products were going to use and we dont consider them to be sentient beings but they are. So we go down on the farm and we try to change whats going on there. But were not

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talking about this farm. Were not talking about what everybody either thinks is happening or wants to think is happening. Were talking about the reality, but this is reality if they were treated they way they should be. Its why we fight, if you will. They have sentiency; they have intelligence; they understand what theyre doing. They appreciate the good things in life, like a good bath. They like to go swimming. They know when things smell good. They like the soft feel of hay, like we like the soft feel of a bed. Every one of these animals that were talking about, every one of these animals that you eat, or whose products you eat, have family lives if we let them have them. Their young stay with them; their young care about them. When young calves are taken away from their mothers, so that we can drink their mothers milk, the mothers scream and cry for up to seven days. Thats not anecdotal; thats scientific. Thats reported. Theyre socially cooperative, like we are. They may not all sit in a room like this, but theyll all walk around on the farm together. They wont bother each other. They certainly wont kill each other. But thats not whats happening. Yes, there may be farms here in Australia and there are certainly farms in California that look like this, but 99 per cent of the meat, milk and dairy that you get comes from places with a stark contrast. Im not sure how bad this looks to you, but these animals never leave these pens. They stay here until the day that they are pork, or bacon, or ham. They have not one shred of their natural lives led. Industry says occasionally in defence, when theyre bold enough to say, Well, they can still live and breathe and excrete. Thats not enough as far as Im concerned, and so we try to change that.

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We talked just a little bit, so Ill tell you a little bit more about sows in production; mothers in production. Again remember these are mothers, just like any of you who have been a mother, or any of you who have had a mother so I think that covers everybody. The sows are mothers for their entire lives, much shorter than their lives would be, but they start out as sows in gestation, gestation crates, gestation meaning pregnancy. As Justice Kirby described, those crates are what youre looking at. Its shorter and narrower than the pig herself, so for her entire life she is pressed against metal steel bars. Again, remember its just like if you were pressed against metal steel bars for your entire life and could never move, and all you could do was just stand up and lay down. Thats the life for sows who raise the pigs who become ham and pork. In general, as I understand it, the pork industry then discards the sows. They dont even use them for anything. Theyre just trash. Animals are not trash, but to the pork industry they are, so once they become spent another industry term meaning they can no longer produce the number of young in a pregnancy thats desired theyre thrown out with the trash. Their young go on to come on our tables. Theres another shot. Thats how they are. They cant move. Imagine living like that. One other factor about the pigs. In addition to this confinement, which I submit would be enough for anybody to say I dont want to be involved in this, there are extremely cruel practices which are committed on them on a regular basis. Just some examples, none of them with anesthesia, so just again the pain as it is. They are castrated, their teeth are clipped, their tails are docked. Just imagine going up to your dog with big shears and cutting off his tail. Think about how you think he might feel. Youre right thats how he would feel. Or, gentlemen, think about someone coming up and castrating you without anesthesia. Thats how the pigs feel. When they are meat pigs, they are kept in these facilities where they are constantly pushed against each other, so youve all got

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your nice little chairs there. Think about if there were not chairs and I made you sit in this little spot down here. Thats the way the pigs live, and not just for the 45 minutes you have to listen to me but for their entire lives. It doesnt get any better for chickens. Some argue it gets worse. As Justice Kirby said, an A4 piece of paper. We call them 8 by 11 in America, but Im very familiar with them too. Thats where they are their entire lives. They can never do any of the natural behaviours that chickens are involved in. Thats where your eggs come from.

Tens of thousands of them are loaded onto trucks, tens of thousands on a regular basis to be carted across America, and in the facilities there they are. Dark houses where the light is controlled to control the production. And of course you can only get eggs from a female chicken, so if youre a male chick I dont know, maybe its better, but thats where you go the day youre born, into the trash. Sometimes youre sent through a woodchipper; sometimes youre just put in a dumpster to die with the rest of your brothers.

Veal calves. Youve probably heard of that because in the 80s that became a big cause celebre, and even in America we stopped eating so much veal. Veal calves do not get out of their crates. They are stuck in their crates, or theyre stuck in stanchions, for their entire lives, thousands of them. So how do we change it? We look to the law, were lawyers. Thats what we do. So how about federal law? There should be some good protection in America regarding animal protection. There is not one federal anti-cruelty law. People find that shocking. I imagine youd find that shocking that thats the case in Australia as well, because we think somebody must be watching out. Most people say to me, I know theres anti-cruelty laws, doesnt that take care of it? No, it doesnt. Something I

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mentioned earlier called the Animal Welfare Act in America doesnt cover farmed animals - sorry guys, youre out of luck - but people think the opposite. There are actually two Federal laws in America that cover farmed animals. The first one is the 28 hour law. So imagine being in a truck like that, or like that, for 27 hours and 50 minutes without food, without stopping, without water. Thats what anybody can do legally to an animal in America. After 28 hours they have to give them five hours of rest. They are trucked across America. But remember its been mentioned before in addition to all those farmed animals in that circle, we can separate it out again. 90 per cent of the animals 9 billion every year in America, I guess 450,000,000 in Australia are chickens. In America, the United States Department of Agriculture has declared that chickens dont apply, or dont fit, within the 28 hour law. So theyre not protected at all, and it took until 2006 for the USDA to say Well, trucks apply even though trucks are the way these animals are trucked across they said only trains apply because the law was written 100 years ago. Tens of thousands on a truck. The other law in America that supposedly protects animals protects them at the very, very end of their life, and I submit that is really a joke. I dont say that lightly, but its the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. How do you humanely kill an animal? Well, before you kill him it seems that you should render him unconscious, and that is indeed the first requirement in this law. S1901A says animals can be shocked and hung upside down. Thats the safe way to do it to make sure that we dont get any diseases, if theyre unconscious. But then, because kosher slaughter and other ritual forms of slaughter require a conscious animal, they said the other way to do it is, Well, dont render them unconscious. How can they both be humane? That was challenged, and the courts said Congress decided that both ways were humane. So I guess both ways were humane. Additionally, since kosher slaughter was the issue, and thats a religious practice, the challenge was under the United States First Amendment and you have similar laws here that says you cant mix religion and law. But the court said no, because it has a secular purpose, this humane purpose. Lo and behold last year, with an appeal pending probably coming up this year, the USDA stood by its position that chickens dont have any coverage under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. So again, remember how many? 90 per cent of the animals that are slaughtered in America are covered by no laws, just about. So that line is live chickens about to be placed in boiling water. Thats how they get to die. So we give up with the Feds, we go to the state laws. What can we do there? As a matter of fact, weve got some pretty good cruelty laws in America. Look at all those words, those are words from most of the cruelty statutes in America. It looks like they apply to what Im talking about. Right? Theyre certainly overloaded, theyre overdriven, its unjustifiable, the pain, theyre

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cruelly treated. Theres situations of neglect and omission I wont go through every word but it all fits. Right? Wrong. S35 states say Cruelty law is the law of the state but it doesnt apply to either any farmed animal or standard farmed animal practices. All the practices I have described to you, both the confinement and the unanaesthetised castration et cetera, are standard practices and therefore they are exempt from the cruelty laws. So weve had to get creative, and weve done that. Weve challenged horse slaughter, based on laws that say you cant slaughter a horse for human consumption based on the cruelty behind that, and have had that upheld. We are currently in litigation against the meat industry, which wants to take animals that are down and this is what downed animals look like. They cant get up because they are too sick or injured in the slaughterhouse yard to get up. This cow has had her neck broken after her calf was taken away from her, and we have litigated that particular case both because of the cruelty and because these are some of the diseases just a sample on these two slides that you can get from animals who have been in big production or even from eating the animals, and dont let anybody walk away saying I said you can get swine flu from eating pork. But intensive confinement has caused the problems that we are seeing today. That case is currently in litigation. Youve got rights here in Australia like we do in America as taxpayers, as citizens, so weve used whats called the taxpayer claim to challenge the governments involvement with these practices, which we contend are cruel and illegal. This practice in particular in 2008 we challenged what is called calf ranching. Its just like veal calves, only calves who are dairy calves are taken from their mothers from day one, sent to another place and kept in these stanchions for six months, for a variety of reasons that are good business but certainly cruelty. And the state subsidises this by giving breaks to those who are involved in this practice. So we sued on that basis and, as often happens, we lost. But let me stress that a loss is not a loss like it is in business, where you have to pay somebody, because the public found out about this. People were alarmed and upset. Recently in California we passed a law that will bar this kind of practice, and I have to believe its part and parcel because of that case. Consumer protection you have here too, cases that say Youre lying to me about the product Im getting. Either you say its humanely treated, or its cage free, or its just that when I walk into the supermarket I expect that the animals Im eating were not treated in violation of the law.

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This is the labeling case. This is the PETA case also known as the unhappy cows case. In that case the California Milk Advisory Board, an arm of the government entitled to advertise to get people to buy California dairy products, had the ads which you see on top, which say Great cheese comes from happy cows, and happy cows come from California. The idea being that, as a consumer, you want to buy products from happy cows, cows who are treated humanely. Below is the way the cows in California are really treated. 95 per cent of the cows in California never see a blade of grass. They live in lots that are either mud in the winter or hard dirt in the summer, and they have horrible diseases that are described in these exhibits from our complaint. You can see the size of those udders. So we sued, claiming that there was a misrepresentation which was admitted by the California Milk Advisory Board, and as often happens in our cases we lost simply on a procedural issue, which said that the California Milk Advisory Board was not a person under the statute, not an appropriate organisation, because it was a government subsidised organisation admittedly lying to the people as it advertised milk. Heres the other pig case. Consumer protection cases brought by consumers or animal protection groups. So in this particular case, we have the Animal Legal Defense Fund and three purchasers of pork suing over this particular practice, the practice being keeping the pigs confined that I have described based on the fact that this practice is illegal under the California law I just mentioned, which says they need adequate exercise, any animal that is confined. According to industry, thats adequate exercise in California. That

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case was settled, because the industry called up and said Okay, were going to pull all the cows out of California and they did. Thats what we call a win. There is also a connection between Americans and Australians. Do you know where we get our Adidas? Right there. Adidas are made from kangaroo skin. In California we decided that we didnt like the methods that were used to kill kangaroos, especially the joeys who were bashed and decapitated, but in general it just didnt seem like a nice way of killing animals not that we have any way to govern what happens in Australia, but Californians decided that was no good. So in order to protect what for us are just some of the most amazing animals in the world, from one of the most amazing countries in the world, we had this statute that said no kangaroos can be brought in no kangaroo skins, no kangaroo leather therefore Adidas would be out of business in California. We won that case in the California Supreme Courtand heres another one of the ways in which we lose, because this is a movement of Davids - and the Davids are Prof Sankoff and the people who work in the field and Goliaths and the Goliaths are big industries and big companies that often put profit ahead of the interests of animals. So as I said, we won at the California Supreme Court, but then Adidas went to the California lawmakers and convinced them to repeal the law barring the import of kangaroo skins, and so they were able to continue their business with no interruption at all. So we lost that battle, but we will continue to fight against cruelty. We need people who know how to litigate to come to our assistance and in my practice I have probably at any time 30 pro bono lawyers working for me of various levels, who do this work because they are learning about the problems with animals. But you also need some key players on your team, and dont get me wrong you cant do anything without them.

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You have to have somebody watching the media at all times. Somebody who can really look for those animal related issues. Youve also got to get somebody who can read the briefs and appreciate the points you are putting forward, otherwise you may never be able to sell it to a court, so youve got to find one of those experts too. Most important, the factory farms are closed to us. They are especially closed to people like me and Prof Sankoff, and Katrina and Brian. They dont let us in any more, but youve got to figure out a way to get somebody in there, get the information so you can file the law suits, so you need a private investigator, somebody they wont know about. She is available; she flies only first class on Qantas; but any time you want her, shes there. There is a future for animal law, and there is a future for animals. In the 30 years or so that animal law has been going on in America, and in the short time in Australia, the animal law movement has made incredible strides. Voiceless has done some amazing things. I have never been in a room, in all of America, with this many people in one place. I have to attribute that both to the heart of Australians and the power of what Voiceless has done here. Thank you all. --o0o--

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