The Animal Advocate

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 University of Pennsylvania Law School to serving on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania SPCA and founding the nonprofit Hand2Paw, Penny's mission is to educate animal lovers like you to advocate for greater protections for animals, to inspire individual action to protect habitat, and help you make ethical choices every day.If you're eager to learn and make a meaningful impact, feeling frustrated by the current political climate, and wondering how to make a difference, let The Animal Advoca

The Animal Advocate is a education podcast hosted by Penny Ellison, Animal Advocacy Academy, with 53 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Penny Ellison, Animal Advocacy Academy hosts The Animal Advocate, a education show with 53 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #52

  What Is a Puppy Mill? How to Spot One with John Goodwin

  Aug 13, 202641 minS1

  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 and his team publishes the Horrible Hundred. He explains what a USDA license permits, how these operations reach buyers, and why he aimed a national campaign at pet stores instead of the states where the mills are. In this episode, you'll learn: What a puppy mill is, and why the definition can't rest on a number of dogs What a USDA license permits, and the loophole that lets a large breeder skip licensing entirely How puppy mills reach buyers, and what every one of those channels has in common What the numbers show about whether pet store bans push sales online Why a national campaign against puppy mills starts at city councils instead of Congress Key Takeaway: The most productive work against puppy mills is local. Ordinances passed city by city are what make state legislation possible later, and a small group of prepared advocates can carry one. If you want to move policy in your community, or build the skills to do it well, you can access the free private audio series on the Four Cs here: AnimalAdvocacyAcademy.com/fourcs

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  Episode #51

  Why Can't Animal Shelters Save Every Animal?

  Aug 5, 202618 minS1

  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. It's the job we've handed open-intake shelters, the animals they're required to accept, and the resources and support they get from the community. I look at ACCT Philly's 2025 numbers, tell the story of a rural Georgia shelter that went from a place animals came to die to a place with a real way out, and land on the one thing you can do this month that helps. In this episode, you'll learn: What "open intake" means What a shelter's live release rate does and doesn't tell you about how hard its job was How a live release rate is really just a fraction, and changing the top or the bottom can push it in the right direction How one under-resourced rural shelter changed its outcomes without a bigger budget The specific, finite, social way you can start helping your local shelter save more lives Key Takeaway: A shelter can't save every animal because it can't refuse intake, can't choose the easy cases, and can't do the work alone — and the last of those is the one you can change. Want to build the skills to move policy for animals in your own community? Get the free private audio series on the Four C's of Legislative Advocacy at AnimalAdvocacyAcademy.com/fourcs

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  Episode #50

  How to Reduce Shelter Intake: What One Advocate Is Building

  Jul 23, 202630 minS1

  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 the author of The Shift to Prevention. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the prevention conversation needs to occur before someone reaches the shelter door How a pet help desk works and what problems it can solve Why BJ opposes mandatory spay/neuter laws How to make the prevention funding argument to a city council or county commission The one question to ask your local government about its animal welfare spending Key Takeaway: Find the gaps in your own community. The work that needs doing is the work nobody else is doing. Ready to turn what you've heard into action? Get the Four C's of Legislative Advocacy for Animals, a free private audio series on Common Sense, Communication, Collaboration, and Compromise, at https://animaladvocacyacademy.com/fourcs

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  Episode #49

  Miranda's Rescue: How 138 Dogs Disappeared After Being "Saved"

  Jul 18, 202632 minS1

  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 dogs from the property, with more than 700 still unaccounted for. How does that happen? Not through one monster acting alone, but through a system full of people who believed they were saving dogs, delivering animals and money to that property for years with no reliable way to know what happened next. This episode traces how a "rescued" dog can vanish, and lays out the small, achievable fixes that would make the next Miranda's much harder to hide. In this episode, you'll learn: Why paying a rescue at intake, rather than for outcomes, creates an incentive that can be quietly exploited How a transfer counted as a "live release" can conceal what actually happened to a dog Why vetting a rescue at the front end may not be enough How Colorado has published a public intake-and-outcome ledger for shelters and rescues for 26 years Two things any shelter can do right now, without new laws, to make deception risky The questions to ask before you recommend a rescue or sanctuary to anyone Key Takeaway: A dog leaving a shelter is an event, not an outcome. Getting an animal out the door is only rescue if someone has to report what happened later. Want to build the skills to turn a story like this into real change in your own community? Start with the free private audio series on the Four C's of Legislative Advocacy for Animals.: AnimalAdvocacyAcademy.com/fourcs

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  Episode #48

  Philadelphia Bans Carriage Horses. Will New York?

  Jun 18, 202626 minS1

  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 in part luck, not strategy, and what the real strategy was How to foresee loopholes while there is still time to close them Why banning an entire use of animals is hard but CAN get done if public opinion supports it How to spot the substitute "reform" bill that gets passed instead of a ban, and quietly kills it Key Takeaway: Law doesn't create public opinion, it follows it, so the advocate's job is to build the record, watch for the opening, and when the moment comes, ask for the law that prevents the harm instead of the smallest fix you think you can get. If you want to move policy in your own community, or build the skills to do it well, you can access the free private audio series on the Four C's of Legislative Advocacy for Animals here: AnimalAdvocacyAcademy.com/fourcs

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