Legal Resources
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The Animal Legal Defense Fund provides these resources to help you learn how animal protection laws function within the legal system.
Animals and the Law
The field of animal law is complex. Use these articles as a guide to understand the fundamentals.
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What You Can Do
Do you need help with a specific legal situation involving an animal? Our guides below are provided with that end in mind.
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Other Resources
Identifying signs of dogfighting
It’s critical to stay vigilant and report suspected animal cruelty to local law enforcement whenever you see it. Here are the facts about dogfighting and the warning signs you should know.
Industrial Animal Agriculture: Exploiting Workers and Animals
The animal agriculture industry — which is primarily comprised of enormous, multinational corporations — profits from exploiting animals and humans alike.
COVID-19 Policy Recommendations
Pandemics have not only been predicted, they are also preventable. While the country continues to fight COVID-19, we must also prepare for — with the intention to prevent — the next pandemic. The Animal Legal Defense Fund is developing a series of papers, each outlining policy strategies calibrated to reduce specific zoonotic risks.
Prohibiting Circuses and Traveling Acts that Use Animals
Wild animals used in circuses and traveling acts endure severe abuse and neglect. Help protect these animals by passing a ban on the use of animals in circuses and traveling acts in your own city and county!
Innovation in Food Production: Plant-Based Meats
The rise of plant protein and cultivated meat, fish, dairy, and other animal products carries great potential to reduce cruelty and spare millions or even billions of farmed and wild animals.
Protecting Animals Using the Freedom of Information Act
The Animal Legal Defense Fund routinely uses FOIA to request documents from government agencies including the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
How Animals Differ from Other Types of “Property” Under the Law
Our legal system still considers animals to be “property,” in many ways not much different from a table or a chair. But, there are some ways that the law does recognize animals as the living, feeling beings that they are.
Ways to Give
Since 1979, the Animal Legal Defense Fund has been the leader in the fight to win animals the legal protection they so desperately need—and deserve. Your generous support is vital to our continued success.