S8. E12: Roy Afflerbach, Jo-Anne Basile, Roland Halpern and Allie Taylor: A Better Future for Animals
“If a bill has been passed in another state, then you know who the opposition was, you know who the supporters were. And it really helps grease the skids for another state to get something through. It builds and then eventually you get a critical mass. And then hopefully at that point, Congress takes a look at it and passes something nationwide,” – Roland Halpern
Last week, Allie Taylor was on the podcast. She runs New York Voters for Animal Rights. Allie and I spoke about how real change happens for animals in the US and that much of it happens at the local level.
The problem is that many people just don't know where to start or how to get involved so that they can actually affect said change. So, Allie and I agreed that it’d be a good idea to bring on some other people running organizations that are similar to hers from other states.
So that is what we did. This conversation is again with Allie Taylor from Voters for Animal Rights of New York, Roy Afflerbach of Pennsylvania, Roland Halpern from Colorado, and Jo-Anne Basile of Connecticut.
It's a conversation about how and where change happens.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Learn more about VFAR
Learn more about Colorado Voters for Animals
Learn more about Connecticut Voters for Animals
Learn more about Roy Afflerbach
Transcript:
Elizabeth: [00:00:11] Hi. I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people to find the show. Last week I had Allie Feldman Taylor on the podcast. She runs New York Voters for Animal Rights. I just don't think most people really know where to start or how to get involved so that they can actually affect real change. But this is where real change happens at the local level. So Allie and I were talking about this and thought it might be a good idea to bring some other people running other organizations similar to hers in other states. So today's conversation is again with Allie Feldman Taylor from Voters for Animal Rights of New York, Roy Afflerbach of Pennsylvania, Roland Halpern from Colorado, and Jo-Anne Basile of Connecticut.
Roy: [00:01:43] I'm Roy Afflerbach on this particular issue, I am engaged with a group called Humane PA, which is a political action committee.
Allie: [00:01:51] My name is Allie Taylor, founder and president of Voters for Animal Rights in New York.
Roland: [00:01:55] My name is Roland Halpern, and I'm the executive director for Colorado Voters for Animals. We're out here in Colorado, and our mission is basically to identify and help elect animal friendly lawmakers. Then once they're in power, to work with them to pass sensible animal welfare protection laws. We focus on welfare rather than animal rights because we are a big cattle country and we don't want to be seen as being too extreme because we do work with a lot of ranchers and on things we can agree on.
Jo-Anne: [00:02:25] I'm Jo-anne Basile and I'm executive director of Connecticut Votes for Animals. We are an advocacy organization in the state trying to pass laws that will protect animals in Connecticut.
Elizabeth: [00:02:36] My whole idea behind this and bringing all of you together and you guys can jump in if you have other ideas or you don't like this one. But my idea is I know a lot of people who really want to make a change for animals. I would say most of them don't know how. I don't think people really think unless they're really directly involved in organizations like yours or have friends who are the way this country is right now, It is so crazy to begin with that people don't even think that they can make change, one of the reasons I want to do this is to make people aware that organizations like yours exist, that you actually do create change and you have created a lot. Some change takes decades and sometimes it takes not as long, but when people really can get involved, they can learn how to vote better. Also what else can people do? Because there's so many people in this country and on both sides, but so much of it is bipartisan with animal issues. There are so many people who are like, Yeah, yeah, that should happen, but they're not doing anything to help push it along. That's the purpose, I think, of this get together from my end.
Jo-Anne: [00:03:51] That's clearly what we all do. We're a grassroots organization and my job is constantly trying to be creative about stimulating people to take action. So I know that stuff doesn't move unless we get people contacting their legislators. That's the formula that we find that works in a state that is, for all intents and purposes, very progressive in lots of things, except when it comes to animals.
Roy: [00:04:20] I have to chuckle because in Pennsylvania we have never been called progressive, but yet we've been able to make significant progress with animals because that is a bipartisan issue. Truthfully, some of our best champions in the legislature happen to be ultra conservative republicans. Being a good old, solid Democrat myself. I have to bite my tongue on occasion when I'm talking with these folks because we agree on absolutely nothing else except animals.
Jo-Anne: [00:04:48] If I look at what we've been enable to enact, in fact, the only bill that passed this year was it was initially authored by a Republican. She was savvy enough to know that we need to have bipartisan support in order to get it through a Democratically controlled legislature. So, yeah, the animal stuff is very bipartisan.
Elizabeth: [00:05:09] What was the bill, Jo-Anne?
Jo-Anne: [00:05:10] Adequate shelter for what we call outside dogs. It was a bill that was actually authored by a Republican who had since left back in 2018 and made it through the House and never made it through the Senate. It got resurrected because of a local issue. Ironically, from the same town as that legislator was from, the dog issue, kept outside, constantly barking, became a huge issue on social media and really provided the impetus to move forward with legislation. It's the only bill and we had five big bills this year make it through committee, both kind of environmental wildlife bills as well as a circus bill which keeps coming up and keeps not going anywhere. This is the only one that moved unanimously.
Elizabeth: [00:05:58] A lot of animal rights issues and animal welfare issues are bipartisan, but I don't think most people know that Connecticut is progressive, they must be really good to animals. I do think this will shock people.
Jo-Anne: [00:06:09] Shocking legislators when we tell them.
Roy: [00:06:12] A lot of it has to do also with the terminology we use, as Roland mentioned earlier, is his people talk about animal welfare as opposed to animal rights. I can tell you when I first became involved in this back in the early seventies, if we said animal rights or animal welfare, we were practically thrown off people's portraits because they said rights. Animals don't have rights. We eat animals. I mean, who's going to get enough welfare? Right now, we don't have to give welfare to animals as well. So it's all a matter of terminology. So we talk about the compassionate treatment of animals. I have yet to find someone who will argue with me at any length about the compassionate treatment of animals. I've had a few challenges with me about the fact that animals have no souls. I've told them I don't know if I have a soul. I'd like to think I do. But I can tell you that no one doing an autopsy has ever found a soul. By the same token, no one doing an autopsy has ever found a thought either. But yet we know we have them. So it's all a matter of how you present it in many cases and the words we choose.
Roland: [00:07:10] Just going to launch a little bit off of what Roy was saying. For example, in Colorado, we have very strong animal protection laws when it comes to companion animals. But when you get to livestock, there's basically a carve out that says none of the above apply. So we're kind of practicing speciesism where we're protecting one type of animal, but simply disregarding the welfare of another type of animal because it's put into a different classification.
Jo-Anne: [00:07:37] Pretty universal, isn't it?
Roy: [00:07:39] Yes, it is. Although interestingly enough, a few days ago in Pennsylvania, we did a fireworks bill that was focused upon just the opposite view. It was really generated in part to be able to control fireworks within too close a distance to stockyards or any type of other farm animal facility as opposed to companion animals. So naturally, as we try to get an amendment in there to also apply to shelters and rescue groups that ran into a lot of opposition for whatever reason, I can't begin to tell you, maybe because it was a last minute effort, I don't know. But we did get language that was broad enough to allow our municipalities to essentially declare firework free zones, which they can then do to make sure these fireworks are not too close to the shelters or rescues they may have.
Jo-Anne: [00:08:21] We had a situation this year where one of the shelters, municipal shelters along the coastal area and New London, some, we presume kids set off firecrackers around the shelter and actually threw them inside the windows. People were horrified. Boy, would I like to be able to capitalize on that.
Elizabeth: [00:08:42] Roy, since you've been in this for so long and starting in the seventies, will you just talk a little bit about some of the progress that you and Pennsylvania has made with some of these issues?
Roy: [00:08:52] Actually, in the seventies and eighties, we didn't make very much progress at all. In fact, I recall very clearly there was a particular bill. I don't even remember what it did, but it had to do with dogs. It came up in the late seventies, early eighties in the state Senate. At the same time, we had a piece of legislation doing a number of things with the judicial districts, and there are quite a few judicial districts in Pennsylvania. Well, a couple of months went by, three or four months went by. Other members of the Senate began saying, look, whatever you do, don't ever introduce a dog bill again. I've got 10,000 constituents on top of me over this damn dog bill and I got nobody on top of me over the judicial bill. So let's just deal with the judges and forget the dogs. As funny as that sounds, it really did hold back any effort to do any kind of animal welfare laws for several, several years. Then finally in the nineties, we began to make some progress, and that helped in part because we had governors that were also sympathetic to it. As we move forward, it's only been in the last decade that we have really made some substantial progress in Pennsylvania. In fact, it was, I believe, about four years ago, we passed a piece of legislation that had a number of things in it. It was the greatest single piece of animal protection legislation we had in 50 years without question.
Elizabeth: [00:10:09] What were some of the things in it?
Roy: [00:10:11] Well, we weren't able to get the piece about the regulated outdoor facility, so to speak, other than just an old barrel to keep the dog in. But we were able to get things like not leaving the animal out in subfreezing weather, not leaving the animal out in extreme heat weather, making sure that if they were outside to do their business or whatever it was for a limited period of time, those kinds of things in terms of the breeders and what have you, we put some language in there to make sure that animals were kept on, not rather not kept on, just cage type floors, wire mesh floors, but that they actually had some solid flooring upon which to receive some rest and respite and so forth. Significant improvement in the regulations regarding breeders and making sure that the facilities had temperature and climate controls and so on. So a number of those things went into place. Most importantly, and most recently was the upgrading of the cruelty statutes to toughen penalties and also to better define cruelty, provide our animal enforcement officers with the ability to actually confiscate the animal and go back and make sure that the care was paid for if the individual was found guilty of the cruelty statement by that individual. So those things were pretty much put into one major piece of legislation.
Elizabeth: [00:11:30] That's incredible. I had no idea Pennsylvania was doing so much, so much good in the animal sense.
Roy: [00:11:35] Well, as I said, up until just about within the last decade, and actually less than that for these bills, we weren't. It was just a constant fight. We still have the fight over farm animals. As you might expect, agriculture is still the single biggest industry in Pennsylvania, now because we don't have the massive farmland that you have out in the Midwest, much of that is animal husbandry.
Elizabeth: [00:11:56] What are some of the biggest things you're up against with getting things passed?
Roy: [00:12:00] Well, the number one is the National Rifle Association. Anything we introduce either because it's generated through the Humane Society, the United States or the SPCA or any other animal organization, the National Rifle Association becomes involved. That is number one on the list of opponents to anything we try to do with animals. They come out with some really strange little organizations that I think are created almost overnight just to be able to put in opposition sometimes. So that's our number one issue. Then of course, we have the normal farm lobby, as you might imagine, for the other animals. Right now, we're trying to push a bill through that would include domestic animals, companion animals in the protection from abuse orders. Now, we've been trying to do that for several years, and there we run up against the judiciary itself who basically says, look, we're already overworked. We're already dealing with all these protection from abuse orders for people. We don't want to get a call at midnight because there's a protection abuse order violation on animals. So that's something we have to overcome, but we're making progress with that. I would expect that perhaps the next legislative session beginning in January, we'll actually be able to get a bill through to include companion animals in the protection from abuse order itself, rather than just stiffening the penalty if the animal is injured.
Elizabeth: [00:13:17] Talk a little bit about Colorado and some of the things you have gotten through and some of the things you've just been fighting for years.
Roland: [00:13:25] We've actually gotten a lot of things through. Two years ago, we passed a law that keeps elephants, lions and tigers out of traveling, circuses, and acts that took three years to get through. We have a law that allows you to break into a car to rescue a dog or cat or human that appears to be in distress. We also got a bill passed that allows a judge to prohibit somebody convicted of animal cruelty from owning another animal for a specified period of time. The judge can also order that person to undergo a mandatory mental health training program to try and prevent recidivism. We do have a protective order so that if there's a restraining order against a particular individual, that also applies to the animals. So it's against the law for them to kidnap, hurt, kill, or do anything to that animal to get at the other person. So we've really passed a lot of really good laws. When it comes to agriculture, though, we do have a problem and kind of what Roy was alluding to, we have this slippery slope thing where it's yes, it's dogs and cats this year, but it's going to be pigs and chickens next year. We always hear these arguments that if we loosen up or pass any laws to protect animals, it's eventually going to trickle down and really affect every kind of animal. So that's probably our biggest obstacle. Right now for next year, we're working on a law that would prohibit the purchase or sale of a horse for slaughter, for human consumption. So similar to the SAFE Act, which has been introduced in Congress going back to 2005 and has never moved forward. We just decided we're not going to wait for that to happen. We're going to do it locally.
Elizabeth: [00:15:06] With these federal laws that try to get passed through Congress. When it comes to animal stuff, they almost don't move most of the time. Right. It's really up to the states for a lot of this protection.
Roland: [00:15:17] We've created a coalition, an allies, a member of that. We're calling it the Coalition of State, animal advocacy organizations. The whole idea is to bring in states and share information. So if I've been able to pass a law here in Colorado and some other state is working on something similar, we can share that information and vice versa. So the whole idea is to be kind of a clearinghouse, if you will. So we're not reinventing the wheel and that anybody who is a member of the group can have access to that information. But we're being very careful not to be a national group because and again, this kind of gets back to what Roy was saying a little bit earlier. If you're perceived as some kind of national organization, you look like the hired gun. You're coming into somebody else's state to try and push your own agenda. That's not what we want to do. We want to, as Tip O'Neill used to say, all politics is local and we're trying to keep it local.
Elizabeth: [00:16:12] I love that you're doing this with the SAFE act like your own version because it's true. I get excited about it every year and nothing happens. Did you guys have anything to do with the wolves coming back?
Roland: [00:16:23] Yes, actually, that was a ballot initiative rather than a legislative one. But we helped to collect signatures to get it on the ballot and raise some awareness of it. We're still working with some of the groups on how this is all going to be implemented and rolled out.
Elizabeth: [00:16:38] There was a lot of resistance here with the wolves.
Roland: [00:16:40] There was, it was interesting because prior to the actual election when we were doing the polling, I guess if you call it about 70% of people that responded were in favor of the reintroduction. On election night, we didn't even know if it was going to pass and it ended up passing by about 51 to 49. Wow. So yeah, so you never know.
Elizabeth: [00:17:05] I'm really just shocked about this Connecticut thing, like how tough it is in Connecticut. So what do you talk about that a little bit, Jo-Anne?
Jo-Anne: [00:17:12] We struggle with this question all the time. We had some rough roads. What we get from leadership all the time is, oh, yeah, yeah, we kind of pat down on the head, Oh, that's a nice issue, but we don't have time for this. I try to impress upon them how popular it would be to do some of these protection bills and they kind of give it lip service. But then when push comes to shove, they're not interested in moving them through. They get a little nervous about there might be some controversy around them and obviously there always is. They don't want to hold up the legislative session to debate an animal bill. So they just don't bother to take them up. It's really problematic. It's interesting because if you talk to them one on one, they get it. They like animals. They want to do stuff to support them. They want to do stuff to make life better for them. But when they get in their role, they're not moving them.
Roy: [00:18:21] So, Jo-Anne, you sort of answered a question I was going to have for you. That was this. Do you have active opposition or is it just simply, as you've indicated, it's not on their agenda as something that important to deal with?
Jo-Anne: [00:18:33] Probably more the latter, we have the usual set of opposition. I mean, we do two things. One, we try to be proactive and get legislation enacted. I've got a list of bills that have been enacted into law that are very impressive. But we also spend a lot of time stopping bad things from happening. One of them is a bear hunting Bill. Your problem is the NRA. Our NRA here is cloaked in the hunt with the hunters, and they are, as they are around the country, a diminishing return. They're not a lot of them in Connecticut, less than 1% of the hunters. They have their champions. We run into problems with that all the time. But they squawk and the leadership says, oh, okay. Then they don't do anything. They backed down.
Roy: [00:19:31] The NRA already has that automatic alliance, if you will, with all sportsmen's organizations. They've got the ability to get out to them and get them activated. I suspect you find the same thing in Colorado.
Jo-Anne: [00:19:42] Oh, my God. I can't imagine.
Roland: [00:19:44] We do. But before we got started, Beth, you were saying, what can an individual do? People feel like they're not empowered, if you will. But really, it is a numbers game when you look at it. Colorado voters for animals can't vote for a lawmaker. I can, as can Roland, but it's the individuals and the legislators who have a tick sheet. When people call up and say vote for this bill, they put it on one side. Somebody says vote against it, they put it on the other. At the end of the day, if you have more people opposing or supporting, depending on the nature of the bill, that may not always, but it may be the way the lawmaker is going to lean, because lawmakers are only concerned about three things: getting elected, getting elected and getting elected. The only way they can get elected is if somebody votes for them. So you as an individual have something every lawmaker wants and only you can provide that. And that's the vote.
Jo-Anne: [00:20:43] We're going to do a workshop series which we've done for the last three years. But one of them is on advocacy and legislative advocacy 101. It's on that. That is the theme, what we say to people is that a legislator needs to hear from five people and suddenly it becomes an issue for them. Right. Particularly in this environment, people are less apt to talk to their legislator, except for the kind of big items that the state is focused on or national politics and so on. It's one of the reasons why, as I said, we had a really, really great year. We had five bills come out of tough committees. What that does is it lays the groundwork for next year. It always takes more than one year to get a bill enacted into law.
Elizabeth: [00:21:36] Take a bill like banning wild animals and circuses. It's kind of a no brainer. Like when it happened in New York, nobody seemed very upset about it, like the general public once it actually passed, even though there was definitely opposition to what was happening. But I think when one state sees another state, do some of these big ones like that one. Is there any influence?
Jo-Anne: [00:21:57] Absolutely. As advocates, we love to point to other states because it gives comfort to a legislator to know that particularly like New York, our next door neighbor has done it. The fact that you guys passed a puppy mill bill, we are ecstatic and nervous.
Elizabeth: [00:22:16] Why nervous?
Jo-Anne: [00:22:18] Because we're concerned that the pet shops are going to come over the border
Elizabeth: [00:22:22] Oh.
Jo-Anne: [00:22:24] But you could use that as all the more reason. Trust me, we are.
Roland: [00:22:31] That sort of gets back to the purpose of the coalition, and that's if a bill has been passed in another state, who the opposition was, who the supporters were. It really helps grease the skids for another state to get something through. So it does build and then eventually you get a critical mass. Then hopefully at that point, Congress takes a look at it and passes it to something nationwide.
Elizabeth: [00:22:53] Then a lot of these cases, like what Roy is saying with the NRA? Is it just that the opposition is just louder? Are they better at contacting their legislators? Like was that why these things take so long?
Allie: [00:23:05] I think they're more well resourced is what a lot of it is. Look at voters' rights. We are 100% volunteers. We don't have any paid staff. We do our own lobbying. I look forward to the day when we can hire a retained lobbyist like Roy to help us out, because that will open up enormous amounts of doors and relationships that we currently don't have. We do okay with what we have right now, but the potential that we would have if we were able to hire professional PR firms, the most expensive lobbyists, that would be enormous. That's how the opposition is able to defeat this stuff, is that they know exactly which lobbyists to hire, to pull those levers, to pull off support, and they're able to hire many of them. We've seen them use that strategy before. They're able to hire the best of the best. Unfortunately, it works.
Roland: [00:23:56] Also they have political action committees and they have money to get elected. It takes money. If you're an organization that can give to a candidate, basically that's going to put them ahead. More yard signs, more advertising, more things like that. A lot of our organizations, like Ali said, we're just all volunteers and we don't have that money.
Roy: [00:24:17] Where we've been able to stand up to them without money has been by utilizing social media. When we started humane pay back between somewhere between 2006 and 2010, we didn't have the ability of social media immediately at that time, but we discovered as we went on that if we utilize just Facebook and Twitter, two of the earlier ones, we were able to generate enough followers that we would have them in every legislative district across the Commonwealth. Years ago I learned that trick, incidentally, from working with the State Teachers Association. It was very plain that we had teachers at every crossroads in the Commonwealth. So if we could activate that organization and just get 10% of it working for us, that gave us enough voice across the entire Commonwealth. Well, the same thing is true now with social media. We have over 40,000 followers on our Facebook Twitter combination and nearly all of them are Pennsylvanians, because we ask them that as they come on as a new follower, we have a person that gets in contact with them. So we can now go to the legislature and say, look, we've got 40,000 people following us on Facebook and Twitter across the commonwealth. You know some of those are in your district. Then we urge these folks to begin sending tweets and sending messages and so forth to the legislators. That has really broken the logjam more than anything else, because it's virtually free. That's what held us back in the seventies and the eighties and even into the nineties. We couldn't do it free and we could only get so much free media. But now that ability to contact through social media is extremely important. Then we raise funds the same way and we use PayPal, I'm sure there's others we could use, but we use PayPal for small contributors. We have contributors that throw in five bucks a month every month, you know, and so after a while this begins to add up. This year we have the best year we've had for a political action committee that's a $70,000 fund. We're going to use it to play in a number of key elections in the Commonwealth because of reapportionment. We have a lot of open seats and that gives us the opportunity to bring in people who are more compassionate to animals than perhaps some who were there. So all of that adds up step by step by step.
Jo-Anne: [00:26:24] So let me ask you this, Roy. Do you do endorsements?
Roy: [00:26:27] Yes, we do. We send out questionnaires to every candidate for the fall. Actually, we start in the primary in contested primaries. We send out questionnaires and then we make endorsements based upon the responses to those questionnaires. First and foremost, we look at incumbents. Of course, if an incumbent has done well by us, that individual automatically has a head start. No matter what the opposition in a primary may say, it's gotten to the point, frankly, where we have candidates coming to us to ask for endorsements. We don't have to go out and contact the candidates any longer. They realize that this is an organization, and again, because of being able to motivate through social media, that's as valuable to them as a few bucks that we can give them because they get larger contributions to a lot of other people.
Roland: [00:27:09] We operate very similarly. We send out a survey, we compile it, we put together what we call a ballot body, then we send it out to people's districts and say, this is where your candidates stand on a number of issues. We typically do two open ended questions. One is what role have animals played in your life? That a lot of times will help us identify a champion. Because if somebody says, I grew up on a farm and I rode horses and all of this and we're working on a horse bill, that's great. We also ask another open ended question. What are the most pressing animal issues for you right now? Again, that could help us identify a lawmaker who might be willing to run a bill on that issue, and then the rest have to do with what we think is going to be proposed. In the next session. So we try and get a feel, would they support it or won't they? We never say, will you support me? We say, are you likely to because the lawmaker is not going to commit to anything until they've actually seen a bill.
Roy: [00:28:07] A lot of times this serves as an educational piece as well, because many legislators, especially new candidates that have not run for the state legislature before, have never heard of some of these issues. They don't even know it's an issue. So the questionnaire in the way in which we word the questions or the survey, as you indicate, can be an educational piece. Oftentimes we've had responses coming back and saying, can you provide me with more information about this particular issue? So it works all the way around for us.
Elizabeth: [00:28:35] For people who aren't informed and even, a lot of these issues and even the winds that have happened in the past decade and all of your states, some of them sound like they should have passed like in 1950, like you can't leave your dog outside when it's freezing cold and. I think people are probably shocked by a lot of the things that are legal.
Roy: [00:28:56] Yes.
Jo-Anne: [00:28:57] I mean, I would say that on that particular bill, the one issue with two things that motivated people most, and one of them was the issue of outside dogs, people were stunned to think that keep your dog out. If it was 105 degrees above or below zero. It made no difference. They were just stunned about that stuff.
Allie: [00:29:18] One tactic that we've used that I think has been really helpful with moving elected officials has been showing them public polling. When we did the foie gras ban, we actually hired a professional polling firm who did polling of registered New York City voters. This polling cut across Democrats, Republicans, all races and genders. We found that it was overwhelmingly supported by everybody. So that enabled us when we actually went to go talk to legislators, to walk in with polling data in hand and say, this is what your constituents think of this. That provided them with the support to say, okay, this is something we can get behind. It is expensive, but I think it's an invaluable tool that I hope we start to see a lot of organizations use in trying to get legislation across the finish line.
Roy: [00:30:07] If I followed up with what Jo-anne said earlier, by having people actually make calls, five, ten calls on that one issue after they've gotten the survey that gets the legislators attention, as Jo-anne said, five calls, puts it on their radar, ten calls. It's practically a landslide. They don't get ten calls on any one issue.
Elizabeth: [00:30:25] Do you think that's because people don't think it's effective anymore to call or to write?
Roy: [00:30:30] I think it's because they don't have enough passion to do it. There's so many other things demanding their time that they and many people are intimidated by the idea of picking up the telephone and calling an elected official at any level so they just don't do it.
Jo-Anne: [00:30:45] We try to make it as easy for them as possible. That's critical, we've noticed a difference this year. There were some things that we did this year that we haven't done in the past that have really kind of moved the needle on people's activism. One of them is giving them scripts so that because we all have kind of been involved in politics for a long time. Roy, I don't want to admit this, but I think you and I are probably of a similar era. I was in DC for 30 years, so it's easy for us, but it is not easy for people out in the real world. I mean, it's intimidating to pick up the phone. You say to them, don't worry about it. You're not going to talk to the legislator, you're going to talk to their staff person. If anybody picks up in the era of Kobe, nobody picks up the phone. So you have to coach them, the other thing we ended up doing is, we bought a CRM system this year that does, a one stop. You press the button and we send the email to the legislator and people will say, Oh, I don't want to get these robo emails or everybody saying the same thing, yada, yada, yada. Now, hello. You have a constituent who wants to tell you something. It is hard for them to do that, for them to write an email. They won't do it. If you tell them, push this button and we'll send it for you, they do it. It's amazing the amount of just the success that we have from people doing that.
Elizabeth: [00:32:28] That's awesome.
Roland: [00:32:29] I've talked with a couple of legislators and they call that slacktivism and I've had two legislators tell me that the only count that is one person, even if they get 20 or 30 of the identical emails coming through because they think, well, how much effort went into that.
Jo-Anne: [00:32:46] I know that, I fight them on that because I think that's arrogance on their part. Then if they say that they don't understand what it's like for their constituents to get on an email and send them a note.
Roy: [00:33:00] One of the tactics we utilize with my senior center is, I also represent the Pennsylvania Association of Senior Centers, and of course, that's a captive audience. ost of the people who are there can still at least sign their name and write a short note. Now, it may be beyond them to write any kind of a lengthy letter and so on, but we have postcards printed for them, and then we ask them to just simply sign the postcard and put a short note on it in their own handwriting. Use the old snail mail method, and when these and we make it a nice bright color so that as they're going into the office, all of a sudden they're getting 50, 60, 170, 90, whatever it is. Pink postcards. As soon as they see that pink postcard, they know what the issue is. But it's more important the fact that they've signed it personally and it's all different handwriting. We don't have somebody sit down and sign everybody's name. That really does still affect legislators and their judgment as to whether they're going to look at it or not. Look at it when they see that these people are coming in from their own constituency and taking the time to actually sign their name and write a short note. What works for us? We actually stopped the disintegration of a department that the administration wanted to just totally get away. The Department of Aging, of all things they want to do away with the Department of Aging. I still can't believe they thought they could do that. But we had thousands of postcards going into the governor's office signed by reps who attend these senior centers, and that brought that to a pretty solid start.
Elizabeth: [00:34:20] That's amazing, though.
Roy: [00:34:22] Oh, yeah, it works equally well with legislation for animals. The two big bills I mentioned much earlier, we had old fashioned postcards coming in as well, so that the legislators knew that these folks were engaged. We mentioned something earlier about you getting a call in and there's a tick sheet and they say, yes, this is so-and-so called about such and such on this issue. Any incumbent legislator that's going to get reelected and has gone through this process also has somebody on their campaign team that checks in the county voter registration office wherever the voter registration is kept, and checks to see if this person is, in fact, registered and if, in fact, they were frequent voters. Those lists are made up in that way. If I'm getting ten telephone calls and they're coming from people who aren't even registered, I pay no attention to it. All right. If I get ten telephone calls and five of them are coming from people who are frequent voters, now I'm paying close attention, because I know these people are coming out to vote. All right. That's the way it really works for legislators who have been around for some length of time.
Elizabeth: [00:35:24] For your everyday person who does really love animals, but they don't really feel like they have a lot of power or influence in terms of moving the needle. What else can they do in each of your respective states from getting behind your organizations or learning more?
Roland: [00:35:40] You can write a letter to the editor and we have kind of outlines that people can use and the editors like to hear from local people versus an organization, even if they don't publish the letter, if six or seven or eight, however many people write in and none of them get published, it's at least on the paper or the media sources radar that there's people that are concerned about this and they might follow up later and do a whole story on it. But that's something people can do. We always tell people, if they're if it doesn't get published, don't worry about it. It still brought attention to something, alot of times, even when you lose, you win because you've raised awareness of an issue. More people are aware of it and it lays the groundwork for making it that much easier to pass in the future.
Elizabeth: [00:36:25] What's big on the agenda coming up next year?
Roland: [00:36:29] Well, for us, it's going to be the anti horse slaughter bill. As an all volunteer organization, we really only have the bandwidth to take on one major thing and we want to devote all of our resources to that particular issue. Right now, there's a lot of pressure because of the Bureau of Land Management roundups, rounding up all the wild horses. So it's really in the public view, the people think it's horrible. So the timing is right. The stars are aligned, if you will, and now's the time to go after that bill.
Elizabeth: [00:36:57] Are other states going to do this as well?
Roland: [00:36:59] Not that I'm aware of. Hopefully, again, getting back to this coalition we're forming, we're hoping if other states do that, we'll be able to exchange information and help each other out.
Elizabeth: [00:37:10] So it would just be so powerful, especially all the states that have wild horses on their land. If everybody was doing their own version of the SAFE Act because so few people in this country are for horse slaughter, that would get more momentum.
Roy: [00:37:24] We looked at that legislation at the state level a few years ago, actually, again, I had one or more one of my ultra conservative Republican friends willing to introduce it. He said, Well, they're eating the pony. We don't want them to keep you the pony, for God's sake. So they were looking at it in that sense. But again, we ran into this idea that, well, it's not really happening in Pennsylvania, and that's pretty much true. I don't know that there's any active horse slaughtering going on in Pennsylvania, but we attacked it by the transportation. That's where it was taking place at some of these auctions, you might say. They were auctioning off the horses, cramming them into trailers and taking them across state lines to have them slaughtered in Canada. Why Canada? I'm not sure, but that's where they were doing it.
Elizabeth: [00:38:07] That's where the slaughterhouses are, in Mexico and Canada. So they're all taken to Mexico or Canada.
Roy: [00:38:12] I see.
Roland: [00:38:13] If you look at New Jersey, there's not a lot of wild horses in New Jersey either. But then Governor Chris Christie signed into law a ban on horse slaughter. So there's presently four states where it's illegal. California, Illinois, New Jersey and Texas.
Elizabeth: [00:38:28] So they can't be transported out of the country in those four states.
Roland: [00:38:32] No, you can't buy or sell, it would only apply to horses in Colorado. You can't affect interstate commerce. So if somebody is traveling through Colorado with horses bound for Mexico or Canada, there's nothing we can do at that point because that's interstate commerce. But what we're trying to do is stop the slaughter auctions here and just say it's going to be against the law to knowingly buy or sell a horse, knowing the intent is to send it to slaughter for human consumption.
Elizabeth: [00:38:58] What about you, Jo-Anne?
Jo-Anne: [00:38:59] We're going to bring back for the fourth time the circus bill. I think we will have worked out some of the issues that stopped it from going forward. We're going to have to deal with the bear issue again in the last, I don't know, eight years, i think seven of those years have been spent fighting a bear hunt bill and where we have just formed a coalition of organizations to have a kind of consistent voice and do education on non-lethal methods. So we're going to be doing stuff on bears.
Elizabeth: [00:39:41] Before we close. Does anyone want to add anything?
Roland: [00:39:44] I would just like to reiterate, people have more power than they think they do. It's really again, it's a numbers game, the more people that support or oppose a particular issue, the greater the chances that's going to either go through or be defeated.
Elizabeth: [00:39:58] Yeah, I think that can't be said enough.
Jo-Anne: [00:40:00] Because it's an election year. A lot of the local politicians are doing community meetings and we're recommending that you go and get to know your legislator and those kinds of environments. It's very non-threatening and theres lots of folks. You don't have to say anything if you don't want to, but you could certainly stand up. We tell them you could stand up and just say your name, where you live and that animals matter to you and you vote.
Roland: [00:40:28] We ask them to ask the lawmaker, are you likely to support or oppose a particular piece of legislation? Because then you kind of have them on the record. They can't turn around later and deny that they said they'd support.
Jo-Anne: [00:40:39] That's right.
Roy: [00:40:41] Well, and in addition to that, most often the legislator is likely to say, unless they're really engaged and really knowledgeable, they're most likely to say, well, I'll have to take a look at it.
Jo-Anne: [00:40:51] Yeah.
Roy: [00:40:52] Because that gives you the opening for another meeting and another telephone call. The more you can get into that legislator's office, the better off you are, because that's the relationship building. All of this is done on relationships and the way to build them is as much communication back and forth as you can. The last point I would like to make is this. If you see in your local news media, television, radio, social media, newspaper, whatever it is that a certain legislator has done something with which you agree doesn't have to be anything with animals, just anything with which you agree. Drop them a note, make a telephone call, send them an email, whatever it is, congratulating them on that and thanking them for doing it. You can also happen to mention I've talked to you before. This has nothing to do with the animal issue. I just really like that you step forward on this issue that will get attention because almost no one does that.
Jo-Anne: [00:41:42] Every time we have a bill that makes it through a committee process, we tell them, just you write them all the time to tell them this is what you want them to do. Well, they did it. You need to thank them for that.
Roy: [00:41:55] Sure. Again, the issue doesn't even have to be one you've been lobbying them on. It can be anything that you happen to see with which you agree.
Roland: [00:42:03] Just springing off of that, Roy, I mean, we've been down to the legislators offices and they get so many complaints and when they get something thanking them, they actually pin it up on the wall. We went down there and we recognized our cards and it's on their board. So it really makes an impression.
Roy: [00:42:24] That's a small little victory, you know? That's the kind of thing we're looking at that encourages more volunteers. Hey, we were in the office the other day. We saw your card up on the wall. Perfect.
Elizabeth: [00:42:33] I love that. I want to thank all of you very much, not only for doing this today, but for everything you are doing to keep these fights going and all these successes and huge wins for animals. We need more people like you all across the country. So thank you very much.
Roy: [00:42:52] Thank you, Beth.
Jo-Anne: [00:42:54] It's great love during this.
Elizabeth: [00:43:04] To learn more about Roy, Roland, Allie and Jo-anne and their organizations, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @Speciesunite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna O'Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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