More Than a Pet Project
Animal Legal Defense Fund students push for lasting change
“It breaks my heart to contemplate the vastness of animal suffering,” he says. “I see animal rights as the moral blindspot of our generation.”
Uppal, Abraham Brauner ’24, and current group leader Krishna Desai ’25 worked vigilantly to broaden awareness of ALDF’s robust programming and Plant-Based Berkeley Law campaign, and how animal rights issues connect with other social justice concerns.
One event featured activist and former Mexican slaughterhouse worker Susana Chavez and UC Berkeley School of Journalism Professor Andrés Cediel, whose documentary Trafficked in America chronicles a group of Guatemalan teens who were smuggled into America and forced to work on an Ohio egg farm.
ALDF also connects students to animal law attorneys and careers, and strives to learn from previous social justice efforts, including the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements.
“The meat industry’s deliberate veil of secrecy includes unconstitutional ‘ag gag’ laws that prevent people from finding out about their atrocities,” Brauner says. “Industry wants to keep this out of sight and out of mind, because they know the vast majority of people would be outraged if they found out.”
Desai relishes seeing how animal rights concerns unite people across races, birthplaces, and religions. Unaware of animal law until coming to Berkeley Law, she now finds it “just the kind of radical lawyering I came here wanting to do” and says law school “is about more than just getting the best grades and the gold stars and the big firm job.”
An estimated 10 billion animals are slaughtered each year in the United States, 99% of them raised on factory farms. ALDF leaders say America’s food system is built around this exploitation — but that when activists discuss it, people often feel personally attacked about their own diets and judged if they’re not vegan.
“We need to flip the social norms, expand plant-based nutrition, and put plant-based foods on every shelf of every grocery store,” Uppal says. “Only then will we be able to create a world where the default option is also the ethical option.”
Toward this end, the group collaborates and co-sponsors events with several student organizations that focus on the environment, migration, labor, and more.
“By teaming up with folks fighting for other causes, we can tackle things from all angles,” says Desai, who helped undocumented migrant laborers at Mississippi poultry plants before law school and heard harrowing depictions of grueling labor, jarring deboning and defeathering tasks, and common sexual harassment. “Animal rights doesn’t exist in a bubble.”
Says Brauner, “The struggle for animal rights is part of the same struggles that so many in the Berkeley Law community care about.”