Attorney Alene Anello ’10, J.D. ’16, grew up with a cockatiel named Conrad who perched on her shoulder while she cleaned the house and watched TV. Now she tends a trio of parakeets who fly free in her Oakland, California, bedroom.
Two of them, she says, are deeply in love. “They spend all day looking at each other, and he’ll sing a little quiet song right up in her face for hours, like a love song about how beautiful she is, and then they’ll vomit into each other’s mouths,” she laughs. Not pure vomit—but partially digested food, the kind parent birds feed their chicks. “It’s really like, ‘I love you, you’re my baby,’” she says. “Gross. But also cute.”
Growing up so close to animals (including the family’s dogs and hundreds of fish her father cared for in aquarium tanks and backyard ponds) taught Anello to empathize with who they are and what they need. At Harvard, she studied psychology and photography but had no solid career plan until a summer internship with the influential nonprofit Humane World for Animals. There she finally felt proud, she says—“like I was doing a good deed”—and helpful in a way she never had before.
After college she spent three years developing media stories for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and later delved into the complexities of animal law as a staff attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Yet she yearned for her own entrepreneurial niche. So, in 2021, with help from a seed grant from the Harvard Law School Public Service Venture Fund, she founded the nonprofit Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC).
The six-person organization, based in Sacramento, California, focuses on the plight of factory-farmed chickens, known as “broilers.” More than nine billion of them are killed annually in the United States, where chicken is the most popular meat to consume. Americans also eat more of it than anyone else: 102.6 pounds per capita in 2024, according to the National Chicken Council (NCC), a Washington, D.C.-based trade group. “In a little over 50 years,” the NCC website notes, “the U.S. broiler industry has evolved from fragmented, locally oriented businesses into a highly efficient, vertically integrated, progressive success story.”
That profitability, however, comes at a huge cost to animals, Anello maintains. These birds don’t get enough attention, she argues, and animal cruelty laws against hurting them in large scale commercial settings are generally not enforced. She cites undercover investigations, including those on which LIC has based lawsuits, that have documented industry problems ranging from starvation and dehydration to filthy, overcrowded living conditions. Although many people don’t dwell on the idea of chickens being harmed, Anello says, “I’m going to think about it the same way I would think about seeing a child who looks hurt.” The NCC did not respond to a request for comment; its website cites a list of animal welfare guidelines which, it says, “have been widely adopted as a baseline by chicken farmers and processors to ensure all U.S. chickens are being properly cared for and treated humanely.”
In the last century, researchers, scientists, and others within the rising field of animal welfare science have increasingly explored and documented animals’ experiential states and social connectedness. The global animal protection movement has made people more aware of animals’ capacities and struggles, as have books like Animal Liberation Now and Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (by Martha C. Nussbaum, JF ’74, Ph.D. ’75, BF ’81, LL.D. ’22). Scientists have even been studying fish, identifying why, when, and how they feel pain. “People have known for a long time that animals feel pain,” Anello says. “That’s why painkillers have been tested on animals.”
So far, LIC has initiated a handful of cases, with limited success. In 2024, as counsel for a shareholder of Tyson Foods (the biggest chicken producer in the country), LIC tried, but failed, to get complete company records pertaining to the treatment of animals and workers. In 2022, LIC represented two Costco shareholders who sued executives of the discount club and grocery chain, which, under a subsidiary, develops and sells its own broilers—the popular $4.99 rotisserie bird. The suit, based on a 2021 undercover investigation by the livestock-protection organization Mercy for Animals, attempted to hold Costco executives accountable for alleged mistreatment of birds, including breeding birds “to grow so big so fast that a lot of them could not stand up under their own weight and had no way to get to food or water,” says Anello. The judge dismissed the case, expressing appreciation for the intent to shield animals from cruelty but ruling from the bench that the lawsuit was not the right vehicle for that goal and that there were no “actual illegal actions that have been identified.”
For its client Animal Outlook, a national animal welfare group, LIC did successfully negotiate a settlement with a Washington, D.C., butcher shop for falsely advertising foie gras as “humanely raised”; the shop stopped selling the product.
Anello knows litigation is a drawn-out series of small battles. (Her father and siblings, including her brother Russell Anello ’04, J.D. ’07, are lawyers, too.) But the sheer number of broilers produced, and the lack of unified laws and legal procedures to protect animals across states, make it especially hard to mount private civil cases against animal cruelty, let alone win them.
Federal laws—the foundational Animal Welfare Act of 1966 and the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958—cover a range of issues and animals but are not especially applicable to factory farms or chickens, Anello says. Instead, she mines the animal cruelty statutes that exist in every state, which, she says, are very often under-enforced. Local animal control and police departments intervene where they can, she notes, especially in cases of pet neglect and hoarding scenarios. But they often don’t have the bandwidth or resources to target the commercial animal food industry.
In most states, filing a civil suit first requires a cause of action—a statute or court doctrine identifying a specific, allowable reason to prosecute—and there are few such pathways for animals. Suits also need standing: the alleged victim needs to show they were personally injured by whatever occurred. “So, you have to piece each case together,” Anello says. “We are trying to develop pathways so that’s easy and everyone knows how to do it, but right now we’re not at that level yet.” She cites recent, successful efforts in some states—especially in Massachusetts and California—to ban the sale of eggs that were not produced in “cage-free” facilities. These developments, however, were primarily based on ballot initiatives, rather than private lawsuits.
Anello is clear that LIC’s mission is not to shut down farming businesses—only to make them follow existing laws. “Our lawsuits are always focused on things where the company would still be able to make money if they addressed what we are concerned about,” she says. Her mission is also to make it easier for consumers to feel good about their food choices. “You should be able to assume the chicken was treated lawfully,” she says, “because if it wasn’t, why are the companies allowed to sell it?”
At times, the weight of the fight, and the massive scale of the chicken industry, makes Anello wonder if things are truly getting better. She thinks of Conrad, the family cockatiel, and how he and Anello’s brother Russell would often hang out, just whistling together and communing. They had a special bond. “Conrad always got excited when my brother was around. He just wanted to be with him,” she says. “So, when Conrad was dying, the one thing I could do to cheer him up would be to call my brother and put him on speaker phone.” It was a compassionate act—which has driven her to try to extend that comfort to billions of other birds.
