Jodie Wiederkehr–veteran animal advocate and Founder-Executive Director of the Chicago Alliance for Animals (CAA) —recounts details of how CAA was formed in 2015. (She has recalled in a previous “Talking Animals” conversation how her earliest professional animal advocacy work began in 1997.)
Wiederkehr explained that she and her CAA cohort decided that aiming to ban horse-drawn carriages would be “an easy target” for their first campaign and ideal way to get started, while occasionally shifting to an anti-circus strategy when a circus rolled into Chicago.
But after a period of flyering and generally gentle efforts to raise awareness, Wiederkehr remembered that while she and a colleague were working the CAA booth at an Animal Rights conference in Washington D.C., and began chatting about the carriage campaign, realized it was too mild, and decided they needed to “up their game.”
Not long after they returned to Chicago, (incidentally: while not the intention going into the interview, this conversation unfolded into what might be labeled “Anatomy Of A Victorious, Major Animal Rights Campaign”), Wiederkehr and company implemented the more rigorous version of the campaign, including spending 12 or more hours a day documenting how the carriage horses were being treated relative to the city’s regulations for them: how many hours per day, how many rides, what are the temperatures, and so on.
She goes on to chronicle challenges and delays involved with engaging the City Council, and how one key alderperson—whose district included the horse carriage stands/rides—refused to meet with Wiederkehr or return her calls, yet persuaded by CAA’s research and media coverage, yet ultimately proceeded to introduce legislation to ban horse-drawn carriages. Wiederkehr has helped others elsewhere tackle this issue by forming the Partnership to Ban Horse Carriages Worldwide, by offering guidance to those running such campaigns.
We covered some other topics, among them, current CAA campaigns, such as “Free Spur,” an ongoing effort to gain release of the titular Spur, an African tortoise who’s been cooped up in a small display case in Chicago for more than 30 years.
Additionally, we touched on “If Cage Walls Could Talk,” Wiederkehr’s weekly radio show, focused on animal rights issues and leaders, airing Saturdays, 5-6pm CT on WCPT.
Listen here:
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