eaDefense

Environmental and Animal Defense fulfills its mission to provide relief to the poor, underprivileged and undeserved members of Colorado's community by addressing a priority of the Colorado Bar Association (CBA Executive Council and CBA Board of Governors) as recently reported to the Colorado Access to Justice Commission: [e]xplor[ing] ways lawyers can provide legal assistance and representation to low and middle income Coloradans, including limited scope representation and modest means representation.

While litigation is an essential part of protecting the environment for the public benefit and the prevention of cruelty to animals through the realistic development of an enforceable body of environmental and animal law through enforcement of existing statutes, regulations and common law principles, many issues are usually overlooked. With scarce availability of resources to devote, many nonprofit public interest litigation organizations focus heavily or exclusively on large national issues that whose litigation creates the largest impact. This often results in less popular, smaller, or nonnational issues concerning individual animals being overlooked by other nonprofits. While foundation, indicator, keystone, or other types of critical or important species to ecosystems probably should be prioritized, Environmental and Animal Defense thinks that every species and each animal should be preserved for the public benefit and each individual animal protected from cruelty. Protecting livestock from cruelty by litigating against a state agency that promulgates regulations that allow cruelty in violation of an authorizing statute certainly prevents cruelty to many animals, but protecting a single canine unlawfully seized to be euthanized also aids in the prevention of cruelty to animals. The same way public interest litigation serves civil rights by defending them in broad strokes in national and historic litigation and through individual defense of those rights, environmental protection and the prevention of cruelty to animals benefits from both large and small issues. The need for this a nonprofit for these public services is demonstrated by the absence of these services by national nonprofits and other organizations. In fact, part of the inspiration to form Environmental and Animal Defense came out of a legal need by a Denver Metropolitan Area animal shelter. A woman who was fostering a dog for this animal shelter refused to return the dog to the shelter when it became ill for medical treatment. The shelter attempted to hire an attorney, but could not afford the quoted cost to recover the dog from the woman who unlawfully kept it in her possession. The shelter, worried that the dog would die without legal intervention quickly, reached out for legal assistance to the only other available source, social media. The founders of Environmental and Animal Defense responded and shortly thereafter the dog was returned to the animal shelter for medical treatment. There was no other organization available to the animal shelter to provide legal services to prevent the cruelty to this dog through failing to provide medical treatment. Very few groups rarely take on these types of cases unless it is to set precedent for larger national impact.