In the Supreme Court and the court of public opinion, an expert has her say on animal welfare
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Remember the pandemic? When a respiratory disease leapt from a wild bat, likely in a live animal market, and went on to wreak colossal damage to human society? Well, start getting ready for the next one, because the way factory farms jam together billions of cows, pigs, and other livestock, they’re guaranteeing an outbreak of another new infectious disease with no known treatment.
That’s the message of a recent report by the Animal Law & Policy Program of Harvard Law School, where teams of law students, attorneys, faculty and researchers churn out research, analysis, briefs and litigation in the public interest, related to animal welfare. They’ve helped battle the pork lobby in the highest court in the land, tangled with park rangers to save dying elk, and challenged the USDA on the treatment of primates in research. And all of these efforts are overseen by the center’s executive director, Nirva Kapasi Patel (ENG’00).
Not only that, Patel is an executive producer of several documentaries, including The Game Changers, which features Arnold Schwarzenegger and a pantheon of power lifters, Olympians and other elite athletes who train on a vegan diet. The film is one of the most watched documentaries on Netflix. Patel has also chaired the board of animal rescue nonprofit Farm Sanctuary. And she’s the mother of four, kids who inspired (and helped) her to wage successful campaigns to ban the sale of fur in Weston and Lexington, Massachusetts.
Patel is also a former biomedical engineer who believes the scientific community has a part to play in making the world safer for animals and humans. After all, it was scientists who pushed the European Union to ban animal testing for cosmetics, she points out. “You can find your place,” she says. “If you care about animals, you don’t have to give up that passion to continue your path in engineering. It’s not binary.”
Doing no harm
Patel grew up in Ashland, Massachusetts, practicing her father’s Jain religion, a key precept of which is nonviolence. That respect for life very much extends to animal lives. “On road trips, if we saw roadkill, we would sometimes stop and say a prayer and give that animal some sort of honor or respect.”
That also means Jains are vegetarian. “I didn’t even know what bologna was until I started school,” Patel recalls. “My sisters and I got teased because we brought Indian food to lunch. It had strong flavors, it smelled different—it was really, really good food, but sometimes we were like, ‘Can we just do PB&J and a bag of Doritos?’”
When applying to colleges, Patel—the daughter of a chemical engineer—was drawn to BU’s College of Engineering. “The idea of problem-solving and then having real-world impact was fascinating to me,” she says, and her biomedical engineering studies did not disappoint. “I had the most amazing teachers,” Patel says. “The interdisciplinary work was fantastic.”
But she was bothered by the role—common across biological and medical research everywhere—of animals in the lab.
“I witnessed a lot of surgeries on mice,” Patel says, “and I remember being traumatized and sad, just watching these cute little mice being flipped upside-down and injected and then dead. I remember scanning the room, thinking, ‘Is anyone else upset by this? Maybe we should say a prayer and at least acknowledge this little animal?’”
To Mumbai and back
Years later, Patel would read studies on the subject and find she was not alone. “The mental toll animal testing takes on the human researchers is a somewhat hidden experience in labs,” she says.
After graduating from BU, Patel worked for the Genetics Institute, while studying patent law part-time at New England College of Law, initially hoping it would aid her in inventing alternative methods to animal testing. Upon passing the bar, she worked for the Boston law firm Nixon Peabody as an associate in their Technology & Intellectual Property Practice Group.
In 2006, Patel moved with her husband to Mumbai, India. There, she had four children, went fully vegan, and became more involved in animal welfare issues.
After the family returned to the U.S. in 2014, Nirva Patel started volunteering for the Animal Rescue League. In time, she joined the board of Farm Sanctuary, which cares for escaped and cast-off farm animals. Cows, pigs, ducks, goats, and other critters “get to stay with their babies,” says Patel. “They get to experience life. They get to grow old!” Eventually, Patel served as chair of the board for a year.
Along with James Cameron, Patel and her husband were among the executive producers of The Game Changers, a documentary about the nutritional benefits of a plant-based diet—even for NFL linebackers, champion log lifters, and other tough guys. After all, protein and calcium are found in the plants that big, strong animals like cows eat in the first place, argue the elite athletes, scientists, and medical professionals interviewed in the film. Patel was also an executive producer of The End of Medicine, a documentary that focused on the threats posed to human health by factory farming—pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and antibiotic resistance.
All the evidence
To gain more expertise in the field, Patel went back to school, earning a master’s degree in animals and public policy from Tufts University in 2021. Patel began working for the Animal Law & Policy Program (ALPP) at Harvard Law first as a volunteer, then as a global policy fellow, before her promotion to executive director last July.
With Patel’s involvement, the ALPP sued the National Park Service for failing to protect the native Tule elk dying of starvation and dehydration in Point Reyes National Seashore—cut off from forage and water by a fence erected across the public land by private cattle ranchers. The fence may soon be coming down thanks to pressure from ALPP and other advocates.
The ALPP also filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in a case the pork lobby brought attempting to overturn a California law outlawing confined spaces where pigs couldn’t turn around. “Because the court reads the brief, it’s an opportunity to magnify the issue and put into the public record all these pictures, details, data, and evidence of cruelty.” The court upheld the law.
Next, Patel has her sights set on the animal experimentation that so upset her as an undergrad—and she rejects the false dichotomy that concern for animals means you’re in favor of cancer ravaging humans. In many cases, animal testing isn’t even reliable, she says, citing growing evidence of alarmingly high failure rates in human clinical trials—even one case where a hepatitis B drug did well in rats, dogs, and even primates, but when it went to clinical trials, seven people died.
“There are promising alternatives, like organs on a chip,” Patel says. “These are highly sensitive, miniaturized versions of the human organs, they’re adaptable to high-throughput design, and it’s more accurate than an animal organ.”
“Ultimately, scientists will convince other scientists in their community to take a closer look at whether animal experimentation is actually worth it,” Patel says. “I think it’s critical that even if a scientist is not an animal advocate, necessarily, as a human being we have that ability to invoke our compassion at some point in the process, and I think we need to allow that to happen.”
Banner photo by Conor Doherty