They were some pigs. Much like Fern in Charlotte's Web, young Delcianna Winders loved the two pet pigs that her father gave to her. She bottle-fed Olivia and Dodger as piglets in her bedroom in her family's suburban home in Vallejo, California, where the animals lived in the back yard. It was terrific.
Once they grew, the pigs moved to her father's wrecking yard outside of town, where Winders worked on Saturdays. One weekend, when she was about 14 years old, her mother called her aside before work.
"My mom said, 'I forgot to tell you. The pigs aren't there anymore,'" says the associate professor and the director of the Animal Law & Policy Institute at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. "My dad had them slaughtered and didn't tell me."
Devastated and angry, she headed to the library and read everything she could about animal welfare and animal rights, aiming to rid the world of injustice to animals, a mindset echoing Fern's.
"I became a vegan and animal advocate," Winders says.
It was that fury that kickstarted a career in animal law and earned Winders the 2025 ABA Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section's Excellence in the Advancement of Animal Law Award.
As an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Winders studied the intersection of animal issues and law. She found a mentor in Donna Haraway, a scholar of environmental and animal issues, taking several independent study courses that culminated in Winders teaching a seminar on factory farming and animal advocacy. After graduation in 2001, she worked for the Emma Goldstein Papers Project at the University of California at Berkeley.
Then she became a mortgage broker.
"I made probably more money than I'm ever going to make again in my life," she says.
Though finance wasn't her calling, she left with enough cash to pay off her undergraduate student loans and finance some of her tuition at the New York University School of Law.
There, she wove a web of students from around the city interested in animal law, bringing in speakers and building community, says Chris Green, who was part of that group and is now the executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund.
"She was doing everything she could, even as a student, to just build the field," Green says.
During her first semester, her contracts professor pulled her aside, telling her that animal law was a distraction, and that he envisioned her becoming a law professor. She staunchly disagreed.
"I was like, 'No, I'm definitely not going to do that. I am here to practice and [learn] the law. I'm here to advocate,'" Winders says.
That same professor then encouraged her to become a clerk for Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati in 2006. After a year, she moved to a law firm then known as Meyer Glitzenstein & Crystal, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest firm, where as an associate, she worked on her first captive wildlife cases.
She worked as part of a trial team that litigated an Endangered Species Act case against the Ringling Bros. for the mistreatment of Asian elephants the circus held in captivity.
"She's very smart, a very creative thinker, which is really important in public interest law because rarely is there a case right on point," says Katherine Meyer, then a partner at the firm and the former director of Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Clinic. "Delci was a master at it."
On that case, Winders was charged with "making sure everything could get admitted," Meyer says, putting together a binder of all the research along with memos explaining each document, video and photograph. It was called "Winders on Evidence."
"It was fantastic," Meyer says. "I still have my Winders on Evidence binder, which I have consulted from time to time."
In 2009, Winders jumped at the chance to work at Farm Sanctuary, where as the director of legal campaigns, she guided the advocacy group's legal response on animal agriculture issues. One big topic was downed animals, "meaning animals who are too sick to stand or walk at slaughter," she says.
Though the U.S. Department of Agriculture bans the slaughter of downed cattle for human consumption, the rules don't cover other animals, such as pigs, sheep and goats. At Farm Sanctuary, Winders worked on an amicus brief for the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court case National Meat Association v. Harris in support of California's law that slaughterhouses couldn't take downed pigs.
"Unfortunately, the Supreme Court held that that preemption provision is incredibly broad, and that California could not do that," she says.
A year later, she moved to the PETA Foundation as the vice president and the deputy general counsel. Over the next five years, she developed a captive animal law enforcement team comprised of lawyers, veterinarians and support staff to work on issues involving wild animals and those used in entertainment. The group's work included ending tiger cub petting and rehoming bears from bear pits, she says.
But her law school professor's prediction came true. She started teaching animal law as an adjunct lecturer at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and the Tulane University School of Law.
"It's how I feel I can have the most impact by exponentially increasing the number of animal advocates," she says.
In 2017, she was encouraged to apply to be an academic fellow at Harvard Law School's then-brand-new Animal Law & Policy Clinic. The appointment came just months after she married Benjamin Varadi, now an associate professor at Vermont Law. "I was like, 'We're going to go to Harvard for two years.' And my amazing husband said, 'OK, we'll do that.'"
When the fellowship ended, she returned to PETA and continued to rehome animals -- professionally and personally -- especially in a case involving Nosey, an elephant born in Zimbabwe but used at a small circus.
Nosey moved from town to town with her circus, often chained in a trailer while suffering from a range of health problems, Winders says.
On Winders' and Varadi's third wedding anniversary, she received a call from law enforcement in Moulton County, Alabama, saying they saw Nosey chained by the side of the road.
"They said, 'Everyone's telling us that we should talk to you,'" she adds.
Winders convinced the officials to hold tight and not initiate a seizure of the animal until she got there.
"I told my husband I needed to go to the airport, not to our anniversary dinner, and I took a red-eye [flight] to Alabama," she adds.
A hearing happened that day, and the court ordered Nosey to be seized. Winders' team took her to one of two accredited elephant sanctuaries in the United States, she adds.
Afterward, protracted litigation brought by the government challenged the seizure. But with Winders' help, the government won.
"Now, Nosey is living amazingly at the elephant sanctuary, and she has the company of other elephants. She's doing great," she adds.
But on the way to the sanctuary, Winders found a homeless dog at a Love's Travel Stops station.
"I brought the dog home," Winders says.
A few weeks later, she accepted a visiting scholar post at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in White Plains, New York, leaving her husband in Portland, Oregon, with Lovey, a mountain cur mix.
"My amazing husband socialized the dog I just dumped on him," she says.
In 2018, she started co-teaching animal welfare law at Vermont Law in summers with one of the veterinarians on her PETA team.
"It was a really great class, very interdisciplinary," she says.
The experience helped her decide to move into teaching full time. She headed to the Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon in 2019 to help start its Animal Law Litigation Clinic, working as its director and as an assistant professor.
"Training these incredibly motivated, brilliant students is really important," she says. "Of course, I was still practicing through my teaching, through the clinic and mentoring students."
Then in 2021, Vermont Law recruited her. The vice chair of the ABA Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section's Animal Law Committee jumped at the chance to launch its Animal Law & Policy Institute as its director and work as an associate professor in the beauty of rural Vermont.
Along with the clinic, she's started three degree programs as her focus shifts to training future animal advocacy leaders.
"Animal law and policy are complicated," she says. "You can be the most motivated, hardworking person in the world, but if you don't have the training and the skills, you may not be successful, and you might even muck things up."
This year, the program launched 13 graduates who specifically want to work in animal law, plus a handful of others who took one or two animal law classes.
"And I think that's great because they're going to be in positions where animal issues come up sooner or later," she adds.
While there are more jobs in animal law policy than ever before, "that does not mean it's easy. It is very competitive," Winders says.
Winders continues her work regarding downed pigs, still inspired by the two animal friends that she loved that launched her advocacy work.
"Becoming a lawyer was a good pathway to channel my animal advocacy, and the law plays a really important role in the status of animals," she says. "It's an important lever that I could have an impact on."