Daphna Nachminovitch

As the senior vice president of PETA’s Cruelty Investigations Department, Daphna Nachminovitch has overseen countless cruelty cases and many eyewitness investigations. Her staff fields hundreds of calls every week from concerned citizens around the world.

In one high-profile case, Nachminovitch worked with state and federal officials in what may be the largest animal seizure in history: Nearly 27,000 animals were confiscated from international exotic-animal dealer U.S. Global Exotics in Texas. The company was shut down overnight, and its operator is now a federal fugitive.

In another of Nachminovitch’s record-breaking cases, PETA’s investigation of Global Captive Breeders prompted law-enforcement officials to charge the company’s owner and manager with 106 counts of felony cruelty to animals. Sixteen thousand rats and 600 reptiles were seized from the facility in the largest seizure of rats in U.S. history and the largest-ever seizure of animals in California.

Nachminovitch oversaw PETA’s investigation of Professional Laboratory and Research Services (PLRS), a North Carolina product-testing company that closed within a week of the release of PETA’s findings to the public and put hundreds of animals up for adoption. A grand jury indicted four former PLRS workers, marking the first time in U.S. history that workers faced felony cruelty charges for abuse of animals in a laboratory.

Nachminovitch also directed PETA’s investigation of a pig factory farm that supplies Hormel, which resulted in six workers’ admitting guilt in the neglect and/or abuse of pigs—the first convictions of their kind in Iowa, the top pork-producing state. She also helmed PETA’s investigation of turkey factory farms in West Virginia, which resulted in the first-ever felony indictments for abuse of factory-farmed birds. The case led to five convictions and the stiffest penalty ever imposed in U.S. history for cruelty to any farmed animal.