Daphna Nachminovitch has been with PETA since 1997. She oversees PETA’s Emergency Response Team, which fields hundreds of calls every week from across the country.
She also directs PETA’s undercover investigations. In one recent high-profile case, Nachminovitch worked with state and federal officials to execute what has since been coined the largest animal seizure in history: Nearly 27,000 animals (including the bearded dragon pictured here at a temporary rescue facility) were confiscated from international exotic-animal dealer U.S. Global Exotics in Arlington, Texas. The company was forced to shut down, and the operator is now a federal fugitive on the run. Nachminovitch also oversaw the case implicating North Carolina product testing laboratory Professional Laboratory and Research Services (PLRS)—a North Carolina product testing company that closed and released for adoption hundreds of dogs and cats within six days of PETA’s breaking its investigation. A grand jury has since indicted four former PLRS workers on 14 felony cruelty-to-animals charges.
Under Nachminovitch’s direction, PETA investigators have infiltrated and documented abuse and neglect backstage at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, at Georgia-based PETCO and PetSmart supplier Sun Pet Ltd., and at a Pennsylvania dairy farm that supplies milk to Land O’Lakes. Nachminovitch also directed PETA’s 2008 investigation of a pig factory farm that supplies Hormel, which resulted in six abuse and neglect convictions, and PETA’s investigation of Aviagen’s 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.
Nachminovitch also oversees PETA’s low-cost spay/neuter clinics—which have “fixed” more than 74,000 animals since 2001—as well as PETA’s fieldwork division and doghouse program, which provides custom-made doghouses, straw bedding, toys, and other services to neglected dogs in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. She has successfully worked with government officials to pass laws restricting or banning the chaining of dogs in several cities.
Born in Israel and having lived in Ivory Coast and Paris, Nachminovitch is fluent in Hebrew, French, and English. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a major in communications and theater. Before starting at PETA in 1997, Nachminovitch worked at Chicago’s Anti-Cruelty Society animal shelter and at Head Start centers doing speech and play therapy with underprivileged children on Chicago’s South Side.