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Martina Pluda, JD

26th June 2023

is the first Director for Italy of international animal protection organization Humane Society International and has been holding this position since early 2020. She a professional animal advocate with a media and legal background. Before her current, she worked for several years as Head of Programmes and Interim Country Director at FOUR PAWS in Vienna, Austria. For almost a decade, Martina has been successfully running legislative, corporate, and awareness campaigns to improve the legal protection of farm, companion, and wild animals, influence company policies and practices, change the public perception around pressing animal protection issues, and encourage plant-based and cruelty-free options. By exposing hidden animal suffering and offering concrete solutions, Martina strives to achieve meaningful, long-term structural and societal change. Her work includes campaigning against cruel farming practices, fur fashion, dog fighting, animal testing, trophy hunting, and more. In recent years, her policy work has directly contributed to obtaining a ban on fur farming in Italy (2021/22) and to the submission of the first bill to prohibit the import of hunting trophies of CITES-listed species to Italy (2022/23). Martina holds both a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) and a Juris Doctor (JD) from the University of Salzburg, as well as a Master’s in Animal Law from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Martina has been working for over fifteen years as a free-lance journalist and is the author of Animal Law in the Third Reich (Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2019). She is also a frequent conference speaker, a regular op-ed contributor and media commentator on animal protection issues, and her work has been featured in numerous news outlets, nationally and internationally.