2025 Ann Cottrell Free National Press Club Animal Reporting Award Winners
L-R: Chiara Eisner (NPR), Nicholas McMillan (NPR), Melody Gutierrez (LA Times) and Rick Klein (ABC News Washington Bureau Chief)
Not pictured: Mara Hvistendahl of the New York Times
Not pictured: Mara Hvistendahl of the New York Times
Print/Online
Winner: "Pets for Profit" by Melody Gutierrez, Alene Tchekmedyian, and David Wharton, of The Los Angeles Times
In their “Pets for Profit” series, the reporting team at the LA Times spent more than a year uncovering deep flaws in California’s oversight of the multi-billion dollar pet industry. They found an underground puppy market that includes sick and diseased animals, ex-cons and scammers and the practice of kenneling dogs indefinitely to harvest their blood for veterinary hospitals. Their reporting also put a spotlight on dogs shipped into the state from mass breeders in the Midwest, sketchy resellers, and a lack of oversight surrounding a private rescue catering to Hollywood’s elite.
Despite the health records of dogs coming into California being routinely deleted, the LA Times team obtained 60,000 records by requesting pet export documents from other states, a task complicated by different regulations in each state. They used Google Pinpoint to extract data from travel documents and then manually rechecked each document for accuracy. Along with data journalist Sean Greene, the reporters developed a database that allows pet owners to trace dogs that are microchipped to out-of-state breeders, providing transparency.
As a result of the team’s reporting, California lawmakers authored three bills to end the puppy mill pipeline and the state began preserving the veterinary inspections records that they had been deleting. Additionally, the paper’s reporting on Wagmore Pets resulted in an investigation by the state attorney general.
Honorable Mention:
"The Panda Factories" by Mara Hvistendahl of The New York Times
The judges also wanted to spotlight the work of New York Times reporter Mara Hvistendahl, who was following up on a tip she received years prior when she was a freelance science writer in China: “investigate China’s panda breeding centers,” she was told, “they aren’t what they appear to be.”
After joining the New York Times, Hvistendahl was in the position to pursue that tip. Starting in late 2023 she began a worldwide quest for documents and sources, trying to piece together the true history of what has been hailed as a conservation success. She filed records requests with national and international government agencies and unearthed more than 10,000 pages of documents from the archives of the Smithsonian Institution. The records were jumbled and out of order, so Times reporters wrote code to organize them.
The documents revealed that American scientists were disturbed by breeding practices they had witnessed. Pandas had been burned, shocked, excessively drugged and accidentally killed. Millions of dollars were being wasted and misspent in China. The documents also revealed why no one had spoken publicly. Pandas drive zoo attendance and merchandise sales.
Hvistendahl’s investigation also took her to a panda breeding center in China. Shortly before the publication of her first story, the Smithsonian refused to license any of its archival material to The Times, calling it “too sensitive.” The paper published anyway - on the day that two pandas arrived with much fanfare at the National Zoo in Washington.
Broadcast
Winner: "'That's a bloodbath': How a federal program kills wildlife for private interests” - Chiara Eisner and Nicholas McMillan, NPR
Over the course of two years, the NPR team of investigative reporters Chiara Eisner and Nicholas McMillan found that the United States Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services program, which is charged with protecting US wildlife, was killing thousands of wild animals on behalf of private landowners and at taxpayer expense — with no evidence that the wildlife posed a threat to people or property.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, the NPR team obtained more than 7,000 work tasks from the Wildlife Services Montana division, and by asking for unique identification numbers that corresponded with the locations of the killings, NPR associate data producer Nicholas McMillan was able to develop a custom database. By analysing the data, the team determined that in Montana, for instance, Wildlife Services had killed 11,000 wild animals on properties where no wildlife had threatened livestock. The data revealed that at just one location, federal employees had shot and killed 61 coyotes from a helicopter in under four hours.
In addition to collecting and analyzing the data, the team conducted extensive field interviews with ranchers, tribal members, landowners, and current and former government employees who backed up their findings.
Because of their creative, thorough, and dogged approach, which resulted in groundbreaking findings on behalf of animals, the judges found that the NPR team should be recognized with the 2025 National Press Club Ann Cottrell Free Animal Reporting Award.
Honorable mention: "Investigating SeaQuest” - ABC News and Reporting Partners KXTV, KSTP and KTNV
ABC News, working with its local affiliates, KXTV, KSTP, and KTNV, investigated allegations of animal abuse at the popular mall-based aquarium chain SeaQuest, which allows customers to interact with exotic marine animals. Their reporting found undocumented animal deaths, lack of basic veterinary care, neglect, poor hygienic practices — which is a risk for zoonotic disease — and carelessness that resulted in injuries to visitors at 70 SeaQuest facilities.
Over the course of a year, the combined network and local teams spoke to dozens of current and former SeaQuest employees and their reporting led to calls for change by state and federal lawmakers, the CEO of SeaQuest resigning and the business ultimately filing for bankruptcy.
The judges found that the strong collaboration of network and local news resulted in excellent reporting on behalf of animals and is deserving of recognition by the National Press Club.
