SACRAMENTO — Her inner alarm chimes before dawn, long before her dog Yoda emerges from his nightly nest amid the bed covers, before the proverbial rooster crows and the day begins for 19 million or so egg-laying chickens whose lives she worked to change.
It's 5 a.m., and Jennifer Fearing is beginning another day as the rising star of California's animal protection movement.
The statehouse point person for the Humane Society of the United States plucks her iPhone from a bedside table and launches the first of hundreds of e-mails she'll send today. Fearing, raised an Air Force brat, calls her schedule "a wartime blessing and a peacetime curse."
But it is routine for the 37-year-old, whose career took off with the landmark ballot measure California voters passed last fall easing the confinement of hens and other factory farm animals. Fresh from her victory as manager of that campaign, with its 19-hour days, she set up shop as the Humane Society's lobbyist in the Golden State.
She flips through blogs and news websites and e-mail, prepping for the long day ahead. It will be paced like the marathons she somehow finds time to run.
"Jennifer has an extra motor in there," says her boss, the society's chief executive, Wayne Pacelle, who often arrives at his Washington headquarters to find a flock of Fearing's early e-mails.
Fearing stands out in the Capitol's animal rights corps -- a passionate but sometimes scruffy lot -- with her stylish blond hair, high heels and a resume jammed with achievement. She has a Harvard graduate degree, a highly paid past with a Los Angeles consulting firm and service at all ranks of the animal-protection movement.
She was reared a Midwest Republican and a Presbyterian. As a teenager, she was president of Christian singer Amy Grant's fan club. She interned for the first Bush administration and voted once for the second. Among the liberal-leaning true believers at the Humane Society, Fearing is still considered the token Republican, though she grew disillusioned with the GOP several years ago and registered independent.
Chums once jokingly presented the former sorority girl with a plastic doll of Elle Woods, the Chihuahua-toting dynamo who triumphs over stereotype in the movie "Legally Blonde."
Fearing nonetheless remains a rookie in the house of mirrors that is the state Capitol. She has her worries.
"I'm probably going to get eaten alive," she says.
