Updates on Our Tangible Work on Behalf of Animals

Summary

• New Balance agreed to halt sourcing kangaroo skins by the end of next year.
• The U.S. House approved our amendment to stipulate that $1 million or more will be spent on enforcement actions against cockfighters and dogfighters under federal law.
• We launched a ballot measure in Colorado to end trophy hunting of mountain lions and trophy hunting and trapping of bobcats.
• We continued to press to stop the EATS Act—which would repeal Prop 12 and Question 3 in Massachusetts.
• We are building major momentum for our Farm bill priorities: the FIGHT Act (animal fighting), the SAFE Act (horse slaughter), and the Greyhound Protection Act.
• The ADD SOY Act is now introduced in both chambers of Congress.
• We have requested, in partnership with our in-house and affiliated scientists, an FDA rulemaking action to conform agency regulations with the plain language of the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 and its elimination of the decades-long mandate for animal testing.

New Balance Says It Will Halt Sourcing of Kangaroo Skins for Shoes
New Balance informed the Center for a Humane Economy at the end of September that it has altered its sourcing policies to phase out by the end of next year its use of kangaroo skins for its soccer cleats. This major announcement comes six months after Puma and then Nike announced similar policies, with both of those companies ending sourcing and sales of the skins by the end of this year. Since the Center began its Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign just more than three years ago, four of the five biggest global athletic shoe brands have announced they are shedding kangaroos from their supply chains (Diadora, based in Italy, is the fourth). Adidas, based in Germany, is the major outlier among the five top brands, though there are some other shoe companies still using kangaroo skins, including Mizuno.

Our friends and partners at Their Turn have conducted multiple protests at Adidas flagship stores in New York City, entering the stores and demanding the company halt its financing of kangaroo killing in Australia. Actor James Cromwell joined the protest, chanting that “kangaroos are not shoes” in the store and alerting customers to Adidas’s role in a cruel wildlife trade.

TAKE ACTION: Support the legislation here, and sign the petition for Dick’s Sporting Goods here.

House Backs $1 million Amendment in Dedicated Funds for Animal Fighting Enforcement
In late September, the U.S. House of Representatives, without dissent, passed an amendment to require at least $1 million in spending on casework against animal fighting by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General, with the aim to apprehend the people driving this illicit animal cruelty. Animal Wellness Action conceived and successfully lobbied the measure, led by two great champions of our cause — U.S. Reps. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., and Vern Buchanan, R-Fla. It was considered as an amendment to H.R. 4368, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, for Fiscal Year 2024

It’s hard to fathom that there may be as many as 20 million fighting birds in our homeland. That’s precisely why we are working to fortify the legal and enforcement framework to shut it all down, including by providing for a private right of action in new federal legislation called the Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act. We are building major momentum for this national legislation, introduced by U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and John Kennedy, R-La., and U.S. Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Andrea Salinas, D-Ore. Already, it has attracted more than 300 organizations and agencies in the animal welfare, law enforcement, gaming, agriculture, and conservation communities. But there is opposition, including from Congressman James Moylan, R-Guam, who introduced H.R. 5650 to repeal key prohibitions against animal fighting in the U.S. territories. Animal Wellness Action strongly opposes this outrageous effort to legalize cockfighting, after Congress progressively restricted cockfighting through five separate lawmaking efforts in 2002, 2007, 2008, 2014, and 2018.

Note: We also saw the first prosecution under the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which we worked to pass in 2022 in partnership with Big Cat Rescue.

TAKE ACTION: Easily write to your legislators here. Part of an organization or group willing to endorse the bill? Go here.

Animal Wellness Launches Measure to Ban Trophy Hunting, Trapping of Big Cats
Cats Aren’t Trophies (CATs), a new political committee in Colorado, has filed 2024 ballot language to ban trophy hunting of mountain lions and trapping or hounding of bobcats or lynx. Mountain lion trophy hunters use a pack of dogs — up to eight — fitted with GPS collars to keep track of the pack as it chases a fleeing cat up into a tree. The “hunter” then finds the location with high-tech telemetry equipment, walks up, and shoots the cat off of a tree limb. Trophy hunting guides offer these “guaranteed” kills for a bucket list trophy tom, collecting fees of up to $8,000 for a highly commercialized exercise for their clients.

This campaign, thanks to Animal Wellness Action, marks the return of the ballot initiative process in the animal movement, after two cycles with no statewide campaigns in the United States. With our guidance, CATs worked to place a column in the Denver Post to frame the issue and that same piece ran in papers throughout the state, including the Greeley Tribune, Boulder Daily Camera, and Longmont Times Call. Two of our spokespersons conducted an interview on KGNU radio, and the Denver Post (if you cannot read it behind paywall, a replica of that story ran in the Spokesman Review) ran a feature on the campaign, and a couple of days before that, so did the Grand Junction Sentinel. This ballot measure will draw national attention given that trophy hunters and trappers kill 500 lions and 2,000 bobcats a year in Colorado.

TAKE ACTION: Live in Colorado and want to volunteer? Go here.

Congressional Effort to Repeal Prop 12, Question 3 on Life Support
Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy, and key allies have the proponents of the EATS Act — a measure to repeal key state laws to help animals, mainly Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts — on the defensive. We helped organize letters from 171 House lawmakers and 30 Senators in August urging Agriculture Committee leaders to reject the EATS Act as an amendment to the Farm bill, with additional Congressional opposition soon to follow. A number of news reports indicate that the backers of the EATS Act are facing an uphill fight to pass the measure, given our fierce defense of Prop 12 and Question 3. You can read Wayne Pacelle’s exposé of the China-NPPC connection and Dr. Jim Keen’s essay against the EATS Act in the Des Moines Register.

The Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action released a new August 2023 report on EATS, Prop 12, and Question 3, conducting this virtual press conference and this news release announcing key findings in that report. The report reveals that the industry has been in transition for more than two decades since Florida banned the use of gestation crates in 2002 and that it has existing capacity to supply gestation-crate free pork to states and companies that are demanding an end to extreme confinement of sows.

TAKE ACTION: Go here to send an email to lawmakers and oppose the EATS Act.

Farm Bill May Be Vehicle for Key Policy Reforms for Animals Action
With five years having passed since the last Farm bill, Congress is due to pass this new Farm bill and, because of hard work and an outpouring of grassroots concerns, more than a half-dozen animal welfare policies could find their way into the final version of it. Three measures, if enacted, would close out what many people view as horrid practices that have endured for decades in the United States.

• Animal Fighting. The FIGHT Act would ban shipping roosters by U.S. mail for fighting, would allow private citizens to sue dogfighters and cockfighters when federal law enforcement fails to act on known information about ongoing criminal fighting ventures, and outlaw online gambling on dogfighting and cockfighting. More than 300 groups and agencies have endorsed the FIGHT Act, including the American Gaming Association, Small and Rural Law Enforcement Executive Association, Rose Acre Farms, Indiana State Poultry Federation, Pennsylvania Sheriffs’ Association, Vital Farms, and the United Egg Producers. We’ve noted the murder and mayhem associated with animal fighting, along with infectious disease threats from cockfighting.
• Horse Slaughter. The SAFE Act comes just months after we partnered with Animals’ Angels on a North American investigation documenting that the extraterritorial slaughter of American horses is rapidly waning but still a merciless journey for around 20,000 American horses a year. New York State is poised to join California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas in banning horse slaughter for human consumption, underscoring that big border states want to end the live export of horses for slaughter to Canada and Mexico.
• Greyhound racing. The Greyhound Protection Act would end gambling on live racing in the United States and ban foreign tracks from simulcasting their races here at home. A generation ago, there were 60 greyhound racing tracks. Today, tracks hang on in just two small cities in West Virginia. The industry, battered by an unyielding movement to ban racing, has shed tracks one at a time and also in larger bunches as now 42 states have banned greyhound racing.

Key Lawmakers Working to End Milk Mandate and Give Kids Choice
Animal Wellness Action, the Center, and Switch4Good lauded U.S. Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., John Kennedy, R-La., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., for introducing the ADD SOY Act to give kids a nutritionally equivalent, plant-based milk option to cow’s milk in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Reps. Troy Carter, D-La., and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced the companion bill some weeks ago because perhaps half of the 30 million kids participating in the NSLP are lactose intolerant.

Under law, the USDA spends $1 billion a year of taxpayer dollars to fulfill a “milk mandate” in public schools, even though 70-95 percent of Black, Pacific Islander and Asian, Native American, and Latino individuals are lactose intolerant. In fact, the National Institutes of Health reports the majority of all people have a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy, and lactose intolerance “is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek, and Italian descent.” This “milk mandate” leads to millions of kids getting ill in the classroom (making the learning experience more difficult) and also to extraordinary food and fiscal waste. According to the USDA’s findings, 29 percent of the cartons of milk served in our schools are thrown in the garbage unopened, sending at least $300 million in tax dollars into the trash. Another study found that kids discard 45 million gallons of milk each year. The Soy Nutrition Institute Global “advocates for the removal of this specific requirement to ensure the foods and beverages in school meals serve all children.”

TAKE ACTION: Let your lawmakers know you want to ease the suffering of dairy cows by going here. Part of an organization or group willing to endorse the bill? Go here to add your team’s name.
 

For the animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Animal Wellness Action