• KANGAROOS ARE NOT SHOES.There were seismic effects in our campaign to halt the use of the skins of the iconic marsupials to make soccer cleats. Nike, Puma, and then New Balance submitted to the demands of our campaign, pledging in 2023 to stop sourcing kangaroos to make soccer cleats.
• MODERNIZE TESTING. Our signature effort, passed just hours before we turned the calendar to 2023, was the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 to change the business model of the pharmaceutical industry. That federal policy lifted a national animal-testing mandate that had been in place for 84 years. It was our goal in 2023 to put the newly signed law into motion. While much work remains to apply the national policy, and to see that it’s felt throughout the global pharmaceutical industry, we are in the process of ushering in a new era of a safer, better, more humane paradigm for screening drugs and easing animals out of the equation.
• CAGE-FREE FUTURE (Part I).The biggest news: the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Prop 12 as a constitutionally sound animal-housing policy. It brings us closer to the day when we’ll halt selling any pork, eggs, or veal from factory farms that immobilize the animals as a routine animal-housing strategy.
• CAGE-FREE FUTURE (Part II). And it was big news, too, when the definition of the “organic seal” was expanded to include animal welfare. The Organic Livestock and Poultry Standards are the first legal standards in federal law to forbid extreme confinement and to impose a set of other quality-of-life standards for animals raised for food on organic farms.
• ANIMAL FIGHTING, HORSES, AND MORE. In 2023, we built major momentum in our serious-minded efforts to close out industries that have been with us for longer than any of us have lived: 
  • horse slaughter for human consumption
  • greyhound racing for gambling
  • and dogfighting and cockfighting for the thrill of the bloodletting.

Through pathbreaking investigations, we’ve been shrinking the size of these enterprises. Our goal in 2024: make them vanishingly small, on the way toward wiping them out altogether.

In all that we do, we want to drive better outcomes for animals through a combination of moral purpose and human innovation. These forces, if we work to propel them, have the potential to cast cruelty aside, leading us into a newly energized economy and a new set of social norms when it comes to our relationship with animals.

Thank you for being on this journey with us—for fueling it, for energizing it, for bringing it to life in the workings of business, politics, and culture.

I hope you’ll make your most meaningful financial and advocacy commitments to the Center for a Humane Economy. Our very purpose is to change the world for animals. To fight for them—all of them, domesticated and wild. To combat systemic exploitation—in the U.S. and abroad. Every day.

For the animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy