Our Monthly Accomplishments and Update
Animal Wellness Action
March-April 2024
Summary
- Sokito, a soccer brand based in the U.K., announced an immediate end to sourcing kangaroo skins, joining Nike, New Balance, and Puma and adding momentum to our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign. Meanwhile, protests against Adidas—the outlier among big athletic shoe brands and biggest corporate apologist for kangaroo killing—are spreading across the globe.
- After witnesses leaked details to the media, we stirred global outrage against Cody Roberts because of his torture of a young female wolf in Wyoming. We are not only demanding Roberts’ prosecution but also meaningful state and federal policies relating to wolves, including a ban on running down wolves and other wildlife with snowmobiles.
- Animal Wellness Action worked to oust Stoney Green as chairman of the board of the Wilkes County Board of Commissioners in North Carolina and to defeat him in a primary race for a seat in the North Carolina House. It was one highlight of our unrelenting campaign against dogfighting and cockfighting across the nation. With our partner organization SHARK, we’re investigating animal fights, working with law enforcement to interrupt their derbies, driving arrests, and promoting passage of the FIGHT Act.
- After pressure from us and from lawmakers in North Dakota, the National Park Service relented and said it will not remove 200 wild horses from Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a critical but rare win for wild horses in the West.
- We’ve thrust into the spotlight a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to kill as many as half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. The government agency is justifying its plan by saying it wants to tamp down interspecies competition between the barred owls and 4,000 or so rare spotted owls. We’ve organized 115 organizations to oppose the largest-ever raptor slaughter planned anywhere in the world.
- Our campaign against the EATS Act or a derivative has picked up more momentum after we organized 26 House Republicans to oppose the effort to overturn the nation’s most important farm animal protection laws (e.g., Prop 12 in California). We are organizing opposition in the Senate, too, as a battle looms over the provision in the Farm bill.
KANGAROOS ARE NOT SHOES
Sokito Joins Nike, Puma, New Balance in Stopping Use of Kangaroo Skin
Citing concerns over “kangaroo population management practices and population count discrepancies” in a commercial kill managed by the Australian government, soccer-cleat maker
Sokito announced it will no longer use kangaroo leather in the production of its soccer shoes. Australia’s Animal Justice Party made the first entreaty to the company, and together with the Center for a Humane Economy, Sokito CEO Jake Hardy announced, “the time is right to phase out kangaroo leather.”
Sokito joins sportswear giants Nike, Puma, and New Balance, which each made 2023 pledges to end their sourcing of kangaroo skins for all shoes. Diadora, an Italy-based athletic shoe giant, dropped kangaroo-based shoes in 2021.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands-based
ASN Bank took Adidas off its list of recommended companies. Mariëtta Smid, senior manager of sustainability at ASN Impact Investors, told the Center, “We have indeed excluded Adidas from our investment universe because Adidas sources kangaroo leather and continues to do so.” We continue to work with groups in the United States and abroad who have held protests at Adidas corporate headquarters in Germany and stores throughout the world, with
videos of the protests viewed by over 6.7 million people.
- Take action! Use this form to add your support to federal legislation that would protect kangaroos.
SAVING WOLVES
Wolf Killing in Wyoming Sparks Global Furor
Wyoming’s Board of Tourism pulled its national advertising promoting wildlife watching within the state. It did so as global protests mounted over hateful state policies that gave license to rancher and trophy hunter Cody Roberts to run down a wolf with a snowmobile and then parade the grievously wounded adolescent female around a bar before killing her. We were among the first to condemn the serial acts of cruelty and to call for his prosecution, with our legal team producing a memorandum detailing how the state’s anti-cruelty statute should be applied to Cody Roberts in this case.
The story has been covered from across the globe, with strong reporting throughout Wyoming and Montana, from Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker, and outlets such as The Guardian, The Daily Mail, New York Post, and the Sun. Cases have been opened at the state and federal level, but no serious charges have yet been filed.
We’ve offered a $15,000 reward for information that leads to the prosecution and then the incarceration of the perpetrator, and that reward fund will grow. We’ve also sent a letter announcing our intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its failure to impose federal protections after seeing that Wyoming has allowed the killing of wolves across 85% of the state with no limits and by any means, including running animals down with snowmobiles and crushing them. We’re also demanding changes to state policies.
Addendum: In a separate revelation of canine cruelty in the interior West, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem wrote in a new memoir about her decision to shoot an adolescent female dog named Crickett that she’d come to “hate” and behaved in ways that triggered the governor to shoot the dog, named Cricket, and dump her in a gravel pit. Our condemnation of this cruel act from someone seeking to become Donald Trump’s pick for vice president was included in stories across the world, from National Public Radio to the Daily Beast to the Mirror to the Washington Examiner. We’ve noted Gov. Noem’s awful record on animal welfare during her four terms in the U.S. House.
- Take action! We’ve made it easy to add your name to a letter to Sec. of Interior Deb Haaland, asking her to restore protections for wolves across the lower 48 states. Get on board here.
ANIMAL FIGHTING IS THE PITS
Animal Wellness Action Defeats North Carolina Politician with Dogfighting Record
As more arrests rack up across the nation for dogfighting and cockfighting—so many of them resulting from our campaign to crack down on the practices—we worked to defeat Stoney Greene, the chairman of the Wilkes County Board of Commissioners, in his run for the Republican nomination for a North Carolina House seat. Then the board of commissioners more recently called on him to resign his seat altogether and it endorsed the FIGHT Act in Congress. We now have more than 520 agencies, organizations, and local jurisdictions endorsing the strongest-ever upgrade of the national animal fighting law—energized by local busts from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma to Louisiana. The FIGHT Act has more Republican cosponsors than any other animal welfare bill in Congress and creates a private right of action against animal fighters, enhances forfeiture of property for convicted animal fighters, and bans shipping roosters through the U.S. mail.
IN THE STABLE, NOT ON THE TABLE
U.S. Scuttles Plan to Eliminate 200 Wild Horses at Theodore Roosevelt NP
Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy celebrated news that wild horses will not be rounded up and removed from Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP). U.S. Senator John Hoeven, R-N.D., secured a commitment from the National Park Service to maintain—rather than remove—wild horses inside the park after a drawn-out battle between wild horse advocates and the federal government. There are fewer than 200 wild horses in the 70,000-acre park in the western part of the state.
The announcement came after pressure from Animal Wellness and the Center, along with a local organization in North Dakota, to halt the plans to remove the horses by inhumane round-up and send them to an uncertain fate. We worked to make the issue a national concern after the North Dakota legislature, Governor Doug Bergum, and the state’s Congressional delegation made emphatic statements that the horses are a cultural and economic treasure and should be protected. The wild horses drive tens of thousands of people to travel to western North Dakota and are an economic engine for rural communities there. The horses are one of the top tourist attractions in the state.
Sen. Hoeven included report language in the Fiscal Year 2024 Interior Department spending bill. Animal Wellness Action had earlier sent a letter to Director Charles Sams, demanding that the Park Service scuttle its roundup and removal. If future population control is a core NPS objective for wild horses, we argued, it can be achieved by the application of fertility control rather than physical removals.
SPARING OWLS
We Are Standing in the Way of Federal Plan to Kill Half a Million Barred Owls
The Center and Animal Wellness Action are in the lead in working to quash a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) plan to kill nearly a half million barred owls in the American Northwest as a Hail Mary pass to attempt to reduce competitive pressures adversely affecting spotted owls. The plan is unworkable on its face, and the FWS neither has the infrastructure nor the federal funding to conduct or manage such a massive wildlife control plan that covers more than 10 million acres from Marin County to the Canadian border. The kill-plan amounts to the largest raptor killing plan in global history.
We wrote a letter, signed now by 115 organizations, including 17 local Audubon societies, opposing the measure, and it’s gained coverage from National Public Radio to The Guardian to the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to the Sacramento Bee. Both the LA Times and the Vancouver Columbian, in widely picked up editorials, have panned the idea and urged the FWS to nix the idea.
We’ve estimated the cost of the plan at nearly a quarter of a billion dollars—three times more than the annual FWS annual budget for endangered species recovery of $82 million per year. It’s an allocation of a major chunk of finite resources that does nothing for habitat preservation or restoration that all agree is the key to long-term protection of spotted owls.
Former FWS biologist Kent Livezey noted, in a peer-reviewed paper, that 111 other native birds species engaged in “recent” range expansion, and with 14 of them over an area larger than barred owls. With range expansion occurring so widely with birds and mammals, given human impacts on the environment, these kinds of movements of wildlife will be a never-ending feature of species interactions. Would USFWS, in the future, sign off on a plan to conduct mass shootings of North American owls if they were predating on a highly endangered salamander? Would they seek to massacre orcas if ocean temperature changes cause orcas to spend more time in Hawaii and they start feasting on endangered monk seals? The FWS is going down a dangerous path of managing social relationships and competition between North American species.
- Take action! Dept. of Interior Deb Haaland has the power to stop this massacre. Ask her to do so by following this link today.
CAGE-FREE FUTURE
Protecting Prop 12, Other State Farm Animal Laws from Congressional Attacks
We organized a letter from 10 conservative Republican members of the U.S. House to House Agriculture Committee leaders. The letter urged them to exclude the EATS Act and any slimmed down version of it from the forthcoming Farm Bill. Led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., the lawmakers argued that the measure would override state farm-animal-welfare laws and further expand China’s enormous footprint within America’s pork industry.
Last month, we reported that Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts are already in effect with thousands of farmers supplying the state, with many of them having made investments in humane housing systems. This is the second major letter from Republicans we’ve organized against the EATS Act, with 16 lawmakers previously announcing opposition last October.
- Take action! Tell your U.S. representative and senators you are against the EATS Act by using our simple tool today.
For the animals,
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Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
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