Dear Friend,

The world has more than its share of people who don’t give a damn about animals. They don’t have empathy for animals, don’t get it that animals are sentient, and don’t fathom the simple idea that their lives matter.

Frankly, a subset of them are just evil. Take Cody Roberts, the sadist who ran over an adolescent female wolf as an act of hate and viciousness in Wyoming. After he chased and then crushed the wolf named Theia with a snowmobile for the hell of it, Roberts took the innocent wolf into his possession, bound her mouth, and then tortured her in a public setting before killing her.

The good news is, some of those who witnessed his cruelty blew the whistle on this Wyoming trophy hunter and rancher, like you or I would have. These whistleblowers and witnesses were rightly disgusted by what Roberts did. They released the details of his savagery, including pictures and videos to the press.

We took the story from there and gave it legs worldwide, offering it as a reminder to people that animals face horror from cold-hearted people and that, in the end, justice must be served.

South Dakota Governor Favorably Recounts Her Killing Spree

Not long after that incident, in the neighboring state of South Dakota, the public learned of the crude and cruel actions toward animals by Governor Kristi Noem some years ago.

Noem violated the norms of pet care and animal welfare when she shot a perfectly healthy 14-month-old pet dog named Cricket because the self-described “farm girl” doesn’t know how to handle animals.

This was an excitable, juvenile dog who needed love, training, and socialization. That she killed Cricket and then dumped her limp body in a gravel pit—including these grisly details in her memoir as examples of her “toughness”—just underscores that she doesn’t have a clue about the proper treatment of animals.

She lives near animals in rural South Dakota, but she doesn’t understand animals or possess much in the way of humanity.

The Public Isn’t Giving Coarse and Cruel People a Pass

The good news here is, as with Cody Roberts, you can hardly find a person who will defend Noem’s killing of Cricket. For that matter, they didn’t like her recounting of her shooting a goat she called “smelly,” or her killing of a trio of elderly horses—additional revelations we heard from the governor in her memoir and her interviews about the book. All these stories just cemented a central character question: she’s out of touch with animals and the values of regular people toward animals.

But condemnation and outrage by left and right, while a good thing, is alone not a sufficient response. We need prosecution of people like Cody Roberts. And we need policy action by the likes of Kristi Noem and other politicians. We are even more interested in their votes and vetoes than in their personal habits.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Noem, in 2018, was one of fewer than two dozen Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote against a bill to crack down on dogfighting and cockfighting in the U.S. territories. There were 359 federal lawmakers who voted for the measure, but Noem and just 50 others opposed extending the national ban on animal fighting to every inch of U.S. soil.

That was such an important amendment because Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas all allowed legal cockfighting. Some of the territories also had anemic laws against dogfighting, and the bill sought to make all forms of animal fighting a federal felony, everywhere in the United States.

Here at Animal Wellness Action, we take note of isolated cases of cruelty, but then we put our focus on attacking large-scale forms of institutionalized cruelty. We want to enact policies that prevent animals from getting into a situation of danger or distress in the first place.

That’s why we are pressing for the FIGHT Act in Congress. That's why we are working to ban the live export of horses for slaughter for human consumption. That's why we are working to defend Prop 12 and other landmark farm animal welfare policies from political attack by federal politicians. That’s the work we do every day. It’s life-saving work. And it involves calling people out where it’s warranted. And it’s also about asking good people to stand tall and stand up for animals.

You are one of those people. And that’s why I hope you make a commitment to support this work. We care about every one of their lives. We aim to spare thousands, even millions, of animals from cruelty. That’s what our pathbreaking public and corporate policy work seeks to do.

Join us in this fight.

Sincerely,

Wayne Pacelle President Animal Wellness Action