Dear John,

At Animal Wellness Action, we confront extreme forms of animal mistreatment and cruelty. You are familiar with them—staged animal fights, trophy hunting and hounding of mountain lions and bobcats, running over wolves with snowmobiles, kangaroo shooting to make soccer shoes, immobilizing farm animals on factory farming for months or even years, and more.

It's hard work to think about these awful forms of cruelty. It’s even harder to confront them.

But that’s what we do at Animal Wellness Action. And in all these battles, we rely on you.

I told you recently that Cody Roberts—the guy in Wyoming who ran over a wolf with a snowmobile—is a long-time hound hunter and that his favored quarry is mountain lions, whom he kills with the aid of his pack of dogs.

We are in a battle over trophy hunting of mountain lions and commercial trapping of bobcats in Robert’s neighboring state of Colorado. In fact, we are a lead member of a coalition in Colorado to qualify and pass a ballot measure to stop these abuses.

Of the 500-600 lions shot for their heads annually in Colorado, more than half of them are killed by out-of-state hunters like Roberts who treat Colorado’s beautiful mountain landscapes as their private killing grounds.

But we can only get ballot access if we secure enough signatures for our initiative petition. Our deadline for submitting signatures of registered voters is July 3. We are just a cat’s whisker short of getting the 180,000 signatures we need to qualify the measure.

With out-of-state hunters killing more than half of the lions in Colorado, it’s up to all of us around the nation to help with this campaign. You can help by supporting Animal Wellness Action and enabling us to qualify this measure in the coming weeks and then passing this reform by convincing voters to back it in November.

Please consider donating today to the organization to fight time-sensitive, high-impact battles like this one.

Every Signature Counts, Every Vote Counts

Let me tell you why your involvement matters.

Just this week, we had a fight in a small community over a big and important issue: enforcing our laws against staged animal fights.

In recent weeks, Oklahoma cockfighters targeted an incumbent county sheriff up for re-election who had been enforcing the anti-cruelty laws of the state. At our urging, the Carter County sheriff and his deputies acted on information we’d supplied about illegal cockfighting. The law enforcement officers arrested people involved not just in cockfighting, but also in illegal gambling, money laundering, and narcotics. The sheriff was doing his duty.

Animal Wellness Action got involved in this campaign and alerted all primary voters about the cockfighters targeting an elected official seeking to enforce the anti-cruelty laws of Oklahoma.

That primary election happened on Tuesday night in this county in southern Oklahoma. It turns out that, with more than 5,000 votes cast in a Republican primary, it was a dead-on tie: 2,569 votes for the Republican incumbent sheriff, whom we backed, and the exact same number for this challenger. Today, we’ll get word on who won when officials tally the five provisional ballots that had been sent in.

Your participation in democratic decision-making matters—whether our Colorado members gathering signatures to qualify a measure, our Oklahoma members casting votes in a crucial race for sheriff, or your donating to enable us to execute our life-saving campaigns. Indeed, participation in the political process is the only way some forms of animal cruelty can be addressed—through lawmaking and through enforcement of the laws on the books.

Winning for animals is not a spectator sport. It is a participatory process, and YOU can make a difference.

We Need You Now on our Crucial Campaigns

Trophy hunters use packs of dogs—up to eight in a pack—fitted with GPS collars to keep track of them as they chase the fleeing cats into trees. The trophy hunters find the location with their high-tech telemetry equipment, walk up to the tree, and shoot the cats off of a limb.

Bobcats are hounded, too, but because of their beautiful fur, they are also trapped, with their pelts exported for sale to wealthy elites in Russia and China.

Roosters have knives and curved ice picks attached to their legs, and they are placed in a pit to fight to the death. It’s all done for illegal wagering and for the thrill of the bloodletting.

These animals deserve better. They deserve protection from people who would menace and hurt them for no good reason at all.

There are so many battles—sparing the barred owls from government shooters, sparing the kangaroos from shooters, and halting the trade in bear bile and gall bladders for Traditional Chinese Medicine.

We need your help.

Will you consider a donation to Animal Wellness Action to support campaigns like these?

For all animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Animal Wellness Action