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Dear friend,
There’s so much at stake for animals every day.
Factory farms immobilize pigs in extreme confinement.
Night-time shooters in Australia take aim at kangaroos to kill them for their skins for export, while here at home, our own government has hatched a plan to conduct night-time shoots of long-protected barred owls simply because they’ve adapted to human effects on their environment and expanded their range.
Clandestine networks of dogfighters and cockfighters stage animal battles for their amusement and illegal gambling.
Men assault wolves with body-crushing traps or packs of dogs, and even mount snowmobiles to run them over, across a vast portion of their range.
Someone has to stand in the way of the people who do these terrible things.
Our nation needs a strong organizational voice for animals in the political sphere, and that’s the notion that animates our work every day at Animal Wellness Action.
The law must speak and shield animals from human malice, greed, indifference, and cruel customs or habits.
We are making bold and strategic public policy maneuvers every day to address these problems, and we are locked in political struggle with our opponents, who seem hellbent on defending the status quo.
There are better ways to rear animals than keeping animals in cages or crates barely larger than their bodies. There’s no need for the skins of kangaroos when other fabrics match or exceed their performance in shoe wear. There’s no reason to attack wolves, who are the forebears of the domesticated dogs we cherish, as some expression of an irrational hatred towards these native canids.
Government Is So Often the Problem for Animals
And let’s face it, so many government agencies are captured by animal-use industries, and here again, we’ve got to tackle those structural problems with hard-hitting campaigns.
Let me give you an example: the milk mandate in our public schools—a circumstance that contributes to the suffering of cows for no good reason. Even though millions of lactose intolerant kids can’t and won’t drink milk, the schools are forced under the National School Lunch Program to put a carton of cow’s milk on every tray. The kids who can’t safely drink the milk throw it out in enormous volumes—about $400 million worth of it. We put cows through the rigors of production only to see their milk yield tossed in the trash.
That’s so unfair to the cows, as well as the kids, who should have a healthy beverage option instead.
A second example. The federal government rounds up wild horses and burros and then turns them into captives, spending more than $100 million a year on this never-ending cycle of roundups and removals and keeping them in captive holding facilities. The government can administer proven and effective fertility control drugs to wild equines to keep them on the range.
Until we eliminated the animal-testing mandate in statute by passing the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, the FDA mandated that drug developers collectively subjected millions of animals a year to animal tests, even though the data showed that the animal tests failed to predict the human reaction to drugs in 90 percent of the cases. Now we need to break the FDA’s alliance with the lab-breeding industry to implement the law with full effect.
We Need You in All These Fights
I send you updates on our campaigns with frequency. I do so because success requires your political participation. To put the best team of advocates to work in fighting for animals, we need your financial support.
I am confident we are going to prevail on the issues I’ve touched on. But we win only because of you.
Since we formed in 2018, we’ve ushered into law 12 new federal statutes for animals—from the first-ever national anti-cruelty law (the Preventing Cruelty and Torture Act) to the national ban on animal fighting (the Parity in Animal Cruelty Enforcement Act) to the elimination of the animal-testing requirement (the FDA Modernization Act) to the national regulatory plan to ban race-day doping of horses (the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act).
You can also read about our most recent gains by reviewing our 2024 Annual Report here.
But there’s so much more work to do: creating an Animal Cruelty Crimes prosecutors’ section at the Department of Justice to enforce our national anti-cruelty laws. Scuttling the barred owl massacre. Banning the use of toxic and deadly lead ammunition in sport hunting. Halting the century-long practices of slaughtering horses for consumption.
Making the kind of grand change we seek for domesticated and wild animals is perhaps the toughest form of social change. And the work is not a spectator sport, but a participatory one. We need your engagement to win. Please support our work today.
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