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Our Efforts to Drive a Moral and Economic Revolution
Seeking to turn the page on animal testing, push ahead a cage-free future in animal agriculture, end inhumane forms of animal entertainment, halt commercial exploitation of wildlife, and more.
By Wayne Pacelle
I am pleased to present you with our 2024 Annual Report of the Center for a Humane, which also previews new campaigns for 2025 and beyond. The Annual Report starts with a president’s message on the distinct mission of the Center and the ways we breathe life into that mission. I am sharing that essay here to reinforce that our work to protect animals has immense, even incomparable, potential to reduce suffering in our world. You may go here [[link removed]] to read the complete report.
Dear friend,
Though we’ll have to be ready for a reprise of our fight, the Center for a Humane Economy and its sister organizations succeeded in 2024 in stopping the so-called EATS Act, which was formulated to undo the most important state laws to protect animals used in agricultural production. Pushed by factory farming special interests, including the Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, the EATS Act aims to impose gestation-crate confinement as the industry standard nationwide, even after millions of American voters said they want meat and eggs sold in their states to be sourced from farms that allow the animals to stand up, lie down, and turn around. That’s all.
We also continued our march to persuade the athletic shoe industry to purge its global supply chains of kangaroo skins, ratcheting up pressure on Adidas and the remaining shoe-sellers who have been stubbornly using the hides of these iconic marsupials to make uppers for soccer shoes.
And we continued to push the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — and pharmaceutical companies conscripted to seek approval from the agency for new drugs in the marketplace — to begin a wind down of the era of animal testing and to choose safer, faster, less costly alternative methods of screening new drugs.
There were all forms of animal use forged in the 20th century by the collaboration of key actors in business and government: animal-testing mandates for screening all drugs (with the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938), cage confinement of domesticated animals on factory farms (launched circa 1960), and night-time shoots of kangaroos to ship their skins for soccer cleat manufacturing (circa 1970).
While that prior century was no picnic for animals, it did see some expressions of human mercy and innovation that turned the page on some forms of exploitation. The nation saw the end of killing birds for their feathers for ladies’ hats — the millinery trade — which was halted by around 1920, principally with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
More than anyone else, it was Henry Ford, who, in developing the Model-T, ushered in an era of automobile production that slowed down the overworking and overdriving of horses used in personal and commercial transportation.
And a century after petroleum was harnessed for energy use — swapping in fossil fuel oil for the whale oil that powered the economy of the 18th and 19th centuries — we saw in the 1980s a global moratorium on commercial killing of whales (though the accord was routinely violated by a few nations, including Japan). In the run-up to the whaling moratorium, Congress in 1972 enacted the landmark Marine Mammal Protection Act to check American exploitation not only of whales, but also of dolphins, seals, walruses, and even polar bears in coastal waters.
The cross-cutting winds of history left us with a morally confusing 20th century when it came to human dealings with other species, featuring both progress in some realms of animal use but also scaled up exploitation in other domains. There was both demolition and germination of animal abuse, with ruthlessly efficient means of killing being ascendant in the spheres of animal agriculture, scientific testing, and wildlife trade.
But if they are met with strategic force, these scaled-up forms of exploitation won’t be able to withstand the combined forces of moral scrutiny and human self-interest in the 21st century. The H5N1 “bird flu” epidemic is revealing major cracks in food production strategies built around extreme overcrowding of animals on factory farms (just as the COVID-19 crisis exposed the risks of live wildlife markets and other zoonotic disease threats). A dozen eggs, at least for now, costs a consumer as much as $10 — an unheard-of price for this staple. Alternative proteins, be they plant-based or cultivated cell-based meats, offer the promise of better health for consumers, less inputs of water and food, and no use of animals at all. Cell-based meat is real meat that doesn’t require the death of any live animal.
Athletic shoe companies are already using sustainable fabrics instead of wild animal skins for most of their shoes. Why not for soccer shoes, too? And when it comes to animal testing, organ-on-a-chip technology, artificial intelligence, and other novel drug screening methods will substitute for the use of beagles and macaques and leave us with better forecasts of human reaction to drugs.
But it’s no small matter to change the way animals are treated. Unwinding animal abuse takes time and effort, given that profits, academic training, customs, habits, and beliefs reinforce present-day defenses of animal exploitation. Resistance to change is often not grounded on reason, but on reflex, built into the muscle memory and political activity of its practitioners. The fear of dislocation or change is a stubborn xxxxxx to change, even when the case for a new way is morally and economically unassailable and cleansed of so many adverse collateral effects.
But there is a path forward. And the trails are well marked. Looking forward to what innovation means for animals, I wrote in “The Humane Economy,”
"Just about every enterprise built on harming animals today is ripe for disruption. Where there is a form of commercial exploitation, there is an economic opportunity waiting for a business doing less harm or no harm at all. Factory farming, for example, is the creation of human resourcefulness detached from conscience. What innovations in agriculture might come about by humane resourcefulness guided by conscience?"
Our economic history is a litany of dramatic and almost unimaginable changes that became mainstream and have enhanced human experience. From the printing press to digital technology to artificial intelligence, from the horse to the car to the plane to the space shuttle, from the candle to the lightbulb to the nuclear reactor, change and progress are watchwords of the human story.
When there are such adverse spillover effects on human society from factory farming, live-wildlife markets, crime-ridden animal fighting networks, and other problematic forms of animal treatment, innovation and self-interest are compelling motivators for change. But with our elemental understanding that the lives of animals matter to them and to us, are there two better motivations for change than mercy for the weak and the defense of our own welfare?
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For the animals,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Center for a Humane Economy
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