Monthly Accomplishments and Update:
Animal Wellness Action and the Animal Wellness Foundation
April 2025

Summary

• In the first of two game-changing announcements for animals and public health in the United States, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., announced a plan to phase out the use of animals in drug testing. As the FDA acknowledged in its Roadmap to Reducing Animal Testing in Preclinical Safety Studies, our FDA Modernization Act 2.0, by eliminating the decades-old animal testing mandate for new drugs, created the legal framework and the political momentum for this action.
• Two weeks after the thunderbolt announcement from the FDA, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., made a similar announcement to also wind down animal use by the biggest medical research and grant-making institution in the world. The actions by the new leaders of the largest two public health agencies in the world signal a remarkable turnaround in the 150-year debate over the use of animals in laboratory testing and research.
• We’ve exposed animal sacrifice — in this case, the capture, tormenting, and killing of eagles and hawks — by two Indian tribes in the Southwest. We broke the story in our In- Depth section on AnimalWellnessAction.org and CenterforaHumaneEconomy.org with a detailed story by award-winning nature writer Ted Williams.
• Meanwhile, we applauded federal law enforcement for securing a conviction of John Waldrop, an organizer and practitioner of live-pigeon shoots, for illegal wildlife trafficking. We worked with Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) last year to document a live pigeon shoot on his Georgia property, where he also committed his crimes involving eagles and other protected birds.
• We are working to reform a key component of the National School Lunch Program by renewing our call to eliminate the “cows’ milk mandate,” ease the tremendous production burden on dairy cows, give kids healthy choices, and stop the squandering of $400 million in taxpayer assets on tossed-out milk. We have bipartisan bills in Congress to address the annual wastage of 177 million gallons of milk by kids who don’t want it and are unable to safely digest milk because of lactose intolerance.
• We worked with Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., to reintroduce the Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act to crack down on illicit animal fighting. We are also pushing for the creation of an animal cruelty crimes section at the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce our national animal fighting law and other national anti-cruelty statutes.

MODERNIZE TESTING
FDA commissioner and NIH director say their two public health agencies will embrace human-relevant methods to move away beyond animal testing.
In his first outward-facing announcement after his Senate confirmation, Dr. Marty Makary said that the FDA would no longer rely only on animal testing for new drug screening and would instead embrace and allow the use of non-animal testing methods. This policy was enabled by our work to pass the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, which eliminated an animal-testing mandate for all new drugs in statute since 1938. In fact, the FDA commissioner’s announcement came on the same day that a bipartisan group of U.S. Representatives introduced the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 (which had already been introduced in the U.S. Senate) to prod the agency to get moving on the transition away from animal testing and toward safer, more predictive, and less expensive testing strategies.

Commissioner Makary captured it well: “For patients, it means a more efficient pipeline for novel treatments. It also means an added margin of safety, since human-based test systems may better predict real-world outcomes. For animal welfare, it represents a major step toward ending the use of laboratory animals in drug testing. Thousands of animals, including dogs and primates, could eventually be spared each year as these new methods take root.” (Emphasis in the original.)

The stock price for Charles River Labs — the largest breeding and animal supplier to labs — has cratered and is now down nearly 50% from one year ago.

Then, in a follow-up that was dizzying for those of us who’ve worked against animal testing for decades, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya embraced the same innovative approach to scale down the use of animals for intramural research and for grant-making to research institutions. Much of NIH’s work is built around drug testing, too, but the agency also funds a wide range of other research and testing – with the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 triggering this broader reboot of all laboratory work and a commitment to dramatically reduce animal uses.

“For decades, our biomedical research system has relied heavily on animal models. With this initiative, NIH is ushering in a new era of innovation,” wrote Dr. Bhattacharya. “By integrating advances in data science and technology with our growing understanding of human biology, we can fundamentally reimagine the way research is conducted — from clinical development to real-world application. This human-based approach will accelerate innovation, improve healthcare outcomes, and deliver life-changing treatments. It marks a critical leap forward for science, public trust, and patient care.”

• The FDA Roadmap and NIH initiative will expand the use of innovative 21st-century human-based science to reduce animal testing.
• The agencies are making it a national priority to reduce and replace animal testing and research to use billions in tax dollars more efficiently.
• This new focus on human-relevant science will accelerate innovation, improve healthcare outcomes, and deliver life-changing treatments, in a critical leap forward for science, public trust, and patient care.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a less surprising move, reaffirmed its commitment to phase out all uses of animals for safety testing for new chemicals by 2035 — a commitment the EPA originally made during President Trump’s first term.

Support our efforts to modernize testing by going here.

HALTING ANIMAL SACRIFICE
Our investigation exposes animal sacrifice by two Indian tribes in Southwest
Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy are calling on the new leaders of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service to stop the government’s role in abetting the capture, prolonged torment, and ritual smothering of golden eagles, bald eagles, and red-tailed hawks by two Indian tribes in the Southwest, including on NPS lands. In the 21st century, animal sacrifice is never acceptable, regardless of historical and cultural claims by enthusiasts of the practice. There’s been a social consensus on renouncing child sacrifice and dog and cat sacrifice, and now it’s time to stop the ongoing sacrifice of eagles and hawks.

We unveiled the campaign by publishing an investigation of the practice by award-winning nature and outdoors writer Ted Williams revealing that Biden administration wildlife officials quietly approved raptor “take” permits for animal sacrifice purposes.

In 2023, for the first time, the NPS authorized the Jemez Pueblo tribe to take a bald or golden eagle from a national park unit — the Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. The decision marked a dramatic departure from a longstanding agency policy forbidding animal take from national park units restricting hunting. The USFWS has also issued similar permits in recent years, including an annual allotment of 40 golden eagles and 50 red-tailed hawks to the Hopi Tribe, and a recurring eight-eagle quota to the Jemez. (A detailed rundown of the “take” permits is provided in Williams’ news story.)

STOPPING MASS BIRD KILLING
Notorious pigeon-shooting fanatic nabbed for trafficking in endangered birds
Last year, in collaboration with Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), we investigated and exposed Dr. John Waldrop, a 76-year-old orthopedic surgeon from Cataula, Ga., for engaging in live-pigeon shoots on his property, even though he’d been indicted already for smuggling of endangered birds. In April, Waldrop was sentenced in April 2025 for his involvement in one of the largest bird-trafficking cases in U.S. history, ordered to pay a $900,000 fine, and sentenced to three years of probation. In addition to his hobby of using pigeons as living targets, Waldrop illegally imported hundreds of taxidermized bird mounts and thousands of bird eggs from countries including Germany, Russia, and South Africa. They used online platforms like eBay and Etsy to purchase these items and circumvent U.S. wildlife protection laws. Perpetrators of animal cruelty are typically involved in a wide range of crimes, and so was the target of our pigeon-shooting investigation.

Want to help barred owls who staring down the barrel of a planned U.S. mass-killing plan? Go here.

DUNKING THE MILK MANDATE IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Prodding Congress to stop putting cows through rigors of production only to have millions of gallons of milk tossed by kids.
We helped a mother and daughter come to Congress to ask federal lawmakers to ditch an unfair, wasteful, and inhumane “cows’ milk mandate” in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) by passing the Freedom in the School Cafeterias and Lunches (FISCAL) Act, led by Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., John Kennedy, R-La., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Reps. Troy Carter, D-La., and Nancy Mace, R-S.C. Jamisha Augustine’s daughter became severely ill after being served milk at Rollins Place Elementary in Zachary, La., even though her mother had submitted medical documentation of her condition at the start of the school year. That sort of phenomenon is happening across the country because 10 million kids participating in the NSLP have some degree of lactose sensitivity and need an alternative. This attempt to force-feed kids a product that makes them ill results in 40% of milk served to kids being tossed in the trash. Taxpayers also cannot stomach seeing $400 million of their hard-earned tax dollars tossed away every year. Cows endure the rigors of production and an array of health problems only for so much of their milk yield wasted.

Tell your elected officials to support the FISCAL Act today. Go here.

ANIMAL FIGHTING IS THE PITS
Investigations, lawmaking continue in our attempts to wipe out staged animal fighting
Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., reintroduced the Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking Act (FIGHT) Act to give law enforcement and private citizens enhanced tools to destroy animal fighting in America. The FIGHT Act has nearly 800 endorsers, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the National District Attorneys Association, the American Gaming Association, and the United Egg Producers.

Meanwhile, we defeated a bill in Arkansas to legalize trafficking of cockfighting birds, with our team on the ground in Little Rock unpacking the deceptive efforts of cockfighters posing as legitimate farmers. And we continue our field investigations to disrupt cockfighting operations, with the shutdown of a cockfighting operation in North Carolina and continuing investigations in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas. Meanwhile, we applauded the arrest of a second major dogfighting network in Oklahoma.

Go here to join our fight for the FIGHT Act.

Wayne Pacelle President Animal Wellness Action