Monthly Accomplishments and Update

The Center for a Humane Economy and the Animal Wellness Foundation
June 2025

Summary

• The Senate Agriculture Committee passed a compromise bill advancing key features of the FISCAL Act, setting the stage for eliminating an 80-year-old milk mandate in the National School Lunch Program. This reform will reduce massive food waste driven by widespread lactose intolerance, and better honor the cows who endure the rigors of production only to see 177 million gallons of their milk tossed every year.
• Our undercover work unmasked top leaders of the United States Gamefowl Commission who were actively participating in cockfighting. It also helped drive a major cockfighting raid in Alabama. These investigations came just days in advance of nearly 50 House lawmakers introducing the FIGHT Act to enhance law enforcement’s capacity to crackdown on these criminal enterprises.
• Sportswear brands Mizuno and Umbro committed to phasing out their sourcing of kangaroo leather, following similar announcements by Adidas and ASICS last month. With this latest cluster of corporate commitments, we have run the table on the top nine global brands in the $140 billion athletic shoe sector. Sens. Duckworth and Booker punctuated that success by introducing the Kangaroo Protection Act to ban any imports or domestic trade in kangaroo parts.
• The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a pork industry challenge to California’s Prop 12, marking the 19th consecutive loss for the factory farm lobby seeking to overturn our nation’s most important farm-animal protection laws.
• We worked with allies in the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce the bipartisan FBI Animal Cruelty Taskforce (FBI ACT) Act to create a dedicated unit within the FBI to tackle egregious acts of animal abuse.
• Our legal team was in U.S. District Court in Montana challenging U.S. Fish and Wildlife inaction as wolves experience ruthless killing by trophy hunters and trappers allowed to run wild in Northern Rockies states. We expect a ruling from a federal judge soon.

DUNKING THE MILK MANDATE
Senate committee backs school choice for plant-based milk in move that will help cows
The U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee approved compromise legislation combining the Freedom in School Cafeterias and Lunches (FISCAL) Act with the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act that promotes more choice and competition in a National School Lunch Program that has maintained an 80-year “milk mandate” policy. This legislative breakthrough, which we expect to advance swiftly through the Senate and House, will break the dairy industry monopoly in the schools and allow them to offer nutritious plant-based milk options to students.

This long-overdue policy will benefit millions of kids who participate in the National School Lunch Program and who are lactose intolerant or choose not to consume cow’s milk for health, cultural, or ethical reasons. We partnered with Olympic medalist Dotsie Bausch and her group Switch4Good and built a coalition of more than 200 organizations in the public health, medical, and animal-welfare communities to promote the FISCAL Act.

ANIMAL FIGHTING IS THE PITS
Cockfighting leaders unmasked in undercover operation as FIGHT Act reintroduced
Our latest undercover investigation revealed that top figures in the “U.S. Gamefowl Commission” — long claiming to be part of a lawful trade association focused on “chicken farming” and “gamefowl shows” — are actively participating in criminal cockfighting events. Our undercover investigators sniffed out the illegal fighting derbies, penetrated them in rural Oklahoma, and caught the two men on video engaged in activities they claimed never to participate in. Our intelligence gathering also contributed to a major cockfighting bust in Alabama, where authorities made 60 arrests (including 55 of people illegally in the country) and seized hundreds of fighting birds. With those two incidents gaining national attention, about 50 U.S. House members, divided evenly by political party, reintroduced the FIGHT Act to give law enforcement better tools to crack down on illegal fighting ventures. That measure has more than 820 endorsers, including the National Sheriffs Association and 20 state sheriffs’ associations.

KANGAROOS ARE NOT SHOES
Two major athletic brands drop kangaroo leather; Senators introduce U.S. trade ban
Still riding the wave after the May announcement that Adidas is exiting the kangaroo skin trade, the Center for a Humane Economy convinced Mizuno and Umbro to phase out the use of kangaroo skins for soccer shoes. Both companies have an enormous footprint in global soccer. Securing pledges from these two global athletic brands closes out all nine major global athletic shoe brands using kangaroo skins in the $140 billion sector. Since the launch of our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign in 2020, we’ve worked company-by-company to eliminate this market, and with this final breakthrough, the commercial pipeline is collapsing.

In tandem with this success, Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Cory Booker introduced the Kangaroo Protection Act in the U.S. Senate to prohibit the import and sale of any kangaroo parts nationwide. This legislation would ensure no backdoor market remains in the United States for the largest terrestrial wildlife slaughter in the world.

CAGE-FREE FUTURE
Supreme Court lets Prop 12 stand — again
In what may be a final blow to Big Pork’s legal campaign in the federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition by the Iowa Pork Producers to revisit the Court’s 2023 ruling in NPPC v. Ross that upheld California’s Proposition 12. That ballot measure, passed by a supermajority in 2018, prohibits the sale of pork, eggs, and veal from cruel confinement systems, regardless of where the product is sourced. It was a near clone of Question 3 in Massachusetts, passed in 2016, and built on Prop 2, which was passed by California voters a decade earlier. Both won in landslide votes. The NPPC and its surrogates have been on the losing side of 19 federal proceedings where they tried to overturn Prop 12, Prop 2, or Question 3. Assuming we can fend off the NPPC’s campaign to overturn these laws in Congress, we’ll preserve the nation’s most consequential anti-confinement laws, retaining the authority of the states to establish humane standards and safeguard public health. At about the same time, USDA announced that nearly 45% of eggs produced in the United States now come from cage-free hens — from single digits before California voters passed Prop 2 in 2008. The ballot measures in California and Massachusetts triggered this shift away from cage confinement. That same dynamic is at work in pig farms, thousands of pig farmers no longer using gestation crates and instead using more extensive housing systems.

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR CRUELTY
FBI ACT Act would create special unit to enforce federal anti-cruelty laws
To elevate enforcement of federal animal protection laws, we worked with Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y. and spearheaded the introduction of the FBI Animal Cruelty Taskforce (FBI ACT) Act. The bill would establish a permanent unit within the FBI focused on breaking up dogfighting and cockfighting rings and animal trafficking, interdicting the sale of crush videos, and stopping other forms of malicious cruelty. This legislation complements the ACE Act, which seeks to create a dedicated team of animal cruelty prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice and build momentum for a more systematic federal response to malicious cruelty that often intersects with other serious crimes.

SAVING WOLVES
We’re back in court for wolves — in this case federal court to protect wolves in the Rockies
Our attorneys were in federal court in Montana arguing our case to restore federal protections for wolves in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, charging that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has turned its back on science and on the law. In 2009, the agency promised to restore protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies if state lawmakers and wildlife managers acted recklessly toward wolves. They’ve reneged on that promise. State lawmakers, with tacit federal approval, are permitting year-round, unlimited trapping of wolves. They are allowing trophy hunters to use night-vision scopes to kill them 24/7. They even allow wolf haters to run them down with motorized vehicles and crush them. And they pay bounties when they bring back a dead wolf. The assault on wolves makes little sense, since the packs bring so many economic and ecological benefits, including by acting as a xxxxxx against the spread of a brain-wasting disease (Chronic Wasting Disease) infecting deer and elk in the West and the Upper Midwest.

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy