Monthly Accomplishments and Update
Animal Wellness Action
October 2025

Summary

• We came up short on a vote in the U.S. Senate to stop the massacre of a half-million North American barred owls, but in the process of fighting the plan, we’ve unraveled a larger scheme to hurt forest owls and destroy their habitats: the Department of the Interior is using barred owl killing as a means to displace and kill northern spotted owls and cut down their old-growth forest habitats. Sen. Kennedy’s brilliant speech against the unprecedented assault on forest owls has more than 700,000 views and is climbing, as we continue our fight in the Congress and the federal courts.
• We are getting closer to ending beagle breeding for use in invasive and painful tests in laboratories, with the Wisconsin-based Ridglan Farms agreeing to shut down that activity next year in exchange for avoiding charges of cruelty to dogs. Ridglan confines up to 3,000 beagles at a time before shipping them to labs for torment.
• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit turned back an appeal by a Missouri-based factory farming company and upheld the Massachusetts’ farm-animal protection law that includes a state prohibition on selling pork from sows kept in extreme confinement. The ruling was 3-0, and it marks our 20th straight defeat of the National Pork Producers Council and its surrogates on the subject.
• The Dallas Morning News generated a headline story based on the release of our report about a criminal network of cockfighters operating in eastern Oklahoma and northeast Texas. The report exposes a company posing as an agricultural shipping company that traffics fighting birds to the Philippines on Korean Airlines. The report also exposes a set of illegal pits operating from Tulsa to Dallas and dozens of major cockfighting breeders, some with thousands of birds destined for fighting pits in the United States and around the world.

Saving Owls
We’ve put owl protection on the national agenda, exposing a plan that will hurt forest owls and open the way for the slashing of old growth forests.
We have made the mass killing of forest owls in the Pacific Northwest a national scandal. Starting nearly two years ago, we took an issue on a fast track for implementation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, held it up to a glaring spotlight, and executed plans in federal courts and Congress to slow it and try to stop it altogether. We’ve been working for months with allies in Congress to introduce House and Senate resolutions to nullify the plan, with U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., managing to get his resolution to repeal the billion-dollar Biden Administration kill-plan to the floor. While most Senate Democrats united to block Kennedy’s resolution and kill the forest owls, we now have more than 20 GOP senators demanding an end to the program in the hands of a Republican Administration. In particular, Sen. Kennedy is calling out Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for his enthusiasm to slaughter owls and demanding the plan be scrapped — hardly a far-fetched idea given that the DOGE team at the Department of the Interior, at our urging, nixed several grants earlier this year.

Sen. Kennedy’s floor speech against the owl kill has already generated more than 700,000 views. What’s more, we’ve uncovered that the plan is even worse than originally described: it is not only an unprecedented assault on barred owls, but a maneuver by federal land management agencies and the timber industry to kill threatened Northern spotted owls and to start cutting some of the most precious old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. We’ve amassed testimonials from a dozen leading wildlife scientists (e.g., here, here, and here). Former top scientists at the National Park Service with the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks asserted that the plan opens 14 iconic national parks to owl hunting and has no chance of attaining its goal of separating barred owls and spotted owls.

We’ll continue our efforts in Congress even as we march ahead with our federal lawsuit, now in a U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., to nullify the costly, inhumane, and entirely unworkable scheme. We are not relenting in our efforts to nullify this assault on owls and old growth.

TAKE ACTION: Consider donating today to support our legal efforts to protect these owls. Go here today to join the work. Go to www.AnimalWellnessAction.org to see how your Senators voted and to express appreciation to senators who voted to protect forest owls and forests and to express keen disappointment with those lawmakers who voted to hurt them.

Cage-Free Future
Federal appeals court upholds Question 3 in Massachusetts, delivering 20th loss for pork lobby.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit voted unanimously to uphold the constitutionality of Massachusetts’ Question 3, a voter-approved law that includes a prohibition on selling pork in the state if the meat comes from farming operations confining sows in gestation crates. We participated in the case because it’s such a consequential one for farm animal welfare and Wayne Pacelle was the key architect of the ballot 2016 measure, approved by an astounding 78% of voters. The decision keeps Question 3 fully operational and is yet one more enormous blow to the pork lobby after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 rejected other legal theories in upholding California’s Proposition 12 and reinforcing the authority of states to enact moral and public health safeguards for animal agriculture within their borders. The pork industry has lost 20 consecutive cases in its challenges to state farm animal welfare laws.

The Massachusetts rulings enhance our chances of halting a Trump Administration plan to nullify California’s series of laws to protect laying hens from extreme-confinement housing. Our successful defensive work in the federal courts is a complement to our fierce defensive efforts in Congress where we seek to block NPPC-backed legislation — the Save Our Bacon Act (a reprised EATS Act) — to unwind Prop 12 and Question 3.

TAKE ACTION: Let your elected officials know you’re opposed to the extreme confinement of farm animals. Go here to make your voice heard.

MODERNIZE TESTING
A business built to breed and sell thousands of dogs to labs will cease that activity.
One of two remaining such operations in the nation, the Wisconsin-based Ridglan Farms will relinquish its license to breed and sell beagles for experimentation, after a coalition including the Center for a Humane Economy applied the pressure to end this trade of dogs for lab use. It comes three years after the federal government shut down the Virginia-based Envigo, which also maintained thousands of dogs for sale to laboratories for cruel tests. These actions took shape not only because of inhumane treatment at the facilities but also our work to pass the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 and to lift decades-old animal-testing requirements for new drugs.

Former employees, state veterinarians, and others have documented ongoing illegal surgical procedures at Ridglan Farms. With Ridglan now on an eight-month phase-out timetable, only Marshall BioResources (MBR) will remain as a beagle supplier — with a shocking 20,000 dogs bred for archaic laboratory uses. Reports show beagles at the upstate New York operation restrained with tight-fitting inhalation masks used in chemical testing, struggling to remove them. MBR claims that the dogs were “trained” to wear the masks, labeling it as “learned helplessness.” A whistleblower report in June 2024 highlighted that beagles and ferrets were confined in filthy cages with dirty food and water containers. The report also alleged that puppies born with physical “imperfections,” such as different-colored eyes, were killed at birth. While working to free the dogs from Ridglan between now and July, we’ll also campaign to shut down MBR and end the era of beagle breeding and testing across the nation.

ANIMAL FIGHTING IS THE PITS
Our undercover work nets two leaders of far-reaching cockfighting crime network.
After a multi-year investigation, enabled by former Animal Wellness Action board member Marion Look-Jameson, we released a blistering new report exposing a vast criminal cockfighting network spanning from Tulsa to Dallas. These investigations generated major stories in the Dallas Morning News, Dallas Observer, and the Longview News-Journal that produced additional investigative findings. Our findings were three-fold:

1) International cockfighting trafficking by the North Texas Livestock Shipping Company — a Dallas-area front company that acts as a broker for fighting animals reared in the United States and then trafficked to the Philippines to die in fighting arenas there — violates U.S. laws against animal fighting activities. We documented that Korean Airlines is the major shipper of fighting birds to the Philippines.

2) Political corruption in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission, led by cockfighters Anthony Devore and Blake Pearce, illegally raised campaign funds by selling fighting birds and used the proceeds to attempt to influence state lawmakers — including direct outreach to Gov. Kevin Stitt, who later appeared in a cockfighting convention video praising their work. In September 2025, the Oklahoma Ethics Commission fined the organization $10,000, ordered it disbanded, and cited gross campaign finance violations. Animal Wellness Action investigators documented the campaign-finance violations and also filmed Devore and Pearce attending and participating in illegal cockfighting — resulting in their arrests in recent weeks.

3) Convicted felons and other hardened fighters operating in plain sight. The report documents criminal activities by John Bottoms of LeFlore County, Okla, and Bobby Fairchild of Coalgate, Okla., both well-known figures in the cockfighting world and previously convicted of drug sales and cockfighting. We documented dozens of other major cockfighters and are delivering dossiers on their illegal activities to federal authorities. Meanwhile, we were pleased to secure the endorsement of the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association of the federal FIGHT Act — a signal that the elected law enforcement officials in all 77 counties in the Sooner State are with us in our attempts to disband animal fighting networks.

TAKE ACTION: Go here to tell your lawmakers you want tougher laws and protections against animal fighting.