Year in Review: 10 Areas of Progress in 2024

Animal Wellness Action and its sister organizations conduct campaigns to help all animals. Whether we’re breathing life into Animal Fighting Is the Pits, Cage-Free Future, In the Stable, Not on the Table, or other campaigns, we fight to protect animals from highly organized and even institutionalized forms of cruelty.

In some cases, as with greyhound racing or horse slaughter or animal fighting, we won’t relent until these enterprises are wiped out. Then our follow up, when we achieve success, is only to chase down the outlaws.

In other cases, such as factory farming, we work to blunt the sharpest edges of cruelty and also to promote superior choices in the marketplace. The same is true, in a way, with our work on animal testing, where we target egregious and highly ineffective types of experiments on animals and also to promote alternative methods that produce better outcomes for human health and well-being. Everyone in a civil society should agree that where an alternative to animal testing is available, it should be selected in place of hurting a beagle or a monkey.

The goal is always to wrestle down or wring out cruelty built into an enterprise or activity. When we do so, it makes society better and safer for everybody. Animal mistreatment is enmeshed with other crimes, a catalyst for disease spread, or an agent of ecological chaos or disruption. So often, helping animals helps us all.

Ten Areas of More Progress, Less Pain

As the year closes, I share some of our organizations’ tangible gains, whether they are small steps or leaps forward in a longer march of sweeping change and societal progress.

CAGE-FREE FUTURE 

• In 2024, we blocked the EATS Act in Congress, allowing key state laws (e.g., Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts) to take hold and to provide better living conditions for pigs, hens, and other farm animals. In a federal court in Massachusetts, we fended off a legal challenge to Question 3, which voters approved nearly a decade ago to halt sale of eggs, pork, and veal that come from the worst kinds of factory farms.

These defensive maneuvers to protect Prop 12 and Question 3 also are protective of other state policies coming into effect. For instance, in January 2025, Michigan law will require that all eggs sold in the state come exclusively from cage-free operations. But also come January, we must again block the EATS Act — a reflexive legislative wheeze from factory-farming interests bent on attacking states’ rights and clinging to animal-housing strategies built around immobilizing sentient creatures.

ANIMAL FIGHTING IS THE PITS

• We prevailed in a case in a federal appeals court upholdinga U.S. District Court decision that animal fighting is banned on every inch of U.S. soil, including in the Northern Mariana Islands. This case turned back a cockfighters’ challenge to the 2018 national animal fighting law arguing the law should not apply to this U.S. territory. We won earlier cases in other U.S. District Courts (and in appellate courts), affirming that the national animal-fighting ban is constitutionally sound as applied to Puerto Rico and Guam.
  
  
• There were a record number of animal fighting busts in the United States in 2024, and that’s because of the prominence of our campaign. There has been a series of federal cases against dogfighters, including the apprehension of a former senior Pentagon official knee-deep in the blood and guts of this betrayal of the human-animal bond. There has been an uptick in federal cases against cockfighting, but local sheriffs have done the spadework here — from Florida to Texas to California and in dozens of other states. We are reshaping and toughening up our animal-fighting laws, feeding information on these ongoing crimes to authorities, and demanding relentless action. There’s never been a riskier moment for scofflaw animal fighters. 

A dramatic step-up in enforcement will occur when we get the FIGHT Act — a set of amendments to the national animal fighting law — over the finish line. The FIGHT Act has attracted unprecedented law enforcement support, backed by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the National District Attorneys’ Association that represent all 5,000 elected officials in every county. More broadly, we have 760 agencies and organizations endorsing FIGHT. We plan to attach this legislation to the Farm bill as work on that grab-bag of agriculture, food, and land conservation policies, deferred in 2024, is taken up in 2025.

ENDING BEAR BAITING

• We worked to promote a final rulemaking action by the National Park Service to impose a ban-bear baiting on 20 million acres of national preserves in Alaska — an area the size of South Carolina. Baiting involves setting out a pile of food for a bear and then shooting the animal while he or she is feeding, violating all norms of wildlife management that feeding bears and habituating them to human food sources is dangerous and foolish. The rule stops that abusive, unsporting, appalling practice.

MODERNIZE TESTING

• Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate passed the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 without dissent, directing the FDA to complete work on its regulations to end the animal-testing mandate for new drugs and embrace 21^st century human-relevant science. The Senate action is a harbinger of our likely success in getting this measure passed in final form early in the new year.

Continued legislative and agency work are imperatives for us because drug developers use massive numbers of beagles, primates, and other animals to screen new treatments and cures for the wide range of human illnesses. The impediment to progress was the animal-testing mandate that had been in place for drug development since the 1930s, a policy that meant that there’s no such thing as a “cruelty-free drug” because every drug went through a battery of animal tests — until, that is, we passed the FDA Modernization 2.0 two years ago.

The U.S. Senate, with Cory Booker, D-N.J., Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., leading the way, has twice passed bills to turn the page on ineffective, wasteful, and inhumane animal testing — in September 2022 and now in December 2024. We’ve seen nearly 1,000 news stories and science publications featuring that law and what profound changes it promises to usher in for animal well-being and the future of human health and wellness, too.

KANGAROOS ARE NOT SHOES

• The year started with Nike and Puma officially ending any purchasing of kangaroo parts for soccer shoes, and it will end in days with New Balance’s kangaroo-free policy taking effect in January 2025. These policies that came about from our relentless advocacy. Meanwhile, for the first time ever, lawmakers in both chambers of Congress introduced legislation to end any imports of kangaroo parts, stemming from our quest to halt Australia’s domestic massacre of kangaroos and its export of the parts of slain marsupials. And also in 2024, we won a pledge from the U.K.-based Sokito to forego any use of kangaroo skins, furthering isolating Adidas, ASICS, Mizuno, and the handful of other companies that still make soccer shoes out of wildlife killed en masse in their native habitats in Australia.

GIVE A HOOT ABOUT ALL OWLS

• We filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to stop its plan to kill nearly half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. The plan is by far the largest-ever raptor killing program instituted by any nation.

Barred owls are a range-expanding North American native species long protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon. Especially in an era of climate change, we cannot punish species that adapt to opportunity or changes in the environment caused by humans. According to one study, a total of 111 other native, North American bird species have engaged in recent range expansions, with 14 of them into more states or provinces than barred owls have. We’ve rallied 200 organizations to oppose the assault on owls.

KEEPING WILD HORSES WILD

• We worked with allies to stop a roundup and removal of the iconic wild horses at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, with a major assist from North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. But we know we must tackle the larger problem of tens of thousands of wild horses and burros being rounded up across our western public lands at an enormous cost to the animals and to American taxpayers. With Burgum nominated to be Interior Secretary, we may find a sympathetic voice to halt this abuse of free-roaming horses and burros and to give a break to taxpayers unwittingly financing a wasteful and inhumane program that’s been on auto-pilot for years, no matter whether Democrats or Republicans have been in charge of it.

ENDING GREYHOUND RACING AND HORSE-SLAUGHTER FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION

• We are poised to close out a century of greyhound racing and slaughtering horses for human consumption. We planned to pass a legislative amendment to the Farm bill on these reforms in 2024, but Congress deferred action on the legislation. We’ll be ready to secure these policies and to close out inhumane businesses not in alignment with American values and now on the back end of a long decline.

SAVING WOLVES

• We blocked Congressional efforts by anti-wolf lawmakers to eliminate federal protections for the wild canids across most of their range. Meanwhile, we sued the federal government to restore federal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies, where wolves are under assault. The killing is particularly ruthless in Wyoming, where it’s legal to run down and crush wolves with snowmobiles. It’s because of that extreme cruelty that we formulated a national legislative campaign — the Snowmobiles Aren’t Weapons (SAW) Act — to ban using motorized vehicles to assault wolves and coyotes.

We are also working to stop assaults on mountain lions, bobcats, and other native cats in the West, along with battling to stop the killing of bears for their gallbladders and bile for Traditional Chinese Medicine.

We are seeking to halt the mistreatment of dairy cows, engineered at the expense of their well-being for hyper production only to see the milk they dispense thrown away in the National School Lunch Program, which requires the milk be provided exclusively to 15 million kids who are lactose intolerant and don’t want it.

Animal Wellness Action, as a 501(c)(4) organization, is equipped to elect humane-minded lawmakers and to oust anti-animal lawmakers, because good policies flow from politicians who are alert to animal welfare sensibilities. Animal Wellness defeated three anti-animal welfare incumbents in the U.S. House of Representatives by conducting independent expenditure campaigns, and we also successfully defended four of our top allies in Congress. Our television ads collectively achieved millions of impressions to achieve these electoral milestones.

We are a strategic organization that takes calculated risks. None of this progress or possibility would be achievable without you — your advocacy for animals, your financial support, and our shared purposes to make the world safer for animals. We are poised for major gains in the new year, but only with your active engagement.