Our Successes (2018–2026)

Animal Wellness Action has led the fight to pass more than a dozen federal laws. And since its inception, the organization has helped to remake the national agenda for animals at the federal level.

Animal Wellness Action is the nation’s leading and most effective public policy and political advocacy organization for animals. It promotes legal standards against cruelty to animals and, once in place, works to enforce them.

As a nonpartisan public policy and political advocacy group, it also favors and opposes candidates for public office, depending on their stances and work for animals. It has worked to help elect and re-elect dozens of candidates to federal office, while playing a major role in the defeat of more than a half dozen members of Congress who opposed mainstream animal welfare policies. It also has supported state landmark ballot measures to protect dogs and farm animals that have reverberated at the national level.

It has led the fight to pass more than a dozen federal laws. And since its inception, the organization has helped to remake the national agenda for animals at the federal level.

1. Eliminating an 84-Year-Old Animal Testing Mandate

Through our Modernize Testing campaign, Animal Wellness Action led efforts to end the federal mandate for animal testing in drug development by passing the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 in December 2022—the most important law ever enacted relating to animal testing. In April 2025, citing the law we passed, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary formulated the Roadmap to Reduce Animal Testing in Preclinical Studies to wind down animal testing within five years. Subsequently, the NIH director made similar pledges and the CDC stopped all primate testing.

We are working with Congress to urge public health agency leaders to execute these plans aggressively. The U.S. Senate passed the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 in December 2025, and House action and final passage are expected soon. Meanwhile, we worked with Democratic and Republican allies in Congress on a December 2025 letter to wind down the long era of primate testing and dog testing and to tie future grant-making to stipulations not to use animals in federally funded tests.

These legislative and executive agency actions are already reverberating around the world, throughout the global pharmaceutical sector and their regulators alike. These actions offer the prospect of driving down the number of animals used and the price of drugs, while making drugs safer and expanding the pool of drug development projects to address a wide range of diseases.

2. Remaking the Federal Legal Framework Against Animal Cruelty

a) Through our Animal Fighting Is the Pits campaign, Animal Wellness Action engineered the passage of the Parity in Animal Cruelty Enforcement (PACE) Act of 2018, outlawing cockfighting in all U.S. jurisdictions—including the U.S. territories from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific. This law shut down animal fighting in five jurisdictions with major animal fighting activities, establishing a ban on staged fighting on every inch of U.S. soil.

Our legal team has since defended the federal anti-fighting law in six federal court victories, locking in this nationwide prohibition and allowing us and federal law enforcement to zero in on the trafficking of fighting birds to more than 30 nations.

We’ve repeatedly secured language in both House and Senate spending bills urging “vigorous enforcement of the Federal animal fighting statutes” by the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. Our group has also secured language and won votes to encourage the DOJ to explore the possibility of creating the Animal Cruelty Crimes Unit—a goal aligned with our prior winning amendments. Our undercover investigators work with law enforcement to break up cockfighting derbies throughout the nation and to trigger arrests of lawbreakers involved in this malicious cruelty.

b) Animal Wellness Action also engineered the passage of the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act—the first-ever national anti-cruelty law. The DOJ, at our urging, has issued directives to all U.S. attorneys to tap an assistant U.S. attorney in each of the 93 offices to focus on animal cruelty crimes.

c) We also helped secure the passage of the Pet and Women’s Safety (PAWS) Act, to establish a program to create capacity for pets at domestic violence shelters. We subsequently lobbied to secure $3 million for the PAWS Act’s shelter program.

d) Animal Wellness Action has long been the leader in the effort for better enforcement of the Horse Protection Act of 1970 (HPA), has made funding for enforcement of the HPA a priority, and led efforts to triple annual funding levels for enforcement of the law.

3. Breaking the Dairy Industry Monopoly in Public Schools

In our Dunking the Milk Mandate campaign, Animal Wellness Action led the congressional effort to end the 80-year-old cow’s milk mandate in the National School Lunch Program and to bring choice in the form of plant-based milks to kids in schools. More than one in three kids who qualify for nutrition assistance suffer from lactose intolerance, creating massive milk wastage in the program, with more than 100 million gallons of milk discarded annually by kids who become ill to some degree by drinking the product. Dairy cows have been selectively bred and bioengineered to annually produce six to seven times more milk than they did in the past, and the milk waste in the schools reflected a gross disregard for the hardships cows endured to produce that milk.

4. Dismantling the Big Cat Pet Trade

Animal Wellness Action helped pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2022, making it illegal to trade in lions, tigers, and other big cats as pets or to operate cub-petting schemes. Through our No Big Cats as Pets campaign, in cooperation with Big Cat Rescue, we helped shutter the largest private menageries of big cats and watched with excitement to see the big players in the trade, such as “Joe Exotic” Maldonado, Jeff Lowe, Tim Stark, and Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, driven from these inhumane menageries. As a result, the trade in big cats has been permanently disrupted and is vastly diminished, with the Big Cats legislation the key driver of that outcome.

5. Reforming Thoroughbred Racing

Under our Showing Horse Sense campaign, Animal Wellness Action partnered with The Jockey Club to pass the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act—creating national standards for drug use and track safety for the first time in history. This forced the horse racing industry to confront its disjointed regulatory structure, end race-day doping to enhance performance, and usher in track safety standards to address the well-being of the athletes at the center of the enterprise.

6. Bringing Greyhound Racing to the Brink of Elimination

As the key maneuver in our Ban Greyhound Racing campaign, Animal Wellness Action worked with GREY2K USA to engineer the passage of the Florida ballot initiative to ban greyhound racing, closing 12 tracks and collapsing two-thirds of the U.S. industry overnight. Seeing the writing on the wall, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, and Iowa subsequently banned greyhound racing, leaving just two tracks operating nationwide, both in West Virginia. The federal Greyhound Protection Act, propelled by our team and GREY2K USA, would seal the industry’s fate, making one of the most tangible examples of a total shutdown of an enterprise that not long ago generated billions in profits from animal competition that turned racing tracks into crash sites.

7. Ending the Slaughter of American Horses at Home and Abroad

Animal Wellness Action successfully lobbied for Agriculture Appropriations language to maintain the de facto ban on horse slaughter in the United States. Through our Horses in the Stable, Not on the Table campaign, we are pushing to end the slaughter of American horses for human consumption. Annual slaughter numbers have plummeted from 400,000 to roughly 20,000. We are now poised to finish the job—ending live horse exports for slaughter and closing this grim chapter of equine exploitation once and for all. Our investigations have continued to document the trade and expose it as cruel and economically irrelevant.

8. Promoting and Defending Cage-Free Animal Agriculture

Consistent with our Cage-Free Future campaign, Animal Wellness Action is leading the fight to block the federal initiatives of the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and the American Farm Bureau Federation to overturn Prop 12 (California) and Question 3 (Massachusetts) that restrict the sale of pork, eggs, and veal from animals kept in immobilizing cages and crates. We’ve held them back year after year in Congress. And the NPPC and its surrogates have now lost more than 20 straight federal court cases seeking the overturn of key state farm animal welfare laws, including a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court in NPPC v. Ross upholding California’s Prop 12 as a proper exercise of state authority. The goal, in the end, is to achieve crate- and cage-free agriculture and to end the era of immobilizing animals as a routine animal housing practice.

Today, nearly half of all laying hens and breeding sows are out of cages and crates, up from just two percent for these female chickens and pigs a generation earlier. Animal Wellness Action president Wayne Pacelle was the key primary architect of the series of winning farm animal ballot measures and corporate campaigns that produced the shift. In January 2026, in an agreement that Wayne hatched 15 years prior, Ohio became the 11^th state with a prohibition on the use of gestation crates.

9. Saving Wolves

We’ve worked at the state and federal levels to advance our Saving Wolves campaign. In 2019, we worked to convince Washington Governor Jay Inslee to establish policies to forbid the hunting of wolves and to limit the killing of wolves in human conflict circumstances, favoring non-lethal methods. In state court in Wisconsin in 2021, we secured a courtroom injunction against wolf-killing in the state after it unleashed a horde of hunters that slaughtered over 200 wolves in less than 60 hours.

The next year, we helped secure a victory in U.S. District Court in Northern California to block the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from removing federal Endangered Species Act protections for wolves across most of their range (excluding three northern Rockies states). In 2025, we were one of the parties that secured a ruling from a federal judge that ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service was wrong not to restore federal protections for wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains after wolves sustained appalling, politically driven assaults in those states. We have annually fended off legislation in Congress to remove federal protections for gray wolves across their entire range in the Lower 48 states.

10. Protecting Wild Horses

As part of its Keeping Wild Horses Wild campaign, Animal Wellness Action conceived and led the effort to secure language in Congress’s annual spending bill reserving $11 million each year for fertility control programs for wild horses and burros in the western states. This funding is a key step to eliminating mass round-ups of the wild equids on Bureau of Land Management lands across the nation.

Laws Shepherded to Passage by Animal Wellness Action Since Inception (2018-2026)

The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 (enacted 2022) – to eliminate the requirement for animal testing for all new drug development protocols.
The Reducing Animal Testing Act (enacted 2022) – to eliminate the requirement for animal testing for biosimilars.
The Freedom in the School Cafeterias and Lunches Act (enacted 2025 as amendments to S. 222) – to eliminate the federal cow’s milk mandate in the National School Lunch Program and to allow kids to receive plant-based milk options.
The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) (enacted 2020) – to ban race-day doping of thoroughbred horses.
Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act fix (enacted 2022) – to amend the language in the original law to settle challenges brought by pro-doping factions within the horse racing industry.
The Parity in Animal Cruelty Enforcement (PACE) Act (enacted 2018) – to ban cockfighting and dogfighting everywhere in the United States, including the U.S. territories.
The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act(enacted 2019) – to create the first federal anti-cruelty statute.
The Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act (enacted 2018) – to ban any sale of dog and cat meat in the United States.
The Pet and Women Safety (PAWS) Act(enacted 2018) – to create criminal penalties for stalking that causes a person to reasonably fear the death or serious bodily injury of a pet.
Rescuing Animals With Rewards (RAWR) Act(enacted 2020) – to provide rewards for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of people involved with illegal wildlife trafficking.
The Big Cat Public Safety Act (enacted 2022) – to ban breeding of big cats, mainly African lions, and tigers, for use in the pet trade and as commercial props at roadside menageries in the United States.
The Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act (enacted 2022) – to halt the trade in shark fins for soup.

Pending Proposals Initiated or Led by Animal Wellness Action

The Minks In Narrowly Kept Spaces (MINKS) Are Superspreaders Act – to phase out U.S. mink farming. After a series of COVID-19 outbreaks at mink factory farms, there are now emerging potential threats from these farms producing a recombined avian influenza virus (H5N1). The inhumanity of these confinement operations should be enough to stir legislative action, but the viral threats add even more urgency.
The Greyhound Protection Act – to ban greyhound racing in the United States. Greyhound racing has been in steep decline, and now we want to finish the job with national legislation.
The Bear Poaching Elimination Act – to ban the trade in bear gall bladders and bile for phony home remedies and medicinal scams. China’s Ministry of Health announced that bear bile was a legitimate treatment for COVID-19; once we heard that, we sprang into action.
The Kangaroo Protection Act – to halt any trade in the United States in kangaroo parts for athletic shoes, finishing off the problem after securing corporate pledges from all the major athletic shoe companies after we launched our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign—ASICS, Adidas, Diadora, Mizuno, Nike, Puma, New Balance, Sokito, and Umbro.
The Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act – to create, for the first time in federal animal protection law, a private right of action to allow citizens to bring civil suits against dogfighters and cockfighters. What’s more, the bill would ban the shipment of adult roosters in the mail and ban online gambling on animal fights.
The FDA Modernization Act 3.0 – to compel the FDA to update its regulations to implement the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, which President Biden signed in 2022.
The Animal Cruelty Enforcement (ACE) Act – to create a new Animal Cruelty Crimes section at the U.S. Department of Justice. We need dedicated resources for enforcement to be meaningful.
The FBI Animal Cruelty Taskforce (FBI ACT) Act – to create a special FBI unit to investigate animal cruelty and apprehend perpetrators.
The Lead Endangers Animals Daily (LEAD) Act – to replace lead hunting ammunition with nontoxic alternatives like copper and steel on National Wildlife Refuges because the toxic spent lead shot left behind in the woods and streams poisons countless animals.
The Pigs in Gestation States (PIGS) Act – to ban the use of gestation crates in pig production nationwide. Ten states and more than 60 major American food retailers have policies against gestation crates.
The Snowmobiles Aren’t Weapons (SAW) Act – This measure is a direct response to the horrific running down of an adolescent female wolf in Wyoming in early 2024. Wyoming, like many other states, doesn’t forbid this barbarism. We are now working to make it a national crime.
The Don’t Feed the Bears Act – to ban bear baiting for trophy hunting on federal lands.
The Fight or Flight Act – to forbid the shipment of adult roosters on commercial aircraft, halting the trade in fighting birds to the Philippines and other nations that rely on air transport to ship fighting birds for their pits.
CRA to nix Barred Owl Management Strategy – This Congressional Review Act resolution would nullify the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan to kill 450,000 barred owls to reduce social competition with spotted owls.
The EGG SAVE Act: Modernizing America’s Egg Industry – to modernize egg production by accelerating the voluntary adoption of in-ovo sexing technology to end the wasteful and inhumane culling of male chicks in hatcheries.

Our Guiding Values

Our nation should never tolerate cruelty, even if it’s conducted by big industries.
All animals deserve humane treatment, including animals raised for food.
We must embrace alternatives to animal exploitation.
Cruelty to animals runs counter to our longstanding legal traditions and religious values.
Actively addressing cruelty to animals prevents the spillover of violence and other crimes in our communities.
We must honor states’ rights and local authority and allow democratic decision-making to protect animals at the local, state, and federal levels.
Government and businesses must root out animal cruelty in their supply chains, R&D programs, and other operations to be aligned with their customers and the norms of a civil society.