Modest changes in the way broiler birds are raised are likely to have consequences for nine billion birds a year. In the work that The HSUS does to relieve animal suffering, there’s no category with as many lives at stake. Photo by iStockphoto

Maryland-based Perdue Farms, one of the biggest brands in the production of poultry raised for meat, is making one of the most important announcements of any major producer in the field. Last summer, The HSUS – along with Compassion in World Farming and Mercy For Animals – worked with Perdue to commit the company to a series of reforms to address chronic animal welfare problems (a separate set of problems from the mistreatment of laying hens in the egg industry that we’re also campaigning to change). These policies address the inhumane way chickens are bred (to grow so large so fast that they suffer crippling and even fatal injuries), the cramped and barren facilities they spend their lives in, and the inhumane slaughter systems that dominate the poultry industry.

Within the world of poultry production, Perdue’s pledge to address these concerns was particularly significant, given that the company is the fourth largest in the field and slaughters 700 million birds a year (about eight percent of all production in the United States). It came not long after The HSUS launched its Nine Billion Lives campaign, calling on producers and retailers involved in the chicken business to shape up.

Today, we’re announcing step two in our collaborative discussions with Perdue. The company, now having seen 25 major food retailers agree to changes in their purchasing practices for chicken, has said it will commit to working with these and other stakeholders to honor these new animal welfare standards.

Meeting the demands of its customers may seem like an obvious pledge for any supply-oriented company. No company can survive if it frustrates its customers’ wishes. But in the world of Big Agriculture, that hasn’t always been the case. Many major producers have fought the public and the retail sector for years on animal welfare. For example, consumers were rightfully outraged for decades over the treatment of veal calves, expressing concern that these poor creatures were chained by their necks in tiny crates. Yet veal producers continued using that practice until The HSUS was able to apply sufficient pressure to the industry and secure a pledge from it to phase out the crates. But it took far too long – almost a quarter century.

From my vantage point, the announcement from Perdue today is as big and as important as a prior pledge related to pig production practices by Smithfield Foods – also a big brand in the world of animal agriculture.

In 2007, just two months after The HSUS led a successful ballot initiative in Arizona to ban the cage confinement of breeding sows, Smithfield, the world’s biggest pork producer, said that over the next decade it would convert all of its company-owned pig-producing facilities away from gestation crates to group housing.

Now, 10 years later, Smithfield is on target to complete that conversion this year. That assurance from the biggest producer in the field set us up for success with the nation’s biggest food retailers in our campaign to end the widespread use of gestation crates. A few years after Smithfield’s announcement, The HSUS had negotiated agreements with McDonald’s, Burger King, Kroger, and more than 100 other big brand names to shake up their supply chains and phase out their purchase of pork from operations that confine sows in gestation crates. We’ve also passed bans on gestation crates in about 10 states.

When producers fight these changes, it doesn’t halt reform, but it slows it. In particular, it complicates the path for retailers to implement their plans and honor their pledges.

When we announced our Nine Billion Lives campaign some months ago – to curb the most egregious practices in the industrial poultry production model – we and others in the animal movement came out strong by winning reforms from Burger King, Boston Market, Aramark, Subway, Jack in the Box, Compass Group, Panera Bread, and others. These companies have pledged to require their suppliers to transition to healthier breeds of birds, give birds more space to live, provide enrichments like perches and hay bales, and slaughter them in a less cruel manner using Controlled Atmosphere Stunning to render the birds unconscious prior to being shackled and killed.

These pledges are so important, but they won’t have full force until these companies know that they can secure enough chicken in order to meet the demand for meat for their customers.

Perdue’s pledge should give every company selling chicken the confidence that it will be able to meet any pledge it makes. And it also signals the same thing to other food retailers we’re now asking to hop on board with our campaign. “Consistent with our history of listening to our consumers and customers,” writes the company, “Perdue is committing to work side-by-side with these existing and future new customers to ensure that products from animals raised according to their committed standards will be available to meet their demand.”

With today’s commitment from Perdue, I see something much bigger than a routine announcement. Modest changes in the way broiler birds are raised are likely to have consequences for nine billion birds a year. In the work that The HSUS does to relieve animal suffering, there’s no category of animal use with as many lives at stake.

You’ll hear more from us on this topic. But today’s announcement is going to be talked about a lot in the years ahead. Kudos to Jim Perdue and his company for standing with The HSUS on this important set of issues.

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Federal checkoff programs have been in place for decades, and you’ve undoubtedly heard the slogans and seen the advertising that’s come from them, such as “Pork: The Other White Meat.” Photo by the USDA

To its credit, the California Senate Judiciary Committee stopped a bill to expand the state tax on cattle and dairy farmers to the tune of millions of dollars – a plan to put the funds into a “commission” that would be authorized to use the money for lobbying against animal welfare and family farmers. The bill was principally backed by the California Cattlemen’s Association, and the bill’s author withdrew the bill from the docket after he realized that The HSUS, legislators, and our farmer allies were poised to kill it

This outcome provides a boost to efforts at the federal level to crack down on checkoff abuses and cronyism. Two pairs of ideological opposites introduced bills in the U.S. House and Senate earlier this year -– Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Cory Booker, D-N.J., in the Senate, and Dave Brat, R-Va., and Dina Titus, D-Nev., in the House — to reform a series of federal government programs that have too often taken on the character of slush funds for the beef and pork industries. Their legislation, the Opportunities for Fairness in Farming (OFF) Act, would prevent the U.S. Department of Agriculture and agribusiness trade groups – including the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) – from diverting tens of millions of dollars a year to salaries, lobbying, and other inappropriate and impermissible activities through the national checkoff programs.

The state system is rigged in the same way as the federal system, and California’s A.B. 243 was designed to make a bad situation even worse. The California Cattlemen’s Association, for example, says on its website that it placed “a high priority on educating consumers to defend against environmental, animal welfare and nutritional attacks from anti-beef activists…” Many rank-and-file farmers don’t like their hard-earned money being diverted to salaries and lobbying when the purpose of the programs is commodity promotion. Even the Kern County Cattlemen’s Association, along with so many other rank-and-file farmers and farm groups, opposed A.B. 243.

Federal checkoff programs have been in place for decades, and they are part of the federal bureaucracy and government money train that makes average Americans wince. You’ve undoubtedly heard the slogans and seen the advertising that’s come from them, such as “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner.” Congress originally intended to tax farmers and force them to pay into what are supposed to be non-political, federal programs to promote their commodities. As it has played out in the real world, however, the NCBA and other leading trade groups got access to the till and now they divert tens of millions annually to their own associations for advocacy or anti-competitive activities that put a special hurt on small farmers. This welcome legislation fits in with President Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” and stop waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. He and other officials can look to none other than the Heritage Foundation, a preeminent conservative think tank, which has endorsed this legislation and is working actively to advance it.

Take the beef checkoff program. The NCBA, the industry’s biggest trade association, is the primary contractor for beef checkoff advertising efforts, despite the fact that the group claims membership of only 3.1 percent of America’s cattlemen. NCBA receives the majority of national checkoff fees, making up most of its total budget. That’s almost every beef checkoff dollar, paid by many of the smallest farmers, going to a lobbying group that typically works for the interests of the biggest producers and against the interests of independent cow-calf operators. In a recent year, an astonishing 82 percent of the budget of NCBA, according to one source, is covered by checkoff funds.

The pork checkoff is arguably just as bad. Years ago, the Pork Board developed its “Pork: The Other White Meat” campaign. Yet, despite the exclusive use of checkoff funds to develop and promote the slogan, the NPPC claimed title to the trademark free of charge. Then, after the trademark had nearly exhausted its market value, the Pork Board bought back (with checkoff dollars) its own unlawful “gift” from the NPPC – for $60 million! These federal funds are now being paid out every year in $3 million installments, and they make up a third of the NPPC’s annual budget. The HSUS, along with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and an individual pig farmer, have sued over this gross abuse of the checkoff program and the pending lawsuit threatens to eliminate NPPC’s use of the checkoff as an illegal slush fund. Remember, the NPPC is the trade association that defends keeping pigs in lifelong inhumane confinement in small cages, the overuse of antibiotics, and so many other retrograde policies.

“For too long, America’s family farmers have been forced to fund programs that undermine their efforts to preserve rural communities and to use traditional methods of farming,” Joe Maxwell, a Missouri hog farmer and executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, said. “Farmers should have guarantees these programs are working for them, and shouldn’t have their hard-earned money going toward a slush fund for big ag.”

“This federal legislation is a show of good faith to America’s farmers who believe in accountability and government transparency,” said Pete Eshelman of Joseph DeCuis Farm and the HSUS National Agriculture Advisory Council. “We deserve to know where our dollars are going. Thanks to Senators Booker and Lee and Representatives Brat and Titus for standing up for open government, free markets and fairness for all farmers.”

Agribusiness trade associations at the state and federal level are cooking up these plans, and rank-and-file farmers pay the bills and get almost nothing valuable in return. It’s one thing if the farmers want to voluntarily contribute to fund the NCBA and NPPC campaigns. But farmers shouldn’t be forced to pay, and state and federal lawmakers shouldn’t abet this privatizing of public dollars, especially for such destructive purposes.

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The collusion between Republican politicians, state fish and wildlife agencies, trophy hunters, and mining interests is murder on America’s small, remaining populations of beloved native carnivores. Photo by iStockphoto

It wasn’t enough that earlier this year a narrow majority of lawmakers in Congress targeted wolves and other native carnivores for destruction on 76 million acres of our national wildlife refuges in Alaska. Now, they are expanding that fight to National Park Service lands in Alaska – another 20 million acres, where they want to allow land-and-shoot hunting of grizzly bears, trapping of black and grizzly bears with snares and steel-jawed traps, and hunting wolves, bears, and coyotes in their dens. But that’s not all. They are also seeking to eliminate any federal protections for threatened wolf populations in the lower 48 states. And this comes at the same time that the Trump administration has announced it will delist grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and turn over management to the states, which have each vowed to establish trophy-hunting seasons.

Collectively, these bills and administrative actions amount to a grab bag of opportunities for trophy hunters, allowing private citizens to kill bears and wolves in dramatically larger numbers, often on lands set aside specifically for wildlife, and by means that are often especially cruel and unsporting.

House Republicans have released a detailed draft of the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement (SHARE) Act, which would remove federal protections for wolves in the Great Lakes and Northern Rockies regions and put Congress in a position to cherry-pick this species from the list of threatened and endangered species. That prospective bill, which includes a raft of other odious provisions to loosen restrictions on the baiting of migratory waterfowl and to bar EPA restrictions on the use of lead sinkers, strips protections for wolves and bears on National Park Service (NPS) lands in Alaska. The House Interior Appropriations Committee also contains a similar rider to delist wolves, in case the backers of these various measures cannot achieve their goal through the other route.

This is nothing particularly new for the legislators involved, who have pushed this legislation for years on behalf of ranchers and trophy hunters. But Democrats in the Senate, with a major assist from House Democratic leaders, have consistently stymied those efforts, by hanging together and holding firm on the issue in spending and reauthorization bills. To their immense credit, House and Senate Democrats fiercely resisted efforts to open national wildlife refuge lands in Alaska to extreme predator-killing practices, and fell short in the Senate only because Republicans invoked a previously little-used legislative maneuver known as the Congressional Review Act, which bars the filibuster option that has long empowered more than 40 lawmakers, acting together, to block controversial legislation.

But two weeks ago, three key Democrats – Senators Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ben Cardin of Maryland, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota – broke ranks with the Democratic defenders of wildlife and are signaling that they too are ready to go along with the Republicans’ bid to delist wolves. Those three Democrats are original cosponsors of the misleadingly-named Hunting Heritage and Environmental Legacy Preservation (HELP) for Wildlife Act. By doing so, they aren’t putting just wolves at risk, but providing a precedent for Congress to subvert administrative authority over endangered species listing and delisting actions and to eliminate judicial review of those administrative actions. It may lead to a species-by-species gutting of the Endangered Species Act if they make deals to allow Republicans to remove species in return for other provisions they are allowed to tack on to these larger packages of bills.

It’s an open secret that most state wildlife management agencies have long been captured by the trophy-hunting lobby. They consider themselves service agents for trophy hunters rather than protectors of wildlife. For example, state wildlife managers in Minnesota and Wisconsin, before The HSUS stopped them in the courts, allowed trophy hunters and trappers collectively to kill more than 500 wolves a year. Wisconsin wildlife managers even allow the use of hounds and bait to help kill the wolves, setting up a de facto animal fighting situation in the woods, when the packs of wolves confront the packs of dogs.

Alaska has been particularly notorious for a scorched earth policy toward America’s apex carnivores, allowing their killing by a wide variety of means, including the use of aircraft. Abetted and often directed by state politicians and political appointees, state wildlife managers dolled up their ruthless predator-control actions in the verbiage of scientific wildlife management. But their motivation was transparent: they wanted human hunters to shoot more moose and caribou, and didn’t like the wolves and bears competing with them. To paraphrase my old friend and ethical sportsman Ted Williams, hunters believe that every moose or caribou killed by a wolf is one less hunting license fee paid to the state. In short, there was a bloodthirsty element to their killing wildlife, but there was also a self-interested economic incentive.

But even these agencies have moments where they must pull back because of the mayhem they’ve created. Just last week, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that it will stop its wasteful and ineffective cull of wolves in interior Alaska, near the border of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.

State wildlife managers had become concerned that some hunters were not getting sufficient opportunity to kill members of the famed Fortymile caribou herd, because it had declined from 50,000 or so in the 1960s to just 6,000 by 1975. To reestablish herd numbers, the state gave hunters fewer permits, and aggressively persecuted wolves in experimental programs, including by shooting them from airplanes.

As a result, the caribou herd once again artificially rose to 50,000 members by 2014. But the state began to realize that it could not maintain its quasi-agricultural aspiration of an ever-expanding caribou herd. Ultimately, the Department of Fish and Game found—to the surprise of no seasoned observers—that the carrying capacity of the land had been exceeded. The state, at least in this study, concluded that localized wolf control backfires, in an ecological sense, and that caribou were starving.

NPS biologists who had been conducting their own concurrent, 22-year-long, radio-collar study of wolves in the nearby Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve found that wolf numbers even in the more meaningfully protected confines of the Preserve had been in rapid decline. Private agents and personnel from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game gunned down the vast majority of wolves who ranged beyond the invisible boundary and safety zone of the Preserve.

The NPS study found that humans, in their attempt to “manage” these complex natural systems, can only achieve short-term relief, and ultimately, killing wolves decreases their pack sizes and the number of breeders. The nearby, protected wolves simply increased their pup production to make up for the loss of those killed by wolf control. A recent study conducted in Canada reached the same conclusion.

The point is, the collusion between Republican politicians, captured state fish and wildlife agencies, trophy hunters, and mining interests pulling their strings are murder on America’s small, remaining populations of beloved native carnivores. The Democrats in the Senate had been, in so many cases, the last line of defense for these species, and The HSUS urges these lawmakers to stand tall and not trade away our legacy of federal protection for wildlife. That includes the strong standards of stewardship on our national parks and preserves and national wildlife refuges and, through the ESA, the shielding of vulnerable species from human attacks.

The consensus among serious-minded scientists is that carnivores moderate prey populations and make them more vigorous by removing the sicker, older, and weaker animals. Predator control schemes often kill the strongest, more robust members of populations and are unreliable, wasteful, and cruel, and fail in the long run to increase the abundance of the prey species that agencies treat like cash cows. Around the world, the massive decrease in top carnivores is changing our very planet. With trophy hunting and predator control schemes, humans are “dumbing down” ecosystems, making them less functional and biologically rich.

Call upon your members of Congress and urge them to vote “No” on any and all efforts to open our parks, preserves, and refuges to predator control, and to remove rare species, like wolves, from the list of threatened and endangered species.

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The same lawmakers who voted today to reopen U.S. horse slaughter plants are blocking a different bill backed by The HSUS that would forbid the transport of horses for slaughter for human consumption to other countries. Photo by Kathy Milani/The HSUS

Today, the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly to give the green light for the reopening of horse slaughter plants in the United States. There were 27 members of Congress who voted against the bipartisan amendment offered by Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., and Charlie Dent, R-Pa., to bar horse slaughter operations in the United States, and 25 who supported it. All but one Democrat on the committee voted to oppose this dreadful idea, while 26 of 30 Republicans favored it.

The vote on the amendment was as unimaginable as the rhetoric from the horse slaughter crowd was hypocritical.

Unimaginable because American horses deserve a better fate than to be gathered up by a disreputable “kill buyer” who outbids a rescuer at an auction, loaded onto an overcrowded truck, and then stunned, hoisted up by a leg, and pulled apart piece by piece – which is exactly what the 27 lawmakers who voted against the Roybal-Allard/Dent amendment are trying to sanction. We don’t do this to dogs or cats when we don’t have homes for them, and it should be unthinkable to do this to the domesticated animal that helped settle the nation. I pity the people who don’t see the majesty of these American icons and who are numb to their suffering.

Hypocritical because the lawmakers who spoke out against the amendment to ban horse slaughter – again, these are the Representatives who want to allow horse slaughter – actually feigned an interest in protecting horses. A couple of them lamented the long-distance transport of American horses to Canada and Mexico for slaughter for human consumption, and said that we might as well slaughter horses here in the United States so they don’t have to be transported.

That logic would make a little sense until you realize that these same lawmakers are blocking a different bill backed by The HSUS that would forbid the transport of horses for slaughter for human consumption to other countries. Only one of the lawmakers who voted to reopen horse slaughter plants in the United States is a cosponsor of that broader anti-slaughter bill, the Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act, H.R. 113, which is led by four animal welfare champions — Reps. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., Janice Schakowsky, D-Ill., Ed Royce, R-Calif., and Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M.

How can you lament the long-distance transport of horses for slaughter to Canada or Mexico and then fight the bill that addresses that very thing? You can do so only if you say one thing and do another.

The defeat of the amendment to bar U.S.-based horse slaughter plants from operating is an ugly start for the House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J. The newly anointed chairman represents a suburban district in New Jersey, and his constituents favor our position in droves. He defied their wishes on this vote, just as he defied their wishes earlier in the year in voting to overturn a Fish and Wildlife Service rule to stop the aerial tracking, landing, and shooting of grizzly bears, and to stop the shooting of wolves and other predators during their denning seasons on national wildlife refuges.

What kind of person wants to kill grizzly bears on wildlife refuges and slaughter American horses on U.S. soil?

Reps. Robert Aderholdt, R-Ala., Tom Cole, R-Okla., and Mark Amodei, R-Nev. also favored horse slaughter in the debate today. To their credit, Reps. Roybal-Allard, Dent, Sanford Bishop, D-Ga., Barbara Lee, D-Calif, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., spoke in favor of the ban on U.S. horse slaughter.

“As a lifelong Republican, I’m deeply saddened and quite ashamed to see my fellow conservatives go to such great lengths to promote the slaughter of American equines,” said Marty Irby, who heads the HSUS equine campaign. “I hope the members who profess to be fiscal conservatives will reflect upon this vote that would have saved millions of taxpayer dollars annually – and begin to practice what they preach.”

As Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., noted in a public statement, this battle is not over. If House leaders bring the agriculture spending bill to the floor, our congressional allies may be able to offer the amendment there and win when all House lawmakers have a chance to vote on the issue. And if even that doesn’t happen, we expect to win a horse slaughter defund amendment in the Senate, which would give us a chance to prevail when the final bill is negotiated and sent to President Trump.

This is how lawmakers voted on the amendment to protect horses:

YES (25)

Peter Aguilar, D-Calif.-31, Sanford Bishop, D-Ga.-2, Matt Cartwright, D-Pa.-17, Katherine Clark, D-Mass.-5, Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.-3, Charlie Dent, R- Pa.-15, David Joyce, R-Ohio-14, Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio-9, Derek Kilmer, D-Wash.-6, Barbara Lee, D-Calif.-13, Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.-17, Betty McCollum, D-Minn.-4, Grace Meng, D-N.Y.-6, Chellie Pingree, D-Maine-1, Mark Pocan, D-Wis.-2, David Price, D-N.C.-4, Mike Quigley, D-Ill.-5, Tom Rooney, R-Fla.-17, Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif.-40, Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md.-2, Tim Ryan, D-Ohio-13, José Serrano, D-N.Y.-15, Peter Visclosky, D-Ind.-1, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.-23, and Kevin Yoder, R-Kan.-3

NO (27)

Robert Aderhold, R-Ala.-4, Mark Amodie, R-Nev.-2, Ken Calvert, R-Calif.-42, John Carter, R-Texas-31, Tom Cole, R-Okla.-4, Henry Cuellar, D-Texas-28, John Abney Culberson, R-Texas-7, Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla.-25, Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn.-3, Jeff Fortenberry, R-Nev.-1, Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J.-11, Kay Granger, R-Texas-12, Tom Graves, R-Ga.-14, Andy Harris, R-Md.-1, Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash.-3, Evan Jenkins, R-W.Va.-3, John Moolenaar, R-Mich.-4, Dan Newhouse, R-Wash.-4, Steven Palazzo, R-Miss.-4, Martha Roby, R-Ala.-2, Harold Rogers, R-Ky.-5, Michael Simpson, R-Idaho-2, Chris Stewart, R-Utah-2, Scott Taylor, R-Va.-2, David Valadao, R-Calif.-21, Steve Womack, R-Ark.-3, and David Young, R-Iowa-3

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It was the dairy industry’s own inattention to good animal husbandry that annually produced tens of thousands of downer cows – animals too sick or injured or battered to walk, and dragged into slaughterhouses to make ground beef. Photo by Kathy Milani/The HSUS

Last week, a heat wave, in tandem with a lack of adequate housing and other safeguards for the animals, resulted in thousands of dairy cows perishing in the punishing heat of California’s Central Valley. It’s one of the worst weather-related incidents to strike dairy herds in recent memory, and rendering plants in California are so overwhelmed with rotting carcasses that county officials are suspending rules against burying the animals whole in mass graves.

The Central Valley is a jarringly hot place in the summer, and global warming may be exacerbating that circumstance. That’s precisely why dairy farmers must be alert and prepared for episodes of intense heat. Having functional and well-placed cooling systems and structures like water misters and adequate shade could go a long way toward preventing the loss of animals.

But there are more problems for dairy cows than overheating and unending exposure to the sun. It’s routine in the conventional dairy industry to keep the animals in a nearly unending state of pregnancy (via artificial insemination) in order to keep the milk flowing. Because they’ve decided that this milk is headed for retail markets and not for the mouths of calves, the farmers take away calves from their mothers soon after birth. These babies and the mothers know what’s going on, and they are distressed by it. It’s truly heartrending to see new mothers bellowing for their calves after watching their newborns carted off.

That’s exactly what an HSUS undercover investigator recently documented at a dairy farm in New York. As you can see in this short HSUS video, anyone who tells you that cows don’t suffer emotionally when their babies are taken away from them is engaging in excuse-making or denial. Maternal deprivation has become one of the hidden ingredients in every glass of cow’s milk and an important question for every consumer to consider.

Cow’s milk, like the milk of any species, is designed for infants, not adults, but if adults have a hankering for milk, they now have an abundance of plant-based options in grocery stores, coffee houses, and other food retail locations. Almond milk, soy milk, coconut milk, rice milk, and other kinds of non-dairy milk represent a full 10 percent of all fluid milk sales in the United States. And where once those seeking dairy-free ice creams were relegated to natural foods stores, now brands like Ben and Jerry’s, Breyers, and Häagen Dazs all offer their own lines of several flavors of vegan ice cream that are sold in regular groceries.

While a decline in dairy consumption might reduce the number of farmers involved in that enterprise, there would likely be a corresponding growth in other sectors of the horticultural economy. In California – the nation’s almond-growing hub – there would be plenty of opportunities to expand almond sales by turning the nuts into milk. This is the sort of dynamism that exists in an adaptive, innovative marketplace, where farmers and other entrepreneurs are offering up more options and consumers are making more informed choices and calibrating the true costs of their choices.

The dairy industry shows more than a few signs that it’s feeling threatened by these other agricultural producers and their innovations in product development and marketing. Big dairy apparently thinks it is not enough for it to use tens of millions in check-off dollars to market its product. It is yet again turning to Congress to impose anti-competitive practices. It doesn’t want other producers to be allowed to use the word “milk,” as if someone buying almond milk might actually be confused as to whether their beverage was bovine-based or not.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc. – hailing from the second-largest dairy-producing state – is regrettably carrying a bill aimed at making it illegal to use the word “milk” to market plant-based milks. The bill so far has seen no action on Capitol Hill, but we have no doubt that she’ll try to attach it to the upcoming Farm Bill. That would be an attack on other farmers, and it would not do a thing to help consumers.

The dairy industry should take a much more comprehensive look at animal welfare issues and get its own barn in order instead of trying to hurt other farmers. It was the dairy industry’s own inattention to good animal husbandry that annually produced tens of thousands of downer cows – animals too sick or injured or battered to walk, and dragged into slaughterhouses to make ground beef. The HSUS has fought the mishandling and mistreatment of downer cows for years, and our landmark Hallmark-Westland investigation in Chino, California, was instrumental in securing the enactment of two federal rules to crack down on downer abuses and to require euthanasia of non-ambulatory cows.

It was The HSUS again that led the successful fight to ban the practice of tail-docking of dairy cows, which is now finally being phased out by the industry. But other animal welfare problems remain, including chronic mastitis and lameness within herds.

Both the dairy industry and Congress can collaborate to improve the future of the dairy industry but they should do it more intelligently. With the support of the industry, Congress can establish basic animal welfare standards for the treatment of cows and other farm animals. Instead of doing that, Congress is stonewalling on animal welfare reforms and continuing to provide subsidies to Big Ag and to promote anti-competitive practices to give one sector of the agricultural economy a leg up over others. Those aren’t the right plays, and lawmakers should hear from you on it.

The post California dairy cows perish, while the state’s almond growers see opportunities for disrupted milk market appeared first on A Humane Nation.

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When it comes to greyhound racing, government should be part of the solution rather than the enabler of a problematic industry. Photo by iStockphoto

In Florida, the hub of a withering U.S. greyhound racing industry, regulators identified 12 greyhounds with cocaine in their blood at the Bestbet Orange Park near Jacksonville, according to The Washington Post and First Coast News. One trainer, Charles McClellan, handled all of the dogs, an incriminating fact pattern. Cocaine is just one of many drugs discovered in racing dogs, and this illegal substance is apparently administrated as a stimulant by cheaters within the industry.

While there’s definitely a way to juice the dogs – even if it’s illegal and underhanded — there’s little the industry has been able to do of late to juice up the sport. It’s been in steep decline, and nobody in the industry really thinks that this trajectory is reversible. Twenty-five years ago, there were more than 60 tracks in the United States with a handle of $3.5 billion, while today, greyhounds run on sand at only 19 tracks, and the handle is only $500 million. Florida is the industry’s last bastion with 12 tracks, including the Jacksonville facility.

The unusual circumstance of the current moment is that dogs typically run in front of empty, or near empty, bleachers at these 19 tracks. The base of fans interested in watching a pack of dogs chasing a mechanical lure around the short oval, in a mad-dash sprint that lasts only about 30 seconds, is small and shrinking.

How do businesses with so few patrons continue to operate?

One answer is they cannot operate well, and that’s why we’ve seen dozens of tracks shuttered. That trend has been aided by animal advocacy groups, led by GREY2K USA, that have helped ban the sport in 40 jurisdictions.

The surviving tracks are not standing on their own two, or four, feet. Rather, state and casino-gaming interests are the reason the tracks remain open, even as the base of spectators recedes.

Florida requires that the dog tracks run a minimum number of days. And casino-gaming interests pay the freight.

Casino gaming companies expanded into more communities in the United States with their games of chance (e.g., blackjack, slots, and other conventional forms of gambling) by developing relationships with dog- and horse-racing tracks. In return for the establishment of gambling in new markets, the casinos promised to subsidize the racing. The tracks were foresighted and went to state legislators to require a minimum number of race days, so that breeders and other players within the industries could continue to operate.

Horse racing remains a viable industry and sport, although it has its own doping problems (The HSUS and The Jockey Club are collaborating on federal legislation to end doping and put the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in charge of a regulatory program to clean the sport of non-therapeutic drugs). But almost everybody agrees that there’s no saving greyhound racing.

The question is, how long will these 19 tracks operate, and what’s the pathway to phase them out?

The first step is to decouple casino gambling and racing. End the required race days.

It’s time for the casinos and the animal advocacy groups to join together to unwind greyhound racing in an orderly way and to protect the dogs. When that’s achieved, we’ll have stopped the doping. Stopped the on-track injuries. And stopped the flood of retired greyhounds into the adoption pipeline, denying other needy animals safe havens.

When it comes to greyhound racing, the market should be allowed to work, and government should be part of the solution rather than the enabler of a problematic industry. It’s been propping up a declining sport for too long. It’s time for serious-minded people to get together and head toward the exits.

The post Doping scandal adds to reputational issues for greyhound racing industry  appeared first on A Humane Nation.

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At the Ka'ena Point Natural Area Reserve in Hawaii, 15 Laysan albatrosses, like the one pictured above, were slaughtered using a bat, a machete, and a pellet gun. The perpetrators also smashed the eggs of the large, rare, and federally protected birds. Photo by Marco Garcia/For The HSUS

In late December 2015, Hawaii conservation officers found a dead bird the size of a small child buried in a nest on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and a stick next to the nest. Sadly, that marker was a faint indicator of a crime committed by a group of young men. Officers would later determine that several alleged perpetrators battered and even dismembered at least 15 Laysan albatrosses with a bat, a machete, and a pellet gun. They also smashed the eggs of the large, rare, and federally protected birds. The scene of the crime was the Ka‘ena Point Natural Area Reserve, the site of a 26-year-long conservation effort to protect the birds. In one violent spree, the perpetrators had unwound the work of government agency staff and volunteers to restore these birds to an extraordinarily beautiful and fragile ecosystem, and turned a refuge for these wild animals into a killing ground.

The investigative trail led authorities to six students who attended a prestigious Honolulu prep school, three of whom were eventually charged – one as an adult. The conservation officers report that the boys severed the birds’ feet to collect their I.D. bands as souvenirs, and posted the photos of the mutilated birds on social media, according to reporting by the Washington Post.

While leaders of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources are calling for stiff penalties, including jail time, for the perpetrators, there is a brouhaha brewing now because the slowly churning justice system may instead give the boys just a slap on the wrist, reducing the number of charges and offering them leniency as first offenders. That’s deeply distressing, given the heinous, premeditated nature of the crimes, and also knowing that this sort of behavior is often predictive of other extreme anti-social behavior and violent conduct.

There’s a body of evidence to show that people who do this sort of thing in childhood often repeat that behavior later in life. Our justice system has been properly recalibrated to mete out meaningful penalties so that perpetrators learn never to behave in this manner again toward animals. Many state anti-cruelty laws also have provisions that call for counseling of young people who demonstrate malice toward animals, since there’s an obvious mental pathology at work.

Hawaii has taken important steps to protect wildlife as a matter of policy. Last year Hawaii enacted one of the nation’s most comprehensive laws to protect imperiled wild animals, such as elephants and rhinos, from the illegal trade in their parts. The law took effect just a few days ago – on June 30th. This law will deal a heavy blow to unscrupulous wildlife dealers, considering that previous surveys found 89 percent of elephant ivory items for sale in the state were from illegal or unknown origins and that Hawaii was the nation’s third largest ivory market.

Clearly, these young men were not involved in wildlife trafficking. But they were involved in cruelty to wildlife, and the law must speak when it comes to their behavior. It was not that long ago that The HSUS launched a national campaign to strengthen all of our nation’s anti-cruelty laws. In the mid-1980s, malicious cruelty was a felony in only four states. In 2014, we completed the effort to make animal cruelty a felony in every state, and just last week, Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf held a signing ceremony, the likes of which we rarely see, for legislation that makes extreme cruelty a first-offense felony (only two other states, Mississippi and Iowa, allow felony penalties for a second or subsequent offense only).

A bill introduced in the Hawaii legislature this year seeks to make the torture, mutilation, or poisoning of Hawaii’s indigenous birds a felony. The legislature should take up the bill when its biennial session resumes in 2018, and pass it into law.

But there must be a closely correlated campaign to help strengthen state laws to protect wildlife from poaching and extreme acts of cruelty. Our anti-cruelty policy work will be closer to completion when that happens.

While the correlation between animal cruelty and other extreme and violent behavior may seem self-evident to those of us steeped in this cause, many law enforcement agents are still learning about the predictive aspect of violence against animals. Through our Law Enforcement Training Center, we partner with enforcement agencies, prosecutors’ associations, and domestic violence groups nationwide to address this relationship and how a multidisciplinary approach to animal abuse and domestic violence keeps our communities safer. Cases like the one in Hawaii remind us what’s at stake and how leniency is not warranted when people do really awful things to animals.

The post Never an excuse for malicious cruelty to domesticated or wild animals appeared first on A Humane Nation.

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