In the News

The House of Representatives today shot down the $940-billion Farm Bill, by a vote of 195 to 234.

Today, the House Appropriations Committee marked up its agriculture spending bill for Fiscal Year 2014, and it included much good news for animals. Most notably, the committee approved by voice vote an amendment offered by Reps. Jim Moran, D-Va., and Bill Young, R-Fla., to forbid spending by USDA on inspections of horse slaughter plants on American soil.  The Senate should follow suit.

The Senate will likely conclude its consideration of the Farm Bill next week, and the House is likely to take up its Farm Bill within the next couple weeks, with a number of important animal welfare issues hanging in the balance. As the Bakersfield Californian wrote in an editorial today, lawmakers “should take a long, hard look at an amendment by Rep.

The Senate will likely conclude its consideration of the Farm Bill next week, and the House is likely to take up its Farm Bill within the next couple weeks, with a number of important animal welfare issues hanging in the balance. As the Bakersfield Californian wrote in an editorial today, lawmakers “should take a long, hard look at an amendment by Rep.

The animals lost a true champion in Congress today, and The HSUS and HSLF lost a great friend, with the passing of five-term U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who was the Senate’s oldest member at 89.

An axiom of wildlife management is that wild animals are for the benefit of the entire public, not for private commercial profit. But there are some forms of commercialization of wildlife that still exist today, and the market is driving the unsustainable killing of creatures with no limits. Bobcats are under such a threat in California, which currently allows the unlimited trapping of bobcats for commercial purposes.

You can take your dog or cat on an airplane, and stay with your pet in many hotels. But why can’t a companion animal travel with your family on a passenger train?

The House Agriculture Committee, late last night, approved its version of the Farm Bill, and with it included an important provision to close a loophole in the federal animal fighting statute and help crack down on people who attend and bring children to dogfights and cockfights. The animal fighting amendment, offered by Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., passed the committee by a bipartisan vote of 28 to 17. It’s based on H.R. 366, sponsored by Reps. Tom Marino, R-Pa., McGovern, John Campbell, R-Calif., and Jim Moran, D-Va.

The House Agriculture Committee will take up the Farm Bill tomorrow morning, and will consider an amendment offered by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, that seeks to negate most state and local laws regarding the production or manufacture of agriculture products. It’s a radical federal overreach that would undermine the longstanding Constitutional rights of states to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens and local businesses.

I’ve pointed out many times on this blog that the horse slaughter industry in the U.S. is cruel and predatory, gathering and killing horses in particularly gruesome ways. It’s a sad fate for so many American horses—iconic companion animals not raised for human consumption but often ending up on foreign dinner plates. The entire horse slaughter pipeline, from auction to transport to the cruel slaughter process, is terrifying and inherently inhumane for horses.