AWI Quarterly Articles | Government/Legal

In 2013, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman established an Animal Cruelty Initiative to focus on prosecuting animal cruelty crimes and protecting consumers from unscrupulous companion animal dealers. Earlier this year, his office struck a...

There is more good news regarding a multijurisdiction cockfighting case first reported in the fall 2015 AWI Quarterly . The case focused on the Big Blue Sportsman’s Club in eastern Kentucky, where cockfights had been...

The 115 th Congress has declared war on the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Even though the ESA has a 99 percent success rate in preventing the extinction of listed species and 90 percent of the...

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to maintain the long-standing ban on horse slaughterhouse inspections by the US Department of Agriculture. Prohibiting these inspections effectively prevents such plants from operating in this country. However, the House...

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) reintroduced the Orca Responsibility and Care Advancement (ORCA) Act (HR 1584) , in March 2017. The original bill—introduced in November 2015—was quite simple: It would have amended the Marine Mammal Protection...

As apex predators, sharks play a vital role in global marine ecosystems. But shark numbers are declining at an alarming rate due to shark finning, the practice of cutting off the fins—often, brutally, while the...

Fourteen-year-old Canyon Mansfield was walking with Kasey, his Labrador retriever, near his house when he noticed what looked like a sprinkler head. Unwittingly, he touched it, causing an explosion that knocked Canyon to the ground...

After the public outcry regarding the US Department of Agriculture’s scrubbing of inspection records and other important enforcement documents from its website, the department began to restore selected records online. These included annual reports for...

AWI welcomes Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL) as the new co-chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus in the 115th Congress, replacing Representative Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who retired at the end of the last term. Rep...

The continuing resolution that the 114th Congress passed in December to fund the government until April 28 kept in place AWI-supported language denying funds for horse slaughter plant inspections by the USDA—a move that effectively...