This week, the Senate Agriculture Committee will hold a markup on the Senate Farm Bill, and we need your help to hold the line in our campaign to exclude the Save our Bacon Act from this or any other major legislative package in the 119th Congress. Please take this simple action to express your opposition to this dangerous measure.
Protect animals in the Farm Bill >>
Big Pork’s poison pill language targeting California’s Proposition 12 and related state-level public health and animal welfare statutes did not make it into the Farm Bill text released by the committee, chaired by Senator John Boozman (R-Ark.). However, we are certain to see attempts to stitch it into the package as an amendment during the markup. Key agribusiness interests will likely recruit one of the senators from a state full of factory farms to spearhead their last ditch-attempts to destroy these valuable laws designed to protect animals and the public interest.
We’ve been fighting this measure since this session of Congress began, and we’re determined to finish it off at this critical juncture. We’ve just launched a new advertising campaign urging Congress to reject Big Pork’s tiresome and reckless attempts to set aside duly enacted laws in multiple states across the country.
We’re also doggedly defending these humane state laws from the industry’s cynical and desperate attacks on Capitol Hill, and on Monday, some 200 advocates joined us there for a lobbying day. Together and separately, they met with congressional staff members including meetings with over half of the Senate Agriculture Committee to discuss their concerns about the Farm Bill and other federal measures with implications for animal welfare, including the Better CARE for Animals Act, another Humane World Action Fund priority.
Help animals in puppy mills, roadside zoos and labs!
Those who came to lobby in Congress were among 500 participants at Taking Action for Animals 2026, our national conference where we educate an engaged base of volunteers about current animal protection legislation and help them hone their skills as citizen advocates. With so much at stake, it’s been great to have supporters from around the country walking the halls of Congress to make the case for animals and the rights of individual states to enact animal protection statutes.
This is what makes us altogether different from Big Pork and other vested concerns with an economic and political interest in animal suffering and harm. Our supporters are volunteers, and citizen advocates, not hired influence peddlers from the pork industry trade associations or the large factory farming corporations that directly profit from the bottom-of-the-barrel standards that deny animals their most basic biological needs. The people who visited congressional offices this week made the case that Americans oppose the cruelty and misery that the meat industry inflicts on animals raised for food and want state laws that address some of the cruelest types of confinement to stay in place. Polling has shown that 80% of American voters, including nearly equal numbers of Democrats, Independents and Republicans, support enactment in their own states of a law like Prop 12 to protect farm animals and consumers.
If you’ve never been to TAFA, let me share a little about what happens there. For a whole weekend, we bring together some of the best and most accomplished advocates for pro-animal public policy on panels to explain exactly what’s in play for animals in the Congress and in state legislatures across the country. Presenters, including representatives of allied and co-sponsoring organizations, share their views about good advocacy techniques and give attendees not just a chance to ask questions but to participate in skills-building exercises and simulations. Our main panels center on current legislative and public education campaigns as well as litigation or legal matters of broad interest to animal advocates.
Whether we’re focusing on pork industry cruelty, puppy mills, animals in testing, the mistreatment of wildlife or some other topic we want attendees to leave TAFA sessions with a deeper understanding and an even deeper resolve to make the case for animals on their own, not just in Washington, DC but in their home states and communities. This is part of a larger initiative of building out the strongest possible public policy agenda for animals, with a network of trained citizens willing to shoulder the burden that such an effort entails. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing all of that energy—and all of that promise—come together, especially on the eve of a consequential vote on the future of animals.
What we did this year at TAFA, and what we’re doing right now in Congress, are part of a larger agenda for the growth of sound public policy advocacy for animals. We’re building a movement, one that unites people across the country in a single goal, that of achieving enduring gains for animals through legislative and regulatory successes, through the building out of political networks, the formation of political action committees in the states, concerted efforts to elect animal-friendly candidates to office, and much more. The stronger we get, the more we can achieve. We’re thankful to all those who have joined us in that greater struggle, the struggle for a better world for all animals.
