More than eight billion chickens and turkeys are raised for food each year in the U.S.—that’s just about a million slaughtered every single hour of every day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture exempts poultry from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, so these birds—which account for the vast majority of animals killed for food in America—lack even the legal protections afforded to cattle and pigs and aren’t required to be rendered insensible to pain before they’re killed.

The Senate and House Appropriations Committees have each produced their agriculture spending bills for Fiscal Year 2015, and both bills contain good news for animals. While the House and Senate will need to reconcile their differences to arrive at a final package, they’re in close agreement on the key items affecting animal welfare.

Horse Slaughter

Every day, every minute, animals are at risk somewhere, whether they’re languishing in abusive puppy mills, confined in metal cages on industrial factory farms where they can barely move an inch, or caught up in some other enterprise that puts profit over animal welfare. And as much as we’ve gained ground in our efforts to help those animals, it’s still the case that there are wealthy special interests and hard-hearted individuals trying to keep them in the crates and mills to guarantee their further suffering.

It’s been years in the making, but not a moment too soon, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has moved one step further on a rule to ban the slaughter of downer veal calves too sick, injured or weak to stand and walk on their own. Federal regulations already prohibit the slaughter of downed adult cattle for human consumption, requiring instead that sick or injured cows be humanely euthanized immediately.

It took less than ten minutes after the Kentucky polls closed last night for Sen. Mitch McConnell to be declared the victor in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate over challenger Matt Bevin—about the same amount of time birds with razor-sharp gaffs strapped to their legs will last in a cockfighting match.

We’re just over a third of the way through 2014, and 42 new animal protection laws have already been enacted this year in the states. It continues the surge in policymaking at the state level, and in total, it makes more than 900 new policies in the states since 2005, across a broad range of subjects bearing upon the lives of pets, wildlife, animals in research and testing, and farm animals. That is tremendous forward progress, closing the gaps in the legal framework for animals, and ushering in new standards in society for how animals are treated.

The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it was doubling down on the industry-coined name “Asiatic raccoon” by refusing to update it to the proper English name “raccoon dog” in its amended fur labeling regulations.

U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., yesterday announced that he and his staff are participating in Meatless Mondays in both his Washington, D.C. and San Fernando Valley offices, to raise awareness of how food choices impact public health, the environment, and animals.

Tonight, WAVE 3 News in Louisville is airing an exclusive story, for which reporter John Boel went undercover with a hidden camera at a recent pro-cockfighting rally.

There is more fallout from the Michigan wolf hunt scandal, in which state legislators relied on and trafficked in exaggerated and even fabricated stories about wolf incidents as they went about authorizing a hunt on the state’s small population of wolves. Nearly two-thirds of all wolf incidents in the Upper Peninsula occurred on a single farm, where the individual farmer baited wolves with cattle and deer carcasses.