There are two pieces of good news for animal advocates coming today from the Obama administration.

Everyone knows speed kills. Speed limits in neighborhoods and school zones protect the safety of the community. But what if the government wanted to let those speed limits expire every few years? It would waste resources and threaten lives. Yet that’s exactly what the Obama administration is considering doing for a speed limit that has saved the lives of critically endangered whales.

Racehorses are impressive, and it would be hard not to be awed by their power and grace. But there’s an important power they lack: unlike other athletes, they have no control over the drugs administered to them. That’s why groups such as The HSUS and HSLF and concerned legislators and citizens must be their voice.  

The world has reacted in outrage to a photo of TV host Melissa Bachman posing next to a dead lion she had shot and killed in South Africa, and the entire episode has shined another spotlight on the disturbing subculture that seeks to exploit imperiled species by shooting them for trophies—and filming it for TV entertainment.

The world has reacted in outrage to a photo of TV host Melissa Bachman posing next to a dead lion she had shot and killed in South Africa, and the entire episode has shined another spotlight on the disturbing subculture that seeks to exploit imperiled species by shooting them for trophies—and filming it for TV entertainment.

Leaving poisons out in the wild is, in comparison to other ways of killing animals, among the most inhumane and indiscriminate of methods. Highly toxic poisons wreak havoc on the animals who ingest them, regardless of whether they were the intended victims or non-target casualties like endangered species and family pets.

Tennessee walking horses got a well-deserved boost today in a House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade hearing on H.R. 1518, the Prevent All Soring Tactics (PAST) Act. The bill, introduced by Reps. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., has the broad, bipartisan support of 230 cosponsors—more than half the House—and the Senate version, by Sens. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., and Mark Warner, D-Va., has 27.

There is more fallout this week in the wake of the MLive.com investigative series exposing politicians and state officials who made up stories out of whole cloth in order to prompt Michigan’s first wolf hunting season in half a century. A leading booster of the wolf hunt, Sen.

MLive.com, which reports for eight newspapers across Michigan, has released the first stories in a jarring investigative series on how state politicians used exaggerated or completely fabricated tales of wolf incidents to justify stripping away legal protection for wolves and opening a trophy hunting season on the state’s small population of wolves.

If the federal government could spend its dollars in a more cost-efficient way and make programs run better, shouldn’t Congress allow it? That’s the idea behind S. 1561, the CHIMP Act Amendments of 2013, which passed the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee by voice vote this morning. The bipartisan legislation sponsored by HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, Ranking Member Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Sen.