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.
This past week the animal protection movement lost a long-serving ally in Congress, with the passing of U.S. Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., at age 82. He served 43 years in the House, coming to Washington in 1971 during the Richard Nixon administration, and was the most senior Republican in Congress at the time of his death.
As we close in on the final couple months of 2013, HSLF is posting a preview of our 2013 Humane Scorecard. I hope you will check it out and see how your U.S. senators and U.S. representative have performed so far this year on animal protection issues.
Today marks the first day of Wisconsin’s second consecutive wolf hunting and trapping season in decades. The first wolf was killed this morning after suffering in a steel-jawed leghold trap. It’s another round of killing in what has been a pogrom against wolves in the areas they’ve reclaimed—with hundreds killed in the Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stripped wolves of their federal protections and turned management of their populations over to states with hostile anti-wolf policies.
As we enter the second week of the government shutdown, the to-do list for Congress only gets longer. During the coming weeks, we will hear a lot of talk about the debt ceiling, efforts to reopen the government and debate about cutting various federal programs.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans failed to reach agreement last night on continued funding of the federal government, and Washington this morning began the process of temporarily mothballing its programs and services. In a shutdown, “non-essential” federal workers are furloughed, while some “essential” operations continue. Several people have asked how a government shutdown affects animals, either by suspending critical animal welfare functions or providing a temporary reprieve from government killing programs.
At a time when Congress is in gridlock over federal spending, there should be heightened scrutiny of unnecessary and wasteful programs. A prime example is the USDA’s Wildlife Services lethal predator control program―one of the most destructive and indefensible government programs that causes untold suffering to animals, while costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
The House of Representatives is likely to take up the nutrition assistance portion of the Farm Bill again this week. While the House has not yet named its conferees and much work has yet to be done to negotiate a final House-Senate package, there’s growing opposition to one toxic provision in the broader bill, which was offered by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, and is the last thing they need if they want to get Farm Bill programs done this year.
