By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

Every day of every year, we take meaningful action to create a better world for animals. In the U.S., our State Affairs team works across the country to help protect animals in a variety of ways. One of the most important involves partnering with elected officials, law enforcement agencies, individual advocates and other parties to ensure that animal welfare legislation is put into place and then properly enforced.

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

By Kathleen Conlee

Advocating on behalf of animals at the ballot box is not for the faint of heart. It requires a kind of strength, determination and stamina. Sometimes we win big—think of our California ballot measure, Proposition 12, that passed in 2018 and became the strongest law for the protection of farm animals in the U.S., which even the U.S. Supreme Court upheld—and sometimes we don’t.

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

Some fights for animals are a long-game—and that’s certainly been the case for everyone’s favorite long-necked animal, the giraffe. After years of advocacy, we are thrilled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing all four species of giraffes under the Endangered Species Act. This overdue proposal comes thanks to a petition and lawsuit brought by us and our allies.

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

Keeping wild animals in small, bare cages inside a retail shopping mall is absurd and abhorrently cruel. Yet this is the business model of SeaQuest, a for-profit chain of shopping mall-based wild animal petting zoos that has been plagued with controversies and cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture more than 110 times for violations of the Animal Welfare Act.