The first animal protection bill of the 114^th Congress is on track and leaving the station.

There’s a new Congress in town, but it includes many veteran members who are back at work on the Hill, too. We want you to know how those members performed on important animal protection issues in the last session, so you can either encourage them to keep up the good work, or let them know you want them to do better for animals this time around. 

The 113th Congress, spanning January 2013 to December 2014, may be remembered for its relative lack of productivity and growing polarization. In terms of general lawmaking, it appears this Congress enacted fewer laws, by a wide margin, than any other since at least 1947, the date to which the House clerk’s records go back.

As the year winds down to a close, I’m pleased to report that 136 new animal protection laws have been enacted this year at the state and local levels—the largest number of any year in the past decade. That continues the surge in animal protection policymaking by state legislatures, and in total, it makes more than 1,000 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.

Congressional appropriators unveiled a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill last night, to continue funding the federal government for fiscal year 2015 and avoid a shutdown when the current budget expires tomorrow.

As poaching of animals rages on in Africa, threatening the very existence of some of our planet’s most iconic species, we in the United States must do still more to tackle the issue of wildlife trafficking both at home and abroad.

The Department of Defense recently announced that it will halt the use of live animals in a variety of medical training programs, beginning January 1. As the Boston Globe reported yesterday, “The military has been instructed to instead use substitutes such as a realistic human dummy developed by a research team from Boston.

Congress returns today for the lame-duck session, and one of the first items on the House agenda is final passage of H.R.4194, the Government Reports Elimination Act. In May, the Washington Post published a report titled “Unrequired reading,” on the thousands of agency reports mandated by Congress, some of which are as thick as “doorstops” and are just “gathering dust.”