The August 5^th primary election in Missouri will ask voters there whether to approve Amendment 1, which seeks to enshrine the “right to farm” in the state constitution. It’s being pushed by the same politicians and special interests who tried to overturn a voter-approved ballot initiative in 2010 to crack down on puppy mills. They want to prevent the state’s voters from protecting dogs subjected to cruel treatment in Missouri's puppy mills or from helping animals suffering the cruelties of intensive confinement agriculture.

There’s good news for our continuing efforts to fortify enforcement and crack down on inhumane practices at slaughter plants. The Agricultural Marketing Service, the division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that buys meat for the National School Lunch Program, just announced that it will strengthen its humane handling audits for the slaughterhouses that supply it with meat.

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.

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.

President Obama has now released his budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2015, to fund the government’s $3.5 trillion-plus operations, and the budget recommendations include several important provisions for animals. If ratified by Congress, these proposals will extend prohibitions on funding horse slaughter plant inspections in the U.S.