You don’t need the glow of Rudolph’s red nose to see that only a Grinch would go after rules that guarantee families get healthy Christmas trees. But Capitol Hill’s reigning Grinch, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, is determined to spoil Christmas for both young and old.

There is more fallout today from the Michigan wolf hunt scandal, in which lawmakers and state officials spread fabricated stories about wolf incidents, even as most of the depredation on livestock occurred at one farm that left cattle carcasses out to attract wolves. That farmer has now been charged with animal cruelty for allegedly allowing two “guard donkeys,” paid for by taxpayers, to starve to death.

It’s been a remarkable year of policymaking at the state level, with legislatures so far passing 107 new animal protection measures. A handful of states are still in session and the number may climb, but in total, it makes more than 800 new policies in the states since 2005, across a broad range of subjects bearing upon the lives of pets, wildlife, animals in research, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to five grueling days of intensive, around-the-clock care, a very fortunate Canada goose at the Cape Wildlife Center in Massachusetts narrowly escaped lethal lead poisoning this week. Unable to stand, walk, or lift his head to eat when he was first found, the suffering bird had nearly no chance of survival without emergency medical care.