An unnamed dog is up for a breed evaluation at the Denver Animal Shelter. Dec. 8, 2020.
Cassandra Ballard | Sentinel Staff Writer
In early returns, Aurora voters appeared poised to repeal a years-old ban on pit bull dogs.
Measure 3A, which would repeal the 20-year-old ban, was leading about 44,341 votes to 40,184 votes at about 7:30 p.m.
The pit bull ban in Aurora was initially enacted in 2005 with some leniency for people the city had previously issued a license. In 2014, voters approved a referendum to keep the ban. In 2021, however, Aurora City Council approved the removal of dog breed restrictions from the city ordinance — without going back to voters for permission.
Later, in 2021, Aurora resident Matthew Snider sued the Aurora City Council over the vote because it did not include voter support. He argued that the council broke city charter language and that Aurora voters decided on the issue and must decide on any changes. By 2023, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Snider.
So, Aurora lawmakers asked voters whether the city should repeal the restricted breed ban and allow residents to own American Pit Bull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers and Staffordshire Bull Terriers.
Veterinarian’s stance on Aurora’s lifted pit bull ban
“We had a big moment of panic when we saw that the repeal had been overturned because we do see a big difference when we have breed-specific legislation on the books,” said Senior Director of Advocacy and Education at the Dumb Friends League Ali Mickelson, “but they are not enforcing that ban right now. So we haven’t felt that yet, but we are preparing for it.”
She said that when there is a breed-specific ban, there is an influx of banned breeds brought to the shelter, and it is very challenging to find them new homes.
Many shelters are usually already at maximum capacity, so having a breed-specific ban overwhelms shelters with finding placement for them. Mickelson said that many shelters are moving away from destroying unwanted dogs, and Colorado shelters have a strong network for moving animals.
When there was a pit bull ban in Denver, and Aurora was fully implementing its breed-specific ban, the shelter would have to label the kennels, warning people that they might live in a place with a ban on that breed.
“We have these families that come in, and they’re so excited to find out more about a dog, and then they find out that they can’t adopt that dog because of the restrictions in their community,” Mickelson said. “It just results in us having dogs that stay longer.”
Denver Dumb Friends League sits at the border of Aurora and Denver. When there was a ban in both cities, Mickelson said they had difficulty finding homes for those breeds.
“When those two communities had those bans, that just really, really limited our doctors for those breeds,” she said.
Fish and Wildlife Service strategy to preserve spotted owl populations doomed to fail on practical grounds given that the control area covers 24 million acres, including 14 units of the National Park Service
Seattle —Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy filed a legal action in U.S. District Court in Washington State challenging a plan crafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency (FWS) that greenlights the killing of almost half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest over the next 30 years. The FWS filed a Record of Decision on barred owl management in late August. The complaint will be filed today and is available on request.
The unprecedented scheme to kill barred owls — a species native to North America and protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — has been approved to reduce competition between that species and its look-alike cousins, the northern spotted owl and the California spotted owl. Spotted owls have experienced significant population decline over decades. This decline began and continues due to habitat loss, particularly the timber harvest of old growth forest. The groups claim in their filing that the plan is not only ill-conceived and inhumane, but also destined to fail as a strategy to save the spotted owl.
“This inhumane, unworkable barred owl kill-plan is the largest-ever scheme to slaughter raptors in any nation by a country mile,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “It calls for unidentified, unspecified individuals to be allowed to kill barred owls over 24 million acres of federal, state, and private lands — including invading national parks such as Olympic, Crater Lake, and Redwoods National Parks at night to shoot owls that look like spotted owls. It has a zero percent chance of success, but it will produce an unheard-of body count of a long-protected owl species native only to North America.”
Barred owls have engaged in range expansion, which is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon and is a core behavioral and adaptive characteristic of many species of birds and mammals, including barred owls. Former FWS forest owl biologist Kent Livezey noted, in a peer-reviewed paper, that 111 other native bird species engaged in “recent” range expansion, with 14 of them expanding over an area larger than the area where barred owls are moving. “To say that this plan is unprecedented is an understatement,” said Livezey, who is extensively published on spotted owls, barred owls, and range expansion of native bird species in the United States.
In their complaint, the plaintiffs allege that FWS has violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to properly analyze the impacts of their strategy and improperly rejecting reasonable alternatives to the mass killing of barred owls, such as nonlethal population control approaches, spotted owl rehabilitation efforts, and better protections for owl habitat. The plaintiffs also argue that the FWS’s plan is so reckless and its implementation is so imprecise and poorly conceived that it is highly unlikely to achieve its goal to stabilize or increase spotted owl populations.
Even worse, the plaintiffs further allege, the plan will result in mistaken-identity kills of spotted owls and other owl species, who are generally nocturnal and living dozens of feet above the forest floor and in dense evergreen forests. The disturbance alone would have adverse effects on a wide range of other wildlife, including threatened species such as the marbled murrelet. Night hunting of the owls is planned, increasing the risk of mistaken-identity kills.
“This shoddy plan is erected on a questionable foundation of short-term pilot studies,” said Jennifer McCausland, senior vice president for corporate policy for the Center for a Humane Economy. “And even those studies undermine the approach being taken today — any short-time beneficial effects for spotted owls will be vitiated by recolonization of surviving barred owls unless the killings continue in an ‘endless management’ paradigm.”
“FWS’s plan is completely voluntary,” said Kate Schultz, the Center for a Humane Economy’s senior attorney. “So even if the agency believed that shooting nearly 500,000 barred owls is required to save the spotted owl from extinction, this scheme will not accomplish that anyway because it is unfunded, haphazard, and relies on cooperation from unwilling actors. We’re going to end up with thousands of barred owls buried in shallow graves in the forests of the Northwest, even more deforestation, and still no solution for the spotted owl.”
That sentiment was also shared by two-term Public Lands Commissioner of Washington State HilaryFranz, who came out against the plan in a June letter of opposition. “I don’t believe that a decades-long plan to kill nearly half-a-million barred owls across millions of acres of land represents a solution that is absolutely viable, affordable or capable — in fact it raises an enormous amount of questions,” she said on a June 20 webinar for Animal Wellness Action. “How can we prevent the surviving barred owls from simply recolonizing and repopulating the very areas we are trying to preserve? I think we can do better, and we have too many questions that need to be answered.”
The Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action have built a coalition of more than 200 organizations opposing the USFWS barred owl kill-plan. That coalition includes more than 20 local Audubon organizations, including a set of Audubon organizations across Washington State. The coalition also includes owl protection and raptor rehabilitation centers across the West.
Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy are represented by lawyers with the Center for a Humane Economy, Animal and Earth Advocates, PLCC, and Greenfire Law, PC.
Animal Wellness Action is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(4) whose mission is to help animals by promoting laws and regulations at federal, state and local levels that forbid cruelty to all animals. The group also works to enforce existing anti-cruelty and wildlife protection laws. Animal Wellness Action believes helping animals helps us all. Twitter: @AWAction_News
Center for a Humane Economy is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) whose mission is to help animals by helping forge a more humane economic order. The first organization of its kind in the animal protection movement, the Center encourages businesses to honor their social responsibilities in a culture where consumers, investors, and other key stakeholders abhor cruelty and the degradation of the environment and embrace innovation as a means of eliminating both. The Center believes helping animals helps us all. Twitter: @TheHumaneCenter
President-elect Donald Trump pardons a turkey named Corn as part of the traditional presidential turkey pardon ceremony in 2020.Kevin Deitsch/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Kenny Torrella is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat.
Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House, and if his next administration is anything like his first, he’ll likely further weaken what few legal protections exist for animals.
During his first four years in office, Trump’s Cabinet:
Increased already excessively fast line speeds at pig slaughterhouses, endangering both animals and workers, and sought to do the same for poultry
Killed a rule to improve animal welfare under organic food standards
And when slaughterhouses became Covid-19 hot spots in the early days of the pandemic, Trump — at the behest of the meat industry — demanded they remain open, even as schools and offices closed.
In a second term, with what could well be a unified Republican government, Trump could go further in weakening animal protections, given his corporate-friendly, deregulatory tendencies.
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“He now has much more active involvement from intelligent and strategic people whose mission is to reduce — if not eliminate — federal regulation of businesses, including animal-using businesses that already get a light touch” from regulators, Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told me. (Disclosure: Last summer, I attended a media fellowship program at Vermont Law and Graduate School.) And while most federal regulatory employees in agencies like the US Department of Agriculture are civil servants, Trump has promised to reclassify them as political appointees so he can fire and replace them with loyalists to advance his deregulatory agenda.
However, some of the people high up in Trump’s orbit, despite their reactionary views on other social issues, have indicated relatively pro-animal welfare or anti-factory farming beliefs. Some in a second term could wind up in positions to advance animals’ interests, like Lara Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — though Kennedy could do plenty of damage to human beings if put in a position of authority on health.
Whether they’ll use their influence to help animals in a second Trump term is unknown to unlikely. But there’s a sliver of precedent they could build on, as Trump’s first term wasn’t all bad for animals. For example, his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Secretary Andrew Wheeler sought to significantly reduce animal testing with the goal of replacing most of it with alternative methods by 2035, and other federal agencies cut back on kitten, dog, and monkey testing.
The death of Moby (pictured) and three other squirrel monkeys used in a US Food and Drug Administration study on nicotine addiction resulted in the shuttering of the research in 2018 and prompted the agency to build a council to oversee its animal studies.US Food and Drug Administration/White Coat Waste
And for all the very real differences between President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the truth is that when it comes to animal welfare, there’s not much daylight between the parties. President Joe Biden’s EPA last year reversed the Trump EPA’s animal testing phase-out, while his Justice Department sided with the pork industry in a Supreme Court case over a landmark California law that banned locking pigs in tiny cages. Biden’s US Fish and Wildlife Service recently sought to revive a Trump-era rule that eliminates protections for gray wolves after environmental groups had successfully sued to stop it. Minnesota Gov. and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, as I wrote previously, also has a long, cozy relationship with the factory farm industry.
That animal protection remains a politically homeless cause was further underscored elsewhere in Tuesday’s election, as animal issues on the ballot in state and local jurisdictions across the US lost resoundingly, illustrating that voters may not be ready for more ambitious animal welfare laws.
Animals lost big at the ballot box
In Denver, 64 percent of voters rejected a ballot measure to ban slaughterhouses, which would have closed the largest lamb slaughterhouse in the US. A recently released investigation of the facility, conducted by an animal rights group, documented injured lambs that are unable to walk being kicked and pushed toward slaughter; lambs hanging upside down on the slaughter line and still thrashing after their throats were slit; employees laughing and spanking animals; and the alleged use of “Judas sheep” — adult sheep used to lead lambs to slaughter.
Fifty-eight percent of Denverites also voted against a ban on the sale of fur.
Despite the losses, Pro-Animal Future, the group behind the Denver ballot measures, celebrated the fact that more than a third of the city’s voters were willing to vote for a far-reaching measure as banning slaughterhouses — even as the campaign was outspent 6-to-1 by a coalition of national and state meat industry groups, restaurants, and labor unions.
“This was a bold campaign, and no one said changing the status quo was going to be easy,” Pro-Animal Future spokesperson Olivia Hammond said in a press release. “Over 100,000 meat eaters voted for a world without slaughterhouses, and that’s a foundation we’ll continue building on. Voters aren’t used to seeing animal rights on the ballot, and we are paving the way with this campaign.”
A volunteer with the ballot measure to ban slaughterhouses in Denver city limits spends time with rescued animals at Broken Shovels Sanctuary in Commerce City, Colorado.Pro-Animal Future
The CEO of the lamb slaughterhouse called supporters of the ban “losers.”
At the state level, meanwhile, with three-quarters of the votes counted, Coloradans voted 55.5 to 44.5 against a prohibition on trophy hunting mountain lions, lynx, and bobcats.
And in Sonoma County, California, where nearly 75 percent of voters cast ballots for Harris, only 15 percent supported Measure J, an initiative to phase out large factory farms, which would’ve closed as many as 21 operations.
“While the opportunity to alleviate animal suffering and move our society in a better direction fell short today, we’ve always known that this will take time and we trust that people are going to get there,” the Coalition to End Factory Farming campaign, which advocated for Measure J, said in a statement. The campaign was outspent 8-to-1 by the measure’s opposition, which was funded by large meat and dairy companies and trade groups.
In Florida, with more than 95 percent of votes counted, 67 percent of voters supported an amendment to enshrine a constitutional right to hunt and fish. Florida law already protects both of these activities, and environmental advocates argue that the measure’s vague language could enable hunters to use more violent methods of trapping and killing wildlife.
While voters have in the past overwhelmingly supported bans on tiny cages for farmed animals (I worked on one of these in Massachusetts in 2016 when I worked for the Humane Society of the US), the proposed outright bans on factory farms and slaughterhouses in Sonoma County and Denver were too much even for some of the bluest parts of the country. The rejection of the fur sales ban in Denver came as more of a surprise, considering that voters in nearby Boulder passed one in 2021. California’s legislature, along with localities in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Florida, have also banned fur (though not via ballot initiatives).
Female breeding pigs confined in gestation crates. Voters in numerous states have banned the crates via ballot measures.Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media
The agricultural measures faced criticism from both the agricultural industry and some fellow anti-factory farming advocates, who argued that they’d just displace meat production elsewhere. They likely faced cultural headwinds, too, given that Denver is in a state proud of its ranching industry, and Sonoma County — an area with both higher-welfare organic farms and conventional factory farms — takes pride in its farming heritage.
Some critics of the Sonoma County ballot measure argued that, despite its good intentions, it was poorly crafted and went far ahead of where voters stand on the issue.
Dena Jones, a former farm animal program director at the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute, told Vox the Denver slaughterhouse and Sonoma County factory farm bans were “ill-advised.”
“I found it very hard to believe in either case that either one of those could be successful,” she said, “and I thought the backlash might make it more of a loss than a gain.”
Whatever the shortcomings of these ballot measures, the fierce opposition they faced in blue strongholds highlights how resistant Democratic voters can be to more ambitious meat industry reforms, even though meat production heavily contributes to issues central to progressives’ agenda: climate change, environmental pollution, and labor exploitation.
How to prevent animal cruelty, whoever’s in office
The losses should come as a sobering moment for the animal rights movement. Voters have been able to stomach modest reforms, like bans on cages for farm animals, which ask little of them besides slightly higher prices for meat and eggs. The economic effects of such measures are also diffused throughout entire industries, as opposed to one city or county — or in the case of Denver, a single slaughterhouse — which may make voters more fearful of impacts to their local communities.
These dynamics ought to weigh heavily into how activists plan future ballot measures. Currently, animal rights groups in Oregon are collecting signatures for a 2026 ballot initiative that would dramatically curtail — if not outright eliminate — animal farming, animal testing, and other business activities that rely on animals in the state. That’s an unpopular proposition to everyone but the most strident vegans, though the theory behind the ballot measure is noteworthy: It works by removing many of the sweeping exemptions carved into Oregon’s anti-animal cruelty laws for agriculture and other animal-using industries, thereby revealing how these businesses depend on legalized animal abuse.
As to how animal advocates should approach the next Trump administration, Jones said, the prospects for new federal animal welfare legislation or regulations are dim. But there are opportunities to improve enforcement of the few federal laws that do protect animals, like the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the Animal Welfare Act. These are primarily enforced by civil servants, not political appointees, so enforcement would be less politically charged than lobbying for new policies altogether.
“I’ve done policy work for animals for 30 years,” said Jones, “and it is possible to make progress for animals” in both Republican and Democrat administrations.
But that progress will be harder to forge if Trump follows through on his vow to mass fire civil servants and replace them with sycophants.
Jones also challenges animal advocates to view their issues from a conservative mindset to better appeal to both parties. Anti-animal testing nonprofit White Coat Waste has found success — like the phasing out of some cruel animal studies — by working with both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. The group advocates for reductions in animal testing on the basis of not just compassion for animals, but also conservative values like reducing taxpayer waste.
“You need to look at issues where the interest of the agency, the industry, and animal protection or environmental protection overlap,” said Jones. “There always are some.”
The recreational trapping season in Vermont begins on the fourth Saturday of October each year and lasts through March 31. For some animals like otters and beavers, this season lasts for five long months. There are no limits on the numbers of animals a trapper may kill. There are also no limits on the number of traps that may be set, including on our shared public lands.
Leghold and body-crushing kill traps are non-selective by design so a trap set for a bobcat or a beaver can just as easily catch a dog or protected species like great blue herons. Every year, non-targeted victims are referred to as “bycatch” or “incidental takes.” These captures should be published on Fish & Wildlife’s website so that the public is aware, however the only way we ever learn about these horrible incidents is through freedom of information acts submitted to Fish & Wildlife.
You might notice that Vermont Fish & Wildlife often refers to the trapping season as the “regulated” season and what that means is that largely unregulated trapping occurs year-round if wildlife is deemed a nuisance by landowners or municipalities (under the statute title 10 VSA §4828). This means that leghold and kill traps are not just a danger during the “regulated” recreational trapping season, but year round with little oversight in a largely unregulated open season. Unlike other states, Fish & Wildlife is not notified if landowners or towns set traps. They’re not even notified after the trapping occurs and animals are killed! The state has little knowledge as to how many foxes, beavers, bobcats and other animals are injured or killed every year during what amounts to an open season.
The public may also be surprised to know that despite the fact that Fish & Wildlife was required to change the trapping regulations under Act 159, these dangerous traps may be set on public lands with no required signage. Traps are baited with enticing items like animal carcasses and scent lures placing any curious animal at risk. Traps are often hidden under leaf debris or dirt making them virtually invisible. Wildlife advocates encouraged Fish & Wildlife to require that traps be placed a far distance from the public, but Fish & Wildlife refused, allowing traps to be set a mere 50 feet from heavily traveled hiking trails. For powerful kill traps that are placed in shallow streams and culverts, there are no trap setbacks at all! As someone who walks in the woods with my dogs and children, these new regulations are far from adequate.
Another inadequate regulation change is that Fish & Wildlife still allows exceptionally cruel methods of capturing animals. Despite Act 159’s attempt to make trapping less inhumane, steel-jawed leghold traps are still the trap of choice for trappers. So-called “best management practices” (BMP) for trapping still inflict tremendous suffering on animals. You can read more about that on the legislature’s website here: [https://shorturl.at/e629l]. According to this report, “BMP research revealed that certain animals like raccoons and skunks have a higher probability of serious injuries due to self-biting as a result of being restrained in leghold traps, yet leghold traps are still included in the BMP recommendations for raccoons.”
If your dog or cat is unlucky enough to find themselves ensnared in a steel-jawed leghold trap or worse, a body crushing Conibear trap, releasing them safely, or releasing them at all, is not easy. Just last year, a dog was trapped in a kill trap set for beavers in Castleton (https://shorturl.at/2U7Nf). The dog was a large German Shepherd and the dog’s size saved his life. A smaller dog would’ve died. Another dog wasn’t so lucky. She lost her life to a kill trap in Underhill (https://shorturl.at/0ILL2). You won’t ever hear about these tragedies because the state knows it’s horrible P.R. for trapping.
But the question we should really be asking ourselves is why any animal, wild or domestic, should be allowed to be tortured in traps in the name of recreation and tradition. If an animal is to be trapped, it should be for a very good reason, not for a recreational hobby.
Exposing the Big Game 