The House appropriations committee has just issued a clear directive to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reinstate full public access to animal welfare inspection reports and other records that show how businesses like roadside zoos and puppy mills, and research facilities that do invasive...

History was made today in Ohio when Gov. John Kasich signed into law anti-puppy-mill legislation that implements major reforms designed to improve the lives of breeding dogs. The new law includes a ban on some of the most cruel practices used by commercial dog breeders, like stacking dogs in cages...

A Petland store that was the subject of an HSUS undercover investigation released this week appears to be closing down. After news of our investigation, which showed more than a dozen rabbits had apparently died at the Virginia store without medical care, and following an HSUS tip-off, police...

Early Monday morning, our Animal Rescue Team arrived at two properties in Milburn, Oklahoma, with officers from the Johnston County Sheriff’s Office, who served search warrants as part of an alleged animal cruelty situation. Law enforcement requested our assistance with rescuing potentially hundreds of dogs from two dog breeding operations.

Since our undercover footage is now in the hands of New York City authorities, we can reveal what our investigations team discovered over the course of six weeks at a pet store called American Kennels on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Between October and early December, our investigator...

Dead rabbits piled up in a freezer and hidden under a table in a back room were among the many shocking discoveries made at a Petland store in Fairfax, Virginia, during a five-month hidden camera investigation by the Humane Society of the United States. But what our undercover investigator, who...

Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture inexplicably blacked out records of inspections at puppy mills, roadside zoos, facilities that do invasive research on animals, walking horse shows and other operations, leaving those who use—and potentially abuse—animals in their care with little...

Each year, millions of homeless pets enter U.S. shelters and approximately two million dogs and cats are euthanized. This is a huge improvement since the 1970s when it was closer to 15 million, but it’s still too many. That’s why ending pet homelessness is a key goal for the Humane Society of the...

In September last year, an HSUS undercover investigation of a Petland store in Frisco, Texas, a city in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, revealed frail and ailing puppies, including some dogs too sick to eat and suffering from vomiting and diarrhea. Also among the gruesome discoveries was a...

On December 11, we released the results of our shocking undercover investigation at two Petland locations, one in Las Vegas and another in Kennesaw, Georgia, where our investigators found several sick puppies and a dead puppy in a freezer. When we started the investigation, we were familiar with the...

Last year, a state inspector visiting Wendy Pets, a puppy mill in Seneca, Kansas, found 24 dogs had simply disappeared from the facility. When asked, a representative told the inspector he had “euthanized” the dogs by shooting them. Although he had been breeding dogs for years, he claimed “he wasn’t...

Americans are taking a stand against one of the gravest assaults on animal welfare, unfolding right now in the U.S. Congress, where a radical faction of the pork industry is pushing to include the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act (H.R. 4417/S. 2019) in the Farm Bill. We’re not going...

There are some 10,000 puppy mills active in the United States – a mammoth number, by any measure. Animals in these enterprises are condemned to a life of squalor and suffering with no relief in sight. At a typical puppy mill, dozens or even hundreds of animals are housed in stacked wire cages or...

Today, in a crucial victory for animals, President Trump signed into law the Farm Bill minus the anti-animal King amendment but with three pro-animal measures. This is an outcome the Humane Society Legislative Fund had long worked for, along with our Humane Society of the United States legal and...

The former manager of a now-closed Petland store in Fairfax County, Virginia, where our undercover investigation revealed a pile of dead rabbits in the freezer and a shocking lack of veterinary care, has pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and three other charges of failing to provide adequate care for...

Inscribing the humane treatment of animals into our laws takes years, and so we are heartened by some key measures at the state level taking effect in 2024, which are the result of so much rallying and advocacy, and which will contribute to shaping the humane world we envision. As of Jan. 1, 2024, California’s Proposition 12, widely considered the world’s strongest law for the protection of farm animals, now enjoys full implementation.

For the last eight years, we have published the annual Horrible Hundred report listing 100 problem puppy mills in the United States. We do this to raise awareness about and fight a deep-seated problem of irresponsible and greedy commercial dog sellers who mistreat the animals they profit from, often...

Our  fight to stop the sale of puppy mill puppies in pet stores is coming to a head in Florida, a state in which we’ve helped to pass over 80 local ordinances prohibiting those sales. A new bill in its state legislature, SB 994/HB 849, would void popular  pet store ordinances recently enacted in...

Our mission is to build a more humane world for animals, and over the past few weeks, I have been reflecting on our progress toward this vision by recounting 2023’s wins for animals of all kinds: wildlife, dogs, cats and other companion animals, animals used in labs, and animals farmed for food and for fur.

Note: This blog is part of a series highlighting how we fight—and win—for animals. For this post, I join with Sara Amundson, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, to tell the story about how we tackle institutionalized animal suffering by changing laws and government regulations. “Why...