Federal Agencies Crack Down on Animal Cruelty, Cite Ties to Other Crimes

Several federal departments announced they have ramped up efforts to prevent and prosecute animal cruelty, ranging from puppy mills to cockfighting.

“Animal welfare is not up for negotiation in this country,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said during a news conference Sept. 21, adding, “It is a cause we are advancing every single day here at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a historic and unprecedented way.”

Speaking at her department’s Washington headquarters, Rollins said she and other members of President Donald Trump’s Animal Welfare Strikeforce outlined steps they have taken to further the president’s goal of better safeguards for animals. 

The public is also calling for action, she said, noting her agency received 7,522 unique public comments supporting efforts to strengthen Animal Welfare Act standards for dogs. Based on that input, Agriculture will release a regulatory proposal next year.

Another leader of the strike force, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., outlined 20 initiatives his department has taken to halt unnecessary use of animals in laboratory testing.

Together, numerous agencies are working “to usher in a new era of companion animal oversight,” an Agriculture news release said.

 As part of that effort, Rollins’s department recently deployed a new Animal Protection Bureau to “target bad actors across the dog industry,” she said. That bureau is working with state, local and federal partners to clamp down on so-called “puppy mills,” and “stop regulatory evasion and enforce the law,” Rollins said, among “tens of thousands” of breeders churning out dogs.

“The Trump Administration has delivered on more than two dozen commitments to improve companion animal welfare” under the Animal Welfare Act, a Sept. 21 release from Rollins’s office said.

Authorities more than doubled enforcement actions under that law compared to past years, the release said, citing  2,000 inspections of breeders and brokers, 15 official warnings for concerning circumstances and suspending, revoking or terminating licenses.

Calling animal cruelty “a gateway crime,” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said animal abuse is “very often attached to other crimes: drugs, dog fighting, gun trafficking, and domestic violence.”

In Pirro’s district alone, “we have 20 animal-cruelty cases where animals are picked out, and abused, shot, or beaten because they are the loved ones of a spouse or a girlfriend,” she said.

The Justice and Agriculture departments, among others, are working together for the first time in U.S. history to “identify, to refer, and to prosecute these cases,” Pirro said.

“These animals cannot speak for themselves; we will speak for them,” she said. “And now, for the first time, we have the ability to do that.”

Pirro’s statement comes just days after the Justice Department announced five men were indicted in connection with an alleged Kentucky cockfighting operation.

“The indictments allege that each of the defendants carried out rooster-breeding operations on their respective farms, for the purpose of breeding, raising, training, and selling roosters to participate in cockfighting,” a Justice Department news release said.

Earlier this year, Pam Bondi, who was then attorney general, said in a Justice memo, “Animal-fighting operations have expanded beyond small-scale, opportunistic actions to coordinated enterprises.”

“The Internet has facilitated the proliferation of animal torture videos that are created and distributed both domestically and internationally,” she wrote Feb. 18, declaring animal-welfare enforcement a Justice priority. “In addition to the unspeakable cruelty imposed on the animals themselves by these crimes, the link between animal abuse and abuse perpetrated against human beings has been clearly established.”