My Annual “Shareholder Letter” to You

In the world of business, some CEOs write an end-of-year letter to shareholders to offer a broad overview of the company’s yearly operations and performance. I am doing the same on behalf of the work of the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action, as a matter of transparency and as a reminder of the tangible gains delivered to you as an investor in the work of two nonprofit organizations devoted to making the world better for animals.

To review, the Center was the first organization in the field of animal protection solely focused on influencing the workings of business to forge a humane economic order. Animal Wellness Action works in the realms of public policy and politics, helping animals by promoting legal standards forbidding cruelty and enforcement of those anti-cruelty policies.

The two complementary strategies roll up into the goals of preventing cruelty and sparing the suffering of millions or even billions of animals, primarily by challenging large-scale institutional uses of animals in agriculture, scientific research and testing, wildlife management, fashion, and the use of animals in participatory and spectator sports.

Here are the core values of the organizations:

• All animals deserve humane treatment, including animals raised for food.
  
  
• Cruelty to animals runs counter to America’s long-standing legal traditions and religious values.
  
  
• Animal cruelty and mistreatment are often tied to social violence and crime, zoonotic disease spillover, and government waste and inefficiencies.
  
  
• Where viable alternatives exist to harmful uses of animals, businesses and government have a moral duty to choose them.

In an era where we’ve had revolutions in ethics and science, we can figure out a way to live well while also not leaving so much animal cruelty in our wake. The combination of moral intention and human ingenuity together are twin drivers of better outcomes for animals and the whole of society.

Where there is a form of commercial exploitation, there is an economic opportunity for a business ready to do no harm at all. Factory farming is, for example, the creation of human resourcefulness detached from conscience. What innovations in agriculture and food production and delivery might be possible with humane resourcefulness attached to conscience?

Helping Animal on a Grand Scale

We are always ready to challenge powerful special interests that have rigged the political system to establish or entrench animal abuse, especially in animal agriculture, science and testing, and wildlife trade and exploitation. It’s been a year of unprecedented progress, in particular, against animal testing and the global trade in kangaroo skins.

In May, after I spoke at its annual shareholder meeting in Germany, Adidas announced its plan to halt any sourcing of kangaroo skins for its soccer shoe models. The Japanese companies ASICS and Mizuno followed suit, as did the U.K.-based Umbro. With earlier pledges from Nike, New Balance, Puma, and others, we’ve now run the table with all major global athletic shoe brands, just five years after the launch of our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign.

In April, in his first public act as FDA Commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary released his agency’s “Roadmap to Reduce Animal Testing in Preclinical Safety Studies.” Dr. Makary explicitly pointed to our FDA Modernization Act 2.0 as the legal basis for his implementation of the wind-down of animal testing in drug development. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institutes of Health promised similar action. Ridglan Farms—a massive beagle factory farm supplying dogs to laboratories—agreed to shutter that part of its business by mid-2026, and that, too, came about because of tenacious and collaborative advocacy and the company’s recognition that its business model was becoming obsolete.

Both chambers of Congress passed legislation to incorporate key provisions of our Freedom in School Cafeterias and Lunches (FISCAL) Act to eliminate a dairy-industry monopoly and give kids plant-based milk options, and especially important choice for the 10 million or so kids in the food assistance program with some degree of lactose intolerance. Kids tossed 100 million or more gallons of milk a year, while others consumed the product and took ill. It’s wrong to put cows through such rigors of production (a Holstein now produces 25,000 pounds of milk a year on average) only to see so much milk headed for the waste bin.

As we did in prior years, we’ve so far stymied attempts by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and its factory farming surrogates to overturn the nation’s most important anti-confinement law for farm animals—Prop 12 in California and Question 3 in Massachusetts. The U.S. Supreme Court chose not to take up a second case brought by factory farmers challenging the laws and a key federal appeals court turned back a separate appeal by a Missouri-based factory farming company. We’ve worked to build steadfast opposition to the legislative initiatives in Congress from the NPPC and its biggest member, the Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods.

Our undercover investigations produced an array of outcomes against the massive, illegal network of animal fighters: smoking out cockfighting derbies and alerting law enforcement to step in and make arrests all across the nation; sniffing out a Texas company that acts as a broker for fighting animals reared in the United States and then traffics them to the Philippines to die in fighting arenas there; and blowing the whistle on sales of cockfighting implements on e-commerce platforms eBay and Etsy.

Our plan to create an animal cruelty crimes section at the Department of Justice took a giant step closer to reality. The Fiscal Year 2026 House appropriations bill funding the Department of Justice urges the Attorney General to allocate $2 million from funds provided to assemble a dedicated team of federal anti-cruelty prosecutors. Meanwhile, the DOJ also issued guidance to all 93 U.S. Attorneys to make animal cruelty a priority. The DOJ and the USDA said they’ll create a task force to examine animal cruelty crimes.

We are in the federal courts and in Congress putting a national spotlight on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to kill a half million North American barred owls in three Pacific Coast states. Sen. John Kennedy’s floor speech against the owl kill has already generated more than 2 million views, while more than a dozen scientists have panned the plan as unworkable and costly and exposed the opening up of 14 iconic national parks to owl hunting.

For another year, we’ve held off efforts to remove federal protections for wolves across most of their range, but threats loom in Congress and within the Interior Department to roll back protections. But we also went on the offense in the Northern Rockies region where they are not protected, securing a ruling that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was wrong to cast aside a petition to restore federal protections for wolves.

Key Partners Boost Our Efforts

In all of this work, I’ve heard your well-grounded exhortations to “work with like-minded groups,” and that’s exactly what we did in 2025. We’ve built a coalition of more than 1,000 organizations and agencies to push ahead the FIGHT Act in Congress to combat dogfighting and cockfighting, including the National Sheriffs Association and the National District Attorneys Association and nearly all other major American law enforcement agencies. For our field investigations work on animal fighting, we partner with the courageous team at Showing Animals Respect and Kindness and together we gather intelligence about fighting derbies, drone and infiltrate them, and then alert the authorities in real time to send the cockfighters fleeing as sheriffs’ deputies enter the fighting pits.

We also pay special heed to research and science, putting to work a team of staff scientists and affiliated scholars to work in the realms of epidemiology, veterinary medicine, psychology, animal behavior, wildlife biology, and other disciplines to document the case against cruelty. That work will build because one generous supporter is making a major investment in a new “think tank” we’ll operate—the first ever well-funded entity in the field of animal protection.

A Relentless Focus on Efficiency and Mission Commitment

And I also want you to underscore that we do this work with extraordinary efficiency. Our chief financial officer is also a board member and an experienced banking executive who works full-time for free. While we think there’s nothing wrong with paying for accounting and human resources work, you don’t pay for any of that. A single donor covers the costs of that important support work. That means your money—100% of it—goes into campaigns and programs to help animals. Our board members are deeply engaged in our work, adding value every day by offering legal services, financial services, international diplomatic work, and more.

We also bring the most experienced set of lawyers, campaigners, and other advocates to the task of driving change. There are no high salaries, just a living wage for our team members. My No. 1 criterion in hiring staff and enlisting volunteers is mission commitment. That hunger for change is a hedge against waste or laxity and a driver of intensity and risk-taking for animals.

As the son of a high-school football coach, I am a competitor and I am calling plays to win for animals. And I have a burning passion to stop animal cruelty. Every day I wake up understanding the stakes of my life are life and death matters.

Human beings can choose malice or mercy in their dealings with animals, and I say it must be mercy. And I am determined to convince the world of that.

If you agree, I want the Center and Animal Wellness to be your top choices for giving and engagement in our work. Join us and be part of a wave of change across many sectors of the economy and the world order.