Our Successes
In just six years, the Center for a Humane Economy has built a track record of reshaping the behavior of corporations and sectors of the national and global economy that profit from animal exploitation, and we’ve championed alternate forms of commerce not grounded on that kind of harm. By promoting animal-protection values in corporate decision-making, and working to eliminate particularly cruel practices long driven by profit, the Center has achieved landmark victories across multiple industries — from pharmaceuticals and agriculture to entertainment and commercial trafficking of animals.
Modernizing the $1.35 Trillion Pharmaceutical Industry and Reducing Animal Testing
Through our Modernize Testing campaign, the Center led efforts to end the federal mandate for animal testing in drug development. Passage of the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, followed by public commitments from FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, signaled a national pivot toward non-animal testing technologies. This set of actions should reverberate across the entire global pharmaceutical sector and act as a catalyst to wind down the long era of animal testing for drug development and other purposes.
Ending Kangaroo Leather in Athletic Footwear
Our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign convinced the top eight global athletic shoe brands, including Nike, Puma, Adidas, and New Balance, to abandon kangaroo leather in soccer cleats. The result: a dramatic blow to the Australian kangaroo skin trade and a watershed moment in aligning wildlife protection values with sourcing of athletic wear.
Crippling the Global Cockfighting Crime Syndicate
Through our Animal Fighting Is the Pits campaign, the Center helped pass the Parity in Animal Cruelty Enforcement (PACE) Act of 2018, outlawing cockfighting in all U.S. jurisdictions — including the U.S. territories. We disrupted a multi-billion-dollar network spanning Puerto Rico to Mexico to Guam and the Philippines, which relied on U.S.-sourced fighting birds. Our legal team has since successfully defended the law in six federal court cases, locking in this nationwide prohibition and allowing us and federal law enforcement to zero in on trafficking of fighting birds to more than 30 nations.
Dismantling the Big Cat Pet Trade
The Center helped pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act, making it illegal to own lions, tigers, and other big cats as pets or operate cub-petting schemes. Our No Big Cats as Pets campaign, in cooperation with Big Cat Rescue, helped shutter the largest private operators and has been a catalyst for ending this dangerous, exploitative trade while also reducing the demand pipeline for captive breeding and relieving the burden on a network of sanctuaries to take the animal refugees.
Reforming Thoroughbred Racing
Under our Showing Horse Sense campaign, the Center and its sister organization Animal Wellness Action played a key role in the passage of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act — creating national standards for drug use and track safety. This forced the horse racing industry to confront its disjointed regulatory structure, end race-day doping of horses to enhance performance, and usher in meaningful reforms that improve the safety and welfare of racehorses across the country.
Promoting and Defending Cage-Free Animal Agriculture
Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals
Our Cage-Free Future campaign was pivotal in securing a major victory at the U.S. Supreme Court in NPPC v. Ross, upholding California’s Prop 12 and other state laws that limit in-state sales of animal products from factory farms that use immobilizing crates and cages. This ruling empowers states to continue to enforce laws to restrict sales of animal products from particularly inhumane production systems. The Center has also been working to stop the EATS Act (recently rebranded as the Food Security and Farm Protection Act), which seeks to achieve in Congress what the NPPC could not achieve in the federal courts.
Eliminating Greyhound Racing
As the key maneuver in our Ban Greyhound Racing campaign, the Center supported the Florida ballot initiative to ban greyhound racing, closing 12 tracks and collapsing two-thirds of the U.S. industry overnight. From 60 tracks a generation ago, only two remain. The federal Greyhound Protection Act, propelled by the Center and GREY2K USA, will close out this industry altogether, making one of the most tangible examples of a total shutdown of an enterprise that not long ago generated billions in profits from animal competition that turned racing tracks into crash sites.
Ending Horse Slaughter
Through our Horses in the Stable, Not on the Table campaign, the Center is pushing to end the slaughter of American horses for human consumption. Annual slaughter numbers have plummeted from 400,000 to roughly 20,000. We are now poised to finish the job — ending live horse exports for slaughter and closing this grim chapter of equine exploitation once and for all.
Breaking the Dairy Monopoly in Public Schools
The Center and Switch4Good are on the verge of a breakthrough to allow plant-based milk in the National School Lunch Program, providing millions of students with a humane, non-dairy beverage as a way of breaking the dairy industry’s stranglehold in school cafeterias. Dairy cows have been selectively bred and bioengineered to annually produce six to seven times more milk than they did in the decades before dairy had a de facto monopoly in schools. Yet 177 million gallons goes to waste each year because one in three Americans is lactose intolerant.
Saving Wolves
The Center’s Saving Wolves campaign is taking on the trophy hunting and commercial trapping industries in seeking to protect wolves from assault across their range in the lower 48 states. In state court in Wisconsin in 2021, we secured a courtroom injunction against wolf killing in the state after it unleashed a horde of hunters that slaughtered over 200 wolves in less than 60 hours. The next year, we helped secure a victory in U.S. District Court in northern California to block the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from removing federal Endangered Species Act protections for wolves across the entire country, including in the Upper Great Lakes states, where wolves have been at risk from state policies. And now we’re leading the charge in federal court in Montana to ensure that wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains states are no longer subjected to the barbaric treatment due to the actions of agencies and state lawmakers hellbent on seeing wolves killed by inhumane means and, in some cases, without limits.
Advancing Other Pathbreaking Campaigns to Build a New, Humane Economy
We are undertaking other game-changing campaigns, such as helping to rebuild Angola’s ecotourism industry by promoting the natural migration of African elephants to a nation that lost so much wildlife after a decades-long civil war. Elephants are more commercially valuable alive than dead and are a draw for tourists throughout the world, especially with their ivory tusks connected to living tissue.
The Center is also actively working to get the egg industry and the food retail sector to implement ovo-sexing technology — an innovation that can prevent the mass killing of hundreds of millions of male chicks each year through maceration. By promoting scalable solutions, we’re pushing the industry toward a more humane and scientifically advanced production model.
Whether reshaping massive sectors like pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and athletic wear, or eliminating niche markets of cruelty like cockfighting, cub petting, and horse slaughter, the Center is achieving what few have attempted: embedding animal welfare into the economic DNA of corporate America and beyond. We are working on structural market corrections rooted in ethics, economics, and public accountability.
As the humane economy asserts its own power, its own logic and its essential decency, an older order is passing away, By every measure, life will be better when human satisfaction and need are no longer built upon the foundation of animal cruelty.
— Wayne Pacelle, The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals