Advocacy Campaigns
PAHS sponsors campaigns on various important issues affecting animals and their welfare. Often, the atrocities of intensely inhumane practices, which have unfortunately become the norm in modern day food production or incarnations of cultural adaptation, affect not only animals but people and the planet as well. Current campaigns include:
PAHS Supports Passage of H.R. 1759, Traveling Exotic Animal and Public Safety Protection Act
In the United States today, wild animals in traveling circuses are suffering. The traveling circus is no place for lions, tigers, bears, elephants, or kangaroos. Exotic animals have complex needs and natural instincts that cannot be met living in the circus. Instead, these animals live a life of abuse and must endure constant transport in small cages or chains. View this one-minute video at http://vimeo.com/30450810 to see what circus animals experience every day of their lives.
Additionally, traveling circuses pose a serious threat to public safety. Keeping wild animals confined in dangerously close proximity to the public in lightweight, temporary enclosures has had disastrous consequences. Circus workers, and members of the public, including children, have been killed and maimed by circus animals, and lions, tigers and elephants have all escaped.
Sick animals also pose public health risk at traveling circuses—an estimated twelve percent of captive elephants in North America are infected with tuberculosis (TB), a contagious disease that can be passed from elephants to humans.
H.R. 1759, a bill currently in the House of Representatives, would ban the uses of wild animals in traveling circuses. To find out more about the bill go to https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1759.
Then, contact your representative in Congress, urging his or her support of the bill, by accessing this site to find your representative and contact him or her by phone or email: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative.
PAHS Supports The Paw Project and California A.B. 1230: Veterinary Medicine: Declawing Animals
The Paw Project’s mission is to educate the public about the painful and crippling effects of feline declawing, to promote animal welfare through the abolition of the practice of declaw surgery, and to rehabilitate cats that have been declawed.
Many people, including animal lovers, do not realize that declawing is a surgical procedure in which the animal’s toes are amputated at the last joint. A portion of the bone, not just the nail, is removed. Declawing may result in permanent lameness, arthritis, and other long-term complications. The practice, although common in the United States, is actually illegal in many countries. Great Britain’s Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons goes so far as to declare declawing “unnecessary mutilation.”
Read more about The Paw Project at https://pawproject.org/. PAHS has incorporated information from The Paw Project, along with its video, into our online educational program (for upper-level grade 3 to 5), Mow Wow Animals.
Campaigning by The Paw Project and others resulted in the passage of the first anti-declaw bill (A. 1303. and S. 5532) in this country by both legislative houses, Assembly and Senate, in New York State on June 4, 2019.
Current legislation in the State of California is stalled, with A.B. 1230 (introduced by Assembly Member Bill Quirk, D-Hayward, and co-sponsored by Assembly Member David Chiu, D-San Francisco and San Mateo Counties) did not pass its committee hearing and is currently considered a two-year bill that can be reintroduced in the next legislative session. To contact your Assembly Member by phone or email to support this bill, go to: https://www.assembly.ca.gov/assemblymembers