In my 30-plus years working in the trenches, the boardrooms, leading campaigns and nowadays a pundit in America’s center-right movement, I haven’t seen until fairly recently a great deal of appetite to take on animal welfare issues—though I know for a fact that the movement is packed with people who love and appreciate animals.
My guess is that the reason for this is twofold: One, over the years animal welfare has become radicalized. Conservatives aren’t really into nonsense like throwing red paint on starlets, stripping down in the middle of Times Square, or shaming omnivores as murderers for eating a steak. Nor are we into associating ourselves with people who do. The issue in many ways has been totally co-opted and there has seemed little room for common sense at the table.
Two, there hasn’t really been an outlet for conservatives to collectively engage. I’ve read beautiful columns over the years from the likes of George Will and Georgie Ann Geyer and others on the subject and watched as elected officials like former Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Bob Smith (R-NH) take action with colleagues across the aisle to lead on issues like puppy mills. And of course if former G.W. Bush Speechwriter Matthew Scully’s extraordinary, almost poetic 2003 book Domain, devoted primarily to making the case why animal welfare is an entirely conservative cause doesn’t change your life, you likely have no soul.
So, some friends and I are trying to stir the pot and speed the plough with a little coalition we’ve formed called Conservatives Against Animal Abuse. It’s nothing formal at this point, just a band of like mindeds who feel the conservative voice is needed at this particular table. We’re not raising money nor trying to build some sort of empire; we’re just going issue by issue to find ways to have an impact and grow our modest movement-within-a-movement.
And we are beginning this week with our first “thing,” a letter to the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget and Agriculture Secretary weighing in on the urgency to stop a form of horse torture called “soring.” Here’s the story:
I’ve written before about this despicable practice by trainers in the Tennessee Walking Horse industry – the torture of the animals’ legs with caustic chemicals, ankle chains and medieval shoeing devices and methods, all to force them to step high for the show ring. It’s a practice condemned by the rest of the nation’s horse industry (which by association suffers a reputational black eye with the public), veterinary and animal protection communities.
The US Department of Agriculture is responsible for enforcement of the federal Horse Protection Act, passed in 1970 for the purpose of ending soring. But loopholes in the law, weak regulations and sometimes lax enforcement have allowed the cruelty to continue unabated.
Recognizing these shortcomings, USDA on several occasions proposed to rein in the outliers if the industry couldn’t do so itself, in Federal Register notices, a response to a scathing 2010 audit report of the failure of industry self-policing efforts by the agency’s own Inspector General and ultimately, in a rule finalized in 2017 to amend USDA’s Horse Protection regulations.
Unfortunately, that rule came too late, in the closing days of the Obama Administration, and was stalled along with many other pending regulations by the incoming Trump Administration – which did nothing with it for four years.
Fast forward to the Biden regime under the same Secretary of Agriculture who put forth the 2017 rule and three years in, USDA finally proposed a new rule last August that garnered over 114,000 public comments in support.
On February 27th, the agency’s latest version of the proposed rule was sent to the Department of Management and Budget for final review. Hopefully it will contain the reforms essential to finally crack down on soring, and OMB will move it along post haste.
Reforms such as those contained in the August proposal have broad bipartisan support, across the political spectrum. Humane treatment of our fellow animals is not a liberal or conservative value – it is a human value.
The issue of soring has been debated and discussed for decades, in the media, the halls of Congress and through several Administrations. We know what the problem is, and the solution. Reform is long overdue, and tens of thousands of horses have suffered – and continue to suffer – due to inaction.
So as mentioned, Conservatives Against Animal Abuse has sent a letter to OMB Director Shalanda Young and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, urging that OMB conduct a swift review of the rule within 30 days, and then for USDA to expeditiously issue the final rule in the Federal Register. The signatory list is pretty quality for a first outing—folks like the aforementioned Senator Smith, Ralph Reed, Dr. Henry Miller and a handful of others—and with a little luck we’ll manage to spread the word and grow the gang for the next fight. And what a good and worthwhile fight it is. Good for the soul.