Last week, state senator Carolyn Comitta issued a memorandum announcing that she was going to introduce a bill to ban declawing in Pennsylvania, as a companion bill to HB508 in the state house. Declawing is already illegal in some communities, including Allentown and...
Alexandra Horowitz is one of my favorite authors, and I was disappointed when her Freakonomics podcast “Off Leash" did not survive beyond the first couple of episodes. However, you can catch her on a recent episode (#49) of the When We Talk About Animals podcast. This...
The "Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act", HR 4417, was introduced in June 2023 by Ashley Hinson of IOWA, seeks to roll back a number of state protections for animals, such as California’s Proposition 12. As you may guess from its libertarian-sounding name, this...
Not too many animal welfare issues make it to the Supreme Court, but that is where we will find California’s Proposition 12 today. Proposition 12 is in the spotlight more because of its implications for interstate commerce than for what it means for animal welfare per...
The Pennsylvania Dog Law of 1982 Just about everything having to do with dogs in Pennsylvania goes back to Public Law 784, enacted on December 7th, 1982 and commonly just called "The Pennsylvania Dog Law of 1982". The Pennsylvania Dog Law of 1982 is a piece of...
Today Aurora Velazquez resigned her executive director position at ACCT Philly (Animal Care and Control Team Philadelphia). ACCT has been widely criticized from many sides for the conditions of the shelter and lapses which included procedural errors that led to (among...
This week Pittsburgh’s City Council advanced legislation that would make it the first city in Pennsylvania to prohibit the practice of declawing cats. The ordinance, #1877, has the hashtag-ready name “Ordinance amending The City Of Pittsburgh Code, Title Six...
If a dog spends over a year at a shelter, watching patiently as the dogs around her come in and out every few weeks, you can be pretty sure the dog has some medical or behavioral challenge that makes it necessary for the shelter take extra time to find the...