Update 12/29/22: President Biden has signed the fiscal year 2023 omnibus appropriations package into law—a big win for animals! We’ve had remarkable success in our end-of-session push for critical legislation in the U.S. Congress, with the Big Cat Public Safety Act, Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act...
Thirty-seven chimpanzees languishing at a New Mexico primate laboratory are still waiting for the National Institutes of Health to fulfil a promise it made in 2015---to retire them to sanctuary after a lifetime spent in research. Today, we’re giving these animals a helping hand by suing the federal...
For Precious and nine other female chimpanzees who have spent their lifetimes in research laboratories, this week marks the beginning of a new existence quite different from anything they have known before. A life where, for the first time, they will get a chance to do some of the things chimpanzees...
The Humane Society of the United States led a decades-long fight to end the use of chimpanzees in research. After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acted on our petition to declare all chimpanzees as endangered in 2015, effectively ending such use, we supported the creation of Project Chimps, a 236...
With Halloween upon us, the residents of wildlife sanctuaries and animal rehabilitation centers associated with the Humane Society of the United States and our affiliates are busy trick or treating. They are snacking on peanut butter and nuts stuffed inside pine cones, bringing down pinatas filled...
Imagine having to work in a roadside zoo, a pet store selling puppy mill puppies, a slaughter plant or a factory farm without ever being able to show your true feelings. Would you ever be able to walk alone among hundreds of dead animals at a wildlife killing contest, surrounded by people carrying...
Right now in Washington, D.C., a single urgent plot line threads together the fate of many animals: wild species threatened by trophy hunting or the commercial wildlife trade, the North Atlantic right whale, the nation’s wild horses, the former research chimpanzees waiting for sanctuary, the pets of...
In a triumph for wild animals and the people who advocate for their protection, Belgium’s Parliament voted to prohibit the importation of hunting trophies from many endangered species into the country. This means that trophy hunters who pay top dollar to travel abroad to shoot endangered animals to death will no longer be able to bring home animal body parts to hang on their walls.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced a final rule to stop a strange, persistent and deeply disturbing cruelty that has survived more than a half century’s legislative attempts to suppress it. In a huge win, the new rule bans the use on Tennessee walking and racking horses of devices and substances integral to soring, including tall, high-heel-like horseshoes (known as “stacks”) and chains that bang against a horse’s chemically sored ankles, all used to cause excruciating pain. The rule also assigns sole responsibility to the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to screen, train and authorize inspectors, and creates an inspection system that relies on veterinarians, veterinary technicians or others employed by government agencies to enforce relevant laws and regulations. We believe that the rule puts the government on a much stronger footing to finally eliminate soring.
The appropriations bill and accompanying coronavirus relief/stimulus package for fiscal year 2021 now advancing through Congress will bring critical and much-needed support to millions of Americans. We are also pleased to report that the package, which funds federal agencies, includes a number of...
The bizarre saga of a former Oklahoma roadside zoo owner, whose menagerie of hundreds of dangerous exotic animals was exposed in a 2011 HSUS undercover investigation, reached a dramatic conclusion yesterday when a federal jury found him guilty on charges that included killing five tigers and hiring...
In a stunning about-face on its own promise, the National Institutes of Health today announced it will not send 44 chimpanzees, now held by the Alamogordo primate laboratory in New Mexico, to sanctuary. Just last October, NIH Director Francis Collins reiterated the agency’s full commitment to retire...
Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago says it has ended a program where visitors were allowed to touch or interact with wildlife, including reptiles and small mammals. The HSUS has long opposed the use of captive wild animals in public handling situations. Our undercover investigations at venues that offer...
Despite a recent court ruling and the animal welfare benefits of sanctuary retirement, media reports indicate the National Institutes of Health is still refusing to allow 26 chimpanzees warehoused in a government laboratory in New Mexico to spend the rest of their lives at Chimp Haven. These chimps have been at this government facility since at least 2001.
The National Institutes of Health says it remains committed to retiring nearly 255 federally owned or supported chimpanzees to a sanctuary. This announcement, made late last week, is a favorable development in a long-running, and sometimes rocky, saga that has been unfolding ever since we succeeded...
Samantha was a little over a year old in 1976 when her world changed forever: The tiny chimpanzee was sold to a laboratory in Liberia by a resident of a nearby village. Like many of the other chimps at the lab, her parents had probably been killed by poachers so that Samantha could be sold. At the...