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...

Next Wednesday, trophy hunters with a yen for slaying some of the world’s most endangered and threatened animals will gather in Reno, Nevada, for the annual Safari Club International convention. This is perhaps one of the world’s largest such gatherings, and it’s a grim affair. On offer will be more...

This year has seen incredible wins for animals despite a steady onslaught of Congressional threats and agency rollbacks. On the one hand, there have been attempts to roll back protections for wild animals, like native carnivores in Alaska, and attacks on the Endangered Species Act. The U.S...

As Joe Biden and Kamala Harris head to the White House, they bring with them a proven track record of protecting animals. In past years, we have worked with both the president- and vice-president-elect to strengthen laws on wildlife, marine mammals, farm animals, and so much more, and we look...

The disturbing trophy killing of an iconic wolf from Yellowstone National Park is a grim reminder that American carnivores are under serious threat, with the states they live in doing precious little to protect them and the U.S. House voting just this month to strip protections for them under the...

Since 2017, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has introduced a bill that would undermine America’s war on ivory trafficking by hindering the ability of states to create laws fighting this illegal trade. The full Senate did not consider the bill the last time, and more Americans than ever before now...

By Kitty Block and Sara Amundson A number of important bills are now making their way through Congress, and this week has been a particularly successful one for wildlife and especially for elephants, rhinos, wolves, wild horses, burros and right whales. Yesterday, the Senate Appropriations Committee...

Scientists and conservationists have long warned about drastic drops in African elephant populations because of habitat loss, conflicts with humans and poaching for ivory. Trophy hunters exacerbate the problem by mowing elephants down for fun. Yesterday, the International Union for Conservation of...

A rule recently proposed by the Trump administration would roll back an Obama-era regulation that prohibits controversial and scientifically unjustified methods of hunting on Alaska's national preserves, which are federal public lands. These egregious hunting methods include killing hibernating...

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...

Update: This evening, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter announced that he had asked for -- and accepted -- the resignation of Blake Fischer. "I have high expectations and standards for every appointee in state government,” Gov. Otter said in a press release. “Every member of my administration is expected to...

Giraffes, with their iconic long necks and unmistakable, beautifully patterned coats, are facing extinction. There are currently fewer than 69,000 mature individuals remaining in the wild today. And the threats of habitat loss and illegal hunting for bushmeat are only exacerbated by demand for...

Grizzly 399, often called the world’s most famous grizzly bear, has a fan base of wildlife watchers that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Each year, dozens of paparazzi attempt to record her every waking moment, from the time she emerges from her den in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the...

Exactly three years after the killing of Cecil the lion sparked outrage among the American public, one more U.S. trophy hunter is making international headlines for killing an imperiled animal -- this time a giraffe. The news of this hunt comes just weeks after another American killed a lion...

American wolves are once again under urgent attack. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is readying a proposal to strip Endangered Species Act protections from wolves across the entire continental United States, which would arrest the recovery of these animals and banish them forever to isolated...

By Kitty Block and Sara Amundson The cheetah, an animal capable of top speeds of 75 miles per hour, is racing toward extinction, with just 7,100 animals left in the wild. Recently, in another expression of the callous disregard trophy hunters show for the world’s most endangered and at-risk animals...

Update 3/15/2022: President Biden signed the appropriations package into law. Humane advocates often look to the passage of animal-friendly legislation as the strongest measure of progress in our work at the federal level, and clearly, good laws are important. But a nation that cares for animals...

News has come out that another bull elephant was shot and killed in Tanzania, reportedly by an American trophy hunter from Texas. This is the third bull, believed to likely be another “super tusker,” beloved by locals, gunned down near the Tanzanian-Kenyan border, part of the Greater Amboseli Ecosystem, within the past six months.

Our National Marine Fisheries Service, slow to take action, really shouldn’t need a prompt about the fierce urgency of now when it comes to protecting the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Still, a new reminder has come with the tragic sighting last week of a four-year old male badly...

Arizona’s Game and Fish Commission has voted to ban wildlife killing contests: gruesome spectacles in which participants vie for cash and prizes for killing the most or heaviest animals within a specific time period. This is a wonderful development because Arizona has been the site for an appalling...