Hope for animals under Trump 2.0 means fight to keep past gains

Cuts to either farm subsidies or animal testing are unlikely

WASHINGTON D.C.––Donald Trump,  as of January 20,  2025,  is back in the U.S. White House,  bringing with him a 25-count legacy of having been the worst U.S. President for animals ever during his first presidency,  2017-2021.

Since that 25-count “indictment” has already been widely amplified on social media,  and since most of it recites the Trump record as already detailed by ANIMALS 24-7 in more than 40 articles during the previous Trump administration,  ANIMALS 24-7 will not remind readers of each miserable point.

Points worth remembering about Trump 1.0

But many of those points are worth remembering in light of several recent optimistic blogs from prominent animal advocates anticipating that maybe the budget cuts promised by Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency might reduce subsidies for animal agribusiness and animal use in federally funded biomedical research.

Bear in mind that among the first actions of the first Trump administration were concealing Animal Welfare Act enforcement records and freezing the impending introduction of new rules meant to stop soring show horses to induce the “Big Lick” goose step.

This may have been because the first Trump Administration never had any intention of actually enforcing any part of the Animal Welfare act.

According to Animal Welfare Institute monitoring,  Animal Welfare Act inspections fell by two-thirds during the first Trump administration.  Nearly 90% fewer new investigations of alleged crimes against animals were begun.

Trashing the Animal Welfare Act was just the start

Trashing the Animal Welfare Act on behalf of animal use industries was only the beginning.

The first Trump administration “made it easier to remove a species from the endangered list and made it harder for regulators to consider climate change threats when weighing whether to protect a species,”  recalled Emily Anthes and Catrin Einhorn of The New York Times back on November 20,  2024.

Ending as it began,  the first Trump administration “moved to open up part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas development and,  in its closing weeks, gutted protections for migratory birds,”  Anthes and Einhorn continued.

In between,  Anthes and Einhorn mentioned,  the first Trump administration “killed a rule requiring organic farmers to meet certain animal welfare standards,  reduced federal oversight of pork processors,  and lifted limits on how quickly they were allowed to slaughter swine.”

The EATS Act will be back

Added Anthes and Einhorn,  “Experts are also keeping an eye on the EATS Act,  a federal bill that would override many state laws on farm animal welfare.  The bill has opponents on both sides of the aisle,  but its prospects could improve in a Republican Congress.  Elements of the EATS Act have made their way into a draft of the next Farm Bill,”  likely to be raised for votes in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate early in the newly seated 119th Congressional session.

Also not to be forgotten is that the first Trump administration opened more National Wildlife Refuges to hunting and fishing than any other in the history of the refuge system,  and for all practical purposes turned running the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service over to trophy hunters.

Reduction of animal testing was empty promise

Anthes and Einhorn noted that during Trump’s first term the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] “announced that it would reduce testing on mammals by 30% by 2025 and all but eliminate it by 2035.”

That did not happen.  Indeed,  under the now departed Joe Biden administration,  the EPA rescinded both the 30% goal and the 2025 target date.

Hope of reinstating the previous empty promise to reduce animal testing offers the main hope advanced by animal advocates for the second Trump administration.  But the Second Coming prayed for by many Bible-thumping Trump supporters has about as much chance of actually happening under a White House pandering to the pharmaceutical industry with promises to dismantle what remains of “Obamacare” and to boost tariffs up to 25% on imports from Canada and Mexico,  including what have been cheaper pharmaceuticals.

Shibboleths

“With the transition in presidential power,”  hoped Wayne Pacelle,  president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy,  “let’s hope the Department of Government Efficiency sees a pattern of federal activity worthy of slashing:  inefficient and costly animal tests on dogs,  primates, and other animals––not only for drug development but also for other categories of inquiry.”

With that,  Pacelle via Facebook introduced “My colleague Dr. Zaher Nahle,”  who is a Ph.D.,  not a medical doctor.

Nahle recently blogged for One Green Planet that,  “The intent of the new administration to create the Department of Government Efficiency” might respond to “inefficiencies baked into our nation’s drug development programs,”  because of “an unwarranted faith in animal testing to model human response in health and disease.”

Nahle went on to recite a long litany of shibboleths familiar among antivivisectionists,  especially religious and political conservatives,  for at least 150 years,  varying in detail rather than theme.  Originating with Creationist resistance to teaching evolution,  the focal idea is that humans,  created by God,  are so different from animals that animal-based research cannot safely,  accurately,  or economically be extrapolated to human medicine.

(See Fauci vs. the White Coat Waste Project: did Hans Ruesch sire the conflict?)

Quoting a Biden cabinet member won’t persuade Trump

Indeed,  as Nahle wrote,  “Francis S. Collins,  the longest-serving former director of the National Institutes of Health,  wrote in the journal Nature a decade ago that ‘preclinical research,  especially work that uses animal models,  seems to be the area that is currently most susceptible to reproducibility issues.’  Consistently, 89% of preclinical studies, most of which involve animals, cannot be reproduced!”

But Francis S. Collins was also a member of the Biden administration cabinet,  as acting science advisor to the president since 2022.  There is small chance that he will have the ear of the Trump administration.

Meanwhile,  if animal-based research was so inefficient as to be unprofitable,  the biomedical research industry,  existing to develop profitable medicines and treatments,  would have abandoned it long ago.

Robert F. Kennedy:  “cook fries in beef fat”

Simple Heart blogger Wayne Hsiung took a more nuanced view.

“Last year,”  Hsiung remembered,   “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared a photo of himself eating a dog. He sent his friend a text message with a photo of a barbecued body on a spit. While metadata apparently showed the image was taken in Korea,  where dogs have historically been killed and eaten by the millions,  RFK Jr. later claimed the animal was actually a goat in Patagonia.

“The dog-eating incident,”  Hsiung wrote,  “is just one example of a broader fear that many have about Trump 2.0 and MAGA:  they are coming for the vegans.

“In a separate post recently on X,  formerly Twitter,”  Hsiung continued,  “RFK Jr. claimed that Americans were being ‘poisoned’ by plant-based seed oils and that fries should be fried in tallow (i.e., beef fat) instead.

“MAGA Republicans have banned cultivated meat in Florida, and supported laws that prohibit using the word “milk” for soy milk.

“Trump can’t pronounce the word ‘vegan'”

“Worst of all, Trump can’t even pronounce the word vegan.”

Yet,  Hsiung argued,  “Trump 2.0 has a chance at being the most vegan-friendly administration in history.  Two senior members of the incoming administration – National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy – are committed vegetarians.  Vice President JD Vance’s wife Usha is also vegetarian,  and Lara Trump,  Trump’s daughter in law,”  Hsiung contended,  “is a noted animal advocate.”

Actually Lara Trump is a committed pit bull advocate,  oblivious to the reality that pit bulls dismember somewhere between 14,000 and 26,000 other animals alive per year,  exclusive of pit bull use in dogfighting.

(See Pit bull attacks on other pets lead to a third of disfiguring human bite injuries.)

“Secretly an animal rights advocate”?!

Hsiung also asserted that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “secretly an animal rights advocate,”  based on statements Kennedy made more than 25 years ago while litigating against factory farmers for the Natural Resources Defense Council,  an organization he left in 2017.

“The notion that Dems are trying to take people’s meat away has been a common attack by MAGA against liberals,”  Hsiung recalled.  “Back in 2021, Representative Lauren Boebert,”  a vociferous Trumpist from Colorado,  “warned that progressives were planning to ration red meat and said the government should ‘stay out of my kitchen.’  Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene,”  a fellow Trumpist from Georgia,  “accused Joe Biden of trying to take people’s burgers away and anointed him ‘The Hamburglar.’

“None of that was true,”  Hsiung acknowledged,  “but the culture war has scared politicians,  even vegan politicians,  away from animal rights.”

Subsidies for factory farming

But Hsiung,  like Pacelle,  Nahle,  and One Green Planet,  hung high hopes on that “Elon Musk and the vegetarian Ramaswamy..have already come hard against subsidies for animal testing. Musk’s pal and podcaster Joe Rogan mocked the millions of dollars the federal government spent injecting hamsters with cocaine and steroids in order to induce them to fight.  And Elon called a federal study where alcoholic rats were sprayed with urine ‘outright evil.’

“Subsidies for factory farming might be next,”  Hsiung speculated.  “That would be a big shift. Trump 1.0 increased direct aid to farmers by tens of billions of dollars,  and even subsidized farmers for roasting animals alive.”

            (See UPDATE: Iowa belongs to Boss Hogg now. The stench? That’s money. and “Depopulation” cannot stop H5N1, vet reform group & Pacelle warn.)

Cellular agriculture

Offered Slaughter-Free America blogger Jon Hochstartner  in the December 6,  2024  edition of Counterpunch,  “There are a surprising number of animal activists who hold out hope that a second Donald Trump presidency would be good for nonhuman welfare or at least less damaging than a Kamala Harris White House.

“The Democrats are indisputably bad on animal issues,”  Hochstartner conceded.  “But in every measurable sense,  they’re far better than the Republicans.  For instance,  almost all of the politicians who receive 100% ratings from the Humane Society Legislative Fund are Democrats. Almost all of those who receive zero-percent ratings are Republicans.

“Similarly,  almost all of the politicians seeking to advance cellular agriculture,”  Hochstartner’s focal cause,  “are Democrats.  Almost all of those seeking to outlaw it are Republicans.

IRS nominee wanted to yank HSUS nonprofit status for trying to regulate puppy mills

“In the latest example of this partisan difference,”  Hochstartner warned, “Trump’s nominee for the head of the Internal Revenue Service,  former Missouri Representative Billy Long,  previously sought to undermine the nonprofit status of the Humane Society of the United States.  In 2011, Long requested the IRS probe HSUS due to the latter’s support for a ballot measure regulating dog breeders.”

As IRS chief,  Hochstartner continued,  Long “would be in a position to strip the tax-exempt status of groups he disagreed with.  This would effectively shut down those organizations.”

That would of course result in litigation that a huge,  well-funded mainstream charity such as the Humane Society of the U.S. could probably win,  but at enormous cost in resources that would necessarily be directed away from any work actually helping animals.

All that the Trump 2.0 administration really offers to animal advocates,  unfortunately,  is the challenge of having to litigate to protect gains already made,  before a judiciary already stacked with Trump 1.0 appointees,  with no realistic hope of making further gains until the MAGA mob are again out of office.

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