Securing Funding for Animal Welfare Priorities

In encouraging news, both Senate and House fiscal year 2026 Agriculture Appropriations bills winding their way through Congress contain provisions that continue to bar horse slaughter operations in the United States. The House and Senate Interior Appropriations bills also maintain long-standing protections against the slaughter and lethal control of wild horses—provisions absent from the administration’s budget proposal released earlier in the year. Importantly, in its report accompanying the bill, the House also directs the Bureau of Land Management to allocate $11 million toward humane fertility control for wild horses.

In addition, the House and Senate Agriculture Appropriations subcommittees included language championed by AWI in their reports that directs the US Department of Agriculture to invest in the development of more effective and humane methods of “depopulation” (i.e., the mass killing of animals to control disease). Such directives are critical given the rampant use of ventilation shutdown plus heat during the ongoing avian influenza outbreak. This controversial depopulation method involves inducing heatstroke over several agonizing hours. (See AWI Quarterly, spring 2025.)

Both House and Senate Agriculture Appropriations bills also maintained key provisions pertaining to Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA) enforcement. Regarding poultry slaughter, AWI secured a first-of-its-kind directive for the USDA to track “good commercial practices” verification procedures. These practices are critical to improving the handling of birds at slaughter, since the USDA interprets the HMSA to exclude poultry. The Senate report also emphasized the importance of disaster planning by livestock operations to prevent high mortality rates during natural disasters and extreme weather events.

Finally, AWI had been alarmed when the administration’s budget proposal and the House subcommittee’s initial Agriculture Appropriations bill contained no funding for the Protecting Animals with Shelter (PAWS) grants program, which helps support domestic violence survivors and their pets. Fortunately, Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Lauren Underwood (D-IL) secured an agreement with House committee leadership to restore $1.5 million to the program in the committee-approved bill. Meanwhile, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), a longtime PAWS champion, was able to get $3 million for these essential grants included in the Senate version of the bill. There is still a long way to go before a final spending package is approved, but these developments leave the PAWS program in a much stronger position compared to where it started in the budgetary process.

Program Terms: Companion Animals, Equines, Farmed Animals

AWI Quarterly Terms: Government/Legal, Quick Read