Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has curtailed its investigations into animal welfare. That means things like puppy mills aren’t getting investigated at all.
Puppy mills are awful. As the Humane Society explained, a puppy mill is “an inhumane high-volume dog breeding facility that churns out puppies for profit, ignoring the needs of the pups and their mothers” and the puppies are often “sick and unsocialized.” They’re precisely the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence, but the Trump administration is basically turning a blind eye to those and other animal welfare abuses.
ABC News reported that data from the USDA’s animal welfare division shows that investigations have plummeted in the years Trump has been in office. During the last year of Obama’s presidency, the division issued 1,320 warnings. By 2017, that number had dropped to 523; and by 2018, it was down to 193. Similarly, in 2016, the division opened 239 cases, but that dropped to only 15 cases in the first three quarters of 2018. To put this into perspective, there are approximately 10,000 puppy mills currently operating in the U.S.
View the complete August 27 article by Lisa Needham on the National Memo website here.
A plan to move Agriculture Department researchers out of Washington has thrown two small but influential science agencies into upheaval. Federal employees at the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) have quit in unusually large numbers since August, when Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced he would relocate the offices.