How Donald Trump could worsen animal welfare in his second presidential term

Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House, and if his next administration is anything like his first, he’ll likely further weaken what few legal protections exist for animals.

During his first four years in office, Trump’s Cabinet:

When slaughterhouses became Covid-19 hot spots in the early days of the pandemic, Trump — at the behest of the meat industry — demanded they remain open, even as schools and offices closed.

In a second term, with what could well be a unified Republican government, Trump could go further in weakening animal protections, given his corporate-friendly, deregulatory tendencies.

“He now has much more active involvement from intelligent and strategic people whose mission is to reduce — if not eliminate — federal regulation of businesses, including animal-using businesses that already get a light touch” from regulators, Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told me. (Disclosure: Last summer, I attended a media fellowship program at Vermont Law and Graduate School.) And while most federal regulatory employees in agencies like the US Department of Agriculture are civil servants, Trump has promised to reclassify them as political appointees so he can fire and replace them with loyalists to advance his deregulatory agenda.

However, some of the people high up in Trump’s orbit, despite their reactionary views on other social issues, have indicated relatively pro-animal welfare or anti-factory farming beliefs. Some in a second term could wind up in positions to advance animals’ interests, like Lara Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — though Kennedy could do plenty of damage to human beings if put in a position of authority on health.

Whether they’ll use their influence to help animals in a second Trump term is unknown to unlikely. But there’s a sliver of precedent they could build on, as Trump’s first term wasn’t all bad for animals. For example, his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Secretary Andrew Wheeler sought to significantly reduce animal testing with the goal of replacing most of it with alternative methods by 2035, and other federal agencies cut back on kitten, dog, and monkey testing.

And for all the very real differences between President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the truth is that when it comes to animal welfare, there’s not much daylight between the parties. President Joe Biden’s EPA last year reversed the Trump EPA’s animal testing phase-out, while his Justice Department sided with the pork industry in a Supreme Court case over a landmark California law that banned locking pigs in tiny cages. Biden’s US Fish and Wildlife Service recently sought to revive a Trump-era rule that eliminates protections for gray wolves after environmental groups had successfully sued to stop it. Minnesota Gov. and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, as I wrote previously, also has a long, cozy relationship with the factory farm industry.

That animal protection remains a politically homeless cause was further underscored elsewhere in Tuesday’s election, as animal issues on the ballot in state and local jurisdictions across the US lost resoundingly, illustrating that voters may not be ready for more ambitious animal welfare laws.

Animals lost big at the ballot box

In Denver, 64 percent of voters rejected a ballot measure to ban slaughterhouses, which would have closed the largest lamb slaughterhouse in the US. A recently released investigation of the facility, conducted by an animal rights group, documented injured lambs that are unable to walk being kicked and pushed toward slaughter; lambs hanging upside down on the slaughter line and still thrashing after their throats were slit; employees laughing and spanking animals; and the alleged use of “Judas sheep” — adult sheep used to lead lambs to slaughter.

Fifty-eight percent of Denverites also voted against a ban on the sale of fur.

Despite the losses, Pro-Animal Future, the group behind the Denver ballot measures, celebrated the fact that more than a third of the city’s voters were willing to vote for a far-reaching measure as banning slaughterhouses — even as the campaign was outspent 6-to-1 by a coalition of national and state meat industry groups, restaurants, and labor unions.

“This was a bold campaign, and no one said changing the status quo was going to be easy,” Pro-Animal Future spokesperson Olivia Hammond said in a press release. “Over 100,000 meat eaters voted for a world without slaughterhouses, and that’s a foundation we’ll continue building on. Voters aren’t used to seeing animal rights on the ballot, and we are paving the way with this campaign.”

The CEO of the lamb slaughterhouse called supporters of the ban “losers.”

At the state level, meanwhile, with three-quarters of the votes counted, Coloradans voted 55.5 to 44.5 against a prohibition on trophy hunting mountain lions, lynx, and bobcats.

And in Sonoma County, California, where nearly 75 percent of voters cast ballots for Harris, only 15 percent supported Measure J, an initiative to phase out large factory farms, which would’ve closed as many as 21 operations.

“While the opportunity to alleviate animal suffering and move our society in a better direction fell short today, we’ve always known that this will take time and we trust that people are going to get there,” the Coalition to End Factory Farming campaign, which advocated for Measure J, said in a statement. The campaign was outspent 8-to-1 by the measure’s opposition, which was funded by large meat and dairy companies and trade groups.

In Florida, with more than 95 of votes counted, 67 percent of voters supported an amendment to enshrine a constitutional right to hunt and fish. Florida law already protects both of these activities, and environmental advocates argue that the measure’s vague language could enable hunters to use more violent methods of trapping and killing wildlife.

While voters have in the past overwhelmingly supported bans on tiny cages for farmed animals (I worked on one of these in Massachusetts in 2016 when I worked for the Humane Society of the US), the proposed outright bans on factory farms and slaughterhouses in Sonoma County and Denver were too much even for some of the bluest parts of the country. The rejection of the fur sales ban in Denver came as more of a surprise, considering that voters in nearby Boulder passed one in 2021. California’s legislature, along with localities in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Florida, have also banned fur (though not via ballot initiatives).

The agricultural measures faced criticism from both the agricultural industry and some fellow anti-factory farming advocates, who argued that they’d just displace meat production elsewhere. They likely faced cultural headwinds, too, given that Denver is in a state proud of its ranching industry, and Sonoma County — an area with both higher-welfare organic farms and conventional factory farms — takes pride in its farming heritage.

Some critics of the Sonoma County ballot measure argued that, despite its good intentions, it was poorly crafted and went far ahead of where voters stand on the issue.

Dena Jones, a former farm animal program director at the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute, told Vox the Denver slaughterhouse and Sonoma County factory farm bans were “ill-advised.”

“I found it very hard to believe in either case that either one of those could be successful,” she said, “and I thought the backlash might make it more of a loss than a gain.”

Whatever the shortcomings of these ballot measures, the fierce opposition they faced in blue strongholds highlights how resistant Democratic voters can be to more ambitious meat industry reforms, even though meat production heavily contributes to issues central to progressives’ agenda: climate change, environmental pollution, and labor exploitation.

How to prevent animal cruelty, whoever’s in office

The losses should come as a sobering moment for the animal rights movement. Voters have been able to stomach modest reforms, like bans on cages for farm animals, which ask little of them besides slightly higher prices for meat and eggs. The economic effects of such measures are also diffused throughout entire industries, as opposed to one city or county — or in the case of Denver, a single slaughterhouse — which may make voters more fearful of impacts to their local communities.

These dynamics ought to weigh heavily into how activists plan future ballot measures. Currently, animal rights groups in Oregon are collecting signatures for a 2026 ballot initiative that would dramatically curtail — if not outright eliminate — animal farming, animal testing, and other business activities that rely on animals in the state. That’s an unpopular proposition to everyone but the most strident vegans, though the theory behind the ballot measure is noteworthy: It works by removing many of the sweeping exemptions carved into Oregon’s anti-animal cruelty laws for agriculture and other animal-using industries, thereby revealing how these businesses depend on legalized animal abuse.

As to how animal advocates should approach the next Trump administration, Jones said, the prospects for new federal animal welfare legislation or regulations are dim. But there are opportunities to improve enforcement of the few federal laws that do protect animals, like the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the Animal Welfare Act. These are primarily enforced by civil servants, not political appointees, so enforcement would be less politically charged than lobbying for new policies altogether.

“I’ve done policy work for animals for 30 years,” said Jones, “and it is possible to make progress for animals” in both Republican and Democrat administrations.

But that progress will be harder to forge if Trump follows through on his vow to mass fire civil servants and replace them with sycophants.

Jones also challenges animal advocates to view their issues from a conservative mindset to better appeal to both parties. Anti-animal testing nonprofit White Coat Waste has found success — like the phasing out of some cruel animal studies — by working with both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. The group advocates for reductions in animal testing on the basis of not just compassion for animals, but also conservative values like reducing taxpayer waste.

“You need to look at issues where the interest of the agency, the industry, and animal protection or environmental protection overlap,” said Jones. “There always are some.”