Animal Care and Advocacy

Protect and defend those who cannot speak for themselves.

Animals endure enormous, systematic abuse across the institutions of modern American life, and they have no voice of their own in the political system that decides their fate. In Congress, I will be a voice for animals and I will work to make clear that their suffering is part of the broader fight for justice that drives the rest of my platform.

Understanding the Cost of Factory Farming

Our current system of industrial animal agriculture is unsustainable and harmful at every level. Workers in slaughterhouses and processing plants face brutal conditions, debilitating injuries, and systematic exploitation. Surrounding communities, often low-income and disproportionately Black and brown, live with the air, water, and soil pollution that factory farms produce. As I have written in my healthcare platform, industrial animal agriculture is the single largest source of novel diseases and pandemics. The animals endure conditions that, by any honest moral standard, would be recognized as torture if they happened to any other living creature.

There is not enough land for ethical farming everywhere, and the answer to that fact cannot be the further expansion of industrial cruelty. We need a different approach.

Creating a Federal Path Forward

I will fight for:

• Increased federal funding, subsidies, and research investment in crops grown for direct human consumption rather than for animal feed. The vast majority of American agricultural land is currently devoted to feeding livestock rather than people, an arrangement that wastes water, land, and energy on a massive scale. 

• Public investment in plant-based alternatives for food and medicine, so that the transition off animal exploitation comes with real, accessible options for ordinary people. The science on plant-based protein, cellular agriculture, and animal-free pharmaceuticals has progressed rapidly over the past decade, and federal research dollars and procurement should accelerate it. 

• Land use alternatives, including stewardship arrangements, re-wilding programs, and ecological restoration on land currently devoted to industrial animal agriculture. Returning that land to its ecosystems would lock in carbon, restore biodiversity, and give us back natural systems we have spent generations destroying. 

• An end to the federal subsidies that prop up factory farming, which currently flow to the largest and most polluting operations while smaller, more humane farms receive little or no public support. 

• Stronger enforcement of the limited animal welfare protections we already have on the books and meaningful expansion of those protections to cover the animals currently exempt from them, including the farm animals who make up the overwhelming majority of animals affected by federal policy.

Thinking Beyond the Factory Farm

Industrial agriculture causes the most animal suffering in this country, but other major sources demand attention as well. Animals are abused in research laboratories, displaced and killed by habitat destruction, exploited in entertainment industries, and produced in vast numbers through irresponsible breeding even as shelters fill up with companion animals in need of homes. I support:

• Federal investment in alternatives to animal testing in research, building on the validated non-animal methods that have already replaced animal use in many contexts and that produce more reliable results for human medicine in many cases. 

• Stronger habitat protection across federal lands, in line with the ecosystem and biodiversity priorities in my environmental platform. 

• Phasing out the use of animals in entertainment industries that cause documented harm, with priority on circuses, marine mammal facilities, and similar contexts where the suffering is most acute. 

• Federal support for spay/neuter, adoption, and animal welfare programs that responsible communities rely on, paired with meaningful regulation of commercial breeders and puppy mills.

Promoting Compassion as Justice

Animals deserve our compassion and our advocacy. The moral logic of this position is the same one that runs through the rest of my platform: where there is suffering produced by structural exploitation, it is the obligation of people in positions of power to fight for change on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves. That obligation does not stop at the species line.