Category: Animals

For 16 years, Animal Equality has been working tirelessly to increase protections for animals all across the world. Through shocking investigations, impactful campaigns, and legal advocacy, Animal Equality has exposed how the meat, fish, dairy, and egg industries are profiting from extreme animal abuse. Our work has influenced the adoption of new animal protection laws, and we’ve convinced major companies to place bans on the worst farming practices, helping to spare countless animals from extreme confinement, painful mutilations, and horrific deaths.

But our work is far from over, and we’re gearing up for an exciting year of new campaigns for animals.

Freeing hens from cages

Since the start of our corporate outreach department that was formed in 2016, we’ve made great strides in improving the lives of hens used for eggs by working with major

Last month during an informational hearing, the Senate in Oregon was presented with a legislative proposal to protect farmed fish in the state. Animal Equality’s Legal Advocacy Counsel, Sarah Hanneken, co-presented the initiative that would create minimum welfare standards for fish as the state plans to see an expansion of aquaculture—”factory farming in water.”

How would this legislation protect fish?

The proposed Oregon Aquaculture Act would establish minimal but essential protections for farmed fish:

• Establish more humane slaughtering processes, including stunning prior to slaughter. Current inhumane killing processes include simply taking fish out of the water and allowing them to suffocate on ice, which prolongs the asphyxiation process.
• Set standards to protect native species, ecosystems, and Oregon’s waters by prohibiting fish farming in marine waters, for example. Oregon would join its neighboring states, California and Washington, in banning open net pens that allow waste, parasites and other harmful chemicals from

By: Abigail Penny, Animal Equality UK Executive Director

“As good as any bullet.” The words of a farm manager on a UK pig farm as he was filmed hammering pigs to death. 

The exposé by Animal Equality led major supermarkets to promptly ditch the producer, while the owner resigned from his government-appointed chairman role within a major farm assurance scheme.

Yet, unbeknown to many, bludgeoning still occurs for some animal species due to legal ambiguity. While the Animal Welfare Act broadly states that ‘unnecessary suffering’ of animals is not permitted, farmed fish are yet to receive species-specific legal protections in the form of ‘Welfare at the Time of Killing’ regulations, leaving tens of millions of fish unprotected against potentially the most gruesome of