Oregon has the best animal protection laws of any state, according to the annual US State Animal Protection Laws Ranking Report.
The report, published by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), ranks every US state and territory on its animal protection laws.
For a second year running, Oregon scooped top spot. The West Coast state passed a bill in April 2024 to strengthen existing cruelty laws. It has also banned all sales of cosmetics developed through the use of animal testing.
ALDF’s Senior Staff Attorney Kathleen Wood told Vegan Poetry: “Our goal in producing this Report is to celebrate the progress in animal protection legislation being made each year and to draw attention to the important work that still needs to be done.”
The best and worst of animal protection
Now in its nineteenth year, the Animal Protection Laws Ranking Report provides a detailed picture of the state of animal welfare in the US.
In 2024, Oregon set the highest standard for animal protection, ahead of Massachusetts, which has a range of leading laws relating to domestic animals, and Maine. The award for most improved state in 2024 went to South Carolina.
At the other end of the spectrurm, North Dakota remained rooted to the bottom of the rankings. The state “has not made any significant improvements to its animal cruelty laws in over a decade,” according to the ALDF. As such, it still lacks fundamental animal protections, including a possession ban law to prohibit convicted abusers from owning or residing with an animal for a set period of time.
Other poorly performing states include Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky and Mississippi. The worst ranking territory is American Samoa, which holds the dubious honour of being the only state or territory without any general animal cruelty laws.
“Our report calls attention to gaps in existing state and territorial laws,” Wood added, “while also spotlighting particularly strong legislation which may serve as a model for other jurisdictions to emulate.”
Room for improvements across the board
The report is clear that even the top performing states have a lot of room for improvement.
In Oregon, for example, veterinarians need only report animal cruelty if it rises to the level of “aggravated cruelty.” Furthermore, the state does not yet have a Courtroom Animal Advocate Program that would allow attorneys to represent the interests of animal victims in cruelty cases.
More broadly, the rankings could themselves be made more complete. At present, the report considers only the enactment of laws and therefore does not take account of how widely these are enforced.
Data on enforcement are difficult to compare. There is currently no centralised database to record all cruelty crimes. This would be a first step. But even having a centralised database would not necessarily give enough information to compare different jurisdictions, the ALDF notes, as this would only indicate which crimes are actually reported.
Sentience outlier
From the report, a clear picture emerges. Despite significant improvements in recent years, the state of animal welfare in the US remains bleak. The one-of-a-kind section of the ALDF report sums it up concisely: Oregon is still the only state that formally recognises in its statutes that animals are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain, stress and fear. ★
See the report and full rankings here: 2024 U.S. Animal Protection Laws Rankings – Animal Legal Defense Fund
[Featured image credit: Christian Domingues]
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