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Hooray for L.A.! Last night, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12 to 2 in favor of a proposed city ordinance to ban the sale of dogs, cats and rabbits in pet stores. If the Council upholds the vote next week, L.A. will become the largest city in the U.S. to pass this type of law!

The ordinance is designed to stem puppy mill abuse by making sure that dogs from puppy mills don’t find their way to pet stores in the city. There’s good news for homeless pets, too: The new law will allow pet stores to sell animals who come from shelters, humane societies, and registered rescue groups—just not from commercial breeders. It also still allows people to buy directly from breeders.

According to our No Pet Store Puppies map of stores that sell puppies, there are 18 stores in Los Angeles that will no longer be able to prop up the puppy mill industry once the ban takes effect.

Kudos to our good friends at Best Friends Animal Society for spearheading this incredible effort and helping to turn the tide for puppy mill dogs across the country! Please help us keep momentum moving in the right direction by taking our No Pet Store Puppies pledge today! 

Update 11/19/12: Way to go, Los Angeles! On October 31, the L.A. City Council formally approved a new ordinance that bans retail sales of dogs, cats and rabbits. The ordinance will go into effect by the end of 2012, after which stores have a six month grace period to stop selling these animals. The ordinance will not affect responsible hobby breeders.

ASPCA Government Relations intern Young Kang.

Guest blog by Jessica Johnson, Grassroots Advocacy Manager for the ASPCA’s Government Relations team.

One of the highlights of my work at the ASPCA is supervising our incredible Government Relations interns. I am so grateful for the many mentors and hands-on experiences I was lucky to have over the years, and I love being able to pay that forward to future animal welfare professionals.

If you are a student with an interest in pursuing a career working in animal welfare, policy, law, or other similar field, we have a great opportunity you should know about. Apply for an ASPCA Government Relations internship in our Washington, D.C. office where you can work side-by- side with our Government Relations staff! There is no better window to our world than interning with us, and you can make a real difference while learning about public policy as it affects animals.

Our interns were incredibly instrumental in our work last summer. They reached out to members of our ASPCA Advocacy Brigade to mobilize them on key initiatives, responded to constituent requests for information, and helped me organize citizen lobby days. They tracked the thousands of state and federal laws and administrative regulations pertaining to animals, and they drafted letters, memorandums, and fact sheets to support our lobbying efforts. Throughout the summer, they served as our eyes and ears at many hearings and briefings on the Hill, and accompanied us at meetings with legislators. They sat in on our internal staff and strategy meetings, getting a real insider’s view of our work.

We appreciate interns’ contributions more than words can say, but I also want to share what some of our former interns have said:

“I feel extremely fortunate for the learning experience that the ASPCA internship provided because I think that few interns are exposed to such a wide variety of work. This internship has taught me what nonprofit government relations work really is, and it has confirmed my desire to work in this field after graduation.”
- Rachel Easter, first-year law student at Stanford Law School

“Working with the ASPCA Government Relations team has made for an awesome internship. I enjoyed working alongside the fun and supportive staff, and I feel that I was able to work on a diverse group of topics and have become much more familiar with animal welfare issues than I was before.”
- Joshua Loveall, second-year law student at Georgetown Law School

“My summer internship at the ASPCA was the perfect transition between school and working, and provided me with so many valuable experiences and skills with which to start my job search. I learned a ton about policy in a short amount of time, and everyone was welcoming, gracious and so much fun. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the government relations team!”
- Melissa Rothstein, graduate student, Master of Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University

If you’re ready to make your mark on Capitol Hill and work on animal issues across the nation, I strongly encourage you to apply for a Government Relations internship! Learn more about the position and how to apply [PDF]. And feel free to email me with any questions at GRinternship@aspca.org.

I hope you’ll join us in our work to change laws and save lives!

Check out our Advocacy Center for more information about laws affecting animals in your state and in Congress.

The findings of a dairy farm investigation were released last week, and they aren’t pretty.  Video footage reveals workers beating, kicking, jumping on and shocking cows at Bettencourt Dairies, a major Idaho dairy. In one appalling scene, a cow, apparently unable to stand, is dragged by her neck with a chain attached to a tractor. Five Bettencourt employees have been fired and three face charges of animal cruelty.

As hard as the video is to watch, these acts of cruelty are sadly not unusual. With every new investigation released, we learn that cruelty is rampant on factory farms all around the country. Some of the cruelty comes in the form of obvious violations like in this recent investigation, while some is inherent in the standard practices of factory farming. Unsurprisingly, cruelty and cleanliness are often linked, and raise food and worker safety issues: This video showed extremely unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

Farm investigations are one of the few tools animal advocates have to bring criminals to justice, and to pressure the food industry to adopt higher standards of animal welfare and food safety. Aware of the power of these videos, Big Ag lobbies to criminalize investigative workers and keep consumers in the dark. “Ag-gag” bills, introduced over the last few years in states around the country, attempt to make it a crime to document animal abuse on factory farms. Last year we fought hard to defeat these bills in many states. But this year will likely bring a fresh onslaught. Ag-gag bills will continue passing until every one of us stands up to the industry’s effort to block reforms for both consumer and animal welfare.

Learn more and find out where your state stands on ag-gag today! 

Got a sec? It’s Adopt a Shelter Dog Month, and we’d love for you to donate your Facebook status to help homeless dogs. It’s quick, it’s easy…and it’s an awesome way to help these pups find the homes they deserve.

Step One: Find a dog to sponsor! You can choose one from your local shelter or pick one of the dogs the ASPCA recently rescued.

Step Two: Share the dog’s profile on your Facebook page—and be sure to encourage your friends and family to share the profile, too!

That’s it! We told you it was easy. And did we mention effective? Chances are you just reached hundreds—even thousands—of people with that one status post. Better yet, you may have helped Fido find a new family. So, paws up to you!

Can you think of other ways to help shelter dogs using social media? Let us know!