Does Your Congressman Care About Animals?

by Martin Matheny · 2010-09-13 11:50:00 UTC
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It's election season again — the midterm elections to be precise, where one-third of the Senate and all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are out looking for your vote on November 2nd. While these midterm elections usually aren't as exciting as the presidential-year contests, there's a lot at stake for both parties.

So, before you go into the voting booth in fifty days, wouldn't it be nice to know where your elected officials stand on animal issues? The Humane Society Legislative Fund (an arm of the Humane Society of the United States) thinks so, and they're here to help. Behold, the HSLF 2010 Humane Scorecard. You can check it out here (pdf).

If you just want the basic rundown, animal law expert Doris Lin breaks it down for you at about.com. In the Senate, 29 members got a zero, while 13 earned a score of 100 or 100-plus. On the House side, the numbers are a little more even, with 54 Representatives getting a goose egg and 50 scoring 100 or 100-plus. Texas, which (legislatively speaking, at least) has never met an animal it didn't want to barbecue had 11 representatives with a score of zero. On the positive side, Maryland and Massachusetts each had four representatives with perfect scores.

Don't just take the HSLF's scorecard as gospel, however. Make sure you know what issues they're using to grade your politicians. The issues HSLF chose represent a pretty diverse group of animal concerns: horse slaughter, antibiotic overuse, fur labeling, and conservation measures for wild canids, felids, marine turtles, and cranes.

The bottom line for us is simple. As exasperating as election season might be, with all of the negative ads, mailboxes full of campaign fliers, and the other assorted detritus of electoral politics, it's also a very important time for us. For the next 50 days, your elected officials are going to be bending over backwards to at least give the impression that they're accountable to you. If they didn't make the grade on the issues, then you should ask them why they voted the way they did. If you don't like their answer (or worse, if you don't get an answer), then it might be time to shop around for some new representation.

Photo credit: Florian

Martin Matheny is a political consultant and animal welfare writer based in Athens, Georgia.
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