Recently, something incredibly rare happened: American policymakers at the highest levels of government committed to tackling animal cruelty.

Specifically, late last month, the Trump administration announced a multi-agency “strike force” to crack down on animal abuse.

In a Fox News interview with Lara Trump about the initiative, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Trump’s Department of Justice will aggressively pursue dog fighting cases, and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promised to hold puppy mills — operations that confine dogs in cages for breeding, and where most of America’s puppies for sale originate — accountable for mistreating animals.

Key takeaways

• Last month, the Trump administration announced a “strike force” to crack down on puppy mills, dog fighting, and animal experimentation.
• Reactions from animal advocates are mixed, as the administration has made progress to phase out animal experiments, but has also taken actions to benefit industries that exploit other animals.
• The move reflects a growing interest on the political right to improve animal welfare, an issue that neither major US political party has substantively addressed.
• The real test will be whether conservatives will take on the meat industry, which accounts for some 99 percent of exploited animals.

Alongside Bondi and Rollins, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke about how his agency has been working to end animal experimentation for drug development and scientific research.

The announcement of this new “strike force” took animal advocates by surprise. Historically, both Republican and Democratic administrations have largely ignored animal welfare as a policy matter, failed to enforce what few legal protections animals do have, and benefited animal-exploiting industries through favorable executive orders, subsidy programs, and deregulatory measures.

That was certainly the case during Trump’s first term and, for the most part, it’s true for his second, which makes it hard to square the agency heads’ strong language in support of animal welfare during the Fox News interview with many of its past actions. Those include reduced enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, gutting the USDA’s animal welfare research department, removing protections for endangered species, and suing California to dismantle its cage-free egg law. (The one major exception is the Trump administration’s long-running campaign to phase out animal experimentation.)

It remains to be seen just how much the “strike force” initiatives will help animals,........

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