Two Minutes, One Email

The carriage-horse ban has the votes. What it doesn't have is a vote.

On June 17th, eighteen-year-old Romanch Mahajan — visiting Central Park with his family from India — was killed when the carriage horse bolted after its driver stepped away to take their photo. His mother fell; he went after her and struck his head. It was the first human death in a New York carriage incident in decades, and it came eight days after a horse named Deniz died in the park. Days later, the Council agreed to do what it had long avoided.

On July 15, 2026, the Committee on Health held a nine-hour hearing on Int 0943-2026 — Romanch's Law, sponsored by Council Member Christopher Marte, which would halt new carriage medallions immediately and end the rides by June 1, 2028, with a workforce program for drivers. Romanch's parents testified by video, his father holding the room: "Let our son be the last victim of this industry." And while advocates were still testifying, the 26th council member signed on. With Speaker Julie Menin's support announced the day before, 27 of the Council's 51 members now back the bill — a majority, and one more than a bill needs to pass.

So the obstacle is no longer arithmetic. It is the calendar. A previous version of this bill also reached a majority and never received a floor vote, because no one scheduled one; it died in this same committee in November 2025. That is the whole lesson of fifteen years of this fight, and it is why the ask has changed. The Health Committee and the full Council have to put Int 943 on a calendar. Nothing else moves until they do.

Two minutes, two offices. Ask Health Chair Lynn Schulman and Speaker Julie Menin to schedule the committee and floor votes on Int 0943-2026, then tell your own member to vote yes. Give your name and neighborhood and one sentence about why. Staffers count calls; they don't debate them.

Find your Council Member →

Direct: Health Chair Lynn Schulman (District 29) at District29@council.nyc.gov; Speaker Julie Menin (District 5) at SpeakerMenin@council.nyc.gov.

Sign NYCLASS's petition at nyclass.org and follow Voters For Animal Rights, who are organizing the vote push. New to this? Read the essays: It Was Never Just the Horses and Another Horse Is Dead in Central Park.

The city banned foie gras seven years ago. Albany is still keeping it on the menu.

In 2019 the City Council voted to end the sale of foie gras in New York City — a product made by driving a pipe down a duck's throat and force-feeding it until its liver swells to roughly ten times its normal size. The law was supposed to take effect in 2022. It never did. The state Department of Agriculture and Markets ruled that the city's ban unlawfully burdened two upstate farms, and the ban has sat frozen ever since.

On March 12, 2026, the Appellate Division, Third Department, ruled unanimously against the state. New York's right-to-farm law, the court held, preempts local laws that directly restrict farm operations — and a rule about what may be sold in Manhattan restaurants is not that. Local laws, the court noted, "frequently have the potential to create economic ripple effects that extend to other areas of the state, and beyond." That is not a reason to void them.

Rather than accept the ruling, the state is pursuing further appeal — and a separate injunction won by the producers keeps the city from enforcing anything until there is a final, nonappealable order. The practical effect is that a law passed by the Council and upheld unanimously on the merits can be held in suspension almost indefinitely, on behalf of two farms. Delay is doing the work a loss couldn't.

Call Gov. Hochul: (518) 474-8390 (Mon–Fri, 9–5), or write. The ask: "Please drop the state's appeal in the foie gras case and let New York City enforce its ban." Name, zip code, one sentence.

Write the Governor →

Background from Earthjustice and Gothamist. Voters For Animal Rights has run this campaign since 2019.

New York's octopus-farming ban is passed, waiting, and quietly stalled

The Legislature acted on June 4, 2026. The Senate passed S.7421-B 55–5; hours later, at 1:27 in the morning and as the very last bill on the agenda, the Assembly passed its companion 129–13. Senator Monica Martinez's bill is a preemptive ban on farming octopuses for human consumption, modeled on laws already enacted in Washington and California.

The case is unusually clear. Octopuses are solitary, curious, escape-prone, and carnivorous — they must eat several times their weight in other animals — which makes farming them a welfare disaster and an environmental one at the same time. There are no octopus farms in New York. The point is to keep it that way before there is an industry with a lobby.

Here is the part that matters now. The bill has not been sent to the Governor. In Albany, a passed bill sits with the Legislature until it is formally delivered, and that can take months; the Governor's ten-day clock does not start until it arrives. So the widely repeated line that this bill "is on Hochul's desk" is not yet true. Calls still count — an office that has heard from New Yorkers all autumn behaves differently when the bill finally lands. If signed, the ban takes effect on the sixtieth day after.

Call Gov. Hochul: (518) 474-8390 (Mon–Fri, 9–5), or send a message online. The ask: "Please commit to signing S.7421-B, the octopus farming ban, when it reaches your desk." Name, zip code, one sentence.

Send the Governor a message →

Background from the Animal Legal Defense Fund and Woodstock Farm Sanctuary. Track the bill on the NY Senate site.

Two more animal bills passed in the spring. Neither has reached the Governor.

Both of these cleared the Assembly and the Senate months ago, and both are still sitting with the Legislature awaiting transmittal to the Governor — the same holding pattern as the octopus bill. Nothing is expiring this week. But an office that hears from New Yorkers for three months before a bill arrives is a different office than one that hears from them for ten days after.

A.5850 / S.3629-A (Glick / Fernandez) ends the use of wild cats, bears, primates, kangaroos, and wallabies in traveling animal acts — circuses, fairs, roadside shows. It passed the Assembly in April and the Senate on May 5, 2026, by a vote of 53–9. Non-mobile permanent institutions are exempt; the bill reaches only animals hauled venue to venue in trucks and trailers. If signed, it takes effect December 31, 2026.

A.10272 / S.9207 (Rosenthal) closes the renter's loophole in New York's dog-breed insurance law. Since 2021, insurers can't cancel or surcharge a homeowner's policy over the breed of dog in the house — but renters were left out, and pit-bull-type dogs keep landing in shelters when tenants are forced to choose between their dog and their coverage. It passed the Senate 59–3 on May 5 and the Assembly on May 19. One caution: the Governor vetoed the previous version in December 2025, which is exactly why the calls matter this time.

Call Gov. Hochul: (518) 474-8390 (Mon–Fri, 9–5). The ask: "Please sign A.5850, the traveling wild animal act ban, and S.9207, ending dog-breed discrimination in renter's insurance, when they reach you." Name, zip code, done.

Or send a message online →

Track both bills on the NY Senate site: S.3629-A · A.10272. New to the first one? Read the essay: Made to Perform.

Prop 12 survived the summer. Keep it out of the fall Farm Bill.

The Save Our Bacon Act (H.R.4673, Rep. Hinson) would preempt state farm-animal welfare laws — California's Proposition 12, Massachusetts' Question 3, and with them the strongest protections farmed animals have anywhere in American law. On April 30 it passed the U.S. House buried inside the Farm, Food, and National Security Act, after House leadership blocked the bipartisan amendment that would have stripped it.

Then it stalled. The Senate Agriculture Committee did not advance a Farm Bill before Congress left for the summer recess, and the Senate's working version left the Save Our Bacon language out. That is a real win, and it is also a pause rather than an ending: preemption riders are exactly the kind of provision that reappears in conference, late, when a large package is being closed and nobody wants to reopen it.

So the ask has changed from strip it to keep it out — and the moment to say so is before negotiations resume, not after a deal is announced. New Yorkers have two of the more influential votes in the chamber.

Sen. Chuck Schumer: (202) 224-6542
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: (202) 224-4451
Or the Capitol switchboard, (202) 224-3121 — ask for either office.

The ask: "Please keep the Save Our Bacon provision out of the final Farm Bill and protect Prop 12." Name, zip code, one sentence. Staffers tally calls; they don't debate.

Read H.R.4673 →

Background: Humane World Action Fund on who opposes the Prop 12 "fix," and the Animal Legal Defense Fund on the Senate bill.

Every item on this page runs through someone who was elected

Read back through the alerts above and notice what they have in common. A committee chair decides whether a bill gets a vote. A governor decides whether to sign, to veto, or simply to let a bill sit. A senator decides whether a preemption rider survives a conference. None of these are technical questions, and none of them are decided by argument. They are decided by people who want to be re-elected by people who are paying attention.

New York's general election is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, with early voting October 24 through November 1. State Senate, Assembly, and congressional seats are all on the ballot — which is to say, most of the offices named on this page.

Check your registration now rather than in October, when fixing a problem is harder. Then take five minutes with a slate: Voters For Animal Rights, the NYC-based group that has worked these bills for a decade, publishes a slate for State Senate, Assembly, and congressional races — and it is not a party list; the 2026 slate endorses Republicans and Democrats alike on the strength of their animal records.

See the VFAR endorsements →

Check or update your registration at the NY State Board of Elections; find your polling place and early-voting site at the state voter lookup or, in the city, at vote.nyc.

Not everything is a phone call. Some of it is a Saturday.

On August 13, 2026, Speaker Julie Menin and Council Member Harvey Epstein announced the fall slate for the Council's Animal Welfare Caucus, formed earlier this year to advance humane legislation and make pet ownership affordable in a city where a vet bill is a common reason a dog ends up at a shelter. The fall program runs adoption events, vaccination and wellness clinics, pet food pantries, and service-animal preparedness workshops across all five boroughs.

Dated so far: a mobile pet adoption with the ASPCA, Animal Care Centers of NYC, and Council Member Linda Lee in Queens on October 11; a City Hall chamber event on October 15; a volunteer day with PuppyKitty NYC in Queens on November 13; and a Positive Tails vaccine and wellness clinic in the Bronx in December, date to come.

This is the least abstract item on the page. Nobody has to be persuaded of anything, and the outcome is legible by the end of the afternoon: a specific animal goes home with someone, or a family that was choosing between rent and a rabies shot doesn't have to. It also puts you in a room with the organizers who run everything else here.

See the fall schedule →

Volunteer year-round with Animal Care Centers of NYC or the ASPCA.

95% of the National Wildlife Refuge System is now open to hunting

This one is a spotlight rather than an alert, and the reason is itself worth knowing: the moment to act on it has already passed. On May 27, 2026, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a proposed rule opening or expanding hunting and sport fishing at 111 field stations — more than 1,450 new opportunities, including hunting for the first time on 14 refuges. Comments closed on June 26. The administration announced the finished rule on August 14 as the largest such expansion in the system's history. Something over 92 million acres, more than 95% of the refuge system, is now open to hunting. The rule also rescinds nonlead ammunition and tackle requirements at nine refuges — protections against lead poisoning in scavenging birds that were due to take effect this September.

There is no petition to sign here and no vote to swing, and it would be dishonest to invent one. What there is, is a lesson about tempo. A thirty-day comment window in late spring is where a decision of this size actually gets made, and almost nobody outside the affected industries is watching the Federal Register in May. The organizations that do watch it — and that file the comments, and litigate afterward — are the ones worth supporting precisely because their work is invisible until it is too late to start.

Read the rule →

Want the next one while it still matters? Federal comment periods are searchable at regulations.gov.

The UK campaign treating factory farming the way we once treated tobacco

In England and Wales, roughly 90% of pigs are killed in CO₂ gas chambers — a method the industry markets as humane. The government's own Animal Welfare Committee concluded otherwise in October 2025, finding that exposing conscious pigs to high concentrations of CO₂ causes pain, respiratory distress, and fear — what the report describes, behaviorally, as screaming, gasping, and frantic attempts to escape. The same advisory body recommended ending the practice back in 2003. More than two decades later, it is more common than ever.

Project Slingshot exists to close the gap between what we permit and what we would accept if we actually looked. Its opening campaign — Don't Buy It — placed more than 750 ads across 206 London Underground stations and another 2,200 inside Tube carriages, each one challenging that single word, humane. When Slingshot polled the public, 81% of Britons called the practice unacceptable. The point is hard to miss: this persists not because people approve of it, but because almost no one knows it happens. As actor Sir Mark Rylance puts it — "The industry knows we'd object if we knew. So they made sure we didn't."

What makes the campaign worth studying is its strategy. Slingshot is modeled explicitly on the anti-tobacco and anti-drink-driving efforts that came before it: slow, sequenced, high-visibility "drumbeats" designed to make a harmful practice socially indefensible rather than merely illegal. Co-founder Naomi Hallum calls the industry's framing "industrial-scale gaslighting" — "while the pigs get gassed, the rest of us get gaslit." The backers (Diane Morgan, Rylance, Dr. Amir Khan, Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney, MP Neil Duncan-Jordan, and others) supply the one thing that dissolves moral disengagement: attention. The stated goal is to end factory farming by 2040.

It is tempting to file this under British problem. It isn't. The United States runs the same practice at the same scale: of the roughly 130 million pigs slaughtered here each year, an estimated 90% are killed with CO₂ gas — nearly 120 million animals — yet because the pigs are sealed inside the machinery, federal inspectors cannot actually observe the deaths the law obliges them to certify as humane (Animal Welfare Institute, 2023). What the industry has worked to keep unseen, activists have dragged into the light. In the documentary Pignorant (Carbstrong, 2024), investigators Joey Carbstrong and Dan Sheppard smuggled cameras into a Pilgrim's Pride abattoir near Manchester and filmed pigs lowered in metal gondolas into the gas — thrashing, screaming, and gasping for a minute or more before they fall still. It is footage almost no one chooses to watch, and that is exactly the point: the practiced not-looking that lets us eat what we would never stomach seeing is the carnism, and it operates here at home too. New Yorkers can't vote in Westminster, but the lever is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: look at what is actually happening, refuse the product, and refuse the story that sells it.

Visit Project Slingshot →

Read the broader mission at endfactoryfarming.com. Closer to home, send the octopus email above, browse our NYC plant-based directory, and support the US groups doing this work.