The Initiative and Referendum Institute (I&R), an educational and research organization that analyzes ballot measures across the country, declared in its 2002 post-election report that "animal rights advocates fared well on Election Day."
That's something of an understatement. In the November 2002 general elections, the animal protection movement won five out of six statewide ballot campaigns, including important victories in Florida, where voters banned the use of gestation crates for pregnant sows, and in Oklahoma, where they outlawed cockfighting. But the wins, while extraordinarily significant for animals, were nothing new for animal advocates.
"Since 1990, the animal protection movement has had a stellar record in qualifying and passing statewide ballot initiatives on subjects ranging from cockfighting to canned hunts," notes Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of The HSUS. "When voters have an opportunity to adopt laws to improve the lives of animals, they usually do so, even if animal-use industries outspend us in the campaigns."
(Just to use but one example, pro-gambling forces in Arizona spent more than $6.3 million, the sixth highest amount spent on a ballot measure in 2002, in an effort to expand gambling opportunities at horse and dog tracks in the state; the measure failed overwhelmingly, 20% to 80%.)
Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia currently allow citizens to create laws through the initiative process, according to the I&R Institute. Between 1990 and 2002, there have been 25 animal protection initiatives, and voters have passed 17 of them. In the previous 50 years, between 1940 and 1990, there were about a half dozen animal-related initiatives, and our movement prevailed in only one campaign—and that measure was later overturned by a subsequent ballot measure.
Some initiatives inspire similar ones in other states. For instance, Oklahoma was the third state to adopt an anti-cockfighting initiative, after Arizona and Missouri had done so in 1998. Likewise, in 1994, Arizona was the first state to adopt an anti-trapping initiative, and four states followed its lead. California banned all mountain lion hunting in 1990, and since then, three other states have adopted measures relating to hound hunting and baiting of predators.
When our side has lost campaigns, it's usually because our opponents have massively outspent us. "In Ohio, the hunting industry poured millions into a fight to defeat a measure to restore a ban on dove hunting, essentially sidestepping the issue of dove hunting and arguing that the measure would ban all hunting and animal research," notes Michael Markarian, president of The Fund for Animals, which works with The HSUS to spearhead most of the pro-animal ballot measures. "The same types of campaign deceptions were conducted, and heavily financed, in Idaho and Michigan where 1996 measures to restrict bear hunting failed under a torrent of negative advertising."
The pro-animal initiatives have also prompted hunting groups to place ballot measures to repeal voter-approved animal protection measures or to try to restrict the use of the initiative process.
In California and Oregon, hunting groups failed to repeal voter-approved initiatives that dealt with lion hunting. And in four states, hunting groups and their allies have tried to make it more difficult to qualify or pass pro-animal initiatives, but voters turned back these efforts in three of the four. The most recent was in Oklahoma, where voters rejected a measure that would have nearly doubled the number of signatures needed to qualify an animal welfare initiative for the statewide ballot.
The HSUS only opts to use the initiative process after state legislators have failed to embrace reforms popular with citizens. "Ideally, we'd rather not conduct initiative campaigns. They are expensive, logistically complex, and time consuming," says Pacelle. "But when legislators don't heed the will of the people and fail to do their jobs, it's awfully important that a mechanism exists to allow the people to make law directly. The initiative process has been used to usher in important new laws for animals and to demonstrate to elected officials that there are millions of Americans who care about animals and want strong laws to protect them."
To view a more detailed summary of animal related ballot initiatives, download the PDF.
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