where science and ethics intersect with politics
From global food labels to wild-horse roundups, 2025 pushed animal issues into the center of climate, policy, and public-health debates. New transparency laws, plant-based investment, companion-animal protections, and growing scrutiny of industrial livestock marked a year in which governments could no longer ignore the ethical and environmental costs of animal exploitation.
December opens with World AIDS Day — a global moment of remembrance and resolve — but it also reveals a deeper reality unfolding across the United States: a federal government growing increasingly silent in the face of suffering. From HIV prevention and civil rights protections to hunger, housing, and public health, compassion is receding from national leadership at a time when communities need it most. This month’s This Month in Compassion examines where empathy is thriving at the grassroots level, where it is disappearing at the federal level, and why ethical governance demands that compassion remain at the heart of every policy decision.
HHS’s recent shift away from federally funded animal testing is a meaningful win for the animals trapped in America’s laboratories. But when progress arrives from a political figure widely regarded as unreliable, it exposes a deeper problem: true leadership was missing long before this moment. The credit belongs to public pressure, not to the man temporarily occupying the seat.
The U.S. Senate has voted to end the long-standing milk mandate in American schools, breaking an 80-year dairy monopoly. If approved by the House, the reform would allow schools to serve plant-based milks without medical exemptions, opening the door to nutritional equity and humane, evidence-based policy.
The Humane Herald 