This is all good politics—both in the sense of being morally correct and of giving people what they want. (More than half of all adults oppose the use of animals for medical testing, for example, and surveys find that puppy mills are not, in fact, beloved institutions.) Yet the current administration is more determined on this front than any other president’s in recent memory. Since Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, he and his appointees have made a project of protecting animals from abuse. By December, they had already banned U.S. Navy testing on dogs and cats, ended monkey research at the CDC, curtailed the use of animals at the FDA, and promised to abolish every trace of work on mammals at the EPA by 2035. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy led the government’s attempt to save a flock of ostriches from being slaughtered up in Canada, and at the puppy summit, he declared that the entirety of his department, which includes the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, is now “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” In the meantime, though Trump hasn’t yet secured his own Nobel Peace Prize, he has received two official thank-yous from the activists at PETA.