Background

Question: Can you briefly tell us a story that impacted the way you feel about animals?

Answer: Just a few stories that are relevant here:

First, growing up, our family always had rescue dogs. That experience of giving a home to animals that needed one stuck with me, and it shaped how I think about the relationship between people and animals – that we have real obligations to creatures who depend on us and can’t speak for themselves.

In my legal work, I’ve represented workers at PetSmart after the company was taken over by private equity. These workers came to PetSmart because they loved animals. What they found instead were fine-print contracts requiring them to repay thousands of dollars if they left–trapping them in jobs with deteriorating conditions. But what struck me most in talking with these workers wasn’t just their own exploitation. It was that they kept coming back to the animals. They told me that the same gutting of the company that was crushing them was also harming the animals in their care. The race to extract profit was bad for everyone – workers and animals alike. That connection between how we treat workers and how we treat animals has stayed with me, and it’s always a good reminder that the brokenness of our economy causes real suffering.

And then, most importantly, there’s my oldest daughter. She adores animals. She thinks and talks about them all the time. She spends as much time as she can researching cats who need a rescue home. She has made clear to me, with the kind of moral seriousness that kids sometimes have more of than adults, that protecting animals has to be part of what I do as Attorney General and what I talk about on this campaign. I take her seriously. She’s a good reminder that these issues matter to the next generation, and that the people we’re accountable to aren’t just the ones who vote–they include the ones who are watching to see whether we live up to our values.

Role

Question: Do you agree that the Attorney General has an obligation to actively enforce animal cruelty and animal welfare laws, including those that apply to agricultural operations? How would you characterize the Attorney General’s role when animal welfare laws exist but are inconsistently or weakly enforced?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. The Attorney General has not just the authority but the obligation to enforce animal welfare laws–including those that apply to agricultural operations. A law that exists only on paper isn’t a law. It’s a suggestion, and powerful interests have learned to treat it as one.

What I’ve seen in my legal career is that the business model of the largest corporate monopolists–especially in agriculture–often depends on cutting corners across the board. The same private consolidation and corporate abuse that drives animal cruelty drives the exploitation of farmworkers, the squeezing out of independent ranchers and growers, and the degradation of our environment. These aren’t separate problems. They’re the same problem: concentrated corporate power that has decided the rules don’t apply to them.

When animal welfare laws go unenforced, it sends a message that the laws are optional. And in my
experience, companies that are willing to flout animal welfare laws are rarely in full compliance with their other legal obligations either, labor laws, environmental laws, food safety standards. Weak enforcement in one area is usually a symptom of a broader failure to hold corporate power accountable, especially when it is in an area like animal welfare that’s so fundamentally bound up with our ethical obligations to the world. The Attorney General’s role, when laws are on the books but not being enforced, is straightforward: enforce them. Use the full investigative and litigation authority of the office to make clear that the law means what it says. That’s what I’ve spent my career doing on behalf of workers, consumers, immigrants, renters, and others who are exploited and oppressed, and it’s exactly the approach I’ll bring to animal welfare as Attorney General.

Responding to Ongoing Violations

Question: Colorado banned keeping pigs in gestation crates years ago. In 2025, however, attorneys associated with the DU Law School Animal Activist Legal Defense Project submitted a report to the Colorado Bureau of Animal Protection regarding a documented violation of the gestation crate ban on a large pig farm in Colorado. If elected, how would your office respond to reports of ongoing violations of animal welfare laws in industrial agriculture?

Answer: Enforce the law–that’s the answer. Colorado banned gestation crates because voters and lawmakers decided that this practice was wrong. When a documented violation gets reported and nothing happens, that ban becomes meaningless–and the animals still suffering in those crates don’t care about jurisdictional complexity, neither do all the communities that have suffered from the ban.

My office would take reports like the one submitted to the Bureau of Animal Protection seriously and act on them. That means first working with the agencies responsible for enforcement to understand what action they’ve taken, what their capacity is, and where the gaps are. Agencies sometimes lack the resources or the political will to pursue powerful agricultural interests. Where that’s the case, the Attorney General’s needs to provide all the support it can, as the lawyer for these agencies and the lawyer for the people of Colorado to ensure that the law is real and enforceable.

One of those hooks is consumer protection law. When a company markets its products while violating Colorado’s animal welfare standards, that can constitute an unfair or deceptive trade practice. Consumers are making purchasing decisions based on representations, explicit or implied, about how animals are treated. A company quietly flouting a gestation crate ban while selling pork to Colorado consumers may be deceiving those consumers. That’s actionable by the AG’s office.

The broader point is that the Attorney General has more tools than people realize, and the job is to use them. I’ve spent my career finding legal theories that powerful interests said didn’t exist and winning with them. I’ll bring that same approach to animal welfare enforcement, working with agencies, supplementing where they fall short, and making clear that in Colorado, the law applies to everyone, including the largest agricultural operations in the state.

Tools

Question: Would you support using civil enforcement tools, such as injunctions, penalties, or compliance orders, against producers that violate farmed-animal welfare laws?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. These tools are essential to ensuring compliance.

State Agency Accountability

Question: If a state agency responsible for enforcing animal welfare laws appears to be failing to do so, what role should the Attorney General play?

Answer: The failure to enforce laws on the books is very rarely itself a legal violation–so there is unlikely legal authority to, for example, sue those agencies under the pattern and practice laws to coerce their enforcement. But I would be eager to work with agencies in a collaborative way to provide them with resources and political will to enforce. I’m committed to using the role of the AG’s office as the lawyer for state agencies to ensure not only that agencies are in compliance with the law, but that they are using their authority to advance the interests of communities across Colorado. That will often mean helping them identify the resources and summon the political will to perform enforcement–also reinforcing to them that the AG’s office will help defend them against legal attacks against their enforcement actions. And if enforcement still isn’t happening, I’d use the authority of my office to make it clear to the bad actor in question that the AG may have independent enforcement authority. This could happen through direct enforcement.

Leadership

Question: When existing enforcement tools prove inadequate, should the Attorney General take a public leadership role in advocating for stronger inspection regimes or statutory reforms to ensure animal welfare laws are meaningful?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. One of the core responsibilities of the attorney general is to make sure that the laws on the books to protect the powerless and hold the powerful accountable are meaningful. That means bold and courageous enforcement and bold and courageous advocacy, including in the legislature.

Consumer Protection

Question: What role should the Attorney General play in enforcing consumer-protection laws when animal-welfare labeling or marketing claims may mislead consumers about how animals were raised?

Answer: I’ve spoken to this above, but.I think this is an exceptionally important tool. And it helps protect not just animals and consumers but also smaller growers, ranchers, and others who follow the law but can’t compete with larger producers that often trample it. I’ve used consumer protection laws boldly and courageously in these kinds of ways already, for example, using DC consumer protection law to hold Smithfield accountable for misrepresentations regarding worker treatment during the pandemic.

Other

Question: What else would you like to share? Please add anything else that might be helpful regarding your past or current support for pro-animal policies.

Answer: What connects so many of the issues I care about–animal welfare, workers’ rights, environmental protection, consumer protection–is that they are all casualties of the same force: concentrated corporate power that has decided its bottom line matters more than the law, more than basic decency, and more than the creatures and people who can’t fight back on their own.

I’ve spent my career holding that power accountable. The workers at PetSmart trapped by predatory fine print. The detainees at GEO Group’s private prison forced to work for the profits of a billion-dollar private prison company. The meatpacking workers at JBS denied basic wage protections and whose bodies are destroyed for the wealthiest meatpacking corporation in the history of the world. The consumers paying junk fees to corporate landlords. In every one of these cases, the same paradigm was at work: powerful interests exploiting the vulnerable because they believed no one would stop them.

Ensuring humane treatment in our economy is a measure of whether our values mean anything. An Attorney General who takes animal welfare seriously isn’t just protecting animals–though that’s essential on its own–they’re pushing back against the broader idea that profit excuses cruelty. That’s the work I’ve done throughout my career, and it’s the work I’ll do every day as Colorado’s Attorney General.