Animal welfare on the ballot this year

Now that the dust has settled after the 2010 midterm elections, we are beginning to see what we lost... and what we won.

It is not easy to see our victories, but these two are as clear as Sarah Palin's accent.

In Missouri, Prop B -- which will stop puppy mill abuses -- passed with flying colors. Puppy mills look, smell and sound exactly what they sound like: crowded, unhealthy, packed factories that pump out our best friends. Breeding dogs are kept inside cages and often never get to feel real ground. The puppies are ripped from their mothers and shipped off to pet stores in abhorrent conditions.

While their future owners will love them and no doubt treat them like a member of their own family, their brutal beginnings -- and mothers and siblings they left behind -- can never be erased or their treatment justified.

The Puppy Mill Creulty Prevention Act was a win among many losses.

And in Arizona, voters roundly rejected Proposition 109, a initiative that would have politicized wildlife management and taken control out of voters' hands. Not only would it make hunting and fishing the preferred method of managing wildlife, but it could have -- if not defeated -- also rolled-back important wildlife protection measures, like prohibiting steel traps.

Note: I typically support taking support out of voters' hands when it comes to important issues (ie: reproductive rights, civil rights, etc...). But when it comes to fuzzy animal issues, voters overwhelmingly vote for the animal... any animal that we use for meat is of course exempt from this.

So when we are down and out, and looking back at election day, we can always remember these rays of light piercing the darkness.