When people hear “California bans animal testing,” most picture cosmetics: rabbits, mascara, the kind of cruelty that put cruelty-free labels on store shelves a decade ago. That picture is wrong here, and the gap between what people assume and what actually changed is the whole story. The Prohibiting Extraneous Testing Act, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on September 26, 2022, never touched cosmetics. It closed a quieter, less famous loophole: the legal testing of pesticides, food additives, and industrial chemicals on dogs and cats. Cosmetics were already covered by a different law. This one went after the testing almost nobody was talking about.
The loophole the PET Act actually closes
State Senator Scott Wiener’s bill, the PET Act, makes it illegal in California to test pesticides, chemical substances, food additives, and similar industrial and consumer products on dogs and cats when that testing is not required by law. The phrasing matters. Federally mandated safety testing, the kind a regulator can require before a product reaches the market, is carved out. What the law ends is the extraneous version: testing a company chooses to run on dogs and cats when no agency is demanding it. That is the category that had been sitting in a blind spot, legal by default because no statute had ever named it. California named it, and became the first state to do so. The law took effect January 1, 2023.
Why cosmetics were already a separate fight
The reason this felt like a smaller headline than it was is that the cosmetics battle had already been won, in pieces. By the time the PET Act passed, eight states had banned the sale of cosmetics newly tested on animals: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, and Virginia. California’s own Cruelty-Free Cosmetics Act took effect in 2020. So when the PET Act arrived, it was not duplicating that work. It was reaching into the adjacent room, the one full of weed killers, preservatives, and food-additive trials, where dogs and cats could still legally be used as test subjects. Understanding that division, cosmetics on one track and everything-else chemicals on another, is the key to reading what California did and did not accomplish.
The Envigo case that set the backdrop
The PET Act did not pass in a vacuum. Two months earlier, in July 2022, roughly 4,000 Beagles were removed from the Envigo breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia, after a U.S. Department of Justice action and a Humane Society of the United States rescue operation. According to Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, the facility had “performed unnecessarily painful medical procedures on dogs and puppies, including euthanasia without a sedative.” The dogs went into foster care across the country, and many arrived without the most basic experience of being a pet.
“These dogs had never learned what a home sounds like,” says Marcus Webb. “A bowl of food, a television clicking on, a lawn mower outside, the ordinary noise of a house was overwhelming, because the lab was the only world they had ever known. Watching one of them figure out a couch is what a testing ban is really about.”
The Envigo Beagles were a research-breeding case, not a chemical-testing one, but they made the abstract concrete at exactly the moment lawmakers were voting. They are the reason a bill about pesticide trials landed with the emotional weight of a rescue story.
Where the rest of the country actually stands
Here is the honest scorecard, because “first state” can imply more progress than exists. There is still no nationwide ban on animal testing of either kind. The federal Humane Cosmetics Act, introduced by Senators Cory Booker and Rob Portman and co-sponsored by Senators Susan Collins and Jacky Rosen, has been introduced repeatedly and has never passed Congress. On the cosmetics side, the Humane Society reports that more than 40 countries have banned or limited animal-tested cosmetics, including every nation in the European Union, plus Australia, India, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and others. The United States, at the federal level, is not on that list. California’s PET Act is genuinely a first, but it is a first step into one specific room, not a national door swinging shut.
If you want the chemical-testing loophole closed in your own state, the lever is the same one Wiener pulled: a state legislator willing to carry the bill. Contacting your state representatives, not just your members of Congress, is where this kind of law actually moves.
References
- California Senate Bill 879 (Prohibiting Extraneous Testing Act / PET Act), Sen. Scott Wiener, 2021–2022 session, California Legislative Information.
- Office of Governor Gavin Newsom. “Governor Newsom Signs Legislation to Protect Animal Welfare.” September 26, 2022.
- U.S. Department of Justice. “Justice Department Secures Surrender of Over 4,000 Beagles From Virginia Breeder of Dogs for Research.” July 2022.
- Humane Society of the United States. “Cosmetics Animal Testing FAQ.” humaneworld.org.
- Humane Society of the United States. “States That Have Banned Cosmetics Animal Testing.”
