If Prosecutors Won't Enforce the Law, Who Will?

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a video I will never be able to unsee. It was filmed last year at Ali Meat International, an Islamic slaughterhouse in Orlando, during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. In it, children are handed blades and turned loose on live animals while the staff shock the ones still standing. I've spent decades pulling animals out of terrible situations, and I still had to watch it with my hand over my mouth. I made myself sit through every second, because if I don't watch it, I can't do anything about it.

Then I learned something that made me even angrier than the video. The people whose job it is to stop this have had it for a year. It was sent to the office of Democrat State Attorney Monique Worrell, who is responsible for prosecuting cruelty cases in Orange County. A year later, nobody has been charged, and Ali Meat is still open for business. I've read Florida's cruelty laws, along with the Florida Humane Slaughter Act and the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, and nothing in them allows what I watched. I don't care what anyone calls it. It's torture, and in Florida torture is a crime.

So how does a video like that sit on a prosecutor's desk for a year? Before I got to Tallahassee, I would have said it couldn't happen. I believed that once a law was on the books, it got enforced. What I've learned is that a law is only as strong as the prosecutor willing to use it, and the Democrat Party has spent years electing prosecutors who aren't willing. They campaigned on charging fewer crimes, and they meant it. Once that's your philosophy, animal cruelty is the first thing you let go, because those victims can't testify and will never show up to vote you out.

That should worry you even if you don't own a pet. People who torture animals rarely stop at animals, and law enforcement has known it for decades, which is why the FBI tracks animal cruelty as its own category of crime. Look into the background of almost anyone whose violence has made the national news, and you'll usually find hurt animals somewhere in their past that somebody saw and shrugged off. Every time a prosecutor lets one of these cases die, the person responsible learns that nothing happens. The next victim may not be an animal.

Floridians already know what these prosecutors look like. Gov. DeSantis has had to suspend two Democrat state attorneys for refusing to enforce the law, and Worrell was one of them. Both times, the Left called it an attack on democracy. But shielding criminals from consequences isn't democracy, and it isn't compassion.

Republicans have done the opposite. I was proud to sponsor Dexter's Law with Rep. Linda Chaney, which cracked down on aggravated animal cruelty and made Florida one of the toughest states in the country on people who hurt animals. We also have leaders like Commissioner Wilton Simpson and Attorney General James Uthmeier who take this seriously, and since the local prosecutor won't act, I'm calling on the Attorney General to step in and shut Ali Meat down.

The bigger fix is making sure these cases are investigated the same way everywhere. Right now it depends on your county. In mine, the sheriff runs animal control, and we have five detectives who know how to build a case a prosecutor can win. Too many counties have nothing like that, and when an investigation isn't done right, the case is dead before it ever reaches a courtroom. If it's a law, it's a law, and it should mean the same thing in Orlando as it does anywhere else.

When I went on Real America's Voice this week to talk about the video, Dr. Gina Loudon asked me what her viewers could do. I told them to vote, and to vote the right way. I was thinking of people like the person I was for most of my life, someone who loved animals and never gave politics a second thought. There are millions of Americans like that, and the soft-on-crime crowd is counting on them to stay home.

Don't let them. Prosecutors, sheriffs, and the legislators who write these laws are all elected, and in a midterm year those races are decided by whoever shows up. The animals in that video had nobody standing up for them. This November, you can be the one who does.

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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