Dear THLN supporter,

The Texas Legislature is underway, and we have just 140 days to pass laws to protect the welfare of our animals. Wait! Scratch that. We technically have 115 days left.

That’s not a lot of time to pass the bills we’ve been working on for the last 18 months. And if we don’t get the job done, we don’t get another shot until 2021.

Texas animals cannot afford to wait. So for the next 115 days, we’ll be working around the clock.

How can you help? Allow us to call on you: We’ll be calling on you multiple times in the coming weeks and months to help push our important legislative priorities.

Why multiple times? Because there are many phases in the legislative process.

We’re currently in the bill-filing phase, and many bills have been filed that we plan to support. (There may also be a few that we will vocally oppose; stay tuned for a future post!)

The next phase involves getting a bill voted out of committee. That’s when we contact individual committee members and ask them to vote a certain way on our bills.

The next phase involves passing a bill out of the entire House of Representatives and the Senate. So during this phase, we’ll ask you yet again to reach out to your lawmakers. We don’t want a bill getting stuck in a chamber. It has to pass out of both.

(We may even call on you to ensure our bills get onto House and Senate calendars in between committee and floor votes. Because even if a bill passes out of a committee unanimously, if it doesn’t get on the calendar, it doesn’t get voted on. It dies right there.)

You’re probably thinking, “That’s a lot of contact with my lawmaker! If I call them once to express my support, isn’t that enough?”

We are sorry to say that isn’t quite how it works.

Our 181 lawmakers will be presented with thousands of bills in the days ahead. They must be contacted through each phase of a bill’s life so that it remains top of mind. (For reference: More than 6,600 bills were filed during the 2017 legislative session. Only about 1,000 were signed into law.)

We’ve been working since the last legislative session ended to make sure this year’s bills reflect the kind of Texas we want to see. But we need all our supporters to help us realize this vision.

We’ve got 115 days.

So warm up your fingers, charge your cell phones, and fire up your laptops. Prepare to use your voices for those who have none.

We’ll be calling on you.