This letter to Humane Society of the United States Board Chairman K. William Wiseman is dated December 6, 1990. It was sent by California Attorney General John Van De Kamp and Deputy Attorney General Yeoryios Apalla.

In it, the California AG's office gives HSUS two weeks to turn over a wide variety of documents—including Board minutes and recordings of meetings, and copies of financial records—related to the financial scandal that enveloped HSUS's president and treasurer from 1985 to 1989.

The letter reads, in part:

Information obtained by this office reveals that certain principals of the organization have engaged in a course of conduct that, in our opinion, is a violation of fiduciary duties owed to the charitable beneficiaries of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), among them citizens of this state.

Information in our possession indicates the following:

• The senior officers of HSUS, Messrs. Hoyt and Irwin, received significant sums of money in the form of compensation some of which was never authorized by the Board of Directors;
• In May, 1987, HSUS purchased Mr. Hoyt's home for 310,000 and leased it back to him rent-free, declaring the foregone rent to be additional compensarion; W-2s were issued to My. Hoyt which reported to IRS a rental value of $600/month;
• The Deferred Compensation Committee, whose legitimacy is in question, acted in excess of its authority in transferring certain life insurance policies to senior management and approving reimbursement to Mr. Irwin of some $85,000 for funds he expended in improving a piece of property in Maine.

It's unclear how (or if) HSUS responded to this inquiry.

This is a circulated draft of an agreement in principle reached on June 30, 2010 between:

• The Humane Society of the United States;
• Ohio Governor Ted Strickland; and
• The Ohio Farm Bureau Federation

It outlines a series of actions that the parties reportedly agreed to pursue as a condition of HSUS not pursuing a November 2010 ballot initiative in Ohio. HSUS's proposed ballot question would have dictated specific livestock standards to the state's Livestock Care Standards Board.

This document contains 48 copies of "Form 15" submitted to the Ohio Secretary of State in relation to a campaign to put an HSUS-favored question on the state's November 2010 ballot.

Specifically, "Form 15" notifies the State of Ohio that the signer intends to be paid (or to pay a third party) for gathering signatures related to a ballot initiative. "Ohioans for Humane Farms," an HSUS front group, supervised the campaign in question.

These forms are organized according to the organizations they represent, as follows:

• pp. 1-5: Mercy For Animals
• pp. 6-9: M+R Strategic Services (a for-profit firm)
• pp. 10-12: Progressive Campaigns, Inc. (a for-profit firm)
• pp. 13-14: DRW Campaigns (a for-profit firm)
• pp. 15-16: Professional Petition Consultants (a for-profit firm)
• pp. 17-19: Farm Sanctuary
• pp. 20-28: The Humane Society of the United States
• pp. 29-32: Ohioans for Humane Farms
• pp. 33-39: Miscellaneous non-Ohioans
• pp. 40-48: Miscellaneous Ohioans

Of particular interest, page 1 is the form submitted by Nora Kramer, who provided an e-mail address related to Ohioans for Humane Farms along with the mailing address of Mercy for Animals.

Some of this paperwork (those copies submitted on an obsolete version of Form 15) may be invalid. They include pages 10-16, 24-25, 29, 33-38, and 40-47.

This is the Form 990 tax return that the National Federation of Humane Societies filed with the IRS for fiscal year 2006.

NFHS Executive Director Steve Putnam was a vice president at HSUS from 1997 to 2007. According to NFHS’s filings with the IRS, former HSUS door-kicker Scotlund Haisley was also an NFHS board member in the past. And on its tax returns, all the board members have the same address: 2100 L Street, the downtown Washington HSUS building. Wayne Pacelle's official bio states that he co-founded NFHS in 2006.

This is the Form 990 tax return that the National Federation of Humane Societies filed with the IRS for fiscal year 2007.

NFHS Executive Director Steve Putnam was a vice president at HSUS from 1997 to 2007. According to NFHS’s filings with the IRS, former HSUS door-kicker Scotlund Haisley was also an NFHS board member in the past. And on its tax returns, all the board members have the same address: 2100 L Street, the downtown Washington HSUS building. Wayne Pacelle's official bio states that he co-founded NFHS in 2006.

This is the Form 990 tax return that the National Federation of Humane Societies filed with the IRS for fiscal year 2008. 

NFHS Executive Director Steve Putnam was a vice president at HSUS from 1997 to 2007. According to NFHS’s filings with the IRS, former HSUS door-kicker Scotlund Haisley was also an NFHS board member in the past. And on its tax returns, all the board members have the same address: 2100 L Street, the downtown Washington HSUS building. Wayne Pacelle's official bio states that he co-founded NFHS in 2006.

In Friedlander v. Brunner, the Humane Society of the United States sought to invalidate an Ohio law holding that only residents of the state can gather signatures to put a legislative initiative on the ballot. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

On May 13, 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Watson declared the Ohio law unconstitutional, opening the door for HSUS to hire out-of-state workers as signature collectors.

The judge's decree still requires signature gatherers to truthfully disclose their permanent address; but it also restrains the Ohio Secretary of State from invalidating signatures that were gathered by non-Ohio residents.

The "Ohio Humane" campaign's public statements about its signature-gathering totals indicate that as a result of this ruling, HSUS began employing paid signature-gatherers almost immediately.

This file is a combination of two similar documents dated October 3 and October 15, 2007, which were obtained from the city of Gaithersburg, Maryland.
(Two documents were merged and identical pages were deleted in the interest of clarity.)

The material itself shows that the Humane Society of the United States owns 10.5 acres of prime real estate along Interstate 270 in Gaithersburg, on which it also owns a two-story commercial building with 67,800 square feet of office space. The building originally belonged to the Tektronix company. At some point in its life, the building's estimated usable space was downgraded to 62,000 square feet.

In 2007, HSUS began to petition the City of Gaithersburg for permission to improve this real estate parcel. HSUS's proposed development would include:

...up to 300,000 square feet of office development in structures between 6 and 12 stories, up to 250-300 residential units in multifamily buildings between 6 and 12 stories, and a combination of above and below ground structured parking ...

HSUS's development plan calls for a groundbreaking after the completion of a new freeway interchange near the site, which is not likely to commence until at least the year 2012.

This "federal tax lien" tax document (apparently from the Fairfax County, VA Circuit Court) shows that Humane Society of the United States new chief fundraiser Deborah Peeples owes the U.S. Internal Revenue Service more than $87,000 in back personal income taxes.

HSUS has yet to acknowledge or explain its hiring of a serial tax cheat for the position of "Vice President of Philanthropy."

According to the Court, Peeples and her husband remain delinquent on their personal income taxes to the tune of $87,164.60 between 2000 and 2004.

(original source)

This is a four-page letter, with attachments, from HSUS co-founder Larry Andrews to a U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, concerning testimony given by another HSUS co-founder, Fred Myers, in March 1956. The letter was among documents obtained via a 2009 Freedom of Information Act request made of the FBI.

Andrews left HSUS in 1956 to lead the Arizona Humane Society, but remained on HSUS's Board of Directors until April 1958. This letter dates from the month after Andrews became fully detached from HSUS.

In his letter and its attachments, Andrews outlines a half-dozen instances in which Fred Myers allegedly perjured himself during his testimony, writing:

I feel that I have a moral obligation to bring these facts, and my conclusions, to the attention of Senator [James] Eastland's committee and perhaps to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Two reasons motivate me. First, my conviction that Myers is a communist and hence an enemy of our country. Second, that unless he is exposed and dismissed from his position, he will continue to dupe sincere, but gullible persons of wealth in the humane movement. I have a feeling of guilt for being the means of permitting the communists to infiltrate the humane movement. I alone am responsible for Myers being placed where he could create dissention and perhaps provide the communists with another "front."

In his Protecting All Animals: A fifty-year history of the Humane Society of the United States, HSUS's Bernard Unti dismisses concerns about Fred Myers' communist ties as a conspiracy of enemies:

The rift between The HSUS and AHA [the American Humane Association] created considerable ill will and even sparked rumors linking Fred Myers to the Communist Party ... Myers appeared before the Senate Internal Security Committee to refute the accusation that he had been a member of the Communist Party while active in a newspaper writers' union during the 1930s. The charge followed Myers, as antagonists both within and outside the movement resurrected it to tarnish both his reputation and that of The HSUS. [p. 4]

On the contrary, this letter shows clearly that one of the men who knew Myers best—one of his HSUS co-founders—believed that he was a communist, and that he may have started HSUS as part of a larger plan to provide 1950s communists in America with a "front" group to offer them legitimacy and much-needed money.

The New Mexico Livestock Board (NMLB) reviewed allegations leveled by HSUS against the Portales Livestock Auction in a video made by undercover HSUS investigators and released to the media on June 25, 2008. The review is signed by NMLB Executive Director Myles Culbertson and dated August 8, 2008. In part, it concludes:

The video presented to this agency is a record of harsh circumstances that can conveniently fit in the context of a speech about malicious animal cruelty. In this particular case the viewers were told in advance by "the nation's largest and most effective animal protection organization" what they would see; and afterward, told what they had just seen, embellished by suggestions of children subjected to unsafe food. When that same video is broken into its component parts and dispassionately analyzed, it yields findings of a very different nature; nevertheless, they are findings that require the attention of the livestock industry.

The report ultimately declares:

[P]erceptions created by the HSUS media releases and press conferences of malice, extreme cruelty, or illegal marketing of downer cows are not found to match the reality of the subject video.

This is the "Pennies For Charity Report from the Charities Bureau of the New York state Attorney General's office. It consists of statistics covering telemarketing campaigns conducted on behalf of charitable organizations in New York during 2003.

According to this report, a professional telemarketing company called The Share Group raised $1,031,103 during 2003 on behalf of the Humane Society of the United States. Not only did HSUS itself not see a single cent of this money, but the organization paid Share Group $173,726 for the fundraising work (a "net" yield of negative 16.85 percent).

This is the "Pennies For Charity Report from the Charities Bureau of the New York state Attorney General's office. It consists of statistics covering telemarketing campaigns conducted on behalf of charitable organizations in New York during 2004.

According to this report, a professional telemarketing company called The Share Group raised $1,466,145 during 2004 on behalf of the Humane Society of the United States. Not only did HSUS itself not see a single cent of this money, but the organization paid Share Group $175,360 for the fundraising work (a "net" yield of negative 11.96 percent).

This is the "Pennies For Charity Report from the Charities Bureau of the New York state Attorney General's office. It consists of statistics covering telemarketing campaigns conducted on behalf of charitable organizations in New York during 2007.

According to this report, a professional telemarketing company called The Share Group raised $1,679,763 during 2007 on behalf of the Humane Society of the United States. Not only did HSUS itself not see a single cent of this money, but the organization paid Share Group $5,358 for the fundraising work (a "net" yield of negative 0.32 percent).

This is the "Pennies For Charity Report from the Charities Bureau of the New York state Attorney General's office. It consists of statistics covering telemarketing campaigns conducted on behalf of charitable organizations in New York during 2008.

According to this report, a professional telemarketing company called The Share Group raised $1,950,521 during 2008 on behalf of the Humane Society of the United States, but HSUS itself only collected $103,141 of this total (a "net" yield of just 5.29 percent).