The Bottom Line: HSUS = PETA

While this isn’t a website about PETA (if you want one, try this), it’s helpful to remember the bigger picture. HSUS is not about animal welfare, it’s about animal rights.

Your local humane society is about animal welfare—ensuring animals are treated well. The Humane Society of the United States is different than (and unaffiliated with) local humane societies. It’s about ending most uses of animals under the premise that use equals abuse. Given that the vast majority of Americans eat meat, for example, HSUS isn’t going to win influence by claiming, as PETA does, that giving a kid a hamburger is child abuse. HSUS is smart enough to know this.

Writing in The New Yorker a few years back, Michael Specter put it well:

It has been argued many times that in any social movement there has to be somebody radical enough to alienate the mainstream–and to permit more moderate influences to prevail. For every Malcolm X there is a Martin Luther King, Jr., and for every Andrea Dworkin there is a Gloria Steinem. Newkirk and PETA provide a similar dynamic for groups like the Humane Society of the United States…

When you do a little digging, you discover that PETA’s practically a revolving door for HSUS employees, a radical training ground before these activists don a more respectable brand (to say nothing of clothing…). Here’s a list of just some of the links we’ve dug up:

• Matt Prescott, HSUS food policy director—former corporate campaigner with PETA
• Ann Chynoweth, senior director of the End Animal Fighting and Cruelty Campaign at HSUS—former researcher and the director of grassroots campaigns at PETA
• Mary Beth Sweetland, HSUS director of investigation—former director of research and rescue at PETA
• Paul Shapiro, “factory farm” campaign director—former PETA volunteer
• Alexis Fox, Mass. state director—former legal fellow at The PETA Foundation (aka Foundation to Support Animal Protection)
• Jill Fritz, HSUS Mich. Director— former PETA student coordinator
• Peter Petersan, Deputy Director of Animal Protection Litigation—former PETA activist
• Leana Stormont, HSUS attorney—former PETA counsel
• Miyun Park, former HSUS VP—former PETA employee
• Patrick Kwan, New York state director—former media assistant for PETA-linked Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Keep in mind that this is just PETA and its quasi-medical front group the “Physicians Committee” for “Responsible Medicine.” (Click the link to see why the scare quotes are appropriate.) There’s a whole web of animal rights groups with essentially the same agenda: to eliminate the use of animals for food, research, clothing, and entertainment. Many HSUS leaders come from these groups—PETA-esque in worldview, but without the same budget or notoriety as PETA. Wayne Pacelle, Michael Markarian, and several HSUS board members hail from the Fund for Animals, an anti-hunting group, for one example.

Here’s HSUS and PETA in their own words. On the major goals, we can’t see any difference:

PETA Says…                                                       

"Animals Are Not Ours to Eat"

"Animals Are Not Ours to Wear"

"Animals Are Not Ours to Experiment On"

"Animals Are Not Ours to Use for Entertainment"

HSUS Says…

“We don't want any of these animals to be raised and killed.”

“HSUS is committed to ending…killing for fur.”

“HSUS advocates an end to the use of animals in research...”

HSUS “opposes the use of wild animals in circuses”

Egg Shortages Hit Europe. Soon to Hit America?

Starting this year, new animal-welfare regulations took effect for farmers in the European Union. The result? Supermarkets in Britain fear shortages of products using eggs:

Britain's supermarket shelves could be empty of key products within a month as an acute shortage of eggs threatens to have serious consequences for the country's food chain. New EU rules banning the housing of hens in conventional cages are being blamed for what some in the industry are already labelling a "crisis", as competition among food manufacturers to source eggs sends prices rocketing. The price of eggs on the EU wholesale market has nearly quadrupled over the past week to more than four euros a kilo.

"It's now no longer a question of price, it's a question of supply," said one industry source who asked to be anonymous. "I estimate that within three to four weeks some companies will be at breaking point."

France is also facing a potential crisis by suffering a 10 percent shortfall, with the price of eggs having skyrocketed 75 percent since last autumn. In all, the EU is targeting 13 countries that didn’t meet the deadline.

It’s the basic laws of supply and demand—higher production costs from the new infrastructure translate into higher prices, which mean less demand. Supply is likewise reduced, especially in the near-term if farms still using now-outlawed methods and can’t sell their eggs.

This doesn’t benefit egg farmers. It doesn’t benefit other businesses that use eggs, like bakers. And it certainly doesn’t benefit consumers.

Now, we should caution that the EU producers weren’t asked to change overnight. They were given 12 years to do it. We’re not sure if some just didn’t care, or if they simply couldn’t afford to change. (In this economy, who could blame them?)

Whatever the reason, for British egg producers who did comply with the law, it’s unfair to allow the now-illegally produced (and cheaper) eggs to be sold and undercut them. And consumers and grocers are also in a bind. Here’s one example from a Sheffield seller:

The scramble for eggs is forcing him to charge £2.20 for a dozen large eggs – an £1 increase on what he normally charges.

Paul said: “I paid 30p per dozen more for the eggs I bought this morning than I paid for the same-sized eggs yesterday, it’s crazy.

“I have to pass that cost on to my customers who simply can’t pay those kind of prices.

So, cui bono? If you’re a group with a vegan agenda—like HSUS or PETA—this news is just dandy. Call it intended consequences. HSUS has said it wants to “get rid of the entire industry” and that “we don’t want any of these animals raised and killed.” (In a sad twist, some European producers have had to simply destroy their birds.)

Could this happen in the US? Remember, in 2008 HSUS pushed an initiative to require California farms to switch systems in just 7 years. It’s now pushing for a federal law to mandate incremental shifts across the country over the next 15-18 years.

HSUS doesn’t have to go whole hog and ban meat or dairy products. It just has to make them prohibitively expensive so that few people can afford to buy them. (Think about how it’s possible for California to ban foie gras.) And legislative mandates appear to be just the right way.

But for consumers—and producers—it’s looking like mandates drive chaos. Wouldn’t it be easier if change was driven by consumer demand (as it is now) instead of animal rights-backed government interference?

Nebraska Update: Farmers and Ranchers Show Their Pride

We had to laugh when HSUS started its “We Are Nebraska” campaign a few days ago. An anti-agriculture group claiming to represent an agricultural state? Puh-leez.

From what we can see on HSUS’s Flickr steam, only two farmers and ranchers have submitted photos supporting HSUS’s campaign, including one who’s on HSUS’s state council. (Gee, what happened to all those 51,000 HSUS “members” in Nebraska? Maybe they don’t exist.)

In contrast, we’ve seen many times that number of farmers and ranchers submit photos on our Facebook wall as part of our counter-campaign. And we’re the “David” in the campaign against the HSUS “Goliath.” So who’s really got the support of the ag community?

While we’ve kept our submission to just farmers, the clear majority of photos in HSUS’s campaign feature pets—probably because HSUS knows it doesn’t have much support from farmers at all. But that tactic is also straight out of HSUS’s playbook. As communications professor Wes Jamison recently pointed out, this tendency of many Americans to conflate farm animals and pets plays into HSUS’s hands: “The (HSUS) knows the issue, knows their target, their message and their strategy. The message is easy to understand and repeated over and over.” In other words, HSUS is milking the fact that most Americans don’t have any farming experience whatsoever and look at a pig as though they would a dog. Pets and farm animals are different, but as the saying goes, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.

If anything, the HSUS campaign is a sign that the road ahead teaching people the truth about farming and HSUS is long. How many of those pet-loving folks backing HSUS know that HSUS gives only 1 percent of its budget to pet shelters? We wonder. Perhaps we’ll have to inform them—in a very public way—that, according to its tax return, HSUS made just one measly grant to a Nebraska pet shelter in 2010. If all that these folks have seen is HSUS’s ads, they may be deceived.

We’re posting some of the photos we’ve received below. View the rest on our Facebook wall. Keep up the good work, farmers and ranchers!

“We Are Nebraska Farmers and Ranchers”

HSUS has launched a new assault on Nebraska farmers and ranchers. This week, HSUS attacked the Governor after he stood up for animal agriculture and against HSUS—which has said it wants to “get rid of the entire industry.” HSUS is taking offense to some tough rhetoric the Governor used.

It’s a politically opportunistic move, and now HSUS has launched a “We Are Nebraska” campaign, asking its supporters to submit photos of themselves and their animals (so far, it's almost all pets). It’s yet another bait-and-switch campaign: The real issue is HSUS’s anti-agriculture agenda, and it's using photos of dogs and cats to distract. But that’s nothing new for HSUS—its deceptive ads have a similarly manipulative formula.

We’re calling on Nebraska farmers and ranchers: Submit a photo of yourself, your animals/pets, or (better yet) you with your animals/pets to our Facebook wall and show your support for agriculture. Here’s how:

Click on the “photo” tab near the top of the page.

Then click “Upload a Photo” and find it on your computer’s hard drive. (If you can’t get it to work, email us at info@HumaneWatch.org and we’ll post it for you.)

Be sure to include a description of your farm and your background when you post the photo! If you want to email us a testimonial or your thoughts on HSUS, we’d be happy to publish some.

HSUS absurdly claims it has 51,000 members in Nebraska. That’s its self-claimed “constituency,” which we’ve shown overstates HSUS actual membership by a factor of potentially 10 or 20. So, really, there are likely only a few thousand actual HSUS members in the state.

There are far more people involved in producing food for Nebraska and the rest of America. If you’re one of them, we hope you’ll take part in our campaign and stand against a group that wants to destroy your livelihood!

HSUS: The “Hysterical Society for Uninformed Simpletons”?

Over at Western Outdoor News, Bill Karr writes about an ongoing HSUS-manufactured “scandal” in California. The head of the state’s Fish and Game Commission went and recently hunted a mountain lion in Idaho. The catch? Mountain lion hunting has been off limits in California for the past few decades. It’s legal in Idaho, but HSUS’s fur is flying anyway.

Karr writes that HSUS is simply trying to take advantage of California’s “uninformed simpletons,” which presumably is a not-so-nice way of referring to California’s substantial urban population that has little or no experience in the outdoorsman/hunting culture. (After all, some odd ideas come out of San Francisco and Los Angeles.)

Whether or not you think hunting a cougar is moral, he does have a point (though a bit crudely stated). We’d argue that point is much better illustrated when it comes to HSUS and farmers.

HSUS has started ballot campaigns across the country to regulate how farmers can raise animals. But an Ohio farmer raised a good issue the other day: No one on the HSUS board has a degree in animal husbandry.

That’s true of HSUS’s leaders, as far as we can tell. CEO Wayne Pacelle is a Connecticut man who went from Yale straight into a New York City-based anti-hunting group. Paul Shapiro, director of HSUS’s farming campaign, is from the DC metropolitan area and a longtime vegan agitator. HSUS’s “food policy director” is a former PETA activist from a small New Hampshire town near the Atlantic coast.

The key link running across HSUS’s leadership isn’t that they’re farmers, it’s that they’re animal rights ideologues. They come from a belief system that holds all animal agriculture to be immoral, so that’s the ultimate goal and it shapes their thinking. Farm animal welfare is a sideshow to farm animal rights (like the “right” not to be eaten).

Unfortunately, they’ve found success in preying upon the large number of folks in urban and suburban communities who are long removed from the farm, especially modern practices. HSUS focuses on one aspect of animal welfare—how much space animals are given. This is important, but farming is much more complicated. The simple language, however, is meant to appeal to folks with no farming background. (Cartoon-ish ads like the one from Chipotle aren’t helping.)

Over at CCF recently, we wrote about the brouhaha over a new HSUS “undercover” video allegedly showing conditions at two Oklahoma hog farms. HSUS presented its skewed, spliced propaganda to the media, but it was refreshing to see an actual hog farmer offer her take. Diana Pritchard, a small-scale hog farmer, wrote about the many sins of omission in HSUS’s video:

I’m also about to share with you another inconvenient truth, because unlike the HSUS I don’t intend to blow rainbows and bunnies up your ass: Animals die. Some never live to begin with. Still born piglets– see the shocking image of a bucket full of dead piglets at 0:27 — are not uncommon. Even if you get rid of gestation crates animals will still die. Even on our farm where sunshine, pasture, room to move around, belly rubs and behind-the-ear scratches are the norm, some piglets are born dead; some get stuck in their amniotic sacks and die immediately after birth; still some others are simply not thrivers and die within the first week of life. It sucks, but it’s nature. There is nothing more gut wrenching than disposing of tiny bodies or more exhausting than tending night and day to an ill animal, but it’s part of raising them for any reason — including for meat. Where you have livestock, you have dead stock….

They don’t disclose when they tell you the dimensions of gestation crates that pigs are generally afforded more space per pig in crates than in pens (fourteen square feet versus nine). And when they quote the pew research council on the stress the crates cause the sows — which I’m not disputing, not at all — they don’t include that pen rearing can be just as stressful if not more so. They don’t tell you that the scrapes and scratches on the pig shown at 1:32 are probably from fighting with other pigs.

Of course, for us to deem it “sins of omission” means HSUS knew all this. Given the dearth of actual farmers at HSUS, perhaps its “experts” didn’t have the slightest clue.

It’s no surprise that HSUS’s major ballot campaigns have had a certain tilt: Prop 2 in California in 2008, followed up by threats last year of egg initiatives in the Pacific Northwest. Ohio, a state with heavily urban and suburban areas, was a target until a deal was reached between HSUS, the governor, and the state Farm Bureau. Colorado, another “purple” state, also faced a threat a few years back.

It’s a demographic calculation, and once HSUS passes a few initiatives, it can go for the whole hog—federal legislation. Just ask the United Egg Producers, whose president says “we can’t win ballot initiatives because of consumer emotion” and is now seeking federal regulation of hen housing.

We wouldn’t range to call urbanites who don’t understand modern farming “uninformed simpletons.” Sure, there will be a few smarmy know-it-alls like the occasional New York Times columnist, but the vast majority is just misinformed by HSUS, PETA, and other radicals who want to “get rid of” animal agriculture.

It wasn’t long ago that the folks at HSUS were off in far more radical endeavors. (See here, here, and here for some examples.)  They’ve been able to coalesce on a massive propaganda campaign and change the dialogue, but the pendulum is primed to swing the other way.

HSUS can’t continue to play consumers for dummies forever. After years of distortion, HSUS and its ilk may have pushed farmers to a “Network” moment.

Photo: KRO-Media

The Backyard Barnyard

Imagine this scene on a farm: Feathers litter the ground amidst streaks of blood. A few mangled bodies of hens lay on the ground as fresh evidence of the calamity.

If this was an HSUS video (doesn’t it sound like one?), you’d receive a lecture about how this shows the “real truth” behind “factory farming.” But this actually was the scene that an associate of ours saw—in his own yard.

Raising backyard farm animals—especially chickens—has been a growing trend—so much so that a number of localities are looking at easing regulations on keeping hens. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of having your own farm animals, of course, but there are plenty of practical considerations. It’s harder than some people think. (In our friend’s case, a local fox got to the hens.)

We came across an interesting article on the Mother Nature Network the other day: “Failed backyard farms lead to growing number of homeless animals,” the website claims. The growing number of do-it-yourself urban and suburban farmers has unsurprisingly led to an increase in the number of animal surrenders for a variety of reasons—one being that chicks are sometimes not sexed properly, so some people wind up with roosters when these male birds are in fact banned under local law. The animals then wind up at sanctuaries, which are basically at a breaking point.

Sounds like a task for HSUS and its $200 million, no?

To a degree, these problems are representative of the fact that most people don’t know about farming and don’t understand farm animals. Only about 1 percent of Americans today are farmers, compared to 39 percent back in 1900.

Communications professor Wes Jamison recently noted that most people view farm animals as they would pets. That’s obviously a good thing for HSUS to [ab]use in its PR messaging, but bad for the realities faced by farmers (and farm animals).

Our friend with the well-fed fox learned a lesson about predators. In the larger picture, it’s worth remembering that farms evolved to where they are for a reason, even as the number of farmers decreased.

Moving animals indoors, for example, is a way to escape natural elements (like bad weather), predators, and disease vectors. It does come at a cost—the animals have less space to move around. But there’s a tradeoff in any system.

Hopefully the growth in hands-on experience with farm animals will disabuse people of the rainbows-and-unicorns view of the farm promoted by agenda-driven activists (or Chipotle). Modern farmers strive to keep the fox out of the henhouse—and unwitting consumers shouldn’t open the door.

Photo: Flickr

Unsuccessful Farming?

UPDATE 10-6-10: Several readers have emailed us with a new response, this time from BHG's editor in chief:

Dear [NAME],

Thank you so much for contacting me regarding our charity pumpkin stencil program.  Your opinion is important to me, and I sincerely appreciate hearing your views and receiving the information that you’ve provided.

The goal of our Carving for a Cause program is to give readers a chance to support the various causes that they are passionate about, and we selected these charities with that goal in mind.

With respect to the Humane Society of the United States, our contribution of $5,000 is a one-time restricted donation to the Animal Rescue Team’s efforts to aid animals after natural disasters.  We know that our readers truly love their pets and domestic animals.  In retrospect, I should have made that focus clearer in my editor's letter.  As an editor I strive for clarity, but fell short in this instance.

Thank you again for reaching out. I so appreciate that you wrote to share your views and this information.

Gayle

Original post:

We’ve heard from many of you who have contacted Better Home and Gardens following its editor in chief’s promotion of HSUS in the October issue. (Read this for background.) An astute reader emailed us today and pointed out something ironic—the Meredith Corporation, which publishes Better Homes and Gardens, was actually founded in 1902 with the Successful Farming magazine.

Here’s the problem: Promoting HSUS and promoting successful farming are mutually exclusive endeavors.

Why? HSUS wants to end animal agriculture. That couldn’t have been clearer when HSUS Vice President for Farm Animal Issues told an animal rights conference:

We don't want any of these animals to be raised and killed. But when we're talking about numbers like “one million slaughtered in the U.S. in a single hour,” or “48 billion killed every year around the world,” unfortunately we don't have the luxury of waiting until we have the opportunity to get rid of the entire industry.

And so because of that, a number of organizations including the Humane Society of the United States, we work on promoting veganism.

It couldn’t be any more transparent than that. HSUS’s version of “successful farming” means putting every dairy, livestock, and feed-crop farmer out of business. More and more folks are getting the picture, with Nebraska’s governor and U.S. Rep. Steve King becoming very vocal about the threat to farmers’ livelihood.

One HumaneWatch reader sent us the response she received from Better Homes and Gardens after she emailed them to share her disappointment with the magazine’s promotion of HSUS. BHG told her:

Thank you for taking the time to comment on the charity stencil program.

We respect your right to disagree with our choices, and hope you will consider another charity stencil option from the assortment offered through the program, or one of the many stencils we offer on our website:
 
BHG.com/charitystencils

http://www.bhg.com/halloween/pumpkin-carving/printable-pumpkin-stencils/
 
Again, thank you for writing. You are a valued reader.

Does it sound like they “get it”? If you want to share your thoughts with BHG, you can email BHGEditor@meredith.com.