Dr. Veg

HSUS’s top MD, Michael Greger, puts out an annual DVD titled “Latest in Clinical Nutrition.” Greger’s spiel is that he searches through just about every English-language journal every day—some 12,000 articles last year, for example—so that we don’t have to. He then presents what he thinks is the most notable science, in what can amount to an hours-long lecture.

(Greger, by the way, says all the DVD proceeds go to charity. We’re not sure which one though. HSUS? PETA? But we digress.)

So what did the good doctor find this year? If you know anything about the propaganda mill that is HSUS, you already have an idea.

“For Animal Liberation to Become Possible”

Paul Shapiro is a member of the “Animal Rights Hall of Fame,” and in charge of anti-animal-agriculture campaigns at the Humane Society of the United States—a moderate-sounding animal rights group that most Americans believe is affiliated with their local humane societies. (This is not the case.)

Appealing to mainstream values is a strategy that the Humane Society of the United States employs constantly, but the group’s end goal is far out on the fringe: By the “humane” treatment of animals, HSUS means an end to all human uses of animals, whether on the farm, in medical schools, at the zoo, or on the dinner table. That’s something mainstream Americans just don’t agree with.

Skeptical? Before Shapiro adopted HSUS’s more moderate “animal protection” tone, he was all about “animal liberation.”

HSUS Plays Chicken with Whole Foods

Meet Miyun Park. She’s a former Vice President for Farm Animal Welfare at the Humane Society of the United States. In 2009, Park’s résumé landed her a job as Executive Director of the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), the organization administering a new 5-tier animal-welfare rating system recently unveiled by Whole Foods Market. (To see GAP’s tax returns, click here.)

To judge from glowing media reports of the new meat, dairy, and egg labeling scheme, Miyun Park sits at the nexus of the animal-welfare mainstream and America’s foodie elites. But Park and GAP aren’t exactly what they seem.

GAP is beginning to show signs of a legitimate vegan takeover, led by Park—who, as the farm-animal VP at HSUS, was crystal clear about her desire to eliminate as much livestock farming as she could.

More on that after the jump.

HSUS Doc Makes Vegan Rounds

If you find the Humane Society of the United States’s official position on eating meat confusing, you’re not alone. 

HSUS preaches the virtues of “reducing [meat] consumption,” but it has generally tried to avoid looking like PETA—until now.

The Most Meaningless Scorecard of the Year

This week the Humane Society of the United States issued its 2010 “Humane State Ranking” report. This is an update of HSUS’s first such report (its 2009 rankings), released in February of this year. California came out on top. But don't get cocky, you west-coasters. This whole HSUS ranking system smells like last week's tofu.

When HSUS's first report came out, HumaneWatch was still 10 days away from launching, so we didn't address it. And besides, HSUS’s arbitrary 65-point ranking system seemed, well … arbitrary.  It read more like an HSUS lobbyist’s wish-list than an animal protection index, since it didn’t take into account laws that HSUS found inconvenient to its command-and-control mission.

Now that a second set of rankings is out, it appears even more foolish to allow this animal rights group to determine which states are (and are not) serious about animal welfare. It’s especially instructive to look at what happened in the intervening months with an eye toward how the rankings have—or haven't—changed.

Let’s take a look.

A Peek Inside Wayne Pacelle’s Brain

Brace yourselves. It’s a little odd in there.

Today Brownfield Ag News published an opinion piece from a Washington, DC lobbyist named Steve Kopperud. Now, before you sound the “LOBBYIST!” alarm, bear with us. This particular guy knows whereof he speaks.

Long before Kopperud went into private practice, he was a reporter with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the San Diego Union-Tribune. He also ran the Washington bureau of ABC’s magazine & newspaper publishing division. Later on, Kopperud ran the American Feed Industry Association and founded the Animal Agriculture Alliance.

Suffice it to say the Humane Society of the United States has been on his radar screen for many, many years.

He writes:

The greatest sin of HSUS is its arrogance. The organization and its leaders honestly believe because they deem a practice to be “wrong” or “unacceptable,” the world must stop and embrace that definition.

Inherent in that arrogance is blindness. I’ve never heard HSUS or any of leaders acknowledge the consequences – intended or unintended – of the group’s actions. While Pacelle proudly points to his victories in Florida, Arizona and California, he does not acknowledge the two producers in Florida who no longer operate, or the single producer in Arizona who spent I-don’t-know-how-much to stay in business. The vagueness of Prop 2 in California has led to even greater spending and uncertainty as the state government and industry struggle with how to comply with a program no one seems to be able to define …

HSUS chooses not to talk about the consequences – intended or unintended – of its actions. To force the changes [Pacelle] champions works against not only the best interests of animal agriculture, but against the best interests of consumers. That’s anti-animal agriculture.

Read the whole piece here.

Art concept

Pacelle’s “Blackmail” Backfires

One of the odder consequences of HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle’s “town hall” meeting show in Lincoln, Nebraska this weekend has been a new spirit of cooperation among the various Cornhusker State agriculture groups. Instead of squabbling among themselves, pork producers, egg farmers, cattlemen—heck, everyone suddenly seems unified against their common foe.

Nebraska Farm Bureau officer Mark McHargue (himself a pork producer) appeared on Monday’s “Agritalk” radio program, and his reaction to Pacelle’s road-show is instructive. Not just for how easy farmers find it to see through Pacelle’s humane-than-thou façade, but also how farmers are slowly getting the courage to stand up and say that they—not animal rights carpetbaggers from Washington, DC—know what’s best for the animals they take care of every day.

The audio below is a condensed version of McHargue’s interview. The whole show is available in a podcast on the Agritalk website. (His appearance begins at the 30:00 mark.) Quotable bits are after the jump. The interviewer is Agritalk producer John Herath.