Self-Dealing at HSUS?

Given that six Congressmen recently wrote to the IRS Inspector General demanding a federal investigation of the Humane Society of the U.S. (not affiliated with local humane societies), we and many others are hopeful that HSUS is getting due scrutiny. But if an investigation is underway, it apparently wouldn’t be the first time the IRS has taken a closer look at 2100 L Street.

According to Animal People, in 2001 the IRS probed the alleged self-dealings of HSUS General Counsel Roger Kindler and HSUS senior counsel Murdaugh Madden, who had formerly been HSUS’s General Counsel for 32 years.

The IRS probe stemmed from a complaint filed by the former secretary for Kindler and Madden’s office at HSUS. This woman, Nancy Dayton, believed that the two were using HSUS’s resources for their own gain in offering private legal services out of HSUS’s headquarters. According to Animal People, Kindler and Madden advertised on the website lawyers.com that they handled wills, trusts, and other matters and listed HSUS’s headquarters as their address. They were apparently acting on their own time, yet allegedly used “HSUS premises, personnel, and equipment” in a significant manner for their for-profit law firm.

Dayton allegedly relayed her concerns to then HSUS President Paul Irwin in August 2000, only to be fired by Irwin a couple of weeks later. So in early 2001, Dayton filed a complaint with the IRS, which in March told her it had assigned an investigator to her allegations.

Specifically, Dayton charged that Kindler “assigned work on the following projects unrelated to the Humane Society of the United States’ chartable mission and on behalf of individuals with no relationship to the HSUS charitable mission.” For instance, she alleged that Kindler helped a friend get out of an $87 debt to a music club, along with using HSUS resources for personal gain.

All this certainly seems shady, but we presume that the IRS didn’t find any wrongdoing since Kindler is still employed by HSUS. It’s still a fascinating story nonetheless. It would certainly fit into the history of questionable financial dealings at HSUS—from its major scandal in the 1980s involving executive housing and compensation to grabbing $1 million from the Humane Society of Canada (which drew harsh words from a Canadian judge).

Click on the image below to read a scan of the full piece from the April 2001 Animal People (not available online that we could find).

Another ALF Supporter in HSUS’s Leadership?

We’ve written before about the questionable pasts of HSUS leaders Michael Markarian and Paul Shapiro. Now meet Patrick Kwan, the New York state director for HSUS. He’s the founder of the Student Animal Rights Alliance, a group which demanded total animal “liberation,” and was apparently in high enough regard that PETA published a glowing interview with him.

In the 1990s, Kwan was an organizer for the so-called New York City Animal Defense League (ADL), a radical “direct action” group. According to the NYC ADL’s publication (page 8), Kwan was arrested on multiple occasions in 1997 and charged with inciting a riot (a felony), disorderly conduct, trespass, and resisting arrest. That’s quite a record. (Kwan is listed as a contributor and photographer for the publication.)

Additionally, Kwan was reportedly arrested in Northboro, Massachusetts in 1999 for malicious destruction of property, being a disorderly person, disturbing the peace, and threatening to commit a crime. The group he was with was protesting outside the private home of a medical researcher. The Telegram & Gazette reported:

According to court documents, Akita, in his 911 call to police, said the group was chanting, "Animal rights! Hang 'em high." Akita said the group then chanted what he considered to be a direct threat: "Their freedom, your death." …

Police said all the suspects wore dark clothing or camouflage. They allegedly vandalized Akita's mailbox and smashed the rear window of a car at his house. No one was injured. …

Arrested were Patrick Kwan,18, of New York…

Here’s something else important: The NYC ADL openly declared its full support of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), an officially recognized domestic terrorist group. By 1997, ALF activists had already been involved in multiple instances of arson and deploying incendiary devices. And the NYC ADL wrote that it “does, and always will, support the Animal Liberation Front.”

According to former NYC ADL co-founder Ryan Shapiro, the group “work[ed] closely” with the DC-based Compassion Over Killing, then run by his brother Paul Shapiro (now with HSUS), and that the ADL sought to “combine…aggressive militancy” with “strategic and tactical planning.”

Interesting, the ADL’s publication also includes an interview with John “J.P.” Goodwin, then with the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade and a former “spokesperson” for the North American Animal Liberation Front. Where’s Goodwin now? He’s at HSUS with Kwan. (Kwan’s bio also states that he was “an organizer” for CAFT. And Goodwin’s employment with HSUS apparently dates to 1997.)

Interestingly, Kwan’s Student Animal Rights Alliance founded the “Demand Liberation” conference. “Demand Liberation” counted the Fund for Animals, which merged with HSUS, as a sponsor. The “Demand Liberation” speakers list for 2003 looks like a list of future HSUS leaders: Paul Shapiro, Miyun Park, Michael Greger, and Matt Prescott.  The 2004 speakers list included HSUS VP Wayne Pacelle (now CEO).

Starting to see a trend? A lot of fringe activists in small, largely irrelevant groups have converged on one big, wealthy group called the Humane Society of the United States. Not that you could tell from HSUS’s fundraising appeals.

After NYC ADL dissolved, some of the activists went on to saucier endeavors. Sarahjane Blum and Ryan Shapiro were arrested for burglary and pled to misdemeanor trespassing. And separate chapters of the ADL also housed well-known radicals. The Los Angeles ADL was founded by Jerry Vlasak, who has endorsed the idea of murdering doctors who use animals in research. The Long Island ADL is described by fundamentalist No Compromise as a “grassroots animal liberation group.” And the New Jersey ADL was co-founded by Darius Fullmer, who later received a one-year prison sentence for violating the Animal Enterprise Protection Act.

We’d sure like to be a fly on the wall anytime the NYC ADL has a reunion.

Just to keep this straight: A guy who was an “organizer” for a group that openly supported terrorists and who helped organize “Liberation Now” conferences is now HSUS’s NY state director? We wonder what he sees in HSUS.

“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.”

The Harold D. Guither HSUS Archive

In the HumaneWatch Document Library you can already see two significant archives of documents originally collected by others. One is a set of papers from the late Amy Freeman Lee, a 30-year veteran of HSUS’s Board of Directors. The other is an extensive set of controversial, internal HSUS Board documents from former Board member Susan Pepperdine.

Today, through the courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, we’re releasing a third such "special collection": The Harold D. Guither HSUS Archive.

Harold Guither was an agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois until he retired in 1995. In his 1998 book, Animal Rights: History and Scope of a Radical Social Movement, Guither profiled HSUS, PETA, the “Physicians Committee” for Responsible Medicine, and other liberate-the-lab-rats groups. (We reviewed that book last month.)

This archive largely includes items from the early 1990s, with a few from the 1980s. It includes gems like a speech from then-CEO John Hoyt to the California Farm Bureau Federation about HSUS and vegetarianism; HSUS catalogs full of endless tchotchkes; and some comparatively radical writings of former HSUS vice president Michael W. Fox.

Click here for a full list of these documents and direct links to download them all.

2004: The Year the Tide Turned

In case you’re wondering, the Humane Society of the United States wasn’t always PETA’s suit-wearing older brother. More and more, it’s looking like HSUS married into the activist family right around 2004.

To see the difference, compare what HSUS’s annual reports have chosen to emphasize in recent years. In 2000, the big news included an expansion of HSUS’s "Pets for Life" animal-adoption campaign, the "Kindred Spirits" memorial program for people who have lost their pets, and a section titled, "We Don't Run Shelters, We Help Shelters Run Better." This kind of literature is what you might expect from a group with “Humane Society” in its name.

Now look at 2009 (the most recent annual report available), when the focus had little to do with pets at all. It’s all about regulating animal treatment, banning the commercial sale of animal products, “investigating” cattle ranches in a quasi-legal undercover fashion, and running programs to keep hunters away from wildlife.

So what was the turning point? If you guessed Wayne Pacelle becoming CEO in 2004, you win a vegan cookie.

A Constituency Ain’t Nothin’ But a Mailing List

The Humane Society of the United States, which spends millions of dollars a year on lobbying, claims it represents “11 million members and constituents—one out of every 28 Americans.”

If you’re a legislator on the fence about a bill, HSUS can sway your vote if you believe it speaks for so many people. But does it really?

HumaneWatch readers will remember that we've tried to figure out the answers to a few nagging questions: How many people are actually bona fide HSUS "members"? And what is an HSUS “constituent,” anyway? (See here for a little background.)

With help from an insider document, we can answer the “constituent” question with some certainty now. The short answer is that an HSUS “constituent” is anyone who has given the group money in the past three years—plus everyone on its mailing list.

Announcing “The Pepperdine Papers”

One of the most interesting features of HumaneWatch is its document library, where we’re assembling what we believe is the largest repository of publicly available documents about the Humane Society of the United States. While our archive’s contents contain ordinary tax documents and fundraising materials, occasionally we can share something truly extraordinary with you. Today is one of those days.

This morning we published a complete collection of documents that once belonged to Susan Pepperdine, who was a Board member of HSUS for six years during the 1980s. This is the second such collection we’ve been able to share: Last July we published the HSUS-related papers of the late Amy Freeman Lee, who served on HSUS’s Board longer than anyone else in the group’s history.

Pepperdine’s HSUS papers run the gamut from old tax returns to internal minutes of Board meetings; they filled a whole banker’s box when we received them.

Ms. Pepperdine has confirmed the authenticity of this collection for us, and we’re sharing them with her permission. She tells us her papers represent an unfortunately scandal-plagued period in HSUS’s history, and that telling the episode’s complete story is the right thing to do. We wholeheartedly agree.

We’ve sorted the Pepperdine Papers into 13 PDFs, and we also provide an Excel file containing a complete inventory of each document. We’ll be pulling specific documents out of the collection to discuss as time goes on, but in the meantime we’re offering the complete collection freely to historians, journalists, and other interested parties.