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

Is Modern Man a Part of Nature, or Apart from Nature?

We’ve written before about the “humane paradox,” namely that the “protecting ‘all animals’” goal of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) ultimately falls apart when some animals naturally harm other animals. Lions eat gazelles, after all—an act that surely violates the gazelle’s “right” to live and provides it a less than humane death.

An HSUS lawsuit filed last week against the National Marine Fisheries Service ups the ante even further: HSUS is objecting to the government agency’s chosen method of resolving the conflict between two endangered species.

The Bonneville Dam is on the Washington-Oregon border, about 150 miles up the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean. Sea lions congregate there and feast on the salmon population.

The dam, naturally, has made it hard for the fish to get further upstream, despite “fish ladders” built to facilitate their travel. It’s easy pickings for the sea lions, but this puts them in competition with both four Native American tribes authorized to fish for salmon, as well as conservation efforts designed to protect them. The National Marine Fisheries Service has chosen to reconcile these competing interests by killing a few of the seals with the biggest appetites.

It’s debatable whether it’s necessary for the government to mark some of the “troublesome” sea lions for a euphemistic “lethal taking.” Still, the feds have only killed 27 animals under this program since 2008—or about 0.01 percent of the 265,000-strong California sea lion population.

HSUS, predictably, objects to every seal death. But one of its affiliated organizations is at least daring to ask the obvious: “[W]hen one endangered species is the main food source for yet another endangered species..how do you protect them both?”

Dharma Passes the Hat

On December 7 of last year, “Dharma and Greg” co-star Jenna Elfman “tweeted” a photo taken after she taped a new "give $19 a month" TV ad for the Humane Society of the United States. Elfman made a radio PSA for HSUS in 2001 and lent an image of her lips to an HSUS-branded postage stamp in 2008, but this was her first on-camera work for the animal rights organization. It reportedly began airing late last week.

Last night the video production company that shot this fundraising ad posted a press release about it, but the release was removed early this morning. (Here’s Google’s cache, and our screen-grab for posterity.) In addition to the Jenna Elfman ad, the release also linked to videos of two more spots that may or may not be running nationally: one narrated by Wayne Pacelle, and another showcasing three children. (Note: We can’t control how long these movie files will be available for viewing.)

The Jenna Elfman fundraising ad is the most interesting of three to us. Not because it’s fronted by an actress, but because we counted 44 live animals in this ad, and all but two are dogs and cats:

More after the jump.

Tweaking Animal Rights Activists Is a Dirty Job

One of the very first articles we ever published on HumaneWatch was titled “I Dare You to Disagree with Mike Rowe.”

The "Dirty Jobs" host and Ford pitch man is among the most trusted macho-spokes-dudes in America. And he has little patience for Wayne Pacelle and the Humane Society of the United States. Rowe is well-versed on (and, of course, has hands-on experience with) animal welfare issues, and he has become something of a champion to farmers whose way of life is routinely threatened by HSUS and other animal rights groups.

If you’ve seen "Dirty Jobs" recently, you might recall the show in which Rowe helps pollinate date palms and hangs out with sharpshooters. In one of that episode’s opening sequences, he reads a piece of his viewer mail.

It’s a nasty, barbed-tongue of a letter from a fan named “Wayne P.”

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.

Green Is the New (Old?) Pacelle

Let’s take a walk back to the ’80s. No, mullets and M.C. Hammer parachute pants aren't coming back into style. We're going to take a look at Humane Society of the United States CEO Wayne Pacelle’s entry into animal-rights politics 23 years ago.

In 1987, Pacelle was fresh out of college and quite the busy bee in the animal rights world. In September of that year he joined the aggressive Animals’ Agenda magazine as an Associate Editor. Two months later, he ran for Alderman in New Haven, Connecticut. (He lost.)

What’s interesting, though is that Pacelle ran as a member of the Green Party. (We’ve written before—see here, here, here, and here—about the longstanding alliance between the environmental and animal rights movements, so that’s no surprise.)

And what the Greens stood for in the late ’80s provides a unique window into what Pacelle hoped to gain—and still does—by becoming a political animal.

In July 1987 when Green Party activists met in Amherst, Masachussets to discuss a national party platform, a group of animal “liberationists” offered a 12-point plan called “Ethical Treatment of Animals.” 

Oklahoma and the Rest of the HSUS Election Roundup

If you’re reading this, chances are you already know Election Day is tomorrow. And you're probably also hyper-aware that the “Humane Society” of the United States has a stake in oodles of outcomes, including the re-elections of four Members of Congress (1 | 2 | 3 | 4) and a U.S. Senator.

There’s been an insane amount of media coverage focused on four HSUS-related ballot questions—which isn’t really fair, since there are actually five biggies in play for Team HSUS out of the 160 state-level questions on tomorrow’s ballots.

Easily half of the HSUS-related ballot stories out there have been about the animal rights group's favored ballot measure in Missouri. Most "animal people" also know HSUS is writing six-figure checks to influence outcomes in Arizona and North Dakota. And HSUS is also backing a Proposition in California this year.

That’s four.

Everyone’s forgetting about Oklahoma.