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!