HumaneWatch

If a Governor signs an anti-dogfighting bill into law and the Humane Society of the United States doesn’t issue a press release, is the statute still valid?

On Saturday Illinois Governor Pat Quinn officially made it a felony to hold a dog fight within 1,000 of a school, park, playground, or other kid-centered location. The new law also makes it a felony to bring a child under 13 to any dog fight.

Why the silence from HSUS? The group hasn’t issued a statement, mugged for any cameras, or even posted the news to its Facebook wall.

Update: This post was, in my own judgment, a bit hasty. I've since reconsidered much of it, given that the actual text of the "Buckeye Compromise" isn't entirely consistent with what was presented at Wednesday's press conference. It turns out my enthusiasm was, in many ways, premature.

The next time I buy a house or consider a job offer, I want Ohio Farm Bureau vice president Jack Fisher as my negotiator. (That's him above, at left.)

A little over an hour ago, Fisher stood with Ohio Governor Ted Strickland (center) and Humane Society of the United States CEO Wayne Pacelle (the guy looking displeased) for a press conference, announcing that HSUS will be pulling out of Ohio. Call it a case of campaignus interruptus.

What the heck happened? Did the Farm Bureau fold like a tent and concede victory to HSUS, as other states’ farmers have done? (I’m talkin’ to you, Colorado and Michigan…)

Nope. Despite a self-congratulatory press release from HSUS, the group got practically nothing that it wanted from Ohio’s farmers. Instead, Pacelle has agreed to abandon HSUS’s whole “Ohioans for Humane Farms” front group in exchange for the equivalent of $24 in blue beads.

Let’s take a look at what each side in the HSUS-versus-Buckeye-farmers battle got. It’s not pretty.http://www.journal-news.com/o/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/ohiopolitics/entries/2010/06/30/kasich_has_narrow_lead_in_new.html

A reader from Texas called this morning and pointed me toward a video I'd never seen before. This is Dr. Ron DeHaven, the Executive Vice President of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), speaking last August.

Dr. DeHaven takes the Humane Society of the United States, and specifically HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle, to task for favoring scare tactics and emotionalism over science and real expertise:

Tugging on people's heartstrings to raise money is easy. Finding real solutions to animal welfare concerns and the challenges that go with them is not easy. HSUS certainly excels at the former ... Mr. Pacelle is ignoring the legitimate concerns, and the perspectives and expertise, of legitimate animal welfare scientists and veterinary experts. And he is misleading the public to further his own organization's agenda. If Mr. Pacelle truly cared about the welfare of animals, he would not be so quick to criticize and minimize the expertise of veterinarians ... A knee-jerk response based solely on emotion, and ignoring all of the relevant science, might not be in the best interest of the animals.

I noted this morning that HSUS's own online "Leadership" list doesn't include a single veterinarian.  That just seems wrong, especially at a time when HSUS is trying to compete with the AVMA by running its own activist-oriented "Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association."

That organization (HSVMA) was originally called the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights (AVAR). But HSUS changed its name shortly after annexing it in 2008, apparently recognizing that leaving the words "animal rights" in the title might give people the wrong right idea.

Imagine that you're running a group called Ohioans for Humane Farms. You're (not-so-secretly) controlled by the Humane Society of the United States. And your goal in life is to get a question on the November ballot that would invalidate last year's election, when Ohioans vested control of animal agriculture standards in a thirteen-person board that just started meeting a few days ago.

Now imagine that your volunteer efforts to gather 402,275 signatures of Ohioans by June 29 are way behind schedule. You started canvassing back on March 10, which means that almost half of your signature-gathering time has already passed. It's April 27, and you've collected barely 115,000 signatures. And you'll probably need 600,000 to reach your goal, since so many of yours will read "Wilbur," "Mickey Mouse," and "Kermit the Frog."

What do you do?

If you're following the typical HSUS playbook, you hire professional signature gatherers. That's how the animal rights group got California's "Proposition 2" over the top. (So much for those boasts of having “11 million constituents.” Hardly any of them show up when it counts.) And the activist who ran signature-gathering for HSUS in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2008 conveniently moved to Cleveland just a few days ago.

In Ohio, this could be a big problem. State law prohibits people who are not "residents of this state" from circulating petitions for signatures.

But HSUS's full-time staff includes more full-time attorneys than a Law & Order marathon. So why am I not surprised that the group is trying to sue the state of Ohio into submission?

On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 48 of Chapter Three of the U.S. Criminal Code—a 1999 law that made the "depiction of animal cruelty" illegal. Not the actual animal cruelty (which was already against the law, of course.) The depiction of it.

Affirming an appeals court ruling in USA v. Stevens, the high court said that the law was too broadly written. Indeed, it appears to have actually criminalized TV reality shows about hunters, training videos for slaughterhouse workers, or movies about bullfights.

The Humane Society of the United States is not pleased to see this law struck down. Not one bit.

A little history is in order. Eleven years ago, this now-voided law was touted as a way to criminalize something called a "crush" video. (Apparently, some people derive sexual gratification from watching small animals get killed in a semi-erotic fashion. Yuck.) When President Bill Clinton signed the law, he specifically wrote that it should only be used for combating "wanton cruelty to animals designed to appeal to a prurient interest in sex."

Best of intentions. Road to hell. You get the picture.

And now there's a new law in the works, one that will supposedly be narrower and harder to misinterpret. (We'll see.)

This ought to be good. Actually, I have a legislative fix of my own to suggest.

I wouldn't have wanted to be HSUS Chief Operating Officer Michael Markarian tonight, entering the Ed Block "Courage" Awards ceremony on Michael Vick's arm.

Over 100 Baltimore protesters gather to remind Michael Vick that he's a coward. I bet it's kinda weird having the plastic shoe on the other foot? 

Come to think of it, Markarian is probably the more courageous of the two, because he risked alienating most of HSUS's donors to make an unapologetic statement that vicious dogfighters are people too. And I have to admit it. That takes cojones.

I have absolutely had it up to here (*hand motion at my forehead*) with the Humane Society of the United States promoting Michael Vick.

What is it with these people? Why is HSUS Chief Operating Officer Michael Markarian escorting him to an NFL awards dinner on Tuesday night?

HSUS spends tens of millions of dollars every year making the case that animals deserve the exact same level of legal and conscientious protection as people. Now imagine if a child-services advocate tried to arrange a death-row video hookup so that Richard Allen Davis (remember Polly Klaas?) could make a series of remorseful "don't do what I did" speeches. I think you get the picture. It's the hypocrisy that gets to me.

While I'm on the subject, why did the NFL allow Michael Vick to win a "courage" award in the first place? And why is BET giving him a reality show?

I have the distinct feeling that if HSUS hadn't made the Faustian bargain to get out in front of this sick publicity tour, Wayne Pacelle would be putting rhetorical body-slams on any other animal rights group that chose to take the lead.

My heartfelt apologies to Philadelphia Eagles fans, but when the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, that was something to be proud of. Michael Vick isn't. Rather, it's what Advertising Age called "a comprehensive public-relations scheme to rehabilitate his image." And HSUS is at the center of it.