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”

Will HSUS Be Bullhooked for Millions in Legal Fees?

The ongoing legal drama between a set of animal rights groups and Feld Entertainment, which owns the Ringling Bros. circus, has taken a saucy new turn. And it looks like the animal rights activists and their lawyers could soon be neck-deep in elephant dung.

First, a quick review. Animal rights activists brought a lawsuit against Feld in 2000 alleging elephant abuse in violation of the Endangered Species Act, with former Feld trainer Tom Rider as a key witness and plaintiff. After years of legal wrangling, D.C. federal judge Emmet Sullivan threw out the lawsuit in late 2009, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing and—more importantly—that Rider was “essentially a paid plaintiff and fact witness who is not credible” after receiving at least $190,000 from the animal rights cabal, his sole source of income as the case made its way through the courts. A US Court of Appeals recently upheld the dismissal. (Read the full opinion here.)

Feld returned fire, filing a racketeering lawsuit that hinges on the court’s findings. How the alleged scheme worked, according to Sullivan’s 2009 ruling, was essentially that counsel for plaintiffs' law firm Meyer, Glitzenstein, and Crystal ran a nonprofit called the “Wildlife Advocacy Project” (WAP) and other groups funneled money through it to Rider. (Rider also allegedly received payments directly from animal rights group plaintiffs and through MGC.)

HSUS fits in because the Fund for Animals was a plaintiff in the suit against Feld, and merged with HSUS in 2004/2005. Fund chief—now an HSUS executive—Michael Markarian also apparently fits into the equation, according to Sullivan’s ruling:

Beginning in December 2001 and continuing until at least the beginning of 2008, the organizational plaintiffs made payments to WAP for the purpose of funding Mr. Rider. While FFA/HSUS (Mr. Markarian) testified that it was not certain whether WAP used its “donations” for other purposes as well, this testimony is undermined by the documents underlying FFA/HSUS’s “donations,” which indicate that the money was specifically for use in connection with this litigation. FFA/HSUS’s testimony also is questionable given that in 2003, plaintiffs’ counsel, Ms. Meyer, specifically sent an email to the representatives of the organizational plaintiffs, including Mr. Markarian, requesting funds to support Mr. Rider’s advocacy efforts regarding the elephants and the lawsuit, and expressly suggesting that the funds for Mr. Rider could be contributed to WAP so that they would be tax deductible.

Also named in the racketeering lawsuit are HSUS attorney Kimberly Ockene and HSUS Senior Vice President Jonathan Lovvorn, both of whom used to work at Meyer, Glitzenstein, and Crystal and were plaintiff attorneys during the Endangered Species Act complaint. In fact, Feld’s attorneys allege that money was taken out of an HSUS bank account and earmarked for Rider.

So what’s new?

Last week Feld’s attorneys filed a motion in the original case—not the racketeering case—demanding that the plaintiffs pay for legal fees that Feld accrued, totaling an estimated $20 million. Defending a lawsuit for a decade tends to be an expensive endeavor, after all.

This could be a double-whammy for HSUS. It could be on the hook for a good chunk of the $20 million in legal fees. Additionally, Feld is seeking treble damages under RICO against HSUS and the other defendants in the separate racketeering lawsuit—so add another $60 million to the potential pot.

And that’s not all.

Feld’s attorneys are also asking the court to officially sanction the attorneys for their conduct. They allege that “Not only did counsel bring fraudulent (Rider) and frivolous (API) claims, they doggedly pursued them for more than eleven years.” Feld alleges that the plaintiffs knew that their key witness was unreliable and “each and every step of the way counsel had an opportunity to drop either Rider or API or both (and put an end to FEI’s mounting legal expenses). Yet they did not. Instead, they embraced Rider’s lies and API’s meritless and hollow allegations…”

And since the court is apparently allowed to hold the attorneys jointly and severally liable for the estimated $20 million in legal fees (if the court rules the plaintiffs should pay it), that means HSUS, Lovvorn, and Ockene, among others, could have quite the bill, along with a bench-slap to go with it.

We encourage you to read the whole motion for all the intricacies and details. When there’s a ruling, we’ll be sure you’re among the first to know.

RICO Update: Was HSUS Involved in a Pay-to-Play Racket?

When we formally launched HumaneWatch in February 2010, one of the first things we reported on was that the Humane Society of the United States and two of its lawyers were defendants in a federal racketeering lawsuit. There are some key updates that you should be aware of.

First, some background: A decade ago, animal-rights groups sued Feld Entertainment (parent company of the Ringling Brothers circus) alleging elephant abuse in violation of the Endangered Species Act. That lawsuit was dismissed by a US District Court, and a US Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal the other week.

The key witness in that case was a former circus employee named Tom Rider. The case dragged through the court system for years before a federal judge ruled in December 2009 that the animal-rights plaintiffs, which included the Fund for Animals (which merged with HSUS in 2004/2005), had engaged in essentially a pay-to-play scheme with Rider, who received at least $190,000 as the lawsuit made its way through the courts (his “sole source of income,” according to the ruling). Here’s part of the ruling (Markarian is an HSUS executive who used to run the Fund for Animals):

Beginning in December 2001 and continuing until at least the beginning of 2008, the organizational plaintiffs made payments to [the Wildlife Advocacy Project] for the purpose of funding Mr. Rider. While FFA/HSUS (Mr. Markarian) testified that it was not certain whether WAP used its “donations” for other purposes as well, this testimony is undermined by the documents underlying FFA/HSUS’s “donations,” which indicate that the money was specifically for use in connection with this litigation. FFA/HSUS’s testimony also is questionable given that in 2003, plaintiffs’ counsel, Ms. Meyer, specifically sent an email to the representatives of the organizational plaintiffs, including Mr. Markarian, requesting funds to support Mr. Rider’s advocacy efforts regarding the elephants and the lawsuit, and expressly suggesting that the funds for Mr. Rider could be contributed to WAP so that they would be tax deductible.

Meanwhile, in 2007, Feld filed a countersuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, better known as RICO, using this scheme as the key allegation. That case is still in pre-discovery wrangling (a good lawyer is paid to delay, after all), but named among the defendants are HSUS and two of its lawyers, Kimberly Ockene and Senior VP Jonathan Lovvorn (both of whom came to HSUS a few years ago after being employed at a DC law firm named as a separate defendant).

A key question in the case is whether HSUS is liable—after all, it wasn’t a party in the original suit and didn’t merge with the Fund until 2004.

In a June hearing on various motions from the animal-rights defendants in the RICO case, we saw that Feld’s counsel made some interesting allegations on this point (accessible through PACER):

HSUS is in it as an independent racketeer.…They sent six payments to WAP that were earmarked for Tom Rider, and those payments were made, as we showed, out of a HSUS bank account, on HSUS stationary, a HSUS check sent by a HSUS employee, Jonathan Lovvorn, who had been a partner in that firm before he came over there [to HSUS]. So the idea that they didn’t know about this, that they were innocent, that they were duped, it’s ridiculous. They were in the middle of this.

They are also clearly a conspirator, as is Lovvorn and Ockene. In United States v. Salinas…you just have to further the object of the endeavor, intend to further the object of the endeavor. How is that not satisfied by HSUS making six of the payments? How is that not satisfied by Lovvorn and Ockene being counsel of record in a fraudulent case, and proceeding in a fraudulent case, which is what we’ve alleged; but in addition to what we already know, participating in the obstructions themselves, and also participating in any payments.

The other interesting part of Feld’s allegations is that the animal-rights plaintiffs used the lawsuit to promote a legislative agenda across the US, and that they were able to use the case to raise money in the years during which it was in the courts. We can explore that at a later time.

In the end, Feld claims that the animal-rights lawsuit it defended cost $20 million in legal defenses, and they can be awarded treble damages--$60 million--under RICO. (Defending a frivolous case for so many years tends to rack up the billable hours.) It certainly appears that HSUS could be on the hook for a good chunk of that.

However the case turns out, it’s one more reason to keep your money local. Pet shelters—the ones primarily doing hands-on work—can’t engage in legal shenanigans. They’re too busy spending their money to care for animals. But when you’re a $200-million behemoth with 30 lawyers on staff that donates very little to help these shelters, that’s a different situation.