Dr. Veg

HSUS’s top MD, Michael Greger, puts out an annual DVD titled “Latest in Clinical Nutrition.” Greger’s spiel is that he searches through just about every English-language journal every day—some 12,000 articles last year, for example—so that we don’t have to. He then presents what he thinks is the most notable science, in what can amount to an hours-long lecture.

(Greger, by the way, says all the DVD proceeds go to charity. We’re not sure which one though. HSUS? PETA? But we digress.)

So what did the good doctor find this year? If you know anything about the propaganda mill that is HSUS, you already have an idea.

“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.”

HSUS Plays Chicken with Whole Foods

Meet Miyun Park. She’s a former Vice President for Farm Animal Welfare at the Humane Society of the United States. In 2009, Park’s résumé landed her a job as Executive Director of the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), the organization administering a new 5-tier animal-welfare rating system recently unveiled by Whole Foods Market. (To see GAP’s tax returns, click here.)

To judge from glowing media reports of the new meat, dairy, and egg labeling scheme, Miyun Park sits at the nexus of the animal-welfare mainstream and America’s foodie elites. But Park and GAP aren’t exactly what they seem.

GAP is beginning to show signs of a legitimate vegan takeover, led by Park—who, as the farm-animal VP at HSUS, was crystal clear about her desire to eliminate as much livestock farming as she could.

More on that after the jump.