HumaneWatch

This morning the HumaneWatch blog received a comment from an unusual visitor: David Phillips, the Prosecuting Attorney for Union County, Ohio.

Union County, you’ll remember, was the site of a recent animal rights controversy that erupted after Billy Jo Gregg, a lone dairy farm employee, physically abused several animals while an undercover activist from Mercy For Animals (MFA) passively watched and videotaped. (The Humane Society of the United States claimed it didn't have a clue about this "investigation," but it quickly and cheerfully promoted the result.)

Gregg remains behind bars and faces several serious criminal charges (as he should). But Phillips has been left with the unenviable task of cleaning up the legal mess that Gregg left in his wake.

Following HSUS’s farm animal push in Ohio and California, it’s worth examining what the group believes about eating—especially since campaign director Paul Shapiro recently claimed HSUS “does not have an ‘anti-meat’ agenda.”

If you don’t read Animal People, the animal rights movement’s unofficial newspaper, you might want to. It provides a lot of “inside baseball” about movers and shakers in the movement—such as this note that Wayne Pacelle “hypothetically proposed a three-way merger of HSUS, the Fund [For Animals], and PETA as long ago as 1988.”

Every year, Animal People publishes a Watchdog Report about various animal rights nonprofits like HSUS. And the 2009 edition includes this interesting little gem. Since 2005 (one year after Wayne Pacelle took over), HSUS has had this official food policy:

At HSUS internal events where food is served and to which staff and/or guests have been invited to participate, HSUS will purchase vegan fare and we will strive to have organic products…External events under the control of HSUS should also provide for the purchase of all non-animal products.  If this is not possible, events should be vegetarian—no meat (including fish and shellfish). For events sponsored by HSUS with other organizations, strong efforts should be made to serve all vegan or vegetarian food. Partnering organization are to be informed that vegan options should be available and that they are preferred. Any animal products served at co-sponsored events should be Certified Humane, in keeping with HSUS support for this program.

In other words, slipping in a little bacon into a BLT could be a firing offense in HSUS-land. No wonder the only food HSUS officially endorses is "Tofurky."

"Don't Eat Me," according to its Facebook page, is "an upcoming docu-film on animal rights and veganism."

The film's producer is an 18-year old Canadian woman named Nadia Masoudi. (Her father, conveniently, is a vegan who runs a video production and marketing company.) And according to a press release, she's also organizing "a world-wide event called Animal Freedom Day, which takes place on July 24th 2010."

This one is a doozy. It's pure vegan-utopia stuff, with a not-so-articulate adolescent writing style. Two of Masoudi's stated goals are:

• To globally promote refraining from eating meat, poultry, fish/seafood and animal bi-products [sic].
• To pass a [sic] legislation for all governments to halt the advertisements of raw flesh/meat appearances on any marketing medium.

Why pay any attention to what amounts to a high-school teenager's vanity project? For one thing, the multi-gajillion-dollar Humane Society of the United States is listed among Masoudi's sponsors, right alongside PETA, the Vegetarian Society, VIVA!, Compassion Over Killing, and other organizations with zero-compromise attitudes toward meat and dairy foods. (Side note: What the heck is the Comfort Inn hotel chain doing co-sponsoring this?) [Update 6/21/10 -- Comfort Inn's logo has been taken down.]

Also, HSUS has already been promoting Masoudi (and her veganize-everyone goals) to its youth audience on its "Humane Teen" website.

It's not likely that this film (or its related ad hoc veggie holiday) will amount to much. So why would HSUS publicly hitch its wagon to it? Is the group getting sloppy about hiding its affinity for the whole vegan agenda thing? Or has Wayne Pacelle finally let HSUS come out of the closet and admit that it sings from   PETA's hymnal?

This should be fun to watch.

UPDATE: Hardball with Chris Matthews has a Facebook fan page. There aren't many fans over there, but it might still be a good way to get Matthews' attention.

This week in Republican Congressman Steve King's home state of Iowa, two controversies about the Humane Society of the United States collided. First there was "4-H-Gate," in which the national 4-H leadership still hasn't appropriately apologized for giving HSUS activists access to its young members during a recent 4-H convention. And then HSUS's s latest egg-farm propaganda video hit Des Moines.

You can hardly blame Rep. King for defending his farming constituents against an organization that wants to put them out of work. Here's a quote from his press release:

The Humane Society of the United States is a political machine masquerading as an umbrella organization for local humane societies. HSUS bills itself as an animal care organization but it spends less than 1% of its $100 million annual budget on direct animal care. Instead, HSUS solicits money from well-intentioned but often uninformed animal lovers and uses these donations to lobby Congress for an anti-meat, anti-animal agriculture agenda. HSUS is run by vegetarians with an agenda whose goal is to take meat off everyone’s table in America.

Rep. King might be in error about the "direct animal care" line, since HSUS does run two (reportedly overcrowded) horse sanctuaries, a bird sanctuary, and a road-kill rehab. I think what he meant to say was that less than 1% of HSUS's budget is shared with hands-on pet shelters. Which is absolutely true—as is the rest of the Congressman's statement.

But Hardball host Chris Matthews thinks otherwise. This could be a teachable moment. The video is after the jump.

We constantly hear bluster from the Humane Society of the United States about how it's supposedly not trying to wipe animal agriculture off the map. They're only trying to combat "the worst abuses" in "factory farming," they tell us. They're not anti-meat. Just anti-cruelty.

Yeah. And the Cleveland Browns are going to win the Super Bowl next year.

Here's HSUS's Paul Shapiro. Next to Wayne Pacelle, Paul is the top HSUS guy agitating against meat and dairy producers. He's usually calm, mild-mannered, and reasonable-sounding—which is just how HSUS likes 'em. No PETA nuts here, nosirree.

In the latest issue of Nation's Restaurant News (I read it for the recipes), Shapiro does a Q&A interview. And he comes off sounding more like a corporate PR strategist than the vegan evangelist he is:

We explain the benefits of cage-free [egg production] in terms of animal welfare and food safety ... Companies that are improving the welfare of animals in their supply chain deserve to be applauded for it.

Contrast that with the following piece of video. It's from a 2003 speech Shapiro gave at an event hosted by United Poultry Concerns. (Yes, there is such an organization.)

HSUS has a new evangelical cheerleader, and he's bringing the Gospel According to Wayne to a church near you. Dr. Matthew Sleeth preaches a sort of quasi-Biblical environmentalism; since it's in line with what HSUS wants to promote in the short term, Sleeth will be showing an HSUS video as part of his Earth Day religious simulcast.

Here's how Wayne Pacelle began his essay on Friday:

Concern for animals is Biblical, Dr. Matthew Sleeth told me during a 30-minute interview I recently conducted by telephone. Christine Gutleben, director of Faith Outreach for the Humane Society of the United States, told me that I must talk to this brilliant and passionate Evangelical Christian, and I was absolutely energized by our discussion. A former physician, Dr. Sleeth left medicine behind to devote himself to healing others in a different way. Importantly for the HSUS, which has a rich tradition of clerical leadership, he is at the forefront of an emerging movement within contemporary American Evangelical Christianity that is reclaiming Christianity's history of animal protection.

A bit of housekeeping before we dig into this:

• Christine Gutleben isn't just an HSUS program director. She's also Pacelle's former live-in girlfriend.
• Sleeth is indeed a medical doctor, but I can't find evidence that he has Divinity School or seminary training of any kind. This makes him about as much an authority on the Bible as Pacelle is on farming. And in this context, his history as an emergency-room physician doesn't impress me. (We've seen that particular credential leveraged before in the animal rights movement.) But I digress.
• HSUS does have a rich tradition of "clerical leadership," but that tradition is in horrible disrepair. Pacelle's predecessor, the Methodist minister Paul Irwin, was ousted from the presidency of the American Bible Society because he hired an Internet pornographer to develop the organization's fundraising website, paying him at least $5 million. (HSUS paid the same guy at least $881,000 for online fundraising work while Irwin was in charge.)

It's amazing that it takes that long to deconstruct just one Wayne Pacelle paragraph. But let's get back to this April 21 Earth Day telecast.

I gave a speech last week at the annual convention of the Western United Dairymen, and I understand it has generated some buzz. I titled the talk "Dealing with the 'Humaniacs': Why It Matters and What You Can Do."

A couple of farming publications have already adapted the presentation into a "top ten"-style article, and I think that's great. I was working on the Powerpoint file last week, and what I wanted to tell the hundreds of dairymen at the meeting just happened to neatly fall into a list of ten things. In retrospect, I hope it ends up printed on a BBQ apron or a wallet card, or something.

When I arrived in Modesto, California, the meeting's organizers asked me if they could videotape my speech. And I figured, what the heck? Chances are HSUS had someone planted in the audience anyway with a double-secret buttonhole camera. And it's not like I was saying anything that I wouldn't want turning up on CNN (which is a good measuring stick for public speaking, by the way).

Today I learned that the whole thing had been uploaded to YouTube. It's about 45 minutes long, and it's organized into five video segments. So if you wanted to hear little ol' me last week and you couldn't make it to the Central California Valley, make some popcorn and pull up a chair.