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”

Green Is the New (Old?) Pacelle

Let’s take a walk back to the ’80s. No, mullets and M.C. Hammer parachute pants aren't coming back into style. We're going to take a look at Humane Society of the United States CEO Wayne Pacelle’s entry into animal-rights politics 23 years ago.

In 1987, Pacelle was fresh out of college and quite the busy bee in the animal rights world. In September of that year he joined the aggressive Animals’ Agenda magazine as an Associate Editor. Two months later, he ran for Alderman in New Haven, Connecticut. (He lost.)

What’s interesting, though is that Pacelle ran as a member of the Green Party. (We’ve written before—see here, here, here, and here—about the longstanding alliance between the environmental and animal rights movements, so that’s no surprise.)

And what the Greens stood for in the late ’80s provides a unique window into what Pacelle hoped to gain—and still does—by becoming a political animal.

In July 1987 when Green Party activists met in Amherst, Masachussets to discuss a national party platform, a group of animal “liberationists” offered a 12-point plan called “Ethical Treatment of Animals.” 

Any Which Way They Can

Biomedical research is a field that has been immensely important to the advance of medicine without occupying much media spotlight. But because some of this research uses animals, it's a juicy target for animal rights activists at organizations ranging from the Humane Society of the United States to PETA—whose president famously declared that “even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.”

HSUS shares PETA’s goal of eliminating all medical research on animals. The top sponsor of this year's HSUS "Taking Action for Animals" conference was the American Anti-Vivisection Society, whose stated goal (see its ad on page 25) is to "end the use of animals in science." So much for curing cancer.

It came as no surprise that HSUS crowed last December about a research paper—which HSUS itself initiated—that appeared in the Journal of Medical Primatology. The article reviewed the past 10 years of hepatitis C research on chimpanzees and concluded that the primates were not useful in working toward a cure.

It was written by Raija Bettauer of McLean, VA. Bettauer has a Master of Science degree, according to the study's text, but she apparently is primarily a lawyer who has written on financial and banking topics, is affiliated with the ASPCA, and used to work for the U.S. Treasury Department. Her listed affiliation in the study itself—"Bettauer BioMed Research"—doesn’t have a website, boasts a whopping 10 search results on Google, and isn't in the Virginia State Corporation Commission’s database at all. It also doesn't show up in Washington, DC. (We can't find evidence that it legally exists anywhere.)

Medical researchers whose work depends on chimpanzees didn't take HSUS's contribution to the debate lightly. In a letter to the editor published two weeks ago in the same medical journal, five research scientists (including 3 veterinarians) expressed their doubts about Bettauer’s work—and about HSUS’s goals.