HumaneWatch

I have to say, this is a shame, a real shame.  I think if people knew their donations were going to pension funds, they would be a little unhappy.  I am a rescuer, in the field and I don’t even get a paycheck, let alone a pension…

I’m new to your site and am not clear about your official ‘stance’ in general. If a meat packing plant is grinding up diseased cattle, and passing them along into the food chain, I DO want to know about it. Why would you be against an undercover sting like that? Ask any undercover cop if they ‘immediately’ arrest the first guy they see smoking crack. Of course they don’t, they gather more evidence and build a stronger case. duh.

It’s interesting that you don’t mention that this undercover investigation eventually led to a very successful legal case that helped end the abusive practices.

As your first poster said: “Ask any undercover cop if they ‘immediately’ arrest the first guy they see smoking crack. Of course they don’t, they gather more evidence and build a stronger case. duh.”

But because they are an “animal rights” organization, they aren’t allowed to use intelligent tactics? They have to immediately pounce on everything they see? What good would that have done? What would have been accomplished? Much less than what actually was accomplished through good strategic planning. Your whole point is based on one word in a copy of the by-laws. Your argument amounts to this “They should have been slaves to the language of their documents, and not actually taken the smartest tactics to end the most amount of suffering possible! It wasn’t immediate! It wasn’t immediate! How can they not have done something immediately! They are liars and scam artists because it wasn’t immediate!”

Now, i have no problem with fair criticism. Even as an HSUS supporter, I think the things you publish about their fundraising expenses and their overhead costs, are extremely fair, and deserve to be known. And I think HSUS can do a much better job than that C- grade. But when you jump down their throats because of ridiculous squabbles over language, when as someone who obviously has a reasonable capacity for intelligence, it should be obvious to you that they made some decisions to sacrifice short-term gains for bigger long-term gains, you just look like an angry nutcase.

David—good investigators and good attorneys weigh the value of collecting more evidence for a winning case against the preventable impact of current activities. There’s nothing really fancy going on here, let alone shady ulterior motives. It’s a simple decision of overall utility. Some temporary negatives had to be endured to secure a larger longer lasting positive. People have been making decisions like this since the beginning of rational thought.

Persons that have to deal with scrutiny of their evidence and conclusions by say, a judge, have to deal with things like substantiating evidence, documenting patterns of activity, and demonstrating that supervisors both know of and attempt to cover up employee abuses, etc.

You know, build a case. On the off chance that marching into Federal court with two days of evidence might not have worked.

As it happens, HSUS did an excellent job of building a case; the abuse stopped, suffering was alleviated, school children aren’t being fed potentially contaminated beef from sick, dying and otherwise nonambulatory animals, and the company had to make financial restitution on the government contracts for using that meat in the first place.

I highly doubt you disapprove of any of those outcomes. But then, I suppose eating beef from sick, dying, and contaminated animals is a “consumer freedom”?

Either way, it surprises me that you didn’t see fit to report the eventual outcome of the case to your readers. So that they know how much good work for both animals and school-children HSUS accomplished via this investigation. I guess that would detract from the overall strategy here - launch surface level attacks on personal and organizational reputations, to avoid meaningful discussion of actual issues.

The critics of this article seem to think the goal of the undercover investigation was to put people in jail or subject them to fines.  If that was the goal, then building a court case is an important thing.  I would imagine that the real goal of HSUS would be to prevent the mistreatment of the cows, though.  Even if no one were to go to jail, the presence of a USDA inspector would prevent some of those abuses.  If the USDA refused to intervene without stronger evidence, the investigation would need to continue.  I don’t think HSUS is disputing their failure to contact the USDA.

It takes some reaching to connect that behavior to Prop 2, but what else could the reason be for delaying (if you don’t buy the evidence-building claim, as I don’t)?  If the place was bad enough to be shut down, I think there were more than 2 or 3 instances of abuse over that 3 month period.  Consistent, daily abuses should provide enough evidence in a week.  If you don’t have enough evidence after a month, I can’t believe the place is that bad.

It is more likely HSUS wants to use that evidence as evidence against the industry, in order to change public opinion (if they’re doing some minor bad things, now, we might be able to catch them doing one really bad thing that we can put into a montage video later).  I don’t like ulterior motives and there is too much evidence of HSUS having them to take anything they say/print/do at face value.

Where can i find a recorded phone call of some one calling hsus or lca or any other animal rights orginization to complain about animal abuse?  i need this so that i can present to my class how simple it is to call if they witness animal abuse or know of unsanitary conditions involving animals.