PETA and HSUS: Who’s Horsing Around?

There’s been a lot of press devoted recently to the possible (probable?) reinstatement of horse slaughter in the United States. As expected, HSUS made hay out of horse slaughter’s potential return—while, oddly, HSUS’s little sister in the animal rights movement, PETA, had a different take. Speaking to the Christian Science Monitor, PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk said:

It's quite an unpopular position we've taken. There was a rush to pass a bill that said you can't slaughter them anymore in the United States. But the reason we didn't support it, which sets us almost alone, is the amount of suffering that it created exceeded the amount of suffering it was designed to stop.

We hate to say it, but PETA is the voice of sanity here. (Is it out of place to mention that it’s not like PETA has a problem with animals being killed?) After the ban on domestic slaughter, horses were simply shipped to Canada and Mexico to be slaughtered—a long distance to travel outside of the purview of USDA inspectors and US humane slaughter laws. Last year, the number of horses going to slaughter abroad totaled 138,000. In other words, it’s arguable that HSUS helped cause a decrease in animal welfare.

Meanwhile, horse abandonment has increased domestically. Recent research presented in the Journal of Animal Science found that 100,000 unwanted horses turn up every year, but the capacity of horse rescues is only 13,400 animals.

HSUS president Wayne Pacelle retorts that abandonment has increased because of economic circumstances. He has a point, but he doesn’t answer this one question: If slaughter is totally banned, where are all those horses to go?

Horse sanctuaries across the country are already filled to capacity. So, predictably, some animals have been left to die of starvation. Their owners can’t sell them and can’t afford the cost for a veterinarian to euthanize the animal.

Meanwhile, Pacelle’s response is normative: People shouldn’t own horses unless they can care for them. OK, sure. But who can predict an economic downturn? Welcome to reality, where things don’t always go as planned. (And it’s not like everybody has a six-figure salary and pension plan like Wayne Pacelle.)

To HSUS’s credit, it does operate a horse sanctuary out in Oregon called the Duchess Sanctuary, which holds 200 horses on 1,120 acres. But since we haven’t seen any ideas from HSUS as to what to do with 138,000 horses if all horse slaughter was banned, let us suggest that HSUS build a Duchess Sanctuary for all of them.

By our calculation, HSUS would need to build ranches exceeding 1,200 square miles in size to house all of these animals.

That would require a lot of hard work and a lot of money. Doable? Possibly. But HSUS would have to “pony up” in a major way.

Of course, it’d be far easier for HSUS to continue making hay out of the horse slaughter issue and raising money off of it. If HSUS is going to continue to oppose horse slaughter, hopefully it offers some practical solutions—for the horses.

At HSUS, Equine Welfare Is Horseplay

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report formally analyzing the state of horse welfare since 2007. That was the year the Humane Society of the United States succeeded in stopping domestic horse slaughter by lobbying Congress to cut off funding for U.S. Department of Agriculture horse-slaughter inspections. The GAO report isn’t pretty. In a nutshell, it concludes that HSUS’s big victory was a huge defeat for animal welfare.

HSUS, a political lobbying group unaffiliated with pet shelters, has long advocated for a ban on processing horse meat for human consumption. When the activist group succeeded in 2007, the objections of credible animal welfare experts like those at the American Veterinary Medical Association got short shrift.

The AVMA and other organizations opposed the ban because HSUS didn’t address what would happen to unwanted horses once slaughter was no longer an option. These experts predicted that the number of abandoned horses would dramatically increase. They were right.

A flood of horses has been unleashed upon the West. Meanwhile, many of these animals are trucked long distances to Canada and Mexico, where slaughter doesn’t require the USDA’s say-so. (And in Mexico, humane slaughter standards are anybody’s guess.)

How Many Animals Does HSUS (Actually) Care For?

The Humane Society of the United States hauls in $100 million per year, and has another $191 million in assets. So you might think this national “humane society” would be able to help millions of animals. After all, HSUS shares less than 1 percent of its budget with hands-on pet shelters, so the other 99 percent must be spent directly on caring for Garfield and Odie, right?

Not so fast: It’s true that HSUS runs a few animal sanctuaries—generally for horses and wildlife, though, not pets. But HSUS helpfully, at least in two recent annual reports, put exact numbers on the animals it claims to be caring for.

Could HSUS be doing more? We’ll let you decide.

Dharma Passes the Hat

On December 7 of last year, “Dharma and Greg” co-star Jenna Elfman “tweeted” a photo taken after she taped a new "give $19 a month" TV ad for the Humane Society of the United States. Elfman made a radio PSA for HSUS in 2001 and lent an image of her lips to an HSUS-branded postage stamp in 2008, but this was her first on-camera work for the animal rights organization. It reportedly began airing late last week.

Last night the video production company that shot this fundraising ad posted a press release about it, but the release was removed early this morning. (Here’s Google’s cache, and our screen-grab for posterity.) In addition to the Jenna Elfman ad, the release also linked to videos of two more spots that may or may not be running nationally: one narrated by Wayne Pacelle, and another showcasing three children. (Note: We can’t control how long these movie files will be available for viewing.)

The Jenna Elfman fundraising ad is the most interesting of three to us. Not because it’s fronted by an actress, but because we counted 44 live animals in this ad, and all but two are dogs and cats:

More after the jump.

It’s Not “Problem-Solving” if You Created the Problem

Last week we heard a lot about unwanted and abandoned horses, a problem that the Humane Society of the United States single-handedly created when it lobbied to force the closure of the domestic horse slaughter industry. The American Veterinary Medical Association and other organizations predicted that “saving” horses from slaughter here at home would cause far greater suffering, but HSUS didn’t listen.

The sad reality is that many owners of unwanted horses can’t afford the $500 average cost for euthanasia. When they bought their horses, in fact, they counted on income from the animals’ slaughter when the animals’ lives were near an end. HSUS put a monkey-wrench into such practical economic outlooks, and caused the very harm it wanted to prevent.

Now, of course, HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle says he has a solution to the problem of unwanted horses starving on the Great Plains: He wants to make it illegal to transport horses to Mexico or Canada for slaughter.

Isn’t that nifty? Pacelle is trying to “solve” a problem that he created. And his solution might make things worse. What’s going to happen if he gets his way? (We would argue that a quick slaughter—even one that may look bad on camera—is preferable to prolonged starvation, but that’s just the way we see it.)

Today HSUS is busy trying to “fix” another problem it created.

The subject is dogfighting. In Philadelphia.

You can probably see where this is going.

Rats!

Last week the A&E Network show “Hoarders” showed Humane Society of the United States personnel rescuing 2,000 rats. Yes, rats.

We think keeping rats in your house on purpose is weird, to say the least. But to each his own. And for the record, the real Pied Piper led troublesome rats to their death in a German river, not into a “rescue” van.

But the show, and Wayne Pacelle's blogging about the “Rescue of 2,000 Pet Rats,” made us think.

We asked ourselves: “Wait a second—are rats now pets? Really?” And then a few philosophical pieces fell into place.

Lots of people (most notably pet breeders) have suggested that Pacelle and his cohorts at the Humane Society of the United States secretly want to eliminate the whole institution of pet ownership.

Maybe—just for the sake of argument—we need to turn that idea on its head and look at it a little bit differently. Instead of getting rid of pets, perhaps HSUS wants to elevate as many species as possible to “pet” status. Could that explain what we're seeing?

They Have No Shame.

Last week we told you about a Humane Society of the United States fundraising vehicle that the group called an “Animal Survivor” story—the tale of a horse that, well … didn’t actually survive.

Days after the horse named Second Chance died, HSUS was blithely raising money without telling the public the truth.

Shortly after we exposed this dishonesty, HSUS began quietly altering its online fundraising pitches to reflect reality. We thought that would be the end of it.

But as of last night, HSUS was still raising money on at least one web page with a rather incomplete story of Second Chance.

“This is Second Chance,” the page’s header intones. “He survived.”

“Second Chance wouldn’t have made it without you,” adds HSUS West Virginia Director (and former beauty queen) Summer Wyatt in the accompanying video.

Right.

We fully expect HSUS to quickly cover its tracks again, but you can click on the image above for a time-and-date-stamped screen capture from just before midnight on the evening of January 4.

As of this morning, HSUS president Wayne Pacelle has also not updated his December 20 blog article. In that piece, Pacelle's ghost-writer claimed that Second Chance “grazes contentedly in the pastures of his new loving home, back to a healthy weight and having regained his strength.”

We’ve resisted the temptation thus far to talk about HSUS “beating a dead horse,” but this is getting ridiculous.