Less Meat is “Good News” to HSUS

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), not to be confused with a humane society pet shelter, puts up a façade that it actually supports “humanely raised” food products. In reality, HSUS is a vegan group—it just won’t say so because 99 percent of the public doesn’t have an ideological problem with eating cheese.

HSUS’s mask slips every now and then, however, such as when HSUS Food Policy Director Matt Prescott gleefully wrote last month that a decrease in meat consumption is “good news.” (Not surprisingly, Prescott’s piece was quickly tweeted by former PETA VP Bruce Friedrich.)

Prescott was writing to promote HSUS’s Meatless Monday campaign, which is named after a similar movement started by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health a few years back. That’s the joke, of course: HSUS wants Meatless Monday through Sunday. It just uses the limited “Monday” angle to appear moderate.

Here’s some food for thought: The goal of the Meatless Monday campaign is to, essentially, reduce meat consumption by 14 percent by getting people to eat 1/7^th of what they currently consume. Prescott reports that meat consumption is expected to have fallen by 12 percent this year compared to 2007.

So haven’t the goals of Meatless Monday basically been met? Will HSUS pack up its Meatless Monday campaign once the magic “14 percent” is hit?

Not a chance.

Remember, the goal of HSUS is to eliminate using animals for meat (or eggs, or dairy). An HSUS VP was very clear: “We don’t want any of these animals to be raised and killed.” Even if meat consumption dropped by 90 percent, Prescott and HSUS would still be saying “eat less meat” and still trying to bankrupt the few livestock farmers left. Yes—even the family farmers HSUS claims to favor. (And of course, they’d be cheering the “good news” of bacon’s demise all the way to the salad bar.)

HSUS deflects claims that it has a vegan agenda by saying that 95 percent of its members are not vegetarian. However, soon after Wayne Pacelle (HSUS’s first vegan CEO) took the reins in 2004, he reportedly created a no-animal-products-in-the-office policy. Additionally, HSUS has a corporate policy not to serve any food products from animals—even humanely raised organic products—at any HSUS events. Employees aren’t supposed to expense food products from animals, either.

So let’s get this straight: HSUS won’t recognize 95 percent of its members’ own values (who have no problem eating meat), much less the values professed in public by HSUS’s leaders to support family farmers. Pacelle is all too happy to speak of “so many small farmers who are honoring that standard of animal husbandry and properly caring for their animals.” Just don’t expect HSUS to put its money where its mouth is. Or Pacelle to put his mouth where his mouth is.

If HSUS actually believed there is such a thing as humane meat or ethical eggs, it would buy some. It doesn’t.

Prescott himself is a former PETA activist. And now this guy is HSUS’s “Food Policy Director”? That shouldn’t instill confidence in any farmer—much less the 99 percent of consumers who don’t share the HSUS/PETA values for eating.

HSUS Goes Out of (the Dog Food) Business?

Remember “Humane Choice” dog food, a brand that HSUS launched in early 2010? The vegetarian kibble made in Uruguay and imported thousands of miles into the US that HSUS laughably dubbed “ethically responsible”? With the odd headshot of CEO Wayne Pacelle on the bag?

Yeah, that stuff. It looks like the so-called “Humane Choice” has been voted off the island. We can’t find it for sale anywhere.

The “Humane Choice” website, www.thehumanechoice.com, is no longer active. What about Petfood Direct? “This item is no longer available,” says the company. What about Petco? Nope. Same with Whole Foods. Even Google Shopping turned up zero results.

That’s probably for the better. We were skeptical of it, as were a host of others including HSUS fans on Facebook. Even a former HSUS vice president panned the idea of vegetarian diets for dogs, saying that dogs do best with a diet that includes (gasp!) animal protein. As a veterinarian with NYC Veterinary Specialists put it: “Dogs and cats, they’re carnivores and they do eat meat as part of their natural diet.” Another veterinarian stated, “Dogs need meat in their diet.”

HSUS promotes vegan diets for people, so we assumed that this was an attempt to extend its human ideology to pets. But as pet expert Tracie Hotchner told CNN, we should “respect each species for what it was meant to be.”

Hey, at least HSUS hasn’t ventured into the vegan cat food business.

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.

Happy Thanksgiving from HumaneWatch

It’s Thanksgiving time again, so it didn’t shock us to see news stories of scantily clad “Puritans” from the notorious People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) handing out Tofurky. If you can’t guess from the name, Tofurky is a fake-meat, vegan replacement for turkey. The news reminded us of a little-known fact: Tofurky is the only food product bearing Humane Society of the United States’ logo.

We don’t care if you choose to eat Tofurky or the real thing. That’s each person’s decision to make. But it’d be nice if HSUS stopped pretending that it’s for “humane” meat, eggs, and dairy products when, in fact, it isn’t.

After all, in a moment of rare clarity a few years back, HSUS’s vice president for farm animal issues revealed that HSUS’s goal is to “get rid of the entire industry.”  In other words, HSUS wants all Thanksgiving dinner tables to be turkey-free, and without pads of butter for the rolls. Somehow, that doesn’t make it into HSUS’s fundraising appeals.

If you want to read more about ungrateful activists, our executive director wrote about some—including HSUS and PETA—over at The Daily Caller. But we’d like to give some positive shout-outs instead of just pointing to HSUS’s deception.

First, we should thank the animals themselves, for providing us companionship, food, or whatever the case may be. We should thank farmers who raise their animals well. And we should thank pet shelters for caring for companion animals that need food and shelter.

It’s almost time for our second annual “Shelter Supply Saturday” event. But you should support your local pet shelter as much as you can throughout the year. And if you’re feeling particularly generous this Thursday, slip your own pets some food under the table.

HSUS CEO: Eating Meat is “Speciesist”

We’ve got a bombshell to drop.

In 1985, Humane Society of the United States CEO Wayne Pacelle was a student at Yale, where he founded a group called the Student Animal Rights Coalition. We obtained a copy of a letter Pacelle wrote to well-known animal rights philosopher Tom Regan, asking him to speak at Yale.

Here’s what young Pacelle wrote as a self-introduction:

I am a Yale University undergraduate hoping to establish an animal rights group here this academic year, 1985-6. … After realizing that I too had been a speciesist, I changed my lifestyle by halting my consumption of meat products and my use of other animal derivatives. These actions have been extremely self-satisfying on a personal level, yet frustrating because I would like to help protect animals on a larger scale. (Emphasis added.)

Got that? Pacelle believed that eating meat, drinking milk, or even wearing a leather belt was “speciesist.”

Welcome to the inner Wayne’s World. Let’s take a closer look.

As you might have guessed, “speciesism” is the fringe animal-rights movement’s version of racism and sexism. By using animal products, we’re “discriminating” against other species. Or something like that. It’s all tied into the madcap notion that, in the words of PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” It certainly appears that Pacelle was a full-fledged kool-aid drinker of this extreme philosophy.

But more concerning to us is that Pacelle links his belief in “speciesism” with “protect[ing] animals.”

Does that sound familiar? If we had a nickel every time Pacelle called the Humane Society of the United States an “animal protection” group, we’d have as much money as HSUS stuffs away in its pension plan. (That’s money, of course, that doesn’t make it to pet shelters.)

Words matter. To most Americans “animal protection” means animal welfare. To Pacelle, “animal protection” means eliminating the use of animals, which is an animal rights concept. And Pacelle, a slick politician, knows this. (He now refers to the Student Animal Rights Coalition group he founded at Yale as an “animal protection group.”)

Does Wayne Pacelle still believe today that eating meat is “speciesist”? He’s made mention several times on his book tour about how he’s been vegan for 26 years (which roughly dates back to the time when the letter was written). And if his initial reason for giving up animal products was based on the notion of “speciesism,” it’s quite possible he still holds those oddball premises today. We realize it’s an old quote, but it fits into other fringe animal-rights ideas Pacelle spouted years later, when he was no longer just a college kid.

For too long Pacelle has been able to wage a subtle campaign of semantics to push HSUS’s agenda. It’s about time an intrepid reporter will press him on what he really believes, so that donors know what they’re funding. Getting Wayne to be forthcoming, though, is another matter entirely.

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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.

Vegan…Cats?

Last year HSUS unveiled a brand of vegetarian dog food called “Humane Choice,” to much derision. It’s one thing for HSUS to promote meat-free or vegan diets to people, but asking people to force it on Rover is another matter. The idea of meat-free dogs also faced a bit of professional skepticism.

On Tuesday the Toronto Sun reported that the notorious wingnuts at PETA—an HSUS ally in the push for animal rights—are now pushing for cats to go vegan. That’s certainly odd—cats are obligate carnivores, after all.

The Sun dialed up HSUS for its take on PETA’s attempts to get cats to “go veg.” Fortunately, an HSUS representative panned the idea, telling the paper that “I hope this is not a trend, or we will be seeing a lot of sick cats. It is not appropriate to feed cats a vegan diet.” (This is one of the few times we’ve seen HSUS and PETA disagree on something.)

It’s refreshing to see HSUS take a sane approach. But (and there always seems to be a “but” with HSUS), an HSUS representative appeared to take a different line regarding vegan cats just a few weeks ago at HSUS’s annual “Taking Action for Animals” conference.