HSUS Howls Lack Grey Matter

Last week, HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle took to his blog to vent about a new Hollywood flick called “The Grey,” starring Liam Neeson. The basic plot is that a plane crashes in the frozen wilderness and Neeson and six other survivors struggle to make it back to civilization, while being molested by a pack of wolves. Pacelle warned people to “stay away.” His gripe is that “The Grey”—a fictional movie—takes liberties with how grey wolves really act.

Pacelle’s solution is to watch “Babe”—a movie with talking animals—or “Bambi,” a Disney cartoon. Does anybody else see the irony here?

The political correctness coming from the animal rights movement is ridiculous. (PETA too voiced its criticism of "The Grey" for making wolves look bad—unsurprising, given PETA and HSUS have the same agenda.) By asking people to watch one form of animal fiction over another, Pacelle’s doing what he rails against. Deer are not like Bambi, and pigs are not like Babe. (Ask a hog farmer.)

Wolves are predators. Of people? Not so much. Of people’s livestock? Sure.

But let’s not forget: It’s just entertainment. It’s Hollywood, not a real-world debate on wolf delisting. It’s…fiction, not a documentary on animals.

Asking Hollywood not to play up the scary wolf stereotype is like asking Jackie Chan not to make martial arts movies. What next? Will HSUS tell elementary school libraries to stop stocking Little Red Riding Hood or Three Little Pigs?

It’s hard to believe the average viewer can’t make the distinction. And the movie itself is about much more than the survivors’ struggles with the wolves, but also about their internal struggles.

We have to wonder: Did Pacelle even see the movie? His boycott call came two days before the movie even opened. Pacelle’s post was full of vague, broad assertions but light on details. It’s doubtful he would have been invited to the premier. And it’s not like MegaVideo is still around.

Of course, all the bluster from HSUS and PETA isn’t doing much: “The Grey” was the top-grossing movie across the country last weekend. For all his talk about HSUS being mainstream, Pacelle's cries apparently fell on deaf ears (except for a few comments he printed from readers, including one saying she would misanthropically “root for” the wolves).

If the noble wolf is such a delicate creature, then why doesn’t Wayne Pacelle go live among them once his book tour is over? One man has already. Wayne is always playing up his “bond” with animals, so we’re confident he could fit right in.

Is Modern Man a Part of Nature, or Apart from Nature?

We’ve written before about the “humane paradox,” namely that the “protecting ‘all animals’” goal of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) ultimately falls apart when some animals naturally harm other animals. Lions eat gazelles, after all—an act that surely violates the gazelle’s “right” to live and provides it a less than humane death.

An HSUS lawsuit filed last week against the National Marine Fisheries Service ups the ante even further: HSUS is objecting to the government agency’s chosen method of resolving the conflict between two endangered species.

The Bonneville Dam is on the Washington-Oregon border, about 150 miles up the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean. Sea lions congregate there and feast on the salmon population.

The dam, naturally, has made it hard for the fish to get further upstream, despite “fish ladders” built to facilitate their travel. It’s easy pickings for the sea lions, but this puts them in competition with both four Native American tribes authorized to fish for salmon, as well as conservation efforts designed to protect them. The National Marine Fisheries Service has chosen to reconcile these competing interests by killing a few of the seals with the biggest appetites.

It’s debatable whether it’s necessary for the government to mark some of the “troublesome” sea lions for a euphemistic “lethal taking.” Still, the feds have only killed 27 animals under this program since 2008—or about 0.01 percent of the 265,000-strong California sea lion population.

HSUS, predictably, objects to every seal death. But one of its affiliated organizations is at least daring to ask the obvious: “[W]hen one endangered species is the main food source for yet another endangered species..how do you protect them both?”

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.

Nine Lives and Humane Paradoxes

If you don’t read Wayne Pacelle’s blog, you’re not missing much. It’s good if you want a primer on PR “spin” (see: Michael Vick doing “a good job as a pet owner”) or tips on shameless self-promotion. But that’s about it.

Every now and then, however, there’s something worth commenting on. We had to go back to December for this one, but it’s worth a discussion.

Here’s the setup: A University of Nebraska report concluded that feral cats should largely be eradicated, and recommended how to do it— even including gunshots as one possible option. Why kill the local cluster of wild kitty-cats?

Feral cats … cause significant losses to populations of native birds, small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians; can transmit several diseases such as rabies and toxoplasmosis; and may be a general nuisance.

We’ll leave for another day the substantive debate about what to do with feral cat colonies, and the (fully justified) outrage at the idea of shooting cats in the head. There’s no end of opinions on that topic.

But Pacelle’s reaction is what interests us most. He writes:

The issues some people have with cats are nothing new. For more than a hundred years there have been periodic calls for the eradication of cats, emanating largely from those who are passionate about protecting wild birds.

The HSUS mission includes protecting both cats and birds, and the challenges in balancing such goals are not trivial.

Here’s our question: How can you protect both cats and birds—or both orcas and seals—or both sharks and fish?

Is this a new kind of “humane paradox”? Is there institutional arrogance in any claim to protect (as HSUS’s membership magazine’s title promises) “All Animals”? Or is Mother Nature just toying with Pacelle?

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.

A Little Sunshine

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a vital federal law that gives citizens access to a huge number of government documents. It’s hard to imagine a true democracy functioning without open access to records.

And thankfully, the FOIA law can also give us a window into what animal rights groups are up to. Sometimes FOIA requests are a prelude to other things—lawsuits, press releases, even whole campaigns.

Late in 2010 we submitted our own FOIA letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Our request? We wanted to see what documents the Humane Society of the United States asked the agency for all year. (Pretty nifty, huh?)

We got back 17 FOIA requests; 75 pages in all. And two things jumped out at us:

1. HSUS is sniffing around for documents about wildlife predator control and “puppy mills”; and
2. HSUS is claiming that it’s exempt from FOIA fees because it’s a “news organization.”

Let’s take a closer look.

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?