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?”

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.

Tweaking Animal Rights Activists Is a Dirty Job

One of the very first articles we ever published on HumaneWatch was titled “I Dare You to Disagree with Mike Rowe.”

The "Dirty Jobs" host and Ford pitch man is among the most trusted macho-spokes-dudes in America. And he has little patience for Wayne Pacelle and the Humane Society of the United States. Rowe is well-versed on (and, of course, has hands-on experience with) animal welfare issues, and he has become something of a champion to farmers whose way of life is routinely threatened by HSUS and other animal rights groups.

If you’ve seen "Dirty Jobs" recently, you might recall the show in which Rowe helps pollinate date palms and hangs out with sharpshooters. In one of that episode’s opening sequences, he reads a piece of his viewer mail.

It’s a nasty, barbed-tongue of a letter from a fan named “Wayne P.”