Does HSUS Want 1,500,000 Cows to Die?

The media has been feasting on a hot story the past week: News of so-called “pink slime” infiltrating school food across America. As you might expect, HSUS couldn’t help but chime in, as it does any time there’s the potential to garner negative attention on animal products used as food in furtherance of its vegan agenda. (Strangely, HSUS seems eerily quiet every time there’s an E. Coli outbreak in vegetables.) 

Over at the Huffington Post, HSUS chief food propagandist Michael Greger piled on. “Which is more important,” he gasps, “corporate profits or the safety and health of our loved ones?”

So what’s the truth behind the rhetoric? The food in question is more accurately known as lean finely textured beef or boneless lean beef trimmings. It’s used in hamburgers and ground beef. Basically, it’s beef from leftover parts of the cow. When the meat processors make various cuts of steak, for example, little bits of beef are left over amidst the trimmings and on the bones. And one company found a way to consolidate these bits and process them to remove fat and kill pathogens.

It’s strange, then, that HSUS should attack it. Despite Greger’s false dichotomy, this beef is safe—the company making this product was featured as a model of food safety just a few years ago, even winning praise from a foodborne-illness victims’ advocacy group. Once it’s all cooked, is there really much nutritional difference? Not that we can tell.

And it’s essentially following the old principle of “use the entire animal.” The use of these bits of the animal that might otherwise be discarded provides 7 million pounds of food annually to the school lunch program. Given that the average cow provides about 550 pounds of beef, we’d need to slaughter 12,000 more cows in order to make up the loss in just the schools. Overall, we’d actually need to slaughter an additional 1.5 million cows a year to replace all of the beef product.

Since the news broke, some schools have begun dropping this beef from their menus and the company making it has suspended operations at several plants. This beef may be on its way out.

So congratulations, HSUS and Michael Greger. Millions more cows will be slaughtered because of the handiwork of folks like you.

Graphic: Good.is

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.