Green Is the New (Old?) Pacelle

Let’s take a walk back to the ’80s. No, mullets and M.C. Hammer parachute pants aren't coming back into style. We're going to take a look at Humane Society of the United States CEO Wayne Pacelle’s entry into animal-rights politics 23 years ago.

In 1987, Pacelle was fresh out of college and quite the busy bee in the animal rights world. In September of that year he joined the aggressive Animals’ Agenda magazine as an Associate Editor. Two months later, he ran for Alderman in New Haven, Connecticut. (He lost.)

What’s interesting, though is that Pacelle ran as a member of the Green Party. (We’ve written before—see here, here, here, and here—about the longstanding alliance between the environmental and animal rights movements, so that’s no surprise.)

And what the Greens stood for in the late ’80s provides a unique window into what Pacelle hoped to gain—and still does—by becoming a political animal.

In July 1987 when Green Party activists met in Amherst, Masachussets to discuss a national party platform, a group of animal “liberationists” offered a 12-point plan called “Ethical Treatment of Animals.” 

Any Which Way They Can

Biomedical research is a field that has been immensely important to the advance of medicine without occupying much media spotlight. But because some of this research uses animals, it's a juicy target for animal rights activists at organizations ranging from the Humane Society of the United States to PETA—whose president famously declared that “even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.”

HSUS shares PETA’s goal of eliminating all medical research on animals. The top sponsor of this year's HSUS "Taking Action for Animals" conference was the American Anti-Vivisection Society, whose stated goal (see its ad on page 25) is to "end the use of animals in science." So much for curing cancer.

It came as no surprise that HSUS crowed last December about a research paper—which HSUS itself initiated—that appeared in the Journal of Medical Primatology. The article reviewed the past 10 years of hepatitis C research on chimpanzees and concluded that the primates were not useful in working toward a cure.

It was written by Raija Bettauer of McLean, VA. Bettauer has a Master of Science degree, according to the study's text, but she apparently is primarily a lawyer who has written on financial and banking topics, is affiliated with the ASPCA, and used to work for the U.S. Treasury Department. Her listed affiliation in the study itself—"Bettauer BioMed Research"—doesn’t have a website, boasts a whopping 10 search results on Google, and isn't in the Virginia State Corporation Commission’s database at all. It also doesn't show up in Washington, DC. (We can't find evidence that it legally exists anywhere.)

Medical researchers whose work depends on chimpanzees didn't take HSUS's contribution to the debate lightly. In a letter to the editor published two weeks ago in the same medical journal, five research scientists (including 3 veterinarians) expressed their doubts about Bettauer’s work—and about HSUS’s goals.

Taking a Snooze For Animals?

Editor’s note: A stealthy, undercover member of the HumaneWatch team managed to attend the HSUS-operated “Taking Action For Animals” conference on July 24 and 25. This is her report. Click here to see a copy of the conference program.

Not everyone can manage to sit through a full weekend of animal rights propaganda, but the Humane Society of the United States's “Taking Action for Animals” conference made it pretty easy to stomach. This event had a remarkably “corporate” feel to it, especially compared with the annual national Animal Rights Conference (which is more of a radical kitchen sink).

In fact, if you weren’t paying close attention and you walked past the conference space at DC’s Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, you might think you’d stumbled into an Amway sales convention. Until the vegan lunch was served, at least.

Overall, this event was a giant snoozer. Seriously. Very little information was presented that you couldn’t find with five minutes and a web browser. And so many of the sessions were held at overlapping times that no one could see more than one-third of what was offered. Nice.