John “J.P.” Goodwin

John “J.P.” Goodwin is the manager of Animal Fighting Issues at HSUS. He co-founded the Texas-based Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade.

Goodwin famously wrote in one Internet activist listserv: “My goal is the abolition of all animal agriculture.” Although HSUS has claimed on numerous occasions that Goodwin has reformed his ways and abandoned the radical views he held in his youth, Goodwin has never publicly disavowed this statement.

Goodwin was arrested and convicted for being the ringleader of a crew that vandalized fur retailers in multiple states during the 1990s. The animal-rights watchdog newspaper Animal People News profiled him in 2000, noting that he “gleefully announced a string of Animal Liberation Front mink releases and arsons against furriers and fur farms” while a “spokesman” for the underground terrorist group.

Goodwin also spoke to media after a Petaluma, California, slaughterhouse arson in February 1997. And he shocked the public’s sensibilities with his comment about a March 1997 arson at a farmer’s feed co-op in Utah. Referring to a fire that caused almost $1 million in damage and could easily have killed a family sleeping on the premises, Goodwin told the Deseret News, “We’re ecstatic.”