Local Animal Groups Sniff Out HSUS
When is a “humane society” not a humane society? When it doesn’t run a single pet shelter anywhere, and gives less than one-half of one percent of its mammoth budget to pet shelters. Unfortunately, this is an apt description of the animal rights group calling itself the “Humane Society” of the United States (HSUS). But don’t take our word for it: Local humane societies themselves are the ones calling HSUS out now.
HSUS isn’t affiliated with any local humane societies, but the similarity of its name is one reason that 71 percent of Americans think HSUS is an umbrella group for pet shelters. So when understandably confused donors give to HSUS, which then lobbies for its anti-meat, anti-hunting, and anti-everything agenda, the real hands-on dog and cat care people at humane societies are distancing themselves from the Washington lobby group.
Michigan’s Marquette County Humane Society is actually changing its name, because local residents falsely believe HSUS is helping to pay the bills. (It’s taking suggestions for new names until the end of the month.) And in Kentucky a Garrard County animal shelter decided specifically against affiliating itself with HSUS “because of its polarizing effect.”
In Wyoming, the Humane Society of Park County is renaming itself the Park County Animal Shelter. As the group’s leader told The Cody Enterprise in February: “The HSUS political agenda has created grief for us locally. We’ve tried to get the message out that we don’t receive funding and aren’t connected to them, but it hasn’t worked.”
Over time, more and more pet shelters will probably come to realize that HSUS is hurting them far more than it’s helping. And for all its bluster about wanting to see more pet adoptions, it’s HSUS’s own practice of sucking money out of local communities that’s largely to blame for America’s pet overpopulation problem. (We continue to follow this scandal on a daily basis at www.HumaneWatch.org.)
Groups like HSUS have long claimed that all animals deserve “rights,” and that people are essentially just souped-up animals. If there’s any truth to this line of reasoning, don’t human beings have rights too? Memo to HSUS: Your fellow man has the right to not be fleeced.
