Dandelion Salad
Sent to me by Jason Miller from Thomas Paine’s Corner. Thanks, Jason.
By Dr. Steve Best
8/25/08
In August 2005, when HSUS (hereafter think “H$U$”) Executive Vice President Mike Markarian publicly “applaud[ed]” the FBI for arresting and imprisoning six amazing activists from Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), my outrage over this self-serving betrayal of activists and animals alike inspired me to write “The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy,” a fierce critique of HSUS and its chief executive, Wayne Pacelle. I condemned HSUS for its divisive attacks on animal rights militants, its bureaucratic rigidity, its cowardly conformism, and its disturbingly cozy relationships with the animal exploiters they claim to oppose.
Despite a recent fluff piece in the Los Angeles Times that promotes Pacelle as a consummate animal champion and visionary leader, I am pained to report that his “humane meat” and “cage-free” egg campaigns have promoted more, not less, animal suffering and killing; that HSUS is a collaborationist with, not antagonistic of, various animal exploitation industries; and that HSUS has developed strong ties with law enforcement agencies and the FBI not only to go after animal abusers, but also animal activists, the hard-line militants prepared to do what it takes to stop the torture and murder of innocents. Specialists in political repression, the FBI has a long track record of framing innocent citizens, destroying social justice movements, and even murdering vocal opponents of the state such as Fred Hampton. They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, but this is downright surreal.
The problems I pointed to in “The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy” have considerably worsened in the last three years, and it is now glaringly obvious that HSUS is part of the problem of, not the solution to, animal exploitation. Pacelle is a “leader” alright, one who is steering this great movement into a cul-de-sac where it is becoming increasingly coopted and ineffectual.
Ever more aggressively, HSUS promotes “humane meat” and “cage free” egg campaigns (marketing its “Certified Humane Raised & Handled” label to meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy producers), rather than advancing the cause of vegan education that Pacelle claims to champion. Symptomatic of its bureaucratic deformities, HSUS raked in tens of million dollars from the 2005 Katrina disaster, but spent only a few million to help the animal victims of that hurricane. In fact, after Katrina, there was a second storm involving the furious backlash of grassroots activists complaining that HSUS obstructed animal rescue efforts, and then commandeered the lion’s share of credit and $30 million in donations. Subsequently, many activists and the Louisiana attorney general called for a criminal investigation into HSUS fundraising and demanded an explanation why this organization – like every other bloated bureaucracy, including the “impeccable” Red Cross – disregarded the clear intent of donors and spent a puny percentage of a mountain of money on helping victims of a catastrophe.
For bureaucratic monoliths like HSUS, a transnational corporation, the financial priorities lie in paying lavish CEO salaries (Pacelle’s annual salary tops $300,000), maintaining costly branches and staff throughout the world, perpetuating fundraising efforts (often absorbing as much as 53% of HSUS’ budget), funding lobbyists, building bank accounts, and inflating investment portfolios. What HSUS did in Louisiana amidst Katrina rescue efforts is what Greenpeace does in Canada or Japan during Captain Paul Watson’s effective tactics against the slaughter of whales, dolphins, and seals. They bully their way onto the scene, exploit the drama for photo opportunities, publish glossy pictures in their newsletters and websites, exaggerate their heroism and “victories,” urge their membership to generously fund future forays, and then laugh all the way to the bank.
In fact, like many corporate environmental organizations (the so-called “Gang of Ten”), HSUS not only does not support grassroots groups (few people are aware that they have no affiliation whatsoever with local “humane societies” and “animal shelters”), they often impede and attack their work. Whether the dirty tactics Greenpeace used against Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society or the constant opprobrium HSUS has heaped upon SHAC and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), corporate bureaucracies seek to dominate their cause, promote their own interests, and block anyone who threatens their hegemony, viewing them as competitors rather than allies fighting the same cause. While grassroots groups and shelters struggle for money, HSUS builds assets of $223 million and operates with an annual budget in excess of one million dollars.
In 2007, Nathan Winograd published a stunning expose, entitled Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America. A trenchant critique of the killing paradigm informing humane societies and shelters throughout the nation, Winograd also goes directly after the big game – the ASPCA, PETA, and HSUS — and in each case documents misuse of funds, cavalier killing of healthy and adoptable animals, and appalling failures to support the no-kill shelter movement gaining ground nationally. In contrast to The Los Angeles Times syrupy tribute piece, Winograd reviles Pacelle as a traitor to the animals and claims that he is “condemned by animal lovers from coast to coast.”
Ironically, Winograd documents, Pacelle is like a dry and detached doctor who tends to patients mechanically, has “no hand-on fondness for animals” and he himself confesses that “To this day I don’t feel bonded to any non-human animal.” Given that enormous compassion and empathy drive most animal activists, one has to ask: Why is Pacelle in the animal protection field? Why did he choose this career? What possible motivations propel him from day-to-day? If it’s not a love for animals, could it be instead a love for money, glory, fame, and power? Could it be that his robotic lack of empathy for animals explains why his organization perfunctorily kills so many animals and spends more time on constructing paltry rationalizations rather than building viable alternatives?
Like PETA, HSUS callously kills countless thousands of healthy and adoptable cats and dogs rather than dedicating their prodigious resources to advancing the emerging no-kill revolution. In 2007, for instance, PETA raised over $30 million, adopted 17 animals, and killed 1,815 cats and dogs. Unlike HSUS, however, PETA at least opposes breeding, whereas HSUS provides advice on “How to Find a Good Dog Breeder”! Like any group involved in mass killing, of humans or animals, HSUS prefers euphemisms to truthful terminology and exists in a perpetual state of denial and rationalization. Thus, just as HSUS unashamedly speaks of the by-product of violent slaughterhouse murder as “humane meat,” so they insist that they “humanely destroy” cats and dogs.
To comprehend the extent to which culpable people in bad faith resort to extreme evasions and ridiculous rationalizations, consider the Orwellian doublespeak of HSUS functionary Penny Cistaro: “We’re not, we’re not killing [cats and dogs]… in that “kill” is such a negative connotation. It’s… we’re not KILLING them. We are taking their life, we are ending their life, we are giving them a good death, we’re humanely destr[oying them] — whatever. But we’re NOT KILLING.”
Without melodrama or hyperbole, I suggest that these words could have been taken from the playbook of the German Nazis. But I might qualify the analogy because the propaganda of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933 to 1945, was eminently more sophisticated than Cistaro’s shrill, guilt-ridden rhetoric.
As true of PETA and other animal welfare organizations, the underlying assumption behind HSUS’s pro-kill instead of no-kill policy is that shelters are nasty, overcrowded, filthy hoarding hell-holes where animals suffer greatly, and so the only “compassionate” option is to “humanely destroy” countless of forlorn cats and dogs. The underlying flaw here is an either/or fallacy: either we cause animals needless suffering in shelters, or we “humanely destroy” them. Occluded here is the existence of a genuine third option – building clean, well-managed no-kill shelters where well-treated animals are adoptable and adopted. Winograd’s book, Redemption, argues that no-kill shelters are a pragmatic possibility and a moral necessity.
On this and countless other issues, Pacelle – the consummate politician — talks a good game, but his actions belie his words which seek to mollify his donation base. According to Winograd, “Pacelle says that No Kill must be our goal, than [sic] he refuses to sign the U.S. No Kill Declaration. Wayne Pacelle says that feral cats should live, than [sic] he promotes a vision of sheltering in the Asilomar Accords [an August 2004 meeting of animal welfare industry leaders to reduce companion animal euthanasia numbers] which voted down a proposal to mandate TNR [trap, neuter, and return], claims feral cats are `unhealthy’ and `untreatable’ and are properly put in the same category as hopelessly ill or irremediably suffering animals and often share the same fate—death.”
And don’t we all remember the HSUS heroics during the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal in the summer of 2007? How the suave and unflappable animal champion, Wayne Pacelle, starred on cable news shows night after night, tirelessly condemning Vick’s barbarity? Pacelle tugged on the heartstrings of the nation, and the public, never doubting his sincerity, sent HSUS generous donations along with praise and gratitude. But the story did not end there. For what did Pacelle thereafter argue to the courts? That “it does not make sense to keep these animals alive.” Like the feral cats he condemns as “untreatable,” Pacelle wanted to dispatch Vick’s victims without a fingersnap. Fortunately, other groups – real animal advocates — intervened on behalf of these “kennel trash” pit bulls demonized as dangerous and unfit for human company, and adopted them to loving homes, thereby saving dozens of dogs from the killing clutches of Vick and Pacelle.
The paradoxical Pacelle, the “advocate” with antipathy for animals, easily surpasses Cistaro in his blunt and icy-cold language, as he admits that HSUS has “no problem with the extinction of domestic animals.” One might say that they share the same taste for doublespeak, but in fact the word “extinction” is not a euphemism, it is a frank, brutal, malevolent discourse of a final solution policy, and as cruel and heartless as one could possibly speak – one who happens to run the most powerful and profitable animal “advocacy” organization in the world. Like PETA, HSUS rakes in millions of dollars in the name of “animal protection,” as it does nothing for millions of animals who die annually in nightmarish “shelters” except to lend a killing hand.
Allow me to be brutally frank in speaking directly to Pacelle, Cistaro, and their army of accomplices: When you needlessly take life; when you refuse to seriously pursue alternatives to killing; when you condemn cats and dogs to die with contemptuous complacency; when you lie to the media, the public, your donors, and to the animals; and when you bullshit your way through the whole goddamn bloody process of killing homeless cats and dogs, this is not “humane destruction;” it’s just murder, pure and simple. And Pacelle, you have the gall to call SHAC and the ALF violent? Please, have the decency to at least shut your mouth when others take necessary measures to save animals, and you take unnecessary steps to kill them.
My analogies between HSUS and Nazis are not appropriate at all levels, I don’t think Pacelle is a racist (although you could argue that on his hypocrisy on the Vick case) or an anti-Semite. And whereas Hitler wanted to exterminate entire classes of people, Pacelle does not call for the destruction of cat and dog species; no, in fact, he does his part to support dog breeding and it is only homeless cats and dogs he wants, for the most part, to destroy. But anyone who rationalizes mass murder through the same semantic masks and ploys of Nazis has picked up a malevolent influence they ought to extirpate. I also think the analogy of “humane destruction” and the “final solution” is more than appropriate, because HSUS actually pursues killing as the first solution to dispose of a “problem population” and the final solution to be rid of “unwanted” dogs and cats.
This hidebound hypocrisy of HSUS now takes me full circle, back to the beginning of my essay. For when three years ago HSUS seemed content to merely “applaud” the state for breaking into activists’ homes – armed and angry men breaking down their doors, stealing and destroying their possessions, separating them from their human and nonhuman families, and locking them away in federal prisons for years — now it seems that HSUS has taken its treachery and complicity one step further, by actually offering a $2,500 reward, in cooperation with the FBI and state and local law enforcement officials, to capture the person(s) who set off firebombs at the homes of two vivisectors in Santa Cruz, California in August 2008.
As one bomb exploded when the researchers and their families were here and someone could have been injured of killed, these actions were clearly not the work of the ALF, which adheres to a strict nonviolent policy that targets the property of animal exploiters but never the exploiters themselves. But in their zeal toward self-congratulatory moral purity and zest for demonizing militant activists and tactics, HSUS did not entertain the very real possibility that the firebombs were actually – recall the case of Fran Stephanie Trutt, who, in 1988, was set up, encouraged, and entrapped by the United States Surgical Company to plant a bomb underneath a car in their parking lot – the handy work of the state. Their clear motivation would be to damage the credibility of the movement and to justify unleashing still more repressive laws against the animal advocacy movement and yet another FBI witch hunt. If this is so, and there is good reason to believe it is true, then HSUS is nothing but an accomplice and extension of a repressive police state.
We must not, as some have counseled, “tolerate” or “appreciate” the diversity of the movement in all its diversity and “balance,” operating like many spokes on a wheel or components of an ecosystem. Rather, the reformist, welfarist, and (industry and state) collaborationist actions of HSUS must be ruthlessly criticized, for it is HSUS – not the ALF and SHAC – which is steering this movement away from substantive and meaningful goals. And while HSUS sucks up activists, other organizations, and barrels of cash, it actively collaborates with — sorry Lee Hall, not to offend your pious Buddhist-pacifist sympathies, but I have no problem with the word – our enemies: to be precise, our sworn implacable enemies in the animal exploitation industry with whom we are engaged in a serious battle because they have waged war against animals.
We must end, as Herbert Marcuse noted, our habituated practice of “repressive tolerance,” whereby tolerance is no longer a virtue (as in liberal diversity and multiculturalism) but rather is a vice. Captive to this mentality, we tolerate what Bush does to the Constitution, as we stomach what HSUS does to pervert the cause of animal rights and the ideal of ethical veganism, as it collaborates with our enemies in the corporate-state complex.
It is a tragedy, a nightmare really, that the largest and wealthiest animal “protection” organization in the world squanders its vast influence and treasure to only pay lip-service to the crucial need to build no-kill shelters while it advocates unjustifiable killing of cats and dogs. As Winograd writes, “HSUS continues to fail miserably in terms of moving this country away from traditional, reactionary, `adopt some and kill the rest’ sheltering practices, despite Mr. Pacelle’s facile claims to the contrary.” Moreover, rather than providing advice on “How to Find a Good Dog Breeder,” HSUS should lead a coordinated attack on animal breeding, for without the decline (and ultimate end) of the practice of breeding, along with aggressive spay-and-neuter and TNR programs, no-kill shelters may only lead – as some critics maintain — to animal warehousing.
Pacelle has as much credibility in his claim to “save animal lives” as Bush does in his rationale for invading Iraq. It is a farce that HSUS “applaud[s]” FBI repression of our movement and condemns those who take effective actions to liberate – not “humanely destroy” — animals, even if there is a disagreement on tactics. HSUS also says they oppose “violence” yet have no problem working to promote “Certified Humane” animal flesh, milk, and eggs. Again, Pacelle & Co. have no grounds for criticizing the ALF, who destroy property without injuring lives, whereas HSUS is directly responsible for the gratuitous killing of countless animals.
Pacelle has not only failed to advance the national momentum for no-kill shelters, he has impeded the efforts, and he bears significant responsibility for the five million cats and dogs that will be killed in “shelters” this year. As Winograd observes, Pacelle “has no idea how to lead the humane movement. It is clear he cannot see the future for himself. At the same time, we need to send a very strong message to Mr. Pacelle that we can see through his thinly veiled comments, his insincerity on the issue, his failure to truly challenge the status quo, to fight for the rights of shelter animals to their very lives, and to truly reform what has been a long sordid history of draconian HSUS policies as it relates to dogs and cats in shelters.”
For those who believe in the professionally crafted persona of Wayne Pacelle and the carefully managed public image of HSUS, I encourage them to read Winograd’s exposes of “The Real Wayne Pacelle,” to examine his critiques of PETA and the ASPCA as well, and to ponder the inherent self-serving, money-making, propaganda producing nature of any bureaucratic organization, whether the Red Cross, Greenpeace, or HSUS.
Pacelle is an animal killer, a traitor to animals and activists alike, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a tool for the state and corporate front groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom, and an accomplice (witting or unwitting) of repressive law enforcement agencies and the paralegal thugs known as the FBI. While I have serious problems with PETA, I appreciate Ingrid Newkirk for her undying support of the ALF and for funding the legal counsel of numerous animal rights activists. For those like Gary Francione who throw HSUS and PETA into the same boiling pot of damnation, the difference here could be not clearer: PETA supports animal rights political prisoners, while HSUS seeks to create more of them, and Pacelle would probably be delighted –as would peaceniks like Francione and Hall — if the FBI rounded up every SHACtivist and ALF member and locked them away in Guantanamo Bay forever. Whereas PETA criticizes the corporate-states use of “terrorism” discourse for the biased and repressive framework that it is, HSUS uncritically and pompously employs it toward the same ends of the Bush administration and state – to demonize those individuals and groups it doesn’t like. But both HSUS and PETA, as well as countless other animal organizations, need to get out of the 17th century paradigm and enter the 21st century world moving toward the realization of no-kill shelters.
There are things about Winograd also that invite skepticism, such as granting an interview with the Center for Consumer Freedom, sworn enemies of the vegan and animal rights movements. His claim that “pet overpopulation” is a “myth” seems exaggerated and based on dubious assumptions that shelters can take in an unlimited amount of animals and every home in the country will adopt a cat or dog. While specifics in his proposals may be problematic, his vision is laudable and far ahead of the “leaders” of the animal advocacy movement. Winograd has emerged as a positive catalyst for a national no-kill shelter movement, whereas Pacelle remains an obstacle in the path of this and many other progressive changes for animals. As I am not uncritical or Winograd, nor is my critique of Pacelle and HSUS unqualified. Among other accomplishments, HSUS ballot-initiatives to ban cockfighting in the holdout states such as New Mexico (won in March 2007) and Louisiana (won in August 2008) were successful (such that cockfighting is now banned throughout the entire nation) and a May 2008 undercover expose of the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse in Chino, California brought national attention to the dire plight of animals in slaughterhouses and led to the largest meat recall in US history.
My argument is not that HSUS is an unqualifiedly regressive force, but rather that it mostly squanders its prodigious resources, that its “certified” “humane meat” and “cage-free” eggs campaigns promote more not less suffering and killing of animals (as “guilty carnivores” jump off their vegetarian wagons in droves and run en masse to their local steak joints and diners), and that on the whole it does more harm than good. Just as HSUS works with meat and egg industries at the expense of animals, so they cooperate with law enforcement agencies and the FBI to the detriment of fellow activists.
I was inspired to write this article because I saw no outrage or criticism of HSUS’s ambitions to help catch underground activists such as the courageous warriors in the ALF who have saved countless animals, shut down numerous exploiters, and obtained invaluable evidence of systemic cruelty in laboratories and other demonic dungeons. And while few animal advocates support bombing vivisectors, we all ought to be smart enough to identify a potential state frame-up rather than an actual underground action. But HSUS exploited the bombings for their own purposes, as part of their endless efforts to convince the animal exploitation industries, cops, FBI, and public alike that they are good, pure, and unalloyed moral forces, unlike those with bricks and bullhorns who corrupt the movement’s gilded goals and norms. In fact the problem lies with Pacelle and HSUS — deeply mired in the muck of bureaucratic corruption, corrupt and compromised to the point of complete crisis.
I’m alarmed, moreover, that few people (1) are sufficiently aware of the history, modus operandi, and true goals of the FBI, which is to suppress dissent at home, as the CIA performs the same dirty work abroad; and (2) are concerned about the consequences of the largest “animal advocacy” group in the world developing close ties with the repressive state apparatus, such that it could become an extension of the FBI or a friendly home to police informants. Let us not forget that the FBI elevated the ALF (along with the ELF) to the “number one domestic terrorist threat” in the country and that they fully intend to stop not only the ALF, but also the animal advocacy movement as a whole.
When an individual cooperates with the cops or the FBI, he or she is denounced as a “fink,” “informant,” “rat,” or “mole,” and is ostracized or perhaps worse. But what do we call it when an organization develops ties with corrupt cops and the FBI and offers cash rewards for the capture of an underground warrior? One term is “collaborationist,” and it is important to recognize that HSUS is not only in bed with many animal exploiters, they are also in league with the repressive state apparatus. In their slick, reformist, compromising campaigns, Pacelle has betrayed animals and animal activists alike, as HSUS prefers to develop closer ties with exploiters and cops than grassroots advocates and anti-speciesists.
I encourage people to send HSUS a polemic not a check, and to donate their hard-earned money not to robotic raconteurs but rather to ardent activists who fight on the front lines of the emerging war over nature with substantial results. I’m talking, for instance, about small groups such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society; amazing activists like Anthony Marr or Gary Yourofsky, who foment revolutionary change on a shoestring budget; and stellar local animal rescue groups. People should research, explore, and support the best no-kill shelters they can find rather than fuel hypocritical killing machines and bureaucratic behemoths. Every dollar given to HSUS is a dollar that could have saved, not ended, the life of a cat or dog; that could have promoted veganism, not “humane meat”; and that could have supported, not undermined, our civil liberties which the state and FBI seek to annihilate.
As stated above, Wayne Pacelle was quick to step up and help feed a media frenzy calling for the demonization of Michael Vick and the rise of an overt and pervasive form of animal cruelty for which Vick became the poster child. Lost in this rightful attack on dog fighters and the like, however, is that Pacelle is no saint outing sinners. A pre-eminent member of DC-insider lobby culture, he was quick to learn self-serving, profit-making, power-play politics, as he perfected the art of sound bites and media charm. But let us not be fooled. This cunning cum-laude graduate of the Machiavellian school of politics will throw potential allies — and certainly movement competitors and opponents like Rod Coronado and Kevin Jonas — under the bus if it can earn him a penny of financial or moral capital.
Pacelle is a one-dimensional bureaucrat, a CEO and President of a huge global conglomeration that serves animals in name but pursues money and power in reality. He preaches nonviolence as he pulls the switch on thousands of cats and dogs; he praises democracy and rights as he bankrolls witch-hunts that ally him with the most repressive state apparatus in US history.
I’ve seen great activists hired and coopted by Pacelle, and witnessed their sad transformation from vibrant, iconoclastic, edgy, risk-takers into defanged, muzzled, and collared bureaucrats, party-line ideologues, corporate-yes men and women, and zombified conformists. They morph from critical thinkers into True Believers who think we can win animal liberation (in whatever bastardized form they conceive it) through welfare policies, reforms, collaboration with industries, and turn against the radical elements of their own movement — the important role of which they have absolutely no understanding.
However, billions of enslaved animals don’t give a damn about Zogby polls, FOX News commentaries, or tactics that might alienate the masses. They don’t want bigger cages, better euthanasia, or “humane” labels attached to their dismembered bodies. The animals want freedom. If they could speak our language, they would unquestionably applaud the ALF and condemn the corporate entities who seek to continue the oppression though misguided thinking and opportunistic policies.
[Editor’s Note: Thomas Paine’s Corner posted Dr. Best’s substantial revision of this article today to replace the original version which appeared on 8/19/08. Therefore some of the reader comments do not mesh with the essay as it now stands. I take responsibility for the miscommunication which resulted in running Dr. Best’s piece before he had honed it to this final version—Jason Miller]
NOTES:
1 Steven Best, “The Iron Cage of Movement Bureaucracy” at: http://www.drstevebest.org/Essays/TheIronCage.htm.
2 “Wayne Pacelle works for the winged, finned and furry” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2008, online at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pacelle19-2008jul19,0,4840426.story.
3 It is important that activists have knowledge of the history, goals, modus operandi, and real nature of the FBI, rather than the “good-guy” cartoon portraits one finds on TV series and the media generally. For excellent books exposing the FBI as the US version of the KBG, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. Boston, South End Press, 2001; Brian Glick, War at Home: Covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it. Boston, South End Press, 1999; and Nelson Blackstock, Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988.
4 See Nathan Winograd, “The Real Wayne Pacelle Legacy,” at: http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2008/07/real-wayne-pacelle-legacy.html.
5 “Red Cross, Humane Society Under Investigation,” March 26, 2006, The Washington Post, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032501002.html. See this article for Pacelle’s defense of HSUS actions for Katrina-victim animals and his claim to responsible use of donation money.
6 On the contemptible approach Gang of Ten organization have taken toward environmental grassroots groups, see Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995. There are incredibly important lessons here for serious animal activists if they wish to avoid the same problems that led to the cooptation and defeat of the US environmental movement, such as already threaten the animal advocacy movement in this country and others.
7 See the “Charitable Solicitations Program Charity Profile Report” of HSUS, at: http://www.secstate.wa.gov/charities/search_detail.aspx?charity_id=5458. According to his biography, Winograd “is the Director of the national No Kill Advocacy Center. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School, a former criminal prosecutor and attorney, was director of operations for the San Francisco SPCA and executive director of the Tompkins County SPCA, two of the most successful shelters in the nation”
http://www.nathanwinograd.com/nathanwinograd_002.htm.
9 Winograd, at: http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2008/07/real-wayne-pacelle-legacy.html.
10 Pacelle cited at: http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2008/07/real-wayne-pacelle-legacy-part-ii.html.
11 For their enlightening recommendation, see:
http://www.hsus.org/pets/pet_adoption_information/how_to_find_a_good_dog_breeder/.
12 Cited at: http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2008/05/will-real-wayne-pacelle-please-stand-up.html.
13 Winograd, at: http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2008/05/will-real-wayne-pacelle-please-stand-up.html.
14 See “Government Makes a Case, and Holds Dogs as Evidence,” August 1, 2007, The New York Times at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/sports/football/01vick.html?_r=1&oref=slogin; “HSUS & Wayne Pacelle -Vick’s Dogs Must Die,” August 22, 2007, Dog Politics, at: http://www.dogpolitics.com/my_weblog/2007/08/hsus-wayne-pace.html; and “The Fate of Michael Vick’s Dogs,” August 23, 2007, at: http://network.bestfriends.org/stopbsl/news/18124.html. As these websites document, HSUS and PETA share the same killing sentiments.
15 See for instance the superb work of Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pit Bulls (BAD RAP), at: http://www.badrap.org/rescue/. The contrast between the compassionate outlook of BAD RAP and the cold attitudes of HSUS and PETA is dramatic.
16 Pacelle cited in Animal People, May 1993.
17 For a detailed argument that the post-Mandela South African government never addressed – they only worsened – the problem of ”species apartheid” and use Nazi-like, eugenic, and eco-fascist arguments that elephants “need” to be culled allegedly to protect biodiversity , see Steven Best, “The Killing Fields of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, and Total Liberation,” at
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/best.html.
18 On the August bombing of a vivisector’s house in Santa Cruz see: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-attacks5-2008aug05,0,519903.story. On HSUS’s treacherous betrayal of activists and animals by offering a $2,500 reward and thereby cooperating with law enforcement agencies that protect animal exploiters and persecute liberationists, see http://www.hsus.org/press_and_publications/press_releases/hsus_offers_reward_in_ca_arsons_080408.html. On some credible evidence that the recent Santa Cruz bombing may indeed have been a plant by animal exploiters and/or the feds to delegitimate the movement and authorize a new series of witch hunts on activists; see Rick Bogle’s blog, at: http://primateresearch.blogspot.com/2008/08/august-2-2008-santa-cruz-firebombings.html
19 See Herbert Marcuse, “On Repressive Tolerance, at: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm. This brilliant essay published in 1965, in the ferment of the new social movements and counter-culture, is more relevant today than ever today, both for general social conditions and for continuing social and ecological crisis, and the dilution, perversion, and cooptation of animal rights/liberation goals.
20 http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2007/11/same-as-it-ever-was.html.
21 See www.certifiedhumane.org.
22 http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2007/11/same-as-it-ever-was.html.
23 See http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2008/07/real-wayne-pacelle-legacy.html, and http://nathanwinograd.blogspot.com/2008/07/real-wayne-pacelle-legacy-part-ii.html.
24 Again, on the logic, needs, and operations of bureaucratic organizations, see my essay, “The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy,” at: http://www.drstevebest.org/Essays/TheIronCage.htm.
25 Winograd’s interview with CCF, “The Book HSUS and PETA Don’t Want You to Read,” is online at: http://www.consumerfreedom.com/article_detail.cfm/article/183. The most detailed critical response to Winograd I could find was PETA’s polemic, “Nathan Winograd’s Redemption: `No-Kill’ or No Clue?” online at: http://www.helpinganimals.com/f-Winograd-No-Kill.asp?hanwnkggl&gclid=CJap6qm1mZUCFQ4hnAodeiFSgA.
26 To be sure, HSUS offers (and often gives out) $5,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in activities such as cockfighting or dogfighting, which is a positive use of their largess (see “HSUS Rewards,” at http://www.hsus.org/acf/cruelty/publiced/hsus_rewards.html); it is just unfortunate they try also offer rewards for potential frame-ups. Unlike peaceniks like Erik Marcus who praised HSUS’s actions and rigidly adhere to clichés such as “violence only breeds violence,” some in the animal exploitation industry saw through HSUS’s transparent motives and the disparity between their grave moral tone and laughably diminutive reward fee. On these opposing views, see Paul Davis, “The Misunderstood Vegan,” August 13, 2008, Bohemian.com, at: http://www.bohemian.com/metro-santa-cruz/08.13.08/features-0833.html#
27 To contact and support these amazing activists, and get the biggest bang for your buck, see: Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, at: http://www.seashepherd.org/; Anthony Marr’s Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE) at: http://www.all-creatures.org/hope/index.htm; and Gary Yourofsky’s Animals Deserve Protection Today and Tomorrow (ADAPTT), at: http://www.adaptt.org/
Best is Cyrano’s Journal Special Editor for Animal Rights, Speciesisim and Human Tyranny over Nature.
Award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Steven Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.
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