(Not) Veganism in the Media

HSUS' Wayne Pacelle has been making the rounds recently to promote his book, The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals; Our Call to Defend Them. The articles I've been reading here and there about his various appearances have not offered up anything surprising; they've mostly reflected his continued commitment to ensuring that Americans feel more comfortable about using non-human animals. This recent piece in Michigan's Lansing State Journal, for instance, turned up more of the same. Strangely enough, the article starts off quoting Pacelle as saying that "we [...] need to be mindful and intentional in a society where our attitudes toward animals are conflicted and contradictory". Given the conflicted and contradictory messages HSUS has been disseminating over the years, Pacelle's plea for mindfulness and an associated thoughtful intentionality when it comes to how we think of non-human animals seemed ironic at best -- and disingenuous at worst.

The article's emphasis seems largely placed on Pacelle's great "passion" and charisma. I've no doubt that HSUS' president and CEO is still able to seem enthusiastic while engaging with ease in essentially churning out the same old message he's been churning out for years now. Pacelle's become adept at reassuring people that HSUS is no "us" to the general public's "them" -- that everyone, regardless of actual concrete follow-through has some sort of good intention, and that this good intention is enough.

People of every background and experience have a passionate connection to animals and they want to do something to make the world better for them.

And just what sort of people share Pacelle's "passionate connection" to animals and want "to make the world better for them"? People like attendee Gita Mahabir, who insists that she's "not like a crazy animal person" but that she "just do[es]n't like to see things [sic] suffer". Basically, Pacelle's message is palatable to people who view those who take the rights of non-human animals seriously as nuts. In repeatedly dodging opportunities to talk to the public about going vegan, Pacelle also implicitly endorses this mindset.

How exactly does Pacelle manage to obtain and hang on to the attention -- and financial support -- of people like Mahabir? By making it clear to them that to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with almighty defender Pacelle, you need not worry yourself about being lumped in with the "crazy animal people" who choose not to use animals. Although he asserts that that eating is a moral act, his interpretation of its morality completely sidesteps exploring the notion that anyone should consider the bother of depriving themselves of the taste of animal flesh and secretions.

It doesn't mean you have to be a vegetarian but you have to be conscious and perhaps buy products from farmers who are raising animals humanely [sic].

According to the article, his book contains "50 ideas to help animals" with "many" actually involving cutting back on animal consumption. I wonder how many times Pacelle actually brings up not using animals as a possible way to "help" those locked into this cycle that inevitably ends in their slaughter? (I haven't read it, but would be happy to do so and to give it an earnest review if somebody wanted to send me a copy. A bonus: I own a good shredder!)

So hey, Wayne? Instead of suggesting to people that they "perhaps buy products from farmers who are raising animals humanely" and presenting it as the very least they can do, how about offering veganism as your so-called "prescription" for the immorality of what we're putting billions of non-human animals through every single year? Is it really so far-fetched to consider telling your HSUS donors that not using non-human animals altogether is even a viable option? Is it really so unfathomable to present not using non-human animals at all as the only truly "humane" option when it comes to whether or not we should treat animals like things and continue to breed them for slaughter? C'mon? Think about it.

Thanks for the Reminder, Wayne!

In case you weren't 100% sure that the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) offers nothing but a disinterested shrug to the question of whether or not non-human animals are ours to use, its President and CEO has issued yet another reminder:

I have been a vegan for 26 years, but the Humane Society is broad-minded when it comes to food. About 95 percent of our members are not vegetarian.

But I believe eating is a moral act, and we can make choices to minimize the suffering of (food) animals. We can buy cage-free eggs, buy pork that doesn't come from factory farms, and avoid eating veal and foie gras.

[... W]e don't say you must be vegan and we must stop all hunting. We're working to curb the worst abuses and we're very involved in the political realm.

If Wayne Pacelle earnestly views the question of consuming animals as a moral act -- one in which he does not directly partake himself, how on earth is it that he could condone that 95% of its members are not vegetarian and refer to this sad reality as "broad-minded"?

If "eating is a moral act", instead of paying lip-service to the rights of non-human animals to not be used as things existing solely for human pleasure, why not take the opportunity to suggest not using them in the first place? Is doing so really so unthinkable to someone who chooses to refrain from using them himself? Why, instead, does he promote their continued use? Why does he opt to champion certain types of use as being somehow more moral than others? And why insist on doing it over and over again?

The truth is that HSUS is in the business of regulating animal treatment and without the continued consumption of animals and their products -- i.e. their continued use, Wayne Pacelle would find himself without his annual $250,000 (or so) salary. Why on earth promote veganism, then, when one's living is made off the blood of others? (An argument could also be made questioning whether someone who profits so clearly by facilitating the perpetuation of others' use of animals should, in good faith, consider himself vegan, but that's something I'll leave to better philosophers and debaters to weigh.)

Non-human animals deserve more than to have so-called animal advocates lulling people into continuing to provide the demand which leads to their being bred into lives of misery ending in slaughter. Maybe Wayne Pacelle doesn't think so, but I do. Don't you?

Go vegan. Talk to others about going vegan. If they're not ready to listen, talk to others who are. If you don't, who will? Certainly not Wayne Pacelle.

Wayne Pacelle, Get That Elephant Out of Your Living Room, Will You?

It seems that Wayne Pacelle, President and CEO of HSUS, has been busy traveling coast to coast, spending some of HSUS' millions to field pre-submitted questions from HSUS supporters. According to his blog post on October 22, many people have been asking what they can "do to help The HSUS and animal protection". Pacelle's enthusiasm was definitely infectious at the beginning of his blog post; I have to admit that I got a little excited, myself! I thought, "50 whole options! Surely one of them must be..." and then found myself shaking my head a little sadly as I made my way through the items.

Pacelle asserts that the "movement" can only succeed if millions "take these positive actions" and adds that "we can all pitch in to raise funds to support the vital work of The HSUS and allow it to grow and be a more powerful and effective force" (i.e. please send bigger donation checks). So what are the positive actions? Pacelle presents them under different categorical headings:

In Your Community:

• Encourage your local media to run information and PSAs from HSUS and distribute HSUS leaflets at events.

Get Training -- Get Activated:

• Take advantage of HSUS' various humane education programs to learn to spread the HSUS message, attend HSUS conferences and awards ceremonies, volunteer at HSUS events, take a course through HSUS' Humane Society University.

Volunteer To Help Animals:

• With HSUS' Wildlife Land Trust and the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association Field Services program. It's also mentioned that you can volunteer at your local shelter, although it sticks out a little as a non-HSUS option.

Political Activities:

• Lobby, lobby, lobby for HSUS campaigns and initiatives.

Work with Local Schools:

• Get kids involved in HSUS initiatives and help get HSUS into your local schools.

Give Us Your Moolah:

• Support HSUS corporate sponsors. Buy things through HSUS.

Speaking of Moolah:

• Give HSUS more of your own money, organize HSUS fundraisers to raise additional money for HSUS, and finally, host a social event and invite an HSUS representative to come talk to your friends and family about why they should be giving money to HSUS.

How About What Wayne Pacelle Thinks You Should Do on a Personal Level:

• Sign up for HSUS alerts and promote them through your blog / website / social networking and support their highly-publicized and celebrity-endorsed single issue campaigns (e.g. the illogical "Boycott purchasing / eating one kind of Canadian animal until the Canadian government stops killing another kind of Canadian animal" campaign).

Four of the other suggestions Pacelle makes are sound enough: Adopt or foster from your local shelter, keep your cats indoors, learn to co-exist with wildlife without resorting to killing said wildlife and establish a "pet care trust" for animals in your care lest anything happen to you.

The remaining suggestions about what you can do on a personal level to "help The HSUS and animal protection" were just more of the same old stuff I've come to expect from this welfarist group. Pacelle basically lists off a bunch of half-hearted things that are more about making yourself feel better than they are about taking the interests of animals seriously. He does so while walking around the big ol' elephant in his living room (or swank HSUS office, whichever the case may be). That elephant is veganism.

In a list of 50, there is no mention made of simply not using or exploiting animals as a viable option to "help" them. Instead of suggesting that you purchase animal-free cosmetics, he says to ensure that the cosmetics you use haven't been "tested" on animals. Instead of suggesting that you frequent vegan restaurants, he suggests that you try to talk restaurants into carrying more "cage-free" eggs. Instead of suggesting you go vegan, he suggests you reduce your meat consumption and avoid factory-farmed products. He does mention replacing "meat and other animal-based food with vegetarian food", which is confusing. By "animal-based food", does he mean things that contain animal flesh and that these should be replaced with eggs or dairy? I mean, if by "animal-based food" he meant eggs and dairy, then he should have said that they should be replaced with VEGAN food instead of side-stepping the issue and treating 'vegan' as if it's a dirty word.

What's HSUS going to do about that elephant in your living room, Wayne? 'Cause surely, ignoring him isn't humane. Isn't it time for an HSUS "Go Vegan!" campaign?

Oh, HSUS! Why Do They Malign You So?

I'm not generally one who feels strongly compelled to come to the defence of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). With an annual revenue of over $100 million, I'm sure that they already earmark a bit of pocket change for public relations. However, I simply could not resist the urge to clarify a few misrepresentations about them that I noticed being smeared across the internet this week. They seemed so unfair.

Take this rant in the Zanesville Time Recorder by Troy Balderson, for instance. The State Representative for Ohio's 94th district had a few nasty words to share about HSUS. A few of his wildest accusations include that HSUS is a "vegan organization" and that it "aims to promote vegan lifestyles". It troubles me to see HSUS misrepresented so, when it's worked so hard to establish that it honestly and earnestly does not seek the elimination of animal agriculture and does not concern itself with whether animals should be eaten--that's a non-issue for them. Just this past July, Wayne Pacelle, HSUS' dapper President and CEO, spent a fair amount of time spelling this out to AgriTalk radio host Mike Adams. When describing HSUS' initiatives, Pacelle insisted

[t]hey relate not whether animals should be used for food, but how they are treated during production, transport and slaughter. [...] We’ll have some disagreements depending on what your orientation is, but I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim that our work is moving in the direction of eliminating animal agriculture as some of the folks in the industry keep repeating.

In the rest of the interview, Pacelle insists that most HSUS staff and volunteers aren't even vegetarian, never mind being (gasp!) vegan. You can read my previous blog post about the Pacelle interview here or you can read the actual transcript here to hear Pacelle tell it like it is. Pacelle, although a supposed vegan himself, has even been known to publicly mock vegan education.

Heck, HSUS even condones the consumption of animal products at its own fundraising events. How is this promoting "vegan lifestyles"? How does this make HSUS a "vegan organization"? HSUS may recommend reducing your consumption of animals or comforting yourself that you're making a significant ethical improvement in your diet by choosing one animal product over another, but flat-out promoting veganism as the only truly humane option? Troy Balderson, how dare you accuse them of such a thing? Shame on you!

And then there's an unforgivably badly-written piece on The Examiner website by Lennis Waggoner, a supposed journalism program graduate, writer and conservative policy advisor, who decided to believe everything he reads (in this case, the propaganda on ActivistCash.com, which is run by the big industry funded Center for Consumer Freedom) and to spread even more nonsensical lies about HSUS. Waggoner writes that

HSUS and Farm Sanctuary masquerade as animal “welfare organizations”, which work for the humane treatment of animals, when they are really animal “rights” organizations, instead. There is a major difference between the philosophy of “humane treatment” and giving animals “equal rights” with people.

The thing is that on one point, Waggoner is correct: There is a major difference between animal "welfare" and animal "rights". Unfortunately, he proceeds to conflate the two in a very clumsy manner, providing no actual evidence of HSUS' actual promotion of animal rights, but plenty of their promotion of welfarism. And HSUS is indeed all about welfarism, generally spending the millions it receives from well-intentioned donors to wage one ineffective campaign after another to "pressure" companies into making ethically insignificant changes to where they source their exploited nonhuman animals. Take this recent campaign, for example, in which HSUS seeks to pressure IHOP to "begin moving away from" using eggs produced by hens in battery cages. The rest of the time, they heap praise upon one business after another that continues to exploit nonhuman animals. Where do rights figure in all of this?

So Waggoner is correct that a welfarist approach to the use of animals differs significantly from an animal rights approach; it's just unfortunate that he obviously has no understanding of what those differences--and their significance--actually are. He obviously hasn't read this latest essay by We Other Animals blogger Vincent Guihan, which explores the reasoning behind focusing on the use versus the treatment of nonhuman animals. Maybe then Waggoner wouldn't be wasting his time disparaging HSUS by accusing them of being an animal rights organization, and maybe then I wouldn't have had to use up an entire lunch break to defend HSUS against all of these unfair and wrongful allegations.

(Oh, and Mr. Pacelle, in lieu of payment for my work, could you purchase a dozen or so copies of Rain Without Thunder and ship them to me so that I can hand them out as educational material to some of these awful people who are mischaracterizing your organization as being vegan or animal rights oriented? I'm sure that you could write it off as a business expense. Thanks kindly!)

Wayne Pacelle of HSUS Makes It Clear That He's No Abolitionist

Just yesterday, AgriTalk (aka the "talk radio program for rural America and agriculture") aired an interview with Wayne Pacelle, a self-described vegan and the President and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). For those of you who may have been rooting for HSUS, keeping your fingers crossed and hoping that maybe the animal slaughter industry's labelling of Pacelle or HSUS as having a so-called "vegan agenda" held the slightest bit of promise in terms of ending the use of animals in agriculture, please listen to this abridged version of the podcast.

The fact that Pacelle and HSUS have been standing firmly in the new welfarist camp was (yet again) made more than clear. In the interview, host Mike Adams of AgriTalk asked Pacelle where HSUS stood with regards to animal rights or animal welfare and Pacelle responded.

Adams: We have had a lot questions about where you come down on animal rights and welfare. The livestock industry and people I know believe in the humane treatment of animals. There is a difference between animal welfare and animal rights. How do you define the two? Are they same or different?

Pacelle: We at the Humane Society of the United States don’t talk about animal rights, but human responsibility. That places us more with the comments that you represent from the agriculture community. In almost al of our campaigns and activities, whether it’s Prop 2 in California or prior ballot measures in Florida or Arizona, or in our Hallmark/Westland investigation, where we exposed the terrible mistreatment at a cull cow slaughter plant of the spent dairy cows, or in some other campaigns, those fit squarely in the realm of animal welfare. They relate not whether animals should be used for food, but how they are treated during production, transport and slaughter. [...] We’ll have some disagreements depending on what your orientation is, but I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim that our work is moving in the direction of eliminating animal agriculture as some of the folks in the industry keep repeating.

Pacelle goes on to assert that it's his

core belief that Americans are going to continue to eat meat, milk and egg products. That is the way it is. These are long-standing cultural practices. Our diet has been at work for a long time with people and it will not change certainly not overnight and it’s not going to change over a decade or 50 years.

In the remainder of the interview, when asked about his veganism, Pacelle makes it clear that it's his personal choice and that it has no impact upon and nor does it reflect HSUS or its policies. He goes even further to emphasize how, in fact, very few of HSUS' volunteer board of directors are even vegetarian, as if not eating animals somehow leaves you incompetent to help determine their best interest. When asked if he's stated that he wishes to put an end to all sport hunting, he denies it firmly and then dodges a question about whether he opposes hunting in general, stating that HSUS merely focuses on its "worst abuses" such as "canned hunts, bear baiting, contest shoots, shooting of endangered species [and] pure trophy hunting". When asked if he supports the closure of zoos, he says no. He even calls farming a "noble profession". You can read a transcript of the full interview here.

I think it's important for vegans to be aware of these facts--of this reality. It concerns me when members of the vegan community come out in support of organisations like HSUS, defending them for making supposed small inroads for animal rights. The truth is that organisations like HSUS do absolutely nothing to benefit animal rights. They collect donations from the guilty and wage minor public relations campaigns. What they accomplish isn't merely insufficient; it actually sets animal rights considerations further back. These campaigns invariably end up making those same people who donate feel better about maintaining the status quo concerning society's treatment of non-human animals as property. Is that what the vegan community really wants? Is this man who the vegan community really wants to champion?

Wayne Pacelle on the not-so-vegan-friendly skies

The New York Times had a fairly light piece yesterday -- an article (a one-sided phone interview?) "by Wayne Pacelle, as told to Joan Raymond". Pacelle is, of course, CEO of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The piece was about the serious lack of vegan fare offered by airlines these days, particularly for frequent flyers who fly at a moment's notice and don't have sufficient time to make advance meal arrangements.