A politician who gets it:

In March 7 comments at the Nebraska Cattlemen symposium in Lexington, [Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman] said of the HSUS: “We’re going to kick your ass and send you out of the state.”
And in a speech in Washington in January, he called upon farm-focused lawmakers from across the country to fight the HSUS.
“I’m a graduate of West Point. I’m an Army Ranger,” Heineman said then. “This guy (Pacelle) wants to engage in guerrilla warfare, I’ll teach him a thing or two.”
In a December 2010 speech to the Cattlemen, Heineman said he didn’t trust Pacelle and his organization. “No deals. No compromise,” the governor said.

American Thinker;

Unbelievably, HSUS, and to a lesser extent PETA, have grown into well-funded juggernauts with tremendous political influence at the local, state, and federal levels in the United States. HSUS pushes for a thousand-plus laws on all levels per year to usher in its brave new vegan vision. Most of this lobbying activity appears to be illegal and based upon fraudulent fundraising activity. There is an ongoing IRS investigation into this matter. Meanwhile, PETA’s focus is the media, education, and influencing public opinion to embrace the animal rights agenda. Horrifically, they have been incredibly successful to this end.
It has long been the goal of HSUS and PETA to “capture” California and to mandate veganism through carefully worded and placed state laws. The “capture” of California would be the crown jewel of their animal rights movement knowing that as goes California, so goes the nation. To this end, HSUS has ushered forth SB 917 and AB 1117. SB 917 will legally redefine the term “animal cruelty” with purposefully overbroad and poorly defined law to include the transportation, display, and all sales of animals on public property.

Documents published online this month show that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization known for its uncompromising animal-rights positions, killed more than 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2011.

h/t Ed S.

It’s never a random Hell’s Angel….

An Ohio woman who compared animal-welfare work to the liberation of World War II concentration camps has been charged with soliciting a hit man to fatally shoot or slit the throat of a random fur-wearer, federal authorities said…

Remember, these are the same people who hang around schoolyards;

“This is Jessica,” the narrator, Kevin Nealon, says. “She suffers from ‘BWVAKTBOOM,’ ‘Boyfriend Went Vegan and Knocked the Bottom Out of Me,’ a painful condition that occurs when boyfriends go vegan and can suddenly bring it like a tantric porn star.”

h/t Adrian

The ideological cousins of HSUS – via SF Gate;

In an e-mail sent to the media Monday, the North American Animal Liberation Press Office said it had received an anonymous message from someone with specific details about the fire at the Coalinga ranch, one of the largest farming operations in the San Joaquin Valley.
“Containers of accelerant were placed beneath a row of 14 trucks with four digital timers used to light four of the containers and kerosene soaked rope carrying the fire to the other 10,” the e-mail said.
“We were extremely pleased to see all 14 trucks ‘were a total loss,’ ” the message said.

Ezra Levant;

Sheila Leggett, the clueless bureaucrat running the review, has lost control of the process. Instead of weeding out irrelevant, repetitive and non-Canadian witnesses, she unilaterally declared she’d add on an entire extra year of hearings so that every single man, woman and elementary school child in the world can use the review as some sort of political soapbox. Canada’s economic development and thousands of jobs will take a back seat to Leggett’s personal Oprah Winfrey Show.
Fortunately, adult supervision has arrived in the form of Joe Oliver, the National Resources minister. Yesterday he announced that if Leggett won’t protect the integrity of the review from foreign-funded environmental extremists, he will.
“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” Oliver wrote in a public letter. “They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”
That’s all true. But it’s worse than that. Leggett hasn’t just allowed the panel to be swamped by foreign witnesses, such as Hugo Chavez’s state-owned oil company CITGO, and environmentalist front-groups paid for by U.S. billionaires like the Rockefellers.
Being “hijacked” implies that Leggett is just a naive, passive victim of scheming foreigners. But it’s even worse than that. Leggett herself is actively demonstrating bias.

Last week a new animal advocacy group called the Humane Society for Shelter Pets (HSSP) jumped onto the scene with a high-profile advertising campaign asking people to give to their local pet shelters instead of to national groups that give the impression of helping shelters, but don’t pass more than a pittance of the money along. I’m proud to say that my firm, Berman and Company, helped get this excellent group off the ground by providing substantial pro bono PR and operational services. The group is managed by two long-time animal advocates, Jeff Douglas, who has 30 years of experience promoting veterinarians, and Diana Culp, the former director of education for Humane Society of the United States who now works at a local animal shelter. The group’s Board of Directors is chaired by Debbie Price, Director of Education and Policy at one of the nation’s largest non-profit groups.
You’d think that this venerable team coming together in an organization devoted to encouraging funding local pet shelters wouldn’t be controversial. Unfortunately for the group, Wayne Pacelle does not like competition. He was apoplectic at the notion that people would forego giving to his behemoth organization in favor of local shelters and irate that a pet shelter group was pointing out that HSUS—despite more than 85 percent of the animals in their ads being dogs and cats—gives only 1 percent of the money it raises to local pet shelters.

“The ironic thing about this forum is that there’s little science involved. It is, in my view, nothing more than the Department of Agriculture spending taxpayer dollars to provide the Humane Society of the United States a public forum to espouse its anti-agricultural views. […] HSUS is not your local animal shelter. HSUS is a national lobbying organization that spends most of its budget to lobby against farmers and ranchers who provide us with the food and clothing that we enjoy in this country. In fact, tax documents show that HSUS spends less than 1% of its budget on grants to animal shelters. Given these facts, you would have to wonder why the Department of Agriculture is giving this organization this platform and shunning producer organizations.”

Better Farming;

The horse farmer, who lives in Hillsburgh, was bringing a Charter of Rights challenge against the Ontario SPCA, citing illegal searches of a farm he rented on Highway 9 in Adjala-Tosorontio Township in November, 2008 and February, 2010. The searches were used to gather evidence that resulted in seizure of 32 Tennessee Walking Horses and 14 charges that Luckett wasn’t taking proper care of them.
Instead, in the Ontario Court of Justice in Barrie, Crown Attorney Carol Mitchell told Justice Grainne Forrest that the Crown was dropping all charges against the horse owner. “You are free to go,” Forrest told Luckett.
“There is no more venue for me to hear your application,” the Justice repeated to a protesting Luckett, who wanted to proceed, adding that she was able to hear a constitutional question only in the context of charges against a defendant. Replying to Luckett’s complaint that he had “incurred costs,” Justice Forrest said: “If it is purely a monetary issue it can go to a civil court.”

Animal rights contagion is spreading to even small town humane societies, into our vet teaching colleges, and creating an increasingly activist veterinary profession. (Leftists in our universities haven’t limited themselves to political science and gender studies.)
Double check and triple check to ensure that the causes and professionals you support aren’t in the business of eroding your rights as an animal owner. (h/t Jamie)

MyCentralJersey.com;

When kind-hearted citizens pull out their checkbooks to make a donation to the Humane Society, we’re certain they picture their dollars buying kibble for stray dogs or blankets for abandoned kittens.
We’re just as certain they don’t donate money assuming it will be used to print slick marketing materials that will be used only to generate more donations.
But, according a story in Monday’s editions, that’s exactly what happened to most of the money sent to the Humane Society of the United States.

In case there are any remaining doubts that animal welfare has been hijacked by the hard left;

The editors of a new Journal of Animal Ethics (JAE) published this month by the University of Illinois Press say derogatory words like “pests” and “vermin” should be dropped altogether and “pets” replaced by “companion animals”, while “wild animals” should be termed “free living or free ranging animals”.
“Despite its prevalence, “pets” is surely a derogatory term both of the animals concerned and their human carers. Again the word “owners”, whilst technically correct in law, harks back to a previous age when animals were regarded as just that: property, machines or things to use without moral constraint … In addition, we invite authors to use the words “free-living”, “free-ranging” or “free-roaming” rather than “wild animals”… For most, “wildness” is synonymous with uncivilized, unrestrained, barbarous existence. There is an obvious prejudgment here that should be avoided.”

Check, double check, and triple check just who is running your local SPCA or humane society before donating so much as a nickel to them. Pay close attention to the language they use. There are hard core animal rights activists at work in even small town, rural animal shelters.
Some of those who solicit your money to “help animals” have, as their end game, the removal of your right to own one.

Humane Watch;

.
We’re not sure who’s paying for Pacelle’s tour—the book publisher or HSUS donors—but surely traveling to 100 cities is taking a toll on how effectively HSUS is run. It’s not like Pacelle is getting mobbed, at least judging by a couple of pictures of the event. And The Bond was immediately discounted 40 percent at Amazon and other e-tailers following its release.
In fact, HSUS’s original announcement was that Pacelle was only going on a 50-city book tour. At some point, the length doubled. So what’s the point? Is this really about promoting “the bond” between people and animals, or about Pacelle’s self-promotion?

Pushing back…

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The North Dakota Farm Bureau believes a state constitutional amendment is needed to prevent the Legislature or local governments from approving potentially harmful restrictions on farming and ranching, its president said Tuesday.
The proposed ballot initiative, which the Farm Bureau hopes to put on the November 2012 statewide ballot, would add language to the North Dakota Constitution to block any law “which abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology, modern livestock production and ranching practices.”

Because they’re not stupid.

How come you aren’t an 8 oz tin of rancid meat?

Every Sparrow That Falls: Understanding Animal Rights Activism as Functional Religion (pdf)

ABSTRACT
This article reports original research conducted among animal rights activists and elites in Switzerland and the United States, and the finding that activism functioned in activists’ and elites’ lives like religious belief. The study used reference sampling to select Swiss and American informants.Various articles and activists have identified both latent and manifest quasi-religious components in the contemporary movement. Hence, the research followed upon these data and anecdotes and tested the role of activism in adherents’ lives. Using extensive interviews, the research discovered that activists and elites conform to the five necessary components of Yinger’s definition of functional religion: intense and memorable conversion experiences, newfound communities of meaning, normative creeds, elaborate and well-deŽned codes of behavior, and cult formation. The ar ticle elaborates on that schema in the context of animal rights belief, elucidates the deeply meaningful role of activism within a filigree of meaning, and concludes that the movement is facing schismatic forces not dissimilar to redemptive and religious movements.

More on the scam known as the Humane Society of the United States.