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HSUS a major economic force
The Washington Times reports:
"Many people may consider the Humane Society of the United States a pussycat. But with 10 million donors and a $120 million budget, it is becoming a tiger among Washington's interest groups.
Just ask Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Calif.). Actually, make that former governor and then-representative. The Humane Society targeted both in last year's elections after Ehrlich supported bear hunting and Pombo supported commercial whaling and trapping in wildlife refuges."
Why would a humane society care about hunting and trapping? Well, this isn't the place that runs your local animal shelters. It's a Washington political/lobbying force that just has "humane society" in its title. And happens now to be headed by Wayne Pacelle, who started out at Fund for Animals under Cleveland Amory, the original anti-hunting activist, and became national director of the group. As he explains, "We did a lot of work on wildlife issues,particularly against sport hunting, and we were also in the mix on a broad range of animal issues. We did a lot of field protests against hunting where we would walk with hunters and talk with them about hunting. And in the process they were seldom able to make a kill (the distraction and six people tromping with a hunter scared away the animals)."
And now he's got a $120 million budget to work with, which means that offering $75,000 to a state agency if it would drop a bear hunt is just pocket change.
Doug comments (in a comment stopped by the spam filter, for some reason):
Failure to allow hunting is certainly not humane...you either end up with a starving and unhealthy overpopulation of deer or elk and destruction of every green thing within their reach and incursion into populated areas as they try to find enough food, or you wind up with a surge in the predator population (which may also endanger children and pets as well as adults in extreme cases) or both...Estes Park area and the Rocky Mtn National Park are considering measures to hire professional "harvesters" and pay for the reduction of the deer population at night, with silencers (insane) because the all-caring, all-feeling folks in charge were horrified at having hunters do what hunters do best, and what hunters are willing to pay (within reason) for the privilege of doing. See: http://mainehuntingtoday.com/bbb/?p=1631
...and I don't even hunt!
Doug in Colorado
· animal rights and eco-terrorism
4 Comments | Leave a comment
Is a quick death by .30-'06 for elk or deer not preferable to their starvation and sickness and incursion into populated areas, and the destruction of all available low growing vegetation by starving animals, and a surge in the predator population?
Apparently, there are smaller organizations that go by the name "humane society" or at least use it generically to refer to themselves, but the name apparently isn't trademarked and so anyone can call themselves a "humane society".
(I suppose you could call the NRA a humane society because many of its members advocate putting deer and varmints out of their misery.)
Alcibiades, quite so. it bears repeating, in every discussion like this, that most "humane societies" around are simply locally-based volunteer groups that typically run an animal shelter off locally donated money and generally do no harm to anyone, whereas the "humane society of the United States" is a political lobbying group that shelters no animals. in almost every case, the former has no connection to the latter whatsoever.
There are tons of people that collect for them all the time. I tell them to buzz off, but most people have no idea that it is anything other than a local animal shelter collection thing. I think a lot less people would give money to them if they knew they were political.