Wayne Pacelle: A Humane Nation

Cultivating Animal Protection

The eyes glaze over, and it sounds very boring to the average American. But the Farm Bill—a massive multibillion-dollar hodgepodge of provisions that relate to agriculture and that the Congress takes up every five years or so—is the bread-and-butter bill for anyone interested in food and nutrition policy, agricultural commodities, conservation, energy, trade, and increasingly even animal protection.

Last week, House and Senate negotiators on the Farm Bill agreed to the terms of the legislation, and the final bill (called a conference report) is slated for an up-or-down vote in the House and Senate this week. It's controversial for a number of reasons, mainly its $300-billion price tag and the subsidies that wealthy farmers, including sugar growers, are slated to receive at a time when they are already reaping record profits. For that reason, President Bush is considering a veto. It appears though that the measure has broad, bipartisan support in Congress; there's something in it for everyone (kind of like a Department of Defense authorizing and appropriations bill with a nugget for every district and major player), and if Bush vetoes it, both chambers may override.

Payments to farmers, conservation provisions, more promotions of fruits and vegetables, surplus sugar purchases for ethanol, and other items of the measure have garnered the most attention. But tucked into the bill are several enormously important animal protection provisions, and that's why The HSUS is urging the House and Senate members to approve the legislation and urging the President to sign it.

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The Farm Bill includes a provision, inserted in the original Senate bill by Majority Whip Richard Durbin, to curb the import of puppies for commercial sale from foreign puppy mills. A growing number of breeders in Eastern European countries, China, Mexico, and other foreign countries see the United States as a potential market and are shipping tens of thousands of dogs in, even though there is a strong domestic dog and cat breeding industry here and there are millions of pets available from shelters, rescue groups, and U.S. breeders. The provisions require that any dog imported into the United States for commercial sale be at least 6 months old, to ensure that young, unweaned, and unvaccinated puppies are not forced to suffer from harsh, long-distance transport. They also ensure that any dog entering the United States be deemed healthy prior to entry. Exceptions are provided so as not to interfere with shelter and rescue work, veterinary treatment, or research purposes.

This provision has potential to dramatically slow the inhumane trade in puppies into the United States. That will bring great relief to dogs right now, but it will also be a bulwark against the development of a massive puppy breeding industry in China and other countries that might see the United States as an even more lucrative market for puppy sales, notwithstanding serious animal welfare concerns.

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There's also what I call the Michael Vick provision, and this measure has potentially enormous consequences for the future of dogfighting and cockfighting in this country. The Congress upgraded the federal animal fighting law last spring at The HSUS's urging, making it a federal felony to move fighting animals in interstate or foreign commerce. Then the Vick case broke, and there was unprecedented national attention on the scourge of dogfighting. The Vick case prompted a raft of state legislation to upgrade animal fighting laws, and it also prompted the introduction of new bills by Sen. John Kerry and Reps. Betty Sutton, Elton Gallegly, and Earl Blumenauer to further upgrade the federal law against animal fighting. Sen. Kerry offered his bill as an amendment on the Senate Farm Bill, and it was accepted. In the conference committee on the Farm Bill, thanks primarily to the exceptional work of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (with the assistance of his Senate counterpart, Patrick Leahy), the legislation was strengthened further to toughen the federal animal fighting law by making it a crime to knowingly possess or train animals for fighting, enhancing the penalty for animal fighting offenses from a potential three-year prison sentence to a maximum five-year prison sentence, and making any animal fighting affecting interstate or foreign commerce a federal crime.

In addition to cracking down on all staged animal fights that are organized in the United States, the federal legislation also bans the export of fighting animals to other nations. Yesterday, Jeremy Schwartz of Cox News Service wrote a story about how U.S. fighting birds, specifically birds from Georgia, are dominating in fights in Mexico. Under existing law, shipping fighting birds outside of a state—to another state or another country—is a felony-level offense. So the federal government can crack down on it now. But if the animal fighting provision in the Farm Bill is approved, it will strengthen the federal case against these lawbreakers even more.

True, if viewed in the broadest sense, the overall bill might logically be considered a disappointment for animal advocates (not just because conferees struck language approved by the House and Senate to put a stop to Class B dealers, and their nefarious work in collecting "random source" dogs and cats and selling them to research facilities, often for painful and terminal experimentation). The lawmakers who wrote the Farm Bill do not proactively address any core concerns that animal advocates have about animal agriculture, including intensive confinement systems, cruel mutilation procedures (such as tail docking), the rampant non-therapeutic use of antibiotics on factory farms, or greenhouse gas emissions from farm animal agriculture. Indeed, it was the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production—an independent group chaired by former Kansas Governor John Carlin and that included former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman—that took on these questions squarely in its historic report issued two weeks ago. It would be a failure of Congress not at some point to consider the Pew report and take up many of its recommendations.

But politics is the art of the possible, and the members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees who write the Farm Bill are tied too closely to the agriculture industry to readily take on these issues in a proactive way, and they come from districts with a heavy demographic tilt toward established agricultural interests. But some lawmakers do seem more willing than ever to address animal abuse problems that do not relate centrally to the agriculture industry, and we're grateful for that.

Forecast for Farm Animals

There comes a time in all successful social movements when the seeds of reform that have long been sown finally begin to grow roots and take hold of the soil. When it comes to our fight against the most extreme confinement of animals on today’s factory farms, I see that process developing, and in the end we will see a flower bloom.

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After a comprehensive two-year study, the prestigious Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production concluded that factory farms pose unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and animal welfare. The Pew Commission explicitly recommended the phase-out of confinement practices such as battery cages (for laying hens), veal crates, and gestation crates (for breeding sows), and it made the announcement earlier this week at a press conference in Washington, D.C. These three confinement practices constitute the three core elements of a pending California ballot initiative that The HSUS is strongly backing and that is set for a vote in November.

While this conclusion may seem run-of-the-mill for animal advocates, it’s important to recognize just who sits on this esteemed commission. Indeed, it’s comprised of some of the most respected and knowledgeable voices within the agricultural and scientific community. Some members include former Kansas Governor John Carlin; former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman; former Dean of the University of Tennessee’s College of Veterinary Medicine Dr. Michael Blackwell; Bon Appetit Management Company CEO Fedele Bauccio; Niman Ranch founder and rancher Bill Niman; author and professor Marion Nestle; and Colorado State University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Dr. Bernard Rollin—just to name a few.

For years, The HSUS and virtually all other legitimate animal protection groups have been calling for an end to the confinement of animals in these archaic and abusive cages and crates; animals built to move should be allowed to do so. The validation of this position by the Pew Commission comes at a good time for the California ballot initiative, and for our efforts to work with corporations to phase in these reforms.

With each successful corporate campaign against battery cage confinement and with each new state law banning veal and gestation crates, our movement is making definite advances for farm animals. In a society where Americans express a love and appreciation for animals, confining living and feeling beings in cages so small that the animals cannot turn around is just not acceptable or ethically consistent.

My respect and admiration go out to the Pew commissioners and their staff for the rigorous work and deliberations. It was the Brambell Committee in the United Kingdom in the 1960s that set that nation on the path to phasing out these inhumane confinement practices, and perhaps the Pew Commission will ultimately achieve the same effect in the United States. Policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels should heed their recommendations and take action now for the welfare of animals and people.

The Case for Animals

Michael Van Dusen, the Center's deputy director, introduces me.

I had the privilege of speaking this morning at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars—a living memorial to former President Wilson. It is a setting where policy experts, authors, scholars, and others talk about the urgent issues of the day. I was delighted to have an opportunity to speak at the Center about animal protection. I prepared formal remarks, and want to share the full text of my speech with you. Video of the address will also be archived on the Wilson Center website next week.

Common Denominators

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. EDT, I will be speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and you can watch it live here. The invitation to speak at the Center came from its director, former Congressman Lee Hamilton, whose name should be familiar for his service on both the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group.

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In my speech, “Making the Connection: Animal Protection as a Domestic and International Public Policy Issue,” I will take a big-picture view of animal protection and discuss its moral underpinnings. I'll talk about how animal protection is a worthy moral subject in and of itself, but I'll also discuss how its strength is further reinforced by its connection to other social issues. The Michael Vick case and the Hallmark slaughter plant investigation are just two examples of that principle at work. There is no question in my mind that the respectful treatment of animals is intertwined with some of the most urgent problems of human welfare, planetary health, and global survival. Whether the issue is abating climate change, curbing the spread of violence, assuring food safety, reducing crime rates, or mitigating the global risks of bird flu, I’ll argue, a proper regard for animal welfare must be at the heart of good public policy.

I was excited by the chance to speak at the Wilson Center, for it is known throughout the world as a center for joining the world of ideas to the world of public policy. Please attend if you are in town, or join the webcast.

Keep It Civil

I am not one who sees a conspiracy at every turn. While I have seen a fair share of greed and collusion and even corruption in observing the workings in our nation's capital, I do have a fundamental faith in our government systems and the integrity of the people in this country.

The major social and economic issues in our society—education, poverty, health care, civil rights, environment, and animal protection, to name a few—are matters that can be addressed only in a civil society. Democratic elections, a zero tolerance policy for corruption, transparency in government, and fair application of the law are the bulwarks of a civil society.

When I see corrosion in these processes in any nation, I know that these societies will not be able to address important social issues in a fundamental way—in fact, when the rule of law is disregarded, it often translates into havoc for people and the environment. To take a recent example, the autocratic actions of President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe are doing irreparable harm to what was once a beautiful and promising nation. His suppression of his political opponents and his disregard for the recent election result is a prescription for impoverishment of the people of that nation, the despoiling of the environment, and the destruction of animals there, particularly the remarkable wildlife populations that inhabit this southern African nation.

We must be vigilant about people and corporations that tamper with the levers of democracy and civil society in our nation. It's no Zimbabwe for sure, but I have nonetheless been disgusted by what I've been witnessing in Florida in recent years in the realm of voting rights. Today, Damien Cave of The New York Times has a front-page story about efforts by the state legislature to impede voter registration efforts and citizen participation in elections.

For me, this information is disturbing on its face. But I've been watching this same state legislature, conspiring with the Florida Chamber of Commerce, dismantling the ballot initiative process in the state over the last few years. They have passed a series of laws to weaken the process of citizen lawmaking and make it unusable by the people, as a way of consolidating their own power and shielding corporations from the perceived whims of the electorate (the same electorate that puts these lawmakers in office). State lawmakers have passed measures to shorten the signature gathering period to make it more difficult to qualify an initiative petition. They have pushed a supermajority (60 percent) passage requirement for citizen ballot measures, even though lawmakers themselves only need a plurality or majority to win. They have attempted to impose criminal penalties for people who do not turn in petitions in a timely manner. Seen collectively, their actions amount to a brazen attempt to destroy the initiative process and concentrate state lawmaking power in Tallahassee.

While The HSUS is first and foremost concerned about protecting animals, we cannot separate our social reform work from the larger political context. We can only succeed if we operate within a civil society. We will raise our voice against political corruption, collusion, secrecy, and the erosion of voting rights. I hope you, too, pay attention to these issues because they are the substrate on which all social reform is built.

Cause and Effect

Animal cruelty is a vice, and our society should fight it with every ounce of energy we can muster. Abusing animals is a moral issue, and it commands the attention of people of conscience, lawmakers, and corporations. Given the public's love and appreciation for animals, we have a built-in advantage in taking on human-caused abuse and exploitation.

But our cause is buttressed by the connectivity of animal cruelty to other social ills. The fact is, when we cause harm to animals, there's usually some other closely correlated negative effect. Animal fighters do not just perpetrate acts of cruelty; they are often knee-deep in other criminal behavior, such as narcotics, human-on-human violence, money laundering, or some other form of mayhem. In our investigation of the Hallmark/Westland Meat Co., we documented cruelty to cows. But we also saw that abusing animals resulted in demonstrable food safety threats—to say nothing of the devastating effect on the beef industry itself.

Those of us immersed in animal protection know of these connections. And these ideas were elegantly knitted together in Barbara Cook Spencer's essay in last Friday’s edition of The Christian Science Monitor. Spencer writes:

Much as bullies demoralize themselves when they dominate or ride roughshod over those who are meek, vulnerable, or defenseless, it should be obvious that human beings are the ones demoralized by the commission of inhumane acts.

I've touched on this argument before. But it bears repeating. Cruelty is indivisible, and when we do harm to animals, that's just one manifestation of how this behavior erodes the fabric of a civil society.

Collaborating Against Cruelty

Last Friday's "Oprah Winfrey Show" on the mistreatment of dogs at puppy mills and the related issues of pet overpopulation, euthanasia, and spay and neuter has people of conscience throughout the nation hankering for reform. The intensive confinement and other forms of mistreatment of dogs, particularly the breeding males and females conscripted to mass-produce puppies for the pet trade, is an embarrassment and a moral failure. The HSUS has done three major investigations into the mills in the last year—with footage from these investigations broadcast on "Oprah"—and we are committed to using the full resources of the organization to achieve reform. Thanks to the efforts on Friday of Oprah and her team, our campaign has been turbocharged.

Meanwhile, the machinery of The HSUS continues to advance our cause on other fronts. Today, good news out of Colorado.

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Veal crates will be phased out as part
of Colorado's historic measure.

Just six months ago, I started discussions with leaders in the agriculture community in Colorado about farm animal confinement practices, specifically veal and gestation crates and battery cages. I told them we intended to file a ballot initiative for the November 2008 election, but would prefer to reach an accommodation in the legislature to avoid an initiative fight that would be costly to both sides.

Much to their credit, the leaders in the world of agriculture in Colorado embarked with me and my colleagues in a series of discussions without quite knowing where we'd end up. We had a series of honest and productive meetings, and did our best to put aside stereotypes and bias. We ran across our share of bumps in the road, but we were able to keep on track, thanks due in large part to Gov. Bill Ritter and his aides and also Agriculture Commissioner John Stulp. The Governor and Commissioner Stulp were committed to a positive outcome for all parties. Dr. Bernard Rollin of Colorado State University—an academic with credibility in both the animal protection and agriculture communities—was also indispensable in these discussions.

Today, we saw the culmination of these efforts. The Colorado House of Representatives, following the lead of the Senate, passed legislation to phase out veal crates in four years and sow gestation crates over 10 years. Gov. Ritter has agreed to sign the legislation, and we've agreed to withdraw our ballot initiative.

The public has an expectation of agricultural producers, and intensive confinement of animals for their entire lives is at odds with their commonsense understanding of how animals should be treated. If The HSUS and agriculture interests can work cooperatively to rid agriculture of these particularly inhumane systems, then we are all that much better off. We are grateful to all of the legislators, executive officials, and industry officials who exhibited such good faith. I send them my thanks and appreciation, and hope that what we've jointly accomplished in Colorado can be a model for the nation.

Force for Reform

The remarkable work of The HSUS’s Investigations unit was profiled today in the nation’s second-most popular newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. If you are a WSJ subscriber, you can read the article online. If not, keep an eye out for a newsstand copy.

The piece, “Humane Society Probes Put Pressure on Firms” by the paper’s Jane Zhang, recounts the impact of our investigation into the now infamous Hallmark/Westland Meat Co. as just the latest example of our work to spur industry reforms:

In recent years, a range of businesses have felt the squeeze from the organization, which is separate from local humane societies that deal mostly with animal rescues and pet adoptions. In the fashion industry, Tommy Hilfiger Group and others pulled garments from the marketplace last year after the Humane Society found that the trimming on some apparel was dog fur labeled as faux fur or as other animal fur. A spokesman for Tommy Hilfiger says the company's garments are now free of animal furs, starting with the spring collection.

When several other companies, including Neiman Marcus Group and Macy's Inc., didn't act as quickly, the Humane Society filed a complaint last year with the Federal Trade Commission. An FTC spokeswoman declined to comment.

And on her broadcast today, Oprah Winfrey addresses the puppy mill crisis in America. I was a guest on the show, and I suspect that part of the reason The HSUS was invited to participate was that our investigators have conducted three recent operations to expose different elements of the puppy mill industry.

Our work toward corporate policy reforms is also mentioned in Jane Zhang's WSJ story:

Faced with a Humane Society campaign, some businesses have negotiated big changes. In 2006, the organization alerted Ben & Jerry's, a unit of Unilever, to a video detailing the harsh treatment of hens by an egg supplier. The group demanded the ice-cream maker switch to eggs from cage-free hens, and within weeks, Ben & Jerry's was inundated with calls and emails from Humane Society supporters.

Our investigations focus on exposing abuse (such as the puppy mill investigations), often as a catalyst for public policy reforms. The investigations are also undertaken to pressure corporate actors to do better.

Responding to the wishes of mainstream America and to the ethical imperatives that The HSUS highlights, many of the nation’s leading corporations have set an example and become leaders in reforming to improve animal welfare. Yet others still cling to outmoded or inhumane practices. It is precisely for the latter circumstance that our Investigations unit stands at the ready—along with the other machinery we bring to the battles that must be waged.

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Today, I also want to say a word about Martin Luther King, Jr., on the anniversary of his assassination 40 years ago today.

The founders of The HSUS set up their new organization in late 1954, just a few weeks after Dr. King was installed as the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Within a year, the young preacher found himself leading a bus boycott that gained international attention and was the catalyst for the civil rights movement.

The HSUS has always been a place for people of different backgrounds who share the common bond of protecting animals and, we believe, our animal work is grounded in the approach King advocated. We are a non-violent campaigning organization that uses the wide variety of tools of reform acceptable and available in a civil society. On this day, I recall King's account of the early days in Montgomery: “I insisted that every church member become a registered voter and a member of the NAACP and organized within the church a social and political action committee—designed to keep the congregation intelligently informed on the social, political, and economic situations. The duties of the Social and Political Action Committee were, among others, to keep before the congregation the importance of the NAACP and the necessity of being registered voters, and—during state and national elections—to sponsor forums and mass meetings to discuss the major issues.”

We agree with Dr. King that an engaged and informed citizenry is vital to the success of our own good work. And on this anniversary of his tragic death, we remember him.

Sea Lions be Dammed

Our team is still bracing itself and documenting the seal hunt on the ground in Canada and conveying to the world the absolute horror of this archaic slaughter.

But even as we try to cope with the slaughter of baby seals in this nursery—a mass killing abetted by the government of Canada—we cannot relent in any of our other work. You count on us to keep hundreds of balls in the air, including on other pinniped issues. Last week, we filed a lawsuit to block plans by our own federal government to kill or capture over five years as many as 425 sea lions living near the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, which divides Oregon from Washington.

The charge leveled against the sea lions is simple: fish-eating sea lions eat fish. It's hard to imagine that that's a capital crime, but there's been a long-standing concern about salmon runs and finger-pointing galore, even though the salmon run that sea lions feed on is expected to be up this year by 200 percent. The fish do indeed have a hard time navigating the giant dams built to harvest hydropower, and now the sea lions are asked to pay the ultimate price for our manipulations and degradations of the natural world.

My colleague John Balzar, The HSUS's senior vice president for communications, put the matter into perspective in a column in The Oregonian last week. Please take a moment to read it. John was the former Northwest bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, so he's familiar with natural resource conflicts in Oregon and Washington and has as keen an eye as any observer of the region.

Youth Hunters an Endangered Species

As a child, I had an instinctive fascination with animals. I had all of our encyclopedias dog-eared to the animal entries, and I could name most of the world's major mammals by my early teens. As a young adult, one of the most memorable periods of my life was a four-month stint at Isle Royale National Park, a 210-square-mile archipelago in Lake Superior that was a home to moose, wolves, and foxes. As with almost all other U.S. national parks, sport hunting was strictly forbidden there, and you could actually get a glimpse of the animals because they were not particularly skittish. That experience solidified my view that humans had a place in nature, but it was to be a respectful and unobtrusive one.

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Values toward wildlife are shifting.

But culture is a powerful influence—and we live in a diverse nation. When young people are taught to hunt by parents or grandparents, that's an influence that's hard to resist. Hunting is a rite of male passage in some families, and even some communities, and there's pressure to conform. And once people accustom themselves to the idea, they then develop a belief system to support that behavior.

I was reminded of this in reading a recent story in The New York Times about efforts in West Virginia to reverse the trend of kids not taking up hunting. One hunting advocate featured in the story said that when he was a kid he and his classmates would leave their rifles in the principal’s office so they could hunt squirrels and groundhogs just after the last bell rang.

The story focused on the efforts by industry and the state to pull kids back to the sport of hunting, because so many kids are interested in other recreational activities. The West Virginia legislature approved a bill to allow hunting education in schools—a controversial program even in a major hunting state given the rash of school shootings nationwide and the fear of guns in the hands of emotionally troubled young people. Even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a newspaper in one of the biggest hunting states in the country with readership that crosses into West Virginia, said in an editorial, "If a social custom is in decline—an expression of free choice—then arguably it should be left to decline. The real loser here is the educational process, which surely has better things to do than teach hunting."

The hunting lobby and its allies in arms and ammunitions manufacturing are concerned about a future loss in profits, but it's a bit of a culture war they are fighting, too. They value hunting, and they think that kids should have experiences similar to their own. There's an ideological hue to their campaign—an attempt to validate their own upbringing and favored recreational pastimes. As such, the industry is pouring enormous resources into a nationwide campaign to eliminate minimum hunting ages for children.

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HSUS programs teach respect for wildlife.

At The HSUS, we've always preferred that kids take a walking stick or field glasses into the woods rather than a weapon. For years, we’ve taught students how to respect their wild neighbors through materials like KIND News in K-6 classrooms, coloring books, and study and activity guides for middle- and high-school students. Last year, we took efforts to engage youth in helping animals a step further when we started our Mission: Humane program.

In the Shoot to Save Wildlife project, kids and teens head outdoors holding HSUS cameras to capture images of wildlife they encounter—from a pigeon on the ledge of an apartment building to geese grazing on a school campus. The photos are then used on flyers and posters as part of student-led public awareness campaigns about living peacefully with these animals. In all Mission: Humane projects, students are active in community service as they learn academics tied to National Education Standards.

At the end of the day, the hunting industry is going to have a tough time bucking the trend, despite its handsome investments and zeal. We are seeing the growth of animal protection, the increasing popularity of Animal Planet and other forms of popular entertainment that promote respect for animals and nature, and an expanded set of experiences that kids can tap into in a global communications era. This new social complexity will tempt the imagination of young people and make hunting seem a rather archaic pursuit, even in those communities where it has been such a strong tradition.

Nim Chimpsky: Yes, that's right—Nim Chimpsky

It doesn't take an advanced degree to conclude that other animals, particularly mammals, have real smarts. But during the last 20 years, there's been a raft of publishing on the commonsense conclusion that animals think and are capable of sophisticated cognition.

When I first got involved in animal protection, I read the late Donald Griffin's book "Animal Thinking" (1985). Griffin's work was path-breaking and his collective works are an answer to the reductionist scientists who thought that all animal behavior was driven by evolutionary preprogramming.

It seems, more and more, that the debate is settled—and decidedly so in favor of our recognition of animal cognition. This month, National Geographic had a cover story about animal thinking. Animals solve problems, create and use tools, show cognitive complexity and flexibility, and retain memories. Dolphins, apes, and elephants have a sense of self, being able to recognize themselves in the mirror. Some animals can recognize individual faces and remember them longterm. There is even a dog in Austria who can recognize several hundred words of vocabulary.

And last month there was a biography published about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a language acquisition study in the 1970s.

Nim had been part of a famed experiment in interspecies communication at Columbia University, one that sought to teach American Sign Language to a chimpanzee to refute the linguist Noam Chomsky’s claim that language is exclusively a human trait.

Nim’s story represented an important chapter in the study of animal minds, but as Elizabeth Hess shows in "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human," it also had larger meaning in the world of animal protection and beyond.

Hess gives voice to many of the people who lived with Nim, took care of him, taught him and loved him. The bonds they formed were moving, and it’s clear that these relationships meant something to Nim, too, for he was a highly social creature.

From the vantage of 30 years, however, it’s fair to say that Project Nim was not a success, and that among its conclusions we can offer was the failure of certain of its principals to do right by Nim. All too often, he was at the mercy of human ego, envy, intrigue, and power struggles. Personal, scientific, and financial difficulties bogged the project down.

The book traces Nim’s uncertain path from the primate research center where he was born, to the Manhattan brownstone, Columbia University classroom, and New York suburban villa where he learned to sign, to the biomedical laboratory where he might have ended his life in a study of the hepatitis vaccine.

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Lulu, one of three chimps who live at
Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch.

That his story didn’t end there is largely the result of intervention by The Fund for Animals and Cleveland Amory, who ran a campaign to get Nim transferred back to the breeding facility of his birth, and then negotiated his transfer from his owner, the Oklahoma scientist William Lemmon. In 1983, Nim moved to Black Beauty Ranch, where he soon gained a new companion, Sally. In 1997, after Sally’s death, Black Beauty took in three more chimps in need of homes—Kitty, Lulu and Midge—and they became Nim’s companions. They’re still there, enjoying the great care of our dedicated staff.

I had a special interest in Nim because I saw him dozens of times at Black Beauty Ranch, where he lived until his death in 2000, struck down at the relatively young age of 26 by a coronary occlusion. It was a tragic death to those who worked with him and loved him. And there was a larger wrong, for Nim, who had been through so much and who deserved a chance to grow old at Black Beauty.

Even in death, however, Nim’s story remains important, for it raises big questions, questions about the general use of primates in biomedical and psychological research, questions about the captivity care of such animals, and questions about our larger duty to animals.

The HSUS is deeply engaged with these questions. Our Chimps Deserve Better campaign addresses the challenge of bringing the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research and testing to an end. Our Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, operated in partnership with The Fund for Animals and renamed in honor of its founder, cares for chimpanzees cast off by others. Our efforts on behalf of the Captive Primate Safety Act are designed to prevent the misfortunes that so often result when chimps and other primates are kept by private parties who lack the skills to properly care for them.

In all of these activities, I like to think, we’re extending Nim’s legacy.

Cat-alyzing Change

I had just graduated from college in 1987 when the legendary Cleveland Amory published "The Cat Who Came for Christmas," his now-classic tale of Polar Bear, the stray cat he got himself dirty rescuing from an alley one snowy night in New York City. About 18 months later, I found myself with the incredible opportunity to work for Cleveland and also Marian Probst at The Fund for Animals as their executive director. As our professional relationship and personal friendship developed, I also had the opportunity to get to know Polar Bear, who in short order would become one of the most famous and best-chronicled cats of the 20th century.

Even before writing the book, Cleveland had a special reputation as a lover and champion of cats. But the book's fabulous commercial success—a number one bestseller translated into more than 21 languages, and then the second and third installments in his trilogy, "The Cat and the Curmudgeon" and "The Best Cat Ever"—thrust Cleveland into the slot as the world's greatest advocate and defender of cats.

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Cleveland and Polar Bear are never far from my thoughts when it comes to HSUS work on cat issues, and I am mindful of the many lessons both taught me through the years. A survey of our membership several years ago revealed that 57 percent of our members have cats, and a recent estimate suggests that there are 88.3 million cats in American households. They are, numerically speaking, America's number one companion animal, and the people who love them and care for them are the heart and soul of this organization.

Today, nearly 10 years after Cleveland’s death, the most pressing issue in the feline welfare arena is the presence of countless millions of feral cats, the offspring of lost or abandoned household pets, or other feral cats who are not spayed or neutered. Fortunately, for the cats, there are a legion of self-sacrificing cat allies and advocates who help these creatures in need. These folks have been pioneers in the practice of Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs, where feral cats in specific communities are humanely managed, rather than trapped and killed. TNR is an idea whose time has come, and The HSUS strongly supports this active, humane management strategy.

Our March 2006 policy statement on TNR makes this support plain, but we’ve also made our commitment real by publishing works like Margaret R. Slater’s "Community Approaches to Feral Cats" and Bryan Kortis’ "Implementing a Community Trap-Neuter-Return Program," designed to help cat advocates succeed with TNR programs in their own communities.

As part of our collaboration with Neighborhood Cats, Bryan Kortis and The HSUS’s Nancy Peterson provide daylong training sessions for TNR advocates through Humane Society University. We’ve also provided financial support to Neighborhood Cats and other groups to advance their work on TNR.

I’m pleased to report, too, that at our Animal Care Expo in May, we’ll debut a new CD/DVD on how to run a good community-wide TNR program.

We are also working hard on SafeCats, a program designed to keep household cats safe and indoors (Cleveland wrote in "The Cat Who Came for Christmas" about how outdoor cats live a fifth as long as indoor cats), and on our general spay and neuter work focusing on feline overpopulation. The HSUS has also done its best to bridge the gap with individuals and organizations in the birding and wildlife rehabilitation community, who view cats as an exotic species predating upon birds and other native wildlife. We've argued that a two-pronged program that focuses on 1) people keeping their household cats indoors and 2) cat allies and humane organizations managing outdoor colonies through TNR offers the best opportunity for maximizing public participation and helping cats and wildlife.

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We’re not alone, of course, and I’m personally grateful to see Alley Cat Allies, Alley Cat Rescue, Neighborhood Cats, Best Friends, the ASPCA, and other groups working so hard on this front. A major challenge like this requires that kind of organizational unity, along with the contributions of literally thousands of volunteer cat advocates on the front lines in communities across the nation.

In many communities, feral cats are not welcome, and they’re sometimes demonized by public officials. This happened just the other day, in an Iowa town, where, unfortunately, The HSUS’s role and comments were misrepresented in a poorly edited story that was widely circulated. That situation has been resolved, with an offer of Trap-Neuter-Return assistance being accepted by the local government. But it reminds us that the issue is a challenge in communities throughout the nation. We need to do even more to defuse local controversies surrounding the presence of feral cats, and to address them humanely and responsibly. And we will. Cleveland Amory wouldn't have it any other way.

Taking it to the House

At The HSUS, there's never a dull moment. We are still intensely focused on follow up to the slaughter plant investigation in southern California. And I am recently back from Canada and its extraordinary seal nursery. We are organizing worldwide opposition to the seal hunt, which is regrettably scheduled to resume later this month—though we aim for this year to be its last. Meanwhile, we've been stacking up new laws against dogfighting and cockfighting in states across the country—with major wins recently in Idaho, Oregon, Virginia, and Wyoming.

© The HSUS
Testifying at today's hearing.

Today, I appeared before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Oceans to testify in favor of H.R. 5534, the Bear Protection Act, and H.R. 2964, the Captive Primate Safety Act (you can read my full testimony here).

Last Congress, the leader of the full committee was Rep. Richard Pombo, one of the most anti-animal politicians ever to walk the halls of Congress. He's now in the private sector thanks in part to the work of the Humane Society Legislative Fund. The Democrats took control of the House in the last election, and the new chairman, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, is an outstanding animal advocate and conservationist. So, too, is the Subcommittee chairwoman, Madeleine Bordallo of Guam. Who says elections don't have consequences?

Congressmen Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and John Campbell (R-Calif.) are the co-authors of the Bear Protection Act, and that legislation seeks to halt the highly lucrative trade in bear viscera such as the gallbladders and bile that is principally in demand in the Asian communities at home and abroad. In short, it's an anti-poaching bill, and it seeks to stop the reckless practice of killing bears for their internal organs for commercial profit. There are 34 states that ban the sale of bear gall bladders, and the Bear Protection Act is designed to complement those state laws and to establish a bright-line policy that the trade in bear gall bladders and other internal organs has no place in this nation. (Click here to see excerpts of my testimony on bear protection.)

This legislation enjoys broad support in Congress. But it does have its critics, principally Republican Don Young of Alaska, who greets guests to his Capitol Hill office with the actual hide of a grizzly bear he shot some years ago mounted on his wall. He says he is the only licensed trapper (he says he uses steel-jawed leghold traps) in the Congress. He's the ranking Republican on the Natural Resources Committee and I must confess he's a pretty colorful and entertaining guy. He's mellowed a bit from the old days when he used to mimic the sounds of rabbits caught in leghold traps. Today, he bloviated on the Bear Protection Act for awhile, and even attacked a major hunting advocate, Ray Schoenke, the president of the American Hunters and Shooters Association, for supporting the bill. It was mostly bluster and little substance. Young doesn't have much of an argument against this anti-poaching bill, especially because his home state has a law against selling bear parts, except for the fur.

The other bill, the Captive Primate Safety Act, introduced by Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), will amend the Lacey Act by adding nonhuman primates to the list of animals who cannot be transported across state lines as pets. It does for primates what the Captive Wildlife Safety Act—which Congress passed unanimously in late 2003—did for lions, tigers, and other big cats. A companion bill in the Senate (S. 1498), introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and David Vitter (R-La.), was approved by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works last July and is awaiting floor action.

Sea Change in Animal Testing

USA Today had an important and exciting story in yesterday's paper about the move away from the use of animals in certain toxicity tests. I am truly enthused about the possibility of innovation in this arena making animal testing obsolete.

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Since the 1970s The HSUS has been promoting the Three Rs to animal testing. Our aim has been the reduction, replacement, and refinement of the use of animals in specific testing procedures. However, our long-term goal has been the complete replacement of animals in chemical testing. That goal has always seemed elusive although there have been important gains along the way, including the codification of the Three Rs into the Animal Welfare Act, the establishment of the federal government’s Interagency Coordinating Committee for the Validation of Alternative Methods, and the launching of the World Congresses on Alternatives. The HSUS had, and continues to have, a major role in these and other developments.

However, the era of incremental change is coming to an end. In June, the National Research Council issued a vision and strategy for the future of toxicity testing. It calls for a massive shift away from traditional animal testing, and its eventual complete replacement with non-animal methods. We were privileged to have had staff member Dr. Martin Stephens on the committee that drafted this report. The NRC approach is being widely embraced by U.S. government agencies and progressive corporations as a way to test chemicals more rapidly, inexpensively, and effectively, as well as to address public concerns about animal testing. 

And the action has already begun, as USA Today reports, with the National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Toxicology Program announcing they have formed a partnership to essentially implement the NRC vision. We will be bringing government and industry representatives together in the United States and Europe to launch an even more ambitious effort with the promise of eliminating animal testing within 10 years.

Shaking Up the Food Chain

Safeway, the nation's third largest supermarket, announced yesterday a series of meaningful animal welfare reforms relating to the treatment of chickens and pigs raised for eggs and meat sold at its 1,700 or so stores. The HSUS has been in discussions with Safeway for months, and based on the company's announced commitments on animal welfare, we have withdrawn a resolution we planned to submit to shareholders for consideration at their next meeting.

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Safeway is just the latest food retailer to give a nod to animal welfare. Whole Foods, Wolfgang Puck, Burger King, Compass Group, and a laundry list of others have, to varying degrees, instituted animal welfare reforms in recent years—with many of them responding to HSUS entreaties for action. It's an ascendant trend, and we hope there's much more to report to you on this front in the months and years to come.

Retailers have enormous power over producers, transporters, and slaughtering operations. If they demand new welfare standards, the producers and processors will adjust. U.S. farmers are innovators, and they just need a signal or directive from the marketplace. We've seen that time and again.

After we released the results of our investigation at Hallmark Meat Co., two major fast-food chains terminated their relationships with the company. Our investigation documented downer cows being shocked, struck with wooden paddles in the face, rammed or run over with forklifts, and blasted in the nostrils and mouth with water from a high pressure hose to simulate drowning—all done to get these sick or injured animals to stand to get them to slaughter for human consumption.

The behavior caught on tape and subsequently broadcast to millions of Americans has rightly earned widespread condemnation, even from many leaders and trade press within the animal agribusiness industry. Unfortunately, some players in industry, and even the new USDA Agriculture Secretary himself, also saw fit to criticize The HSUS, claiming that we did not release the results immediately to federal authorities. In a blog last week, I wrote about the timeline for the investigation. The HSUS is the last entity that would ever want to sit on the results; we had no incentive to do so. We were methodical in how we handled the investigation, and how we publicized it, too. The national furor that erupted once we publicly released the information shows we handled the job thoroughly and effectively.

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A worker pulls a downed cow at Hallmark Meat Packing.

In addition, some at the USDA continue to repeat the claim that it has not seen any evidence of downed cows going to slaughter for human consumption. But we have indeed provided incontrovertible evidence to the USDA to show that that's exactly what happened. And let's face it, the managers and employees at Hallmark would not have relied on so many means of tormenting the cows if they weren't intent on getting downers into the slaughter plant. They wanted to convert every cow into cash.

And frankly, this isn't the first time that slaughtering of downed animals for human consumption has recently come to light. The USDA's own Inspector General did a report in January 2006 revealing that USDA inspectors were allowing some downers to be slaughtered, in violation of the agency's own rules banning that practice.

It's not up to The HSUS to do the USDA's job, but it is our job to watch over the USDA if it is not handling its responsibilities properly. The USDA gets millions of dollars in taxpayer funds from Congress and the American people every year to inspect the plants and enforce the law. It's a tough job to be sure, but the USDA should focus on investigating this plant and, in a larger sense, correcting its own procedures and policies that allowed these atrocious practices to occur—on the USDA's watch, I might add.

The Cruelty Connection

Kindness and compassion are infectious. A child who embraces the ethic of compassion for animals is typically a child who is more respectful and empathetic toward other people. We've long known that inculcating a concern for animals builds character and fosters a sense of responsibility. My experience in 20 years of full-time animal protection work has shown me that kindness begets more of the same.

The converse is also true. The person who abuses an animal is more likely to do harm to people. There's abundant evidence of this propensity documented in the sociological literature, and that, too, has been validated by my experiences as president of The HSUS. Dogfighters typically don't just break laws related to animal cruelty. Very often, they are involved in violence toward people, narcotics trafficking, and other vices. Where there is domestic violence, the victims are interchangeable for the abuser; one day it's a spouse, the next a child or the family pet. There's a loss of empathy, and an attitude of license and the raw use of power.

There are normalized behaviors that are not associated with aberrant, socially destructive behavior. Someone who wears fur is not someone who is more likely to cause harm to others, even if there are moral issues raised by the killing of animals for fur. The same is true for people who eat meat. Wearing fur and eating meat are social customs, and these types of conduct are not precursors of violence toward others. We ask the consumers to think about their purchases and to consider the moral costs of their consumption habits, but we do not confuse their choices with any form of social pathology.

But there are production practices that are so harsh and severe that there is a larger moral spillover effect. I couldn't help but think about this in reading about a remarkable investigative report on the poultry industry now running in The Charlotte Observer. The series talks about the systematic exploitation of the slaughterhouse workers, at plants that are processing millions and millions of birds every week.

Plant overseers that systematically orchestrate the brutalizing of animals are generally not paragons of responsible behavior. Mistreating workers, polluting the environment, and producing unsafe food are the other by-products of their operations. And the psychological effect on people who do the killing and dismembering of animals cannot be healthy. It's a demeaning, dehumanizing process, and the people involved must be scarred by the experience.

You cannot compartmentalize kindness. Nor can you easily compartmentalize violence or abuse. It spills over time and again.

That's just one reason why the work of The Humane Society of the United States is so important.

Don't Shoot the Predator

Not all forms of predator control are equal, but there's an underlying core belief for the advocates of these killing programs that the predators are infringing upon our human prerogatives and our ordering of the world. We're the ones who want to exploit prey populations, and predators be damned if they interrupt our best-laid plans.

Aerial gunning of wolves in Alaska—done to boost populations of moose and caribou for hunters to shoot—is surely one of the most indefensible. Mass killing of coyotes by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services branch—about 90,000 coyotes a year—is done in part as a psychological salve for ranchers with a paranoia and hatred of these opportunistic and adaptable canids. The proposal to kill a limited number of sea lions in the Columbia River near Portland, as a means of saving threatened and endangered populations of salmon, has greater moral complexity than the above-mentioned examples, but is still a bad and unworthy idea.

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My colleague John Balzar, The HSUS's senior vice president for communications and former Northwest bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, covered natural resource and environmental issues for years. He reported on many of the major social and ecological conflicts that stirred debate in all corners of the region. He's got just the right take and perspective on the proposed killing of sea lions, and I encourage you to read a column he wrote for the Seattle Times that appeared yesterday, which I've included below.

And after you are done with that, please write to the National Marine Fisheries Service by Feb. 19 and urge them to pursue exclusively non-lethal means of managing conflicts between sea lions and salmon and to look to the more serious culprits in the decline of salmon populations.

Killing sea lions will not save Columbia River salmon

By John Balzar
Special to The Times

When the government gets ready to kill predators in a desperate effort to save prey, you can be sure that something's way wrong in nature. And these days, what's wrong can usually be traced to human mistakes.

That's exactly the situation on the great Columbia River at Bonneville Dam.

Here, the federally protected sea lion swims in troubled waters with the chinook salmon, and bad news is brewing.

Meaterial Excess

"Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago," wrote Mark Bittman yesterday, in a major piece in The New York Times' Week in Review section. He continued, "We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources."

This HSUS ad spotlights animal agriculture's
environmental impact.

The excessive consumption of meat, dairy, and egg products has consequences, and one of the biggest yet least-discussed consequences is the extraordinary output of greenhouse gasses—not just carbon dioxide, but also nitrous oxide and methane. In 2006, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization released a report called Livestock's Long Shadow, which pointed out that the animal agriculture sector contributes 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO₂ equivalent—a larger share than all transportation combined.

Yet, many environmental organizations expressing alarm about climate change have no policy recommendations on mitigating the impact of animal agriculture, nor any exhortations to modify personal behavior to reduce our own greenhouse gas footprint. One can only conclude that it's a moral blind spot for these groups and their leaders. Perhaps it hits too close to home. Maybe they don't want to think about modifying their own behavior, or perhaps they do not want to ask their own members to make changes that would be uncomfortable, or there's a chance they simply don't want to look foolish.

We don't take that view at The HSUS. Our food choices have enormous implications for the planet's health, our personal health, and for animals, and we urge every HSUS supporter to start examining these questions, if they have not already.

A good start to your research is to carefully read Bittman's well-researched and important piece. For a deeper dive, we've detailed the meat, dairy, and egg industry's impact on climate change in a comprehensive report at humanesociety.org/climatechange. Keep clicking through the pages of our website and you’ll find an abundance of information on almost every facet of the animal agriculture industry.