Humane Society to merge with Fund for Animals
By LANCE GAY
Scripps Howard News Service
November 19, 2004

WASHINGTON - The Humane Society of the United States is celebrating its 50th anniversary next week by merging with the late Cleveland Amory's Fund for Animals to become the largest and richest animal rights organization in the country.

"This is a historic move that is going to unite the movement," said Wayne Pacelle, the 39-year-old president of the Humane Society, who has spearheaded efforts to unite the competing agendas of organizations fighting for animal rights.

"I'm looking for us to become a hard-hitting campaign organization," Pacelle said.

He said he plans to use the organization's combined budget of $96 million next year to hire five lawyers for a litigation unit. The organization will focus on inhumane treatment of animals in factory farms, animal cruelty and efforts to enforce crackdowns on illegal cockfighting. It also will try to revitalize the campaign against fur clothing, ban inhumane sports hunting with bows and arrows and launch campaigns against keeping exotics as pets.

Humorist and commentator Cleveland Amory, who died in 1998, created the Fund for Animals in 1967 after breaking with the Humane Society, which he thought insufficiently radical and insensitive to the issues of wild animals. Pacelle previously worked for the Fund.

Pacelle said he would like to further unify the animal rights movement in the United States through other mergers, or by creating an umbrella organization that could carry more political clout in Washington.

Rob Sexton, vice president for governmental affairs at the U.S. Sportsman Alliance, an organization created to combat the anti-hunting movement, said the merger indicates the Humane Society will become a more outspoken opponent of hunting.

"The Fund for Animals has always been 100 percent anti-hunting, but the HSUS has been more subtle about it," he said. "This merger signals that HSUS is taking off the mask and devoting a greater amount of its capabilities at hunters. If we do a good job, we are going to unify sportsmen over this."

Some animal welfare groups predicted the Humane Society is staking out a more radical stand on animal welfare issues with the merger, and they doubted Pacelle can achieve his goal of unifying animal protection groups.

"There are some real differences between animal protection groups," said Patti Strand, president of the National Animal Interest Alliance in Portland, Ore., which promotes animal welfare.

Strand said she is opposed to the confrontational approach to animal welfare issues taken by the Humane Society and the Fund for Animals, which she maintains fuels conflicts for fund-raising purposes.

"We oppose them because of their tactics, and their dishonesty in promoting their agenda," Strand said. "Many of the animal protection groups don't like being seen as extremists."

The Humane Society grew out of a split in the animal rights movement in 1954, when Fred Myers, a former reporter for the Kansas City Journal and New York Mirror, led a breakaway faction from the American Humane Association, then a coalition of state and local societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.

Humane Society historian Bernard Unti said Myers wanted an organization that would be more aggressive in pursuing federal legislation to protect animals, and headquartered the Humane Society of the United States in Washington. Unti said Myers was alarmed that the American Humane Association was not doing enough about the welfare of animals obtained from local pounds that were being used in biomedical research, then unregulated by the government.

Within four years after HSUS was formed on Nov. 22, 1954, the organization claimed its first victory with the help of women's clubs, pushing through Congress the Humane Slaughter Act, which requires humane treatment of animals in slaughterhouses. Myers in 1958 launched an undercover investigation of biomedical laboratories that exposed abuses prompting Congress to pass the Animal Welfare Act in 1966, establishing standards for housing, feeding and proper care of animals used for research.

Unti said the Animal Welfare Act was the most significant of the two new laws because it was extended to include proper treatment of animals in zoos and at roadside animal exhibits.

"We have to recognize it was not an easy road in this society to get these laws passed. There was very significant opposition," he said.

Pacelle said one of his major goals is to close the loopholes in the federal laws that exempted poultry from the Humane Slaughter Act. The Humane Society is campaigning to stop farmers from debeaking chickens so they don't peck at each other in close quarters, and to end battery henhouses.

"I think we're going to see poultry under the Humane Slaughter Act," he said. "It's not healthy for animals to be raised in confined environments."

Pacelle said his organization also is developing programs that will encourage suburban homeowners to live with the wildlife in rural neighborhoods and cut back on hunting. He said the organization does not support a blanket ban on hunting, but is opposed to using bows and arrows, which are inaccurate and can wound animals.

The Humane Society has launched a vigorous campaign to end so-called "canned hunts" where animals are put in enclosed areas for hunters to find them.


http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story...1-19-04&cat=AN


Notice how Pacelle says --- " the organization does not support a blanket ban on hunting ... "

This is an attempt by them to isolate bowhunters from other hunters.

Every person who hunts needs to know that these groups oppose ALL hunting.