7 Things You Didn't Know About HSUS

1) The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a “humane society” in name only. It isn’t affiliated with any hands-on “humane society” organizations, and it doesn’t operate a single pet shelter or pet adoption facility anywhere. During 2008, HSUS contributed barely $450,000— less than one-half of one percent of its budget—in grants to dog and cat shelters. By comparison, that same year it gave $2.25 million to a political campaign committee behind an anti-meat ballot initiative in California, and put $2.5 million into HSUS’s executive pension plan. HSUS is the wealthiest animal-rights lobbying organization on earth. It agitates for the same goals as PETA and other radical groups, but uses fewer naked interns.

2) Beginning on the day of NFL quarterback Michael Vick’s 2007 dogfighting indictment, HSUS raised money online with the false promise that it would “care for the dogs seized in the Michael Vick case.” The New York Times later reported that HSUS wasn’t caring for Vick’s dogs at all. And HSUS President Wayne Pacelle told the Times that his group urged government officials to “put down” (that is, kill) the dogs rather than adopt them out to suitable homes. HSUS later quietly altered its Internet fundraising pitch. Vick now gives HSUS “sponsored” speeches. And most of his dogs have been rehabilitated—without any help from HSUS.

3) HSUS’s senior management includes a former spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a criminal group designated as “terrorists” by the FBI. HSUS president Wayne Pacelle hired John “J.P.” Goodwin in 1997, the same year Goodwin described himself as “spokesperson for the ALF” while he fielded media calls in the wake of an ALF arson attack at a California veal processing plant. In 1997, when asked by reporters for a reaction to an ALF arson fire at a farmer’s feed co-op in Utah (which nearly killed a family sleeping on the premises), Goodwin replied, “We’re ecstatic.” That same year, Goodwin was arrested at a UC Davis protest celebrating the 10-year anniversary of an ALF arson at the university that caused $5 million in damage.

4) A 2008 Los Angeles Times investigation found that HSUS receives less than 12 percent of the money raised on its behalf by California telemarketers. Professional fundraisers keep the rest. If you exclude two campaigns run for HSUS by the “Builda-Bear Workshop” retail chain—which consisted of the sale of surplus stuffed animals (not really “fundraising”)—HSUS’s yield shrinks to just three percent. This is typical. In 2004, HSUS ran a telemarketing campaign in Connecticut with fundraisers who promised a return of “zero percent” of the proceeds. The campaign raised over $1.4 million. Not only did none of that money go to HSUS, but the group paid $175,000 for the telemarketing work. Similar filings exist in Massachusetts, New York, and other states. In 2008 HSUS collected more than $86 million in contributions, but spent more than $24 million on fundraising.

5) HSUS’s heavily promoted U.S. “boycott” of Canadian seafood—announced in 2005 as a protest against Canada’s annual seal hunt—is a phony exercise in media manipulation. A 2006 investigation found that 78 percent of the restaurants and seafood distributors described by HSUS as “boycotters” weren’t participating at all. Nearly two-thirds of them told surveyors they were completely unaware HSUS was using their names in connection with an international boycott campaign. Canada’s federal government is on record about this deception, saying: “Some animal rights groups have been misleading the public for years … it’s no surprise at all that the richest of them would mislead the public with a phony seafood boycott.” A documentary director also caught an HSUS film crew abusing a dying seal while they shot a 2007 fundraising video on the ice floes of Atlantic Canada.

6) HSUS raised $34 million in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, supposedly to help reunite lost pets with their owners. But comparatively little of that money was spent for its intended purpose. Louisiana’s Attorney General shuttered his 18-month-long investigation into where most of these millions went, shortly after HSUS announced its plan to contribute $600,000 toward the construction of an animal shelter on the grounds of a state prison.  In 2009, Atlanta ABC affiliate WSB-TV reported that public disclosures of the disposition of the $34 million in Katrina-related donations added up to less than $7 million.

7) After gathering undercover video footage of improper animal handling at a Chino, CA slaughterhouse during November of 2007, HSUS sat on its video evidence for three months, even refusing to share it with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. HSUS’s Dr. Michael Greger may have perjured himself before Congress, testifying that the San Bernardino County (CA) District Attorney’s office asked the group “to hold on to the information while they completed their investigation.” The District Attorney’s office quickly denied that account, declaring that HSUS refused to make its undercover spy available to investigators if the USDA were present. Ultimately, HSUS chose to release its video footage at a politically opportune time, as it prepared to launch a livestock-related ballot campaign in California. Meanwhile, meat from the slaughterhouse continued to flow into the U.S. food supply for months.

Ten Essential Mercury Facts

  

1. The Food and Drug Administration writes that its dietary mercury guidelines were “established to limit consumers’ methyl mercury exposure to levels 10 times lower than the lowest levels associated with adverse effects.” Americans who consume twice as much mercury as the FDA recommends are still protected by a 500-percent cushion. The same generous safety margin applies to the Environmental Protection Agency’s mercury “Reference Dose.” And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that zero percent of American children exceed the EPA’s hyper-cautionary guideline.


2. The U.S. government’s Institute of Medicine (a division of the National Academies of Science) warned in a major 2006 report that a “spillover effect” from one-size-fits-all fish warnings could deny most consumers the health benefits of seafood consumption. This report demonstrates a severe disagreement between serious scientists and activists who demand “warning” signs (aimed at all consumers) on grocery-store fish counters.

3. There are no scientifically documented cases of Americans developing mercury poisoning from eating commercially available fish. The only documented cases in the medical literature are from Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, following a massive industrial spill of mercury into fishing waters. Mercury levels today (in both fish and people) are nowhere near the levels measured during this tragic episode.

4. The federal government’s mercury-in-fish recommendations are based largely on a single study whose participants were exposed to mercury by eating whale meat—not fish. The study was conducted in Denmark’s Faroe Islands. Unlike fish, whale meat is contaminated with a variety of pollutants, so isolating mercury’s effects is practically impossible. In 2004 the lead Faroe researcher acknowledged in The Boston Herald that “fish consumption does not harm Faroese children … the fish consumption most likely is beneficial to their health.”

5. A twelve-year study conducted in the Seychelles Islands (in the Indian Ocean) recently found no negative health effects from exposure to mercury through heavy fish consumption. On average, people in the Seychelles eat between 12 and 14 fish meals every week, and the mercury levels measured in the island natives are higher than those measured in the United States. But they suffered no ill effects from mercury in fish, and they received a significant health benefit from eating fish in the first place.

6. In February 2007, The Lancet (The United Kingdom’s most prestigious medical journal) published U.S. government-funded research demonstrating a clear health benefit to children whose mothers ate large amounts of fish while pregnant. Researchers wrote that they could find “no evidence to lend support to the warnings of the U.S. advisory that pregnant women should limit their seafood consumption.” Of the more than 9,000 pregnant women in this study, those who ate the most fish—regardless of mercury levels—had children with the highest IQ’s.

7. Studies published in 2005 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that even eating small amounts of fish each week can result in a 17 percent lower risk of heart disease, a 12 percent lower risk of stroke, and (when eaten by pregnant women) a modest increase in children’s IQ. The Omega-3 fats found in fish can also protect against Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, breast andprostate cancer, and many other conditions.

8. Researchers at Harvard University concluded that the health benefits of fish “greatly outweigh the risks,” including those from trace amounts of mercury. Their study was published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) in October 2006.

9. Over forty years of scientific research has established that selenium, a plentiful nutrient in fish, can effectively neutralize the toxicity of trace amounts of mercury in seafood. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 16 of the 25 best sources of dietary selenium are ocean fish.

10. There’s solid scientific evidence that the amount of mercury in fish has remained the same (or even decreased) during the past century. Researchers from Princeton University, Duke University, and the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum have all compared specimens of ocean fish preserved between 25 and 120 years ago with current samples of the same species. In these studies, mercury levels in the fish stayed the same or declined.

The Naturopathy Movement

Naturopathy refers to a doctrine of “natural medicine” that teaches that the body’s “vital force” is the most important factor in healing and maintaining health. The approach has been criticized as largely pseudo-scientific, relying on dogma rather than data. One doctor describes the difference between naturopathy and medical science:

Scientific research has identified measurable, causative factors and specific methods of preventing and/or treating hundreds of health problems. Naturopaths have done little more than create glib generalities. [Their] theories are simplistic and/or clash with science-based knowledge of body physiology and pathology.

Naturopathy’s claims that abstract ideas of “balance” and “vitality” can help the body fight disease have been widely criticized. (For example, some diseases have a genetic link—something that abstractions can’t fight.)
Naturopathy also promotes the belief that “natural” foods are inherently better than so-called “processed” foods that are common in our diets. Some naturopaths claim that sugars like table sugar or HFCS raise the risk of obesity and diabetes. Naturopathic recommendations on an alternative medicine website include advice to completely avoid sugar in order to prevent or treat health problems, including diabetes, premenstrual syndrome, arthritis, and ear infections. Kimball C. Atwood, M.D., debunks anti-sugar scare tactics by naturopaths, writing:

When a naturopath claims that "toxins" or "food allergies" or dietary sugar or "candidiasis" are the underlying causes of ear infections, learning disorders, fatigue, arthritis or numerous other problems, it is a misrepresentation of facts.

In 2003 Dr. Kimball conducted a review for Medscape and found that naturopaths have less training than primary care medical doctors. A review of naturopathic literature “reveals that it is replete with pseudoscientific, ineffective, unethical, and potentially dangerous practices.” Atwood also presented testimony to a Massachusetts state legislative healthcare committee about the “bizarre, irrational, and unsafe” practices of naturopathy.
Dr. Barry L. Beyerstein and Susan Downie concluded in a review of the field that naturopathy does not hold up to medical science:

Throughout, we found underestimation of the power of the placebo. At the same time, our own bibliographic searches failed to discover any properly controlled clinical trials that supported claims of naturopathy, except in a few limited areas where naturopaths' advice concurs with that of orthodox medical science. Where naturopathy and biomedicine disagree, the evidence is uniformly to the detriment of the former. We therefore conclude that clients drawn to naturopaths are either unaware of the scientific deficiencies of naturopathic practice or choose to disregard them on ideological grounds.

In other words, naturopathy has a lengthy history of being rejected by the scientific community. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare said as much in 1968:

Naturopathic theory and practice are not based on the body of basic knowledge related to health, disease, and healthcare that has been widely accepted by the scientific community. Moreover, irrespective of its theory, the scope and quality of naturopathic education do not prepare the practitioner to make an adequate diagnosis and provide appropriate treatment.