Cyndi's Two Cents

Do not be fooled

Commentary.

The animal rights activist group Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is not just another radical group of nearly-naked kids wearing body paint to resemble wild animals. It is not a group whose members would dress like pigs and throw whipped-cream pies in the face of the state pork queen or empty a dump truck load of cow manure at the doors of the convention center where a livestock organization is holding a national annual meeting.

HSUS is a money-raising lobbying machine that has full and deep pockets. You as farmers alone cannot compete with the kind of financial power this group and others like it have. Money gives them the ability to access and influence hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

The farm population is somewhere around 1% of the total population in this country. Unfortunately, the farm population is fragmented. Al Tank, former CEO of the National Pork Producers said these activist groups are like Lions hunting zebras on the Serengeti planes. They work together as a pride, to single out one animal and work together as a pack to take it down.

If we are going to be successful in our efforts to thwart the hunting strategies of those activist groups, we must stick together so that we cannot be singled out and taken down.

If you don’t believe it can’t happen, ask someone in the horse business. One entire species. Which species is next?

I am deeply saddened that a handful of farmers who raise livestock in the Show-Me State have teamed up with HSUS to fight the Right to Farm Constitutional Amendment which Missourians will vote on later this year. The release announcing the formation of this HSUS Missouri Agriculture Council said, “The HSUS advocates compassionate eating – or the Three Rs: “reducing” or “replacing” consumption of animal products, and “refining” our diets by choosing products from sources that adhere to higher animal welfare standards, including the members of this new ag council who raise pigs, cattle and poultry.”

When asked by a reporter how, as farmers who raise meat animals, they could support such a statement, one of them responded that we would all do well to eat less meat.

HSUS has an anti-meat, vegan agenda. Speaking to an animal rights conference in 2006, HSUS’s then vice president for farm animal issues stated that HSUS’s goal is to “get rid of the entire [animal agriculture] industry” and that “we don’t want any of these animals to be raised and killed.”

HSUS is working against you! It is working against small farmers and corporate agriculture. It is working against 4-H and FFA, Farmers Union and Farm Bureau. It is working against Brownfield Network and Agri-News and American Corn Growers and National Corn Growers and meat-eating Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Libertarians and Green Party candidates.

Most farm families – no matter how many acres are farmed or livestock raised – are certainly not going to intentionally pollute the environment or do harm to their animals.

Do not be fooled!