Chairman's Column - 100 Points
HSUS – A Wish List for Animal Rights?
Seeing its opportunity to influence the Obama administration the Humane Society of the United States has embarked on its new “100-Point change Agenda for Animals”.
HSUS says their 100 points of change addresses important animal welfare issues: “Never before has the animal protection movement so carefully articulated a vast array of critical animal protection reforms in the domains of so many federal agencies---“
The 100-Point Agenda tackles issues of foreign pet food, cloning, exotic animal importation, whales and fisheries, as well as slaughter houses. While there are a number of reasonable and important issues covered by the HSUS agenda, it also incorporates new and distressing programs that will have a detrimental effect on animal testing, hunting and pet ownership. The 100-point agenda will affect our ability to own pets and protect our privacy rights. It also stamps all over state and local control issues.
The top two issues are very disturbing. The first issue; HSUS wants the president to appoint an Animal Protection Liaison in the White House, similar to the new position announced for Carol Browner and/or the Council on Environmental Quality, to help coordinate animal protection concerns (policy issues, legislation, and regulations affecting animals across several different agencies—Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, EPA, HHS, State, Transportation, HUD, DOD, FTC, Education, etc.)
In other words, the new animal liaison would have the power to draft rules, regulations and laws to affect animals, including dogs and cats in our homes, businesses, farms, ranches, jobs, law enforcement, agriculture, transportation, housing, defense and any other capacity regulated by law.
The second issue to top their list is an “Animal Protection Division in the Justice Department. Appoint an additional Assistant U.S. Attorney to head a new Animal Protection Division in the Justice Department, similar to the Civil Rights Division, to ensure strong enforcement of federal animal protections laws.
This is “Big Brother” at its worst. Creating a federal justice department (think FBI) to investigate animal protection issues, elevates our pets and other animals to the status of humans. It gives the federal justice department broad authority to file criminal charges against private citizens in the name of their pets.
According to the American Sporting Dog Alliance;” A top priority of HSUS for several years has been to require federal regulation of everyone who raises dogs and cats. Under current law, only commercial breeders who sell puppies and kittens on a wholesale basis are federally regulated. Hobby breeders who sell puppies or kittens directly to the public are not required to be federally licensed or inspected.
HSUS wants everyone who raises and sells puppies to be licensed and inspected by the USDA, and also wants to see much tougher regulations and standards for animal care.
About four years ago, the HSUS-sanctioned Pet Animal Welfare Act (PAWS) was defeated in Congress by a narrow margin. PAWS would have imposed federal licensing and inspection on all hobby breeders. …this is PAWS all over again.”
Here are some of the other issues addressed by the HSUS agenda:
“Immediately enforce a puppy import ban. While this sounds reasonable to stop the importation of inferior and sick puppies and kittens, it also stops any dog or cat owner or breeder from importing a cat or dog to enhance their breeding programs.
Wild animal exhibitions/USDA licensees – prohibit public physical contact with big cats, primates, and elephants (including elephant rides) to protect public health and safety; eliminate traveling exhibits for big cats and elephants.
Microchips – develop regulations (as directed in the FY06 Agriculture Appropriations bill) that will allow for universal reading ability by pet microchip scanners so that scanners can read any chip and microchipping can be more reliable, affordable, and effective in reuniting lost pets with their families; Note: No concern is stated over animals killed by microchipping, cancer causing problems, and the rights of pet owners to determine the advisability of microchipping.
AWA species – support efforts to include all vertebrates under Animal Welfare Act
The dictionary explains: “an animal of a large group distinguished by the possession of a backbone or spinal column, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes.”
All of you folk who are mistreating those goldfish better listen up.
Hunting on National Wildlife Refuges – do not open new public lands for hunting. HSUS has for a long time sought the end of hunting in our country.
Surveys – include pets on census questionnaire in order to determine how many/what types of animals are kept as pets; such survey data would be useful to assess impacts on human health and well-being, develop more effective approaches to community animal control, and ensure appropriate disaster preparation. Not said. “invade the privacy of our homes to find out the numbers of pets in each household, their sex, whether they are spayed or neutered, so local animal control can easily access them, confiscate them and put them in shelters to be killed.”
Pets in public housing – make small change in regulations to clearly prohibit requiring declawing (as is currently the case for debarking) and ensure that Public Health Authorities know not to demand this of tenants, as they continue to do despite Appropriations Committee report language urging an end to such misrepresentations of agency policy; do not impose breed-specific bans in public housing (breed specific spay/neuter policies may be effective and appropriate, if restrictions are needed; outright bans have proven counterproductive, actually reducing public safety in some cases) Note: Is this a half-hearted attempt to admit BSL is counter productive?
Surveys – include pets in CDC surveys in order to determine how many/what types of animals are kept as pets; such survey data could be useful to assess impacts on human health and well-being, develop more effective approaches to community animal control, and ensure appropriate disaster preparation. Note: “community animal control” means mandatory spay/neuter programs.
Companion animals in war zones – explore programs for soldiers who adopt pets in war zones to bring them home; advise and encourage war-torn countries to humanely and effectively conduct stray dog animal control and disease programs. Note: while this sounds admirable on the surface, remember the case of one dog from Iraq that brought in rabies. There doesn’t seem to be any concern about the millions of dollars this would cost the U.S. in third world countries that have no animal care services. Would this also result in huge numbers of dogs brought to the U.S. for more humane treatment and re-homing?
Animal cruelty – add a clause to the Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly prohibiting animal cruelty. Will we now put on trial our military for shooting a dog in a war zone?
While the HSUS is attempting to put in place restrictions addressing a number of important animal welfare issues, it has not strayed from its basic tenant of wanting to control and eliminate animal ownership, and install veganism in the United States.
Maybe, what is left out of the HSUS agenda is more telling. Nowhere does it call for bi-lingual education of pet owners to ensure better treatment of our dogs and cats. Education programs have over the past 30 years reduced animal shelter populations for dogs by 75% and for cats by 90%.
Nowhere does it require better animal shelter reporting procedures so we can ascertain how dogs and cats are really being treated. Nowhere does it call for an end to the mass killing of shelter dogs and cats; nowhere does it advocate for trap, neuter, return programs that have been so effective in reducing the feral cat problem. Nowhere does it call for more funding for our animal shelters to allow for more modern and humane housing. Most importantly, nowhere does it call for an increase in low cost and free spay and neuter clinics to reduce the unwanted animal population.
For this reason alone, we have to be vigilant in opposing those issues that detrimentally affect pet owners. This is why PetPAC and other true animal welfare groups have been preaching the necessity of banding together.
We cannot afford to allow HSUS and other animal extremist organizations to run roughshod over our rights. We can and must make our voices heard in the halls of Congress and the White House.
