Dairy Carrie vs. HSUS

Aaaaand we're back - after a brief hiatus from the blog we're back in full force!

Picture from dairycarrie.com

As a vet student, and someone who cares a ridiculous amount about the well-being of animals, I am constantly outraged by the Humane Society of the United States misleading Americans.  Let's get one thing straight, when you donate to HSUS you are in no way benefiting your local animal shelter and helping animals in need - you're contributing to a power (and money) hungry organization that lobbies against agriculture.


Recently, Wayne Pacelle, the President and CEO of HSUS, wrote an open letter to agriculture journalists and leaders.  This letter is just as misleading as the sappy commercials I see on TV.  Blogger, Dairy Carrie, has such a phenomenal response to this - I had to share.  Enjoy!

http://dairycarrie.com/2014/02/10/dear-wayne-pacelle/

-Alex

Commitment to Care

Photo: Andrew Meares

Today, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) released an “undercover video” attacking the practice and alleging cruelty at a sow production unit in Wyoming.

Livestock producers are committed to providing humane and compassionate care for their pigs at every stage of life. In fact it is one of the ethical principles to which U.S. pork producers adhere to.  The National Pork Producers Council provides best practices training and education as part of its Pork Quality Assurance Plus program which outlines firm animal well-being standards in addition to incorporating the industry’s ‘We Care’ responsible pork initiative.

This behavior upsets us when we hear about an isolated event such as this, has taken place. Simply put, it is extremely heart breaking that these individuals who are few and far between do not share the compassion and respect the remaining 99% of pork producers in the US provide. In fact it is downright appalling.

 If you have questions about how your food is raised and how animals are cared for please don’t hesitate to ask us. That’s our mission as Food For Thought members. We will provide consumers with answers about where their food comes, inform consumers, and confront myths about modern agriculture.

We fully support our nation’s producers who provide the up most care and compassion for their animals. However, individuals who are responsible for abuse and unethical treatment to animals must be held accountable for their actions.

Draft Day: Agriculture Picks Kids in the First Round.

If you think that the recent announcement by the United States Department of Labor to drop its proposed legislation aimed at severely limiting the activities of kids on farms and ranches is solely a major win for agriculture you're forgetting that if someone wins, someone also loses.

That loser is anti-agriculture. While not frontline proponents of these proposed rules, you can bet that they were licking their chops in hopes that the Obama administration would get them shoved through.  The reason they had their pom poms out and cheerleading skirts on is simple: whenever the gap between producers and consumers gets bigger, they score. It is pivotal for their team's survival to maintain a large gap between producers and consumers.  Had the rule gone through, farmers and ranchers would have lost a major player for telling the true story of agriculture, our youth. Getting hands on experience in day-to-day operations of farms and ranches is vital for teaching kids a myriad of life lessons including responsibility, hard work, and trust not just the tangible skills of driving a tractor or pulling a calf, all of which seem to be an endangered species in today's society.  Kids take these lessons and skills from the farm and share them with the rest of America.  Groups like the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) recognize the power of youth to influence the outcomes of both the present and the future and have developed programs the implement their ideologies for children and teachers alike.

However, if anti-Ag was looking for a close game, they were surely disappointed.  With a stellar performance from our star running backs like Senators Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts along with the hard work of many industry groups and individual farmers and ranchers, DOL dropped the rule and announced that is has no intention of pursuing it further during the Obama administration.  Instead they will focus on the development of educational programs to increase safety for kids in agriculture. Everyone that submitted comments, wrote letters, testified, or tweeted about the rule to increase awareness deserves a pat on the back was and integral part of chalking up another "W".

- DJ

State Senator Speaks Out!

Some people put it best, simply.

Nebraska State Senator Tyson Larson puts it best when he speaks out against the Humane Society of the United States. The HSUS plays on consumer misconception of their involvement in local humane society pet shelters to raise milions of dollars for the already large budget they operate on. What many consumers do not realize is that the HSUS shares less than 1% of it's annual budget with local pet shelters. Find out who runs the real show in your community and consider redirecting your donations to the right people.

Senator Larson tells it like it is in this article:
http://nebraskaradionetwork.com/2011/08/16/state-senator-calls-humane-society-of-us-dangerous/

Enjoy!

Tera Rooney

Clearing up Misconceptions

I really love clearing up misconceptions and as it turns out, there are a lot of misconceptions about some of agriculture's biggest opponents, especially HSUS. MOFarmersCare recently released this video entitled 'HSUS Revealed' that addresses some of the issues surrounding HSUS' financial and lobbyist agendas. I hope that you'll share these facts with your friends and family so that more people become aware of the misconceptions surrounding the big budget lobbyist group.

Until next time,
~ Buzzard ~

HSUS: a new perspective

The Humane Society of the United States is an organization that uses it's name and emotional commercials to tug at the heartstrings of millions to raise more money to fund lobbying efforts. Their goal? To abolish animal agriculture as a whole. They do not support the local animal shelters that actually do work in our communities to help stray cats and dogs find homes. I have several classmates who are very passionate about doing work in these shelters and see a growing number of veterinary students interested in shelter medicine. They need to be the ones benefiting from the opening of America's pocket books when the commercial with the sad puppy in it comes across the tube.

I could go on, but this article says it perfectly. I encourage you to read the Q&A with Jake Geis. He is a veterinary student and a very bright, passionate person who will make strides in the animal health and welfare field.

PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SEE HOW JAKE VIEWS THE HSUS!

I encourage you to leave your opinions in the comment section below. I'd love to hear your take on things and learn a bit more myself.

My best,

Tera Rooney

United We Stand, Divided We Fall

The phrase ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall’ has been used in historic situations by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. These famous leaders were talking about sticking together as one nation but I’m talking about helping out your fellow producers. There’s a lot of pushing going on right now - HSUS is pushing legislation in multiple states. In Ohio, to call for the state Livestock Care Standards Board to adopt minimum standards. In Vermont, a bill has been proposed which will require a humane society rep to be present during slaughter. Even in the U.S. House to set forth a mandate that any food purchased for federal programs comes from animals raised with enough room to stretch their limbs. Face it folks, things are just going to get tougher from here. However, it’s an easier pill to swallow if we face the uncertain future together.

Don’t get me wrong – good things are happening too. Idaho, Vermont, Kentucky and Missouri are in various stages of establishing Livestock Care Standards Boards. In Illinois, Rep. Jim Sacia is sponsoring a bill to repeal the state’s ban on commercial horse slaughter for human consumption and in Indiana, animal care legislation passed with very little uproar.

States across the nation are standing up for agriculture, regardless of specific agendas. This pattern needs to continue; cattle, poultry, pork and dairy producers need to unite and aid each other in the fight against radical animal activists. It’s a lot tougher to take down an entire industry than it is to attack one practice. Remember the theme song from The Wonder Years “I get by with a little help from my friends”? That’s exactly what we as agriculturalists need to do. Very similar to when members of the Central Washington softball team carried an injured Western Oregon player around the bases to finish her home run – when members of one sector get hurt, the other sectors need to pick them up, dust them off and carry them home.



Go Team Ag!
Until next time,
~Buzzard~

Insight from Italy

Ciao!

Yes, this is a blog from Italy! While visiting for a spring break tour of the food industry of the Tuscan Region, I have some thoughts that needed to be shared with my colleagues, producers and consumers in the US. I was seeing the markets in Florence and ran across a stand that was very similar to the HSUS and PETA campaigns in the United States. It instantly returned me to "Food for Thought" mode and inspired this blog. We also have two Californians on the trip with us and I believe the insight from this state(they do not have an apostrophe on Italian keyboards!) constituents, especially the few that vote for production agriculture, is very helpful in forming a front against activists of our industry.

Anyways, it leads me to an important topic that I plan on addressing as soon as I return to the states and that is changing things at Kansas State University. Specifically within the Animal Science Department, but it could be expanded to all majors that deal with the food industry in general. We need to have more opinion-provoking topics addressed in our lectures. Period. We need to have more lectures that involve teaching about very basics of our industry to help our students form their own opinions about what is going on today. Let me give you an example to help prove my point.

In a class that I will not name, that deals mostly with an industry I have little experience in, I point blank asked the professor how we defend the industry when looking at confinement type production practices versus looking at free-range type systems or pen housing. This was not unreasonable, I just needed background on what the industry can do to improve public perception. The professor answered matter-of-factly that he did not have a defense. I agree with not skewing lectures with opinions, but we are the minds that are being molded and Universities have to do their part. I need the opinions of my professors presented because I will take those and build my own. We need to tip on the edge of controversy so that students refuse to have no opinion on subjects that matter the most to our industry.

I apologize for the rant, but as the Italians might say - me scuzi! I just found that talking with a few of my fellow students coupled with running into an interesting anti-agriculture group in Italy, sparked a few ideas that we can improve on the "home front". What we as producers and future industry people can do to improve what the public perception is of our industry.

Bueno Notte,

Tera

Businesses Beware -Donating to HSUS Creates Backlash

I want to live in a world where companys wouldn’t dream of donating to H$U$ due to the backlash for the agriculture community….and I think we might be heading that direction.

Last month when [yellow tail] wine donated $100,000 to HSUS I read about it immediately in blog posts, on twitter, in Facebook updates and all over the agriculture media. You can even watch Advocates for Agriculture’s Troy Hadrick dump his last bottle of Yellow Tail out on YouTube. The catchy grassroots campaign slogan [yellow fail] started showing up everywhere.


[yellow tail] took notice and responded with a letter to the Animal Agriculture Alliance where the wine company pledged that any future animal welfare support would go to groups that provide hands-on care rather than lobbying organizations.

This morning Amanda Nolz posted on the BEEF Daily blog about Mary Kay being involved with an HSUS. People responded so quickly that by this afternoon Mary Kay made a statement on Facebook, correcting the record and clarifying that they were not affiliated with HSUS.

Keep a watchful eye out and soon getting in bed with HSUS will be nothing short of the kiss of death for businesses who rely on public support.

Behind the Blogger: Brandi Buzzard

Hey there, I’m Brandi Buzzard and I am a member of the Food For Thought blog squad. Like the other bloggers, I have been involved in agriculture my entire life. I’m a fourth generation agriculturalist - I grew up showing livestock, roping and helping my dad and Papaw with the cattle and horses. I’m a native Kansan, and am currently working on my Masters in Animal Science: Behavior and Welfare at Kansas State. After finishing my Masters, I plan to attend Colorado State and earn my PhD working with the great Dr. Temple Grandin (more on her in later posts). Eventually, after I am done with school, I want to be a welfare consultant to the livestock industry and plan to work bridging the gap between consumers and producers.

As agriculturalists, not only is it our duty to produce the nation’s food supply, we must also market and defend it too. While this is a testament to the determination of the agriculture industry, we must be mindful that we can always improve - we can always keep learning and we must always remember to listen to what the opposition has to say, occasionally they might have a good point to make.

Conversely, the opposition (HSUS, PETA, PCRA etc) takes advantage of the opportunities we give them – especially HSUS. The Humane Society of the United States is run by a group of smooth talking, well dressed philosophy, history and English majors - no one on their board of directors has any agricultural experience. They excel in dancing around direct questions and telling only one side of the story. In a recent article by Chuck Jolley, “Five Minutes With Wayne Pacelle & The HSUS Controversies”, Jolley interviews Pacelle – CEO of HSUS, about various accusations and sketchy issues surrounding HSUS, their budget and their supposed ‘involvement’ in local animal shelters. I encourage you to read this article as it gives insight to what Pacelle and the rest of HSUS are peddling to consumers. Through knowledge of HSUS’s strategies, we can prepare ourselves to proactively stand up for our industry. I look forward to blogging about various topics on the FFT blog - feel free to leave your comments.

Until next time,
~Buzzard~

Using Facebook to spread the word about HSUS

Seven out of ten Americans wrongly believe the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a pet-shelter "umbrella group," according to a recent survey. The survey that was commissioned by the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom and conducted by Opinion Research Corporation.

In my personal experience, social networking advocacy is a great way to clear up misconceptions like this. The Humane Society of the United States is an organization that – despite its misleading name – does not operate any animal shelters or spay and neuter clinics but does spend a considerable amount of its time and money lobbying against animal agriculture. From time to time, I utilize my personal Facebook page to share this with others. Below is a screen shot of an interaction where my friend Craig’s opinion of HSUS changed based on my Facebook advocacy. Craig is a law student specializing in administrative law with an interest in politics.

I had a similar interaction with my friend Tina, a Wichita nurse.

Aren't we still the good guys?

My name is Casey Bieroth and I’m an agriculturalist. I grew up in a very remote little corner of the mountains of Northern Nevada. My family homesteaded in this area over a century ago and we’ve been in the same general location ever since. These days I fancy myself as an agricultural economist—by self proclamation for now, but soon by decree of Kansas State University. I graduated with a bachelors degree in Agribusiness from K-State, and now I’m working on a Masters Degree in Ag Economics with a research emphasis in beef marketing.

Blame it on my economics background, but I come at the world with a very science based approach to problems. I’m a big believer in markets and incentives. Give somebody enough incentive and you can get them do just about anything…good or bad.

Take HSUS and PETA for example. They would have the general population believe that their incentive is to protect animals from abuse and mistreatment- a noble goal indeed. As more and more people are discovering, however, these organizations are huge lobbying efforts that are driven by profits and a personal vendetta against animal agriculture. Don’t believe me? Take a look at how the HSUS divvies out its $100,000,000 budget. And yes that is a one hundred million dollar budget. No typos. If that isn’t scary I don’t know what is.

Now on the flip side, where are the incentives for American farmers and ranchers? They have a great deal of incentive to work hard everyday taking care of their land and livestock. How much incentive do they have to defend their practices day in and day out against attacks from activists? Well not as much as you might think for a couple of reasons. First, as anyone who has been around a full-time agricultural enterprise knows, it’s hard work. I challenge you to show me a farmer or rancher with tons of free time. They just don’t exist. Caring for animals is a job that keeps you on your toes everyday. Contrary to popular belief, livestock eat, get sick, get lost, and are generally needy on Saturdays, Sundays, Easter, Christmas, and even during football season. I’m not discounting the need for a counter attack, I’m just pointing out that agriculturalists usually put out the hottest blazes first and that leaves very little time for proactive PR work. Secondly, there is a free rider problem when it comes to agriculture advocacy. Forgive the economics lesson, but the free rider problem occurs when people consume more than their fair share, or shoulder less than a fair share of the cost of producing a public good. In this case, the public good is ag advocacy and the free riders are agriculturalists who assume that someone else is addressing the problem. Everyone will benefit from increased advocacy, but the ones who have to actually pay to produce the good will benefit less than those who don’t pay anything at all. Ag advocacy is time consuming and as I have already pointed out, farmers and ranchers are already short on this resource. Therefore the “advocators” net benefit will be their share of the public good minus their expenditure (time) used to produce it.

So long story short, we are behind the 8 ball on this one. Inherently, the best agriculturalists are the ones least available to take on the HSUS, PETA, Western Watershed Project, and so on and so on. We will all need to step up our game and shoulder our fair share of the costs of agricultural advocacy. There are organizations out there that are good at pointing out our flaws, but to the majority of the world we ARE still the good guys. We need to work hard to keep it that way.