Washington National Cathedral

Deryl Davis: Our guest this morning is someone who has had a dramatic impact in relatively few years on the animal welfare movement. Wayne Pacelle is president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, America’s largest animal protection organization, with over ten million members.

He has worked on the passage of a number of bills and laws at state and federal levels to promote animal welfare, and he is also a very aggressive lobbyist in many ways for animal causes. We’ll get to that a bit later. He is also someone who hasn’t been afraid to court controversy, or rather to defend his point of view, when necessary. Wayne, thank you for being with us this morning.

Wayne Pacelle: Thank you, Deryl, and welcome to all of you.

Davis: Before we move on to the first question, I just want to remind you those of you watching with us online this morning and those here with us in the Cathedral, that we’ll be moving to a question-and-answer session in about thirty minutes. If you’re watching with us online we welcome you. Please send your questions to sundayforum@cathedral.org. And those of you who may be watching throughout the week, you can always download this Forum and others at nationalcathedral.org.

Well, we’re here this specific Sunday because the Humane Society has just launched a new campaign about religion and animals. And I want to ask you, Wayne, to tell us about that in just a minute, but first give us a kind of brief overview of the work of the Humane Society itself because, as I remember, growing up, I thought of the Humane Society as the people who ran the animal shelters. It’s a lot more than that.

Pacelle: It is. You know, I’m actually the first non-clergyman to run the organization since 1970, so we actually have a rich religious tradition. The organization was formed in the 1950s. It actually split off from another organization that had been founded not long after the Civil War had ended. And that was really the origin, institutionally, of the humane movement in the United States was just in that post-war period, 1866 to 1870. And the groups were constituted at that time to fight animal cruelty, and the horse was a big issue at that time.

When HSUS was created in the 1950s it was specifically created to be a complement to the local humane organizations that were working in our communities to fight pet overpopulation and to shelter animals and adopt animals out. There was a thought that, while those groups were doing fantastic, important work, there needed to be a group at the national level that would look at the national types of cruelty, such as puppy mills and dog fighting, inhumane slaughter, the use of animals in animal testing. And really, HSUS, the concept of the founders was a national organization to help the local groups, but to have its own capabilities to attack some of the big cruelties of the day. And for me now in 2008, that remains an important guiding principle, and I think the founders had it right. And that’s what I think of when I think of HSUS. A national and now international presence to take on the big-picture issues, to kind of look at the culture at large, try to reform corporate behavior, public policies, and to be a voice for animals.

Davis: Well, you’ve launched a department of religion and animals, and you now have a new campaign associated with that. What does religion have to do with animals, we might ask?

Pacelle: Well, our campaign is called All Creatures Great and Small, and we recognize—and the organization has long recognized—that all of the world’s major religious traditions speak to animal questions, and they speak well to them.

The principles of compassion and mercy and kindness are there in all of the world’s major traditions, and what we’re trying to do at HSUS is really to revivify these traditions and to have people put these principles that are there into action. So we’re not inventing anything at HSUS, we’re simply pointing to what exists in these traditions and saying, let’s think about how we live our daily lives, and let’s think about the other creatures who share this planet.

And I really think of this as part of a larger creation care perspective. That we have responsibilities to these animals precisely because we are powerful. Precisely because we are intelligent. We must exhibit an other-centered approach in our lives if we are religious people and we are really adhering to the principles of the major traditions. We cannot forget the animals, and I think in many respects they are a test of our basic character because there is such a disparity in power. We hold all of the cards in the relationship. We can do whatever we want to animals. Often times the law does not protect them, and it’s a test. Are we going to exercise restraint? Are we going to observe limits? Are we going to recognize that these animals have the same spark of life that we have, they have the same will to live that we have, they want to avoid suffering just as we want to avoid suffering? And it’s a sign of a merciful people to be good to these other creatures.

Davis: I know on your website you have an extensive list of different faith traditions—Christian, Roman Catholic, Protestant, other varieties, Islam, different traditions within Islam, and Judaism—and their statements about care for animals. But there is also some concern out there, particularly among conservative groups, that maybe an aggressive agenda towards animal welfare somewhere leads to equating animals and humans, and there is concern about that.

Pacelle: I think it really comes down to a question of definitions and style more than a fundamental difference on how animals should be treated. I think some people may not like the term “animal rights,” but I think everyone can accept the notion of human responsibility. And really, that’s the sort of ground that HSUS is most comfortable on, and that’s what we’re advocating for.

We’re not saying animals are equals, but we’re saying that they deserve our merciful treatment and they deserve kindness. And really, if you do look at all of the major religions of the world, they all speak to these questions. And if you look at the major leaders in churches throughout the United States, many of them have already spoken to the question of animals. And I think you would find very, very few people who would defend cruelty, and who would say that animals have no place in our kind of moral calculus.

And I think what the church generally does, it focuses away from ourself. You know, it’s not just about our own selfish interests. It’s about others. And what we’re doing is simply recognizing other members of the community. They may look different from us, they may not be able to speak, but they can suffer and they can feel, and why don’t we be good to them? I don’t really see the counter argument from many folks in our day.

Davis: I was surprised to learn in reading some materials about the animal welfare movement that people such as William Wilberforce, the 18th-century English abolitionist, was very much involved in an animal protection or animal welfare movement. So from a religious perspective, we’ve been involved for awhile, but I don’t know if as involved for that length of time as secular organizations have been.

Pacelle: Really the first group created in the western world for animals was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1820s in the United Kingdom, and its founders were religious men. They were clergymen. There was William Wilberforce, and Arthur Broome, so the tradition was right there right out the gate. It’s continued; as I mentioned, the two prior CEOs of the Humane Society in the United States, one was a Presbyterian minister, another was a Methodist minister, and we just have never seen any kind of separability between these questions. But we have now formalized it because more and more we recognize the importance of faith in American culture, and we recognize that we’ve got to make an affirmative argument. And we also want to organize people of faith and religious leaders who have passionate concerns about animals.

You know, animals are part of our culture. Two-thirds of American households have pets, eighty million Americans are wildlife watchers. We now have Animal Planet on television, we have a surge in publishing on animals. Animals are a part of the fabric of our culture and we want at HSUS to create programs and activities that allow people of conscience to plug into these programs, and we want to activate them.

Davis: So when you make a pitch to religious leaders, in specific, what’s your single focus to encourage them to be involved in this movement?

Pacelle: Well, again, we do point to traditions, but we also say that the principles of kindness and compassion and mercy are indivisible. You cannot just exhibit kindness to people and claim the mantle of kindness. It has to be a general sort of outlook toward all you deal with, including animals. And we also say that violence is the same way: that, if you are violent to animals, it’s very difficult to compartmentalize that violence.

We see this with people who perpetrate acts of animal cruelty that often start with animals, then they “graduate” to people. We see it with dog fighting and cockfighting. People who exhibit this malicious cruelty to animals, they’ve lost their empathic connect with others, and sometimes the animals are a stepping-stone to harm toward people.

So I guess our basic message, Deryl, is that it’s good for society. It’s good for a civil society. It’s good for an other-centered society to be kind to animals. But we’re really talking to religious leaders about the place of food in faith traditions, That food has a central place in many religious traditions—and, you know, where does that food come from? How does that food get to the table?

If food has such has such a central place, and we’re really tormenting animals in our modern industrialized agribusiness systems on factory farms, isn’t that a departure from God’s teaching? And this is not creation care, its not responsible behavior. Too often now, we now treat animals in agriculture as units of production and as things and as commodities. And if you have that mentality, then you can cram them into cages and crates on factory farms where the animals cannot even turn around, they can’t engage in natural behaviors, like laying hens for instance.

These… a lot of people don’t think of birds as the most charismatic species, but mother hens, they want to nest, they want to dust bathe, the want to perch, they cram them now six or eight into battery cage—a small wire cage—that gives each bird less living space then the size of an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, just 67 square inches is what each bird gets. That’s the living space for twelve or fifteen months of their lives. It was as if you and me and six or seven others were crammed into an elevator and we had to live in that elevator for a year and half. That is the life of these animals on these industrialized farms and we think it is just an appalling system in terms of animal welfare and it is just not consistent with creation care.

Davis: And I know that you connect this with…you connect human welfare with animal welfare particularly in this issue of factory farming. Tell us about how these two things interconnect.

Pacelle: Well we see this in all of our work at HSUS. You know, it’s just not an issue of animal cruelty. When you see animal cruelty, there are often other problems. And I mentioned with dog fighting, you know, if we come across a dog fighting ring, it’s very common to see folks involved in narcotics traffic, other forms of violence in their communities. And with modern industrialized agriculture, it’s just not healthy for the animals, and if you’re producing animals in an unhealthy state, it’s logical that there are going to be other unhealthy consequences.

So we know about the manure issues and the waste issues when you aggregate thousands of animals on industrial farms or sometimes tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. I went to an egg factory farm recently with 750,000 birds, and that’s not a particularly big operation in this modern age of industrial agriculture. All of the waste that is produced goes into manure pits and into lagoons. That seeps into the ground. It pollutes water, it putrefies the air. We talked to people in these communities who can’t go outside of their homes because it smells so bad and the community has been fouled in terms of the air and water, their property values go down. There are also food safety issues.

When animals are overcrowded, when they are stressed, they are not going to be as healthy, they are more susceptible to shedding salmonella or having other pathogens in them that can be passed on to people, because most disease that afflict animals, you know, can jump to people.

Davis: And we know we are getting a lot of antibiotics through the meat that we eat.

Pacelle: Seventy percent of all antibiotics administered in this country are given to animals, and a huge portion of them are given to animals for non-therapeutic reasons on factory farms, because the factory farms are so inherently problematic and overcrowded it’s a situation that is a perfect sort of incubator for disease. And they are given the antibiotics in their feed and in their water to prevent the onset of disease, because the environment is so unhealthy.

And what happens is, you have antibiotic-resistant bacteria that develop in these systems, and it’s making our own antibiotics—when we need them as people to fight problems in the human health circumstance—much more difficult. That’s why you have the American Medical Association, the leading public health agencies in the country saying lets stop this madness and stop giving antibiotics in low doses to animals on factory farms, and then we take it a step further and say why do we have these factory farms?

Let’s get back to what the traditions were in agriculture and have a more humane scale for agriculture. Let’s think about our food choices and how we are contributing to the problem by supporting these factory farms. You know, we raise ten billion—that’s billion with a b—animals for food, ten billion animals for food every year in the United States, and the vast majority of them, the preponderance of them are raised on industrial factory farms, veal calves in crates where they can’t turn around, breeding sows in two- by seven-foot cages, the hens in battery cages. This is just not acceptable for a Christian, for a Muslim, for a Jew who has a view that we have responsibilities to other creatures.

Davis: But is part of the problem that we have to have factory farms now to produce the kind of meats or poultry or whatever, that a larger number of people are now eating and eating more of, and this is just simply a way of meeting consumer demand?

Pacelle: Well, certainly that’s the argument that is advanced, that with this level of population, you have to have these efficiencies. I just think that we can do better as a society. I mean certainly there are improvements that can be made and that are being made in terms of getting animals out of battery cages or gestation crates. Even some of the major producing companies are saying, okay, this has gone too far. And now you have many retailers, like Burger King even is starting to phase in cage-free eggs, and so is Safeway.

And Wolfgang Puck, a restaurateur, will not take any veal from farms that crate the animals, no pork from operations that cage the breeding sows, and no eggs from battery cage operations. So we’re seeing a change.

I think we can do better. I also do think that we’ve got to think about our food choices. I mean whether or not we can eat this amount of meat and other animal products, we do have to question whether that’s sustainable. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization came out with a study last year called Livestock’s Long Shadow. It said that eighteen percent of all greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock agriculture. That is actually larger in the aggregate than all transportation throughout the world together.

A long time ago, Frances Moore Lappé called animals protein factories in reverse, because we feed them grains and the inefficiently convert that grain into animal flesh and other animal products and there are tremendous energy inputs into this process. And then of course the cows and the other animals produce a lot of waste that also contributes to greenhouse gas emission. So I think that one thing in the many religious traditions that urge us to eat, you know, not eat meat on Fridays or Wednesdays, or not eat meat for quite a period of time, those are things that we can do in our daily lives, and we can extend it beyond these very specific religious traditions and think about eating less meat, and think about integrating more vegetarian foods into our diet. It will be better for animals, it will better for the environment, it’s better for your own personal health, and I think that in that sense we can all contribute to solving this problem.

Davis: Well, if one looks at this problem and says, well, this is not only affecting me and my loved ones, family and friends on a personal level, it’s on a societal and global level with the environmental impact of this kind of factory farming. Does one then have to say, well, the logical outcome of this is we all have to become vegetarian? And there you are, it’s an all-or-nothing.

Pacelle: Well, you know, I’ve been a pretty strict vegetarian for quite a while, for 24 years, and I’m still around. And there are lots of us around who I think can demonstrate that it is a good healthful lifestyle. But we at the Humane Society of the United States are a big tent organization, and we embrace any tender act or any act of kindness. So if someone wants to spay or neuter their animals so they can help us fight pet overpopulation, we embrace them and we tell them in a loving way that we really are grateful to them. If they want to buy products not tested on animals in the marketplace, there are lots of cosmetics and household products that specifically are marketed as saying “not tested on animals,” we embrace that. If people want to reduce their consumption of animal products in their diet by ten percent, we think that’s fantastic.

We want people to take action for animals. We want people to become educated about how animals are being treated. And I think the larger layover here, Deryl, is that we have moved…

We are in a moment in society when we are really full of contradictions when it comes to animals. We love animals as individuals. We have, you know, the pet products industry is a $45-billion dollar industry. We love wildlife and we watch wildlife. And yet, at this moment in time, we have some the most severe exploitation of animals that has ever occurred in human history. That’s human-caused cruelty. And I think one force or the other has to prevail, and I think the Humane Society is working to have this sentiment really continue to percolate the popular culture and then to animate corporate behavior and to infuse public policy that animals matter and that we have responsibilities to these creatures.

And we do not have an orthodox set of views. We don’t say, okay, you have to be a vegan or vegetarian, or you have to, you know, not wear leather to be part of the Humane Society of the U.S. That’s not our view, it will never be our view. But we really do want people to think about all of their behaviors and how they affect animals, and we want to say that each person can be part of solving these problems, whether adopting an animal from a shelter, or buying products not tested on animals, or eating lower on the food chain, or eating humanely produced products. So many different ways that people can act to help other creatures.

Davis: Tell us what you are asking people to do this next month in October for your new All Creatures Great and Small campaign.

Pacelle: Well, we are asking people to think about one food item as a start, and that is eggs. A lot of us think, well, you know, we see the images in books, especially our children’s books, about happy hens producing eggs. We also see advertising, say with dairy, about happy cows in California.

Those images are often very far off from what the reality is for these animals. And one option that we have in the marketplace now—any major retailer, whether it’s a Safeway or a Kroger’s or an Albertson’s or a Whole Foods, they have options for us with respect to eggs. You can buy cage-free eggs as a merciful, humane act that limits the negative consequences for animals. So we’re hoping that in October people really think about their few choices with respect to eggs and just buy cage-free. And we’ve had thousands of people sign up through our website to make the cage-free pledge for October.

We hope it extends from there to a larger sort of consciousness about how animals are treated, and you know, so many people are thinking about this. Oprah’s latest magazine, Oprah says what we do to animals in agriculture is beneath our humanity, and so many other people are speaking out about these issues. Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. There is so much literature, there is so much thinking and writing and art about these issues, that we want to just be a catalyst for this process.

Davis: I know we can move into the presidential campaign with this question, but instead, let’s look at the big issue of “animal rights” or animal welfare. I know you use the term animal welfare; and animal rights is sometimes a very loaded term. And I know some people think of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who would like to say, well, we shouldn’t differentiate in terms of rights based upon species and the Spanish parliament, I think this summer, has started working on a bill to grant rights to apes. There’s a lot of tension around this.

Pacelle: I think really you have to look at it historically. And when that term emerged, and Peter Singer wrote his book in the early 1970s, it was really at the height of kind of the women’s rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment that was being discussed. it was also… as we were really in the throes of having dealt with the civil rights issues of the 1960s. And so I think it was really choosing terminology that was very kind of “of the day:” Civil rights, women’s rights, so the talk was animal rights. And what the Humane Society of United States talks about is animal protection and animal welfare. And, while we don’t necessarily reject all of the thinking that everyone who talks about animal rights advances, we think that this is much safer ground. And it leaves some of the baggage aside and really as I was saying at the beginning of our conversation, it’s really more about us.

It’s about human responsibility. It’s more about human behavior than it is about animal behavior. All you have to have in terms of an understanding of animals is the common-sense understanding: of course they suffer, of course they feel pain, they feel sadness, they feel loneliness, they can feel joy and happiness. They have many of the same emotions that we have. And I know a lot of people throughout time have tried to say, well, animals are just things or automata, but we know, as thinking, conscious people, that they are so much more than that.

And I don’t think we have to prove that they are equals. All we have to prove is that they suffer, and they feel, and that should be enough for us to take the right action.

Davis: So it’s a moral burden upon us, and it’s really focused on our moral actions and what it means as us, and I guess in the context of faith, as people of faith, what are our actions like towards other beings?

Pacelle: Absolutely. I think as individuals, if we are people of faith and we honor the teachings of whatever church we follow, this logically flows from that. Frankly, if you look at the larger culture as well, and if we look at the laws that are made by state lawmakers, federal lawmakers, we have anti-cruelty statutes in this country that already make it a criminal act to maliciously harm animals. And there is a moral component to that as well. I mean the law speaks to the moral question.

Really, what we are asking folks to do is to logically apply these anti-cruelty standards to institutionalize settings like puppy mills or factory farms or animal testing labs or other settings where we know we can do better. It’s not a question of us having to sacrifice a great deal. It’s just a new pathway. And innovation and technology show us a new way and, you know, we’re a nation, this nation put a man on the moon forty years ago. We can find other ways to live with animals without causing them cruelty and abuse. And I just think that it is a mark of our character, it is part of our imagination.

I think some of our opponents have a very static view of history. They think, well, we have done it this way, we’ve had cockfighting. Well, because it went on for two hundred years or two thousand years, we should continue. Because factory farms have developed, they think, well, that’s the way it’s going to be. Well, I really reject that static view of history. I think that the watchword of the American people has always been innovation and change and doing things better. And I think that part of our inducement to do better has been our moral compass. And now we are recognizing that these other creatures deserve our consideration and our mercy.

Davis: Let’s talk for just a minute about animal use in medical research and animals used in medical testing. What’s the Humane Society’s stance on that?

Pacelle: Well, we really do agree with most researchers. And I think if you really talk to researchers, any one of them would recognize that using animals in research comes with moral costs. If we can do something in a different way, then we should. If we can use non-animal models on research, and to advance research, that we absolutely should. So we want to kind of embrace that sentiment.

And our approach at the Humane Society is the three Rs, and it’s a pragmatic and sort of reformist approach recognizing that it’s not going to stop overnight. And our approach is to refine—the first R is refine. To refine techniques, to eliminate any pain and distress that the animals endure. Rather than have conscious animals subjected to painful experiments, you do it in a way where they’re caused no pain and distress. Second, you reduce the number of animals in a protocol. If a protocol calls for the use of twenty animals and you can use ten or five, there’s a moral imperative to do so. And finally, is replace. That we’re developing, as we innovate and as we learn more, non-animal testing methods that can replace what many regard as outmoded and outdated animal testing practices, animal research practices.

So our three-R approach—and, frankly, that’s the same approach as on consumption of animals for food: that we want to refine techniques to minimize pain and distress so that would be stopping the cages and crates or the mutilations of animals on factory farms, reducing the number of animals the average American eats, 32 animals a year. So if you reduce that to 25 or twenty or ten, that saves a lot of animal lives. And third is to replace animal foods with plant-based foods, because there are abundant options for us in this day and age that are healthier for us. So any mix of those we think is acceptable, and that’s where we want to push people, and I think that’s our philosophy on the animal research and testing question as well.

Davis: If my understanding is correct, we do use ever more animal organs in terms of organ transplants, and I don’t know how this affects what you’re saying.

Pacelle: Well, in terms of transplants, I mean a lot of the transplants are human-to-human transplants, and I think that technology and innovation are just going to give us different pathways. You know in medical schools, dog lab was used for surgical training. Now almost all of the schools have abandoned that in favor of other non-animal-based methods, and we’re just seeing that. When I started as undergraduate as an animal advocate at Yale, there were very few companies that did not test on animals. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of companies that market products for us, daily products that we use in our lives, that are not tested on animals. And companies have a broader commitment: we don’t do any animal testing. So I think that technology and innovation is going to solve this, but it needs a moral push. There needs to be a view that, hey, this is a moral problem, to subject these helpless, innocent creatures to distress for our own purposes.

Davis: Tell us in terms of where you see the movement going. I know that right after our conversation this morning you’re headed to a plane to go to California, where I understand there is an important proposition regarding animal welfare on the ballot for November 4th. What’s happening there, and where do you see the whole animal welfare movement in terms of, at the same time saying, it seems that we’re mistreating more animals than ever before?

Pacelle: Right, well, I’m going to California later today to work on Proposition 2. It’s a citizen ballot initiative: 800,000 citizens signed petitions to put a measure before the voters on Nov. 4 to advance a very simple set of principles. That certain animals raised for food—veal calves, breeding pigs, and laying hens—should be allowed to stand out, lie down, turn around, and extend their limbs. And the practical effect of that is to stop the confinement of animals in these tiny cages and crates that don’t allow them to move or engage in any natural behaviors. So we’re urging a yes vote on Proposition 2 in just about 35 days. I think that is a good example of where things are going with animal welfare: incremental progress to minimize the suffering that animals endure, often through the law.

This year we’ve passed 85 new laws for animals in the states. We’ve passed measures in Congress to make all animal fighting a federal felony in the wake of the Michael Vic case. Many of these high-profile cases have focused the American public’s attention on animal issues. Whether it was Katrina and the massive effort to rescue the pets, and the inseparability of the human rescue from the animal rescue. We saw many people who stayed behind in Louisiana three years ago when rescuers from the Coast Guard or the Navy had no direction on what to do with the animals. They offered to rescue the people, but people live with animals, because two-thirds of American households have pets. Many people would not leave and protect themselves from a situation of distress if their animals were not taken along. So we recognize that. And it was, I think, a watershed moment in the humane movement in terms of the public recognizing that there is an inseparability between the animal circumstance and the human circumstance.

I think the Michael Vic case showed people that dog fighting is widespread, and there is still a sentiment out there of the total disdain and disregard for animals. And I think the public outrage over that case reflected the emerging sensibility that we do, as a society, care for animals. I also think that an investigation that we did at a slaughter plant in Southern California was very important this year.

We sent an undercover investigator to a slaughter plant in Southern California, Encino, and this was one of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s top slaughter plants that was supplying the national school lunch program. It was the number two supplier of the school lunch program, and they were getting sick and ailing spent dairy cows. So dairy cows are really worked very hard for their milk, and when they are done, when they are no longer commercially valuable, then they are sent to slaughter and turned into a low-grade ground beef product.

And these animals were so beleaguered from being milked so much that many of them could not walk. And the plant managers and personnel were tormenting downer cows. The industry has a term for them—downers are animals that are too sick or injured to walk and they were using hotshots in their genital area or their eye, they were hitting them with forklifts. There were even putting high-pressure water hoses into their mouth to simulate a drowning effect, to cause these animals so much distress that they would get up on their own and walk into the slaughter area to be slaughtered. And the public saw these images from the Humane Society investigation and even though these animals were literally just minutes away from being slaughtered, the public was outraged, because if animals are going to be killed for food, they should not be subject to this torment and cruelty. And I think it validated the principle to me, and I think to all of us at HSUS, that the public is concerned about farm animals. All of our polling shows this. All creatures deserve humane treatment, even animals raised for food.

Davis: We’re going to go to questions in just a minute. And I will ask our two microphone volunteers if they would go ahead and take their position in the central aisle, and if you have a question for us this morning, if you would line up behind one of the microphones. And as always, I do remind you, please do limit your remarks to one question and a short question. That way we can entertain as many as possible this morning. For those of you watching online, you can send your questions to sundayforum@cathedral.org. But I’ve got one last question. This is an easy one. What practical steps can we take, should we be taking, in our daily lives, in our food choices, how we shop, other things that we do, to be more conscious of animal welfare?

Pacelle: Well, I think it’s really important to get information. You know, you can have the idea that you’ve got to match your ideas and your ethics with what’s happening. So I think going to our website, for instance, is a great resource, humanesociety.org, and then actually, if you want to get information on religion, just [add] /religion. It’s humanesociety.org/religion and beyond that I think that, you know, thinking about our food choices, eating lower on the food chain if you’re eating animal products, thinking about animal products that don’t come from factory farms, whether it’s cage free eggs or crate-free pork or crate-free veal, certain products like foie gras, which is basically a diseased duck or goose liver that is induced by dramatically overfeeding the animals to balloon the size of their liver and induce a diseased state should be avoided at all costs.

I think buying products in the marketplace not tested on animals, staying away from fur because we have, fur for wearing, keep furry animals nearby, that’s okay… But you know we have synthetic and natural fiber alternatives for our clothing, so we don’t need to do that. Think about exotic leathers. There are a lot of exotic leathers that people wear that come from animals. The wildlife trade, the killing of wild animals for commerce is, if you can believe it, is a ten billion dollar industry. It’s just an enormous industry. So think of our choices and then becoming an activist or advocate for animals and telling other people about these issues and educating them, offering humane education tools for schools. We’ve got a great program called Humane Society Youth. We’re involved in the schools. And spaying and neutering your animals, giving them vet care, doing as much as you can on a personal level.

Davis: Thank you, Wayne. Let’s go to questions now.

Q: Hi. You’ve strengthened my concerns for pet ownership, cockfighting, and football all being generally cruel, almost banning everything. You haven’t spoken much about non-anthropomorphic animals. And I’m wondering if historically the movement has taken its inspiration from Darwin’s book on emotional processes, I think the title’s Emotional Processes in Animals and Humans. Second, what percentage of Humane Society employees are vegetarian, and third, Seventh-day Adventists for example are vegetarian and they live ten years longer than Americans [sic]. I haven’t heard the argument that vegetarianism is tremendously healthy for humans.

Pacelle: Well, I do think we certainly do point to a lot of the literature out there that speaks to the emotional lives of animals. Jeffrey Mason’s book When Elephants Weep and many other titles are out there that really speak to the richness of these animals’ lives and how we really can’t just kind of cordon them off, or box them up, say they just operate by instinct. There’s a lot more to it than that. And your, the question was, I believe, about vegetarianism…

Q: What percentage…

Pacelle: Oh, yeah right. The… you know, I would say that we’re probably a higher percentage vegetarians and vegans at the Humane Society than the population at large, but we’re not exclusively so, nor is our Board of Directors. And I think that really reflects kind of our mainstream approach to issues, that we’re not demanding an orthodoxy. We’re inviting to all, and we recognize that people are on a different pathway sometimes, and they may take a little longer to get there. I know that I was very conscious of animals from the age of three or four, and it took me until I was 19 to go vegetarian and vegan, so we’re not judgmental about this. Any little merciful act, we think, is great.

Davis: Let’s go to microphone two please.

Q: Hi. Thank you so much for the work that you do. It really has been life changing for me in the last year, with the Michael Vic case and Encino slaughter plant investigation, so thank you. I’m a yoga teacher here in D.C. and I was wondering if your new campaign is focused solely on organized religious settings, or if there is any plan or intention to reach out to folks who, for example, in the yoga community, where there is a strong tradition of compassion, what we call Ahimsa, to reach out to studios and other organizations that are practicing yogis.

Pacelle: Yes, well, thank you for that question. And you know, really, we at the Humane Society of the U.S. are ecumenical in the broadest sense. I mean we really do want to talk to all people, and I would say that our religion analyst program probably is not focused on that particular community, but the rest of the work of HSUS—in fact, a member of our national council is a yoga teacher, owns studios all across country—so we’ve been doing outreach at facilities where yoga is taught, and it’s been a great, receptive community, so we will continue that for sure.

Q: Hi. I have two questions for you. This slaughterhouse problem that was discovered in California through your people, I believe. Aren’t there laws for inspection of slaughterhouses? Are they not being followed? That’s my first question. And second, the waste from cows, I’ve read recently, can be used for energy, it can be a resource for energy, renewable energy, and some farmers are now getting machinery that will help them get involved?

Pacelle: Well there are some laws, and actually HSUS was instrumental in passing the humane methods of slaughter act in 1958, and it was upgraded in 1978, and it stipulates that mammals need to be rendered insensible to pain prior to being killed. So they are stunned before their throats are cut or otherwise killed. Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which enforces that law, has interpreted the law to exclude birds, who represent 95 percent of all animals killed for food. Of the ten billion animals killed for food, 9.5 billion are birds, so they’re completely unprotected in the law in terms of the humane methods of slaughter act.

The problem with the Encino plant was, there were five USDA inspectors there, and they missed what our one undercover investigator found day after day. So there are problems in implementation, and we’ve been working with the Congress to get more funding for humane slaughter programs, to have better training, and to have better protocols, so some of the inspectors don’t get kind of inured to the cruelty that they’re seeing and kind of desensitized to it. So it’s an ongoing process.

In terms of the energy issues from the waste, it’s been a discussion. I don’t think that’s a panacea, because I just don’t think that factory farms are healthy for us in general, and I don’t see that as a particularly valuable pathway for energy. I think that each of us has to be a more conscientious consumer and not contribute more toward greenhouse gas emissions. And one of the best things you can do is think about your food choices because, as I mentioned, nearly one-fifth of all the greenhouse gases come from livestock agriculture.

Davis: Back to microphone two.

Q: I think, if my memory serves me correctly, I think it was Gandhi who said that you can judge a society by how it treats its animals. That being said, I’m curious as to how the Humane Society feels about its “sister” organization PETA and every thing that they do?

Pacelle: Well, we really do have an amazing circumstance in this country now. There are ten thousand animal protection groups, most of them are local organizations, Humane Societies, rescue groups, wildlife rehabilitation centers, then there are a more limited number of animal protection groups of the national level, and I would certainly submit that two of the groups with the biggest impact are HSUS and PETA. PETA has taken a different place, I think, in the spectrum, or occupies different territory in the spectrum. And I think they knowingly engage in more provocative actions to put issues on the radar screen. Obviously, if that were our approach, we’d be doing some of those things that they’re doing. I think we recognize them as an organization committed to many of the same principles, but we just choose a different strategic direction.

Davis: Another question, please, from mike one.

Q: Okay. I first of all want to tell you that I’m just completely on board with your program. I’ve written about this issue and studied it. My question is it that, as I have examined the Christian and religious animal rights movement, there are very little opportunities for concrete engagement in the movement, and my question is, with your new religious and animal initiative, are their internships, volunteerships, job opportunities, or the like?

Pacelle: Well, thank you very much, and one of the driving concepts at HSUS, you know, that comes out of my office, is engagement. That if we don’t engage folks like you and other people of conscience, then we’re failing, and we’ve got to do that. So last night here at the Washington national Cathedral we premiered a new film called Eating Mercifully, a 26-minute film about food and faith, and we will make that available to anyone to show it in your community or your congregation or in any setting. And we have a website, so I would encourage you to go, again, to humanesociety.org/religion, email us, and we’ll find ways to get you involved. Thank you so much.

Davis: Thank you. Another question please.

Q: Hi. My question is the model of the agribusiness, the basic model of it is cruelty to animals, wildlife penning and so many of these things that are going on that are like new businesses that are licensed by state and local, how are they escaping the basic animal cruelty laws that each state already has in existence?

Pacelle: Well, some of the states have weakened their anti-cruelty statutes. They’ve strengthened them in certain respects, because now 45 states have felony-level penalties for certain acts of animal cruelty. Yet they’re also, at the same time there have been some holes punched. And one of the holes that’s been punched in the anti-cruelty statutes is an exemption for routine or accepted animal production practices. So that would be the battery cages or the veal crates, at least that’s how they’ve strategically designed, whether the courts will agree with them is another matter

And I think really in those cases of the canned hunts or the wildlife penning or these production systems, you have powerful lobby groups that want to protect these activities, and they organize themselves politically to defend these actions. And really, this where HSUS comes in, because we are not afraid to take those folks on and we are confronting institutionalized cruelty. We are really working to shut down these canned hunting operations.

Canned hunts, for those of you who aren’t familiar, are fenced enclosures where animals are released just to be shot for a trophy and a guaranteed kill exercise. There are about five hundred to seven hundred of these operations in Texas alone, but they’re scattered around the country and there are so many problems that we face.

There are ten thousand puppy mills in the country as well. And while some people may be charged with cruelty if the animal’s condition is horrible, we just raided a puppy mill this week in Canada in Quebec where there were 110 animals knocking on death’s door and we rescued all of them. And they will be charged with cruelty, but if it’s not severe, then this institutionalized abuse in the form of puppy mills can persist. And that’s what we’re trying to change, because the law is organic, and we’re attempting to build new protections in for animals in an incremental process.

Davis: I think we’ve got time for one ten-second question and about a thirty-second answer.

Q: I work with Small Angels Rescue rescuing, actually the guinea pig coordinator for the rescue, I wondered if the HSUS has any plans to address the problem of the oversupply of small animals through the pet stores? Because we’re absolutely swamped at the moment as a result of the foreclosure crisis, and our adoptions are down, and yet the pet stores are continuing to churn out small animals and selling them to the public. Thank you.

Pacelle: Thank you very much. That’s a very important question and, you know, we celebrate the bond between people and animals and encourage pet keeping, but of domesticated animals. We don’t encourage wild animals as pets, and we really strongly discourage any