Author Archives: HWI_Admin

Martosko’s downward spiral

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In July of 2010, David Martosko made the following statement on the HumaneWatch blog:
Instead of seeing my name plastered on everything, you’ll soon be reading articles contributed by various members of the HumaneWatch team. There will even be some outsiders sharing their own analysis.

Some time thereafter, Martosko’s personal biography disappeared from the HumaneWatch site.

Martosko has a substantial ego, and has always enjoyed the limelight, so his sudden withdrawal aroused our suspicions. We now know the reason for his announced departure.

On July 8th, 2010, David Martosko was arrested for yet another alcohol-related incident. He was taken into custody and charged with Class 3 and Class 4 Misdemeanor offenses: trespassing on school/church grounds at night, public swearing, and intoxication. This is Martosko’s 18th run-in with the law that we are aware of.

Martosko was previously arrested in 2008 for a number of violations, including driving while intoxicated, refusing a breathalyzer test, and drinking *while* operating a vehicle. That’s especially shocking conduct when you consider that the Center for Consumer Freedom — HumaneWatch’s parent organization — aggressively attacks Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and protests blood alcohol limits and sobriety checkpoints.

Following his newest arrest in July, Martosko has denied his erratic behavior at the Nebraska town hall meeting. He remains evasive about the events of that night, accusing eyewitnesses of “spinning tall tales”, but declining to refute any of the specific allegations made against him.

Martosko was barred from the town hall meeting in Nebraska due to his belligerence and odd behavior, which culminated in his confronting the meeting’s host, Kevin Fulton, with a recording device at a men’s room urinal. Martosko’s report on the incident only mentioned that Kevin was “reached for comment”, but unsurprisingly did not provide much detail on the location or circumstances of the attempted interview.

At the time, Martosko’s behavior seemed inexplicably bizarre. In light of his arrest on an earlier night for loitering at a church/school while drunk, belligerent, and obscene, his behavior in Nebraska makes a lot more sense.

David Martosko was granted a continuance until May 10th, 2011. We’ll let you know the outcome of that hearing and sentencing as soon as the information is available, and its impact on the HumaneWatch smear campaign.

Despite our differences with Mr. Martosko, we sincerely hope that he will find the strength to confront his addictions in the coming New Year.

Update: January 3, 2011
General VA Court Case information is now available for the trespassing charge and public intoxication/swearing.

Update: January 10, 2011
A FOIA request for the details of the incident was denied due to the criminal investigation underway against Martosko.

This correspondence is in response to your email received by the Internal Affairs Bureau of the Fairfax County Police Department in which you requested a copy of the police report and warrant associated with Mr. David Martosko’s arrest. I have determined that it is not releasable under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The complete police report is considered to be criminal investigation information or material. As such, it is exempted from disclosure under Section 2.2-3706 (F) (1) ofthe Code of Virginia. If I can be of further assistance please do not hesitate to contact me. Sincerely Timothy W. Field Second Lieutenant Internal Affairs Bureau 4100 Chain Bridge Road Fairfax, VA 22030 703-246-2980 FCPDFOIA@fairfaxcounty.gov

We’ll try again later this year, after Martosko’s hearing and sentencing.

HumaneWatch brings out the worst

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Wednesday, December 15, 2010, was a banner day for HumaneWatch, or so David Martosko thought.  For this was the day that Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, said that maybe, possibly, if he continues to go above and beyond all the requirements of his probation, Michael Vick might someday be able to own a dog. Judging from the reaction, you would think Wayne had endorsed Vick going back to dog fighting.  But the fact is, Vick sought out the HSUS to assist him in speaking to groups of inner city school children to tell them that dog fighting is wrong.  And who are these kids more likely to believe — an Ivy League-educated leader of an animal welfare organization, or a famous athlete with a multimillion-dollar contract whose image they likely have on their bedroom walls? You might also think that Vick had given money to Wayne to line his pockets.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  What happened was the Philadelphia Eagles donated money for several animal advocacy programs, including $50,000 for the HSUS to start an End Dogfighting Program in Philadelphia, $50,000 for the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society to build a spay-neuter clinic, and $50,000 for the Berks County Humane Society to fund a mobile veterinary clinic.  Those all sound like pretty good causes to me. For the record, I disagree with Wayne and believe that Michael Vick should never be able to own a dog.  But the court order preventing him from owning a pet expires in two years, and Wayne truly believes that people who abuse animals can be rehabilitated.  If they can’t, why bother having treatment programs such as AniCare, which many animal abusers are ordered to complete? However, none of this has stopped David Martosko of HumaneWatch from trying to make the most of Wayne’s unpopular opinion.  On Sunday, HumaneWatch took out a full page ad on the Vick situation in The New York Times.  Since then, Martosko has posted about Vick on the HumaneWatch Facebook page no less than 24 times, garnering almost 3,000 comments.  The posts are passionate, strongly opinionated, and almost universally blasting Vick and the HSUS. Unfortunately, many of the comments are also quite violent, something Martosko seems to revel in and encourage in order to whip up rage against Vick and the HSUS to as high a fever pitch as possible.  Let’s take a look at a sampling: From Sunday, December 19 PsychicGirl Devine Natura was quite busy making threats about Vick.  Check out these gems:

Effie Natsis wanted to run Vick over, if not one way, then another:

Other commenters wished additional bad things to befall Vick:

Most disturbing, Liz Willnow threatened Vick’s 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children:

From Monday, December 20 Kira Baulesh spilled her venom against Vick first in regular case letters and then in all caps in case we didn’t get it the first time: From Tuesday, December 21 Ashley Nelson wanted mob-style justice: Jennifer Parmer crossed the line into blatant racism, calling for Vick to be lynched: As you can see from these posts, some sick people hang out at HumaneWatch.  But even worse is the sickness of David Martosko in encouraging comments like these.  The fact that these comments have stretched through a period of days demonstrates a pattern of conduct on the HumaneWatch Facebook page.  In addition, though some of these comments have been taken down, many are still up, and even those that were eventually taken down remained up for hours if not days. What’s even more hypocritical is the fact that many regular commenters on the HumaneWatch Facebook page are animal abusers themselves – people like Katie Dokken, Trish Bragg, Lori Barva Rogers, Barbara Hoffman, and most recently Jennifer Hobbs Butler.  Yet Martosko never bans these people, and their fellow HumaneWatchers applaud their presence and excuse their offenses. So whose side are you on, Martosko?  Either you are against animal abuse or you are not.  If you are against abuse, I challenge you to ban each and every animal abuser from your page and publicly tell us why.  The fact that you don’t speaks volumes about your true agenda.

Whitewash weekend

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When an industry front group pretending to be a charity bashes legitimate animal welfare charities, I get annoyed. When they try to use shelters as pawns in their smear campaign, I get furious. Supporting shelters is admirable, and absolutely necessary to facilities strained to the breaking point. I donate to my local shelters year-round. But HumaneWatch has managed to pervert that selfless act into a wholly selfish publicity stunt, which they’ve named “Shelter Supply Saturday”. We call it “Whitewash Weekend”. For the better part of a year, HumaneWatchers have been spitting on shelters and shelter personnel, while they fight spay/neuter laws, deny overpopulation, accuse shelters of profiting from their work, defend substandard breeders and animal brokers like Hunte Corp., and rail against any legislation that would ease the flood of abandoned and neglected animals into our nation’s shelters. Now HumaneWatch is attempting to whitewash that abuse by encouraging their members to send supplies to shelters — wrapped in HumaneWatch propaganda, of course. It will take a lot more than a dishonest greeting card to cover up HumaneWatch’s anti-animal agenda. Shall we take a look at the scoreboard?
Humane Society of the USHumaneWatch
  • A scheme to boost traffic for their website by offering a $100 donation for a winning comment. ($1700 total)
  • A scheme to convince supporters to donate shelter supplies, and give the credit to HumaneWatch.
Like HumaneWatch’s short-lived attempt to buy comments on its largely ignored website, this stunt will be forgotten in a month… but shelters will continue to struggle year-round. Meanwhile HumaneWatchers will resume their attacks on shelters and staff with comments like these:
You do realize that there is no real pet overpopulation, right? We have a mismanaged shelter system that imports animals from overseas to fill some shelters, rather than ship animals from one part of the country to another–among other problems. — Kim Egan, HumaneWatch Facebook group, July 17, 2010
There are scandals every day about how shelters HAVE room and kill animals because they are just too plain lazy to clean up after them. Or they kill them because they hired a sadist who enjoys it, or they kill them because it’s ‘easier’ than making good faith efforts to adopt them out. — Katie Dokken, convicted animal abuser, “Shelter Supply Saturday” Facebook event, Dec. 3, 2010
I have seen more deplorable conditions in shelters than I have EVER seen at a breeders! — Erica Eblin, HumaneWatch Facebook group, Nov. 10, 2010
Oh, but the shelter workers won’t blame the BS law; they’ll blame the big, bad breeders for having so many dogs and having to unload them or be shut down. They’ll make up stories of “rescuing” these poor dogs from near death in horrible conditions and slap excessive “adoption” fees on them, all the while looking for reasons NOT to “adopt” to the vast majority of wonderful potential owners. Then they’ll claim there aren’t enough homes out there for dogs. — Cathy Merchant, HumaneWatch Facebook group, Nov. 3, 2010
There is a large national rescue… here in CO looking for space…. They already go to the auctions down there and bring back dogs… Every dog that comes in will have some bad luck story about how they rescued it from a fate worse than death. People will be screened and rejected–it’s a Dog!!! — Cindy DeBerge, HumaneWatch Facebook group, Nov. 3, 2010
HumaneWatch, don’t lie to us and say that the HSUS does nothing for shelters. Don’t lie to us and say you support shelters when you encourage abuse like this. And don’t you dare claim to support shelters when you’ve never done a thing for shelters that didn’t benefit you directly.

Needs vs. wants

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Shelley Powers is an eclectic blogger whose brilliant defense of animal welfare left Prop B opponents clutching the tatters of their arguments and weeping during the 2010 elections in Missouri. Shelley has a great post on burningbird.net that highlights the AVMA’s growing tendency to favor the rights of animal owners over the well-being of their animals. Give it a read, then see if you can spot any parallels to other “consumer rights” organizations and their rationalizations for animal abuse.

Martosko has questions. We’ve got answers.

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Cow with answersYesterday, David Martosko of HumaneWatch published five questions for his followers to ask Wayne Pacelle at the HSUS town hall meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska.   The answers are readily available at the HSUS website, Wayne Pacelle’s blogs, and in related websites.

Using these materials, I have taken the liberty of putting together some answers that Wayne Pacelle or another HSUS employee might give to Mr. Martosko’s questions. Please note: I do not work at the HSUS and have not run these answers by anyone from that organization.  These are simply my answers based on reading their materials.

1. “In 1980 at HSUS’s annual meeting, the group made it official policy to – and I quote – ‘pursue on all fronts … the clear articulation and establishment of the rights of all animals … within the full range of American life and culture.’ Is this still HSUS’s goal? If you’re trying to give so-called ‘rights’ to cows, pigs, and chickens, why wouldn’t that completely destroy the entire livestock industry?”

The HSUS works to get protections for animals.  It is not so much a question of animal rights as human responsibility.  Humans have the responsibility to treat animals humanely, and this includes animals raised for food, which are by far the largest percentage of animals used by humans.  Unfortunately, we do not always treat farm animals humanely.  This happens in two ways.  First there is treatment that everyone agrees is abuse, such as what the HSUS and even a USDA inspector has uncovered at multiple slaughter plants.  People were kicking calves and ramming them with electric prods, or using forklifts to move cows.  Despite such violations of the Humane Slaughter Act, people at these plants were treating animals this way on a routine basis.  When an inspector tried to report it, his managers demoted him and kept the plant open.  In this case the laws on the books were clearly not working, and the HSUS stepped in to help bring this situation to the attention of state and federal authorities.

Second, there are standard operating procedures in industrial agriculture that are legal but which the HSUS and the general public see as inhumane.  These include the intensive confinement of veal calves, pregnant pigs, and laying hens in cages so small they can’t turn around and cannot perform any natural behaviors such as rooting, nesting or perching.  Most people understand that an animal needs to be able to move around and perform natural behaviors, but intensive agriculture denies these basic needs.  They even deny that these animals have natural behaviors, despite the fact that they have evolved over millions of years, yet it has only been in the past few decades that we have seen widespread use of intensive confinement.  This intensive confinement also leads to food safety problems such as the salmonella outbreak we saw from the DeCoster egg operations that sickened half a million people and led to the largest egg recall in our nation’s history.  When animals are that stressed, they are likely to get sick.  Antibiotics are not the answer, as this has only led to new forms of drug-resistant bacteria that threaten human health.  The HSUS sees the answer as getting the animals out of intensive confinement and into a housing system where they can move around and express natural behaviors.

The HSUS is not out to put an end to animal agriculture as many of our opponents have charged.  Their purpose is to look out for the welfare of the animals in these systems.  If the Humane Society of the United States were to ignore the welfare of over 1 billion animals killed for food each year — by far the largest sector of animal use by humans — then it would not be doing its job.

2. “Can you name a specific meat, dairy, or egg brand that you and the Humane Society of the United States have endorsed?”

Sure.  The HSUS supports humane and sustainable farmers like Kevin Fulton, who arranged this town hall meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Kevin runs a pasture beef operation in which cattle are allowed to graze freely on a natural diet of grass, which cows were evolved to eat.   The HSUS is also one of 30 animal welfare groups that supports the Certified Humane label.  You can see a list of Certified Humane farmers and ranchers on their website.  The HSUS also supports the new Global GAP animal welfare standards, implemented  just last week by Whole Foods.  Again, the HSUS is not out to end animal agriculture.  Its purpose is to put an end to the worst abuses on our nation’s factory farms.

3. “If you got a federal law passed that demanded a nation-wide switch to the kind of livestock production mandated by California’s ‘Proposition 2’ law, would you and HSUS be satisfied with your achievement and completely dissolve the animal-agriculture part of your organization?”

Certainly the HSUS would be thrilled to pass a law that switches the nation to a Proposition 2 type of livestock production.  However, it would be irresponsible for the HSUS to ever dissolve the animal agriculture part of its organization.  As stated previously, farm animals make up by far the largest percentage of animals used by humans in the United States.   The HSUS would not be doing its job if it did not continue to look out for the welfare of these animals.  That might consist of continuing to work for better laws to protect these animals.  But it might also consist of working to see that current laws are being properly enforced.  As we have seen with the Humane Slaughter Act, which the HSUS was instrumental in getting passed in 1958, our nation’s laws are not always followed, and sometimes when they are not, people in charge look the other way.  So the HSUS must continue to be vigilant in making sure farm animals are treated humanely and according to the law, and that the law is being followed on farms, at auctions, in slaughterhouses, and anywhere else humans are making widespread use of these animals.

4. “Is there such a thing as meat that’s ‘humane’ enough that your ethics permit you personally to eat it? If so, where can we buy some? If not, what’s the difference between your group and PETA?”

Wayne Pacelle has not eaten meat for at least two decades, so he would likely choose not to eat meat of any sort.  However, that is his choice, and not one he asks everyone to make, including employees of the HSUS.  Nowhere is there a clause requiring HSUS employees to adhere to a certain diet.  That is one difference between the HSUS and PETA, as PETA does require certain employees to adhere to a vegan diet.  PETA also has a mission statement that precludes any use of animals by humans for any purpose.  The HSUS has no such mission statement.  Its mission is to celebrate animals and confront cruelty, which is what it does, whether cruelty occurs on a factory farm, at a puppy mill, or in an animal fighting operation, canned hunt, fur farm, or anywhere else.

5. “In HSUS’s Articles of Incorporation – its founding documents – you’ll find the following declaration: ‘No substantial part of the activities of the corporation shall consist of the carrying on of propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation.’ Has that been changed since 1954? If not, what on earth have you been doing all these years? Isn’t your job to propagandize and influence legislation? Isn’t that what Prop. 2 in California and Prop. B in Missouri were all about?”

The Humane Society of the United States does not do direct lobbying or campaigning for candidates for political office.  It does have an affiliated 501(c)(4) organization, the Humane Society Legislative Fund, that works to pass animal protection laws at the state and federal level, to educate the public about animal protection issues, and to support humane candidates for office.  The HSLF tracks votes by members of Congress on animal protection issues and creates a Humane Scorecard to inform voters who care about these issues.

The HSUS has also worked with coalitions such as Californians for Humane Farms and Missourians for the Protection of Dogs to help pass ballot measures in specific states.  It is certainly not the only member of these coalitions.  For example, Missourians for the Protection of Dogs was also supported by the ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society, Humane Society of Missouri, Missouri Alliance for Animal Legislation, and Tony LaRussa Animal Welfare Foundation.  It was also endorsed by over 150 veterinarians and clinics, over 160 Missouri businesses, and over 100 other animal protection charities.  These initiatives have broad support in the states where they have been put to a vote, sometimes winning by a landslide as in the case of Proposition 2 in California, because they are reasonable, common sense reforms that most people want to see passed.

As you can see from this blog entry, which I put together in less than an hour, the answers to Mr. Martosko’s questions are not hard to find.  Unfortunately, Mr. Martosko’s purpose is not to look for fair and balanced information about the HSUS, but to destroy the HSUS by any means necessary including slander and lies so that it cannot work for welfare reforms that might threaten the profits of those who fund HumaneWatch.  My question to Mr. Martosko is:  When are you going to stop waging a smear campaign against the Humane Society of the United States and join the rest of the country in embracing actual animal welfare?