Humane Society of United States Not Primarily About Funding Pet Shelters

One of the most irritating commercials on television depicts pathetic sick and abused cats and dogs, with Wayne Pacelle, the head of the Humane Society of the United States. asking for donations to help HSUS to save the pets.  But HSUS is not your local humane society or SPCA.  As I wrote in A Rat is a Pig, etc. it is a stealth animal rights ideological organization dedicated to making animal husbandry increasingly expensive and onerous.  It is like a big chewing machine working from the outside, in.

The invaluable Humane Watch blog, which is funded by animal ag and food interests, is on the case.  In a recent post, it revealed that HSUS only gives four-fifths of one percent to pet shelter funding.  From the post:

One of the first things we did when HumaneWatch was launched last February was figure out what the Humane Society of the United States was doing with the nine-figure collection plate it passes every year. We were surprised to learn that according to HSUS’s publicly available tax return for 2008 (the most recent year for which data was available at the time), HSUS devoted less than one-half of one percent of its budget to directly funding hands-on pet shelters.



Now, however, HSUS’s 2009 tax return is also a matter of public record. HSUS ponied up a little bit more that year for local pet rescues and shelters, but it’s hardly worth shouting about. In all, HSUS shared less than 0.8 percent of its money with pet shelters in 2009. Some of those shelters share the “humane society” name with their richer (distant) cousin, but the vast majority of pet shelters in the United States received nothing.

We examined every outgoing grant HSUS reported making in 2009, and made a determination about whether or not the recipient was a hands-on pet shelter. Here are the numbers:

HSUS 2009 budget:	$121,725,153
All HSUS outgoing grants:	6,744,923
HSUS grants to hands-on pet shelters:	977,296

So only four-fifths of one percent (0.80%) of the money HSUS collected in 2009—much of it in response to TV ads that begged for money to “save” dogs and cats—actually went to the community-based organizations doing that work. (HSUS runs a handful of “animal care centers,” but no dog or cat shelters and no pet adoption programs.)

People can decide to donate to HSUS or not.  But a little more truth in television advertising would be appreciated.  In my view, if you want to help pets, fund local shelters, not HSUS.