Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Rick Santorum and HSUS - What The Hell?

Frank Miniter has an op-ed in Forbes entitled, "Is Rick Santorum a Closet Animal Rights Activist?" The piece stems from Santorum's support (and sponsorship while still in the Senate) of bills promoted by the animal rights groups and opposed by farmers and hunters.

Anyone who supports the Humane Society of the United States and/or the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is automatically suspect in my eyes. We can see the trouble these groups are causing in California with their campaign against the president of the California Fish and Game Commission Dan Richards for legally taking a mountain lion in Idaho.

It looks like Santorum did more than just support and sponsor the HSUS promoted legislation against puppy mills.
Santorum did more than back animal-rights legislation; he even held a press conference in 1995 in which he was pictured alongside Wayne Pacelle, an animal-rights activist who now heads the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). For those of you who don’t know HSUS, its positions are similar to PETA’s and no, they don’t run your local pet shelter; in fact, HSUS doesn’t run a single pet shelter in the U.S. and only gives about one percent of its money to pet shelters. What HSUS does is spend its money on anti-farming and anti-hunting campaigns.

A 1995 issue of Animal People, an animal-rights newspaper, reported that: “August 10 [1995] dawned bright for the Humane Society of the U.S., as newspapers across the country carried a photo of HSUS director of legislative affairs Wayne Pacelle and Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) decrying puppy mills at a press conference….”
For a candidate who trumpets his pro-life credentials to be consorting with groups who place animals equal to or above humans in the food chain seems rather strange in my opinion. Life saving cancer and pharmaceutical research has been sabotaged more than once by followers of these groups. This is where it starts to get personal for me as I lost my wife to breast cancer in 1993.

I wonder how many of the deer, hog, and turkey hunting social conservatives in Mississippi and Alabama knew of his animal rights flirtations when they voted for him on Tuesday. I'd wager damn few.

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