I find Wayne Pacelle’s blog fascinating. Wayne, as you know, is the leader of HSUS, or as like to think of them, PETA with pinstripes. I’ve done my best to make sure you understand the real agenda behind HSUS’ “animal welfare” mission, which really has little to do with animal care and has everything to do with social control.

Driven by a radical vegan agenda and a desire to remove from you, forcibly, the right of choice, HSUS uses the market’s profit motive to bully companies into adopting portions of their agenda. The largest companies are always the first targets, for example companies like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. We saw this in Ohio last year when retailers caved on the issue of rBST in dairy production: a very few very vocal customers scared major retailers into forcing dairymen to abandon a proven and perfectly safe production practice. While not directly HSUS driven, the lesson of that case rings true all the same.

In every action-adventure movie I ever watched as a kid, I remember a very simple rule of engagement in US defense and diplomacy: the United States of America does not negotiate with terrorists. To me, HSUS is a domestic terror organization, using fear, misinformation, manipulation, lies, and brute financial force in inflict their agenda on a public that if aware of the true intent, would never adopt it for themselves.

And yet, some in agriculture have, and would continue to, negotiate with these radical activists. My argument has always been that if we can’t agree on the end goal, why should we cede the field of battle in any part. You know at the onset that the end goal is to end the consumption of animal proteins and the use of animal products in this country. Why then would you assume that if you abandon a proven practice of animal husbandry to appease Wayne Pacelle that he’ll simply go away and leave you alone?

He won’t.

Smithfield Foods, one of the largest meat producers in the world, may be learning the hard way that my core principle on this issue is absolutely true. From Wayne’s blog: In January 2007, Smithfield announced that it would begin to phase out gestation crates for breeding pigs and transition to group housing, a move which The HSUS applauded. That very important and positive action notwithstanding, we have long been concerned about the broad set of problems associated with mega-animal factories. Animal cruelty, air and water pollution, the dissolution of small farms, and the reduction in property values and the quality of life in rural communities are not just occurring in disadvantaged communities in Mexico and Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world, but also in communities throughout the United States.

Wayne and his organization are attempting to convince consumers that Smithfield and its operations in Mexico are the cause and source of the current H1N1 influenza outbreak, an assertion that has no basis in science or reality. Public health officials, both in the human and animal health arenas, have said repeatedly that Smithfield in specific and hogs in general are not the origin of this outbreak, period.

And so, after kowtowing to HSUS’ radical agenda of excising proven practices of animal husbandry, Smithfield gets kicked in the teeth barely two years later with trumped up charges, accusations, and a tactical media assault. From your typical man on the street “the hog farm is stinky” interview to cries that Smithfield is ruining the agricultural economy of Romania, Wayne covers all the bases in making certain his readers get the picture of Smithfield as the evil corporate ne’re-do-well.

Perhaps we should remember this situation when it comes time to consider whittling away our rights in the hope of buying time.