The number of animals and plants protected by the federal Endangered Species Act is about to increase dramatically.

For Cass Sunstein, radical animal-rights activist and nominee for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator job, that means he will be better positioned than ever to make livestock farming a thing of the past.

How are the two things connected? The Center for Consumer Freedom's director of research appeared on the Fox News Channel last week to explain to Glenn Beck’s audience how much influence Sunstein may soon have over what we eat:

Cattlemen in this country own and manage most of the lands that are covered by the Endangered Species Act, that are subject to control.

So you ask: Why is Cass Sunstein’s hatred and animus toward meat eating such a big deal?

It’s because he’ll be in a position to be able to use the Endangered Species Act to put cattlemen out of business. And then the price of your steak goes up. And then the price of your cheeseburger goes up.

It’s not only cattlemen who could be at the business end of Sunstein’s ridiculous anti-meat philosophy. 

Environmental activists groups sued over the Endangered Species Act in 2006 to divert water to a habitat for a three-inch bait fish in California – taking the water away from drought-stricken farmers and costing the California economy more than 60,000 farming jobs.

Imagine what would happen if activists didn’t have to sue to get what they wanted, but could just pick up the phone instead.

The future “regulatory czar” has made no secret of his coercive tactics to get Americans to eat less meat. His grand plan is to make meat more expensive to produce, which will in turn make it harder for American families to afford. Similarly unpopular tactics have been attempted in the drive to get people to drink less soda.

While Sunstein couches his plans as a “nudge,” we’d say it’s more like a shove.

Hug your cheeseburgers tonight, because they too are about to become an endangered species.

*Source:  The Center for Consumer Freedom 
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I was debating on whether or not to post this information so quickly behind the post on 7 Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Humane Society.

Primarily because CattleGrower.com's primary purpose is to promote fellowship and networking opportunities for livestock producers rather than to become a political forum.

However, given the strong appeal and subsequent readership of 7 Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Humane Society I just couldn't help myself in posting and sharing this with you as well ....

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1) According to government documents, PETA employees have killed more than 19,200 dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens since 1998. This behavior continues despite PETA’s moralizing about the “unethical” treatment of animals by farmers, scientists, restaurant owners, circuses, hunters, fishermen, zookeepers, and countless other Americans. PETA puts to death over 90 percent of the animals it accepts from members of the public who expect the group to make a reasonable attempt to find them adoptive homes. PETA holds absolutely no open-adoption shelter hours at its Norfolk, VA headquarters, choosing instead to spend part of its $32 million annual income on a contract with a crematory service to periodically empty hundreds of animal bodies from its large walk-in freezer.

2) PETA president and co-founder Ingrid Newkirk has described her group’s overall goal as “total animal liberation.” This means the complete abolition of meat, milk, cheese, eggs, honey, zoos, aquariums, circuses, wool, leather, fur, silk, hunting, fishing, and pet ownership. In a 2003 profile of Newkirk in The New Yorker, author Michael Specter wrote that Newkirk has had at least one seeing-eye dog taken away from its blind owner. PETA is also against all medical research that requires the use of animals, including research aimed at curing AIDS and cancer.

3) PETA has given tens of thousands of dollars to convicted arsonists and other violent criminals. This includes a 2001 donation of $1,500 to the North American Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an FBI-certified “domestic terrorist” group responsible for dozens of firebombs and death threats. During the 1990s, PETA paid $70,200 to Rodney Coronado, an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) serial arsonist convicted of burning down a Michigan State University research laboratory. In his sentencing memorandum, a federal prosecutor implicated PETA president Ingrid Newkirk in that crime. PETA vegetarian campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich has also told an animal rights convention that “blowing stuff up and smashing windows” is “a great way to bring about animal liberation,” adding, “Hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it.”

4) PETA activists regularly target children as young as six years old with anti-meat and anti-milk propaganda, even waiting outside their schools to intercept them without notifying their parents. One piece of kid-targeted PETA literature tells small children: “Your Mommy Kills Animals!” PETA brags that its messages reach over 1.2 million minor children, including 30,000 kids between the ages of 6 and 12, all contacted by e-mail without parental supervision. One PETA vice president told the Fox News Channel’s audience: “Our campaigns are always geared towards children, and they always will be.”

5) PETA’s president has said that “even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we would be against it.” And PETA has repeatedly attacked research foundations like the March of Dimes, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and the American Cancer Society, solely because they support animal-based research aimed at curing life-threatening diseases and birth defects. And PETA helped to start and manage a quasi-medical front group, the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, to attack medical research head-on.

6) PETA has compared Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust to farm animals and Jesus Christ to pigs. PETA’s religious campaigns include a website that claims—despite ample evidence to the contrary—that Jesus Christ was a vegetarian. PETA holds protests at houses of worship, even suing one church that tried to protect its members from Sunday-morning harassment. Its billboards taunt Christians with the message that hogs “died for their sins.” PETA insists, contrary to centuries of rabbinical teaching, that the Jewish ritual of kosher slaughter shouldn’t be allowed. And its infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign crassly compared the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide to farm animals.

7) PETA frequently looks the other way when its celebrity spokespersons don’t practice what it preaches. As gossip bloggers and Hollywood journalists have noted, Pamela Anderson’s Dodge Viper (auctioned to benefit PETA) had a “luxurious leather interior”; Jenna Jameson was photographed fishing, slurping oysters, and wearing a leather jacket just weeks after launching an anti-leather campaign for PETA; Morrissey got an official “okay” from PETA after eating at a steakhouse; Dita von Teese has written about her love of furs and foie gras; Steve-O built a career out of abusing small animals on film; the officially “anti-fur” Eva Mendes often wears fur anyway; and Charlize Theron’s celebrated October 2007 Vogue cover shoot featured several suede garments. In 2008, “Baby Phat” designer Kimora Lee Simmons became a PETA spokesmodel despite working with fur and leather, after making a $20,000 donation to the animal rights group.

*Source:  The Center for Consumer Freedom 
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1) The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a “humane society” in name only, since it doesn’t operate a single pet shelter or pet adoption facility anywhere in the United States. During 2007, HSUS contributed only 3.64 percent of its budget to organizations that operate hands-on dog and cat shelters. In reality, HSUS is a wealthy animal-rights lobbying organization (the largest and richest on earth) that agitates for the same goals as PETA and other radical groups.

2) Beginning on the day of NFL quarterback Michael Vick’s 2007 dogfighting indictment, HSUS raised money online with the false promise that it would “care for the dogs seized in the Michael Vick case.” The New York Times later reported that HSUS wasn’t caring for Vick’s dogs at all. And HSUS president Wayne Pacelle told the Times that his group recommended that government officials “put down” (that is, kill) the dogs rather than adopt them out to suitable homes. HSUS later quietly altered its Internet fundraising pitch.

3) HSUS’s senior management includes a former spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a criminal group designated as “terrorists” by the FBI. HSUS president Wayne Pacelle hired John “J.P.” Goodwin in 1997, the same year Goodwin described himself as “spokesperson for the ALF” while he fielded media calls in the wake of an ALF arson attack at a California veal processing plant. In 1997, when asked by reporters for a reaction to an ALF arson fire at a farmer’s feed co-op in Utah (which nearly killed a family sleeping on the premises), Goodwin replied, “We’re ecstatic.” That same year, Goodwin was arrested at a UC Davis protest celebrating the 10-year anniversary of an ALF arson at the university that caused $5 million in damage. And in 1998, Goodwin described himself publicly as a “former member of ALF.”

4) According to a 2008 Los Angeles Times investigation, less than 12 percent of money raised for HSUS by California telemarketers actually ends up in HSUS’s bank account. The rest is kept by professional fundraisers. And if you exclude two campaigns run for HSUS by the “Build-a-Bear Workshop” retail chain, which consisted of the sale of surplus stuffed animals (not really “fundraising”), HSUS’s yield number shrinks to just 3 percent. Sadly, this appears typical. In 2004, HSUS ran a telemarketing campaign in Connecticut with fundraisers who promised to return a minimum of zero percent of the proceeds. The campaign raised over $1.4 million. Not only did absolutely none of that money go to HSUS, but the group paid $175,000 for the telemarketing work.

5) Research shows that HSUS’s heavily promoted U.S. “boycott” of Canadian seafood—announced in 2005 as a protest against Canada’s annual seal hunt—is a phony exercise in media manipulation. A 2006 investigation found that 78 percent of the restaurants and seafood distributors described by HSUS as “boycotters” weren’t participating at all. Nearly two-thirds of them told surveyors they were completely unaware HSUS was using their names in connection with an international boycott campaign. Canada’s federal government is on record about this deception, saying: “Some animal rights groups have been misleading the public for years … it’s no surprise at all that the richest of them would mislead the public with a phony seafood boycott.”

6) HSUS raised a reported $34 million in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, supposedly to help reunite lost pets with their owners. But comparatively little of that money was spent for its intended purpose. Louisiana’s Attorney General shuttered his 18-month-long investigation into where most of these millions went, shortly after HSUS announced its plan to contribute $600,000 toward the construction of an animal shelter on the grounds of a state prison. Public disclosures of the disposition of the $34 million in Katrina-related donations add up to less than $7 million.

7) After gathering undercover video footage of improper animal handling at a Chino, CA slaughterhouse during November of 2007, HSUS sat on its video evidence for three months, even refusing to share it with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. HSUS’s Dr. Michael Greger testified before Congress that the San Bernardino County (CA) District Attorney’s office asked the group “to hold on to the information while they completed their investigation.” But the District Attorney’s office quickly denied that account, even declaring that HSUS refused to make its undercover spy available to investigators if the USDA were present at those meetings. Ultimately, HSUS chose to release its video footage at a more politically opportune time, as it prepared to launch a livestock-related ballot campaign in California. Meanwhile, meat from the slaughterhouse continued to flow into the U.S. food supply for months.

*Source:  The Center for Consumer Freedom 

“Rule one,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times last November, is “never allow a crisis to go to waste.”

But despite some accusations of fear-mongering, the White House clearly seems to understand that not every crisis should be exploited. In response to the growing panic over a new strain of swine influenza A (H1N1) discovered last week in Mexico, President Obama assured Americans today that the H1N1 virus is “not a cause for alarm.”

Sadly, not everyone is following the Commander-in-Chief’s lead. For animal rights activists at the Humane Society of the United States, the opportunity to use “swine flu” to scare American meat-eaters was apparently too tempting to resist.

The mouthpiece for HSUS’ latest anti-meat effort is Michael Greger. Over the years, Greger has shamelessly leveraged public panic over bird flu, mad cow disease, and SARS to promote meatless eating. Now we can add so-called "swine flu" to Greger’s list.

According to HSUS, there is no question that American pork producers are to blame for the latest flu outbreak:

With massive concentrations of farm animals within which to mutate, these new swine flu viruses in North America seem to be on an evolutionary fast track, jumping and reassorting between species at an unprecedented rate. 

Sounds scary enough. But before we start quarantining every piece of ham and bacon in sight, let’s look at what other public health experts have been saying.

Dr. Anne Schuchat dispelled pork contamination rumors at the first Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) press briefing on Thursday:

You know, when you hear the word swine influenza you think about swine and many people wonder can you get this from eating pork?  The answer is no you can't get swine flu from eating pork or from eating pork products.  So that's not something that you need to worry about. 

The CDC quickly reiterated Schuchat’s point in a Q&A on its website:  

Can I get swine influenza from eating or preparing pork?

No. Swine influenza viruses are not spread by food. You cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork products is safe.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack concurred in a statement on behalf of the Department of Agriculture yesterday:

According to scientists at USDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, swine flu viruses are not transmitted by food so you cannot get swine flu from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork or pork products is safe. Cooking pork to an internal temperature of 160°F kills all viruses and other foodborne pathogens.

The World Health Organization also joined the chorus:

Is it safe to eat pork and pork products?

Yes. Swine influenza has not been shown to be transmissible to people through eating properly handled and prepared pork (pig meat) or other products derived from pigs.

Finally, President Obama assured Americans this morning that the new virus strain is no cause for alarm. 

So if it’s impossible to contract swine flu from eating or handling cooked pork, why is it called “swine flu? in the first place” The World Organization for Animal Health in Paris (the "OIE," in its French acronym) has an interesting answer: It shouldn’t be.

The flu virus spreading around the world should not be called "swine flu" as it also contains avian and human components and no pig was found ill with the disease so far, the World Animal Health body said on Monday.

A more logical name for it would be "North-American influenza"

Renaming the virus makes sense to us, but don’t expect to hear much logic from HSUS. To the animal rights giant, the tragic but minimal death toll in Mexico is an opportunity to stoke fears of animal agriculture -- and avoid letting a precious crisis go to waste.

Michael Greger’s anti-pork panic is just the latest example of why dietary zealots shouldn’t be mistaken for reliable health experts. The modern farming practices that HSUS condemns as a source of the swine flu virus are probably humans’ best firewall against the disease. Modern farming keeps animals in controlled environments, where they are far less susceptible to contagion and pandemics. “Free-range” pork, on the other hand, is more likely to spread diseases through communal contact and uncontrolled contact with people.

Source:  The Center for Consumer Freedom