Center for Consumer Freedom

Florida Neuters HSUS Funding

While leading animal rights groups spend top dollar trying to steal meat off our tables, they spend precious little in the way of directly helping animals. As we've highlighted with our popular new website, PetaKillsAnimals.com, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals spends millions on offensive PR campaigns while it penny-pinches by killing more than 10,000 dogs and cats rather than caring for them or finding them new homes. This week, Florida legislators took funds from the state's "friends of animals" license plate away from the radical Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) after they discovered the ultra-rich HSUS doesn't operate any spay/neuter programs.

HSUS has over $113 million in assets and an annual operating budget of $69 million. The group's recent merger with The Fund For Animals will likely bump its budget into the $80 million range. HSUS poured more than $175,000 into a 2002 Florida ballot initiative which gave constitutional rights to pregnant pigs.

Meanwhile, as HSUS itself admits (in a disclosure buried deep within its website):

[T]he Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is not affiliated with, nor is it a parent organization for, local humane societies, animal shelters, or animal care and control agencies ... The HSUS does not operate or have direct control over any animal shelter.

Reporter Mike Jackson poses the obvious question:

Since HSUS doesn't administer any spaying or neutering programs, the legislature was quite correct to have blocked their receiving any future funds. The unanswered questions causing the red cheeks are simple: How did HSUS manage to get designated as a recipient of the funds in the first place, and will there be any move to recover any funds they've already received since they were apparently given to HSUS under false pretenses?