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| This is a repost from April 2011 |
I work in an office around the corner from Wayne Pacelle, the President and CEO of the Humane Society of the U.S. We have never met, but any time he wants to bring over his direct mail accounting records I am more than happy to buy him lunch. Fair warning, however: I am a black belt in direct mail accounting practices, and I do not salute nonsense. And there is a lot of nonsense in HSUS's direct mail accounting.
Take their membership numbers, for example.
A while back, I was quoted in a cover story in HSUS's All Animals magazine about the "The Purebred Paradox." Supposedly this magazine went to all of HSUS's 11 million members.
Eleven million members?! Really? That's a jaw-dropping number. The NRA has only 2 million members.
And so, I waited to get an email or a phone call from someone, somewhere who had actually read the article. Nothing.
OK, I have a common name. A lot of people who know me don't even know I have dogs -- I have a larger life than that found at the end of a leash. There is no reason for most people to associate me with dogs. No matter.
But surely a cover story in the flag ship publication of the Humane Society of the U.S. about painful health defects intentionally being bred for in pedigree dogs would generate a little secondary reporting in newspapers and magazines around the country?
Nope. Nothing. It was like the article was never written. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Which got me to wondering. Did anyone, anywhere, actually really read this story at all? What were the Humane Society's real membership numbers? Could HSUS political power be a lie and a complete fabrication?
Hard to imagine, but guess what? It's true!
HSUS's membership is not eleven million. It's not ten million. It's not five million, two million or even one million.
The true membership of HSUS is less than 450,000 people. That's the total print run of All Animals magazine, which is mailed to every HSUS member that gives $25 or more, and I assure you that this entire print run is not actually mailed to dues-paying HSUS members. My best guess is that no more than one in ten people read the magazine's cover story -- 45,000 people or so. No wonder that article made less noise than a penny thrown down a well!
But don't just take my word about HSUS's membership numbers. You see, if you are willing to wade through a 115-page document, you can find those numbers yourself, buried on page 89 of the report they file every year with the Internal Revenue Service. This is the same federal agency that nailed Al Capone.
So where does that 11 million number come from which the HSUS features so prominently on its web site?
It's a complete untruth. A magical fabrication. A fantastic fraud.
It's a LIE. Eleven million is not even in the same time zone as the truth.
So why lie? What's that all about?
Simple: Lying is how the Humane Society of the U.S. claims unearned political power.
HSUS figures they can lie to their members, the press, Congress, and state legislatures and no one will ever bother to check because no one will ever bother to wade through that 115-page IRS form.
But I did. And you can too, by simply going to this link.
Now to be clear, a lot of organizations lie about their membership numbers. The most common gambit is to assume that every dues-paying member also represents a spouse or an adult child who might also support the core mission of the organization.
Fair enough, I suppose.
But what HSUS has done is truly unprecedented. You see, they have not inflated their true dues-paying membership number by a factor of two or three.... but by more than 24.
Divide by twenty-four.
That's what the board of HSUS and all their supporters should do.
Divide by twenty-four.
Take the salary of Wayne Pacelle -- more than $240,000 a year -- and divide by 24 to see if that "mathematical adjustment" might clarify the extent of the lie that HSUS continues to perpetrate on the American people
Divide by twenty-four.
That's the scope of the lie, and that's why I do not expect to get a call or an email from Mr. Pacelle this week taking me up on my offer to buy him a free lunch if he only will bring along HSUS's direct mail accounting records. Some free lunches are simply too expensive to accept!
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