HSUS sale barn video outrageous

As we learned at the Kentucky Derby last Saturday, animals do get sick or injured and die, just like human beings do. It is tragic and heart rendering when it happens, but it happens. Living creatures don't live on this earth forever, and there is sorrow and sadness left behind when they depart.

So the videographers and stagers of the animal rights radicals at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), not to be confused with the very ethical and well-respected American Humane Society, are at it again, after successfuly shutting down Hallmark meat packing in California, due to video they shot alleging the slaughter of so-called "downer" cows. There is substantial evidence that HSUS staged the video, taking advantage of spanish-speaking packing house workers who really didn't understand what they were being goaded into doing.

This time HSUS shot video at four sale barns, two of which I'm familiar with, and are among the best run such facilities in the industry--the auction markets at Hereford, Texas and Clovis, New Mexico. The video is of downer cows in the pens of the auctions, a scene you could get about every day at any sale barn. Cattle die there, not because they are mistreated, but because they are culls that can no longer breed and reproduce, and the owners shipped them to market to be sold for slaughter. Sometimes they don't make it that far.

Ho hum. Happens everyday. So what else is new?

Both auction market owners, who are fine men, do not run sick or diseased cattle through the sale ring, do not leave them in pens with other animals, put them down safely and humanely, and dispose of them lawfully as soon as possible.

How far does this industry have to go to placate the vegetarian and animal rights radicals at groups like HSUS, who use our industry and its everyday practices that are fully within the law, both legally and ethically, to advance their political agenda through tear-jerking photos and video in the press?

A few sympathizers who don't understand how the world works, or are hopeless Pollyannas seeing the world only through rose colored glasses, put in with HSUS. But thus far, there is no public clamor in sympathy with them. The liberal media, who share the HSUS political agenda, give them publicity on their outrageous stunts, but outside of a few publicity-seeking politicians in Congress--there is no outcry.

John Q. Public is a lot smarter than the radicals and their friends in the mass media think.