Wayne Pacelle
During his 17 years with the Humane Society of the United States, including seven as president and CEO, Wayne Pacelle has played a leading role in transforming the HSUS, the nations largest animal protection charity, into a dynamic public force and voice for all animals. Taking a special interest in law reform, he has been the leading strategist for more than a score of successful ballot initiatives that outlawed cockfighting, cruel factory farming practices, bear baiting, negligent puppy mill operations and a host of other inhumane practices. Pacelle is the author of the bestselling book The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them. He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on almost all of the major network television programsfrom 60 Minutes to the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In 2008, The Los Angeles Times reported, Pacelle has retooled a venerable organization seen as a mild-mannered protector of dogs and cats into an aggressive interest group... Pacelle was named one of NonProfit Times Executives of the Year in 2005 for his leadership in responding to the Hurricane Katrina crisis. Pacelle received his B.A. in History and Studies in the Environment from Yale University in 1987. "
“Often the greatest challenge of the animal welfare movement is to remind people of the things they already know to be true-that to mistreat any animal is beneath us, that cruelty of any kind is dishonorable and inexcusable, and that we all have duties of kindness and self-restraint in the treatment of our fellow creatures.”
“We know too much, and what might have been excused in other times can no longer stand up to reason. ... with that understanding comes moral responsibility.”
“In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can--forgetting to ask whether we should.”