Private Property: The Real Endangered Species?

In 1973, Congress passed and President Nixon signed into law the Endangered Species Act (ESA) with the intent of protecting threatened species such as the bald eagle. Since then, close to 2,000 species and subspecies (1,400 of which are in the United States), have been added to the listing under the Endangered Species Act.

While the original Act was well intended, the Endangered Species Act has become the Trojan horse that sneaks in property-thieving regulations and a “sue and settle” lawsuit scheme while pretending to be beneficial to conservation. This threat to animal owners, animal based businesses, and private property has expanded significantly in recent years with animal rights groups hijacking the conservation aspect of the ESA to advance their radical agenda.

These groups make up a $400 Billion global coalition of organizations that raise money under the guise of promoting the welfare of animals, while using that money to buy lawyers and lobbyists to fund misleading, emotionally driven campaigns to pit the public against animal owners and breeders.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) is one such radical animal rights group based in San Francisco that files lawsuits against privately owned animal businesses with no intent of winning in court. Rather, the lawsuits are used to propagate a false narrative against their targets (typically animal based small business owners) in order to force them out of business. Instead of doing the work of raising, breeding, and caring for animals, the victims of these lawsuits must spend scarce resources on lawyers and public relations experts to clear their good name, and defend their livelihoods and their animals. Many cannot afford this burden and simply close up shop.

Recent reports from the House Committee on Natural Resources have uncovered that an entire cottage industry exists around filing lawsuits based on the ESA. As a result, funds that were once intended to be used to protect species in danger of extinction are now being diverted to fund frivolous lawsuits against animal owners who are the targets of extremist animal rights groups.

In addition, government bureaucrats often act unlawfully through a tactic called “sue and settle.” They settle litigation with their allies in environmental and animal rights groups behind closed doors in a way that advances the activist’s radical agenda, and in the process block out citizens, states, and local governments affected by their decisions and their subsequent rules and regulations.

This “sue and settle” tactic funnels millions of settlement dollars from the Federal Government to the animal rights and environmental activists to fund their continuing efforts to game the system and wrongfully attack animal enterprise ultimately.   The result is the destruction private property, businesses and lives.

One such victim of these attacks is Pam and Tom Sellner, owners of Cricket Hollow Zoo in Iowa, are one of many faces of victims of these attacks. Pam and Tom have been bringing joy to families for years with their privately owned collection of tigers, lions, pumas, and other exotic animals. Their zoo provides learning opportunities for students in rural Iowa who may otherwise not have access or contact with these animals. However, that will never satisfy the animal rights extremists who believe that these animals don’t belong in captivity.

Tom and Pam are now faced with mounting legal fees to fight this frivolous lawsuit from an animal rights activists group (ALDF) radically out of step with American values, but funded and well staffed with attorneys to do the dirty work. The Sellers are just one of the many faces of the victims of ESA-based lawsuits that have sprung up across the country.

While well intentioned when written over forty years go, the ESA has become a weapon for lawyers to beat small animal businesses over the head, all at the taxpayer expense.

Ultimately, the abuse of power under the ESA puts at risk the very animals it was intended to protect, as private property rights are trampled under the hooves of this Trojan Horse, and the system attacks the animals it was intended to protect.

Animal rights groups are using the ESA and our court system as a weapon to destroy those who aren’t in line with their ideology.  If this works on animal enterprise, what is next?

Mindy Patterson is the President of The Cavalry Group, a member based company protecting and defending the Constitutional and private property rights of law abiding animal owners, animal-related business, hunters, and agriculture concerns legally and legislatively nationwide.

Follow on Twitter: @TheCavalryGroup  @cowgirlathart

You can read this article and more at JoeforAmerica.com click here

Skagit County Sentences Animals to Death

All over America, localities are outlawing and killing exotic animals.   Brown shirted bureaucrats claim they are doing it for public safety but the public is in no danger.   By removing animals from our lives, that creates an unreasonable fear of the unknown.    When you get to know these animals, it’s easy to see that there is no danger to the public.   Every animal is different.   Some only eat if they are hungry, others such as wolves, kill for the thrill of killing.   But a captive raised animal has never hunted for their food.   They don’t know how.   Should one of them escape from their home, you are in no danger.   They don’t want to leave their enclosures.   They are used to the routines they live in and have bonded to their caregivers.   In other words, a captive raised wild animal is more afraid of you than you are of them. 

When localities outlaw and ban previously legal animals, there is no other end for the animals but death.  There is nowhere else for these animals to go.   Activists demand that they be returned to the wild, but these animals have never known life in the wild.    Most privately owned animals in America today were born in captivity.  They don’t know any other life.   They are no more “wild” animals, than we are still cave men.  

The new flash point today is Skagit County, Washington.   Local bureaucrats passed a new ordinance last year outlawing the ownership of exotic animals such as wolves, cougars, foxes and some snakes.   Also located in Skagit County is a thirty year old business called Predators of the Heart owned by Dave Coburn.   Predators of the Heart (POTH) is the largest traveling exotic animal business in America with an impeccable safety record and licensed with the USDA.   For 30 years, Dave Coburn has visited schools, churches, libraries, and other events to educate people on his animals.  Overnight, dozens of his animals became illegal to own.  Illegal to keep alive.    No grandfather clause for Dave Coburn.   His choice is, pay a fine of $50,000 a day or kill two dozen animals.     These kinds of bureaucrat actions are happening all across America.   These animals have nowhere else to go.   Zoos and sanctuaries are already full of animals that have been outlawed in other states.   There is no more room at the inn.  

Coburn has already jumped through endless hoops that the Skagit County enforcers have made him perform.  He has filed applications, paid fees.   He has made modifications to his property that un-elected bureaucrats have demanded that he make.  Bureaucrats who have never cared for an exotic animal in their lives are writing regulations and enforcing them at the point of a gun.  The government just pockets the fees, no refunds, and denies his permits.    What is happening to Coburn is no different than what Ohio is doing to Kenny Hetrick and Tiger Ridge.    They arbitrarily make new standards of care to keep the owner jumping through hoops to meet a bar that can never be met.   Today an eight foot fence is legal.  Tomorrow the ordinance is changed to ten feet.   Next month it’s twelve feet.   Bureaucrats love to keep their targets broke and constantly under stress.   When challenged they will simply turn on the owner and proclaim to the media that “Joe American is out of compliance with our laws and has a long history of this.”   Or like just like propagandist Skagit County Commissioner Lisa Janicki said, “[P]ulling at heart strings isn’t fair play.  She calls the issue a matter of public safety.”   This is nothing more than a systemic and methodical destruction of the private property owner under the false flag of safety. 

Predators of the Heart is a private business with a long and successful history.   Legislators and bureaucrats do not have the right to outlaw a business just because they disagree with it.   Agendas do not belong in the government of “We the People.”  Supporters of POTH have set up a GoFundMe account to help raise money to fight back.  You can support them here. 

Katharine Dokken is a Public Affairs Specialist at The Cavalry Group and the  author of a new book, The Art of Terror:  Inside the Animal Rights Movement, available on Amazon. 

Follow Katharine and The Cavalry Group on Twitter:   @KatharineDokken  @TheCavalryGroup

You can also read this article on Joe4America: click here

Private Vigilante Squad Terrorizes Elderly Couple

On April 7^th in Kankakee County, a private animal rights vigilante group conducted a raid of an elderly couple, forcibly taking their business away from them.   The Animal Rescue Corps (ARC) is a private self-styled SWAT team run by high school dropout Scotlund Haisley who operates nationwide stealing animals from their legal owners and flipping them for resale.   Haisley who pays himself a yearly salary of $90,000+ out of ARC funds, claims he is simply an animal lover “saving” animals, but he has no legal authority for any of his actions.   In the Kankakee County raid, Haisley and his volunteer supporters accompanied two animal control officers to execute a search warrant on Adrian’s Puppy Paradise, owned by Adrian and Louise Gutierrez.   Animal rights activists claim the business is a puppy mill to justify their theft of private property.   The problem is, Kankakee County Animal Control Officers have no law enforcement authority to serve search warrants on licensed businesses either.    The search warrant and resulting raid was illegally carried out.   The resulting physical intimidation and coercion used to get this frail elderly couple to sign over their business to Haisley was also illegal. 

Fox 32 interviewed Haisley and quoted him as saying, “It is our belief she shouldn’t be in operation.  These conditions were extremely inhumane as well as illegal.” 

These activists would have you believe that the Gutierrez family deserve to lose their business in an armed SWAT style raid simply because they are opposed to dog breeding in America.   They throw around terms like puppy mill to sway your emotions and ignore the profit motive behind their actions.   ARC is run out of a UPS Mail Drop in Washington, DC, and cleared $465,388 in 2013, all tax free.   They do not run an animal shelter, have no law enforcement authority and founder Haisley has no documented education in animals.   What is illegal in this situation is ARC’s actions and the two animal control officers who participated in this SWAT raid of an elderly couple.

In most illegal raids like this across America, the animals are flipped and resold in less than a week while the thieves run marathon fundraising scams off the media coverage of a puppy mill bust.   Americans open their wallets and give donations of millions of dollars to animal rights groups believing they are helping to save a needy animal and the majority of which is simply pocketed by illiterate thugs like Haisley.

ARC is nothing more than a group of adrenaline junkies, led by a high school dropout, and backed by Hollywood money.   In fact, Haisley was sued over an illegal raid of a South Dakota dog breeder back in 2009.   In the court documents he admitted that he is in this business because it gets him better lap dances from strippers.   In another raid in 2011, Haisley stole an aviary of exotic birds in Tennessee and turned over some of the birds to one of his pet flipping resale partners called The Bailey Foundation of Maryland, run by Beth Lindenau.   Just over a year later, 40 dead animals were discovered in Lindenau’s home.   Haisley is on record saying that the bird raid in TN was justified because, he said, “These are the worst conditions for bird’s I’ve ever seen.”   He said nothing when his partner, Beth Lindenau was found to have killed some of them.  

Adrian’s Puppy Paradise was licensed and inspected by the Illinois Department of Agriculture, passing numerous government inspections over a fifteen year period.   If the Illinois Ag Department couldn’t find anything wrong with the Gutierrez business, then what right does Haisley have to run to the media and slander their reputations?  In the old days, Haisley would have been drawn and quartered as a thief.  Today he hangs out with Hollywood celebrities while his victims hide in their homes in fear.   

Katharine Dokken is a Public Affairs Specialist at The Cavalry Group and the  author of a new book, The Art of Terror:  Inside the Animal Rights Movement, available on Amazon. 

Follow Katharine and The Cavalry Group on Twitter:   @KatharineDokken  @TheCavalryGroup




You can read this article on Joe4America: Click here

Desperately Seeking Credibility, Pacelle Distributes Capitol Hill Memo

March 18, 2015

The statement below was distributed to Members of Congress and their staff on Capitol Hill this morning, March 18, 2015, by Wayne Pacelle, President & CEO of the Humane Society of the United States in an attempt to further cover up the truth about their lies and their betrayal to Americans.

In light of his lies during yesterday's testimony before the U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing about the Bipartisan Sportsman's Act of 2015, this Capitol Hill memo (below) seems par for the course of a person and organization scrambling to gain credibility.

The Cavalry Group Team

-------------------------

You may have received an email from a group trotting out a mixture of decades-old and false quotes about people associated with The Humane Society of the United States.  Independent news investigations have repeatedly exposed this PR and lobbying shop’s underhanded schemes of attacking public interest groups including Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Izaak Walton League and many others.  For more information on why we’re under attack, please visit whoattackshsus.org.

Here’s the truth about who we are:  The Humane Society of the United States and our affiliates are the leading provider of direct animal care through our veterinary services, rescues, sanctuaries, wildlife rehabilitation centers, and other programs.  We’re a charity, not a foundation, so we do the work directly, not exclusively by giving grants to other organizations; and we’ve always said we’re for the humane treatment of all animals, not just dogs and cats.  We’re also advocating for public and corporate policies to protect animals from mistreatment associated with puppy mills, animal fighting, horse soring, and marine-mammal slaughter, and other abuses.  We’ve been consistently rated as the nation’s most effective organization for animals, and our reach has improved the lives of billions of animals.  For more information about our work, please visit humanesociety.org.

 Sincerely,

Wayne Pacelle
President & CEO
The Humane Society of the United States

Winston Churchill Was Right

You're probably familiar with the Winston Churchill quote, "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."

The Cavalry Group has plenty of enemies. Why?  Because The Cavalry Group is standing up and standing firm to protect the livelihoods and private property of our members. Members made up of law abiding animal owners and animal related businesses.  

Let's not forget that the rule of law provides that all Americans are protected by the United States Constitution against illegal search and seizure of private property, and are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law based upon facts and evidence. Unfortunately, for animal owners and businesses today, false accusations, slander, intimidation, and wrongful prosecutions are becoming more and more prevalent.  

The animal rights zealots make their ideology no secret, and they promote their false propaganda and strategies to nudge public opinion to their point of view.  It's no stretch to figure out that what the zealots intend to accomplish with their lies and bully tactics is the abolition of animal ownership, animal related businesses, and ultimately private property. 

Ah... there. I said it! Private property.  The animal rights terrorists loathe the historic principle that animals are property. In fact, they detest that fact that private property is protected under the fundamental foundation of our U.S. Constitution -- and further reinforced under the Fourth, Fifth, and  Fourteenth Amendments.  Unfortunately if your Constitutional Rights go out the window because an animal is involved, then it isn’t a far reach to the point where government or animal rights extremists can ignore your Constitutional rights altogether.

The animal rights industry is a $400 billion machine intent on destroying animal related businesses, animal agriculture, and animal ownership while pushing a vegan agenda for all. You see it every day with new costly regulations based on emotion, not science being introduced at the local, state, and federal levels.  Attacks on pet stores, dog and cat breeders, horse breeders, horse events, carriage horses, livestock breeders, animal agriculture.  And the animal rights extremists are in the news everyday with quotes who know nothing about the businesses or industries that they attack, but who are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way.

 

These animal rights terrorists also despise the notion that people actually make a profit from breeding and selling animals. God forbid, people make a living working to raise and sell animals.  That explains a lot, don't you think?  Just look at the onslaught of the vilification of pet stores today and all the pet store bans popping up all across the U.S.  Not to mention the campaigns against dog breeders, carriage horses businesses, and animal agriculture.

The outcry from the animal rights zealots is never really about animal welfare,  but is more intent on tricking Americans into giving up their Constitutional rights, while destroying our animal heritage, and ultimately destroying the concept of private property. 

 So, let's recap! 

The Animal Rights Terrorists promote: 

•    Destruction of private property rights.

•    Destruction of free market and capitalism (making a living raising, breeding, working with animals.)

•    Destruction of the American way of life.

•    Destruction of animal agriculture.

•    Vilification of breeding all animals.

•    Vilification of hunting.

•    Vilification of animal confinement, animal use, and animal ownership. 

So with all that said, these recent Facebook posts by anonymous cowards who are animal rights extremists (below) and this petition calling to condemn The Cavalry Group, are full of nothing but hot air and propaganda.  The petition organizer got one thing right:  The Cavalry Group is most certainly an anti-animal rights organization, and proud of it! 

The Cavalry Group will continue to stand firm to protect the Constitutional and private property rights of our members all across the United States!

Mindy Patterson is the president of The Cavalry Group, a member based company protecting  and defending the Constitutional and private property rights of law abiding animal owners, animal related businesses, hunters, and agriculture concerns legally nationwide.