The Humane Society and Ag slug it out over animal rights

Around lunchtime on February 5 in Vale, South Dakota, a 33-year-old cattle rancher finished a morning of blogging, then stepped outside with a bottle of wine and a video camera. "Hello, my name is Troy Hadrick. I'm a fifth-generation United States rancher in South Dakota," he ad-libbed. "I recently found out that Yellow Tail wines is going to be donating $100,000 to the wealthiest animal-rights organization in the world, the Humane Society of the United States — a group who is actively trying to put farmers and ranchers out of business in this country." Hadrick said he couldn't support such a company. "This is the only thing I know to do now with this last bottle of Yellow Tail wine that was in our house." In his cowboy hat and Carhartt jacket, Hadrick cocked the bottle, flicked his wrist and sent the contents pouring to the snow-covered earth like a stream of piss. Back online that night, he was shocked by the viewing stats for his first Internet video. First it was 500. Then several thousand. The tally kept climbing. Within two weeks, the Australia-based wine giant announced that it was rescinding the remainder of its $300,000 pledge to the Washington, D.C.-based Humane Society. A week later, Tennessee-based Pilot Travel Centers announced that it would stop collecting Humane Society donations at its rest stops. Then Dallas-based Mary Kay cosmetics publicly clarified that a personal donation by an employee's wife to the Humane Society had been misconstrued by the group as a corporate sponsorship. Hadrick's social-media sensation represented a tipping point in a battle that has seen food producers playing defense for nearly a decade — farmers vs. activists, agriculture vs. animal rights...more