I’ll say one thing for the Humane Society of the United States: These guys are everywhere. You can’t turn on Fox News without seeing their ads with the adorable cats and dogs locked in cages at animal shelters, their sad eyes pleading for your $19 per month. It’s a compelling pitch—puppies are popular—but this “Humane Society” is five times more likely to fund an executive’s retirement fund than a hands-on pet shelter.

Numbers don’t lie: HSUS’s 2008 tax return shows $450,000 for hands-on shelters, and $2.5 million for pensions.

This means two things. First, the save-the-chickens movement insiders in HSUS’s top ranks plan to be hassling you long enough to retire on their laurels. And second, they’re getting cocky.

HSUS president Wayne Pacelle and his vegan cabal surely understand that Americans wouldn’t be so eager to donate $100 million every year if they understood the group’s real agenda.

I don’t know about you, but if I donated money to help some puppies find a new home, I’d be pretty ticked off to learn that I was actually bankrolling a lobby that wants to put ranchers and medical researchers out of business, ban hunting and fishing, and give hogs the legal right to sue farmers.

HSUS even had the nerve to beg for money to save animals displaced by the Haitian earthquake disaster. Personally, I believe saving human lives should come before saving dogs and cats. This might be controversial inside the animal rights industry, but there it is.

But that’s not the truly offensive part. Some of HSUS’s Haiti-related fundraising efforts were works of fiction.

Shortly after the quake, Lloyd Brown from Dade County, Florida, deployed to Haiti with HSUS’s own international arm, Humane Society International. He told a horse enthusiast magazine that his team determined nothing could be done to help animals there.

Even some hard-core vegan activists are fingering HSUS. One, who works for a PETA-style group called Friends of Animals, denounced HSUS for running “misleading campaigns with exaggerated figures.”

We’re accustomed to hearing this sort of condemnation directed at PETA and its band of wide-eyed weirdos, but HSUS is every bit as dangerous. Maybe more so.

Sure, PETA openly supports the ugly underbelly of the animal rights industry. But when PETA leaders and Animal Liberation Front radicals get tired of wearing ski masks and promoting arson, some of them settle down with cushy desk jobs at HSUS.

Wonder who’s leading HSUS’s shareholder activism program? Former PETA shareholder campaign manager Matthew Prescott.

And consider the case of attorney Leana Stormont, also formerly with PETA, who was subpoenaed in January by a federal grand jury to testify regarding a 2004 Animal Liberation Front assault on a research lab at the University of Iowa. The attack caused about $450,000 in damage. One activist has already been convicted on terrorism charges.

Now she’s an HSUS attorney, busily trying to sue egg farmers back to the Stone Age.

There’s more beneath the surface, but here’s the bottom line: HSUS does not exist to help abandoned pets, and its donors are slowly but surely getting the joke. Radical extremism is alive and well in America—and some of the ringleaders wear suits.

Richard Berman is president of Berman & Co., a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm.