Heifer International? Hell No

To the Board of Directors, Heifer International:

I have received your slick gift catalog, "the most important gift catalog in the world" no less, and I am shocked by the dishonesty of your claims.

First of all, the idea of giving goats, ducks, water buffalo, pigs, cows or other "food" or draft animals to third world families to help them toward self-sufficiency is a fallacy. There are animals to be obtained cheaply in most countries that are conducive to a farm economy... Romania, Cambodia, Peru, Rwanda, anywhere. If, however, a person cannot save enough money to buy a couple of chickens or a piglet then he or she shouldn't be "given" an animal.  Feeding, sheltering, veterinary care ... cost money, and without them the animal, i.e., the gift dies. The family is as poor as before and animals have suffered needlessly.

Your catalog pictures a variety of happy people of every race in rapturous communion with the animals they've received from your generous donors (pig $120, water buffalo $250, The Ark [two of "everything"] $5,000, etc.). The animal enclosures look spacious and clean... why, some of the animals even wear flower garlands. Get real! If you have traveled to Mexico, or even the back roads of Arkansas, you know damn well that's not how animals are kept. It's far worse in the Middle East, Africa, the Orient ... where the concept of animal welfare is alien, where there are no laws to protect animals, where people still live like animals themselves. The animals you falsely portray in conditions too idyllic for America, are slaughtered inhumanely right away... if they are lucky. Else they will die of neglect, abuse, and disease.

And, like it or not, the family in Nicaragua or the Philippines, will still be dirt poor.

Why? Because poverty doesn't happen by divine fiat, or capitalistic injustices, or climate changes, or lack of a heifer to milk, but because in much of the world people are incapable of extracting themselves from the hell they, and no one else but they, have created for themselves. Corrupt leaders rob and starve their own people; tribalism and unbridled birth rates keep the people brutish and sick by design in places where, according to your gift catalog, a couple of rabbits or a camel will propell them to a better lifestyle... And this is assuming the local strongman doesn't confiscate the living gift and have a great dinner.

Such bullshit as you foist on the naive would be comical, were it not for the certainty that all the animals you provide with donors' funds suffer and die miserably. How dare you cause so much pain under the guise of altruism!?

At the human level, you fool both your contributors and the hapless thirdworlders. This is a Christmas tragedy-cum-swindle for which you, Heifer International in Little Rock, Arkansas, are responsible. All I can do is expose you, but that I will do until you drop all animal gifts from your offerings.

Dolores Proubasta

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anne 
Date: Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: Heifer Intl lies


Dear Dolores,

BRAVO!!!!!! THANK YOU for blasting these charlatans so eloquently!!!!!

We too received their catalog, and my husband, Deet, checked out Heifer Intl on some of the websites that rank charities for their fiscal efficiency and the honesty of their claims. They ranked very low -- no surprise. But you really jump to the HEART of the whole matter -- BLESS YOU!!

Admiringly,

Anne