Dogged, or just a fanatic for animals?

The new watchdog of the animal kingdom has critics fretting. They warn that behind his John Kennedy Jr. good looks, gentle manner and boyish charm is a teeth-baring dogmatist whose hidden agenda is a scary brand of doctrinaire animal rights that for mainstream Americans would make “humane” feel like the food chain turned upside down.

Strong accusations. Wayne Pacelle, new president of the Humane Society of the United States, just grins. “They all go wild on me,” he says, adding that he has even received death threats. “My ex-boss

Pacelle vows to be “more aggressive” in pursuing the HSUS’ goals -- stopping mistreatment of livestock, decreasing the use of animals in research, protecting wildlife and fostering responsible pet care -- but says he’s a “reformist” and “not an abolitionist.”

He’s the guardian angel of animals, he says, not a misanthrope out to liberate all beasts at all costs.

What is it about Pacelle that has critics so astir?

At the HSUS building in downtown Washington, Pacelle’s corner office is streaming with sunlight. Dressed in a crisp teal suit, he looks more like a 38-year-old corporate Turk than a rabble-rousing activist. On his organized desk are pulpy cockfighting magazines arranged like the courtroom evidence they might become if Pacelle has his way.

“Look at it -- 112 pages! Ads for fighting birds!” says Pacelle, disgusted as he pages through Gamecock Magazine, one of three national monthly publications of the largely underground business.

A champion killer bird graces the cover. Most pages are advertising -- breeders and dealers nationwide selling “game birds” (“$1,500 a trio”) and accessories such as razor-sharp gaffs that strap to their legs, and drugs that thicken the blood to delay the birds’ bleeding to death.

Cockfighting is the kind of brazen animal abuse that ranks high on Pacelle’s to-do list.

“Most people think that cockfighting and dogfighting are relics of past times,” he says. But cockfighting is still legal in Louisiana and New Mexico, and Pacelle estimates that there are more than 100,000 cockfighters and tens of thousands of dogfighters in this country. “This is a barbaric and inhumane activity, and these people need to get a new hobby.”

In recent weeks, he has traveled to Louisiana to fight the hog-dog rodeo, where people set blood-lusting pit bulls loose on defenseless hogs. In Maine, he stoked support for a ballot initiative to ban bear-baiting -- hunters piling huge mounds of cow parts, jelly doughnuts and other food to attract bears, then shooting them from behind as they pig out, a practice that kills about 4,000 bears annually. In Denver, he campaigned for a ballot initiative that would have banned all use of wild animals in circuses and other entertainment. The initiative was defeated by about a 2-to-1 margin Tuesday.

And he ruffled feathers in December in editorials castigating Vice President Dick Cheney for participating in “canned” pheasant and duck-hunting events, where hundreds of farm-raised birds are released and hunters shoot them. “It’s pathetic,” says Pacelle. “It’s live target practice.”

That’s the kind of “aberrant animal cruelty” Pacelle is trying to stamp out. “Most Americans, if they viewed it objectively, would think that this is a repugnant activity that violates basic humane standards.”

Pacelle remembers from age 3 having deep empathy for animals.

“I had this basic sentiment that it was wrong to pick on the less powerful -- even if they had four legs or two wings,” he says.

His mother, Pat, attests to that: “From the time he was born almost, that was his dream -- the animals.”

Pacelle, who grew up in New Haven, Conn., watched all the TV nature shows and relentlessly read encyclopedia articles about animals. He could repeat nearly verbatim information about any species, says his older brother, Richard Pacelle Jr., a political science professor at Georgia Southern University.

Pacelle’s father, Dick, was one of the winningest high school football coaches in Connecticut. Pat was a secretary for an uncle’s construction business. Wayne was the youngest of four children. Like 65 million American families today, they had pets. But memories of his childhood dogs haunt Pacelle.

Brandy, the Labrador-golden retriever, was chained in the backyard. “It was a regular thing back then, but I always was a little uncomfortable about it,” he says. And Pacelle figured out years later that Randi, his quirky West Highland white terrier, came from the Midwestern puppy mills he now rants about. “There are millions of healthy, adoptable dogs in shelters that are fine dogs,” he says. “And shelters end up killing dogs because our society fails to provide homes to them and people fail to sterilize their animals properly.”

A history and environmental studies major at Yale, he decided his sophomore year to go vegetarian. “It started to get into my consciousness that a pig feels pain just as the dog feels pain,” he says.

Two months later, after reading Peter Singer’s seminal animal-rights bible, “Animal Liberation,” about industrial farming, he went vegan -- no meat, dairy products or eggs.

The summer before his junior year, he interned as a ranger at Isle Royale National Park, a wilderness archipelago in northern Lake Superior. For four months, he communed with untrammeled nature.

“I would go out at night on Lake Superior when it was completely still and the moon was full and it was a Thoreau-like experience,” he recalls wistfully. “You see the absence of the hand of humanity. You see this pristine environment, and it is absolutely magical. At that point, I just kind of dedicated myself.”

Back at Yale, Pacelle started the Student Animal Rights Coalition. Members demonstrated against fur stores and the Yale Medical School’s use of animals in research. “I got vegan meals instituted into the dining hall system,” he says with pride.

Pacelle also started connecting with movement leaders, including the late Cleveland Amory, the curmudgeonly author who founded Fund for Animals in 1967.

After graduation in 1987, he wrote for a couple of years for Animal Agenda, the movement’s main magazine, then was hired by Amory as Fund’s 23-year-old national director. Five years later, the Humane Society hired him to be its vice president of communications and government affairs.

“I thought it was a coup because already at that point, Wayne was establishing himself as a leader in the animal-protection movement,” says Paul Irwin, the former HSUS chief executive who groomed Pacelle to take his place. “I wanted him to be the face and the voice of the Humane Society.”

In June, Pacelle succeeded Irwin, who had spent 28 years turning HSUS into the largest and richest animal-advocacy organization in the world, with 8 million members and $80 million in revenue last year. Pacelle took charge, promising to use those deep pockets to take the HSUS into a new era of animal-protection advocacy. “I think they wanted the aggressive approach,” he says. “They wanted someone who was going to think things up. And they got him.”

Pacelle and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) are huddled in the lawmaker’s office at the Russell Senate Office Building one morning in mid-July. They’re talking over the prospects for two bills: one to ban exporting horses for human consumption, the other to make it a felony to transport animals across state lines for the purpose of fighting.

“It’s not just a sick hobby where they get their jollies from watching animals attack each other -- these are bad people in a lot of other ways,” says Ensign, a conservative Republican and a veterinarian who has been one of the Humane Society’s best friends in Congress.

“People like Wayne, what they do is go around and educate,” says Ensign. “What he does is represent people who love animals around the country and get the membership to say, ‘Hey, this is important to us’ and ‘Please pay attention.’ It’s true grass-roots lobbying.”

Pacelle also has been one of the most outspoken opponents of violence in the movement. More than 50 organizations attended the Animal Rights 2004 conference here last month, but not HSUS. Pacelle pulled the group out a couple of years ago because some speakers advocated violence.

“What I represent is mainstream approaches and tactics, even though personally, in the way I live my life, I’m a little more orthodox,” Pacelle says. “I don’t believe there’s going to be any revolutions. I believe it’s going to be a slow process of people seeing alternatives, accepting them and using them.”

Yes, he used to be on the edge. “My views have evolved,” he says. “I’m not the same person I was in 1987. I was definitely less tolerant.” Today, “if I was viewed as just a complete flamethrower, I would never be able to get bills passed in Congress.”