Best Friends Animal Society’s Dark, Disturbing History

Peta

Members of a cult classified as satanic created Best Friends Animal Society after the group decided that the “best way to raise money” would be “based on taking care of animals”.

Many individuals in the organization have disturbing pasts, including documented histories of mismanaging shelters.

Best Friends Animal Society pushes for policies that harm animals and endanger the public.

According to historians of religion, researchers, and FBI reports, the founding members of Best Friends formed a religious group called The Process Church of the Final Judgment (Process Church) in the U.K., which the FBI classified as a Satanic cult. The group “preached that the world would be ending in 2000 and that Satan and Christ would be united.” Members wore “dramatic black cloaks, adorned with the swastika-like ‘P’ symbol, and the ‘Sabbatic Goat.’”

In the 1980s, according to FBI records, the group decided that the “best way to raise money” would be “based on taking care of animals” to appeal to people’s emotions. In 1991, members disbanded the religious cult and created Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, now doing business as Best Friends Animal Society.

According to a 2020 ReligionNews.com article about a man who escaped from the cult:

After being accused of brainwashing its members, about 30 sect members—and six German shepherds—left England, traveling first to the Bahamas and later to a remote Mexican village. The sect eventually settled in the United States, setting up branches in Boston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Dallas, Chicago, and other cities, and growing to about 150 people.

Best Friends Animal Society has for years misled the public, promising Americans a “no-kill” nation by 2025.

A recent opinion piece by the organization’s CEO conceded that its position is that “keeping pets out of shelters should be a first-choice management protocol.” This philosophy, which Best Friends Animal Society has pressured shelters across the nation to embrace, has deprived countless animals and people who care about them of desperately needed help.

Using bullying tactics and personal attacks, including the frequent use of the divisive term “no kill” and referring to compassionate euthanasia in animal shelters as “killing,” Best Friends Animal Society has created a culture of hate and resentment toward individuals who dedicate their lives to helping homeless animals, including by alleviating their suffering when that is the most humane option.

Due to funding from well-meaning, caring people like you, who may have believed that “no kill” by 2025 was a genuine promise, the organization’s influence has been significant, and the group has spawned additional, similar if less well-known entities that push the same harmful policies, which lead to terrible animal suffering and even more death—though not painless or peaceful.

Animals left out of shelter statistics may not be counted, but they count.

‘Best Friends’ Spreads Its Agenda

Members of the former cult now profess to be experts in animal care and sheltering and push shelters across the country to adopt their beliefs. However, their recommendations harm animals and endanger the public, because their number one priority is statistics, not animals. Their policy recommendations include:

“Open adoptions” (giving away animals to anyone who will take them, without any effort to ensure that they can provide a loving, responsible, and safe home), including releasing cats and dogs to those who may have violent criminal histories, including charges of cruelty to animals.

Releasing for adoption aggressive dogs with significant bite histories (Even when an animal’s guardian has requested euthanasia following a fatal attack, Best Friends recommends evaluating the animal for adoption, which not only endangers the public but also results in fewer animals being adopted into good homes because it makes the public leery of adopting any animals from shelters. Such practices destroy the good reputation that shelters have worked hard to build over the years.)

Doing away with any manner of behavior assessments, a vital tool used by many shelters to try to prevent dangerous animals from being released to unsuspecting members of the public (This recommendation endangers residents and creates a serious liability for local governments, resulting in numerous lawsuits against Best Friends and other groups that implement its policies.)

Recommending trap-neuter-release (TNR) programs and/or refusing to accept cats—including cats who have not been sterilized or vaccinated and those who are social and have never lived outdoors—just to keep cats out of shelters at any cost to their life or welfare (Cats abandoned in these ways reproduce, exponentially worsening the overpopulation crisis, and suffer, often before dying violently. Best Friends even acknowledges that TNR may violate local ordinances yet still recommends it. Releasing cats, even to the same area where they were picked up, without ensuring that they are provided with adequate care, is considered animal abandonment in most jurisdictions.)

Encouraging vague language in local ordinances, such as changing the word “shall” to “may,” in order to allow agencies to be derelict and refuse to pick up lost or abandoned animals, including those who may be ailing, injured, aggressive, or in imminent danger

Best Friends gives awards and recognitions to shelters based on statistics alone, even applauding facilities that engage in cruel practices. In Wyoming, for example, Best Friends “honored” a municipal facility for reaching “no-kill” status, even though it uses a gas chamber to kill animals. Gas poisoning is a known inhumane method of killing considered so cruel that it has been banned in dozens of states. It can take up to 25 minutes, during which panicked animals gasp for breath, try to claw their way out, and attack other animals who are trapped in the chamber with them. The Wyoming facility has refused to switch to using humane methods exclusively, despite offers from PETA and others to cover the costs.

Gas chamber used for dogs and cats

Gas chambers, like this one that was used in North Carolina, are inhumane—and have been outlawed in that state.

The Dark Past of Best Friends’ Leaders

Best Friends fills its ranks with individuals it hires to act as “experts” and tell municipal animal shelters how they should operate. But many of these individuals have disturbing pasts, including documented histories of mismanaging shelters.

“I came in and changed everything overnight. We got rid of all adoption policies.”

—Makena Yarbrough, former executive director of Lynchburg Humane Society in Virginia and currently a senior director of regional programs for Best Friends Animal Society

For example, Makena Yarbrough, senior director of regional programs for Best Friends, advises communities on how to operate animal shelters. But serious allegations of neglect surrounded her tenure as executive director of the Lynchburg Humane Society in Virginia. Under a contract, Lynchburg Humane also operated the county animal shelter, the Pittsylvania Pet Center. During Yarbrough’s directorship, state authorities reportedly notified Pittsylvania’s shelter that it “could be subjected to fines of up to $65,250” in relation to animal deaths and substandard conditions. Healthy dogs were reportedly found “stored in a designated isolation room meant to separate the sick from healthy.” Records show that animals were found dead in cluttered rooms at the facility and that animals had starved to death while in the county’s custody.

“No-kill” policies typically result in inhumane, crowded conditions, as they did at this facility (photo for representative purposes only)

Another individual listed by Best Friends as “manager, shelter collaborative program” was hired by the group after acting as “director of lifesaving outcomes” at the Palm Valley Animal Society in Texas. That facility implemented Best Friends’ recommended policies and quickly faced a lawsuit after a dog adopted from the facility seriously mauled a child.

Leaving animals to reproduce on the streets worsens the crisis, and can endanger residents.

A Best Friends “senior manager of national shelter support” was hired by the group after working at LifeLine Animal Project, which operates the DeKalb County Animal Shelter in Georgia. Media reports have described the county shelter as being “plagued by repeated issues,” including severe crowding, warehousing, and allowing animals to die slowly in cages (a common practice among facilities that focus on “live release” statistics over the welfare of animals in their custody).

An individual Best Friends lists as “director, East regions” resigned from Animal Care & Control Team Philly in Pennsylvania, where she was executive director, following disputes with volunteers and allegations of cruelty. A petition demanding her resignation alleged that animals had been mistreated, conditions had deteriorated, employees had quit, and the organization had been hostile to volunteers. A state inspector who visited the facility found the sanitary conditions “unsatisfactory,” noting, “A referral for cruelty was made based on the sanitation issues during this inspection” [emphasis added].

Paula Powell was hired and acted as a Best Friends regional senior manager after leaving the municipal shelter in El Paso in utter chaos.

The Devil’s in the Details

When Best Friends operatives “embed” themselves in shelters, the public isn’t likely to hear about all of the fallout—at least not quickly. Best Friends evidently uses non-disparagement agreements, likely to hinder lawsuits and prevent communities and individuals from negatively reporting on the results of its destructive programs.

For example, a grant agreement between Best Friends and a California county states, “Recipient agrees not to disparage BFAS (Best Friends Animal Society) during the grant period and for three years following the last disbursement from BFAS (Best Friends Animal Society) to Recipient.” The contract includes an indemnity agreement that “holds BFAS (Best Friends Animal Society) harmless” in the event of “bodily injury, personal injury, illness, death, property damage, or other losses of any kind or nature whatsoever” as a result of its programs.

A prospective foster caregiver for Best Friends’ Los Angeles shelter opted not to sign a contract that included non-disparagement and indemnity clauses that extended to all their family members, including the family’s children.

This begs the question: What, exactly, is Best Friends so determined to keep quiet? 

https://www.peta.org/features/best-friends-animal-society/disturbing-history/

When a Toronto church grant caused all hell to break loose in 1972

Capes. Snakes. Pentagrams. The Process Church of the Final Judgment shocked Toronto the Good — and so did the funding it got from the Liberals


Nate Hendley
TVO
October 07, 2021

On March 1, 1972, MP Wallace Nesbitt, a Progressive Conservative representing Oxford, stood in the House of Commons and demanded to know why the Liberals were funding Satanism in Toronto.

The Liberal government had provided grant money to a religious group “widely reported to promote devil worship with attendant rites and rituals,” said Nesbitt.

The group in question was the Toronto chapter of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a small sect that was the subject of intense media scrutiny and high-level debate during its brief existence. Church followers (called Processeans) did not engage in devil worship, but the group’s offbeat beliefs and eye-catching outfits made such a misunderstanding all but inevitable.

Church leaders wore dark, ankle-length capes and modified crucifixes featuring snake imagery. The Church was partial to the Goat of Mendes emblem, which consists of a goat’s head in a pentagram (“a Satan symbol” according to a Toronto Star profile about the group). Male leaders had long hair and beards, giving them an austere, Rasputin-like appearance.

“Anyone who walks down Yonge Street knows them — bright-eyed young people in long capes of black or blue — wearing strange images of a serpent around their necks,” wrote the Globe on February 5, 1973.

The Process Church was started in 1963 in the United Kingdom by Robert de Grimston and Mary Ann MacLean (the couple later married). Originally a therapeutic movement called Compulsions Analysis, the group transformed into an eclectic religious order with branches in London, Rome, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco, among other cities. The Toronto chapter was founded in early 1971. That same year, Process Church co-founders de Grimston and MacLean briefly lived in Toronto.

The Process Church adhered to “a complicated theology,” as the Globe and Mail put it. Explained simply, Processeans believed that God consisted of three separate deities: Lucifer, Satan, and Jehovah. The Church extended the Christian concept of loving your enemy to include the devil and espoused an apocalyptic “the end is nigh” philosophy.

In his extensive writings, de Grimston insisted that the Process Church did not worship demons (Did the trinity at the center of the faith represent literal gods, or were they symbols of common personality traits? Members expressed different views). The public found such theological nuances hard to grasp, and the press usually portrayed the order as a bizarre Satanic coven (“Process Church Sees Satan’s Force as ‘Positive, Vital’” stated a May 16, 1973, Toronto Star headline).

Scurrilous rumours connected the Church to terrible people. There were accusations that Process doctrine had inspired Charles Manson (it hadn’t, although the sect interviewed Manson for Process, the Church’s magazine). Serial killer David Berkowitz, who terrorized New York City in the mid-1970s under the alias “the Son of Sam” was said to be a member (a dubious assertion at best).

While these murderous connections were unfounded, the Church might have been guilty of other sins. The book, Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment chronicled accounts of sexual and psychological abuse in various chapters around the world. Author Timothy Wyllie (a former Process Church member in Toronto and other locales) described the sect as rigid and authoritarian.

The Toronto chapter featured about half a dozen full-time members at first (the order would later claim hundreds of adherents). Church members proselytized on downtown sidewalks and sold books and copies of Process magazine. This slick publication featured interviews with such celebrities as Mick Jagger and articles about esoteric topics. The Toronto branch also operated a drop-in centre and coffee house out of residences at 94 and 99 Gloucester Street. The Church hosted religious services, concerts, and seminars about telepathy that were open to the public.

Initially, things went well: “To our relief [the Toronto branch] quickly became successful. Canadians were generous with us on the street and appeared to enjoy our magazine and started turning up at our Coffee House in droves,” wrote Wyllie.

Prominent followers included funk pioneer George Clinton. Process members got to hang out with the musical genius at a Toronto recording studio at a time when Clinton, who headed the band Funkadelic, was enamoured with the sect.

For all this energetic activity, it took a government grant to propel the Toronto chapter to national notoriety.

In 1972, it was revealed that the Process Church in Toronto had received $25,900 in grant money from the Local Initiatives Program. The LIP had been established by the Liberal government to fund cultural and community projects around the country. The Process Church said the funds went to pay for employees at its drop-in centre.

When news of this grant became public, all hell broke loose — so to speak. The PCs bombarded the Liberals with pointed questions. In response to MP Wally Nesbitt, Acting Prime Minister Mitchell Sharp said the grant application “was endorsed” by well-respected organizations including the YMCA, the Doctors Hospital in Toronto, the Department of Health (now the Ontario Ministry of Health), and the Bank of Montreal.

These groups were quick to clarify that they had not endorsed the Process Church per se, but merely signed off on the grant request. Ontario health minister Richard Potter “disowned” a letter from his ministry supporting the grant, stating it had been “written by a junior member of the departmental staff without [his] authority,” wrote the Globe on March 4, 1972.

In similar fashion, the Doctors Hospital said all it had provided was a letter acknowledging that Process Church members performed volunteer work for the organization. (According to the Globe and Mail, “S.J.Johnston, administer of the Doctors Hospital, said his director of volunteers gave a standard letter of acknowledgement after two members of the sect spent one morning a week for seven weeks working with children in the hospital … He said there was no religious overtone to the volunteer’s work.”)

Denying that they had knowingly funded Satanism, the Liberals held firm and “rejected the suggestion that a group’s religious affiliation should be a criterion on whether or not it should get an LIP grant,” wrote the Globe.

In late March 1972, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau told the Commons that “the offices of the local initiatives program gave the [Process Church] grant in good faith to people who seemed to be engaged in doing some good work.”

The Tories wouldn’t let the matter go; during a Commons committee meeting in early 1973, Erik Nielsen (PC-Yukon) read out “two affidavits alleging that a Toronto coffee-house and drop-in centre financed by the Local Initiatives Program last year [and run by the Process Church] was a haven for addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, and drug traffickers,” stated the Ottawa Citizen.

Toronto Processeans refuted these charges, as well as accusations of devil-worship.

If Wyllie’s account in Love, Sex, Fear, Death is correct, the real grant scandal had more to do with deception than drugs and demonology.

According to Wyllie, a colleague called Phineas discovered “a Canadian government program that promised substantial grants for social work. Without really believing we’d get it, Phineas and I filled in their forms, carefully bending the facts to fulfill the government’s requirements.”

To the chapter’s surprise, the grant was approved. The group quickly transformed the basement of its coffee house into a soup kitchen and began offering free meals to homeless people. Old clothing was gathered and given away to the destitute. The group also counselled drug addicts. In truth, the chapter’s anti-poverty mission was “a half-hearted effort done mainly by us to justify the grant and to enhance our public image,” wrote Wyllie.

Extensive news coverage about the grant did raise the group’s profile. The chapter’s leaders were extensively interviewed by the media; a rock band featuring Toronto Processeans members played regular gigs at Process Church headquarters and other venues.

Despite this burst of publicity, the church’s strange theology hindered mainstream acceptance — in Toronto and elsewhere.

By 1974, the Process Church around the world was engulfed in crisis. Founders de Grimston and MacLean had a falling out, and the latter seized control of the organization. The group changed its name to the Foundation Church of the Millennium, ditched the “love your enemy — the devil” doctrine, and embraced a more mainstream Christian faith. The rebranding didn’t work, and the order faded into obscurity. In 1993, the church adopted another new identity, becoming Best Friends, a non-profit group devoted to animal care.

The Process Church continues to attract notice. The Netflix series The Sons of Sam revived the shaky claim that serial killer David Berkowitz was a member. The church was also profiled in a 2015 documentary called Sympathy for the Devil.

As for the LIP grant — which expired in September 1972 — Wyllie wrote that “credit must go to the Trudeau government in that they didn’t back down, but from our point of view, it just kept all the unpleasant publicity in the news that much longer.”

Unpleasant publicity that made it all but impossible for a fledgling sect with a radical theology to gain a mass following in Toronto the Good.

Sources: the March 27, 1972, edition of the Calgary Herald; the April 17, 1971, February 5, 1973, March 4, 1972, March 9, 1972, March 24, 1973, May 30, 1974, and December 5, 1974, editions of the Globe and Mail; the March 2, 1972, edition of the Leader-Post; Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House: 2009); the February 2, 1973, and March 2, 1972, editions of the Ottawa Citizen; the May 22, 1971, edition of the Ottawa Journal; the May 16, 1973 and May 22, 1971, editions of the Toronto Star; The Ultimate Evil: The Search for the Sons of Sam by Maury Terry (Quirk Books: 1987).

Also: Wallace Nesbit (PC - Oxford) and the Honourable Mitchell Sharp (Acting Prime Minister), House of Commons Debate, Manpower — Local Initiatives Program, Ottawa, March 1, 1972.

The Right Honourable Pierre Trudeau (Prime Minister), House of Commons Debate, Manpower ‚—Local Initiatives Program — Grant to Process Church of the Final Judgement, Ottawa, March 22, 1972.

Local Initiatives Program (LIP), Connexipedia website



Nate Hendley

Description

Nate Hendley is a Toronto-based journalist and author who has written several books, primarily in the true-crime genre.


https://www.tvo.org/article/when-a-toronto-church-grant-caused-all-hell-to-break-loose-in-1972