Imagine if someone worked every day of his life to shut down your business.

Yours is a perfectly legal enterprise, held to the highest standard. You and your family have spent years building it, investing thousands of dollars and striving each day to make it better than the day before.

Still, your adversary lurks, spinning half-truths as fact, exploiting exceptions as the rule and launching attacks under the cloak of law and order.

Sound improbable? Not if you’re one of roughly 200,000 Texans making a living on a livestock operation.

Theirs is a well-respected, noble profession, providing food for an ever-increasing world population.

The villains are many and varied. But chief among them are groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States.

I need to interject two points. First, if vegetables are your thing, I’m not knocking it. I like them, too. I just prefer mine as a side dish.

Second, the Humane Society has nothing to do with local humane societies, the folks who care for our lost, stray or unwanted cats and dogs. Local animal shelters provide an admirable, valued and needed service.

But the group doesn’t mind the name confusion. In fact, it banks on it, pilfering wallets in the name of fuzzy kittens and forsaken puppies to accomplish what its director, Wayne Purcell, has brazenly described as an end to animal agriculture in our country.

What’s unsettling is the new method of attack. Where PETA fanatics would toss paint on furs or parade about in protest, the Humane Society took a more subtle approach.

Rather than picket some place of business, it bought shares of the publicly traded parent companies. Stock in hand, its representatives changed the rules.

Suddenly, that tried-and-true buyer of goods only accepts eggs from certain types of chickens or burgers from cows that keep a certain diet.

It can be a vast change for ranchers, often at considerable personal expense.

What the Humane Society doesn’t accomplish in board rooms, it takes to state houses across our country. Nearly a dozen states have passed laws backed by the group in recent years to limit or otherwise ban certain animal-husbandry practices.

Thankfully, Texas has a few protections in place. Not nearly enough, most ranchers will agree.

Why? Cold hard cash. The Humane Society has loads of it.

The latest contribution reports, released in January 2010, show the group collected more than $86 million in 2009, a year in which many worked hard just to keep their jobs.

Of that, $20 million funded the onslaught of agriculture, while $24 million went to more fundraising.

That’s roughly one-quarter of every dollar raised spent to make more money. Another two dimes go to putting your friends and neighbors out of business.

That’s scary. Even scarier is that these groups claim they do what they do for the care and welfare of helpless animals.

But good animal care is more than some slogan.

It’s waking up on a cold night to help a momma cow deliver her first calf. It’s spending every weekend and holiday to keep the water trough full and hay rack from going empty. It’s real and seen every day on every ranch I’ve ever visited.

Truth is, good animal care also is good business. Happy animals are healthy animals. For a livestock producer, healthy animals pay the bills.

So whom do you trust? Some group trying hard to take certain foods off your plate, or that fellow down the road who does his best daily so that his family — even yours and mine — has plenty to put on ours?

It should be a no-brainer.

Bobby Horecka lives in China Spring with his wife and three children. He writes for the Texas Farm Bureau’s print publications, online news service and video projects.