John A. Hoyt Dies at 80 John A. Hoyt, who made the Humane Society of the United States the largest anticruelty organization in the country during an era when changing cultural attitudes were greatly expanding the number of animal protection groups, died on April 15 in Fredericksburg, Va. The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare brain disorder, said his daughter Peggy Hoyt. Mr. Hoyt, who was president and chief executive of the Humane Society from 1970 to 1996, was best known for expanding its traditional stewardship over dogs and cats to include laboratory animals, livestock, wild horses, whales, endangered fish and rodeo bulls. The society's expanded agenda reflected both cultural sensitivity and public relations savvy in a period when environmentalism and the animal liberation and natural food movements were emerging, said Bernard Unti, a historian of the Humane Society. The new movements were expanding public consciousness, but also competing for contributions. "It was a rapidly changing landscape," Mr. Unti said, "and John made sure that the society blossomed while continuing to be itself." Mr. Hoyt also established the Humane Society as one of Washington's most sophisticated lobbying operations. He began campaigns to save porpoises and baby seals. He worked against fur trapping, sport hunting, roadside zoos, cockfighting and bullfighting, and fought to end unnecessarily painful lab experiments on rats, mice and chimpanzees. The suffering of livestock became a major focus of Humane Society lobbying in the mid-1970s, soon after Mr. Hoyt met Temple Grandin, the animal behaviorist, who was then developing a stress-reducing corral for young cattle being slaughtered for veal. The Humane Society financed research for a prototype of her famous double-rail restrainer system. "That system is in use in half the slaughterhouses in the country, and it probably would not have existed if not for John Hoyt," she said in an interview Friday. "He took the practical approach - "If we're gonna eat meat, well, let's make sure the animals don't suffer needlessly." " Mr. Hoyt was also an early proponent of laws against organized dogfighting. Lobbying efforts by the Humane Society beginning in the 1980s were instrumental in persuading 40 states to adopt laws making deliberate animal cruelty a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Those laws were considered instrumental in the passage of the 2007 Virginia law under which Michael Vick, the N.F.L. quarterback, was prosecuted for dogfighting. By its own accounting, the Humane Society grew to over 5 million members during Mr. Hoyt's tenure from 100,000. Its annual budget, which was under $1 million when he became president in 1970, had grown to about $50 million by the time he retired. When confrontational animal rights organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals emerged in the 1980s - criticizing organizations like the Humane Society for being too focused on fund-raising and for not recognizing the inherent equal rights of humans and animals - Mr. Hoyt vigorously defended his group's approach, which he described as "pragmatic idealism." He dismissed staff members he considered too sympathetic to the animal liberation movement, and in a speech at the society's 1988 annual conference refused to accept "censure for our willingness to accept compromise" or for the society's "organizational growth and financial success." John Arthur Hoyt was born March 30, 1932, in Marietta, Ohio, one of six children of Claremont and Margaret Hoyt. His father was an itinerant Baptist minister. Mr. Hoyt was ordained a Baptist minister, too, after graduating in 1957 from what is now Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester. He was serving as senior minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne, Ind., when he was recruited as president of the Humane Society by a friend who was a board member and an executive in the American Bible Society. At the time, he told his family it was "like leaving one church for another." Mr. Hoyt's survivors include his wife, Gertrude, and four daughters. Besides Peggy, they are Karen Willcox, Anne Williams and Julie Dorman. He is also survived by a brother, David, and four sisters, Carolyn Harman, Josephine Bero, Mary Griffes and Margaret Nasemann. The Humane Society was established in 1954 as a result of a schism within the American Humane Association, which was established in 1877 as a loose national federation, based in Denver, of animal rescue groups. While the leaders of the Humane Association were committed to remaining decentralized, the dissidents who founded the Humane Society believed that the cause required a national focus, federal legislation and a headquarters in Washington. During his tenure, Mr. Hoyt commuted to the society's L Street townhouse headquarters from a small farm in Fredericksburg, where he lived with his family and the many dogs, cats, horses and other animals that he and his daughters brought home on a regular basis, Peggy Hoyt said. Though he had no training in animal welfare when he began the job, Mr. Hoyt told interviewers that he had always loved animals, mainly because of the influence of his grandmother, a vegetarian who lived to be 106. "My grandmother had 40 pet sheep," he once said, "and each one had a name."