Shooting multiple animals with a shotgun within easy distance of people working and children getting off a school bus, deranged behavior on like six levels
South Dakota's my home state, and Kristi Noem is only lucky she's the governor of a state of 900,000 because if she had a higher national profile she would be one of the most hated women in America.
Like I'm a hobby farmer. Mostly we sell eggs and give away extra produce to the community fridge but do you know what I learned fast? There are farm work clothes and there are good clothes and you expect the farm work clothes to get ripped and dirty. That is why you keep clothes for both.
The idea of killing a goat in a really painful way because he had the audacity to do goat stuff.... she doesn't want to farm. She wants paper machee props of farm life.
You know what is a key thing that is drilled into responsible hunters? You practice marksmanship so that you don't cause the animals you hunt undue pain with botched shots. You use weapons appropriate to the animal you're hunting. You don't fire a gun near random people or houses.
You don't hunt in a fucking gravel pit during working hours for the same reasons you don't strap a buck to the hood of your truck and parade it through town.
I just think about how she's using this as an allegory for how we're returning to "the old ways" of politics and crowing about how "honest and politically incorrect" she is. The message seems clear: if you annoy me or aren't immediately useful, I should be able to kill you with impunity
This is a reason that the left needs to start taking a clear look at rural issues at a deeper level than aesthetics. There is ethically and epistemologically complex stuff surrounding questions of livestock QoL and hunting / conservation. Many of these could be approached through collectivist lenses
The class (and, relatedly, racial) tensions at the roots of both the conservation and animal welfare movements as they currently exist are kinda underdiscussed and it results in a lot of leftists being in a weak position when they tackle these issues.
There is also gender at play. I mean, back when it was common to throw paint on furs, it wasn't so common to throw paint on leathers. And, at that time, furs were mostly worn by women while leather was worn more by men.
Oh don't get me started on gender and bird conservation and feather hats. We'll be here fifteen years and I have a picture of a muff made out of a whole seagull.
