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
Too many, particularly on the political center and center-left, discard hunting as something done by conservative gun nuts and either completely ignore livestock or want to abolish the practice of keeping livestock entirely.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently who pointed out that the decline of hunting as an activity has really damaged wildlife conservation NGOs because so much of their funding base came from hunters.
Meanwhile there is a significant question in Canada about Indigenous right to hunt and fish and how enclosure of land and Canadian state regulation has violated these treaty rights.
And, of course, permaculture often depends on the integration of both livestock and wild animals into the constructed ecosystem. Our principal source of fertilizer is chicken droppings. As a result, we don't need to use nitrogenated fertilizer, and we recycle food waste.
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.
I should really write an essay (or more) about all of this stuff but I know it's a rabbit hole I could live in for the rest of my life and not be satisfied with how well I explained it.
Yeah, it's pretty clearly a metaphor for "I will kill homeless people/immigrant children/annoying college students/whatever" but her target audience is not known for their keen literary analysis and also
I can't emphasize this enough
she admitted to shooting a puppy in the face.
It's a small relief to see people on both sides of the aisle condemning this, though there's no shortage of people who are taking the "fragile liberal snowflakes won't even shoot their dogs for being a mild disappointment" route
Botched her shot and didn't even have the foresight to bring additional rounds with her from the car. Just so fucking.... thoughtless, sloppy, incompetent, calous, irresponsible and cruel.
