No shade on cats, but I do feel like leftist spaces are dominated by cat people. But I’ve always loved dogs.
Edit: Jesus Christ I just wanted to see some cute dog pics, now I’ve waken up to find I started a struggle session. Can y’all be normal???
No shade on cats, but I do feel like leftist spaces are dominated by cat people. But I’ve always loved dogs.
Edit: Jesus Christ I just wanted to see some cute dog pics, now I’ve waken up to find I started a struggle session. Can y’all be normal???
Do cats work or survive solely on the the benefits of the surplus labor of their owned human?
Both cats and dogs were kept because their function historically, cats for mostly pest control and dogs for guarding and herding. Nowadays both are kept for companionship which should not to be minimized as an important function either.
Real question is where to stand on dogs kept for hunting mostly by aristocracy and then by bourgoise for sport. Not to even mention dogs used by colonizing forces such as Spanish for tracking and subduing people.
As Marx notes in 18th of Brumaire, there is such a thing as lumpenised aristocrats, who align themselves with capital. This is the cat. Dogs are lumpenised proletariat.
I’m so tired of this rhetoric that hunting is antithetical to leftism and that keeping dogs for hunting (and hunting in general) is only accessible to the bourgeois and is also somehow antithetical to leftism.
If any of you chronically online, city-dwelling goofs actually took some time to get to know hunters, you’d learn a thing or two about the working class.
I personally know hunters and they all suck, collectively and individually. Not a single one of them is meaningfully “Working class”
That’s partially because hunting is a terribly inefficient way of getting calories, both for animals and for people. For all of those preppers out there who think their stockpiles of ammo is going to help them hunt after societal breakdown, and they still don’t know how to can, their ammo just makes them human lootboxes. In the best-case scenario, they’re still going to have to compete with everyone else who thinks they’re going to subsist off of hunting, but there would be less incentive to not shoot hunters to eliminate competition, and fewer enforcement of the consequences of doing so.
So you’re completely right. I live in a place with a lot of hunters too, and all of them are dickheads.
That’s a lot of assumptions about someone made on a response specifically talking about hunting for sport isn’t it?
I also find it a bit facetious to be speaking as if most hunting isn’t done recreationally to kill animals for the sake of killing animals for fun, even in case of culling where most do it as part of hunting for sport and the fact it is useful is more of a beneficial secondary outcome to be used as an excuse often with great deal of jubilance.
As for the few people who actually hunt for subsistence especially due to lack of alternatives which is rare anywhere in most of the developed and indeed developing world or to otherwise guard livestock which is more common, their practical need to kill animals doesn’t proactively justify anyone else killing animals for other reasons just because it happens to be same activity on most basic terms.
I made three assumptions: that the anti-hunting left are chronically online, that they’re largely city-dwellers, and that they’re goofs. So far I have yet to be proven wrong.
Listen yall, I hunt. I hunt alone and I hunt with people. Every person I hunt with is working class. Nearly every person I encounter while hunting is also working class. Most of the anti-hunting rhetoric I encounter seems largely anti-rural in nature, which to me seems antithetical to class solidarity.
Several breeds of hunting dogs were developed by and for the working class — hell the entire German breeding program was designed specifically for the working class hunter. The Russian Spaniel was developed specially to be a hunting dogs adapted to urban apartment life. The fucking Epagneul Breton traces its roots to French peasants who bred and kept small, less conspicuous dogs for the purpose of poaching game from the estates of the French nonility. Hunting and hunting dogs are inexorably linked with the working class.
Honestly, I would be willing to entertain more of this ideology if those promoting the idea that hunting and leftism are antithetical were predominantly vegans, but many of the people I encounter making this argument are not vegan. If you are complicit in the killing/suffering/exploitation of one animal because it’s convenient for you, then you sacrifice your right to be critical of others.
Moreover, I don’t understand the logic that killing a living creature is wrong, and that somehow humans are distinct from their nonhuman counterparts. Surely, the colonial extractive mindset is a mind virus, but hunting isn’t inherently extractive. Killing other living beings isn’t inherently extractive. Further, if the argument against killing animals is based on the issue of consciousness, that we shouldn’t kill conscious beings… who are you to arbitrarily decide what living things are conscious and which things aren’t? What even is consciousness? I believe it a far safer bet to assume all living things across all domains are conscious, rather than assuming a small class of vertebrate and invertebrate animals are conscious.
Ah, fuck. I’ve got shit to do. Peace.
Since cities are densely populated then most people are city-dwellers, including leftists and workers. If hunting is working class and most of the working class lives in the city…you see how your point breaks down. You can’t really pin being hunting-adverse on being in the city. People live in the city and then go on hunting trips. Why do you think Cabellas and Bass Pro exist? Being an urban or suburban hunter is pretty common.
You made those three assumptions, you further made two more that I don’t talk to “rural” people and that I don’t know any hunters. I am not from West and a significant portion of my family lived and lives rurally, the kind that does subsistence farming in small yards with a small barn with couple of cow or sheep and a few chickens and sells a bit of produce. I spent quite a bit of time in village houses as a child and happen to live in a place that used to be more rural until urban development absorbed it, I also regularly visit places to buy produce that actually have working dogs, cats that hunt pests and have to keep firearms to kill boars and wolves. Even in such a case is hunting rarely necessary for them and while some do hunt it’s mostly to put some more food on the table for variety.
Rest of what you are saying comes back to using people killing animals as a blanket proactive justification for killing more animals for no reason. People hunting rarely for subsistence or occasionally to protect livestock does not mean killing animals in general is something to be defended as fine. Naturalistic arguments about how humans are not apart from the nature also doesn’t mean much, humans already raise and kill animals at an industrial scale and hunting isn’t more or less natural, it just is something that people do. Troubles that come with large scale animal husbandry with industrial methods of animal raising and killing doesn’t excuse killing animals for fun. Suffering does not justify further suffering. If anything, the fact that factory farming exists should exactly be reason for people to wantonly hunt animals without specific purposes. People already greatly reduced living habitat for most other animals and driving with a car into few remaining ranges to kill the animals there with gear from a hobby shop doesn’t make you a subsistence hunter.
All of that just means you like to hunt because you want to and I am going to go ahead and assume it is done so recreationally when I know many who live off the land and very rarely hunt anything as opposed to grazing a few animals and only kill boars, wolves or very rarely bears when they are within sight of their houses or grazing areas.
You know who cares about the historical pedigree of the ‘working class dogs’? Real leftists who, in true american fashion, live a well equipped suburban lifestyle while cosplaying as medieval poachers.
Unlike you I am not going to claim to be rural myself but I did live in a sparsely populated town for a third of my life. Half of our residents - around 30k people at the time - engaged in subsistence farming and hunting. They grew and processed manioc artisanally, which means they were dirt poor and could make use of the undeclared commons all around us to round out their diets.
The idea that hunting isn’t extractive is an alien one to me, given that our people engaged in it in order to survive. Hunting wasn’t a sport to them - and they sure as shit don’t know anything about the Epagneul Breton. Nor was it even a tradition (another concern of true leftists), as the moment things improved financially they became more focused on farming than on passing their hunting skills to their kids.
Is this a you are killing plants so you are not better carnist talking point
Holy shit lol