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???

  • GnomeGodsGnomeMasters [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • LangleyDominos [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      that they’re largely city-dwellers

      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.

    • LupineTroubles [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      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.

    • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      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.

      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.