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.
Yes, big time dog person here. I currently share my life with four crazy, high energy dogs and it’s absolutely marvelous (if not a bit exhausting).
I went on a slightly unhinged rant on here the other day about how lefties ought to get on board with protection sports and the k9 world.
The dog world (in my particular dog sports of choice in my corner of the U.S. at least) in general skews conservative-to-fascist. I’m a member of multiple dog clubs/training groups/orgs and I am, thus far, the only person left of Obama that I know of. There are a few libs here and there, but most are pretty quiet about it. Since I share a mutual loathing for libs with the more conservative members of my dog groups, I use it as an opportunity to sprinkle leftist theory/talking points into our conversations.
Honestly, it’s pretty great. I get to hang out with dogs and build working class solidarity/develop class consciousness with people who otherwise would never encounter these ideologies.
Preach. Tea and Coffee are some of the only hyper-colonial goods on which I spend as much money as I can reasonably afford. I love a good, malty, tannic and almost sweet assam — especially in the summer when brewed cold.
Coffee, it seems, will not fare as well as tea in the impending climate apocalypse, so I’m really treasuring the good stuff now. Pro-tip: vacuum seal some of the good shit in whole-bean single-servings and stash it in your freezer. Shit will stay fresh for years that way. Don’t know if it works the same for tea, though :(
Sail the high seas and procure yourself a copy of Samin Nosrat’s book, Salt Fat Acid Heat.
One of the better primers on how to cook, as opposed to your typical cook book that is a poorly edited collection of recipes, over-saturated photos, and weepy/saccharine philosophical musings about the author-chef’s origins and joie de gastronomie
Though not one of his best, Blindboy touched on Dubai chocolate some months back in the episode “Fairy Forts, Anthrax, Dubai Chocolate bars and Seagulls are all intimately connected and flow as one in the cognitive ether.”
I also train dogs and — assuming he did use some sort of aversive stimulus on his dog — I am both on his side and not on his side.
If he used vibrate, as he claims his collar can only vibrate, I am less on his side. Many (most I’ve worked with) dogs find it to be more aversive than low-level electric shock.
If he used shock, I’m more on his side.
BUT if he used shock, lied about it, and claimed he used vibrate, then I’m barely on his side. I’m only on his side insofar as I am in favor of the use of aversives to train dogs (as long as the trainer/handler knows wtf they’re doing, which Hassan likely does not). Lying about it on the other hand? Very not on his side about that.
Ultimately I don’t really care. Rather, I hope more people can develop a more nuanced understanding of the use of e-collars in dog training.
Some dogs prefer vibration, some dogs prefer shock. Most dogs benefit from some form of aversive or another. Aversive =/= pain. Aversive = discomfort.
See my other comment in this thread for a slightly unhinged rant on the subject.
To be fair, I think a lot of experiencers are earnest. I think a rather large portion of them believe what they experienced was real.
Imagine, if you will, that you’ve just had what you believe is a genuine encounter/experience. Where do you go? Who do you tell? We don’t take the issue seriously — likely due to a concerted effort on behalf of US government to smear experiencers because experiencers were actually 1: exposing US defense tech they inadvertently witnessed or 2: genuine uap/nonhuman-extraterrestrial intelligence experiencers and the gov’t is terrified.
So they turn to the only people who will listen to them: the grifters. These poor people get exploited over and over, and many of them just kind of end up having their lives ruined.
And look, I’m not saying any of this is real, just that many experiencers are likely genuine. The grifters are also likely arm-in-arm with US intelligence, and most of the national discourse is a distraction/psy-op of some sort. To what end, though, is unclear. Still having a tough time wrapping my head around what the psyop would be during the “grusch era” so-to-speak, especially with so many libs showing genuine interest in the subject (AOC in particular, but also chucky s., killibrand, moskowitz, etc.).
Edited to say: an abundance of “experiencers” are rural people and I have entertained the idea that this might be a coordinated psy-op to deepen the urban-rural divide. Though, there are several high profile U.S. UAP sightings/experiences that are counter to this notion (east coast “drone incursions,” phoenix lights, etc.), so iunno, I’m just talking out my neck I guess.
Man, I know we’re here to talk about how fucking dumb the whole situation is, but there’s something in particular about this that is so fucking stupid outside of the psy-op part:
If Hasan does have a “vibrate only” collar, it’s highly likely that his dog FUCKING HATES IT. Many dogs find vibrating collars to be more aversive than low-to-mid-level shock, because it’s scary and uncomfortable as shit.
Shit, dawg, I’m gonna take this opportunity to rant about some shit.
Seriously, find a collar that does both vibration and shock, strap it to your neck, and have a friend/partner/stranger/whoever shock you without warning at a setting that would be considered a reasonable “working level” for a pet dog (in between a 1-Low and 2-Med on a garmin/tritronics models, somewhere between 5-15 for e-collar tech.). Great. Feel that? It ain’t much, is it? Kinda almost feels nice, right? Cool. Now, have that same person hit you with the vibrate function without warning. FUCKIN SCARY AND UNCOMFY RIGHT??
Here’s the thing, folks: shock collars aren’t bad. In fact, if you are against the euthanasia of “problem” dogs, you should probably be PRO shock collar. Anyone who says otherwise has likely never spent any time with a truly powerful, aggro, anxious, dominant dog. And all you R+ folks out there, let me know how your fucking “positive only” methods work on a bigass mal or dutchie who wants to fucking hurt you.
If you’re anti-collar and are a totally pro-animal liberation, anti animal-husbandry totally vegan person who believes that we shouldn’t even have pets, then you get a pass, because your logic is consistent with those views. Anyone else can fuck right off if you’re hating on e-collars.
More lefties need to get into the k9 protection world, not for sport, but out of necessity. Some shit will likely come to pass in the future, and dogs are going to be a not insignificant component. You wanna know who currently has the monopoly on fucking hard ass dogs who can do WAY more than just bite? It ain’t lefties, thats for sure. The stuff out in the public domain about the U.S. military use of dogs for surveillance/recon/protection/violence etc is absolutely nutty. And that’s just the stuff in the public domain.
Aight sorry rant over
Being a landowner is not incompatible with being a proletariat. Moreover, hunting does not require ownership of private land — a great many hunters are not landowners. They either benefit from family or acquaintances who are landowners, knock on doors of complete strangers and ask permission to hunt their land, or — if they are fortunate enough to live in a state with an abundance of public land open to hunting — they hunt public land.
Surely, there are those who only hunt estates, ranches, preserves, etc., but I’d wager they make a up only small, but disproportionately represented percentage of the hunting population due to their visible wealth.
As I said in another comment, many of the hunters I encounter are of humble means, many are immigrants, and most are working class.
I appreciate your feedback, and you’re probably correct. Though, I did intend for it to be somewhat vague, I did not intend to signal support for sport hunting.
My intention with the ambiguity was quite literally to survey the community’s thoughts about hunting, and more specifically their feelings about hunters and their motivations. To that end, I feel like it was fairly successful.
Much of my curiosity is driven by the ever-increasing urban vs. rural sentiment in America (a story as old as civilization itself, I fear). I wonder, too, how many people in online spaces such as this one are city-dwellers, and how many reside in rural areas? I personally grew up in and currently live in a very rural area. Not being a landowner myself, I spend a fair amount of time on public land hunting and foraging. Many of the people I encounter are of no greater means than myself. A surprising number are immigrants who view it as a cost-effective means to provide for their families. Many are your typical white cis male, to be sure, but that’s not entirely the case.
Often when I see hunting come up in online, left-of-center oriented spaces, I see most people view the average hunter as landed gentry — petite bourgeois suburbanites. Though they represent a great number of hunters, in my own experience, they only make up a portion of the American hunting population. Certainly it is rare that I meet left leaning hunters, and I have yet to encounter one who outright claims to be a leftist.
I find this curious because these are supposed to be workers movements, yet, so many rural working class Americans are misrepresented in the discourse about them. I find it more curious, because I hear my own story reflected in the stories of my neighbors, and I wonder: how did we end up so ideologically opposed? Further, I wonder, how is it that the left (myself included) expects to motivate people to abolish capitalism, rectify settler-colonialism, and have any semblance of solidarity with one another when so much working class American culture is antithetical to both online and in-person leftist rhetoric.
Ugh. Long rant is long. Hope that clears things up.
looking at hunting as a subculture
I pretty much abhor hunting culture (or any sort of purely extractive subculture for that matter), but I continue to participate in the ways I do because I appreciate the opportunity to spend time with people who are ideologically opposed to me. We are all members of the proletariat, and I’m quite certain that I am one of the few leftists many of the hunters I encounter will ever personally meet — much less have a relationship with.
Curiously enough, the right seems to be doing a sufficient job of alienating their base of hunters. Millions of acres of public lands are slated to be sold, while countless more are being opened up for mining and various other forms of resource extraction.
Additionally, non-toxic (read: lead-free) ammunition is becoming more expensive due to the ongoing trade war with China, which controls upwards of 80% of the global supply of bismuth and tungsten. This poses a problem for migratory bird hunters and all hunters who hunt on federal land regardless of pursuit. Federal regulations stipulate that use of lead shot is forbidden for pursuit of migratory birds, and the mere possession of lead shot is forbidden on federally owned and managed lands.
Copper and Steel alternatives exist, yes, but they are as yet inferior to bismuth and tungsten. Prices for bismuth and tungsten cartridges skyrocket, as does demand for steel and copper, thus driving the price for those inferior products ever higher, and —as fucked as they all are — I can’t see any federal regulatory agency backpedaling on the issue of lead. Moreover, the so-called “ethical hunters” who refuse to shoot lead are in an even bigger pickle. Superiority of bismuth and tungsten is due in large part to increased density which means superior killing potential over steel and copper. This results in fewer crippled birds, and thus, is considered more humane.
Autistic info dump. Sorry. Anyways, I’m curious to see how all of this plays out.
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.