Why Republican Lawmakers Oppose Animals

This article analyzes Republicans in the US, but is equally applicable to conservative and right-of-center parties around the globe.

Animal activists are constantly imploring legislators to enact laws and policies that will protect animals, reduce suffering, amd require compassion in the treatment of our fellow Earthlings.

At the local level, we demand that all shelters become No Kill. We try to increase the number of companion animals permited per household. We demand that landlords be required to rent to families with pets. We seek to lengthen the hold times for animals doomed to die in municipal death camps (shelters).

Almost all Republican officials oppose these reforms.

Why?

Because humane legislation costs tax dollars and reduces profits to businesses.

Republicans argue that increasing hold times for stray costs more money in food, staffing, and veterinary care. They dismiss the idea of No Kill shelters as too expensive, that it requires additional staff, additional training, and that it is much more efficient to destroy unwanted and stray animals than it is to incur the burden of educational campaigns, recruiting and managing volunteers, and training staff.

Similarly, they oppose increasing the number of pets per household as possibly detrimental to real estate values and home sales. They oppose any restrictions on landlords being able to rent to whom they wish as intrusive upon their businesses. Republicans do not care that increasing the number of pets allowed per household would immediately create millions of homes across the country for dogs and cats that would otherwise be murdered in “shelters.” Nor do Republicans care that countless dogs and cats die each year because people facing financial hardships often must surrender family pets to shelters because landlords refuse to rent to families with pets.

It is cheaper to kill stray animals than it is to care for them and place them in loving homes. And Republican officials at the city and county level are more interested in appearing to be champions of the taxpayers than they are in being compassionate to stray dogs and cats.

Republican lawmakers at the national level vote against animals as well, and for the same reasons: Compassion costs tax dollars and compassion reduces profits.

Republicans oppose bans on puppy mills, they support hunting and drilling on public lands. They want to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. They oppose animals that are threatened from being listed by the EPA. They excuse habitat destruction by Big Oil and mining interests. They deny climate change and oppose restrictions on air and water pollution.

The biggest battle in which animal activists are engaged is against the Animal Holocaust, in which well over a billion animals per week are murdered on slaughterhouse floors. That conservatives are the enemies of those animals trapped in the food system is all too obvious as we try to alleviate some of the terror and pain these animals suffer. Big Agriculture (Big Ag) runs the factory farms, the feedlots, the slaughterhouses, and the packing plants which turn innocent creatures into corpses for profit.

Profit drives the Animal Holocaust, and profits are championed by conservative legislators. All Republicans, and many Democrats, are conservatives. They value corporations over compassion, profits over principle, private property over everything. And private property is all that animals are to conservatives and Big Ag.

Big Agriculture and Wall Street buy politicians with campaign contributions, which are nothing more than legal bribes. In turn, politicians do the bidding of those who own them. It is the antithesis of democracy, and it is the reason that government is controlled by a fraction of one percent of the population.

Big Ag fights us tooth-and-nail to prevent reforms in the way animals are treated and killed.
Big Ag’s lobbyists and bought-and-paid-for Members of Congress block our attempts to end veal crates, gestation crates, de-horning, de-beaking, tail-docking, and castration without anesthetics. Ending these cruel practices will cost the industry money, so ending them must be opposed by conservatives.

The cruelest practice of Big Ag is running slaughter lines as fact as they can. The faster the slaughter lines, the more corpses per hour are produced.

But running fast slaughter lines means many cows and calves are not dead when line workers cut off their legs with chainsaws or rip their skin from their bodies. Seven percent of cattle are screaming in agony as they are cut up alive.

Fast slaughter lines in chicken slaughterhouses means that live chickens are tossed into vats of boiling water to remove their feathers.

The horrors are all about profit. And conservatives are ready to defend profits over animals every time.

Republican legislators actually believe that private enterprise is more important than the public. They believe that private property and “free enterprise” are more important than the public interest.

And Republican legislators certainly believe that business is more important than animals.

It is the reason that Republican officials are the enemies of animals, even if individual Republicans have no clue to the Republican agenda that they are supporting.