Read on Twitter
THREAD.
1/ While many humans are happy with the outcome of the US #election (and rightly so), perhaps it's time to have a look at some of the ways in which this may also matter for #nonhuman #animals and human-animal relations.
Bear with me - this may be a slightly long one.
1/ While many humans are happy with the outcome of the US #election (and rightly so), perhaps it's time to have a look at some of the ways in which this may also matter for #nonhuman #animals and human-animal relations.
Bear with me - this may be a slightly long one.
2/ First, it's worth noting some of the ways the Trump administration has been bad for nonhuman animals - for example by refusing to act on #climatechange, or indeed to accept the science at all - bad for humans too, btw. Here @JoeBiden has pledged to take a different approach.
3/ Moreover, in 2019 the Trump administration dealt a severe blow to the Endangered Species Act by removing automatic protection for species deemed 'threatened' and allowing for a cost-benefit analysis of saving species up against corporate interests. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-12/trump-administration-guts-endangered-species-wild-animals
4/ As if that wasn't enough, Trump reversed Obama-era guidelines that banned various #hunting practices in National Parks federally. This especially affects animals in Alaska, where a number of controversial practices thus became legal again.
5/ These practices include killing wolves, coyotes (incl. pups) and hibernating bears (incl. cubs) in their dens, using artificial ligts. It also allows for baiting brown and black bears with human food, hunting swimming caribou from motorboats, and hunting bears with #dogs.
6/ Then there's the matter of trophy hunting, where Trump has gone back and forth in his public announcements, but has been surrounded by avid trophy hunters, including - infamously - his sons.
7/ Trump first put a decision about the import of trophies from species like elephants and lions on hold, then the administration announced decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis, and then ultimately, quietly, reversed an Obama-era ban on import of elephant trophies.
8/ Among the case-by-case decisions, btw, was the 2019 decision to permit a trophy hunter from Michigan to import trophies from a rare black rhino bull killed in Namibia in 2018.
9/ We may not know exactly how @JoeBiden's administration will handle issues such as the ones outlined above, but it is unlikely to be worse than Trump, and we may hope that some of the above decisions are reversed.
10/ It's also worth mentioning the peculiar brand of machismo promoted by Trump and people around him, which relies heavily on the sexual politics of meat (as analysed in the work of @_CarolJAdams), like when Pence said this: https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1294006093035733001
11/ It is likely that with @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris we'll see a lot less of that kind of thing. It would be great if we even see some sensible revisions of national dietary guidelines so they place less emphasis on meat - to the benefit of human and nonhuman animals alike.
12/ And while on meat, it's worth mentioning that the Trump administration has worked to decrease the number of USDA inspectors at pig slaughterhouses AND allowed pork producers to determine slaughter line speeds on their own. This is likely bad for both workers and animals.
13/ The Obama Administration did something similar with poultry slaughterhouses in 2014, but ultimately decided against raising line speeds. Up to a million birds in the US already miss the blade at current speeds and consequently end up being boiled alive, acc. to the USDA.
14/ Again, we don't really know what a Biden administration will do in relation to this, but it is unlikely to be worse, and might be - slightly - better, for animals and workers, instead of consistently privileging meat producers.
15/ For good measure, it should be mentioned that Trump did sign the new Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) act into law in 2019, after the bipartisan bill passed the Senate unanimously. This makes animal cruelty a felony - with some notable, systemic exceptions.
16/ On the perhaps lighter side of things, people are noting that there will now be a dog in the White House again.
This is not as trivial as it may seem. Trump was the first president since Polk (in the mid-1800s) not to keep pets at the White House. https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/dogs-white-house
This is not as trivial as it may seem. Trump was the first president since Polk (in the mid-1800s) not to keep pets at the White House. https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/dogs-white-house
17/ Given that roughly two thirds of US households have pets and more than half have at least one dog, it can be an important point of identification with a national leader, and some certainly believe how a person gets on with animals says something about their character.
18/ There was even a political ad in support of Biden that played on exactly this:
Btw., if you're interested in the rich history of presidential pets, the Wikipedia page on this actually gives a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pets
Btw., if you're interested in the rich history of presidential pets, the Wikipedia page on this actually gives a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pets
19/ Trump, by comparison, has repeatedly used comparisons with dogs to talk demeaningly about other people, saying, for instance that they "died like a dog", "choked like a dog", "were fired like a dog" etc.
I think we can certainly expect better rhetoric from Biden.
I think we can certainly expect better rhetoric from Biden.
20/ I'll end here, though there's always more to be said, of course.
Please do comment, and point out things I may have overlooked.
In all, I think there's reasonable hope that @JoeBiden's administration will be better for animals than Trump's has been.
Please do comment, and point out things I may have overlooked.
In all, I think there's reasonable hope that @JoeBiden's administration will be better for animals than Trump's has been.
Addendum: I completely forgot about Trump's love of walls.
As a general rule, walls are bad news for #wildlife (as well as for humans), but I'll refer you to @samuelgilbert1, who explains a bit more in the @guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/31/trump-border-wall-wilderness-wildlife-impact
As a general rule, walls are bad news for #wildlife (as well as for humans), but I'll refer you to @samuelgilbert1, who explains a bit more in the @guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/31/trump-border-wall-wilderness-wildlife-impact
