Caring For Animals Is Racist, Apparently

It’s been quite some time since I have written an article like this, seemingly over a year. But we are back once again with yet another example of something that any sane person would think would have nothing to do with race whatsoever being deemed racist at some capacity or another.
 
In this case, we are talking about the caring of animals, and more specifically, white people caring about animals that end up in shelters.
 
Writing for Areo Magazine, Nathan Winograd tells of how “Critical Race Theory Is Coming for the Dogs: Katja Guenther’s ‘The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals’”. The article is rather lengthy, so there are parts of it that I will entirely omit, but it is a good read nonetheless and you get a better picture of how twisted Katja Guenther’s philosophy regarding race and shelter animals is by reading it.
 
Winograd begins his article by noting the great advances that have been made over the last few decades, and even centuries, regarding the treatment of shelter animals. It used to be that being sent to an animal shelter was statistically a death sentence for any animal, as it was typical for animal shelters to kill “roughly 70% of its animals”. But over time, residents of various cities demanded that the shelters would stop routinely killing the animals and instead attempt to find homes for those animals at higher rates.
 
According to Winograd, “Millions of municipal shelters are now finding homes for upwards of 99% of animals… The result has been a 90% drop in pound killings nationwide since the 1970s. Despite the fact that pet ownership has doubled, the number of dogs and cats killed has gone from roughly 16 million a year to less than one million.”
 
But despite all the great progress made with regard to keeping animals safe and alive, particularly being placed in good homes which can and will take care of them, writer Katja Guenther argues in her book “The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals” that animals are killed because of “capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy and patriarchy.”
 
Frankly, the only things Guenther is missing in her typical liberal blame-game are homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia, but this is wacky enough as it is.
 
Guenther argues that dogs are “privileged” if they are allowed to sleep inside because such a thing is reserved for the white and wealthy, and argues that policies which are against keeping dogs chained up in the backyard are meant to oppress minorities by imposing upon them “middle-class norms of animal keeping in which companion animals are considered family and treated accordingly,” and which ignore that minorities “are themselves trapped in poverty, may have few options for legitimate income generation and possibly rely on their dogs for… status.”
 
It’s pretty darn easy to see that Guenther equates being black, brown, etc. with being poor. At one time or another, such a thing would be considered racist, but today, I guess it’s considered “anti-racist”, a term which is utter bullcrap and masquerades anti-white racism (and practically speaking, anti-black racism, as you can see here).
 
And as often is the case, the most insane of far-Left-wing proposals tend to gain some amount of traction. Winograd notes that one shelter director believes Guenther “gets it right” in saying that “racism, classism and the caste system are at the heart of the broken animal sheltering institution.” And people working at the University of Denver Institute for Human-Animal Connection argue that laws which prevent abuse of dogs discriminate against “anyone in the US other than white, middle class and upper-class individuals”, proposing that enforcement of animal protection laws be relaxed.
 
I don’t think I have to tell you why such a proposal would be detrimental to the progress made with regard to protecting animals.
 
And while I have never been one to believe in “animal rights” like liberals (ironically) usually do, I am not exactly heartless regarding animals and believe they ought to be protected, at least if they are domesticated animals or if they are in danger of going extinct. Humans were created by God to be above all animals and plants – above all other creations by God.
 
Genesis 1:26 says: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
 
But this dominion does not equal a right to abuse. Proverbs 12:10 says: “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.”
 
Of course, this has more to do with the fact that a wicked man, even when showing mercy, is going to be cruel so one ought to be righteous, but there is reason King Solomon opted to talk about having regard for animals and not simply other people. He easily could have written “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his neighbor” or “for the life of his fellow man”, but he chose to write “for the life of his beast” because a righteous man is caring for the life of even his animals.
 
Sure, he says “life of HIS beast”, meaning of one’s own animals and livestock, but there is no denying that the care of animals and not abusing our dominion over other creatures is something which is important. Not as important as other things, of course, but still important enough.
 
So it is quite easy for me to see just how twisted and evil such a proposal and book are. To argue that dogs are “privileged” to be able to sleep indoors and that such ideas are “oppressive” of poorer people (particularly, poor black and brown people, as again, Guenther equates being poor with being a minority) and seeking to undo decades of progress regarding the killing of animals in shelters in the name of “wokeness” and “anti-racism” and “social justice” is putrid to me.
 
At any rate, Winograd then goes on to point out how Guenther herself admits to not being impartial with her research.
 
“Guenther writes that, because of racism, the overwhelming majority of the dogs who ended up at the Baldwin Park, California shelter where she worked as a volunteer had belonged to poor people of Asian and Latino heritage and, to a lesser extent, black people. But this simply reflects the demographic make up of Baldwin Park itself. When I ran a shelter in a predominantly white community – a shelter with a higher per capita intake rate than the Los Angeles County pound system of which Baldwin Park is a part – most of those who surrendered animals were white… In other words, the ethnicity of the people who surrender animals to shelters is largely a function of demographics, not race.”
 
“Guenther deliberately rejects objective evidence of this kind, admitting that ‘it is not possible for me to be impartial’: ‘I was trained in sociology, a discipline that emphasizes impartiality and the need to systematize observations and analysis in ways that distance the researcher from the researched. I deliberately turn away from these tendencies and instead embrace the messy possibilities of being a researcher with complex ties to the social setting I am analyzing.’”
 
So basically, Guenther admits that she is biased in all of this and has a subjective opinion that is tied to the conclusions of her research. That is a MASSIVE no-no in the scientific community and enough to warrant entire papers and theses to be disregarded because, at best, they can only be considered OPINIONS and not scientific proof, data, or evidence.
 
In that little bit alone, Guenther completely destroys her own credibility and reputation (of which there was very little to begin with considering she doesn’t have to admit it in order for one to recognize all of this as hogwash). So why, then, would anyone take her or her book’s findings seriously?
 
Well, because they say the “right” things. White people bad, brown people good, and that is true pretty much no matter the context. The only time they consider a white person even semi-decent or a brown person to be bad is when the white person capitulates to the Leftist narratives and when the brown person is a conservative, at which point the conservative brown person is called an “Uncle Tom” or some derogatory term to mean “race traitor” as though brown people can only ever be Leftists.
 
At any rate, Winograd continues, noting Guenther’s insane and racist belief system:
 
“In Guenther’s book, moreover, white people do things; people of color have things done to them. For example, people of color who abandon their dogs in empty apartments are victims ‘ensnared in the legal system,’ forced to leave their animals behind ‘under the duress of sudden eviction or deportation or arrest.’ Guenther even claims that such people actually believe that what they are doing is for the best, because of ‘the constraints of their knowledge and resources, both of which are limited by the nexus of their class, status as immigrants, and ethnicity.’”
 
So when a Latino man on a bicycle drops a dog “while escaping from mall security officers… after stealing a pair of Wrangler jeans,” Guenther explains this away as being a result of his “status as marginalized.” Basically, she excuses the criminal behavior of the Latino man and the result of the dog being dropped because HE is a victim of the system.
 
Excusing crime is bullcrap and extremely dangerous, which is why the Left loves to do this. Everyone has a choice, including committing a crime. Even if one argues “I didn’t have a choice, I HAD to steal food to survive” or whatever else, that is not necessarily true. It’s a hard choice, don’t misunderstand, and it makes sense that one will do whatever it takes to survive, but choices are always up to the individual. One might argue that it’s okay to steal food to survive, but they absolutely cannot argue that a choice was not involved. They weren’t forced at gunpoint to steal food – they made the conscious choice of doing it. So excusing it as “I had no choice” is bullcrap.
 
Not to mention that if a Latino man has enough money and resources to have a bike (granted, it could be stolen, but still) AND own a dog, then that Latino man has even less of an excuse for stealing a pair of jeans. Excusing criminal behavior does not lead to a good society.
 
Guenther also seemingly argues that if a minority person can earn a profit or build a reputation for themselves through exploitation of animals, that that excuses such exploitation: “[R]escuers… critique urban Black and Latinx communities for not seeing companion animals as sufficiently part of the family and instead seeing them as resources, whether protective (as in guarding) or financial (as in breeding or possibly fighting)… From a class perspective, wealthy people are believed to be too ‘civilized’ to engage in barbaric activities like dogfighting, and it’s no coincidence that the only affluent person who has been publicly shamed for dogfighting in the U.S., Michael Vick, is Black, newly wealthy after growing up in poverty.”
 
Good Lord, she is trying to excuse MICHAEL VICK and what he did because he is black and grew up poor. No, idiot, Michael Vick was not publicly shamed simply for participating in dog fights. He was publicly shamed because he hosted dog fights in his own home and investigators found the decomposing corpses of dogs who were killed by “hanging, drowning, and being slammed to death.”
 
These people, possibly Vick himself, would clip jumper cables onto the ears of underperforming dogs, connected the cables to car batteries, and threw those dogs into a pool.
 
One of the rescuers in the case noted: “It seems that while they were scrambling to escape, they scratched and clawed at the pool liner and bit at the dented aluminum sides… This death did not come quickly.”
 
So no, Michael Vick was not publicly shamed for participating or even hosting dog fights. He was publicly shamed because he participated and hosted dog fights and proceeded to GRAPHICALLY AND INUMANELY TORTURE AND KILL the dogs which performed poorly.
 
Further, Vick was far from the only one who was prosecuted and publicly shamed for it. Pretty much everyone involved here, including many white people, were also prosecuted and publicly shamed. It’s just that Michael Vick was the most recognizable of the bunch, being a star quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons at the time.
 
In any case, there is plenty more I wish I could put here, but this article is already pretty long, so I will conclude here. It is absolutely insane that there are people out there who will make the claim that being compassionate to domestic animals is racist and “white privilege” and that abuse of animals, if done by poor brown people (or even rich brown people, seeing as she is defending Vick), is perfectly okay and understandable.
 
Again, I don’t put animals above humans or even on the same level of importance as humans. But it takes an inhumane and heartless person to abuse an animal, and an equally inhumane and heartless person to argue in favor of animal abuse at any capacity.
 
May God curse the kind of people who think this way.
 
Matthew 6:26
“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”