Is there any vegan on the planet who was surprised to learn that the Nevada moocher rancher, Cliven Bundy was also a racist, liked guns and was a tad hostile to women’s rights?

Exploiting other races or other genders and exploiting other species go together very well, kind of like a “horse and carriage” or a “horse and carriage in New York City.”

In fact, some writers on the topic of animals and racism and animals and sexism, think people didn’t even know how to systematically exploit and abuse other groups of people until they started exploiting and abusing groups of animals.

The systematic exploitation of animals started around 11,000 years ago when humans went from hunting and gathering to the “domestication,” of plants and animals. Despite the fact that “domestication” sounds like such a sweet word, implying perhaps sitting by the fire with Mrs. Tiggywinkle or house-breaking Bella the new puppy, when it comes to most animals “domestication” means violence.

The transition from hunting to herding was gradual: “(the former hunters, now herders) learned how to control animals’ mobility, diet, growth and reproductive lives by castration, hobbling, branding, ear cropping and such devices as leather aprons, whips, prods and eventually chains and collars,” writes Charles Patterson, author of “The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust.”

This ruthlessness, detachment and brutality involved in “raising” animals was built into the culture so that it was a short hop from confining and slaughtering animals to slavery and genocide of humans.

If you look at the history of American slavery, many of the “tools of the trade” such as branding and collars, were the same as what was and is used by ranchers. If you look at the history of the Holocaust, the Nazi’s first reviled Jews by calling them “pigs” and “vermin” over and over and over again, until finally the German people agreed: the “vermin” had to be exterminated.

So as a rancher, old Cliven Bundy’s been around the cruelty and exploitation block. He knows how it’s done. When he started flapping his meat hole about black people, it all made sense to him.

— A Vicious Vegan blog post —