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Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts stands accused this week of killing his neighbor’s dog with a shovel circa 2004. Three people who knew Roberts during his time at New Mexico State University told The Guardian that they remember Roberts telling them that he had killed the dog because it was barking too much. Three more people reportedly recall hearing the story at the time from those colleagues [Roberts, however, denies it, calling the allegation “patently untrue and baseless.” In some ways, that denial is the most unusual part of this whole story.]

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The most striking example [of a Republican killing pets and other animals] is Kristi Noem, who stunned the country this spring by bragging in her book about shooting her 14-month-old puppy and a family goat, portraying the story as an example of her grit and fortitude.

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In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney participated in a so-called “canned hunt,” shooting pheasants that had been raised in captivity and then released specifically for this event.

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[While] George H.W. Bush banned ivory imports to protect African elephants, the younger Bush proposed reversing the ban on importing hunting trophies of endangered species into the U.S., and later named a top lobbyist for the trophy hunting organization Safari Club International as acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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Then, of course, there were the Trump children. In 2011, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump traveled to Zimbabwe with a safari firm that Zimbabwean conservationists later said was not registered in the country. They killed an elephant and leopard, among other animals, posing with the dead bodies. “I AM A HUNTER I don’t hide from that,” Trump Jr. tweeted when the photos surfaced the following year. In late 2019, ProPublica reported that Trump Jr. had received “special treatment” during a trip to Mongolia, shooting an endangered argali sheep, for which he was retroactively given a permit after meeting with Mongolia’s president. (The hunting trip was later reported to have cost American taxpayers over $75,000.)

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This isn’t a comprehensive list, because the examples are too numerous to recount. In 2022, Trump’s former secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, posted a picture of himself pressing a hot cattle brand into a strapped-down calf during his congressional campaign. As Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg memorably wrote for The New Republic last year, meat eating is now so entrenched as a masculinity marker on the American right that vegetarian men minding their own business are now mockingly referred to as “soy boys.”

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