Sharpshooters Anonymous

Posted by Daniel Engber

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/02/maga-animals-nationalism/686084/?utm_source=feed

In the week before Christmas, while the U.S. Department of Justice was getting ready to release a trove of documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, some of the nation’s most important public servants gathered for a meeting at the DOJ headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Two Cabinet secretaries were there, along with the attorney general. They had an important matter to discuss. The important matter was puppies.

A soft black puppy, for one. A baby yellow lab. A floppy noodlepuff with cream and caramel fur. Records of this meeting clearly indicate that each of these was in dire need of snuggling, as well as Cabinet-level scratches underneath its ears. But as representatives of America’s puppy politic, the animals were also due, per that day’s declarations, the full protection of the U.S. government. Brooke Rollins, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Pam Bondi would be joining up to lead a new “strike force” aimed at puppy mills, dog-fighting rings, and unscrupulous animal research. “We’re coming after you if you’re going after these babies,” Bondi warned, and then she squeezed the puppy in her lap for emphasis.

This is all good politics—both in the sense of being morally correct and of giving people what they want. (More than half of all adults oppose the use of animals for medical testing, for example, and surveys find that puppy mills are not, in fact, beloved institutions.) Yet the current administration is more determined on this front than any other president’s in recent memory. Since Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, he and his appointees have made a project of protecting animals from abuse. By December, they had already banned U.S. Navy testing on dogs and cats, ended monkey research at the CDC, curtailed the use of animals at the FDA, and promised to abolish every trace of work on mammals at the EPA by 2035. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy led the government’s attempt to save a flock of ostriches from being slaughtered up in Canada, and at the puppy summit, he declared that the entirety of his department, which includes the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, is now “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” In the meantime, though Trump hasn’t yet secured his own Nobel Peace Prize, he has received two official thank-yous from the activists at PETA.

[Read: Who would want to kill 314 ostriches?]

Trump is, of course, a man whose rise to power has been fueled by his denigration of people for being animal-like. The same politician who describes his political enemies as “vermin”—who claims that Somali gangs are roving Minnesota streets “looking for prey,” and who has said of some undocumented immigrants, “These aren’t people; these are animals”—also leads a government with a great concern for mice and rabbits. Some of the administration’s zeal for animal welfare is personal: Attorney General Bondi, for example, is so besotted by dogs that she has made a habit of bringing them to meetings dressed with bows, and Kennedy’s array of pets has reportedly included a pair of ravens and a free-ranging emu. It’s certainly not unusual for people to feel more affinity for animals than for certain other human beings. But the Trump administration’s PETA bona fides go beyond the predilections of its top officials, and hint at something more widespread in right-wing, nationalist politics.

Illiberal factions in Austria, Denmark, France, and Italy have all made a similar point of taking up the cause of animal welfare. In the United Kingdom, too, the scourge of animal abuse has been central to a nationalist project. Images of bloody bulls and butchered whales—portrayed as victims of the European Union’s moral laxity—were used to make the case for Brexit. Boris Johnson promised in his first speech as prime minister to “promote the welfare of animals that has always been so close to the hearts of the British people.” Even the Trump administration’s new “strike force” for going after puppy crime has its recent parallels in Europe, where zoophilic, far-right parties in both Sweden and the Netherlands have pushed for the creation of national “animal police” units.

This link, when it appears, can be “quite astonishing,” says Jakob Schwörer, a political scientist at Mälardalen University, in Sweden, who has analyzed the rhetoric of European party manifestos and social-media feeds. When he looked at the 2019 manifesto of Austria’s Freedom Party, a far-right group that has lately surged in popularity, he found that 7 percent of its sentences made positive reference to animal welfare—an extreme outlier, even in a data set that included materials from green parties, socialists, and other left-wing groups.

To some extent, such appeals may be strategic. “You can’t have an opposite position to it,” Schwörer told me, given the strong and nonpartisan appeal of not torturing animals. But according to his research, which he co-produced with Belén Fernández-García, a professor at the University of Granada, other groups at the illiberal fringe are either disinterested in animal welfare or take positions in support of culturally specific forms of animal exploitation. Schwörer noted that in Spain or Portugal, the right-wing nationalists might defend the right to hunt and hold a bullfight. Taken on the whole, he said, concern about the plight of animals is certainly not obligatory for Europe’s assorted far-right parties. But different rules may apply to countries such as Austria, France, and Italy, where the right-wing fringe has explicit fascist roots.

In fact, a particularly ferocious form of animal nationalism emerged in the spring of 1933, very shortly after Hitler first established his dictatorship. That April, the Nazi government banned the slaughter of warm-blooded animals without stunning. Six months later, it passed the most sweeping animal-welfare act of the time. The Animal Protection Law set careful rules for laboratory research, such that even a scientific study of a worm might be found against the law if it weren’t given anesthesia. The law also banned the force-feeding of poultry, the improper castration of piglets, and the general maltreatment or neglect, broadly defined, of any animals at all. Subsequent laws would add more detailed rules on how much space an animal must have while on a train or in a truck, and how it must be cooked. (The slow-boiling of lobsters was made illegal.)

Such policies were interwoven with the Nazis’ racist ideology. Jews and Romani—then known as “Gypsies”—were targeted for doing special harm to animals. The slaughter law was designed to banish kosher practices, and the pets of Jews were confiscated. Both groups were accused of eating hedgehogs, Mieke Roscher, a historian of human-animal relations at the University of Kassel, told me, as the lowly hedgehogs were in turn upheld as a symbol of the German people.

They are cruel to animals, but we are kind: This conceit is fundamental to the animal-nationalist idea. At the end of 2024, then-vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance spread the false rumor that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs. The lie was taken up by Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, and House Republicans, among other figures on the right, and Trump himself repeated it in a nationally televised debate. Sixteen months later, the federal government is preparing to send its paramilitary force of immigration agents into Springfield for a 30-day operation. “‘They’re eating the cats, and they’re eating the dogs’—that is right out of the playbook of fascism,” Roscher said. The hedgehogs have returned.

[Read: The real reason Trump and Vance are spreading lies about Haitians]

So have other echoes from the past. In her published work on the role of veterinarians in the Third Reich, Roscher quotes a journal article by a Nazi scientist who argues for applying eugenic principles to German farms, with the goal of creating “robust animals able to survive all hygienic conditions.” Selective breeding was used elsewhere in an effort to re-create lost species, such as the auroch and the tarpan, that were imagined as “primeval German game.” A similar fixation on the past, and on the lost purity of the natural world, has been central to the MAHA wing of Trump’s coalition. Last year, Kennedy proposed allowing bird flu to run rampant on the nation’s poultry farms, so as to kill off all the weakest chickens. Poultry experts say this plan would never work. Trump obsesses over bloodlines too. “Look, I am derived from Europe,” he said at Davos two weeks ago, in reference to his purebred European parents.

Animal nationalism has, in practice, a marked tendency to self-negate. The Nazis passed a law to limit animal experiments, then quickly scaled it back; Hermann Göring, though among the most aggressive of the Nazis’ animal protectionists (a contemporary cartoon shows him getting Sieg heils from a crowd of bunnies, frogs, and birds), was himself an avid hunter. In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen—who is notably obsessed with cats—has talked up the healing power of touching animals (among other such positions) but will not forswear foie gras. And as Kenny Torella points out in Vox, despite the Trump administration’s play to be the great protector of the nation’s dogs and cats and guinea pigs, it has also undermined that goal—by scaling back enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, by suing states to overturn their laws on cage-free eggs, by disbanding the research team that tried to limit animal suffering, and so on. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Through a spokesperson, Bondi told me: “I have fought against animal abuse my entire career and will never stop working to prosecute the sick individuals who prey upon innocent animals.” A USDA spokesperson told me that his department “continues to push for stronger, more consistent enforcement” of the Animal Welfare Act, especially when it comes to dog-breeding facilities.)

[Read: What I learned from a steer named Chico]

This may seem confusing only if you think that in this context, protecting animals is necessarily an act of love. “That has nothing to do with it, nothing,” Roscher said. “It’s not about love; it’s not about liking.” It’s about something else instead—a reordering of social values. This comes through in Trump’s own professed affinity for animals, which seems to overlap exactly with his antipathy for windmills. “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!” he wrote in a social-media post on December 30, above a photo of a feathered carcass in the sand. Note the possessive. Our birds, our land—we protect these things because they are our property.

It turned out that the photo he’d posted did not, in fact, depict our national bird, and also hadn’t been taken anywhere in the United States. But these were just the details on the ground. The important thing to know was this: Something in the natural world was broken, and Trump alone would be the one to fix it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/02/maga-animals-nationalism/686084/?utm_source=feed