This reminds me of how the Only Fans weirdo with the squirrel he was keeping illegally got into the right wing outrage sphere.

Theres a violent attack on animal rights going on in the background. Deregulation on the meat industry is what lead to those recalls (Boar’s Head, etc) - if they’re slacking in the basic requirements needed to not get humans sick, what on earth does enforcement of animal welfare look like right now?

The fascist ideology sees animals purely as raw resources. There’s something really scary and creepy going on with the obsession with carnivore diets, cooking everything in tallow, and being aggressively “pro meat.”

They want people to be able to do whatever they want to animals. These kinds of “person keeps wild animal as pet and gets in trouble” stories serve as a nice wedge - because ahh, it’s a cute animal and they just want to be fweends with it 😢 - while not recognizing how fucked and narcissistic it is to kidnap an animal from the wild and assign yourself as it’s caretaker. That’s something people go to school to learn to do, like I’ve volunteered a lot in wild and domestic refuges - shits complicated! I’m a smart guy, but I was only good for the dumb labor, the kind of knowledge you need to have to recognize fly strike or that you can’t save possum fetuses takes years to develop (this is also related to the attack on intellectualism/professionalism/knowledge).