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Saturday, August 03, 2013

Bambi vs the Wisconsin DNS
  
     When I read about hyper-militarized fascist bullshit like this, it makes me despair for this once-compassionate and humane country, putting ideas in my head that would, in this Fuck the 4th Amendment, We're the NSA, Bitch! day and age would make me a victim and not just a mere commentator on said fascism. I'll just let the Daily Kos blogger editorialize in their own words to start:
In a case that highlights absolutely everything wrong with this country, Wisconsin state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) agents and sheriff's deputies "armed to the teeth" raided a non-profit no kill shelter based on multiple anonymous tips of a deer on the premises. Aerial photos were taken, warrant issued, and the raid ensued by heavily armed agents. The staff was corralled, not permitted to make calls and a cellphone was confiscated to delete pictures of the raid. A baby deer (named Giggles by the staff) was indeed seized and stuffed into a body bag...and then promptly killed by the agents. The presiding warden compared it to a drug raid to justify the SWAT-like tactics.
     At some point, every rational-thinking person with even just a baseline of compassion has to wonder how the fuck we turned from a nation renowned for its national parks and animal cruelty laws to a collaboration of Alice's Resatuarant between Leni Riefenstahl and Sam Pekinpah and all within our lifetimes. Fucking seriously? Aerial photographs were taken? Were they 27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against them?
     And why would these fascist twats think they needed to be armed to the teeth? Because they were expecting bin Laden and his merry band of cave-dwelling terrorists fresh from Tora Bora instead of the mostly teenaged volunteers? And all because some anonymous, do-gooder, "Teacher, teacher, you forgot to assign us homework!" tipster called in that the no kill shelter was harboring an illegal fawn? Why didn't they call Ted fucking Nugent over so they could have a barbeque, maybe invite Bush over for some tender venison and hold a Republican fundraiser over the tiny, half-eaten carcass, for fuck's sake?
     Better minds than mine have gone over and over at how much our police have been flooded with federal Daddy war bucks ever since 911 and how our local constabularies mostly made up of people we knew and grew up as kids now treat the citizenry they're mandated to protect as if we're 300,000,000 potential criminals and terrorists. Whereas SWAT teams weren't created until after the Charles Whitman mass shooting at the University of Texas in the late 60's, police now have tanks, helicopters, SUVs with battering rams, mortars and all sorts of ungodly ordnance, grenades, and, as Occupy showed us, even sonic disruptors (LRADs) that would cripple the Hulk. And, of course, your local constabularies are now coordinating with federal agencies, some say as many as 52, starting with the FBI and Homeland Security.
     And any second amendment foam finger-waver who would tell you that we're not living in a fascist police state seriously needs to have a head-out-of-the-ass-ectomy.
     It would be very easy to lay this at Scott Walker's doorstep at the Governor's mansion in Madison but this isn't something for which we can blame a single Governor or even a single administration or session of Congress. This is some serous mission creep we're talking about here. Now that al Qaeda is all but crippled and bin Laden allegedly dead, anxious, trigger-happy cops who dearly miss the 60's are just itching for an excuse to pull the trigger, even getting throbbing, oozing hardons at the thought of murdering a defenseless fawn shoved into a body bag and searching the rest of the shelter for what other incriminating evidence they could find, even destroying evidence to cover up their allegedly legal police action.
     I'd like to close by saying that I wish every cop who was involved in this Wisconsin raid would die of cancer but I have to stop short and say that such a fate, dying in a nice clean hospice bed, is simply too good, too sedate and not exciting enough for them. People who have such a complete, sociopathic disregard for even the most harmless forms of life simply have no socially redeeming assets and therefore have no place upon this planet.
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5 Comments:
Blogger BadTux said...
Well, just to be a contrarian:

1) The shelter owner is well known to the local authorities as a major-league hard-case. She was unlikely to hand over Bambi bin Laden voluntarily.

2) CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease) is endemic in the area. If the fawn was indeed left motherless (doubtful, mother deer spend very little time with their fawns in order to avoid leading predators to their fawns, showing up a couple times a day to nurse their fawns and otherwise leaving them in hiding), it is likely that the mother died of CWD -- and passed it on to her fawn.

3) There is no shortage of deer in Wisconsin, even *with* CWD taking out entire herds. The safest thing to do when you have a stray deer that has a high likelihood of carrying CWD is to kill that deer. You aren't endangering the species by doing that because there's plenty of deer in Wisconsin, rather, you're protecting the rest of the species.

So the *particulars* of what DNR did are reasonable. But: THIRTEEN heavily armed cops? Uhm. Two DNR agents combined with the four Sheriff's deputies who showed up would have been more than enough to deal with the hardcase shelter owner and various volunteers without busting the budget and without terrorizing anybody. This was a no-kill shelter, not a friggin' grow op! What was the shelter owner going to do, use a cat-a-pult to pelt them with cats?

Someone needs to buy these fish cops some spines and balls. 'Cause obviously they ain't got none of their own. Just sayin'.

Anonymous The WP said...
First thing this Minnesota resident with deer (including two fawns)in the backyard and a retired big animal vet in sitting on the sun porch watching said deer, thought was CWD.

The swat team was overkill, but the DNR has procedures in place for orphaned wildlife. The rules are not meant to be callous or cruel; they are there to protect the rest of the wildlife.

Blogger jurassicpork said...
Oh really? Then explain to me how keeping everyone at gunpoint, forbidding them from making calls and deleting cell phone videos is part of protocol? If everything was all nice and legal, then why the Gestapo crackdown?

Blogger BadTux said...
Clearly the raid was conducted in a manner that is, let us say, *dubious*. That said, Bambi bin Laden had to die. There is no cure for CWD other than killing every deer that may be carrying it. Which is why I have no problem with them conducting a raid and taking out Bambi bin Laden, just with the way that raid was conducted. An old lady shelter owner and teenage volunteers do *not* warrant the same response as a meth lab, period.

Anonymous Anonymous said...
Well, of course it's terrible - but this is what happens when you and your fellow ineffectual pseudoradical jerkoffs boost Republicans into positions of authority. Stupid policies get enacted and they take forever to repeal. Even you are not so foolish as to believe, not seriously, that President Stein can simply wave the magic wand and make everything all better.