Rock musician, crackpot, and prime comedy fodder Ted Nugent said something stupid again. Color me shocked. In a recent interview with The Chuck Shute Podcast, Nugent talked about the recent death of his beloved dog, Happy, and somehow managed to tie that into an argument in favor of hunting rights. Yeah, I don’t understand it either. But here’s his latest unhinged rant, as transcribed by Blabbermouth:
“I eat venison. I don’t eat dogs. [Former U.S. president] Barack Obama eats dogs, but I don’t eat dogs. And I have some friends in Vietnam and China that eat dogs, and it’s meat. If that’s what you wanna eat, but we don’t have that relationship with our dogs. Even though if you go to a Chinese restaurant, I promise you you’re gonna eat dogs at some point and cats. The point is, is that I’m a hunter, a fisherman and trapper. I harvest the surplus to maintain a healthy environment. Anybody who’s got a problem with that is like brain dead. You’ve gotta be the dumbest motherfucker on the planet to think you can stop hunting for one season. I donate tons of venison, which is the purest, most healthy, nutritious, delicious protein in the world. [My wife] Shemane and I, and my son, my family, we donate tons of venison to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Do you really know somebody that has a problem with that? Can you realize how soulless, how nasty a person would have to be to go, ‘Well, you shouldn’t feed the homeless venison.’ [Laughs] Fuck you. “
Okay, there’s a ton of stupid shit to unpack there. But let’s start with his claim that Barack Obama eats dogs. You might be wondering what the hell the Nuge is talking about there. Well, in Obama’s 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father, the former president told a story about being fed dog meat one time in Indonesia when he was traveling there as a child with his stepfather. So, in 2012, when the scandal came out during the election about Mitt Romney putting his family dog in a kennel on the top of his car during a family trip in 1983, the right-wing tried to hit back by pointing out that Obama ate a dog once. Considering that no rational person would consider a grown adult cruelly putting a dog in an unsafe and terrifying situation to be on the same level as a child being fed dog by a culture where that’s customary, the scandal quickly blew over and Obama easily trounced Romney in the election.
Then there’s the claim that you’re going to eat dogs and cats at Chinese restaurants, which is patently false. As Snopes points out, while there are some remote regions in China that do eat cats and dogs, the practice has never been brought to Europe or North America, and there’s nobody sneaking dog or cat meat into your Kung Pao chicken. It’s a claim commonly drummed up by racists to make Asian cultures seem strange or “other.” As for Nugent’s claim that he personally has friends in Vietnam and China that eat dogs, I find it hard to believe that Nugent has friends at all let alone Vietnamese and Chinese friends who put up with his constant racism.
As for his comments about hunting, obviously there’s a lot of debate over animal rights and hunting in general and I’m not going to try to convince anyone here to share my opinions on animal rights. That being said, Nugent is all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and wrote in a 2014 post on his website that the poor in America have everything handed to them and have no incentive to work, so it seems a little strange that he’s suddenly claiming to donate to homeless shelters and claiming a moral superiority about it.