Hearts Still Care

Across the world, animals are becoming collateral damage in a political culture that celebrates dominance over empathy. The pattern is disturbingly clear: whenever right-wing politics ascends, compassion for non-human beings descends. What varies is not the outcome, but only the scale.

India: Where Stray Lives Are Treated as Disposable

In India, the tension between development, majoritarian politics, and animal welfare has reached a breaking point. The Supreme Court’s recent verdict actually moves toward culling stray animals because shelters are just not equipped here to host the sheer volume of animals. This reveals how fragile and conditional compassion can be. Cows may be sacralised for cultural reasons, but street dogs, cats, and countless other beings exist in a legislative vacuum. This is not to say, by clear evidence, that cows are treated better. They are not.

Animal activists routinely face harassment, threats, and even physical assault. Their work is dismissed as “anti-development”, “elitist”, or oddly, “anti-national”. The message is chillingly clear: empathy outside the ideological script is unwelcome.

The contradiction at the heart of Indian politics could not be starker. A civilisation that once spoke of ahimsa now debates how best to eliminate the creatures who live alongside us. Animal rights, as a legal concept, barely exist. Welfare boards and NGOs operate with fewer protections than the animals they’re trying to save.

United States: The Trumpian Assault on Conservation

Across the ocean, the United States has witnessed its own war on the natural world under Donald Trump. His administration rolled back dozens of environmental and conservation policies, opening protected lands—including the Arctic—to oil drilling and mining. Wolves, bears, and endangered species lost protections painstakingly built over decades.

More than policy, though, it was the disdain embedded in the rhetoric that revealed the shift. Trump mocked Greta Thunberg, a child demanding climate responsibility, not because he misunderstood the science but because empathy itself threatened his worldview.

Right-wing populism thrives on the performance of strength, and in that performance, the planet and its creatures become expendable props.

A Global Pattern: Strength Without Stewardship

Globally, right-wing governments—from Brazil under Bolsonaro to parts of Eastern Europe—share a familiar pattern:

Environmental protections weakened in favour of extractive industries. Wildlife treated as a nuisance when it interrupts development. Animal advocates vilified as radicals or enemies of progress. Traditional practices defended uncritically, even when inherently cruel.

The ideology is not built on stewardship but on supremacy—of humans over animals, of industry over ecology, of political identity over compassion.

What makes this pattern dangerous is its universality. Whether it is a street dog in Delhi, a wolf in Alaska, or a rainforest species in Brazil, the message is uniform: if a life cannot vote, pay taxes, or further political symbolism, it can be discarded.

Why Right-Wing Politics So Often Collides with Animal Welfare

Several threads connect these global examples:

Hyper-nationalism reframes empathy as weakness. Development-first agendas ignore ecological and ethical costs. Cultural absolutism defends cruelty when it is traditional. Anti-activist sentiment treats compassion-driven movements as political threats. Masculinity politics turns care into a liability.

These attitudes create a world where the voiceless remain unheard, and those who speak on their behalf are targeted.

The Cost of This Indifference

When animal lives are treated as disposable, societies lose far more than biodiversity—they lose moral clarity. The willingness to mistreat animals normalises brutality. It makes violence thinkable, then permissible, and finally, invisible.

A society that cannot protect its weakest beings eventually struggles to protect its own people.

Choosing Empathy in an Unempathetic Age

Not every right-wing individual hates animals. But the ideological machinery that dominates right-wing politics today prioritises power, extraction, and cultural symbolism over care. In that machinery, animals simply do not count.

The task for the rest of us is urgent. We must insist on laws that recognise animals as sentient beings, not nuisances. We must support activists who put their bodies on the line where institutions fail. And we must remember a simple truth: a civilisation is not judged by the slogans of its leaders, but by how it treats those who have no voice.

If the world continues on this path of sanctioned cruelty, it is not only animals who will be lost—our own humanity will erode with them.