New NRA Chief Once Tortured a Cat to Death

Republicans spent the better part of September falsely smearing migrants as sadistic pet torturers in their bid to stoke fear about immigration. Yet for a party seemingly concerned with the welfare of animals, they raise few objections when cruelty takes place within their own ranks.

According to a Monday report from The Guardian, the National Rifle Association’s recently crowned CEO, Doug Hamlin, once pleaded no contest to having brutally tortured a cat to death alongside several of his fraternity brothers at the University of Michigan.

In 1980, Hamlin and four of his Alpha Delta Phi fraternity brothers were sentenced to 200 hours of community service and a monetary fine after brutally murdering the organization’s pet cat, BK. At the time, Hamlin served as Alpha Delta Phi’s chapter president.

According to contemporaneous news reports obtained by The Guardian, in December 1979 the group of men — allegedly upset with BK for not using his litter box — cut off BK’s paws before stringing him up and setting him on fire, ultimately killing him. A passerby who heard BK’s screams as he was being tortured notified police.

Hamlin and his fraternity brothers were ultimately expelled from Alpha Delta Phi, but not from the university, and their records were expunged after completing their sentences.

“Heartlessness must be in the job description to run the NRA,” Everytown for Gun Safety Senior Vice President for Law and Policy Nick Suplina told The Guardian. “This revelation shows that the NRA has failed to turn the page on its scandal-plagued leaders and its doom spiral continues with Hamlin at the helm,” he added, referring to a multi-million dollar fraud lawsuit against the NRA’s former CEO Wayne LaPierre, which was adjudicated earlier this year.  

Hamlin is not the only Republican to come under fire for their mistreatment of animals in the past year. Most infamously, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem created a firestorm of backlash in April after bragging about executing her puppy — a wire-haired pointer named Cricket — in her memoir. According to Noem, Cricket was not a very good hunting dog, and was more interested in playing and killing chickens. “I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling Cricket, “less than worthless as a hunting dog,” “untrainable,” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.” In subsequent interviews, Noem repeatedly insisted that she’d done nothing wrong and that her actions were a testament to how she doesn’t “shy away from tough challenges.”

Last month, reports emerged that Kevin Roberts — president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a key architect of Project 2025 — once bragged that he had beaten his neighbor’s dog to death with a shovel while a professor at New Mexico State University. The justification he gave to his colleagues was that he found the dogs barking annoying. Roberts denied the report.

Perhaps no figure has collected more stories regarding their questionable treatment of animals than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate turned surrogate for former President Donald Trump.

In July, Vanity Fair published a photo allegedly showing Kennedy posing with a dog that had been spit-roasted over a fire. The then-candidate denied having eaten a dog, claiming that the animal was actually a goat. Then, in August, Kennedy revealed that he was the culprit behind a 2014 incident in which a dead bear cub was found dumped in New York City’s Central Park. Kennedy says he attempted to stage a scene to make it look like a cyclist had actually killed the cub after he picked up the dead bear from the side of the road during a falconry excursion.

Later in August, a 2012 Town & Country interview resurfaced in which his daughter, Kick Kennedy, said her father once decapitated a dead whale with a chainsaw, attached the head to the top of their car, and drove it back to the family’s home in Mount Kisco, New York, as rancid whale juice splattered the occupants of the car and other vehicles. It makes the then-scandalous story of Mitt Romeny putting his family’s dog in a carrier on their car’s roof sound quaint by comparison. The National Marine Fisheries Service confirmed in September that it has launched an investigation into the incident.

All of this is to say that if the right wants to embark on a crusade against animal cruelty, they should first clean their own house.

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