The Colorado Sun reports that Democratic state Rep. Manny Rutinel, now running for Congress in Colorado’s 8th District, used since-deleted Reddit posts to support “animal liberation,” a movement seeking to put animals on the same legal footing as human beings and prohibit their use for food and other purposes. This was not merely a teenager deciding tofu was delicious. The posts described a future animal-liberation amendment, fewer farm animals, and the remaining livestock being relocated to sanctuaries or kept as pets.
Rutinel says those posts, written when he was 22, no longer represent his views. Fair enough. People grow up. But The Sun found that his activism continued much later, including calling animal agriculture a “horrific, exploitative industry” in 2021 and praising proposed Denver bans on slaughterhouses and fur sales in 2023. Now he wants to represent a district packed with ranches, feedlots, dairies, farm families and the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley. Nothing says “I understand rural Colorado” quite like discovering rotational grazing shortly before running for its congressional seat.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Rutinel’s deleted Reddit posts reportedly promoted animal liberation, including a future in which agricultural animals would be removed from production and sent to sanctuaries. Basically, Old MacDonald gets served an eviction notice while the cows lawyer up.
- He also urged people to adopt vegan lifestyles and described meat as the product of tortured and slaughtered animals. Caring about humane treatment is normal. Treating every 4-H family like the opening act of a livestock war-crimes tribunal is activist brain rot.
- Rutinel says he no longer holds those views and now eats meat. Apparently, the road from animal liberation to congressional moderation runs through a campaign consultant and ends at a barbecue.
- His explanation deserves consideration, but voters may notice that the rhetoric did not vanish with adolescence. The Sun reports that his animal-rights advocacy continued through law school and right up to the beginning of his legislative career.
- CD8 includes thousands of farms and ranches and generated roughly $1.2 billion in animal products in 2022. This is not a faculty lounge thought experiment. People’s jobs, food costs, land use, water management and family operations are attached to these ideas.
My Bottom Line
This is not about mocking somebody for caring about animals. Most ranchers care more about the daily welfare of livestock than activists who have never cleaned a calving pen, broken ice on a stock tank or stayed awake all night trying to save a sick animal. That is called stewardship. It is practical, demanding and rooted in reality.
Animal personhood is something else entirely. Give livestock the same legal standing as people and basic rural life becomes a courthouse circus. Ranching, hunting, pest control, veterinary care and food production all become targets for endless litigation. Does a rancher need consent before treating an injured steer? Does a mouse get an attorney before the trap is set? Does a cow have standing in a water case? The theory collapses the moment it leaves the nonprofit basement and encounters an actual barn.
Rutinel says he changed after speaking with ranchers and seeing that they care for their animals, steward water and rotate grazing. Good. Better late than never. But that revelation should also embarrass the political ecosystem that trained another ambitious Front Range progressive to view agriculture as a moral offense until meeting the people who actually do it.
Deleted posts are not proof of present guilt. They are proof that voters have questions. Rutinel is asking an agriculture-heavy district to trust that the ideology disappeared just as his political ambitions arrived. Rural Coloradans are entitled to examine that claim closely, preferably before the chickens receive counsel and the feedlot gets served with a civil-rights complaint.
Source: The Colorado Sun
Now It's Your Turn...