Cruelty is behind governor's use of razor wire at border

There’s a reason Native Americans called barbed wire the “ devil’s rope.”

The cruel embrace of the spikes offered 19th century settlers the solution they’d been looking for to stake their claims out west: a fence that kept cattle in, and undesirables out. Unsuspecting wild buffalo and longhorns often became ensnared, thrashing their bodies against the wire, not knowing that the more they struggled, the more they’d suffer. If hunger or thirst didn’t kill them, infections from their festering wounds would.

Though many cowboys and even ranchers protested the wire and its agonizing violence, the devil’s rope offered something too tempting: dominion.