Excerpt from Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals

Edited by Steven Best, PhD, and Anthony J. Nocella I

Table of Contents

Foreword
Ward Churchill

Introducing the Animal Liberation Front

Animal Liberation Front Guidelines

Introduction: Behind the Mask: Uncovering the Animal Liberation Front
Steven Best, PhD, and Anthony J. Nocella II

History

Thirty Years of Direct Action
Noel Molland

Animal Liberation—By “Whatever Means Necessary”
Robin Webb

A Personal Overview of Direct Action in the United Kingdom and the United States
Kim Stallwood

Liberation

Legitimizing Liberation
Mark Bernstein, PhD

At the Gates of Hell: The ALF and the Legacy of Holocaust Resistance
Maxwell Schnurer, PhD

Abolition, Liberation, Freedom: Coming to a Fur Farm Near You
Gary Yourofsky

Mothers with Monkeywrenches: Feminist Imperatives and the ALF
pattrice jones

Motivation

Aquinas’s Account of Anger Applied to the ALF
Judith Barad, PhD

Direct Actions Speak Louder than Words
Rod Coronado

Touch the Earth
Lawrence Sampson

Take No Prisoners
Western Wildlife Unit

Perception

Understanding the ALF: From Critical Analysis to Critical Pedagogy
Anthony J. Nocella II

Open Rescues: Putting a Face on Liberation
Karen Davis, PhD

From the Front Lines to the Front Page: An Analysis of ALF Media Coverage
Karen Dawn

Tactics

How to Justify Violence
Tom Regan, PhD

Direct Action: Progress, Peril, or Both?
Freeman Wicklund

Defending Agitation and the ALF
Bruce Friedrich

Bricks and Bullhorns
Kevin Jonas

Revolutionary Process and the ALF
Nicole Atwood

Terror

ALF and ELF: Terrorism Is as Terrorism Does
Paul Watson

The Rhetorical “Terrorist”: Implications of the USA Patriot Act for Animal Liberation
Jason Black and Jennifer Black

It’s War! The Escalating Battle Between Activists and the Corporate-State Complex
Steven Best, PhD

Afterword: The ALF: Who, Why, and What?
Ingrid Newkirk

Appendices

My Experience with Government Harassment
Rod Coronado

Letters From the Underground: Parts I and II
Anonymous

Defining Terrorism
Steven Best, PhD, and Anthony J. Nocella II

Resources

About the Authors

Foreword: Illuminating the Philosophy and Methods of Animal Liberation
Ward Churchill

The fire this time. —Eldridge Cleaver, 1969

For the past four decades, an entity loosely referred to as the “animal rights movement” has conducted an increasingly concerted series of direct actions against industries, “sports,” and scientific enterprises guilty of the confinement, abuse, torture and mass death of nonhuman beings. From physical disruptions of English fox hunts during the early 1960s to a raid upon the animal colonies of the Oxford University Laboratory in 1974, from infiltration/disruption of New York University Medical Center’s experimental facility in 1977 to the torching of an animal diagnostics lab at the University of California-Davis a decade later, from the 1997 rescue of over 10,000 mink from the Arritola Mink Farm in Oregon to the still more recent arson of a partly complete ski resort near Vail, Colorado, that was eradicating the habitat of the local lynx population, animal rights activists have engaged in several thousand noteworthy actions in two dozen countries since 1973. Along the way, they have extracted penalties from their opponents running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Often stunning in their sheer audacity—and in the dexterity with which they’ve been carried out—these assaults upon the sites of carnage have commanded considerable public attention. They’ve also been systematically decontextualized, sensationalized, and otherwise distorted by the minions of the establishment media with the result that, although every action has been crafted in such a way that not a single fatality has resulted from the movement’s lengthy campaign of sabotage, the activists responsible are commonly viewed as “terrorists.” Hence, the methods, if not the objectives, of groups like the Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and Earth First! have been as readily condemned by all too many self-styled progressives as they have by the governmental and corporate officials most directly under attack.

To be valid, however, denunciation requires an accurate understanding of that which is denounced. And, unquestionably, those committed to the struggle for animal liberation are among the least understood of all contemporary oppositionists, not only in tactical terms, but philosophically. It is therefore fortunate that Steven Best and Anthony Nocella have teamed up to provide the present volume, providing as it does what is undeniably the most detailed and comprehensive overview of the thinking that has underpinned the sustained and to all accounts growing activism in behalf, not only of nonhuman animals, but the natural order in its entirety. One will finish reading this book agreeing or disagreeing with what is said herein, or more likely some combination of the two, but one cannot read it and at the same time remain functionally ignorant of what the animal liberationists are doing and why they are doing it. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? is thus a perfect antidote to the falsehoods spewed on a regular basis by the likes of CNN and Fox News; it provides the basis, that is, for constructing genuinely informed opinions on its subject matter. Suffice it to say that no more can be asked of any book.
The probability is that those who avail themselves of the essays that follow, regardless of their preexisting political perspectives, will find themselves holding far more in common with the most militant animal rights advocates than they’d previously imagined. The logic employed by the movement is, in a word, compelling. It cannot be evaded even by those, such as myself, who explicitly privilege humans over other species by taking as the centerpiece of our posture an active resistance to genocide and such corollaries as racism, colonialism and aggressive war. Given that the key to the “genocidal mentality” resides, as virtually all commentators agree, in the perpetrators’ conscious “dehumanization of the Other” they have set themselves to exterminating, it follows that removal of the self-assigned license enjoyed by humans to do as they will to/with nonhumans can only serve to better the lot of humans targeted for dehumanization/subjugation/eradication.1

In sum, it is more than superficially arguable that to attack the grotesqueries of scientific/medical experimentation using live simians is to seriously undermine the psychointellectual foundation upon which the nazi doctors stood when using dehumanized humans to the same purpose at Dachau and elsewhere (and upon which the nazis’ American counterparts stand when undertaking projects like the Tuskegee Experiment, MK-ULTRA, and so on).2 By the same token, to assault the meatpacking industry is to mount a challenge to the mentality that allowed well over a million dehumanized humans to be systematically slaughtered by the SS einsatzgruppen in eastern Europe during the early 1940s, and the nazis’ simultaneous development of truly industrial killing techniques in places like Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka3 (one might look to the penal labor camps of America’s Deep South and American Indian residential schools in both the U.S. and Canada during a slightly earlier period to find counterpart examples4). The implications embodied in such connections are, of course, theoretically profound.

Among other issues raised is the manner in which those purporting to oppose a genocidal—or, in the terms posed by animal liberationists, omnicidal—reality are obliged to confront it. Can the constraints of dialogue or debate concerning the ethics and morality of genocide/omnicide really be appropriate to a context in which one side of the debate entitles itself to perpetrate such crimes even while the supposed “dialogue” is being conducted? The answer, to be sure, is—must be—an unequivocal “no.” The niceties attending this sort of civic discourse pertain only to situations in which commission of the offending course of action has yet to be undertaken or in which the perpetrators are willing to suspend their activities pending resolution of the debate. Neither of these circumstances prevailing, direct action of the sort designed to disrupt—and at an optimum halt—the process of commission is absolutely essential. In the alternative, the “opposition” is an utter farce.

That said, the question becomes that of which varieties of direct action may be warranted. The answer is to a significant extent situational; that is, determined by the nature of the offense confronted. Abridgements of civil rights—those evident under a regime of Jim Crow racial segregation (apartheid), for example—can perhaps be addressed more or less exclusively by reliance upon such methods as mass demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, and the like. So, too, problems like wage inequity and occupational safety. But is there anyone deluded enough to believe that such tactics might in themselves have been effective—and thus appropriate as a set of methodological constraints—as a means of confronting/stopping the Hitlerian genocide?5 That making condemnatory statements, sending petitions, refusing to buy German products, staging rallies/marches in protest, and/or conducting prayer vigils and other such bearings of witness to the nazi slaughter constituted all that “moral” or “responsible” persons could/should have done in response?

Animal liberationists, unlike the great majority of oppositionists in other vectors, appear, at least in principle, to have drawn the correct conclusions from these and comparable queries. To this extent, if none other, there is much to be learned from their praxis. At the same time, however, it seems to be a consensus position within groups like the ALF and the ELF that infliction of property damage upon entities engaged in the willful perpetration of omnicide constitutes the limit of legitimate response to the crimes at hand. Plainly, if there is the least merit to the above-discussed nazi analogy—which is advanced with regularity by proponents of animal rights—then the drawing of such a figurative line in the tactical sand is as arbitrary as that drawn by those who would restrict the range of responses to symbolic gestures.

The crux of the issue is revealed by the positing of another hypothetical: Given the opportunity to do either in, say, 1942, would it have been more effective/appropriate to have torched the office of Adolf Eichmann, the nazi bureaucrat whose peculiar expertise made an orderly implementation of the Final solution possible, or to have eliminated Eichmann himself?6 The answer need not be rendered as an abstraction. Instead, it is bound up in the esteem in which the Czech partisans who assassinated Eichmann’s boss, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, continue to be held even by those inclined most vociferously to revile the ALF/ELF brand of “ecoterrorism.”7 Similarly, the degree of valorization now all but universally accorded the so-called June Plotters—i.e., the group of German military officers and diplomats who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler himself in 1944—speaks eloquently to the conclusion which must be drawn.8 Neither a principle or an analysis, after all, is more valuable than the consistency with which they are applied.

Whether and how such unification of principle, analysis and action should—or can—be actualized in the present setting are matters that Terrorists or Freedom Fighters only begins to address. Nonetheless, and to their everlasting credit, the authors whose work is assembled herein lay much of the informational/conceptual groundwork necessary for such questions to be interrogated on a rational rather than merely visceral basis. Best and Nocella are to be commended for having brought this collection of voices together. As well, Lantern Books for having displayed the courage to make the result available to a general readership.

Notes

1. For explication of the quoted phrases, see Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic Books, 1988), and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). Also see the section title “Yea Rats and Mice or Swarms of Lice,” in my Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 169–78.
2. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986); James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1981); John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” (New York: W.W. Norton, [2nd ed.] 1991); Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press [2nd ed.] 1992).
3. See Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); the section titled “Killing Center Operations” in Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), 555–638.
4. The death rate in the nazis’ notorious Dachau concentration camp was 36 percent. At Buchenwalld, it was 19 percent. At Mauthausen, generally considered to be the harshest of all nazi facilities other than outright extermination centers like Auschwitz, it was 58 percent; Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on the Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 211. By comparison, no prisoner is known to have survived a 10-year sentence under the conditions prevailing in Mississippi’s convict leasing system from 1866 inception to formal abolition in 1890; David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), 46. On the residential schools, the conditions in which were so abysmal that a 50 percent mortality rate prevailed among the American Indian children incarcerated therein from roughly 1880 to 1930, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); John S. Milloy, “A National Crime”: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999).
5. Gandhi apparently filled the bill in this regard. As has been noted elsewhere, “Civil disobedience as a strategy of political opposition can succeed only with a government ruled by conscience. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, when Gandhi advised the Jews in Germany to employ Satyagraha, the Indian version of passive resistance, he disclosed his inability to distinguish between English and German political morality”; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (New York: Free Press, [2nd ed.] 1985), 274.
6. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1964); Jochen von Lang and Claus Sibyll, eds., Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archive of the Israeli Police (New York: De Capo Press, 1999).
7. Callum MacDonald, The SS Overgruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (New York: Free Press, 1989).
8. Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945 (Montréal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, [3rd ed.] 1996), 263–534

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Introducing the Animal Liberation Front

Reprinted from the ALF Primer

The Animal Liberation Front consists of small autonomous groups of people all over the world who carry out direct action according to the ALF guidelines.

These groups, called cells, range from one individual to many individuals working closely together. Activists in one cell do not know ALF activists in another cell because they remain anonymous. This is what helps to keep activists out of jail, and free to be active another day.
Since there is not a central organization or membership guide to the ALF, people are driven only by their own personal conscience or cell decisions to carry out actions. The ALF is non-hierarchical in its structure, which allows for only those people involved directly in the action to control their own destiny.

Anyone in your community could be part of the ALF without you knowing. This includes PTA parents, church volunteers, your spouse, your neighbor, or your mayor. No one is immune to the suffering of animals, which includes even the workers themselves in any animal abuse industry who cannot bear to watch animals withering in pain any longer.

Any action that adheres to the strict nonviolence guidelines, which follow, can be considered an ALF action. Economic sabotage and property destruction are considered ALF actions, as well as live liberations. Volunteers carry out actions across the world to bring animal liberation a little closer to the victims of untold agony.

Since there isn‘t a way to contact the ALF in your area, it is up to each of us to take the responsibility ourselves to stop the exploitation of fellow animals. In the words of a convicted ALF activist, “when you see the pictures of a masked liberator, stop asking who‘s behind the mask and look in the mirror!“

Animal Liberation Front Guidelines

Reprinted from the ALF Primer

To liberate animals from places of abuse, i.e., laboratories, factory farms, fur farms, etc., and place them in good homes where they may live out their natural lives, free from suffering.

To inflict economic damage to those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals.

To reveal the horror and atrocities committed against animals behind locked doors, by performing nonviolent direct actions and liberations.

To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human and non-human.

Any group of people who are vegetarians or vegans and who carry out actions according to ALF guidelines have the right to regard themselves as part of the ALF.

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Introduction: Behind the Mask: Uncovering the Animal Liberation Front
Steven Best, PhD, and Anthony J. Nocella II

“The world only goes forward because of those who oppose it.” Goethe

“But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity.” Krishnamurti

On September 11, 2001, the political landscape changed dramatically. Instantaneously, it became unpatriotic to criticize President Bush, the government, or US policy on any front. Activist groups like the Sierra Club announced that they were indefinitely suspending all criticism against Bush’s pro-corporate agenda as the nation tried to pull together. Without question, there were real enemies outside our continent to be wary of, but the government exaggerated the threat as it began to identify imaginary enemies within. The “war on terrorism“ quickly became an attack on civil liberties, free speech, and domestic dissent. While flags waved everywhere, the Bush administration was gutting freedoms and shredding the Constitution, moving America ever closer to tyranny.

Nowhere was this dynamic more obvious than with the October 26, 2001 passage of the USA Patriot Act, which endowed the government with unprecedented powers of surveillance, search and seizure, and suppression of dissent (see Best and Black and Black in this volume).1 As liberty was being attacked in the name of “security,” activists in the post-9/11 world confronted a threatening new terrain where political action against the state and corporations decimating animals and despoiling the earth was suppressed and conflated with “terrorism” in order to legitimate severe political repression.

During this turbulent time when the nation and its patriots called for unity—a “unity” that masks deep divisions, injustices, and conflicts inherent in the US—the war between animal rights and environmental activists on one side, and corporate exploiters and the state on the other, began to heat up as never before (see Best in this volume).2 Animal rights and environmental activists refuse to ignore the plight of the natural world as the country focuses on the human costs of global conflicts; rather, they emphasize the bloody war the human species has perennially waged on nonhuman species and the violence and terrorism of the human pogrom against the earth. Far from backing down in the face of government repression, the militant wings of the animal rights and environmental movements have escalated their struggles and thereby provoked an intense confrontation with their enemies in the state and corporate worlds.

We have entered a neo-McCarthyist period rooted in witch-hunts against activists and critics of the ruling elites. The terms and players have changed, but the situation is much the same as in the 1950s: the terrorist threat usurps the communist threat, Attorney General John Ashcroft dons the garb of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the Congressional Meetings on Eco-Terrorism stand in for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Now as then, the government informs the public that the nation is in a permanent state of danger, such that security, not freedom, must become our overriding concern. As before, the state conjures up dangerous enemies everywhere, not only outside our country but, more menacingly, ensconced within our borders, lurking in radical cells. The alleged dangers posed by foreign terrorists are used to justify the attack on “domestic terrorists” within, and in a hysterical climate the domestic terrorist is any and every citizen expressing dissent.

But the state’s tactic can only backfire, for if every dissenting group is branded as “terrorist,” none are terrorist, and the true enemies become harder to identify. As US policy fails miserably in Afghanistan and Iraq, with chaos, anti-American hostilities, soldier casualties, public opposition, and terrorist threats growing, the government nonetheless squanders significant resources to persecute animal rights and environmental activists whom the state, corporations, and mass media smear as “violent” and demonize as “terrorists.” The new ecowarriors, however, insist that their only crime is a principled defense of the earth and the billions of animals massacred in an ongoing global holocaust. As ecowarriors see it, the human individuals, corporations, and state entities that promote or defend the exploitation of the natural world are the true violent forces and the real terrorists.

Thus, in the post-9/11 climate, intense controversy brews around the discourse of violence and terrorism. And so the questions arise: Who and what are “terrorists”? And, conversely, who and what are “freedom fighters”? What is “violence,” and who are the main perpetuators of it? It is imperative that we resist corporate, state, and mass media definitions, propaganda, and conceptual conflations in order to distinguish between freedom fighters and terrorists, between nonviolent civil disobedience and “domestic terrorism,” and between ethically justified destruction of property and wanton violence toward life.

I. The ALF: The Newest Liberation Movement

Where there is disharmony in the world, death follows. —Ancient Navajo saying

Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the “final frontier.” —Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer

This is a book about a new breed of freedom fighters—human activists who risk their own liberty to rescue and aid animals imprisoned in hellish conditions. Loosely bonded in a decentralized, anonymous, underground, global network, these activists are members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Their daring deeds have earned them a top spot on the FBI “domestic terrorist” list as they redefine political struggle for the current era. An intense sense of urgency informs their actions. They recognize a profound crisis in the human relation with the natural world, such that the time has long passed for moderation, delay, and compromise. They can no longer fiddle while the earth burns and animal bodies pile up by the billions; they are compelled to take immediate and decisive action.

ALF activists operate under cover, at night, wearing balaclavas and ski masks, and in small cells of a few people. After careful reconnaissance, skilled liberation teams break into buildings housing animal prisoners in order to release them (e.g., mink and coyotes) or rescue them (e.g., cats, dogs, mice, and guinea pigs). They seize and/or destroy equipment, property, and materials used to exploit animals, and they use arson to raze buildings and laboratories. They have cost the animal exploitation industries hundreds of millions of dollars.3 They willfully break the law because the law wrongly consigns animals to cages and confinement, to loneliness and pain, to torture and death. They target a wide range of animal exploiters, from vivisectors and the fur industry to factory farmers, foie gras producers, and fast food restaurants.

Resolved not to harm living beings, motivated by love, empathy, compassion, and justice, animal liberationists are the antithesis of the “terrorists” that government, industries, and mass media ideologues impugn them to be. They are not violent aggressors against life; they are defenders of freedom and justice for any enslaved species. They uphold rights not covered by law, knowing that the legal structure is defined by and for human supremacists. The goal of the ALF is not simply to liberate individual animals here and there; it is to free all animals from every form of slavery that binds them to human oppressors. The ALF, like the animal rights movement as a whole, is attacking the entire institutional framework of animal exploitation along with the domineering values, mindset, identities, and worldviews of the human species.

Although human slavery has been outlawed in “liberal democracies” where many dispossessed and disenfranchised groups gain more rights and respect (while industries still command slave trades in domestic and foreign sweatshops), animal slavery in many ways has become worse than ever. This is the case in the sheer number of animals killed, the degree of violation of their natural lives (culminating in the technological manipulations of genetic engineering and cloning), and often in the intensity and prolonged nature of their suffering (as evident in the horrors of vivisection, fur farming, factory farming, mechanized slaughter, puppy mills, and so on).4 Animal “welfare” laws do little but regulate the details of exploitation.5

Just as nineteenth-century white abolitionists in the US worked across racial lines to create new forms of solidarity, so the new freedom fighters reach across species lines to help our fellow beings in the animal world. In this endeavor, they unleash a frontal assault on the prevalent mentality that says animals are objects, resources, or property, and they advance the universalization of rights that is the key marker of moral progress.6

By expanding the definition of the moral community, animal liberationists challenge long-entrenched prejudices. These relate not only to class, gender, race, sexual orientation, or specific interest groups, but also to the human species itself—to the arrogant conception of its place in the web of life and its ugly, condescending, vicious, and violent attitudes toward other species. Speciesism is the belief that nonhuman species exist to serve the needs of the human species, that animals are in various senses inferior to human beings, and therefore that one can favor human over nonhuman interests according to species status alone.7 Like racism or sexism, speciesism creates a false dualistic division between one group and another in order to arrange the differences hierarchically and justify the domination of the “superior” over the “inferior.” Just as society has discerned that it is prejudiced, illogical, and unacceptable for whites to devalue people of color and for men to diminish women, so it is beginning to learn how utterly arbitrary and irrational it is for human animals to position themselves over nonhuman animals because of species differences. Among animals who are all sentient subjects of a life, these differences—humanity’s claim to be the sole bearer of reason and language—are no more ethically relevant than differences of gender or skin color, yet in the unevolved psychology of the human primate they have decisive bearing. The theory—speciesism—informs the practice—unspeakably cruel forms of domination, violence, and killing.

The animal liberation struggle is the most difficult battle human beings have ever fought, because it requires widespread agreement to abandon what most perceive as their absolute privileges and God-given rights to exploit animals by sole virtue of their human status. Moreover, where the stakes of human liberation struggles were largely confined to particular interests, the failure of human beings to drastically reframe their attitudes and relations to animals—such as inform trophy hunting of endangered species and factory farming on a worldwide scale—will have catastrophic and global consequences for all humanity, if for no other reason than systemic environmental collapse resulting from ecological disruption, pollution, rainforest destruction, desertification, and global warming.

In a capitalist society, human struggles for freedom—especially those of gender, race, or sexual “identity politics”—can easily be co-opted and absorbed into the channels of affirmative action, “representative democracy,” “liberal pluralism,” and multicultural consumerism, where their critical edge is blunted.8 Similarly, animal welfare advocacy is easily absorbed by current systems of domination. But the fight for animal liberation demands radical transformations in the habits, practices, values, and mindset of all human beings as it also entails a fundamental restructuring of social institutions and economic systems predicated on exploitative practices. The philosophy of animal liberation assaults the identities and worldviews that portray humans as conquering Lords and Masters of nature, and it requires entirely new ways of relating to animals and the earth. Animal liberation is a direct attack on the power human beings—whether in premodern or modern, non-Western or Western societies— have claimed over animals since Homo sapiens began systematically hunting them over two million years ago. The new struggle seeking freedom for other species has the potential to advance rights, democratic consciousness, psychological growth, and awareness of biological interconnectedness to higher levels than previously achieved in history.

Animal liberation is the next logical development in moral evolution. Animal liberation builds on the most progressive ethical and political advances human beings have made in the last 200 years and carries them to their logical conclusions. Animal liberation demands that human beings give up their sense of superiority over other animals and tear down the Berlin Wall between species. It challenges people to realize that power demands responsibility, that might is not right, and that an enlarged neocortex is no excuse to rape and plunder the natural world. Animal liberation requires that people transcend the comfortable boundaries of humanism in order to make a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity. Distorted conceptions of human beings as demigods who command the planet must be replaced with the far more humble and holistic notion that they belong to and are dependent upon vast networks of living relationships. Unless human beings radically alter their relations toward animals and the earth by creating new worldviews, identities, sensibilities, and an ethic of reverence for life, animals will continue to die by the billions and one third to one half of the earth’s life forms may go extinct in the next few decades.
Since the fates of all species on this planet are intricately interrelated, the exploitation of animals cannot but have a major impact on the human world itself. When human beings exterminate animals, they devastate habitats and ecosystems necessary for their own lives. When they butcher farmed animals by the billions, they ravage rainforests, exacerbate global warming, and spew toxic wastes into the environment. When they construct a global system of factory farming that squanders vital resources such as land, water, and crops, they aggravate the problems of desertification and world hunger. When humans are violent toward animals, they often are violent toward one another. The connections may go far deeper. Some theorists argue that the cruel forms of domesticating animals at the dawn of agricultural society created the technologies and conceptual model for hierarchy, state power, and the exploitative treatment of other human beings, as many feminists argue speciesism and patriarchy emerged together with the rise of male power (see jones in this volume).9

In countless ways, the exploitation of animals rebounds to create crises within the human world itself. The vicious circle of violence and destruction can end only if and when the human species learns to form harmonious relations with other species and the natural world. Thus, animal liberation and human liberation are interrelated projects.

II. Direct Action and Democracy

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. —Frederick Douglass

Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. —Henry David Thoreau

Direct action is always the clamorer, the initiator, through which the great sum of indifferentists become aware that oppression is getting intolerable. —Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912), American anarchist and feminist writer

We always obeyed the law. Even if you don’t agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos. —Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, chief of the Women’s Bureau under Adolf Hitler

Anyone quick to condemn the tactics of the ALF needs a history lesson and logical consistency check. Especially amid the current hysteria over war and terrorism, it is easy to forget that the United States won its independence not only by war with England, but also through acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, including property destruction. As dramatically evident in the Boston Tea Party, when in 1773 fifty members of the underground Sons of Liberty group dumped 342 chests of British tea into the Boston harbor to protest the high tax on tea and British tyranny in general, the colonies employed sabotage tactics to undermine the power of the British and to galvanize the will of the newly emerging nation. Of this form of “terrorism,” John Adams said, “There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this … effort of the patriots that I greatly admire.”10

Not merely an act of senseless demolition, property destruction was and still is a legitimate cry for justice and a powerful means of achieving it. Civil disobedience and sabotage have been key catalysts for many modern liberation struggles. As James Goodman succinctly puts it,

The entire edifice of western liberal democracy—from democratic rights, to representative parliament, to freedom of speech—rests on previous acts of civil disobedience. The American anti-colonialists in the 1770s asserting “no taxation without representation”; the French revolutionaries in the 1780s demanding “liberty, equality, fraternity”; the English Chartists in the 1830s demanding a “People’s Charter”; the suffragettes of the 1900s demanding “votes for women”; the Gandhian disobedience movement from the 1920s calling for “Swaraj”/self-government; all of these were movements of civil disobedience, and have shaped the political traditions that we live with today. 11

Few things are more American and patriotic than dissent, protest, civil disobedience, and property destruction in the name of freedom and liberation. From the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, from the suffragettes to the civil rights movement; from Vietnam War resistance to the Battle of Seattle, key struggles in US history employed illegal direct action tactics—and sometimes violence—to advance the historical movement toward human rights and freedoms. Rather than being a rupture in some bucolic tradition of Natural Law guiding the Reason of modern citizens to the Good and bringing Justice down to earth in a peaceful and gradual drizzle, the movements for animal and earth liberation are a continuation of the American culture of rights, democracy, civil disobedience, and direct action, as they expand the struggle to a far broader constituency.

American history has two main political traditions. First, there is the “indirect” system of “representative democracy” whereby citizens express their needs and wants to elected local and state officials whose sole function is to “represent” them in the political and legal system. The system’s “output”—laws—reflects the “input”—the people’s will and interests. This cartoon image of liberal democracy, faithfully reproduced in generation after generation of textbooks and in the discourse of state apologists and the media, is falsified by the fact that powerful economic and political forces co-opt elected officials, who represent the interests of the elite instead of the majority.12 From the realization that the state is hardly a neutral arbiter of competing interests but rather exists to advance the interests of economic and political elites, a second political tradition of direct action has emerged.

Direct action advocates argue that the indirect system of representative democracy is irredeemably corrupted by money, power, cronyism, and privilege. Appealing to the lessons of history, direct activists insist that one cannot win liberation struggles solely through education, moral persuasion, political campaigns, demonstrations, or any form of aboveground, mainstream, or legal action. Direct action movements therefore bypass pre-approved efforts to influence the state in order to immediately confront the figures of social power they challenge. Whereas indirect action can promote passivity and dependence on others for change, direct action tends to be more involving and empowering. In the words of Voltairine de Cleyre, “the evil of pinning faith to indirect action is far greater than any … minor results. The main evil is that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, [and] teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they should do for themselves. … [People] must learn that their power does not lie in their voting strength, that their power lies in their ability to stop production.”13

Direct action tactics can vary widely, ranging from sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, and tree sits to hacking Web sites, email and phone harassment, home demonstrations, and arson, as well as bombings and murder. Direct action can be legal, as with home demonstrations against a vivisector, or illegal, as in the case of the civil disobedience tactics of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Illegal direct action, moreover, can be nonviolent or violent, and can respect private property or destroy it.

Opponents of direct action often argue that illegal actions undermine the rule of law, and they view civil disobedience as a threat to political order. Among other things, this perspective presupposes that the system in question is legitimate or cannot be improved. It misrepresents direct activists as people who lack respect for the principles of law, when arguably they have a higher regard for the spirit of law and its relation to ethics and justice than those who fetishize political order for its own sake.14 Moreover, this argument fails to grasp that many direct action advocates (such as in the ALF and ELF) are anarchists who seek to replace the states and legal systems they hold in contempt with the ethical substance of self-regulating decentralized communities. Whatever their approach, champions of direct action renounce uncritical allegiance to a legal system. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the law is the opiate of the people, and blind obedience to laws and social decorum led German Jews to their death with little resistance. All too often, the legal system is a simply a Byzantine structure designed to absorb opposition and induce paralysis by deferral, delay, and dilution.

III. Origins of the ALF

We are a nonviolent guerilla organization, dedicated to the liberation of animals from all forms of cruelty and persecution at the hands of mankind. —Ronnie Lee, ALF founder

Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission—to be of service to them whenever they require it. —St. Francis of Assisi

During the 1970s, environmental and (to a lesser extent) animal welfare and rights organizations became important forces in the US political landscape, taking their place alongside various social movements that emerged in the 1960s. While environmental and animal advocacy groups were increasingly influential and passed a number of laws protecting the environment and animals, they were compromise- and reform-oriented movements that became institutionalized, co-opted, and limited in the change they could effect. Their main tactics were letter writing, lobbying, boycotts, and sometimes protests and demonstrations. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, it became increasingly apparent that mainstream approaches had failed to bring about the substantive changes necessary to protect animals and the natural world, and that animal advocacy and environmental protection groups often had become part of the status quo they set out to change. Despite huge amounts of time, money, and energy invested in various strategies, the situation for animals and the earth was steadily worsening.15

Animal and environmental activists began looking for more radical and effective tactics of struggle. In 1977, for example, Paul Watson was voted out of Greenpeace for increasingly confrontational tactics with the butchers of newborn harp seals.16 Rejecting Greenpeace’s timid condemnation of sabotage tactics against animal exploiters, Watson formed a new organization that became the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. With a 206-foot-long ship purchased with the help of Cleveland Amory and the Fund for Animals, Captain Watson and crew set sail on the high seas in defense of marine mammals everywhere. Watson rammed pirate whaling ships, impeded dolphin massacres, destroyed driftnets, and did whatever it took to defend his constituency, all without ever injuring human life (although his own life was often threatened, jeopardized, and nearly ended by sundry sealing thugs). Similarly, in 1981, Dave Foreman abandoned mainstream environmental politics in order to join with friends to create Earth First! and conduct campaigns of sabotage and monkeywrenching against loggers and other plunderers of nature.17 Through tactics such as tree spiking, tree sitting, road blockades, chaining bodies to fences, pulling up survey stakes, and destroying equipment used to clear forests and build roads, Earth First! reinvented environmental politics for the new era of ecotage. As Watson, by his own count, has saved millions of animals, Earth First! successfully delayed, weakened, or stopped numerous development and logging projects.18

While direct action movements for radical ecology and animal rights were dawning in the US, a powerful new group known as the Animal Liberation Front was gaining strength in England and would forever change the struggle to protect animals and the earth. The roots of the ALF in England can be traced to the Band of Mercy, a nineteenth-century Royal Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals youth organization (see Molland and Webb in this volume). Originating in 1824, the Band of Mercy focused their efforts on thwarting hunting. A similar English group, the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA), was established in 1963 to contest hunting and continues today.19 HSA members disrupt hunting activities by blowing horns, blockading roads, setting off smoke bombs, distracting dogs with meat and false scents, and setting themselves in the path between the hunters and the hunted.

Women often played an important role in the HSA and were singled out by pro-hunt thugs as easy targets for violent physical attacks.20 These courageous women challenged both the speciesism of the hunt and the patriarchal identities and authority of the hunters. The empowering ability of direct action is particularly important for women because it provides a potent vehicle to subvert traditional gender roles. As one author points out, “Women are gendered emotional and empathetic, but also passive and weak. Direct action on behalf of animals takes the desirable aspects of that gendered analysis (compassion, empathy) and destroys the oppressive aspects (passive, weak). In this way, women in the animal liberation movement who use direct action can be seen as creating new conceptions of gender.”21
By 1965, HSA members grew tired of being assaulted by hunters and the courts, and sought more effective means to stop hunting. They decided to work underground and shift to property destruction tactics. In 1972, some HSA members formed a new organization in Luton, reviving the name of the Band of Mercy. Led by Ronnie Lee and Cliff Goodman, the group had a more militant philosophy and tactical approach. To stop hunting on land and at sea, they destroyed vans, boats, and equipment, and often succeeded in halting the slaughter. When Lee learned more about the horrors of animal testing, the group targeted vivisectors. On November 10, 1973, Lee’s group set fire to a half-completed building at Milton Keynes—their first attack on the vivisection industry and their first use of arson.22 Through such actions, the Band of Mercy sought to wreak enough property destruction that insurance companies would end coverage to exploitation industries, and in many cases they succeeded.

The Band of Mercy grew increasingly strong and bold, expanding their activities to include animal rescues. Through arson, destruction, and liberation, the group halted many hunts, saved many lives, undermined or shut down animal exploitation businesses, and helped to stop some possible ventures from even starting. The successes continued until Lee and Goodman were arrested in August 1974 for the raid on Oxford Laboratory Animal Colonies in Bicester. The two soon achieved national political fame as the “Bicester Two.” Both were given three years in prison but served only a third of the time and received parole. Once released, the two took completely different paths. While Goodman became the first-ever police informer on the animal liberation movement, Lee evolved into an even stronger warrior for the animals. Lee organized more than 30 people to begin a potent new liberation campaign, choosing a name that would intimidate exploiters yet demonstrate the ethic of compassion. In 1976, Lee christened his group the Animal Liberation Front. The ALF soon became an international force, and currently has active cells in over 20 countries. The US in particular has become a hotbed of action.

Migration to the US

We ask nicely for years and get nothing. Someone makes a threat, and it works. —Ingrid Newkirk

We should never feel like we’re going too far in breaking the law, because whatever laws you break to liberate animals or to protect the environment are very insignificant compared to the laws that are broken by that parliament of whores in Washington. They are the biggest lawbreakers, the biggest destroyers, the biggest mass-murderers on this planet right now. —Paul Watson

The facts of how the ALF started in the US are somewhat sketchy. According to Freeman Wicklund and Kim Stallwood (see this volume), the first ALF action in the US happened in 1977, when activists released two dolphins from a research facility in Hawaii.23 Others identify the origin of the ALF in the raids that took place on March 14, 1979, at the New York University Medical Center, where activists disguised as lab workers liberated one cat, two dogs, and two guinea pigs.24 The most complete account of the ALF in the US is chronicled in Ingrid Newkirk’s book, Free the Animals: The Amazing True Story of the Animal Liberation Front.25 Newkirk gives yet another genealogy, arguing that the ALF first emerged in the US in late 1982, with a Christmas Eve raid on a Howard University laboratory in order to rescue 24 cats whose rear legs were being crippled in a cruel experiment.

Newkirk’s book eloquently captures the pathos of compassion, the drama of liberation, the courage of ALF activists, and their dedication to finding emergency and long-term medical care for the animals they liberate. To read Newkirk’s book is to understand what the ALF does and why. Where references to the ALF might conjure up images of male warriors, it is significant that in this account the founder and key organizer of the ALF in America was a woman. Newkirk writes that witnessing the horrors of monkey experiments at the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, inspired “Valerie” to launch a US branch of the ALF. “Valerie” led numerous break-ins and liberations; funded vehicles, supplies, and transportation costs; served as transporter and facilitator; and overall was the principle force for establishing ALF cells throughout the country.

The first wave of ALF actions included the liberation of cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, pigs, and primates from experimental laboratories at Howard University, Bethesda Naval Research Institute, various branches of the University of California, the University of Oregon, the University of Pennsylvania, Texas Tech University, the City of Hope, SEMA lab, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, and elsewhere. One of the most important raids took place in May 1984, when the ALF broke into the University of Pennsylvania’s head injury laboratory, where primates’ heads were strapped in metal helmets and forcefully struck by a pneumatic device in order to research human head injuries. The ALF unleashed $60,000 in property damage and, more importantly, stole 60 hours of researchers’ tapes that documented sadistic acts of cruelty and callous indifference to the suffering of the monkeys. The rescue led to the shocking movie Unnecessary Fuss, which helped to shut down the lab and, with public relations assistance from PETA, spread awareness of animal confinement and torture to the public.26
Similarly, liberations in January 1985 at the City of Hope National Medical Center, Los Angeles, exposed an appalling hellhole behind a façade of progressive science and “humane research.” ALF rescues and follow-up media work via PETA news conferences brought national attention to deplorable conditions where dogs and other animals endured sloppy surgeries and inadequate or no post-operative care, and frequently bled to death in their cages or suffocated in their own fecal matter. Newspapers were inundated with letters from an outraged public, government investigations found serious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act, the National Institutes of Health suspended over $1 million in federal research grant funds, and the experiments were stopped. Three months later, the ALF raided the University of California-Riverside laboratory to rescue Britches, a three-week-old macaque monkey separated from his mother, isolated in a wire cage with his eyes sewn shut. PETA filed formal complaints about this extreme abuse to government agencies, urged its members to write their representatives in Congress, and made a moving video of Britches. The “before” and “after” liberation pictures were stirring, and the justice of the action was obvious. Once again, the public learned about the kind of horrors that truly transpire behind the closed doors of “science,” and Riverside received a well-deserved black eye. Eight of the 17 research projects interrupted by the ALF the night of Britches’ liberation were closed forever.
The ALF was able not only to free innocent animals, but also to expose the sadism that masquerades as science, to educate the public about institutionalized animal abuse, to spark public debate about rarely discussed issues such as vivisection, and, in many cases, to bring about welfare reforms or to shut down some operations altogether. After numerous well-publicized raids and rescues, Newkirk writes, “Society’s comfortable belief that all animal research was conducted humanely began to collapse.”27

Whereas the early raids involving “Valerie” concentrated on rescues, the emphasis gradually shifted to property destruction and arson. One of the most devastating blows was dealt in 1987, with the torching of the animal diagnostics lab and 20 vehicles at the University of California at Davis, causing $5.1 million in damage. In February 1992, Rod Coronado and other ALF members set fire to a Michigan State University mink research facility, causing $100,000 in estimated damage and wiping out 32 years of research data accumulated to breed mink in fur farms. In an April 1989 raid on the University of Arizona at Tucson, activists liberated over 1,200 animals, costing the university an estimated $700,000. In May 1997, 10,000 mink were released from Arritola Mink Farm in Oregon, the largest liberation in the US to date. In economic terms, the most costly act of arson destruction was inflicted on the Alaskan Fur Company in Minnesota in November 1996, creating over $2 million in damage to fur coats and other merchandise and over $250,000 to the building. While perhaps not as pleasing to the public as pictures of rescued animals, these actions had powerful economic effects on industry targets.

IV. Philosophy and Structure of the ALF

We’re very dangerous philosophically. Part of the danger is that we don’t buy into the illusion that property is worth more than life … we bring that insane priority into the light, which is something the system cannot survive. —David Barbarash, former spokesman for the ALF

If one is looking for groups with which to compare the ALF, the proper choice is not Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, but rather the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance movement and the Underground Railroad. The men and women of the ALF pattern themselves after the freedom fighters in Nazi Germany who liberated war prisoners and Holocaust victims and destroyed equipment—such as weapons, railways, and gas ovens—that the Nazis used to torture and kill their victims. Similarly, by providing veterinary care and homes for many of the animals they liberate, the ALF models itself after the US Underground Railroad movement, which helped fugitive slaves reach free states and Canada. Whereas corporate society, the state, and mass media brand the ALF as terrorists, the ALF has important similarities with some of the great freedom fighters of the past two centuries, and is akin to contemporary peace and justice movements in its quest to end bloodshed and violence toward life and to win justice for other species.

On the grounds that animals have basic rights, animal liberationists repudiate the argument that scientists or industries can own any animal as their property.28 Simply stated, animals have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which contradict the property status that is often literally burnt into their flesh. Even if animal “research” assists human beings in some way, that is no more guarantee of legitimacy than if the data came from experimenting on non-consenting human beings, for the rights of an animal trump utilitarian appeals to human benefit. The blanket privileging of human over animal interests is simply speciesism, a prejudicial and discriminatory belief system as ethically flawed and philosophically unfounded as sexism or racism, but far more murderous and consequential in its implications. Thus, the ALF hold that animals are freed, not stolen, from fur farms or laboratories—and that when one destroys the inanimate property of animal exploiters, one is merely leveling what was wrongfully used to violate the rights of living beings.

The ALF is any individual or group in any area of the world who at any time decide to strike against animal exploitation in the name of animal rights while following ALF Guidelines (see this volume). To join the ALF, one does not consult the local Yellow Pages; rather, one goes into stealth action. There is no national leader to capture in order to decapitate the movement, only a host of individuals and affinity groups that spread rhizomatically and clandestinely. A given ALF cell is probably unaware of the identities and activities of other cells. This decentered structure defies government infiltration and capture, and thereby thwarts the kind of success the FBI had in its illegal surveillance, penetration, and disruption of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and numerous other groups.29 Given the decentralized and anonymous nature of ALF actions, the ALF in principle is not about authority, ego, heroism, machismo, or martyrdom; rather, it is about overcoming hierarchy, patriarchy, passivity, and politics as usual so that creative individuals can dedicate themselves unselfishly to the cause of animal liberation. The structure and philosophy of the ALF thereby has some key affinities with anarchism and radical feminism (see jones in this volume).

Crucially, the ALF follows a strict code of nonviolence whereby they carefully avoid causing physical injury to animal oppressors when they attack their property. The ALF claims that in thousands of actions and over three decades of operation, they have never harmed a single human being: “The ALF does not, in any way, condone violence against any animal, human or nonhuman. Any action involving violence is by definition not an ALF action, any person involved is not an ALF member.”30 Some critics, however, allege that on at least one occasion someone inadvertently was hurt (see Stallwood in this volume), while others question the validity of the claim to nonviolence by a philosophy that accepts that small animals may be injured or killed in arson attacks (see below). Still other detractors argue that the decentralized and anonymous nature of the ALF allows it to engage in physical violence and deny that the act was authentically ALF. The same structure, however, permits any rogue individual to wreak havoc in the name of the ALF in violation of its nonviolent principles.

In an “organization” where anyone can claim membership, there may be individuals who join the ALF for the wrong reasons—less because they believe in justice for other species than because they have destructive and violent temperaments or enjoy media attention from their actions. Such individuals clearly are ill suited to the cause they betray, but do not discredit. When position papers and manifestos signed by ALF members proliferate, and when there is no significant opposition to violence by other ALF members, then one can say that the ALF is a violent organization. For now, the ALF holds to a nonviolent stance that its opposition cannot claim, since police and thugs such as sealers and hunters often have violently assailed and killed animal activists.31 But this point is never made by the apologists of animal exploitation, who arbitrarily define violence and terrorism as attacks on the property of industries and exploiters but not as assaults on animals, the earth, or defenders of the natural world.

While the ALF renounces physical violence against human beings, it also rejects the claim that destroying property is violence. The ALF is grounded in the principle that laws protecting animal exploitation industries are unjust, and they break them in deference to the higher moral principle of animal rights. As former ALF spokesperson David Barbarash sums up the ethical foundations of the ALF, “The basic premise is that if someone’s property is used to inflict pain, suffering, and death on innocent animals’ lives, then the destruction of that property is morally justified. It is not unlike freedom fighters in Nazi Germany destroying the gas chambers. The ALF believe that life is more important than things.”32

Following a basic tenet of civil disobedience philosophy, the ALF believes that there is a higher law than that created by and for the corporate-state complex, a moral law that transcends the corrupt and biased statues of the US political system. When the law is wrong, the right thing to do is to break it. This is often how moral progress is made in history, from defiance of American slavery and Hitler’s anti-Semitism to sit-ins at “whites only” lunch counters in Alabama. Thoreau’s maxim that one ought to obey one’s own conscience rather than an unjust law is a good start toward critical thinking, autonomy, and political responsibility, but it can also provide a formula for violence.33 To be consistent with its principles, the ALF must abide by the belief that however righteous their anger, no one must ever be harmed in the struggle for liberation of others; only property is to be damaged as a necessary means to the end of animal liberation. Despite their zeal, ALF members are unlike some radical anti-abortionists who kill their opponents, and the vast differences should never be conflated.

The ALF can be likened to peace and justice movements with the pronounced differences that it militates for other species and challenges the arbitrary boundaries of the community of rights-bearers as set by “progressive” humanist philosophies and struggles. The ALF demands justice for animals so that they may not be discriminated against, exploited, injured, and murdered solely because of their species. The ALF struggles for peace in the animal world so that nonhuman species may live among their families, fellow beings, and natural habitats unimpeded by the pain and violence human beings gratuitously inflict on them. The ALF is not a “hate group” motivated by appetites for destruction, wrath, and revenge; rather it is comprised of people who love animals and the earth, and who are guided by a positive vision of a world where human and nonhuman animals co-exist more harmoniously.

The activist thrust of the ALF shows that there is a clear distinction between animal welfare and animal rights, as well as between animal rights and animal liberation.34 While those who adopt the animal welfare position seek merely to reduce animal suffering, supporters of animal rights aim to abolish it, demanding not bigger cages and “humane treatment,” but rather empty cages and total liberation. Animal welfare philosophy accepts the property status of animals, but animal rights philosophy insists that animals are subjects of their own life and no one’s to own. Whereas animal welfare philosophy reinforces the moral gulf between human and nonhuman animals and allows any use of animals so long as it furthers some alleged human interest, animal rights theory puts human and nonhuman animals on an equal moral plane and rejects all exploitative uses of animals, whether human beings benefit or not.35

Clearly, animal rights is the guiding moral philosophy of the ALF, but whereas animal rights often is a legal fight without direct action, animal liberation is an immediate confrontation with exploiters. ALF tactics move beyond protests and demonstrations outside animal prisons in order to illegally break into these compounds, to free their tormented captives, and to destroy the instruments of pain. While appreciating the value of education and philosophizing, working in aboveground and legal channels, and striving for long-term changes for the animals, ALF activists feel compelled to take immediate action, to directly free as many prisoners as possible, and to break any security system or law that stands between them and a suffering animal they can help. For the ALF, animals have fundamental rights to freedom, and these rights entail human duties to secure them.

V. The “Principled” Critique of the ALF

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kinds of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the ALF uses “extreme” tactics, it is only because the evil done to animals is extreme and emergency measures are required in conditions where laws rigorously protect the holocaust unleashed by animal abusers. Despite ever-escalating government repression and penalties for animal and earth liberation actions, today’s guerilla warriors are not deterred or intimidated. “The only way to stop the ALF and ELF,” asserts the North American Animal Liberation Front Press Office, “is for our society at large to seriously deal with the issues which have brought these people to take such dramatic actions, and that does not seem to be happening very quickly.”36

Whether voiced by advocates within the movement or opponents outside of it, there are two common criticisms of ALF tactics, which we will call the “principled“ or “intrinsic” and the “pragmatic“ or “extrinsic” objections. The principled critique examines the intrinsic ethical nature of property destruction (is the action right or wrong?), while the pragmatic critique considers the extrinsic consequences of sabotage tactics (do sabotage actions help or hinder the movement?). The distinction between principled and pragmatic objections is an analytic one drawn for clarity’s sake, and it should be clear that detractors can and often do conflate both critiques into one.

Proponents of the principled objection tend to uncritically define property destruction as violence and reject it as inherently wrong on this ground. Their argument assumes the form of a classic syllogism: (i) property destruction is violence, (ii) violence is always wrong, (iii) therefore, property destruction is wrong. These critics rarely define what they mean by “violence,” they dogmatically cling to the pacifist positions of Gandhi and King, and they make unqualified universal judgments that violence is always wrong and never works politically to achieve liberation.

ALF opponents assert that the animal rights movement is grounded in the values of nonviolence and that “violent tactics” contradict these values. Consequently, they argue that groups like the ALF and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) disarm the movement’s moral advantage, which is best exerted in ethical persuasion and education efforts intended to create legislative changes. Some may criticize any effort at illegal direct action, while others may only object to property destruction and allow other means of illegal direct action such as open rescues. Those who use violence in the fight for animal rights, ALF opponents say, degenerate into the same mindset they are challenging and reproduce destructive social dynamics. The end does not justify the means; rather, the end must be reflected in the means. The argument here could be summarized in Gandhi’s phrase, “Be the change you seek.”

Advocates of the principled critique believe that illegal actions and “violence” are unnecessary for a cause strong enough to prevail on the logical arguments supporting it. Peter Singer, for example, affirms “animal liberation” as a just cause, so long as it remains “nonviolent.”37 Violence can only beget more violence, he argues, recommending that animal liberationists emulate Gandhi and King in their goal to divest themselves of hatred, anger, and the will to revenge. Singer thinks that direct action is most effective when it brings results other tactics cannot, and uncovers evidence of extreme animal abuse that awakens public understanding about the plight of animals. As an example of a just and effective raid, he points to the ALF break-in at the University of Pennsylvania head injury research laboratory, which exposed a truth never meant to be seen by the public. Singer argues that to stop or reduce animal suffering “we must change the minds of reasonable people in our society. . . . The strength of the case for Animal Liberation is its ethical commitment; we occupy the high moral ground and to abandon it is to play into the hands of those who oppose us. . . . The wrongs we inflict on other species are … [undeniable] once they are seen plainly; and it is in the rightness of our cause, and not the fear of our bombs, that our prospects of victory lie.”38 The motto here is not Burn Baby Burn, but Learn Baby Learn.

Education and ethical argumentation are indeed potent forces of change. In many cases, argumentation—especially if reinforced by powerful images of animal suffering —can sway reasonable, open-minded, and decent people whose problem is that they do not know, not that they do not care. Passionate and eloquent animal rights educators like Gary Yourofsky have changed many minds and lives across the country. Indeed, many of the leading figures in the animal advocacy movement such as Don Barnes, Steve Hindi, and Howard Lyman are, respectively, former vivisectors, hunters, and cattlemen who had a profound awakening and were transformed through education. Moreover, the movement continues to innovate powerful new means of education, communication, and legislation because more can be done within the mainstream paradigm, and advocates proclaim that one must not prematurely close any doors to respectful dialogue with the public and animal oppressors.39

While Singer and many others appeal to the “minds of reasonable people,” the ALF believes that far too many are unreasonable and closed-minded, rendering the force of reason and persuasion insufficient. Industries and the state have strong institutional and monetary biases against justice for animals that no amount of persuasion or education is likely to change. Those who champion education and legislation as the sole tools of struggle project a rationalist belief that discounts the irrational forces often ruling the human psyche, the sadistic pleasure all too many derive from torture and killing, the deep psychological mechanisms human beings use to resist change and unpleasant realities, the mechanisms of detachment and compartmentalization that allow them to ignore the enormity of animal suffering, the vested interests they have in exploiting animals, and their identities as members of a species they believe is the preordained master of the earth.

Semantic Quagmires: Defining “Violence” and “Terrorism”

It’s a strange kind of terrorist organization that hasn’t killed anyone. —The Observer

A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. —George Savile, first Marquess of Halifax

A key controversy surrounding the ALF concerns whether or not their actions are “violent” and whether they are “terrorists.” Before one can productively address these questions, it is important to provisionally define the terms; yet rarely do critics undertake this task, and when they do their definitions typically are flawed, biased, inconsistent, and politically motivated.40 Because their definitions are vague and circular, dictionaries are a problematic place to start. But if we consult them we find that they define violence in broad terms, such that a “violent” act involves “exertion of physical force to injure or abuse” (Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition) or the “purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing” (American Heritage Dictionary). Terms such as “injure” or “abuse” themselves need precise definitions, and dictionaries tend not to specify whether violence applies only to living beings or also to physical objects—obviously a key question in discussions of animal liberation through illegal direct action.

Some key questions immediately arise: Is property destruction violence, or is this an unwarranted extension of the term that distorts its meaning? If property destruction can legitimately be called violence, and the ALF might therefore be labeled a violent organization, is violence always wrong? Or are there times when violent actions in defense of human and nonhuman animals are legitimate and necessary?

A reasonable definition of “violence” would seem to be an intentional act of one individual or group against another individual or group that inflicts physical damage or harm upon their bodies, possibly resulting in death. The word “intentional” is important. If one willfully and purposively intends to physically harm another person, that is violence, but it is not violence if one does it unwittingly or by mistake. If an enraged person intentionally shoots another person with a gun or runs over him or her with a car, that person has committed a violent act, but if the gun fires by mistake or the driver falls asleep at the wheel, that is sheer accident or possibly neglect (even though there may be “violent” consequences involving bloodshed, injury, and death).

But there are many ways to harm, injure, or abuse another person without causing physical damage, and so violence might require a broader definition. Violence could involve the intentional infliction of psychological as well as physical injury, such as in a situation of domestic verbal abuse. Verbal battering can cause far more harm to a person than a physical attack and might legitimately be construed as a form of violence. One can also intentionally injure a person by maliciously damaging his or her name, reputation, or career, although it is questionable whether “violence” is the best term for this kind of harm (whereas “slander” fits the bill).
If violence entails the intentional causing of physical or psychological harm to a sentient human subject, then this applies equally as well to sentient nonhuman subjects. “In suffering,” Peter Singer notes, “animal are our equals.” Without question, human beings can and do act violently toward animals in a sickening litany of practices, including branding, tail docking, teeth cutting, debeaking, castration, confinement, beating, clubbing, trapping, shooting, shocking, scalding, burning, blinding, mutilating, chemical poisoning, anal electrocution, and boiling, skinning, or dismembering animals who are still alive and conscious. Once society drops its speciesist blinders to define nonhuman animals as sentient beings and complex subjects of a life who can be maliciously victimized, traumatized, and hurt just like human animals, and who can experience not only physical but also psychological pain, then it is quite logical to conclude that those who intentionally harm animals for whatever dubious purposes are violent malefactors.
Since violence is related to terrorism—easily the most abused term of the present era—we must also ask: What is terrorism? (see below, “Defining Terrorism,” and Watson in this volume). Can a movement be violent but not terrorist? Is the ALF a “terrorist” organization—or a counter-terrorist resistance force? Are animal exploitation industries and the state that defends them the true terrorists in this conflict?

Any valid definitions of violence and terrorism must include the obscene suffering humans inflict on animals, yet common usage conveniently ignores this barbarity toward animals while targeting activists who protest the enormity of such evil. If society used non-speciesist definitions of violence and terrorism, ones that acknowledge and respect both human and nonhuman beings as subjects of a life, then the outcry against terrorism would shift from the activists trying to prevent injury, loss of life, and environmental degradation to the industries and individuals profiting from bloodshed, torture, and destruction.41 Those who cry “eco-terrorist” the loudest are typically those who profit the most from violence and killing, and those who seek to disguise their own crimes against life by vilifying others.

But what if we follow Gandhi, King, and ALF critics both inside and outside the animal advocacy movement and expand the concept of violence to include property destruction (see Regan in this volume)? Is the concept still logically coherent, or have we exceeded its definitional boundaries? How can one “hurt,” “abuse,” or “injure” a nonsentient thing that does not feel pain or have awareness of any sort—e.g., a van, a laboratory, or a fur farm? One simply cannot—unless a human being or another animal is involved indirectly in the attack.
Proponents of the “sabotage is violence” argument seem to assert that there is violence (1) in the action itself and (2) in its effect on human targets. First, in the act of property destruction, objects are defaced, smashed, burned, and demolished. Anger, aggression, hatred, and hostility are exerted rather than calmness, peace, love, and compassion. If this is violence, then one certainly ought to open up the definition of violence and terrorism to include corporate destruction of oceans, rivers, marshes, mountains, forests, and ecosystems of all kinds, for certainly their peace and integrity are disturbed and it is doubtful love informs such pillage and annihilation.

Second, by destroying property, activists do cause some kind of harm or injury to those who own the property or have a stake in it. People whose homes, cars, or offices are damaged suffer fear, anxiety, and trauma. Their business, livelihood, research, or careers may be ruined, and they may be harmed psychologically, emotionally, economically, professionally, and in other ways. From this line of reasoning, one could conclude that property destruction is violence. If sabotage is violence, it pales in comparison to what industries inflict on animals in the speciesist Gulags, factories, and killing fields/seas of industrial capitalism. Animal liberationists rightly underscore the ironic disparity between the outcry over home demonstrations, liberations, and property damage and the silence over the obscene violence inherent in the torture and killing of billions of animals every year for food, fashion, sport, entertainment, and science. Let moral outrage be put in proper perspective.

Depending on the motivation and act, one might call intentional damage done to property vandalism, defacement, or theft, but not necessarily violence. In the context of animal liberation, however, property destruction is not vandalism, which entails sheer hooliganism and lack of a noble ethical purpose; rather, it is destruction for a just cause—a principled act of sabotage. The ALF believes that the ends justify the means, and that if property destruction is an evil, then certainly it is the lesser of two evils when compared to the suffering it is designed to mitigate or to end. Strict pacifism is a self-defeating position. As Paul Watson (who accepts the argument that property destruction is violence) puts it,

To remain nonviolent totally is to allow the perpetuation of violence against people, animals, and the environment. The Catch-22 of it—the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma—is that, if we eschew violence for ourselves, we often thereby tacitly allow violence for others, who are then free to settle issues violently until they are resisted, necessarily with violence…. Sometimes, to dramatize a point so that effective steps may follow, it is necessary to perform a violent act. But such violence must never be directed against a living thing. Against property, yes. But never against a life.42

Typically, those who vilify saboteurs as “violent” leap to the conclusion that they are “terrorists,” failing to realize the differences between the two terms insofar as one can use violence in morally legitimate ways in conditions ranging from self-defense to a “just war” (see Bernstein in this volume).43 A viable definition of “terrorism” contains at least three specific conditions, namely that there is: (1) an intentional use of physical violence (2) directed against innocent persons (“non-combatants”) (3) for the ideological, political, or economic purposes of an individual, corporation, or state government. The intent to create fear (terror) in the mind of the victim might be viewed as a necessary condition of terrorism, but it is not a sufficient condition to be privileged apart from or over the use of physical harm in identifying a wrong. Besides ignoring state terrorism, a key omission from prevailing definitions is species terrorism, whose innocent victims are the billions of animals tortured and slaughtered by human beings and animal exploitation industries any given year (see “Defining Terrorism” in this volume). Just like human animals, nonhuman animals experience the trauma, pain, torment, and injury of terrorism; they are not (human) people, but they are persons. If property destruction is violence, it is not necessarily terrorism, for in a just war to save animals it avoids “non-combatants” (ordinary citizens), targets only “combatants” (executives and managers of industries exploiting animals and the earth), and does not even physically harm its opponents.

The distinction between physical and psychological violence provides a key to understanding the indiscriminate deployment of the word “terrorism,” whose root is “terror.” Using another broad definition, a “terrorist” is someone who causes the feeling of panic or fear in another’s mind. SHAC is a vivid example of liberation soldiers using psychological warfare or “psychological terrorism.” To accomplish its goal of bringing down Huntingdon Life Sciences, SHAC deploys tactics of harassment and persecution—ranging from a blitzkrieg of faxes, emails, and phone calls to home demonstrations—to torment executives who work for HLS or their supporting companies (accounting firms, janitorial services, food providers, and so on). If one’s definition of “terrorism” involves only a conscious effort to instill fear and anxiety in the mind of others (as a sufficient condition of terrorism), then SHAC is a kind of “terrorist” organization—and so too is the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, since society is inherently conflict-ridden and fraught with tension among actors with competing goals and antagonistic viewpoints, political struggle often involves giving and receiving injury, harm, and fear in some sense.

Dilemmas and the Politics of Language

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. —George Orwell

The act of destroying objects can be construed as violence if the premises of the argument are clear enough from the start, but these premises are shaky and this definition takes one into some very grey semantic territory that has potentially problematic consequences.
First, broadening the term “violence” to include store windows, buildings, laboratory equipment, and assorted physical objects can easily trivialize the violence done to human and nonhuman animals and may blur the critical distinction between living beings and nonliving things. There is a huge difference between breaking the neck of a mink and smashing a fur store window, but the values of society are revealed all too clearly when only the latter action is condemned as a crime worthy of intense opprobrium and legal action.

Second, animal advocates who accept the state’s argument that property destruction is “violent” may unwittingly contribute to the demonization of saboteurs and freedom fighters as “terrorists,” and thereby help legitimate FBI suppression of the animal rights movement and activists alleged to be involved with or supportive of the ALF. Suppose the ALF agreed that property destruction is violence and publicly announced that indeed they are a pro-violence group. This would solidify the prejudice in the public mind that they are terrorists—a mistaken impression, for, as noted, a political group can be violent yet not fit the definition of terrorists who aim to traumatize, injure, or kill innocent people to bring about their political goals. The ALF might be counter-terrorists, but not terrorists. We suspect, however, that such subtleties would escape the propaganda machines of the state, animal exploitation industries, the mass media, and much of the public. Consequently, the ALF’s status would be sealed as a “terrorist” organization, bringing disastrous political results for anyone suspected or convicted of ALF activity or “support” of it.

Just as, in the 1980s, Latin American peasants asking for land and fair wages were denounced as communists, so today’s activists defending the natural world against corporate attacks are called terrorists. Just as the US corporate-state complex used the term “communism” to export violence under a morally acceptable cover (fighting the “communist threat”) through brutal dictatorships, juntas, and death squads, it now deploys the discourse of “terrorism” to discredit activists and promote the terrorist agendas of the ruling powers. Past Red Scares effectively weakened social justice movements by casting suspicion on the patriotic integrity of labor and reform movements; similarly, the corporate-state complex and mass media now manufacture “Green Scares” to legitimate a war against the movements defined as dangers to the fabled American Way of Life.

Detractors insist that it is only a matter of time before the ALF inadvertently kills someone or pursues a course of violence. Some critics argue that the ALF has already injured or killed people, but they confuse the ALF with ultra-radical English groups such as the Animal Rights Militia and the Justice Department. While in solidarity with the ALF on many points, the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, and the Revolutionary Cells feel the ALF is too conservative in its policy of nonviolence. In contrast, they openly espouse physical violence against animal oppressors, unable to fathom why some believe that a human life has absolute value, especially if it involves a person inflicting violence upon animals. Consequently, these pro-violence groups employ fake poisoning scares to force companies to pull their products from the shelves. They target exploiters with booby-trapped letters fitted with poisoned razor blades. They set off bombs and they issue death threats.44 The Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, and the Revolutionary Cells graduated from the “all is justified” school, and they aim to ratchet up the conflict between activists and industry to new levels (see Best in this volume).45 Razor blade letters, bomb threats or bomb attacks, arson, harassment, death threats, and physical assaults have proven to be effective means of preventing and ending animal exploitation, and therefore will continue to be used by the most militant elements of the struggle.
But it is important to clearly distinguish between such groups and the ALF, and to keep in mind that when a “radical” animal rights group threatens or commits violence, it is not acting in conformity with the ALF philosophy.46 Indeed, it could easily be a framing action by the state or an animal exploitation industry, intended to discredit the cause of animal liberation. True, ALF spokespersons and supporters have sometimes expressed violent sentiments against animal abusers, and phrases such as “do whatever it takes” and “animal liberation by any means necessary” can give credence to charges that the ALF has a violent edge. But given the enormity and magnitude of animal suffering, and the righteous anger that animal liberationists feel, one should notice that the ALF has demonstrated remarkable restraint in their war of liberation. When it comes to violence against living beings, even animal abusers, the ALF believes that the means do not justify the end, and therefore they renounce physical violence against their human adversaries.

Death threats and bomb scares, while effective tools of intimidation, may inflict considerable psychological harm, and on this ground one might argue that such tactics are inconsistent with ALF nonviolent principles—while recognizing the absurdity tainting those critics who exonerate animal abusers from moral wrong in causing intense physical and psychological pain to animals. Booby-trapped letters sent by the Justice Department and baseball bat attacks against HLS executives are clear-cut cases of violent actions intended to cause a person physical harm; while fine for those who endorse violence, they contradict ALF principles. In April 2002, however, an avowed ALF cell placed 38 unidentified bottles of Pantene Pro V shampoo contaminated with a diluted solution of ammonia and hydrogen peroxide in 13 supermarkets throughout New Zealand to coincide with World Week for Laboratory Animals. Although their communiqué stated that the dilution was harmless, it mimicked a bona fide terrorist action by targeting innocent people for a political cause.

Arson is a valuable weapon for destroying laboratories and research facilities, but it also is a problematic tool for nonviolent direct action because fire is so destructive and unpredictable. More than anything, acts of arson conjure up images of violence and terrorism in the public mind and pose credibility problems for the ALF.47 For many animal advocates, the question is not whether illegal direct action is defensible, but rather where to draw the line with such tactics, and some in this camp draw it at the use of arson.48 If the arsonist does not accidentally injure or kill a human being who was not known to be in the target building after careful reconnaissance, small animals in the vicinity might be injured or killed, as could any firefighter called to put out the flames.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that small animals have been injured or killed in arson strikes, thereby calling into question the nonviolent character of the ALF in an absolute sense. Robin Webb poses the problem thus: “In my opinion, arson does not fall under the classification of ‘damage to property’ but rather, actions that endanger life. The ALF is proud of its claim never to have harmed human life but arson has, almost undisputedly, taken life, whether it be a mouse, rat or spider. One cannot check every nook and cranny of a department store or broiler shed; the presence of a small creature is not so obvious as that of a human and they do not understand fire alarms and emergency exits. If one does not or cannot take at least as great a care to ensure that spiders are not present as one does to ensure the absence of humans then that is not only endangering life but also practical speciesism.”49

Seemingly, if the ALF wishes both to be nonviolent and to continue using arson, the only philosophical resort it has in the face of this dilemma is (1) to claim it never intentionally causes violence to any form of life, or (2) to shift from deontological (absolute) defenses of the rights of all beings to a utilitarian justification of possibly harming animals or firefighters in order to save maximum animals lives through sabotage. The ALF seeks to do no harm to any living being, but no action carries any guarantees and, like all human beings, ALF activists unavoidably injure life (the ant beneath one’s footstep) simply by existing, raising the question of what “nonviolence” means and to what extent it is possible.

VI. The “Pragmatic” Critique of the ALF

Until the last fur farm burns to the ground, expect to hear from us. —ALF press release

We played the game, we played the rules. We were moderate, reasonable, and professional. We had data, statistics, and maps. And we got fucked. That’s when I started thinking, “Something’s missing here. Something isn’t working.” —Earth First! activist Howie Wolkie on attempts to protect wilderness through compromise with the US Forest Service

The pragmatic argument brackets the ethical status of sabotage tactics in order to scrutinize their possible or actual consequences for the animal advocacy movement. Like the principled critique, the pragmatic critique advocates legislation and education as the proper tools of progressive change, arguing that sabotage is premature and counterproductive. Following Tom Regan’s line of argument (in this volume), if significant options for nonviolent change have not been fully explored, then “violence” (which for Regan includes property destruction) is not a legitimate option. Hence, many animal advocate critics argue that sabotage tactics seek a perilous shortcut to the hard work to be done through education and legislation.

As we have seen, however, the ALF believes that there is no virtue in following the legal path if it is a road to futility, and legalistic dogmas ought to be overturned in favor of a more realistic appraisal of effective tactics. If the legal system were open to justice for animals, the ALF would not have to exist. Animals are slaves. Society views them as property and resources for human use. As such, animals have no legal standing, whereas their exploiters have constitutional rights of property ownership. When laws protecting animals are passed, they typically are rewritten and watered down over time, rendering them toothless. Frequently, they are not even enforced.50 The vast majority of animals used in research—95 percent—are rats, mice, and birds who have no legal protection whatsoever in the Animal Welfare Act, and so any form of abuse is permitted.51 Furthermore, in the age of global capitalism dominated by treaties and institutions such as the General Agreement of Trades and Tariff, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, legislative changes for the animals are especially precarious. The WTO has overridden numerous progressive laws such as those protecting sea turtles or banning steel-jawed leghold traps as “barriers to free trade.”52

The inadequacies of adopting a strictly legal approach are obvious if one studies the history of Paul Watson’s efforts to protect whales and baby harp seals. Despite the laws of the International Whaling Commission that prohibit whaling, Russia, Japan, Iceland, and other nations kill thousands of whales every year with impunity while governments