Liberation

Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.—Elie Wiesel

If we are trespassing, so were the soldiers who broke down the gates of Hitler's death camps; if we are thieves, so were the members of the Underground Railroad who freed the slaves of the South; and if we are vandals, so were those who destroyed forever the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. —anonymous ALF activist

The fight is not for us, not for our personal wants or needs. It is for every animal that has ever suffered and died in the vivi-section labs, and for every animal that will suffer and die in those same labs unless we end this evil business now. The souls of the tortured dead cry out for justice, the cry of the living is for freedom. We can create that justice and we can deliver that freedom. The animals have no one but us, we will not fail them.—Barry Horne

Legitimizing Liberation

MARK BERNSTEIN, PHD

It is for good reason that a positive connotation is universally associated with the notion of liberation. To liberate is to free, and to make free—or, at least to make more free—is largely a measure of allowing a group of individuals to behave in conformity with their natural instincts and act in accordance with their desires and preferences. Prior to being liberated, individuals are oppressed, subjugated, and unduly restricted. Blacks were liberated in this country in 1863 with the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, Indians were liberated from British colonial rule in 1947, and Afghans were liberated from the Taliban regime in 2001. Undoubtedly, liberation is a matter of degree. No reflective person believes that Blacks or Afghans are fully free at this time. Moreover, despite the dating of seminal events, liberation is a process and is rarely accomplished by a particular edict on a particular date. The Emancipation Proclamation, important as it was, was just one step toward the end of slavery and racial discrimination.

The logic of liberation mandates that candidates for liberation have the possibility of living more fulfilling and happier lives. They must, in other words, have welfares. This is why it is senseless to query the merits of liberating chairs or vegetables. Although one can paint and rein-force a chair to make it both more aesthetically pleasing and more functional, the chair, in and of itself, is not made better off by such modifications. Similar considerations apply to vegetables. Adding fertilizer may help them grow more quickly and salting them may enhance their taste, but vegetables cannot be made better (or worse) off, any more than chairs can. One does not know where to begin to liberate chairs and vegetables, not from ignorance, but in virtue of the fact that there is no point of departure.

Nonhuman animals are prime subjects of liberation. To be sure, there are still some rather perverse neo-Cartesians who cling to the idea that animals are devoid of consciousness and are nothing more than relatively complex automatons.¹ For these philosophers, there is no issue of animal liberation. Without any awareness, animals cannot feel pain, frustration, discouragement, and depression. Nor, of course, can they experience pleasure, satisfaction, hope, or joy. Lacking any consciousness, they are absent any well-being. The only criterion of an animal being better or worse than it was at an earlier time resides in its serviceability to us. Just as the function of a clock is to tell time—and so a better clock is one that more accurately tells time—the function of a burro, say, is to carry loads. The heavier loads the pack beast can bear, the better and more valuable he is.

There are those who would deny the intelligibility of liberating animals by arguing that they unfailingly lack the capacity to form desires and preferences.² These theorists are not quite as radical as the neo-Cartesians; they allow that animals have consciousness and feelings but deny that, for example, they can prefer that they not be in a state of intense pain. The avenue to this conclusion inevitably turns on the idea that only language users have the capability to create preferences. Since nonhuman animals are considered linguistically deprived, desires can never form part of their mental lives. The reasoning fails for a host of reasons. Conditioning the possibility of desires upon actual language use would entail that we are mistaken in believing that human infants desire their mother's milk, let alone their mother's attention and comfort. Secondly, at least some animals seem to have language ability; witness the sign language capacity of some primates. Perhaps most importantly, were such an unlikely hypothesis true, it would still carry little weight in denying the coherence of animal liberation. After all, these theorists still accept the commonsense idea that animals can feel pain and suffer, and so have a welfare. Even if they are incapable of forming desires to rid themselves of pain, their welfare would still be compromised by it; a dog relieved of his pain is surely made better off even if he could not—by virtue of limited language skills—form a preference to be rid of his suffering.

Although strictly unnecessary to the argument for a meaningful liberation, recent studies in cognitive ethology have supported the intuitive belief that the difference between animal and human minds is, at most, one of degree rather than kind. Darwin, himself, insisted upon a continuity between animal and human experience, a point forcefully advanced by zoologists, physiologists, and primatologists, as well as ethologists. Discarding a priori prejudices that impose an unbridgeable chasm between animals and humans allows us to appreciate the unsurprising results of scientific research. Most will not find it revelatory to read that many animals communicate, play, deceive, make tools, and have intimate social relationships.³ In the ways that matter most, they are like us.

So much for the intelligibility of liberating animals. Outside the offices of a few philosophers, the urgent question is not whether the notion of liberation can be meaningfully applied to animals, but is rather whether the liberation of animals is justified. We want to know whether the liberation of animals is a morally right (or at least morally permissible) course of action to pursue or whether it is morally wrong or impermissible. Not surprisingly, the simplicity of the question is deceptive.

Liberation is, as are all intentional processes, a means toward an end. One therefore might object to the propriety of animal liberation on either of two grounds. First, the argument may be aimed at the end of liberation, accusing this goal of being immoral in its own right. Here, the means that liberationists employ are simply irrelevant to the moral issue; if the aim is unworthy, it is superfluous to discuss the validity of the means of reaching it. A second argument may concede that the goal of animal liberation is a just one, but insist that the usual means that liberationists use to try to attain their goals are morally repellent. In this case, there is more hope of agreement; it may be possible to find a mutually acceptable instrument to efficaciously carry out the purposes that both parties deem worthy of completion.

Those who believe that the purposes of animal liberationists are unjust would appear to inherit the burden of proof. After all, there is little dissension concerning the liberation of slaves, Indians, and Afghans. The objective of freeing a group of individuals from a repressive regime so that they can live autonomous lives hardly seems in need of vindication. Thus, the anti-liberationist bears the onus of showing why the animal liberation movement is relevantly different from these other lauded campaigns. Effectively, he or she needs to demonstrate why, although improving the plight of oppressed human animals is a good, taking measures to try to enhance the lot of nonhuman animals is not.

Once we adopt the commonsense, anti-Cartesian position that animals have consciousness and can feel pain and suffer, it becomes extremely difficult to see how any sort of compelling argument can be mounted. What reasons can be forwarded suggesting that the pursuit of bettering nonhuman lives is either wrong or unworthy?

Perhaps one can argue that nonhuman animals, by their very nature, have no value. In this case, one would deny the radical Cartesian portrayal of animals as deprived of consciousness (let alone sentience) but insist the pain and suffering that animals endure are of no moral significance whatsoever. Animals hurt, of course, when they experience unpleasant feelings, but since their lives are of no inherent importance, there is no intrinsic reason why their pains should concern us. From this point of view, it is at best a waste of time and energy to care for the plight of animals, and more likely is an indulgence of a superstitious attitude that unfortunately pervades much of contemporary society.

When alleging that animals “by their very nature” lack value or that animal lives are of no “inherent importance,” apologists are tacitly relying on a time-honored distinction between two sorts of values. An individual has instrumental value insofar as it contributes to the performance of some goal. Money is paradigmatic of an object with instrumental value. Few of us care about the green rectangular pieces of paper in and of themselves; their worth is purely a function of how well they serve as a means toward an end. Money serves as a means to own the food, shelter, and clothing that we desire. If the pieces of paper lost their commercial function, money would lose its value. On the other hand, an item has intrinsic value insofar as it has value in and of itself. The value of an object is intrinsic if it has worth independently of any use that we may make of it. Pleasure is frequently cited as something with intrinsic value. We value pleasant sensations for their own sake and not for their serviceability.

The objection, then, can be reconfigured: Animal lives are merely instrumentally valuable. The worth of animals reduces to the benefits that they can provide us. So, for example, burros are valuable for their ability as pack animals, butterflies have value in virtue of giving us visual pleasure, and dogs and cats are valuable because they provide us with companionship. Subtract the services that animals supply and their value is eliminated; therefore, to concern ourselves with the feelings of animals per se, i.e., independent of how their interior lives may affect our own lives, is just plain silly.

But why should we accept the notion that animals possess only instrumental value? Pain and suffering are bad states to endure for the creature who experiences them regardless of color, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, intelligence or species. Making the world a better place is a venerable aim, and relieving individuals of pain and suffering, especially intense pain and suffering of innocent creatures, is one way of improving it. Conceiving of animals as nothing more than conscious commodities, as the objection does, is an unwarranted reduction. The argument against liberation on the grounds that its goal is unworthy therefore fails. It rests upon a counterintuitive, provincial assumption that has nothing to recommend it.

A second anti-liberationist argument concedes that, in a perfect world, animals should be liberated, but reminds us that, pace Leibniz, we do not inhabit the best of all possible worlds. The charge is that liberationists are starry-eyed idealists who are oblivious to the real-life contingencies that pervade our everyday lives. Millions of people are employed in industries that consume animals. It is rhetorically asked whether the liberationists would have us dismiss the workforce of those who work in the agricultural, hunting, and pharmaceutical industries, thereby escalating unemployment to unknown heights and effectively ruining our entire economy. Perhaps there is a historical scenario in which our nation might have developed in ways to be far less dependent upon our use of animals, but, for better or worse, this is not the world in which we currently live. This objection may allow that certain segments of particular industries are so cruel and so peripheral to their maintenance that relatively minor modifications are justified. Perhaps we should make the cages somewhat larger for battery hens who now live most of their lives in ultra-confinement; perhaps more care should be exercised in the slaughterhouses of cows and pigs so that they do not, respectively, get skinned or scalded alive; perhaps minks should not have to suffer anal electrocution on their route to becoming fur coats. Still, goes the objection, we should not be so ingenuous to believe that major institutional changes can be instituted with-out enormous negative implications for our society.

We should take note that, at bottom, this is a utilitarian argument. It suggests that, given the situation in which we currently find ourselves, the consequences of animal liberation would be dire; we are incalculably better off if, at most, we tinker with the present system, making just minor concessions to the demands of pro-animal forces. Of course, the “we” here conveniently refers to our human community. If we were to consider the interests of all the nonhuman animals that lie at the lifeblood of our institutions, the calculus would undoubtedly be quite different.

Consider a similar argument purveyed by a slaveowner in early nineteenth-century Virginia. He rails against the abolitionists, reminding them that the agricultural industry would suffer untold economic setbacks were the practice of slavery abandoned. He reminds his idealistic, tender-hearted opponents that cheap labor is what makes the cotton industry, among so many others, profitable. Being a kind and decent fellow, he is willing to make some minor modifications. He will provide his slaves with slightly larger living quarters and not beat them quite as severely if they fail to give him an honest day's work.

We need not belabor the analogy. If we want to employ a utilitarian or consequentialist criterion to determine the right course of action, we cannot, without being arbitrary and self-serving, limit the interests to be calculated to a group of persons of which we, mirabile dictu, happen to be members. The welfare of all must be considered, be it that of black slaves on colonial plantations or animals in contemporary institutions.

Animal liberationists may, as have many others, question the utilitarian presumption. There seems to be more to determining right and wrong behavior than merely subtracting bad from good. Suppose that an unsuspecting innocent walks into a hospital to visit a sick friend. Several very ill patients are waiting for life-saving organ transplants. If our visitor donated his kidneys and heart, he would save the lives of three deserving human beings. Understandably, our visitor, although feeling sympathy for the dying patients, does not want his organs extracted. Surely, we believe that by refusing donation he acts permissibly, and we just as certainly believe that if the doctors compelled him to involuntarily undergo the fatal operation to get his organs, they would be doing something horribly wrong. Yet, on utilitarian grounds, our innocent visitor ought to give up his organs and the doctors, if need be, ought to force him to yield his life. After all, although we are killing one, we are saving three.

There are limits on what others can do to us without our voluntary consent. Although the general good may be served by our discomfort and death, our lives have a certain value that allows us not to sacrifice ourselves to this end. Cases vary, of course, but to deny animal liberationists the use, in general, of non-utilitarian considerations will also impoverish our moral interactions among humans.

Far and away, the most frequent complaint hurled against animal liberationists vilifies the means they use to try to reach their ends. At least for the sake of argument, the goal of liberation—to free animals to allow them, as far as possible, to lead autonomous lives without artificial restrictions—is conceded as good. What cannot be accepted, goes the objection, are the instruments that the liberationists employ to reach their justifiable aim. In short, anti-liberationists remind us of the longstanding moral adage that the end does not justify the means, especially when the means employed often result in great property damage, societal disruption, and personal harm.

The openly conservative are not the only ones who decry liberationist methods. Some anti-liberationists who pride themselves on being progressive believe that activists ought to proceed with their campaigns “within the system.” They encourage liberationists to for-swear their illegal ways and write letters to their local newspapers and congressional representatives. Instead of breaking into laboratories and animal farms, they claim, activists should hold peaceful demonstrations and protests. Progressives find these lawful and peaceful actions perfectly permissible—even laudable—but rescind their support once activism steps beyond the legal boundaries.

So liberationists need to vindicate their conduct not only to those who are ideologically opposed to their views, but also to those who are somewhat sympathetic to their crusade to aid animals' interests. I want to argue that liberationists have an excellent justification for their illegal activities. Let me emphasize that what I will suggest is a moral justification for past—and perhaps future—liberationist actions; the means that have been employed, and even more “radical” ones that may later be employed, are in fact morally justified by the conditions in which billions of animals find themselves. This is quite different from claiming that these behaviors would constitute the best strategy for accomplishing their worthwhile goals. This latter question is not one that is particularly situated in the province of philosophers. Although my discipline may have something useful to add to this discussion—probably in the form of game-theoretic considerations—my guess is that empirical psychologists and Madison Avenue mavens are more likely sources of wisdom on how best to effect the change of hearts and minds of the general public. In the end, a different Weltanschauung is probably necessary for the grand changes that the liberationists hope for.

We begin by issuing a couple of caveats to those who have this legitimate concern about liberationists' means. First, we should be careful to resist the temptation to exaggerate the harm caused by liberationists. To my knowledge, no human has ever died as a result of any liberationist activity, nor has anyone been the intentional target of physical injury. Furthermore, the extent of social disruption has been minimal. Procter and Gamble, the firm that has killed more animals than any other in cosmetic testing, scarcely skipped a beat when animal activists invaded their offices, nor did their home city of Cincinnati suffer any noticeable lasting consequences. Still, there can be no doubt that animal liberationists have caused property damage. Vivisection laboratories have been severely damaged, cages and grounds of mink farms have been destroyed, furs in “upscale” stores have been sprayed with paint, and hunting blinds have been trampled. As a result, people have lost money and families have been disrupted. Some individuals may have experienced psychic problems; having your workplace (and even recreational arena) violated, like enduring a home burglary, may be a traumatic event.

Secondly, we need to be careful not to turn this very important substantive moral issue into one of mere semantics. Much of the contemporary media is wont to label animal liberationists “terrorists,” a term that carries a great deal of emotive and normative baggage; terrorists and their actions are evil just as surely as heroes and their actions are good. Given this ordinary understanding of the term, it is blatant question-begging to categorize animal liberationists in this way. More fairly, we should withhold the rubric and directly investigate whether their behavior is justifiable. The notion of terrorism, however, does prove useful as a mode of entry into our examination.

Terrorists use violence partly as a means to accomplish an immediate objective, and partly as a way of creating fear or intimidation to prevent future objectionable—by their lights—acts. Inculcating fear is not an end in itself. Terrorists view the introduction of fear as a further means to change the behaviors of others. In truth, terrorists would rather do without terrorizing; if they could bring about the societal changes that they deem legitimate, they would just as soon do without it. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that frightening people is a necessary means to bringing about a desirable end.

When “terror” is used with wide scope, I believe that animal liberationists must admit that there are times when they intentionally terrify. They want certain people who indulge in particular practices to feel uncomfortable. In the best of all worlds, this discomfort would provide an opportunity for reassessment, but, whether a considered reflection occurs or not, the liberationist ultimately hopes for a change of behavior. Obviously, the liberationist who illegally enters an animal laboratory is aiming for the experimenters to quit and the business to shut down. Liberationists, by and large, do not intend that the scientists feel concerned about their own personal safety, but they do want them to realize that their working conditions will degrade if they continue maiming and killing animals.

On the other hand, insofar as terrorist attacks are conceived as essentially indiscriminate, as tactics that do not distinguish between those who actually participate in the undesired action and those who are innocent, there is little connection with the animal liberation movement. On the contrary; liberationist actions are quite focused, meant only to interfere with the working lives of those who conduct their anti-animal behaviors.

Even with these qualifications, there is no dispute that liberationists' activities are illegal, disruptive of places of business, discomforting to those who work in the selected workplaces, and violent to property. Without a potent justification, animal liberation would be an immoral movement, no better than the practices that liberationists strive so diligently to abolish. I submit that the prime justification for animal liberation is that the activists are proxies for subjugated animals who unwillingly find themselves in a war against their oppressors. When viewed as representatives of an oppressed group who, by their very nature, are incapable of fighting their own battles, rather than being labeled as scofflaws, animal liberationists are cast in a far more flattering light. No more should they be characterized as a fringe element violently attempting to change the social structure to reflect their warped picture of how our community should be shaped. Risking humiliation and incarceration, these activists should be understood as brave, self-sacrificing, and honorable persons who should be embraced and emulated rather than marginalized and dismissed.

In this conception, animal liberationists continue a hallowed line of heroic visionaries; the Suffragettes fighting in the early twentieth century, those in the 1960s engaged in the Civil Rights Movement, and, perhaps most fittingly, the courageous men and women who harbored Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Although at first blush the analogy with the Holocaust may strike some as offensive,⁴ it is most apt. In both cases the number of individuals tortured is enormous, the treatment of the oppressed is indescribable, and the possibility of freedom fully resides in the hands of some benefactors.

I have claimed that animal liberationists should be viewed as being at war with animal oppressors, those who most directly expose animals to great pain, suffering, and distress, e.g., factory farmers, vivisectionists, fur ranchers, and hunters. It is an unusual war in certain respects. Most significantly, the aim of the liberationists is altruistic; they fight for the improvement of the lot of nonhuman animals. Liberationists do not covet territory, riches, or glory. They seek no person's death or harm. They use no torpedoes, rockets, bombs, or guns. Still, they engage in war—a physical war—and not merely a war of words or ideas.

One advantage in characterizing animal liberation in this manner is that it suggests a means of testing its legitimacy. There is a traditional template for investigating whether a war is just or not. It would be probative to discover how good the fit is between a just animal liberation movement and a just war, keeping in mind, of course, that the rules of war were devised with states or regimes constituting the warring parties. To the extent that the animal liberation movement conforms to the criteria set forth by an orthodox rendering of a just war, the movement gains justification.

The so-called just war doctrine (bellum justum) contains two components. The jus ad bellum component concerns the grounds for entering a conflict. This part of the doctrine deals with the conditions that must be met in order to justifiably go to war. The jus in bello component concerns the prosecution of the war, including the moral conditions governing the actual waging of war.

Jus ad bellum informs us that engagement in war must come as a last resort. We must have the practical certainty that peaceful means of resolving the conflict are not adequate to the task. The declaration of war must derive from a legitimate authority. The initiation of combatants must be preceded by an intention to bring about a defense against aggression in an attempt to reestablish a peaceful and just society. Finally, jus ad bellum allows engagement in a war even if the injustice that requires redress occurs somewhere other than in the state that joins the battle.

Animal liberation, I believe, conforms quite well to these requirements. For decades, activists have implored, cajoled, debated, and sued those who oppress animals. Very little progress has been made, and in many ways the plight of the animals has worsened. Lust for money is a difficult incentive to blunt. Vivisectors are still not legally required to keep records of the number of rodents and birds that are savaged in laboratory experiments. Farm animals, thought of as “resources,” objects to be exploited for their product, are now consumed in the US at the staggering annual rate of 10 billion. Technology has allowed farmers to have chickens, turkeys, and cattle grow to unnatural sizes at unnatural rates. Manipulating the natural life cycles of animals is a recipe for disaster—for the animals, that is.⁵ Statutes have done little. Vague and virtually unenforceable, they carry almost no practical bite. From my own experience, reflective of many on the “pro-animal” side, reason has had little effect. I have had literally a dozen debates on my campus with vivisectionists with no noticeable effect on animal testing—this despite the fact that these experimenters are frequently “gracious” enough to concede that they cannot answer my objections to their use of animals.

Since this war is not state sponsored, there is no venue for a formal declaration. In this respect it is unlike most—but not all—wars. Korea was a “police action.” Vietnam, Kosovo, and Afghanistan were campaigns of indeterminate character. Here, the requirement of jus ad bellum is not so much unsatisfied as inapplicable. Liberationists want—in fact, yearn—for peace; the idyllic picture painted by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 11:6) well captures the liberationist wish. Finally, the altruistic nature of the liberationist's battle harmonizes perfectly with the sanction to intervene on the behalf of another who suffers injustices.

Turning to the prerequisites of prosecuting a war, we find that the idea of proportional violence is key; we are not justified in creating more injustice than that produced by those who use animals as resources. In fact, it would be extremely difficult to violate this condition, in virtue of the horrendous manner in which animals on farms and in laboratories are treated. The ways in which these animals are raised, treated, and eventually slaughtered almost defies description. Liberationists' maneuvers are inordinately mild by comparison. Jus in bello also demands that the force be used discriminately, a requirement that calls for not harming innocents. As a practical matter, it is all but impossible not to harm innocents in war and, a fortiori, to know in advance that no innocents will suffer. Unless we want to abandon the possibility of a just war altogether, we must, then, concoct an escape hatch. The traditional way out is to use the church-honored “doctrine of double effect.” Simplifying, this doctrine allows the killing of innocents in war as long as they are not the intended targets of the violence. Thus, although we may know with practical certainty that innocents will die in our bombing Afghanistan, for example, as long as they are not the intended targets of the bombing (as they presumably are not), this “collateral damage,” unfortunate as it is, is consistent with a just war.

My purpose here is neither to defend this doctrine nor even to defend the viability of a just war. But, if there are just wars and the doctrine of double effect must be employed in order to legitimate wars, then the liberationist's war is at least as proper as any ordinary war carried out by any regime. Animal liberationists never intend to harm innocents, and the probability of any guilty party, let alone an innocent person, being physically harmed approaches zero. Since no missiles are launched, bombs dropped, or machine guns fired, the chance of innocents directly suffering is minimal. Economic losses are the worst that are likely to plague non-combatants.

In fact, animal liberationists can absorb even further limitations on the constitution of a just war. They can sincerely avow the justified belief that more violence will not follow their own intentional violence, effectively admitting that their tactics would be verboten were they to believe that their intended activities would beget a net increase in pain and suffering. One should not be deluded into believing that this addendum is vacuous. Consider a scenario in which the US is attacked by North Korea, and our destruction is assured whether or not we retaliate. If we do launch our own missiles, we will cause millions of foreign deaths. Some may urge that, despite the fact that even more suffering and death will be produced, we are justified, perhaps even morally required, to militarily respond. In meeting the burden of an additional restriction, the justification of the liberationists' case becomes further strengthened.

Moreover, liberationists can satisfy a demand that they be motivated by a strong and intuitive moral principle. The Principle of Utility in its classical form serves this purpose. Here we are told that we ought to produce the action that creates the greatest net balance of pleasure over pain. Given the enormous number of animals involved in the oppressive practices and the extent and degree of the pain and suffering they continually experience, this principle would certainly encourage liberation. The motivating moral principle need not be consequentialist. Once we realize that the capacity to experience pain and pleasure confer non-instrumental value (i.e., dignity) upon its possessor, we can understand how a principle morally sanctioning us to respect an individual's autonomy naturally elicits the adoption of a liberationist stance.

Animal liberation is an honorable cause. The enlightened have always known that improving the lot of the oppressed is just. There are none more oppressed than animals and none more innocent. We welcome you to the battle.

Notes

1. See Peter Carruthers, The Animal Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Peter Harrison, “Do Animals Feel Pain?” Philosophy, 66, 1991.

2. See my On Moral Considerability: An Essay On Who Morally Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 2.

3. See, for example, D.R. Griffin, Animal Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); B. Rollin, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and D.L. Cheney and R.M. Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

4. In a recently completed book, titled Without a Tear (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press), I speak to this very important psychological issue. Having lost five ancestors to the Nazi death camps, I have great empathy for those who believe that the term “holocaust” should be reserved for what occurred under Hitler's regime. I ask only that people educate themselves about the happenings in factory farms, slaughterhouses, animal laboratories, and the like. One may come to discover, as I have, that when the term is used to cover these activities as well, it denigrates none and honors all.

5. And, indeed, for humans as well. There have been very recent studies strongly suggesting that the antibiotics routinely injected into cows and chickens have made the consumers of these animals far more susceptible to various diseases. This should not strike anyone as surprising; we have known for many years that bacteria, in virtue of the replicative prowess, can become resistant to antibiotics fairly quickly.

At the Gates of Hell: The ALF and the Legacy of Holocaust Resistance

MAXWELL SCHNURER

The ALF (Animal Liberation Front) has been the subject of heated debate in the popular media, with intense scrutiny applied to its tactics. This concentration on tactics obscures the ALF's capacity to bring issues of animal liberation into focus in the larger public. This essay attempts to reframe the discussion of ALF tactics by placing the ALF within the historical legacy of Jewish resistance fighters who struggled against the Nazi regime. Approaching the ALF from the context of a scattered guerrilla militant movement opposing a totalitarian state, we can help to explore two aspects of ALF actions that have been hidden: the impact of direct action animal liberation on the ethical relationship of humans and animals, and the role of ALF actions in challenging the technological infrastructure vital for animal oppression.

The Animal Liberation Front represents a part of activist culture that is foreign to most people. The actions of the ALF are not part of the traditional framework of American political participation. The ALF do not lobby for legal change or elect members to Congress. The goals of their activism (animal liberation) are not a familiar topic, and their midnight-creeping, balaclava-wearing image blurs the definitions of “activist” and “terrorist.” Given this popular conception of the ALF, how can we position their tactics to better understand the ramifications of their actions?¹

This essay suggests that the ALF should be read in a particular way. Rather than engaging in a systematic analysis of their tactics in comparison to other American social movements, this essay proposes that we juxtapose the ALF and the underground partisan militants that fought against the Nazi Holocaust.² When we place the ALF in the historical footsteps of Holocaust resistance movements, we can explore the role of direct action animal liberation politics in exposing the ethical disjuncture between animals and humans. In addition, the ability of ALF actions to expose and disrupt networks of technological infrastructure and control becomes evident.

This analysis can help us to understand how evil can be perpetuated in our world and how direct action exposes and resists this evil. This essay argues that the ALF must be understood as a part of our culture, and that the meaning of the ALF extends far beyond the animals saved. The first section of this paper explores the mental categories that enable racism, speciesism, and sexism to continue. More importantly, it positions direct action as an important tool in helping to restore the lost ethical relationship between humans and animals. The second section discusses how the creation of bureaucratic infrastructure and networks of control are vital for the success of mass violence. This section also suggests that direct action can expose this infrastructure and create new meanings in the face of overwhelming destruction of life.³

Exposing the Ethical Tension

To those who believe that America could never be a totalitarian state, Stanley Milgram proposes an eloquent and terrifying rejoinder. In a series of 1962 experiments, Milgram tested Americans to explore their willingness to obey authority. Rigging a laboratory so that the subjects believed they were testing a partner (in reality a co-conspirator of Milgram's) about word pairs, Milgram asked participants to give a series of increasingly powerful electric shocks whenever the wrong answer was given. More than half of Milgram's subjects were willing to obey the researcher's orders and give 450-volt shocks to humans who were screaming in pain or whose silence presumably indicated that they had passed out from the experience.⁴

Milgram's work can be read in the context of the Nazi experience. When it was exposed that hundreds of thousands of average, everyday people had participated in the slaughter of millions of Jews, Romany, Gays, Lesbians, Anarchists, Communists, and other “undesirables,” thinkers across the globe wondered what would make a person perpetuate such evil on the suffering face of another person. Milgram suggested that the human personality could not be trusted to respond to ethical situations with compassion. The Nazi experience and his own experiments led Milgram to conclude that there was widespread possibility for evil to be perpetuated even in the United States.

We can explore Milgram's experiments and the Nazi experience in terms of mindlessness, a concept that Ellen Langer introduces in her book Mindfulness. According to Langer, mindlessness is a mental position that creates patterns of knowledge that enable us to make quick judgments based on categories.⁵ In Milgram's example, the participants were able to justify the terrible shocks they were doling out because an administrator was telling them that the experiment was of the utmost importance. For Milgram, our values associated with science and the unwillingness to disobey orders are positions of mindlessness. In the case of Nazis, the mindless categorization of Jews and other unwanted races/classes coupled with a hierarchical industrial order created a context in which concentration camps made sense. Participants in the systems of these orders were willing to engage in evil and become complicit with the evil around them because that was simply the way the world was.

The experience of living within these regimes of thought cannot be simply criticized or exposed. Any notion that liberation from mindlessness simply requires information suggests a shallow comprehension of a very complex problem. The nature of being within a system of meaning precludes certain approaches or resistance. Those living within a system of mindlessness (obedience to authority, the Third Reich, nationalism, etc.) have a very difficult time understanding the nature of the problem because from their perspective, the injustice is a necessary part of their existence. Oppression is not only acceptable, but often it is made to be a fundamental part of how we come to know the world.

Obedience to authority cultivates a mindset that allows one to commit violence toward another. In the case of the oppression of animals, philosopher Carol Adams has argued that acts of violence are made acceptable through cultural symbols that encourage dominance of humans. Adams parallels the oppression of animals through a comparison to the oppression of women. She argues that humans learn to ignore the lived nature of animals (and women) through a process of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption.

Objectification encourages humans to think of animals as objects (a cow has value because it can be made into a meatball). Fragmentation encourages people to break apart the bodies of animals to further distance them from their ethical subjectivity (turkeys become known as drumsticks or dark meat). Consumption is the final act of violence that solidifies the secondary ethical status of the animal (eating or abusing an animal).

Adams uses these same tools to explore how violence against women becomes normalized. She argues that objectification encourages men to think about women as two-dimensional objects, fragmentation teaches men the eroticization of body parts (fixation on specific body parts), and consumption teaches men that women's bodies are available for their pleasure through non-consensual consumption (rape). Her theory helps to explain how the human subject can commit violence against humans and animals and avoid feeling responsible. More importantly, she suggests that challenging these normative processes can help to restore the absent referent (i.e., the lived nature that is ignored) to animals and women.⁶

In the case of the Holocaust, Charles Patterson's book Eternal Treblinka points to the methods of distancing used by the Nazis in regard to Jews. Patterson points out that the “use of animal terms to vilify and dehumanize the victims, combined with the abominably degraded conditions in the camps, made it easier for the SS to do their job, since treating prisoners like animals made them begin to look and smell like animals.”⁷

Understanding the process of obscuring the face of the other is only part of this project; the other half argues that militant direct action can help to restore that ethical relationship. This approach can help us to understand how a person participating in oppression can internally justify oppression. Realizing this process of numbing leads us to ask how a person might resist this process. Adams suggests that activists struggle to restore the absent referent by reminding people that animals and women are living, complex beings. Langer proposes that we work to become mindful by fighting the simple mental categories that can emerge. But how do we do this? How can we overcome these mental categorizations that perpetuate injustice? And if Milgram is right, that governments and leaders contain the potential to simply reframe an injustice into a new path of obedience, then can these mental gymnastics have any effect on the systems of violence?

The ALF and Holocaust resistance represent a method of bringing about new understanding that challenges these mental habits. The actions of these militants blaze new paths of meaning far beyond the direct actions that they participate in. The meaning of active militant resistance can pervade the popular consciousness of entire societies, and in the case of the ALF and of the Holocaust resistance, their actions work to make mindlessness more difficult.

The Ethical Challenge of Holocaust Resistance Fighters

The actions of militancy are done a disservice when we think of them as singular campaigns or even as terrorist actions. Militant activists operate in a cultural space, bringing new ideas and rebutting popular ideas about what is important. More significantly, direct-action militants open up new pathways of resistance that can become echoed (either by copying the method or by expounding/defending the method) by other activists. These actions challenge the categories of oppression by crying out “Here I am”—a living breathing being, whose very existence necessitates an ethical rejoinder.

The actions of Holocaust resistance certainly fulfill this mandate. Werner, a Jewish fighter who struggled against the Nazis in Poland, described the importance of their first attack against the Germans. “It was a tremendous uplift to our morale to be able to hit back at the Germans. It was also important to us to show the villagers that Jews, once armed, would strike back.”⁸

Werner's comments are important because they suggest that direct action has communicative value. Actions of liberation communicate a message far beyond those directly involved. In the case of the Holocaust resistance fighters, their actions sent notice to potential Nazi collaborators that their actions would be noticed and could have dangerous ramifications for them. This communicative act was vital considering the difficulties resistance fighters encountered when dealing with local villagers.

A Polish Jew, Werner fled to the countryside, where a local farmer provided him shelter and food while he worked as a farmhand. At one point the Nazis passed a law that forbade farmers to employ Jews. “According to the order, the assembled Jews were to be transported by horse and buggy to the Wlodawa ghetto. Effective immediately, if a Jew was discovered in a village or on a farm, the punishment was death, both to the Jew and the farmer who sheltered him. Stephan told me that he could not risk his life and the lives of his family by keeping me any longer.⁹

Werner's band of partisan resistance fighters struck back after hiding in the winter forests. Their actions not only directly attacked the German Nazis, but also sent a message to Polish villagers that the Jews were not empty of value and passive. The message restored the absent referent and challenged the categories of meaning associated with being a fugitive Jew in Nazi-controlled Poland. For the Polish farmers, the popular idea of Jews as objects of derision came fully into clash with the reality of a living, breathing band of resistance fighters.

Simha Rotem, a leader of the Jewish resistance fighting organization ZOB, describes the beginning of the Warsaw uprising that led to the protracted battles against Nazis. The Germans had been clearing Jews out of the ghettos, dispatching them to concentration camps and exterminating them. Rotem described the outbreak of fighting in the ghetto.

I was nailed to the spot, almost paralyzed—a tremendous explosion! I had a fervent desire to see it with my own eyes. And I did see: crushed bodies of soldiers, limbs flying, cobble-stones and fences crumbling, complete chaos. I saw and I didn't believe; German soldiers screaming in panicky flight, leaving their wounded behind. I pulled out one grenade and then another and tossed them. My comrades were also shooting and firing at them. We weren't marksmen but we did hit some. The Germans took off. But they came back later, fearful, their fingers on their triggers. They didn't walk, they ran next to the walls. We let the first group of six pass—a shame to waste ammunition on a small group. Then we burst out, with two homemade grenades, 10 Molotov cocktails and pistols in our hands. “Shlomek—the gasoline!” I shouted to one of my comrades, and hurled a grenade at the Germans. We threw the Molotov cocktails at them and they burst into flames, so we shot at the fire. A waste of the only grenade we had, and we retreated up the street, taking a position with the rest of the fighters.¹⁰

Rotem's powerful narrative highlights two important things about Jewish resistance. First, the very action of resistance disrupts the minds of the oppressors. The Germans in Rotem's passage had only encountered peaceful Jews, Jews who went to the gas chambers with passive resistance. They had never encountered Jews organized to fight, and their mental categories of Jews and resistance were challenged. Second, the experience of resistance was transformative. Rotem describes “a fervent desire” to see the Germans die. All of his experience with his oppressors had come from one direction, Nazis dictating Jewish behavior. This single act of militant armed resistance fulfilled desires for vengeance and simultaneously opened up the idea of resistance.

This creation of the idea of a particular kind of resistance is one of the most powerful parts of direct action. Those in power easily dismiss traditional political protest. In the case of direct action, there is no negotiation or compromise; the action communicates the most intense distaste. Direct action is visceral empowerment. Participants immediately feel in control of a situation that was previously defined by others. This change transforms the understanding of all involved. The act of killing Germans affirms and makes concrete the very possibility of a particular kind of resistance. In this case, the direct actions of the Jewish resistance fighters reframed the identity of Jews, and of Nazis. For Polish citizens terrified of Nazi punishment, the militant actions of the Holocaust fighters placed ethical weight on the side of the Jews, making complicity all the more difficult. For Nazis, unfamiliar with Jews as anything but objects to be destroyed, the actions of resistance fighters sent a clear message that Jews were living entities who demanded ethical respect.¹¹

The establishment of this possibility is of vital importance, because in the ontology of oppression the oppressed only exist as objects. The Nazis removed the lived nature that necessitated ethical relationships with Jews (e.g., farmers no longer felt the need to protect them). This establishment of a process of control can only make sense if the victims of that system are willing to participate. The very act of violent resistance sends the signal that the victims are opposed to that system, and that the oppressors' system of understanding must be revised.¹²

In this process of discovery about the lived subjectivity of Jews, the experience of resistance can expand beyond the immediate struggle. For many, the act of resistance against the Nazis was a bold move that enlarged the circle of humanity to include these Jewish humans. For many others, the experience of intense suffering during the Holocaust became the justification for widening the ethical circle of all life. Many Jews became aware of animal suffering because of their experiences of human suffering in the Holocaust. Patterson profiles several such individuals who chose to speak out for animals in his book Eternal Treblinka. One of these people is the famed author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who is quoted in Patterson's book as writing: “There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers à la Hitler and concentration camps à la Stalin. . . . There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”¹³ Singer's experiences as a Jew who lived through the Holocaust came to gird his vegetarianism and his lifelong commitment to alleviate the suffering of animals.

The ethical frame that develops from Singer's experience highlights the constant need to challenge and resist the reduction of living beings to objects. The Jews who became fighters against the Nazi regime were potent reminders to all who encountered them that they were not objects to be destroyed. Their call for recognition expanded the idea of liberation far beyond the precise actions that they took. The actions and experiences of suffering are not soon forgotten. Singer and many other Jews took their horrible experiences and built a system of ethics that included animals. A vital part of that ethical relationship is not simply being considerate to animals, but also acting on their behalf. Today, activists attempt to act for animals, and, like the Jews who fought against the Nazis and racism, the actions of the Animal Liberation Front represent a potent challenge to animal exploitation industries and to speciesism.

The Ethical Challenge of the Animal Liberation Front

When we consider the status of animals in our society, we are dealing with a very strict system of social meaning. Speciesism holds an extremely tight grip on this culture's consciousness. Much like the system of meaning that allows genocide to “make sense” to a community, speciesism is a system that makes sense not only to those who benefit from that system, but also those who simply live within that system.

Some may criticize the claim that ALF direct action can change people's opinions about animals. I agree with this argument. A person who owns a butcher shop will not shut down his or her business after reading an article about an ALF attack on a laboratory. At the most pragmatic level, the actions of the ALF, like the actions of Holocaust resistance fighters, can best be justified by their ability to directly slow or stop the actions of their enemies. On another level, the meaning of the ALF is in the argument presented to those who are listening: that some humans are willing to sacrifice everything for animals.¹⁴

Dave Foreman is one of the founders of the radical environmental organization Earth First!, a group that explicitly supported direct action destruction (or “monkeywrenching”) of logging and mining equipment. Foreman's autobiography, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, focuses the justifications for direct action as an effective means of stopping loggers and others from hurting the environment. While Foreman acknowledges that for those who are opposed to environmentalism “there may be no effective argument for ecodefense,” he also recognizes that direct action can elicit some new meaning in an oppositional public. “Even a small-town John Bircher,” he writes, “might monkeywrench to protect his backyard or his favorite fishing hole.”¹⁵

Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamieson argue that the very nature of social movements is to change the way people think. The arguments in their book, Cognitive Approach to Social Movements, suggest that social movements are effective precisely at this moment when they alter the very fabric of meaning that people cling to. Social movements create change by transforming patterns of knowledge. For example, homophobia may recede only when a person has some stake in changing his or her opinion about gay people (e.g., a family member reveals his or her homosexuality).¹⁶ Eyerman and Jamieson argue that social movements can serve the same cognitive function and elicit new meaning from an old situation: they can help people re-interpret everyday life and make new meaning from it. Functioning like the Holocaust resistance fighters, the ALF makes a pointed rebuttal to the ideas of speciesism, and their actions represent a vigorous rejoinder to those whose system of meaning allows them to commit evil.

Three elements make the ALF's actions uniquely challenging to the system of animal oppression. First, the ALF documents a world hidden from view. Photographing and videotaping animals trapped in the most intense states of cruelty provides an immediate ethical challenge to an audience. Second, the ALF communicates a direct sense of warning to all who participate in animal oppression. The actions of the ALF resonate in the minds of those who profit from animal abuse.¹⁷ This combined with financial cost can make industries unwilling to defend particularly high-profile animal abusers.¹⁸ Third, the actions of the ALF send a message to all who might encounter, or consider taking part in, animal oppression, that they must be aware of the stakes of the issue. The ALF encourages reflection on the part of anyone considering animal experimentation or any other form of exploitation. These three implications elevate animal oppression from the position of “ethically contested” in our society and call upon audiences to consider their own ethical role in relationship to animals.

The ALF acts to fundamentally challenge the notion that animals are objects that humans can consume and exploit. The ALF elevates a previously non-considered group (animals) to the level of humanity. By constantly risking their freedom ALF activists may create a wedge of analysis in an audience's brain. Just as the actions of militant Jewish resistance forces disrupted the German concept that Jews were objects for destruction, ALF actions call upon us all to relocate animals to the sphere of respect. Not everyone will receive or even acknowledge such a message, but the possibility exists that some change will occur because of ALF tactics.

For those who doubt that ALF actions forward such a radical read-justment, keep in mind that ALF activists and supporters constantly highlight their actions in terms of animal suffering. Consider Gina Lynn's essay in a 1996 volume of No Compromise magazine:

So what if they put us in jail for a few days or a few weeks or a few years. . . . It's an old but relevant argument: it's nothing compared to what the animals go through. There is NOTHING that “they” could do to us that could come close to the suffering that animals endure for hours, days, years, on end. I know I don't need to remind anyone of the pictures we've all seen of monkeys in stereotaxic devices, cows being shackled and their throats slit, foxes being anally electrocuted. . . .¹⁹

Lynn's argument resonates with some people—challenging assumptions and transforming static notions of being in regard to animals. Some argue, however, that the wider community misses the ALF's message, and that traditional methods of persuasion (protest, lobbying, leafleting) should be the focus of animal rights activism. The problem with this argument is that the wider community has the largest commitment to the system of meaning that holds animals under slavery. It is this very system of control that makes animal cruelty a “fact of life.” Like the Polish citizens who willingly participated in the oppression of Jews, the average American has no reason to step out of his or her comfort zone to challenge speciesism; he or she has not yet encountered the strong voice that requires respect and may prompt rethinking one's relation to animals. However, even if the general public ignores the message of ALF attacks, the people who experiment and trap and kill animals feel the impact of these direct actions. In the same way that the actions of the Jewish resistance fighters sent a message for Polish farmers who might turn Jews in to the Nazis, the ALF actions communicate a message of warning for researchers, contractors, and others who might be complicit with those who harm animals. In a secret interview with an ALF activist who helped liberate animals from the University of Arizona, No Compromise asked about the use of fire and vandalism during the liberation. The ALF activist replied:

. . . you make people who are considering experimenting on animals . . . think twice about going into that. I do think that, in a way, it is much the same thing as the abolitionists who fought against slavery going in and burning down the quarters or tearing down the auction block o[r] the wiping [sic] post—whatever was being used to subjugate the slaves. It's very much the same thing. I think it sends a message to researchers about how serious this is. Sometimes when you just take animals and do nothing else, perhaps that is not as strong a message.²⁰

The ALF causes significant financial and systemic cost for people who harm animals, and for these actions liberators should be commended.²¹

The legacy of the Jewish activists who fought against Nazis during the Third Reich can help us to understand how the communications of the ALF spread ideas through the communities of meaning. For the Jewish militants, the stakes were personal survival; in the case of the ALF, the stakes are the survival of animals in our world. The messages of these activists outline an ethical understanding and then punctuate those messages with action that reinscribes the lived nature of the subjects. Jews fighting back against their oppressors' forces every interaction to be rethought, as previously passive subjects become transformed into strong resisters. ALF activists engaging in direct action to free animals calls for a reevaluation of the role of animals and what the ramifications might be for those who harm them.

Exposing the Methods of Destruction

To discuss the Animal Liberation Front or the Holocaust resistance movements in terms of numbers of lives saved does not get at the vital importance of these agents of cultural transformation. Rather, we should examine these militants in terms of their strategies. These activists choose to apply pressure to particular industries and individuals, and we can get a more meaningful sense of the value of direct action by exploring how and where these activists strike.

The mental boundaries described by Adams and Langer are only part of the problem of systems of destruction. Along with these mental justifications of mindlessness comes a complicated system of industrial mechanisms designed to perpetuate oppression. These infrastructures are a fundamental support mechanism for the continued destruction of subjects whose lived nature has been obscured. Whereas the absent referent and mindlessness remove the essential nature of lived beings in order to enable violence, the bureaucratic infrastructure of an industrial society allows the remaining responsibility for violence to be spread among many people. The responsibility for suffering becomes obscured by the complex process of implementing mass slaughter.²²

That process of obscuring is vital to the reduction of living beings to objects upon whom atrocities can be heaped. In the case of the Holocaust, it was necessary to sustain a complex infrastructure that enabled each participant to disguise his or her responsibility. Patterson describes death camp efficiency as vital in checking the compassion of the killers. He argues that the high-speed efficiency and industrial technological structure were crucial “to minimize the chance of panic or resistance that will disrupt the process.”²³ In the case of animals, as Adams notes, it is essential that the acts of killing, enslaving, and torturing animals be well hidden from sight, so that the consumer only ever sees the finished “product.” For both systems of oppression, it is critical that the process of destruction be as compartmentalized as possible. The reason to obscure the face of suffering is as obvious as it is hidden—the vision of terrible actions can elicit sympathy and compassion, and often call for remedy.

For both Nazis and the animal oppression industries, it was essential that the general public never comprehend the vast system used to divert responsibility away from consumers and participants in the process of destruction. It is at this point that the ALF and the Holocaust resistance movements clash with this system. Their actions expose the mechanisms of oppression and not only make public the hidden secrets, but also strike at the points of weakness. It is this exposure of the clear system of power that enables change to occur. Michel Foucault argues that through exposing lines of power and control individuals can envision new ways of thought. The Animal Liberation Front risks imprisonment to bring the horrible images of research laboratories, slaughterhouses, and fur farms to the public, exposing the cruelty inherent in these industries. In the example of the Holocaust, resistance fighters made clear the systems of oppression that allowed the Nazis to hide their actions. By bombing train tracks and destroying records, their actions opened up the Nazi machine to scrutiny.

When we analyze this process, it is important to recognize that industrial capitalism was essential for the Holocaust and the wide-spread oppression of animals. This is not a claim of causality; I am certainly not arguing that capitalism created either of these catastrophes. Rather I am arguing that the creation of industrial capitalism was an essential function for the networks of power that enabled mechanized animal exploitation and the networks of railways, disbursement, and control of the Nazi order. Because Jews were shipped out of the ghet-to in carefully coordinated train journeys, their disappearances were hardly missed by non-Jews. Because fur farms exist far away from the luxury boutiques that sell their skins, the process of trapping, breeding, shipping, and killing is hidden from consumer sight.

In many ways, the actions of the ALF and Holocaust resistance fighters implicate not only these mechanisms of control, but the entire system of industrial capitalism. Their actions call into question the process that necessitates destruction. Especially when it comes to the ALF, we are beginning to see a larger criticism that exposes the destruction of animals as fundamental to the current order; thus the ALF calls to account the very nature of our current system.²⁴

In the following section we will examine the primary texts of several ALF and Holocaust resisters who applied direct action pressure to the networks of control and surveillance that made the gates of hell obvious for all to see.

Holocaust Resistance, The ALF, and Direct Action Against a System of Destruction

Werner describes two examples of sabotage in his book Fighting Back. Of the first occasion, he writes: “During the late summer of 1943, we burned and destroyed dozens of large estates which supplied or served as food storage depots for the Germans.”²⁵ Well aware of the dangerous ramifications of food supplies for Germans, these partisan armies of Polish Jews engaged in direct sabotage to slow the network of oppression. It was only the functioning of the well-oiled machine that enabled the genocide to continue, and enough pressure on the hinges of the machine could destroy its feasibility.

Later on in his book, Werner justifies their actions of sabotage. “Part of our sabotage work was aimed at wiping out all German/Polish outposts. We wanted to destroy their administrative records to diminish their ability to collect food quotas from the farmers, and in general to disrupt their control of the area.”²⁶ This quotation is remarkable in that the enemy is described as data. Militant activists are well aware that the Nazi mechanisms only survived so long as orders and files were maintained.

Similarly, Krakowski describes Polish/Jewish resistance groups desperately attacking train tracks south of Lublin in Poland. Anxious to destroy the mechanisms that were shipping Jews to their deaths all over the continent, these militants attempted to bomb and shatter train tracks. Realizing the essential nature of these transportation routes, the German government quickly dispatched Nazi troops to protect sections of the train tracks in these partisan-heavy areas.²⁷

In the case of the ALF, we see similar strategic attacks. The Western Wildlife Unit of the ALF describes a fierce action against the Oregon State University Experimental Fur Animal Research Station:

While one warrior busied themselves [sic] with removing breeding identification cards from the mink cages (to confuse the researchers as there was no other way to identify the animals), two others slipped through the still unlocked bathroom window into the main records building. Research photos, slides and documents were loaded into backpacks along with the vivisector phone books, address books and other material that would [alert] supporters and financiers to the station's dirty work. After this, every single file, research paper and archive in the station was spilled onto the floor and every available liquid poured onto them until a water line from the bathroom was broken that would flood the entire floor.²⁸

The attacks outlined seem strange without the context of an assault on the infrastructure of injustice. Why would activists destroy the files and labels on cages? Isn't the goal of the ALF to liberate animals? Of course it is, but beyond freeing individual animals the ALF activists in this action recognize that the damage they can do to the organized system of fur research is perhaps the most powerful blow they can strike in the service of animal liberation. These activists recognize that exposing the hidden structures that enable destruction to continue is the highest goal of their activism.

Consider the continued attacks not only on the farms and cages that hold animals, but also on the transportation mechanisms that bring the animals to slaughter. In an anonymous article in No Compromise, a member of an ALF cell describes the justification to turn toward strategic arson rather than just liberating animals, based on the notion that significant damage could slow an industry. Describing an attack on a veal processor near San Francisco, the activist wrote: “Gasoline was liberally spread throughout and a crude cigarette timer was used to ignite the building which suffered tens of thousands of dollars in damages. Before the year was out, a slaughter-house, livestock auction yard and a fur shop all went up in flames with-out any injuries.²⁹

When we recognize that not only individual acts of cruelty but the institutional means to harm animals is the focal point of ALF action, we can begin to reposition ALF tactics as strategic assaults on the infrastructure of oppression.³⁰

The application of force to these targets is only part of the situation; sabotage also has a symbolic and communicative function. Robin D.G. Kelley describes the sabotage tactics of African-Americans in his book Race Rebels, arguing that attacks on employers who are unfair to working-class African-Americans is a vital part of reclaiming public space and communal self-worth. He describes a series of examples from North Carolina in which African-Americans thwart factory mechanisms in order to slow down production capability and recapture personal time from their employers.³¹ Like the ALF and the Holocaust resistance fighters, these workers were well aware of the bureaucratic structures that had to be targets. Whether packing bins of tobacco more loosely to enable others to keep up, sabotaging a train that would take Jews to a death camp, or pulling the identifying labels from breeding cages, those who enact resistance are well aware of the weak points of industrial oppression.

Kelley's argument, which applies equally well to both ALF and Nazi resistance, is that sabotage has a vital and productive function in the world. It reaffirms the value of the individual participating, reframes the capitalist-oriented authority of the employer, and opens up the space for more collective affirmation.³² Solidarity among those who are oppressed is one of the strongest elements of resistance. Sabotage unifies the oppressed and outlines the parameters of a struggle against oppressors.

For both the ALF and the Holocaust resistance fighters, the very targets chosen suggest a realization that infrastructure is an enemy. The Jews facing death in Poland were aware of the dangers of seemingly innocuous objects like train tracks, and the ALF are aware that the loss of breeding files can damage a fur farm. The importance of the ALF is at least threefold: they set individual animals free, they inflict significant damage to institutions that harm animals, and they challenge the very structures that enable oppression.

Exposing Liberation

ALF literature often uses the Holocaust as a frame of reference. Open any ALF/direct action–oriented publication and you will find a metaphorical connection to the victims of the Holocaust who “broke open the gates of Auschwitz.” Consider the front page of the magazine Resistance by the Earth Liberation Front, where this well-known quotation appears:

If we are trespassing, so were the soldiers who broke down the gates of Hitler's death camps; if we are thieves, so were the members of the Underground Railroad who freed the slaves of the South; and if we are vandals, so were those who destroyed forever the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

This quotation is certainly not the only one of its kind that is popular within the direct action–oriented animal rights community. For years I wondered about this comparison. I felt faintly uncomfortable positioning the animal rights movement in the shadow of the Holocaust, because I view the Holocaust as the most significant evil moment in our history. Being ethnically Jewish, I felt a connection to the Holocaust as the ultimate evil, and those who sacrificed their lives to fight back against their oppressors I considered to be the bravest of heroes.

In October of 2002 I traveled to Krakow and was able see the death camps of Auschwitz. I walked through the gates labeled Arbeit Macht Frei and felt the palpable history of hundreds of thousands of lives that had been taken by a regime of evil. As I walked through the barracks uncovering the smallest historical data of the suffering, I was overcome by a great depression. By the time I walked into the remaining gas chamber I was simply overwhelmed—the tears flowed uncontrollably. After I saw Auschwitz, I went to see the Birkenau concentration camp that was created several miles away when Auschwitz became crowded with Jews.

Auschwitz is dedicated as a museum of the Nazi system of evil, with each barrack showcasing some horrible element of the plan of genocide. Birkenau was virtually unadorned. A few signs and a single labeled barrack were all that were available to instruct the visitor about what life was like in this death camp.

What I could see at Birkenau were the artifacts of a system of destruction that was massive in scale. I had never realized the size of the infrastructure that was needed to control, enslave, and exterminate that many people. There were hundreds of barracks covering square miles of ground fanning out from my gaze, with nothing but desolate wind between them. Long views of barracks juxtaposed against barbed wire were my only guides as I walked across the concentration camp.

At the far end of the camp were the remains of the gas chambers and incinerators. These gas chambers were far away from the public—with a wide zone of exclusion around these two death camps, citizens would never be exposed to the horrors of the camps unless they worked there or were entering to be killed. At this point I began to think about the geographical position of slaughterhouses in America. Kept far away from the public view, the institutions of slaughter in America are equally massive and hidden from sight.³³

Unlike Auschwitz, where the gas chambers seemed terrible simply for their historical meaning, these four gas chambers were overwhelmingly large. Each gas chamber, as big as a football field, had been destroyed and lay crumbling as monuments to the evil that somehow remained possible. It was at Birkenau that the inspiration for this essay emerged.³⁴ In the scale of destruction lay the understanding that enables us to tie these two struggles together. Killing of this scope requires that people who kill (and who are complicit in that killing) have a moral excuse to let it continue and that the industrial bureaucracy be so expansive as to obscure the specific acts of violence.

What the Nazis needed more than anything was a system to exterminate undesirables. They required large-scale destruction and a bureaucratic system that allowed each person to wash his or her hands of ethical responsibility. What they needed most was a populace willing to set aside ethics and compassion when given orders by someone in a position of authority. The six million Jews and tens of thousands of others who were exterminated stand as testament to their intent and their success. In the United States, billions of animals die each year in structures like death camps that are hidden from public view. Like the manufacturers of the Holocaust, animal killers need a justification to abandon caring for animals, and they need an industry that efficiently kills and keeps the blood from seeping into public consciousness.

In the face of despair and overwhelming oppression, I found a moment of inspiration in an exhibit on the wall of Auschwitz that chronicled the lives of women prisoners in the camp. Out of a desperate feeling of helplessness I started to read every single caption and exhibit. Almost at the end I came across Roza Robota, who had the dubious honor of being the last woman ever killed in Auschwitz.

The exhibit explained that she and several other conspirators had helped to smuggle explosives to Jewish resistance fighters in Birkenau several miles away. They had smuggled tea packet–sized packages of gunpowder to colleagues in Birkenau, risking their lives. These hundreds of packets of gunpowder enabled Jewish resistance fighters to blow up one of the gas chambers in Auschwitz and sabotage another in the last days of the war.

At this point, the Nazis were exterminating everyone they could and destroying as much evidence as possible. The sabotaging of two of the four gigantic gas chambers represented a vital spark of light against the darkness of death. I found in Roza Robota a certain amount of hope that even in the worst of situations resistance is possible. These women had sacrificed their lives to cripple a death machine, and they had succeeded.

The ALF activists who face incarceration in order to save animals use direct action to stop oppression. Their actions not only disrupt killing, but also challenge the two most vital mechanisms of speciesism: ethical distancing and the bureaucratic mechanisms that remove responsibility. Both the ALF and the Holocaust resistance fighters expose indifference and bureaucracy to the light of public scrutiny and challenge the systems of meaning that allow evil to triumph.

The Holocaust stands as a pattern of evil. Nazis created a process that allowed ordinary people to participate in and benefit from the systematic extermination of a group of people based on their race or ethnicity. In examining the response from militant Jewish resistance fighters, we can reframe the actions of the Animal Liberation Front. The ALF, like the Holocaust resistance fighters, acts to directly stop oppression, but their actions also call upon humans to examine their own ethical relationship with animals. The direct action liberations help to bring attention to the system of thought that excludes animals from that ethical relationship, and encourages a process of self-reflection about animal cruelty. In addition, the ALF exposes the lies of industry that obscure the suffering of animals. The documentation that emerges from ALF actions is invaluable in the struggle to bring animal rights to public consciousness, and the destruction of the bureaucracy that enables violence is vitally important. Perhaps more importantly, the ALF focuses attention not only on the animals who suffer, but also on the people who benefit from that suffering.

The ALF offers us all a call to conscience about animals in our society, it exposes institutions that profit from suffering, and it pressures those who would turn their face from a world of suffering. ALF actions follow in the footsteps of Roza Robota and the women of Auschwitz whose actions saved lives in the most evil of places. The ALF's continued willingness to articulate a world free of animal cruelty and to do what is necessary for the creation of that world furthers the cause of liberation everywhere.

Notes

1. “An Animal Liberation Primer” (ALF pamphlet on file with the author) defines members of the ALF as “activists who directly intervene to stop animal suffering at the risk of losing their own freedom while following ALF guidelines” (3).

2. For a good description of one Jewish resistance organization, ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization), see Simha Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, translated and edited by Barbara Harshav (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. viii: “[T]he organization consisted almost entirely of young men and women (the oldest were in their late twenties; most were between 18 and 21) who had virtually no weapons, no influence, no money, and no experience in warfare. All they had were a remarkable strength of will, tremendous reserves of intelligence and courage, and amazing talents for initiative and innovation” (viii). In this paper, I will use the examples put forward in several books of primary data by the resistance fighters themselves. Most of them are Jewish.

3. It is important to recognize that many Jews consider the Holocaust to be a unique event whose horror can never be compared to other events. There is significant debate about the danger in lessening the impact of the Holocaust by comparing it to any other suffering. This paper does not directly compare the suffering of animals to the suffering under the Holocaust. Instead, I argue that the processes that helped make the Holocaust possible continue in the continuation of speciesism and that the resistance movements to both of these horrors can benefit from a comparison. For those who are upset with the comparison of these two killing regimes, I would point you to Charles Patterson's book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), which carefully connects the methodology of destruction of both of these systems. It is important to point out, as Patterson does, that many Jews were made aware of animal suffering by their experience in the Holocaust. For many Jews, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Holocaust became the initial spark of consciousness about animal suffering.

4. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974).

5. Ellen Langer, Mindfulness (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1989). It is interesting that Langer is willing to engage in mindlessness in some areas, but reduce their significance in others. Consider the section of her book where she takes a niece to feed the ducks during the day and then finds the contradiction emerge when she orders duck for dinner. Langer quips that “Luckily we hadn't visited an entire farm before dinner” and then orders another animal for dinner (49). Langer seems unwilling to challenge her own mindlessness regarding her speciesism.

6. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum Books, 1990).

7. Patterson, p. 47.

8. Harold Werner, Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II, edited by Mark Werner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 110. It is important to remember that the active members of the Jewish resistance movement were by far in the minority. “Some of the Jews in the Ghetto, who couldn't imagine the evil intentions of the Germans, were steeped in delusions, one of which was that they had to fight the resistance movement and its allies. Other Jews said, ‘This too shall pass. There have been similar things in the history of our nation.’ Religious people put their faith in God. Some in the Ghetto were simple cowards, paralyzed with fear. Others were collaborators” (Rotem, p. 23).

9. Werner, p. 73.

10. Rotem, p. 34.

11. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a former Black Panther in New York City, described the danger of the Panthers as the danger of ideas. He argues that the Black Panthers were relatively few, but the idea of armed resistance of African-Americans was so powerful that the idea had to be quashed. “My point was that the Black Panther Party had to be destroyed because of the idea that it represented. Black assertiveness and Black self-defense, that this should be achieved by any means necessary, in fact by the same means, if necessary, that white people would employ to defend themselves. And the system couldn't tolerate that.” See his essay “War Within,” in Still Black Still Strong: Survivors of the US War Against Black Revolutionaries, edited by Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones and Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993), p. 26.

12. Charles Patterson describes a series of events that have stayed executioners' hands in his book Eternal Treblinka. He describes both slaughterhouse workers and Nazis whose killing was paused for a moment when the face of compassion shines through the system of oppression. In these small windows of solace, we can argue that the transformation of agents of evil is possible. The actions of the ALF and Holocaust resistance fighters can expose killers to the ethical face of the animals and people they are killing and possibly stay their hand (118–120).

13. Patterson, p. 199.

14. There are certainly activists who have put their lives at risk for a variety of social causes; I do not claim that the ALF are unique in this regard. Rather, the ALF are the first to put their lives at risk to agitate for the rights of animals. The level of commitment calls upon the audience to re-interpret their own value system in regards to animals. Some might argue that the public perception of the ALF is primarily negative. This claim is irrelevant to the argument I am making. I am arguing that the ALF's actions encourage a momentary pause or reflection. Because ALF activists are willing to destroy property, liberate animals, and steal records, the public perception will likely be negative. But along with that dislike of the tactics will be a moment of curious reflection where people wonder what might make a person do this kind of thing. Another good comparison might be John Brown, the American abolitionist who attacked Harpers Ferry military outpost to gain weapons in preparation for a large-scale slave revolt. Brown's actions were universally ridiculed, but the meaning of his actions reframed the conversation about slavery long before the issue was seriously addressed in the traditional political realm. The ALF may make new meaning about animals by perhaps moving the audience into a moment of reflection.

15. Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), p. 119.

16. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamieson, Cognitive Approach to Social Movements (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

17. Adrian Morrison, a prominent animal researcher, describes his reaction when his lab was destroyed in 1990: “I was shocked but not surprised . . . animal rightists had good reason to be angry with me so I knew I was vulnerable. . . .” See his “Personal Reflections on the ‘Animal Rights Phenomenon.’ ” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Winter 2001), p. 62. Morrison's public defense of Edward Taub (the primary researcher in the Silver Spring monkey experiments which were exposed by direct activists and publicized by PETA) and his willingness to defend animal experimentation made him a primary target (not to mention his own animal experimentation). The vital thing is that he was well aware of the risk he was taking. The ALF had successfully communicated what their reaction to his work and politics would be.

18. Perhaps the best example of this kind of campaigning is the Huntingdon Life Sciences campaign, which has put significant pressure (primarily using direct action) on investors of the infamous animal research laboratory. The actions of this campaign have been incredibly successful in getting industries to abandon Huntingdon Life Sciences when the pressure from animal rights activists has gotten to be too much.

19. Gina Lynn, “Direct Action: Time Tested . . . and Effective,” in No Compromise (March–April 1996), p. 4.

20. Carla McClain, “ALF: A Secret Interview With A Compassionate Commando,” in No Compromise, March–April 1996 p. 12.

21. Dave Foreman points out the potential of direct action to change the investments of those who might cause damage to the earth. He writes: “Some contractors nowadays refuse to bid on Forest Service road projects or timber sales in roadless areas because of the likelihood of damaged equipment and resulting cost overruns. Companies bidding on road construction for the Mount Graham Astronomical Observatory complex in Arizona doubled their bids because of fears of monkey wrenching and the need for round-the-clock security on site” (135).

22. Remember that people benefit from animal and human oppression. The Nazi regime used Jews as slave labor, and as testing subjects for medical experiments. Humans use animals as “beasts of burden” and as subjects for biomedical experiments. Both of these institutions have a concerted financial benefit in not questioning these systems.

23. Patterson, p. 110.

24. For more on this, see “Memories of Freedom,” a pamphlet by the Western Wildlife Unit of the ALF, available at http://www.cala-online.org/Academic/mof_us2.html, in which the authors describe the particular meaning of the graffiti left at the UC-Davis. “The circle ‘A’ anarchy symbol was affixed to the ‘A’ of the ALF's signature. To those who bothered to look beneath the carefully controlled media coverage of ALF actions this was a sign that the ALF was no longer simply just an ‘animal’ group but one that also was opposed to the entire system which perpetuated animal abuse” (4). This argument can be made for Jewish Holocaust resistance units—many of the first to be persecuted were outspoken activists, anarchists, and communists. In fact, the original role of Auschwitz was to house political prisoners; only later was it used as a death camp. When it was found to be insufficient for the job, Birkenau was built.

25. Werner, p. 161.

26. Werner, p. 164.

27. Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944, translated by Orah Blaustein (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers Inc., 1984), p. 92. Krakowski also describes partisan groups in Zelechow who, in the summer of 1943, focused their sabotage actions on bridges and railway lines, including destroying a train bound for Auschwitz (128).

28. Western Wildlife Unit, p. 22.

29. Anonymous, “Inside an ALF Cell,” in No Compromise magazine, Summer 1999, p.

30. This approach can certainly be applied to the Earth Liberation Front as well. See “A History of the ELF” in Resistance: Journal of Grassroots Direct Action, 2000, p. 5. The newspaper outlined a series of ELF attacks and included a quote from a biotech researcher who claimed to have “lost basically my entire professional life. I've lost every paper I've ever wrote that analyzed the benefits and risks of this technology” (5).

31. Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

32. This notion of self-affirmation can be seen in the grimmest of uprisings, the resistance in the death camps during the Holocaust. Krakowski describes the terrible conditions and the inspiring yet overwhelmed acts of rebellion that emerged in the concentration camps in The War of the Doomed.

33. I am not the only person to have this realization. Charles Patterson describes artist Judy Chicago's similar experience in Eternal Treblinka (48–50).

34. Birkenau housed up to 100,000 inmates and at the height of the Holocaust exterminated 25,000 people in a single day.

Also Consulted

Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and its Discontents. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Coronado, Rod. “Strategic Nonviolence in Perspective.” No Compromise (Winter 1998–9): 12–13.

Finsen, Lawrence and Susan Finsen. The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect. New York: Twaine Publishers, 1994.

Foreman, Dave and Bill Haywood. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Chico California: Abbzug Press, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

——. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Guither, Harold D. Animal Rights: History and Scope of a Radical Social Movement. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois State University Press, 1998.

Jasper, James M. and Dorothy Nelkin. The Animal Rights Crusade: The Growth of a Moral Protest. New York: The Free Press, 1992.

Smith, Paul. Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North. London: Verso Publishing, 1997.

Wicklund, Freeman. Strategic Nonviolence for Animal Liberation. Minneapolis: Animal Liberation League. www.exploreveg.org/help/activist/snv.

Abolition, Liberation, Freedom. Coming to a Fur Farm Near You

GARY YOUROFSKY

For weeks after the events of 9/11, I was transfixed by the news media. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Brian Williams. Report after report. Image after image. The collision. The fireball. The smoke. The collapse. The rubble. The debris. Ground zero. The panic. The response.

As a national lecturer on animal rights, and one of the country's most outspoken animal liberationists, I believe I speak for the entire movement in saying that animal rights activists have the utmost empathy for every innocent victim of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. We mourn human tragedy as much as animal tragedy. The notion that animal rights activists are somehow anti-human is untrue. Rather, we choose to be activists for other species because billions of innocent animals are murdered each year, without even a twinge of guilt. We are vegans because we realize that violence and hatred must be destroyed at the root, in our everyday habits of consumption. We embrace Alice Walker's words of wisdom: “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.”

Missed Opportunities

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the outpouring of love, empathy, compassion, and community inspired faith in humanity. The world was condemning evil and the taking of innocent lives. As we united to find the perpetrators, I wondered if we would realize that murdering any living being was wrong. I hoped that, by a collective awakening to compassion, the terror that humans inflict upon innocent animals for food, clothing, sport, entertainment, and research would end or at least abate.

In a moment of optimistic speculation, I pondered whether the camouflaged hunters—lurking on American soil, skulking in the distance with guns and bows, waiting to terrorize and kill more than 200 million innocent animals annually—might throw their weapons to the ground.

Would the animal researchers who terrorize 50 million dogs, cats, primates, and mice annually in vivisection procedures have a revelation? The March of Dimes experimenters who sew shut the eyes of kittens and ferrets to see if blindness affects their brains would surely stop their barbaric acts of terrorism. The researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center—who electro-ejaculate primates in order to obtain sperm for their breeding colonies—would make the connection now. Surely, the animal research community was going to be arrested and charged with acts of terrorism.

Would fur farmers and trappers be sent to prison for breaking the necks of mink, anally electrocuting foxes, genitally electrocuting chinchillas and catching wild animals in steel jaw leghold traps?

Would humankind realize that animals do not want to be our food, clothing, entertainment, and research specimens? Would we finally hear and accept the words of British Bishop William Inge—“If animals ever formulated an organized religion, the devil would be depicted in human form”—and would we finally seek to change that image? Would Gandhi's immortal words of peace—“The life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human”—be recited at every school across America?

No. Nothing changed in human attitudes toward fellow animal species. The routine violence of human custom was swept even further under the rug. Hypocritically, deceitfully, people talked of revolting against evil, and it sickened me.

It seems, to our shame, that human hatred for nonhumans is so vicious, bitter and entrenched that millions of wishes for peace could not eradicate it. When reporters, civilians and government officials vowed to “destroy the evil,” they were only referring to the evil people who disrupt the rest of society in the performance of its own evil deeds.

Each human carnivore is responsible for the death and dismemberment of more than 3,000 animals throughout his or her lifetime. Annually, in the US alone, over 10 billion cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals live in concentration camps. Within the first year of their pathetic lives, they're sent to killing houses where knife-wielding terrorists slit their throats, drain their blood and dismember their bodies, all too often while the animals are still conscious and aware. Sadly, I realized that any lesson learned in the wake of 9/11 was not going to change that.

Path to Liberation

If people truly want to end terrorism, then they should discard animal flesh from refrigerators, toss bows and bullets into the trash, insist that universities close down their vivisection laboratories, demand that department stores close their fur salons, drop animal acts from circuses, abolish the rodeo once and for all, and support the courageous ALF activists who liberate animals from places of terror. People who yearn for a compassionate world should have nothing but praise for these amazing altruists. Otherwise, any talk of peace, civilization and justice will only be hypocritical rhetoric.

Remember, outlawing an act does not make that act morally wrong. And legal avenues are not necessarily the best ones for facilitating substantive change. Laws have always been broken by freethinking, radical individuals who realize that it is impossible to make progressive changes within a corrupt, discriminatory system.

Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau and Jesus, to name a few, were routine, radical lawbreakers who went to jail for disobeying unjust laws. We see them as heroes today, but in their time they were considered by many to be villains and radicals. The word “radical” has a negative connotation in society today; however, it is simply the Latin word meaning “root,” and what radicals do is to bypass pseudo-solutions and get to the root of a problem. Everyone should realize that all social justice activists were considered radical in their time. It is only after social justice activists die and society begins to evolve and comprehend their actions that the “radical” is placed on a pedestal and embraced.

Without question, ALF liberations are akin to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, which assisted in the liberation of blacks from white slave-owners. One must understand that ALF raids have two goals: giving enslaved animals a chance at freedom and causing major economic damage. As a movement, we must let go of the fantasy that those directly involved in torturing and murdering animals, and profiting handsomely from it, will listen to reason, common sense, and moral truth. The vast majority will not. If they did, there wouldn't be an animal liberation movement, because they would have understood the cruelty of their ways by now and adopted a vegan lifestyle.

I am aware that some activists like Howard Lyman and Don Barnes were former abusers of animals who had epiphanies and changed. But in the vast majority of cases, it is just a fantasy to believe that direct abusers collectively will change. What those involved in animal exploitation will listen to, however, is damage to their profits and livelihood. Only if we make their blood businesses unprofitable will they cease the violence against the animal kingdom.

Remember, since the inception of the animal liberation movement, no human has ever been injured or killed during a liberation or an act of economic sabotage. We need to stop accepting the lies propagated by the media and the corporations who murder animals for a living. ALF activists are not terrorists; those who abuse animals for a living are. ALF activists are not criminals; those who enslave, torture, mutilate, dismember, and murder animals for a living are. Activists who liberate animals should not go to prison; animal exploiters should. It should never be viewed as a crime to try to forcibly stop hatred and discrimination and terrorism; it is an act of compassion and courage.

All animals are simply disenfranchised nations in search of the one thing that every sentient being demands: FREEDOM. They are not property. They are not objects. And they are not commodities. Humans place an inordinate amount of value on property such as buildings and machines. But the earth and its inhabitants do not belong to humans, and the property of animal killers should never be placed ahead of an animal's inherent right to be free.

Let Them Read Lies

I believe one main reason the ALF does not yet have broad public support is the lies spewed by animal exploiters and the distortions reported and perpetuated by the mass media. Sadly, animal killers and their supporters will go to any lengths to deceive and mislead the public into believing that they, and not the animals, are the victims. Having inside knowledge of what animal liberation entails, let me give an example of how the propaganda machines work.

On April 31, 1997, I was part of a mink liberation effort at the Eberts Fur Farm in Blenheim, Ontario. We released 1,542 mink from their cages but were apprehended shortly thereafter. The media reported four lies that are typically issued by the fur industry after liberations: (1) the mink froze to death after freedom; (2) the mink starved to death overnight after freedom; (3) the mink suffered from stress and pneumonia after freedom; (4) the mink were run over by cars on rural roads at three in the morning after freedom.

Let's look at the facts. (1) Mink are clothed in natural fur coats that make it impossible for them to freeze to death; also note that the Ontario raid took place not in the dead of winter, but in April. (2) It takes several weeks for mink to starve to death. It cannot happen overnight. In fact, authorities involved in the Ontario mink liberation stated that the liberated mink raided a nearby chicken farm for food, incontrovertibly exposing the starvation lie. As for the chickens, my heart goes out to them. But my enmity is still enflamed by the almost 300 million Americans who kill and eat billions of chickens each year to satisfy their meat addictions. If humans didn't enslave chickens, mink wouldn't raid chicken farms. If humans didn't enslave mink, the ALF wouldn't raid mink farms.

On rare occasions, some people claim that mink attack companion dogs or cats; however, I have never seen proof of this happening. Rather, I believe it is another ploy to divert attention from the real victims: the mink. Even if the mink did attack a dog or a cat, dogs do from time to time attack cats, cats attack birds, and so on. Neither the domestication of companion animals nor the farming of wild animals has changed this fact.

It should be noted that in the late 1990s after the Frye Fur Farm in Illinois was raided—and thousands of mink were given a chance to escape—the fur industry issued a press release professing the Fryes' love and affection for their mink. The release stated that the Fryes routinely picked up and played with the mink. Yet, across the waters in England that same year, a liberation of 10,000 mink took place. That release stated that everyone should hide their dogs and cats and children, because the mink were vicious animals who would attack and eat everything in sight. Isn't it remarkable that Illinois mink are sweet and cuddly, yet English mink are rapacious and vicious?

The fur industry's public relations people are masters of doubles-peak, which they use to hide their atrocities from public view. It is obvious that the fur industry can't even get their lies straight. And that's because one lie leads to another.

(3) Mink do not spontaneously contract pneumonia or stress when they are not in cages. Being kept in a cage for your entire life causes stress and neurosis. Freedom is the cure for caged-induced stress and neurosis. (4) There are no cars on rural roads at three in the morning except for those of fur farmers and police who are trying to recapture the liberated mink. If they backed off and let the mink go, mink–car casualties would be rare.

The fur industry knows that if people were aware of the five methods they use to kill mink, foxes and chinchillas, virtually no one would buy a fur coat. The anal electrocutions, genital electrocutions, gassings, neck breakings and toxic chemical injections are purely evil. So the fur industry's spin doctors have devised some glittering propaganda in order to divert attention from the heinous methods of killing, and the prejudiced media are all too happy to report them uncritically. The industry and media conspire in an attempt to make animal liberations appear foolish and describe the actions as creating more harm than good.

Any wildlife biologist or veterinarian who is not associated with the fur industry and does not own a fur coat will admit that mink and foxes are wild animals who will undoubtedly survive after being set free. They also will admit that no amount of genetic breeding can take away animals' innate, instinctive survival mechanisms. And let me be perfectly clear: Freedom does not cause death. Hunters, meat eaters, fur wearers, leather lovers, and animal experimenters cause death.

According to the fur industry, 400 mink instantly died after my Easter Sunday raid. Yet, on my request, the lawyers asked them to provide proof of the purported 400 dead mink. They were asked to do so by either bringing in photos, dead bodies or testifying under oath. They declined all offers.

Not surprisingly, the death toll quickly descended from 400 to 300 to 200 to 100 to 12. Subsequently, during my three-day trial, when I was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison, the furriers brought in photographs of two dead mink who had allegedly died the night of the raid.

Now, I did not believe in the authenticity of the photos, but for argument's sake, let's say that two mink were run over by the cars of the fur farmers who were trying to recapture the freed mink. Those two deaths are unfortunate. But every mink in the concentration camp was going to die. Opening the cages was the only chance any of them had. The act was justified.

The job of an ALF activist is not to guarantee safety and freedom, but to give incarcerated animals an opportunity to live in freedom. Unfortunately, 1,000 mink were recaptured because they never found the holes in the fence that would have allowed them to make it across the street to the fields on the other side. (According to some authorities who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the official numbers of the Ontario raid were 1,542 released, 1,000 recaptured, 540 escaped and two dead.) However, of the 1,000 recaptured mink who never made it off the grounds through the cut fence-holes, the best news was that 70 to 80 percent of the pregnant ones miscarried their fetuses. The animal rights community does not want animals bred into enslavement. A miscarriage is infinitely more humane than a lifetime of imprisonment, horror, and eventual murder.

It's truly disheartening when the media and much of society get so upset when enslaved, tortured and soon-to-be-murdered animals are liberated. Yet these same individuals don't get upset when enslaved, tortured, and soon-to-be-murdered animals—who spend their pathetic lives inhaling the fumes of their own excrement—are gassed, anally electrocuted, genitally electrocuted or injected with toxins, or have their necks broken manually. In reporting on liberation stories, journalists rely on the words of the police, who are experts at manipulation, and furriers, who collectively murder 40 million animals a year for profit. If reporters would think rationally instead of trying to fit into the sleazy world of media hype, they could actually produce a brilliant story on ALF humanitarians and the current paradoxes in our society.

People who put their lives on the line for a cause should be commended, not condemned. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once stated, “There are some things so dear—some things so precious—some things so eternally true—that they are worth dying for. And if a person has not discovered something that he or she is willing to die for—then that person isn't fit to live.”

I wholeheartedly concur!

The Aftermath

For my random act of kindness and compassion on behalf of the tortured and doomed mink, I spent 77 days in prison. (Hilma Ruby, my lone, upstanding compatriot out of the five who were accused, spent 60 days in prison.) Canadian Judge A. Cusinato sentenced me to six months in the Elgin Middlesex Detention Center in London, Ontario. A deportation parole was issued, though, and I returned to Michigan after serving 77 days at the maximum-security lockup.

Before being carted off to prison, I was able to address the judge:

I stand before this court without trepidation and without timidity because the truth cannot be suppressed today and the truth will not be compromised.

Mohandas Gandhi, one of the most benevolent people to ever grace this earth, once said, “Even if you are only one person the truth is still the truth.”

The dilemma we face today is whether this court chooses to acknowledge the truth. The following statement is for everyone's edification.

One day every enslaved animal will obtain their freedom and the animal rights movement will succeed because Gandhi also proclaimed, “All throughout history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants and at times they have seemed invincible, but in the end they always fall. Always!”

The true devoted humanitarians who are working towards the magnanimous goal of achieving freedom for animals cannot be stopped by unjust laws.

As long as humans are placed on a pedestal above nonhumans, injustice to animals will fester, because without universal equality, one type of equality will always create another type of inequality. There will be no compromise here today because the truth cannot be compromised.

My presence in this courtroom today is paradoxical. I ask this court: If it is not a crime to torture, enslave and murder animals, then how can it be a crime to free tortured, enslaved and soon-to-be-murdered animals?

Humankind must climb out of its abyss of callousness, apathy, and greed. Enslaving and killing animals for human satisfaction can never be justified. And the fur industry must understand that the millions of manual neck-breakings, anal and genital electrocutions, mass gassings, drownings, and toxic chemical injections can never be justified.

The snaring of millions of free-roaming animals in steel jaw leghold traps, where they die slow, horrific deaths, is unjustifiable as well.

There will be no compromise, for the truth cannot be compromised. The schism that this court has created among the five co-accused has been sealed.

Now that I have been convicted, through my volition and in a symbolic protest of the unjust conditions that animals endure, a hunger strike will begin tomorrow at 7:30 A.M.

For every mink who ever languished in a tiny cage and was savagely murdered at the Eberts Fur Farm, I will go hungry. And for the 40 million other animals worldwide who have the skin ripped off their backs in a disgusting display of barbarity, in the name of vanity, I will go hungry.

And if this court expects me to experience an apostasy, meaning an abandoning of my beliefs, it is sadly mistaken. In April of '97, when I was incarcerated for 10 days in a Chatham jail, I briefly experienced, vicariously, what a caged animal goes through. And, thanks to that 10-day bail hearing, my empathy for every mistreated animal intensified.

Whatever I go through during my incarceration and hunger strike will be nothing compared to the everlasting torture that innocent animals endure on a daily basis.

And if this court is alarmed by my honesty, let me close with a quote from slave abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison: “I will be as harsh as the truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead. My influence shall be felt in coming years, not perniciously but beneficially, not as a curse but as a blessing, and posterity will bear testimony that I was right.”

There will be no compromise here today because the truth cannot be compromised.

Mothers with Monkeywrenches: Feminist Imperatives and the ALF

PATTRICE JONES

Its necessity is its excuse for existence.—Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage, 1916¹

I

The black cat glances back before springing ahead. It was she who inspired the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the Boston Tea Party. She gives breath to the Shakers and Quakers and Sufis who even now weave their bodies in dances of defiance. She sat down with Rosa Parks and stood shoulder to shoulder with Wobblies on wildcat strikes. The tunnels of the Underground Railroad still echo her name.²

Call her Krazy, but she knows that direct action brings satisfaction. Call her Mehitabel because she is always hopeful, toujours gai, despite the horrors she confronts every day. Call her Felix because she's never without her bag of tricks.³

Today the black cat rides on the backs of the women and men who sabotage animal research labs, delivering very real kittens from death. She graces the shoulders of tree huggers, road blockers, and the blackclad “night gardeners” who uproot test plots of genetically modified monstrosities.⁴

Along with the sabot and the monkeywrench, the black cat has long been a symbol of direct action. Direct action is often misused as a synonym for civil disobedience or flamboyant protest. But, in fact, mass arrests and dramatic street theatre may or may not add up to direct action, depending on the context. Direct action includes only activist tactics that, like boycotts and sabotage, are intended to have an immediate impact on a problem or its causes. In contrast, indirect action aims for future change through more circuitous routes, such as education, legislation, and symbolic demonstrations of opinion. Actions may include both direct and indirect elements. Ideally, direct action will illustrate or illuminate the problem at the same time as it interferes with its causes or effects. The very best direct action contributes to a long-term strategy for future change even as it offers tangible results in the here and now.

Direct action is best understood by example. People who have integrated segregated lunch counters, put their bodies in the paths of troop transport trains, distributed illegal clean needles or birth control devices, boycotted chocolate or Coca-Cola, staged rent strikes, or built “tent cities” for the homeless have all taken direct action against one or another form of oppression. Direct action for animals is similarly diverse. People who interfere with hunts, deface fur coats or egg cartons, stage open or covert rescues, provide sanctuary to escaped and rescued animals, block the entrances of slaughterhouses, destroy the laboratory equipment of vivisectors, or simply stop buying animal products all immediately impact the lives of actual animals.

Specific examples may help to clarify the distinction between direct and indirect action. When the Berrigan brothers destroyed draft records during the Vietnam War, that was direct action, because they went straight to a target and the destruction of the records actually impeded the conduct of the draft. More recently, when massive crowds protested the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq by marching through the empty streets of the District of Columbia, that was indirect action aimed at changing the hearts and minds of citizens in the hopes that they would, in turn, influence or replace their elected officials.⁵

Symbolic demonstrations can be designed to be direct action as well. When the Field of Dreams Hunting Club went out in a huge yellow rubber ducky, shooting into the air in order to scare the birds away from the real hunters, they took both direct and symbolic action because they saved bird lives while mocking hunters. In contrast, trying to pass legislation to ban certain types of hunting is indirect action, since there are very many steps between the activists, who may or may not succeed in convincing enough legislators, and the wildlife officials, who may or may not effectively enforce any new regulations.

Direct action for animals may be legal or illegal, overt or covert, sardonic or sober. The one thing all forms of direct action have in common is that they without doubt relieve the suffering of animals or obstruct the activities that cause that suffering. This is in contrast to the more speculative nature of indirect action, wherein success depends on both an accurate theory of social change and an effective implementation of that theory. Harriet Tubman may well have had a theory of social change concerning how her actions might lead to abolition but did not need such a theory to know that leading specific slaves to freedom would result in liberation for them. In contrast, when Sojourner Truth made abolitionist speeches, she was working according to the theory that rhetoric can change people's minds, which in turn can change their behavior. Tubman's actions were certain to bring the desired results as long as she didn't get caught. In contrast, success for Truth depended upon both the accuracy of her theories about relationship between beliefs and behavior and the effective enactment of her theories about rhetoric.

In direct action, one often risks physical injury or loss of freedom; in indirect action, one wagers time and energy on strategies that may or may not bear fruit. Thus, direct action tends to require more courage while indirect action tends to require more faith. Both require skill and dedication. Neither is entirely effective without the other. Analysis of other social movements in history suggests that our best bet will be a strategy that includes a diversity of direct action tactics in coordination with a diversity of other types of tactics.

The black cat of direct action is usually presumed to be female, perhaps because of the association with witchcraft and the left-handed, or feminine, nature of transgressive activity. The black cat usually symbolizes the most secret and subversive forms of direct action, such as those utilized by the ALF. The kitten in the laboratory is the captured kin of the black cat. It is her ongoing and inescapable pain that makes direct action against vivisection necessary. We must remember that kitten, and the cow crying for her calf, and the hen driven mad by the battery cage, whenever we assess the allegedly extreme tactics used by the ALF to free animals and interfere with the industries that abuse them.

II

Like the black cat, feminism doesn't ask whether ALF actions adhere to the law or conform to abstract philosophical principles. Like the black cat, feminism asks: Do ALF actions contribute to the abolition or relief of animal suffering?

Why should we care what feminism asks of the ALF? Because animal liberation is a feminist project. Speciesism and sexism are so closely related that one might say that they are the same thing under different guises. Women and animals, along with land and children, have historically been seen as the property of male heads of households. Patriarchy (male control of political and family life) and pastoralism (animal herding as a way of life) appeared on the historical stage together and cannot be separated, because they are justified and perpetuated by the same ideologies and practices.⁶

Both women and animals are seen as less rational and more constrained by biology than men. Both suffer by being reduced to their bodies or, worse, their body parts. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex: “Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulations: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female—this word is sufficient to define her. In the mouth of the man the epithet female has the sound of an insult.”⁷

The word animal also has the sound of an insult. Women are derided as “fat cows” and condemned for “cattiness.” Meanwhile, as Karen Davis has pointed out, even people who claim to venerate “wild and free” animals display only contempt for the farmed animals “whose lives appear too slavishly, too boringly, too stupidly female.”⁸ Tactics such as objectification, ridicule, and control of reproduction have been and continue to be used to oppress and exploit both women and animals.

This can be seen more easily by looking at specific issues generally assumed to be within the sphere of either feminism or animal liberation. . . .

Milk is a feminist issue. Milk may be defined as the exploitation of the reproductive capacities of the cow in order to produce profits for the dairy industry. Cows are forcibly and repeatedly impregnated so that their bodies will produce the milk intended to sustain their calves. People then steal both the milk and the calves. The cows suffer painful physical ailments, such as mastitis, as well as the emotional distress of having their children and their own freedom torn away from them. Meanwhile, milk products are responsible for an unhealthy acceleration in the onset of menses in girls and are also correlated with breast cancer in women. Thus the mammary glands of cows are exploited in order to produce a product that harms the mammary glands of women.

Rape is an animal issue. One out of every three women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime—one in four before the age of 18. Experts agree that rape is about power, not sex. Rape puts into action the idea that women and children are objects that can be used for pleasure without regard for their own wishes or subjective experiences. The same attitude underlies a host of abusive practices toward animals, ranging from circuses to factory farming. Animals are raped too, sometimes for the pleasure of the male human rapist (as in so-called “bestiality”) but more often to control their reproduction so that corporations can have the pleasure of profits (as when bulls are electro-ejaculated and cows forcibly impregnated on what dairy farmers sometimes call “rape racks”).

Cockfighting is a feminist issue. Sex role stereotypes hurt both human and nonhuman animals. In cockfighting, the natural behavior of roosters is perverted in order to force them to act out human ideas about masculinity. The birds are traumatized and then deliberately placed in harm's way so that their handlers can feel like big men. They die in stylized spectacles of masculinity that have nothing to do with natural bird behavior and everything to do with human ideas about gender. Meanwhile, human boys are also traumatized in order to make them conform to cultural ideas of masculinity. Those who do not distort themselves into stereotypes of “masculinity” may find themselves “gay bashed” to death.

Domestic violence is an animal issue. Domestic violence is one way that men maintain control of the women, children, and animals in their households. The World Health Organization has identified domestic violence against women as a global public health emergency of the highest order. Here in the United States, partner violence is the number one reason women visit the emergency room, and at least two out of every 10 pregnant women are beaten by their male partners. Very often, domestic violence includes abuse of companion animals as a way to frighten, traumatize, or control women. Many women remain in dangerous households because battered women's shelters do not accept animals and they are afraid of what will happen to their animal companions if they leave them alone with the abuser. No one knows how many companion animals have been killed by domestic abusers or how many women are dead because they stayed to protect a companion animal.

And the list goes on and on.⁹ Eggs, sex tourism, Premarin, lack of many legal rights enjoyed by adult males—all of these and other problems have both sexist and speciesist components.¹⁰ This is why so many of us insist that neither women nor animals can truly be free until both speciesism and sexism are abolished.

The ALF seeks the abolition of animal enslavement and exploitation. Hence it is legitimate to ask whether it is consistent with feminist theory and practice. That's not so easy to do, because there are so many varieties of feminism, each of which is a matter of ongoing debate. Below, I examine the ALF from the perspectives of ecofeminism, anarcha~feminism, radical feminism, and feminist ethics as I understand them. Some may disagree with my demarcations or descriptions of these feminisms, but I trust that no one will fail to agree that all of the ideas and principles I discuss fall somewhere within feminism.

ALF and Ecofeminism

The world is round. Everything that happens on it happens in it. Mystics have intuited it and scientists have proved it: everything is connected to everything else. That means that the old anarchist slogan—“no one is free while others are oppressed”—is literally true.

Ecofeminism understands that the exploitation of ecosystems, animals, and women is connected and that the solution to these problems resides in the resituation of people within, rather than outside or above, the web of life. From tree huggers in India to tree sitters in the US, from oil refinery occupiers in Nigeria to road blockers in the UK, ecofeminists express their kinship with people, plants, and animals by using their own bodies to block the bulldozers and chainsaws coming to kill their relatives.¹¹

Abstraction is the antithesis of ecofeminism, which is all about embeddedness, embodiment, and embrace. “Theoretical ecofeminism” is a contradiction in terms. This does not mean that theory is useless, only that it is impossible to be an ecofeminist only in theory—one can only be an ecofeminist in practice. The best ecofeminist theory arises from and interacts with practical experience.¹²

Ecofeminist principles must be lived to be meaningful. Thus, just as the Declaration of Independence asserts the right and the duty to rebel against illegitimate authority, the credo of ecofeminism might be said to mandate sabotage and other forms of direct action.

The ALF is also all about action. Anyone who liberates animals and/or interferes with animal abusers in accordance with the ALF principle of nonviolence can consider herself a member. Absent such action, one cannot claim membership in the ALF, no matter how pretty one's political opinions or how earnest one's intentions.

Thus, the ALF is the antithesis of an abstraction. It coincides precisely with a group of people engaged in the difficult and dangerous work of actually liberating animals. In this existentialism, the ALF is entirely consistent with ecofeminism.

Being based in an awareness of the intrinsic and practical value of biodiversity, ecofeminists understand that both beauty and survival require a balance of diverse elements. Scattered everywhere like seeds, flowering individually within agreed-upon parameters, ALF “cells” are diverse in comparison with each other while also offering a necessary balance to the more conservative aims and tactics of other animal activists.

Deeply rooted in natural reality, as well as analysis and spirituality, ecofeminism agrees with abolitionist and suffragist Frederick Douglass that it's not possible to have “rain without thunder” or “the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” ALFers are always ready to “bring the thunder,” consequently facing not only the risk of arrest but also the hostility of allies who do not understand the role of the ALF in the natural order of the animal liberation movement. Ecofeminists do, or at least ought to, recognize the ALF as an agent of change that may, in retrospect, prove to have been as vital as carbon dioxide to photosynthesis.

ALF and Anarcha~Feminism

Just as the ALF is often viewed with annoyance by both mainstream animal advocates and the left, anarcha~feminism has been angering male anarchists and mainstream feminists since the early 1970s. Anarcha~feminists insist on actually putting into practice the principles that spring from feminist and anarchist analyses of the dynamics of oppression. Thus, anarcha~feminists believe that liberation movements and organizations must be non-hierarchical and unselfish in order to overturn an oppressive social order that is based on private property and an algebra of hierarchical dualisms (e.g., men over women, people over animals, culture over nature, etc.).

The ALF is non-hierarchical and unselfish. No one runs the ALF, and no one who is truly ALF tries to take credit for it. Unselfish action intended to undermine the people-over-animals paradigm is its reason for its existence.

Most anarcha~feminists do their work in other movements, and few bother to explicitly identify themselves as such. Nonetheless, anarcha~feminist principles have been elaborated by women working with-in anarcha~feminist collectives. Peggy Kornegger notes that anarcha~feminists work to dissolve power rather than to seize it, value both collectivity and individuality, and favor both spontaneous and organized action.¹³

Anarcha~feminists believe, as one manifesto put it, that “the world obviously cannot survive many more decades of rule by gangs of armed males calling themselves governments.” Thus, anarcha~feminists seek to destabilize and replace, rather than join and reform, governments. The ALF is anarchistic in both aims and means. The goal is abolition of illegitimate authority. Actions are aimed at undoing, rather than revising, power over animals. ALF activists take matters into their own hands, rather than waiting for governments to get around to liberating the animals.

Anarcha~feminists believe in individuality within collectivity, valuing both the creativity of the individual and the power of the group. Similarly, anarcha~feminists value spontaneity within the context of a set strategy. In its cell structure, the ALF embodies the principle of individuality within collectivity. Individual cells are free to be as creative as they please within the guidelines of the limits set by the minimal ALF principles.

Thus, the ALF appears to be consistent with both ecofeminism and anarcha~feminism. That is not surprising, since it also turns out to be consistent with radical feminism in general.

ALF and Radical Feminism

Radical feminists and radical lesbian feminists of the 1960s and 1970s took direct and often flamboyant action concerning many of the problems that have since been addressed more moderately by main-stream feminists. It was radical feminists who first established safe houses for battered women and brought previously unspeakable topics like rape and child sexual abuse into the public discourse. Radical feminist activism persists to this day, but the dominant tone of the feminist movement is now determined by quieter and less troublesome women.

Radical feminism aims to identify and undermine the very roots of sexism, understanding that the original subjugation of women under patriarchy has served as the template for all subsequent intra-species oppression. Thus, radical feminists also do the intellectual, cultural, and educational work of undoing the often unconscious categorical thoughts that pattern our perceptions about sex and gender.

Any investigation into the roots of sexism has to go back to the origins of patriarchy, which turn out to be entirely entangled with the emergence of pastoralism. Again and again, enslavement and exploitation of women and animals appear together in the historical record, and it is impossible to say whether one preceded the other or they arose contemporaneously.¹⁴ Thus, the radical feminist project of exposing and uprooting the sources of sexism will necessarily require uncovering and dislocating the roots of speciesism.

The distinction between radical and mainstream feminists is not unlike that of animal liberationists and animal welfarists and may best be understood by example. Radical feminists talk about women's liberation rather than women's rights. Seeing the police as the muscular arm of the patriarchal state, the radical feminist works to directly protect and empower girls and women rather than asking for more police protection against rape and domestic violence. Radical feminists write the names of date-rapists on bathroom walls and subvert the billboards of companies that exploit women's bodies for profit. They shout and stomp and don't think its a crime to feel and express anger. They have a history of physically protecting women from batterers and rapists just as ALFers protect animals from farmers and vivisectors. They do not implore or compromise. They set limits, impose consequences, and do whatever they can to make the bad behavior stop immediately. You probably want a mainstream feminist to argue for you in court or Congress, when what you need is credibility and persuasive ability. But you hope that a radical feminist will be around when you need action because the fundamentalists are menacing your picket line or the cops are banging on your head.

Who do you hope will be around if you are ever confined in a cage or about to be forcibly impregnated?

Both animal liberationists and radical feminists take what are seen as extreme positions on fundamental questions and are often willing to use what are seen as extreme means to achieve their aims. Quiet as it's kept, many of the so-called Suffragettes were radical rock throwers and fire starters who ended up in prison—where they more often than not asked for vegetarian meals. Like many radical lesbian feminists of the 1970s, many of the most radical women's advocates in Edwardian England found that their feminism led them naturally to vegetarianism.¹⁵

Radical feminists of more modern times coined the phrase “the personal is the political.” The implications are often uncomfortable and go well beyond the prescription of veganism for those who believe that animals are not property. Every time you walk past a dog on a chain, the radical feminist or ALF activist might remind you, you are making the political choice to allow that animal to spend his or her days in lonely anguish. These kinds of difficult political choices face us every day, making us all complicit to some degree in the ongoing abuse of animals. Radical feminists demand that we learn to live with the feelings that awareness of such realities brings and take appropriate action. Only in so doing can we make our ethical choices with necessary modesty, honesty and empathy.

ALF and Feminist Ethics

The ALF is the metaphorical mother of all animal activism. Like a mother, the ALF rushes to the rescue of endangered youngsters. Like a mother, the ALF labors behind the scenes, rarely getting credit for the results of its productivity. Like a mother, the ALF says, “Eat your vegetables,” and, “Just because everybody does it doesn't mean it's right.”

It's not an accident that women were the actual mothers of the early antivivisection and animal welfare movements, or that women continue to far outnumber men in virtually all animal advocacy and liberation organizations, including, so far as we know, the ALF. Carol Gilligan's groundbreaking research demonstrated that, for a complex constellation of reasons, women tend to make their ethical decisions on different bases than men. While there are always individual departures from the norm, boys and men tend to make their decisions on the basis of laws or abstract principles while girls and women tend to make their decisions on what is best characterized as an ethos of care.¹⁶

When asked if it is justifiable to steal medicine to save the life of someone who cannot afford to purchase it, boys and men will tend to talk about the illegality of stealing versus the principle that life must be valued above all else. In contrast, girls and women will tend to talk about who gets hurt and who needs care. They may reach the same conclusion by different routes—a boy concluding that the value of life trumps the value of private property while a girl concludes that the harm suffered by the shopkeeper if the medicine is stolen is less than the harm suffered by the sick person if it is not. Feminist ethics assert that this ethos of care is at least as valid a method of moral reasoning as the rule-based method preferred by men.

The ethos of care is pragmatic rather than theoretical, and particular rather than abstract. The ethos of care infuses the activities of ALF activists, who exercise actual care for actual animals who would otherwise suffer almost unimaginable harm.

“But,” one might ask, “what if ALF activities slow down or hinder efforts to improve the conditions for animals in general? Wouldn't that contradict the ethos of care?” That seems a reasonable objection until one realizes that there is no evidence whatsoever that ALF activities on behalf of specific animals will in any way inhibit the efforts of other activists to free or improve the welfare of animals in general.

“But,” the argument often goes, “they make us look bad, and that makes us less effective.” Another common argument is that ALF activities make our opponents angry and thus unwilling to compromise with us. These are understandable but baseless concerns. As other liberation movements have learned through hard experience, it doesn't matter how “good” you are—they will always find someone to mock or condemn in an effort to discredit your movement. It's no good telling gay boys to stop swinging their hips or women to stop showing their emotions; those who benefit from the oppression are always going to find some person or organization to point to with derision or censure.

People enjoy their privileges and don't give them up without a struggle. It's trying to take away their privileges that makes them mad, by whatever manner or means you try to do it. People enjoy the material and emotional benefits of owning and feeling superior to animals; corporations enjoy the profits they obtain through animal exploitation. That means that ALF efforts on behalf of specific animals, by interfering with the process of extracting profits from animals, may make the ultimate liberation of all animals more rather than less likely. Just as the pig farmer may switch to organic vegetables if the costs of complying with new environmental regulations make pork less profitable, so corporations have scaled back animal exploitative operations due to real or imagined ALF-related costs. In this way, the ethos of care for particular animals furthers the cause of caring for animals in general.

III

If ALF principles and practices are consistent with ecofeminism, anarcha~feminism, radical feminism, and feminist ethics, are there any critiques feminism might offer the ALF? Since feminism never lets any-body get away without some sort of challenge, the answer to that is, of course, yes.

Like speciesism, sexism is inherently violent, requiring constant force (or threat of force) to maintain itself. While men like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. have tended to get the credit for the theory of nonviolent social change, it has been women who have most consistently deployed nonviolent tactics against violence throughout recorded history. From the Sumerian priestess who wrote the first war protest poem circa 2300 BCE to the women who set up the Greenham Common peace encampment in opposition to nuclear weapons in the 1980s, women have used creative and nonviolent means to contest violence against themselves and others.¹⁷

Hence, the primary feminist challenge to the ALF is to find ways to ensure that individuals and cells considering themselves ALF do, indeed, act in accordance with the ALF principle of nonviolence. It's not good enough to simply disclaim any actions that are violent by using the circular reasoning that “the ALF is nonviolent, hence any violent actions are not ALF.” If, indeed, violent actions are taken by persons inspired by or believing themselves to be ALF, then the ALF bears some responsibility.

Maintaining disciplined adherence to principles across widely distributed secret cells is difficult but not impossible. One must learn, as feminists have done concerning issues like domestic violence, to be able to quite firmly say, “That's not okay,” and be willing to back up that assessment with action.

This means that it will be necessary for ALF cells to immediately disclaim any alleged spokesperson who implicitly threatens or condones violence, as one self-proclaimed ALF spokesman recently has done when answering media inquiries about a non-ALF action. Spokespersons who cannot be trusted to voice the collective position of the ALF without straying into the realm of personal opinion must be jettisoned in favor of spokespeople with the discipline and reserve required to place the needs of the group above their own wish to give voice to heroic fantasies of violent resistance.

This might more easily be done by setting aside the practice of the single, stable spokesperson altogether. Allowing a single person to call him or herself the voice for the ALF gives that person more power than anyone should have in a non-hierarchical organization. Furthermore, there's simply no way to ensure that this person does, in fact, speak for all of the widely distributed and secret cells of the ALF. Better for individual cells or sets of cells to call upon a rotating set of spokespeople who can be trusted to say only what they have been given explicit permission to say and to make clear that they are speaking for only a subset of the ALF. This would bring the ALF's method of communication with the outside world into better agreement with both ALF and anarcha~feminist principles concerning distribution of power and individuality within collectivity.

The ethos of care requires one to actively prevent foreseeable harm. This raises the question of arson as a means of property destruction. I would argue that fire always involves an inherent risk of harm to fire-fighters and ecosystems and thus is not consistent with either ALF principles or the ethos of care. More creative effort must be expended to discover alternative methods by which to interfere with or raise the costs of exploitative operations. Remembering the proverbial monkey-wrench in the machine, it may be possible to identify the point in a complex system where a simple intervention can have a profoundly destabilizing effect.

Just as people may disagree when interpreting abstract rules, differences may arise when invoking the ethos of care. For example, some feminists have argued that the tactic of picketing the houses of vivisectors should not be permitted when there are children in the home, because the children might be frightened or traumatized by the idea that their parents are not able to make home a safe place. Others argue that it does children no favor to collude with the deceptions of violent parents and that therefore, so long as the picket lines are peaceful and no invective is hurled at the children, such demonstrations are not only permissible as direct action against vivisection but also may have the side benefit of encouraging the children of animal abusers to help pressure their parents to change or to look outside of their families for role models.

It takes discipline and self-restraint to maintain the proper attitude during actions in which care must be taken to avoid harming people or other animals. An uncomfortable issue that cannot be avoided is the potential for disaffected and potentially violent young men to use the ALF as an excuse to vent their anger in inappropriate ways. Studies of the violent racist right have established that, prior to recruitment, the young men involved could have gone either way—right or left. Filled with pain and rage and desperate for a feeling of belonging, these young men are drawn to any extreme movement that will help them feel less powerless and alone.¹⁸ It stands to reason that the ALF, which offers the opportunity to defend the powerless in a powerful manner, would be attractive to young men fitting this profile. The animal liberation movement can offer such young men the opportunity to develop the discipline and maturity needed to channel their emotional energy into productive activism. But the combination of macho posturing by ALF spokesmen, the unstructured nature of the ALF cell system, and the essential lawlessness of the ALF itself makes it equally if not more likely that such young men will use the ALF as an excuse for destructive behavior.

One way to mitigate this potentially very serious problem would be to put a feminine face on the ALF. What mental image comes to mind in response to the phrase “Animal Liberation Front”? Probably a black-clad young man. What happens when you change that mental image to a young woman or a gray-haired grandmother? One thing that happens is that the ALF suddenly becomes much less attractive to young men motivated more by macho ego than by compassion. Such a paradigm shift easily could be accomplished by deliberately choosing female spokespersons and using images of women on t-shirts and other promotional materials.

Putting a feminine face on the ALF would be accurate, since the US ALF was founded by a woman and we have no reason to believe that the gender balance of the ALF is any different from the rest of the animal liberation movement. Such a shift might help the ALF to accomplish the other feminist challenge facing it, which is to ensure that the ALF does not in any way hamper total animal liberation by contributing to the oppression of human animals.

Obviously, since people are animals, total animal liberation will not be achieved until both human and nonhuman animals are free. That explains why all animal liberationists must, at minimum, avoid contributing to the ongoing oppression and exploitation of women and other persecuted groups. At best, animal liberation activists will forge alliances with social justice activists and sometimes structure their actions so as to illustrate one of the many connections among speciesism and sexism, racism, militarism and economic exploitation.

For the ALF, this means that, in the selection of targets and tactics, care must be taken to ensure that ALF actions are never used as an excuse to express sexist or racist aggression. In addition, ALF cells must consciously attend to gender dynamics so that certain common problems do not occur. Thanks to sex role socialization in childhood, it's very easy for women and men to slip into unequal relationships without realizing that they have done so. In group discussions men may interrupt and dominate while women wait politely before giving up and giving in. This can lead to an illusion of consensus. In allegedly non-hierarchical groups, an unofficial leader often arises and often just happens to be the most masculine person in the group. Sexual harassment or sexual assault may be perpetrated by one member on another. Partner violence might be an issue when two group members are dating. Such problems are always difficult for groups to process, even more so when the group is underground and group members may feel that it would be disloyal to confront the rapist or batterer.

In confronting these often unconscious dynamics, it's important to remember that, just as we were all taught to think about animals in certain ways, we were all taught to think about men and women in certain ways. It takes just as much conscious work to undo sexist socialization as it does to undo speciesist socialization. In neither instance is the job ever done. Ongoing unlearning and relearning is necessary.

Thinking through such issues might aid ALF activists in framing actions and communiqués that illuminate the connections between exploitation of animals and exploitation of women. In this way, and by helping cells to become more equitable and effective, confrontation of sexism can increase the ALF's contribution toward total animal liberation. For example, ALF cells might elect to challenge sexism by questioning what Marti Kheel has called a “heroic ethic” in which the natural world and nonhuman animals are reduced to “damsels in distress” awaiting rescue by the muscular hero.¹⁹ Of course, many captive animals are, indeed, powerless to effect their own escape and thus in need of rescue. Our cultural conditioning makes it very easy for us to slide from that fact into the fantasy of the helpless feminine victim who is entirely dependent on the powerful masculine hero. This, in turn, can lead us to fail to take the animals' own agency and opinions into account when planning our actions on their behalf. Seeing ourselves as their voice, we can forget to listen to them.

Thus, the feminist challenge to the heroic ethic leads us to a renewed appreciation of the animals' participation in their own liberation. How this might be put into action will vary according to circumstance. For example, ALF cells in relevant regions might seek to understand the patterns of and put themselves into alliance with the recent upsurge in elephant escapes and attacks on property. In the United States, sanctuaries and those who staff them offer opportunities to get to know individual animals, so that plans can be grounded in their hopes and experiences rather than our fantasies and theories. This, of course, is a prescription that applies to all animal advocates, not just those associated with ALF.

IV

Feminism also offers challenges to all animal activists—ALF and non-ALF alike—concerning cooperation, coordination, coalition, and communication. Because social change struggles have always been most effective when diverse tactics have been deployed within the context of a coordinated strategy, these principles of feminist practice can help us to build a more effective animal liberation movement.

Cooperation means, at minimum, not impeding the actions of one's allies and, at best, facilitating their work. The rest of the animal liberation movement must recognize ALF activists as allies and vice versa. Mainstream animal advocates need not jump to distance themselves from the ALF and certainly should not find reasons to criticize the ALF in public. Similarly, ALF activists ought not harshly condemn liberationists who include within their work efforts to improve the lives of animals until such time as freedom is achieved. There's simply no evidence to support the idea that either ALF actions or welfare reforms in any way inhibit the long-term struggle for animal liberation. Both ALF actions and welfare reforms seek to improve the lives of actual animals right now, and the animals have not given us any indication that they believe we should cease such efforts on their behalf.

Cooperation beyond mutual respect extends to coordination of efforts. Coordination need not involve discussions across the above-ground/underground divide. For example, if news of an ALF raid on an egg factory appears in the media, aboveground groups might strike while the iron is hot by immediately staging events, lobbying lawmakers, or publishing educational material or letters to editors about battery cages. Or, if an ALF cell were to notice that an aboveground organization in its region was mounting a campaign about eggs, that might be the time to gather and release some footage revealing what goes on behind closed doors at the local egg factory.

Coalition goes a step beyond coordination and does require some communication, if only through a trusted third party. The potential benefits are worth the effort. If, for example, a diverse array of organizations were to agree to focus for a set period of time on milk—with each tackling the topic from its own perspective and with its own favored tactics—then the public and the government would encounter different aspects of the problem at every turn, as they did when both the Black Panthers and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were among the diverse groups fighting segregation.

Honest and responsible communication is another important principle of feminist practice. This could go a long way toward bridging the divide between the ALF and mainstream animal advocates. In the context of communication, responsibility and honesty mean owning one's feelings, being willing to back up opinions with fact, and ruthlessly examining one's own assumptions. Thus, in debate with an ally, one doesn't say, “You're making it hard for the rest of us,” or, “You don't really believe in liberation,” but rather, “I believe your tactics are counterproductive because. . . ,” or, “I feel uncomfortable with your approach because. . . ,” offering evidence to support any assertions of fact. You can even say, “It's not okay with me that you . . . because . . . ,” as long as you stick to talking about behavior and refrain from making assumptions about the feelings or motivations of others. Feminist practice requires assuming that the other person (or group) is acting in good faith unless you have solid evidence to the contrary. That means refraining from calling ALF activists “reckless” or “destructive,” as if they were not pursuing a viable, if debatable, strategy for social change. That also means taking people at their word when they say that they believe working for welfare reforms can eventually lead to liberation. Open debate is great as long as we all admit that there's no way to say for sure what will work to achieve total animal liberation until we have done so. But the confrontation of thesis with antithesis will never lead to synthesis in an atmosphere of name-calling and character assassination.

It bears repeating that one's circle of communication ought not be confined to human animals. Debates about animal liberation tactics quickly become sterile in the absence of the viewpoints of actual animals. The challenge to all of us is to improve our ability to listen to the animals for whom we purport to speak and act.²⁰ Only then can we trust ourselves to be the allies they so desperately need.

V

The need for animal liberation remains as urgent as ever. Despite arguments and pleas for vegetarianism dating back to antiquity, per capita meat production and consumption is at an all-time high in the US and around the world.²¹ Meanwhile, genetic engineers are designing ever more perverse methods of vivisection, factory farming, and other modes of exploitation. While significant gains have been made against a few specific forms of animal exploitation, such as veal and fur, we must admit that our efforts on behalf of animals cannot yet be described as successful.

More of the same is not enough. All of us—ALF and non-ALF alike—must be more creative and cooperative. Feminist analyses and practices can help to guide us. The ALF is implicitly feminist but often not explicitly so. While the ALF must remain underground, its inherent feminism need not stay under cover. More conscious use of the principles of ecofeminism, anarcha~feminism, radical feminism, and feminist ethics will make the ALF an even more effective component in the multi-faceted struggle for total animal liberation.

The black cat stalks the slaughterhouses and haunts the dreams of vivisectors. Strong and stealthy, fierce and fearless, she taunts and tricks the rapists and the child abusers, too. Sometimes, in quiet moments, you can feel her watching you. The ALF should follow her, because she knows what to do.

Thanks to Karen Davis, Karen Dawn, Miriam Jones, Marti Kheel, and editor Steve Best for insightful and practical comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890–1961) was an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Her essay on sabotage is online at digital.library.arizona.edu/bisbee/docs/128.php.

2. The Yellow Turban Uprising of 184 CE was a peasant uprising staged by Taoists. The Boston Tea Party was a night of property destruction staged by American colonists protesting British rule. Shakers, Quakers, and Sufis all have been condemned as heretics, and all use motion in pursuit of spiritual goals. Contrary to popular belief, Rosa Parks sat down in the white section of a segregated bus as part of a deliberate strategy for change, rather than just because her feet hurt. IWW members are called Wobblies. Wildcat strikes are staged by workers without the sanction of a union recognized by the employer. Harriet Tubman and others used the Underground Railroad as an avenue of freedom for enslaved people of African descent.

3. Krazy Kat was the black cat of indeterminate sex who appeared in the George Herriman comic strip of the same name. Poet e.e. cummings wrote that Krazy's “ambiguous gender doesn't disguise the good news that here comes our heroine.” Mehitabel appears in archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis, which is a novel in verse about a roach and a black cat. Mehitabel the cat has an “extensive past,” proclaims herself to be “toujours gai” [always happy] in the face of deprivation, and says that “the things that i had not ought to/ i do because i ve gotto.” Felix the cat is a more modern cartoon prankster known for his bag of tricks. For historic and modern examples of images of black cats used as symbols of sabotage and other forms of direct action, visit the IWW online graphics library at www.iww.org/graphics and click on the Sabocats link.

4. For many years, women in the Chipko Andolan (the hugging movement) in India have blocked bulldozers by wrapping their bodies around trees. See Ynestra King, “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/Culture Dualism,” in Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (Sierra Club Books, 1990). Many of the activists who block environmentally destructive road development in Britain are “eco-pagans” who blend an appreciation of fairy mythology with the hardcore realities of direct action. See Andy Letcher, “The Scouring of the Shire: Trolls and Pixies in Eco-Protest Culture,” Folklore, October 2001. Night gardeners uproot and otherwise interfere with plantings of genetically modified plants.

5. For more on the distance between purely symbolic demonstrations and effective direct action, see my “Marching in Circles: The Tactics of Dizziness and Despair” in Freezerbox Magazine at www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=264.

6. For the latest scientific evidence concerning the link between pastoralism and patriarchy, see “Cattle Ownership Makes It a Man's World” in the 01 October 2003 issue of New Scientist magazine (available online at www.newscientist.com), which summarizes Holden and Mace (2003), “Spread of cattle led to the loss of matrilineal descent in Africa: A coevolutionary analysis,” Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, DOI 10.1098/rspb.2003.2535.

7. Simone de Beauvoir's 1952 The Second Sex (Knopf) helped to launch the modern feminist movement. Her 1948 Ethics of Ambiguity (Philosophical Library) provides an easy-to-understand explanation of the ethical implications of the existential principle that existence precedes essence. I would argue that this principle means, for example, that one becomes an environmentalist by making environmentally sustainable choices and that one cannot be an environmentalist if one's choices run counter to the best interests of the ecosystem.

8. “Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection” by Karen Davis is one of several important essays in Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). This essay is also online at www.upc-online.org/thinking_like_a_chicken.html.

9. For more examples of links between sexism and speciesism see Carol Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum, 1990) and The Pornography of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2003).

10. Premarin is a hormone replacement medication made from the urine of cruelly confined pregnant horses and given to women who have been led to believe that the natural life cycle of menopause should be treated like a disease. The Women's Health and Ethics Coalition is an innovative international alliance of feminists and animal advocates using a multifaceted strategy against Premarin and its derivatives.

11. Tree sitters such as Julia Butterfly Hill live in the branches of trees that have been marked for felling, protecting the trees with their bodies. In Nigeria, women have challenged the environmental and economic practices of Chevron-Texaco by occupying a major facility and stopping production.

12. We all think about and come up with theories to make sense of our lives and the world. In his Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), Antonio Gramsci identified the “organic intellectual” as someone who conceives and articulates ideas that are rooted in experience rather than education. Organic intellectuals exist in all classes and can play key roles in liberation struggles. The slaughterhouse worker who perceives and articulates a connection between her company's inhumane treatment of animals and its disregard for the safety of workers is fulfilling the function of an organic intellectual. Her observations will be more accurate and persuasive than the speculations of a theorist who has never seen the blood of butchered animals mingling with the blood of injured workers on the floor.

13. For more on anarcha~feminism, see Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha~Feminist Anthology, published by Dark Star Rebel Press (UK) and available online at web.archive.org/web/20040309170009/http://www.cluefactory.org.uk/ace/rumours/.

14. Although deeply flawed by its reliance on Reichian assumptions, James DeMeo's “The origins and diffusion of patrism in Saharasia c. 4000 BCE: Evidence for a world-wide, climate-linked geographical pattern in human behavior” (World Futures, 30, 247–271) gives a thorough presentation and thought-provoking analysis of key facts concerning the origins of patriarchal societies in various regions. While he does not stress this fact, all of the original patriarchal cultures he discusses were also pastoral (animal herding) cultures.

15. For more on radical vegetarian women in Edwardian England, see Leah Leneman, “The Awakened Instinct: Vegetarianism and the Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain,” Women's History Review, Vol. 6 No. 2, 1997.

16. Carol Gilligan's findings concerning moral reasoning can be found in most text-books of introductory psychology as well as in her book In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977).

17. For further information on women and nonviolent social change, see Pam McAllister, ed., Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1982). For further information on past and present women's activism against war, see Daniela Gioseffi, Women on War (New York: The Feminist Press, 2003).

18. For an insightful analysis of violent young men drawn to extreme organizations, see Rafe Ezekiel's The Racist Mind: Portraits of Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (New York: Viking, 1995).

19. Marti Kheel's “From Heroic to Holistic Ethics: The Ecofeminist Challenge” is but one of many illuminating essays in Greta Gaard, ed., Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). This essay is also online at martikheel.com/pdf/heroic-holistic-ethics.pdf.

20. If you have no idea how you might go about taking the opinions of animals into account, that's a sign that you have not paid enough attention to the problem of how to listen to the animals before attempting to be their voice. Given the limitations of cross-species communication, one must take particular care to learn whatever it is possible to learn about the hopes and fears of the nonhuman animals one hopes to help. There are two intersecting avenues of approach: empathy and observation. Getting to know animals—either by spending time with them or by learning from trustworthy people who have spent time with them—allows one to use empathy accurately. That means asking not “What would I want if I were in a battery cage?” but “What would I want if I were a chicken in a battery cage?” Careful observation—either directly or via the factual reports of trustworthy people—allows one to make inferences about animal preferences based on the actions they have taken on their own behalf. That means asking not “What do the experts believe that these animals want?” but “What do the actions of these animals tell anybody willing to listen about what they want?”

21. Up-to-date statistics concerning US and worldwide per capita meat production and consumption may be retrieved from the US Department of Agriculture and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.