There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust. It is important to see that there are times when a manmade law is out of harmony with the moral law of the universe. There is nothing that expressed massive civil disobedience any more than the Boston Tea Party, and yet we give this to our young people and our students as a part of the great tradition of our nation. So I think we are in good company when we break unjust laws, and I think those who are willing to do it and accept the penalty are those who are part of the saving of the nation.—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something that the best people have always done.—Harriet Beecher Stowe
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.—Frederick Douglass
Understanding the ALF: From Critical Analysis to Critical Pedagogy
ANTHONY J. NOCELLA II
Many in the animal liberation movement are frustrated at the lack of diverse public support for the ALF. The most common image of the group's advocates may be that of the “punk rocker”—chain wallet, baggy pants, a black shirt, and colored spiked hair—or other rebellious types. Yet no group or individual that endorses the ALF has presented the public with a credible alternative image. This, however, is beginning to change as the ALF gains a more professional look, better forums of communication, and, indeed, serious academic support as a bona fide liberation movement. No Compromise, a militant above-ground grassroots magazine defending animal liberation, recently has revamped itself from an inky newspaper into a professionally produced magazine. Bite Back has emerged as another appealing magazine for supporting animal liberation, and Arkangel magazine, founded by Ronnie Lee (the originator of the Animal Liberation Front), is a well-designed international magazine on militant underground and above-ground animal liberation. In 2001 the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA) opened the door for serious discourse on the ALF in the academic community.1 With new and improved magazines, better reporting and analysis, and an academic “think tank,” dialogue around and support for the ALF expands and diversifies.
Saul D. Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, emphasizes that a diverse support network for a radical cause is important because power lies in diversity and numbers.2 It is for this reason that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), for example, invited high-school and college students to join their “Freedom Summer” organizing drive to advance voting registration and civil rights in the American South. It is the reason Subcommandante Marcos has on numerous occasions allowed radical academics such as Dr. Peter McLaren to conduct field research on the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, so that a sympathetic writer could deepen understanding of their movement and help legitimate it through substantive historical, political, and philosophical analysis. And, to complement the external contextualizing by academics, socio-political movements have internal mechanisms to develop legitimacy and foundation, as when charismatic leaders such as Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently and incisively dissect the logic of poverty and racism in their writings and speeches. While there is a need for eloquence and motivational speaking, there also is a need for leaders and organization members to be able to articulate a coherent strategy for their movement.
Solidarity and interaction with sympathetic academics helps to give political movements a more diverse base and increased legitimacy through what many may view as respectable viewpoints and voices. After an articulate and sound theoretical and political foundation is developed, it needs to be promoted and popularized by the movement. At that point other important figures should be targeted for support, such as musicians (e.g., Rage Against the Machine in solidarity with the Zapatistas), politicians (e.g., President Bill Clinton meeting with Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein), and religious affiliation (e.g., Subcommandante Marcos's popular story about Votán Zapata, a mythological figure he created to develop a spiritual connection with the Mexican working-class on behalf of revolution). A diverse and sympathetic network increases the possibility of popularizing a movement and thereby diversifies and strengthens it.
But, before even the development of relations to the academic community is possible, there needs to be set in place a method that academics and others can use to understand a complex political movement. To understand a native culture foreign to her, anthropologist Margaret Mead took an ethnological approach, living among the people, learning its language and customs, and adopt them as her own. Along the same lines, Brazilian professor and educator Paulo Freire believed that to comprehend a particular people or culture, one must submerge oneself in their everyday activity, culture, and rituals. The researcher, argued Mead and Freire, needs to develop the ability to see life not from a detached, external perspective, but through the lens of the group or culture being studied. It is this particular interpretative approach that I ask all to adopt when trying to understand the ALF, or any other radical or oppositional group challenging standard ethics or ways of thinking.3
Unfortunately, many people believe that the ALF is a violent organization that grew out of anger and hate. In order to understand the ALF, one must sidestep this and other stereotypes, generalizations, and preconceived mindsets that for the most part have been developed and re-enforced by mass media, capitalist ideologues, and legal authorities. Through a more open and informed approach, one will find that the ALF grew out of love for all life, a perspective strongly supported by the “ALF Guidelines,” which state that it is crucial “. . .to take all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human and nonhuman.”4 The misconception that the ALF is a “violent” group can be avoided by understanding the group's origins and the reasons and motivations for their actions. In this essay, I suggest a process the public can use to better understand the ALF and their actions.
In order to understand an issue, we can approach it from “outside the box,” i.e., from a detached standpoint (critical analysis), or from “inside the box,” i.e., from a participatory standpoint (critical pedagogy). While critical pedagogy strives to experience issues through empathy or by living among the subjects studied, critical analysis strives to dissect an issue or object, much like a scientist categorizing, labeling, and defining living processes, thereby removing himself or herself from the object of study or field of experience.
Whereas critical analysis maintains the distance of “objectivity,” critical pedagogy breaks down the distinction between subject and object. In the case of anthropology, for instance, critical pedagogy is willing to live among indigenous people in order to acquire knowledge and help preserve their culture. Critical pedagogy argues that the theorist is not dominant over or separate from an issue or subject, but rather strives to understand it by being part of it. A perfect example would be Jane Goodall, whose groundbreaking research was attained only by living among—and often acting like—the chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania. Her work revolutionized our understanding of our closest ancestors. A juxtaposition of both of the contrasting approaches I have described can be seen in the film Instinct. Anthony Hopkins plays Dr. Ethan Powell, an anthropologist engaged in becoming part of a gorilla “family.” He has a run-in with the law and is imprisoned. Dr. Powell explains to psychiatrist Dr. Theo Caulder (Cuba Gooding Jr.), why Caulder cannot understand him. It is the same reason why Powell for some time could not understand the apes—he did not dissolve the subject-object dichotomy to live among the apes and gain true insight phenomenologically.
Because understanding cannot always be achieved through the rigid barrier of “objectivity,” a critical pedagogy approach is often useful. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed5, Paulo Freire demonstrates the importance of striving for an intimate educational experience in the classroom, in Freire's case through a dissolution of formal boundaries between “teacher” and “student,” requiring a give-and-take relationship between them. In critical pedagogy, the institutional roles are loosened or dissolved and replaced by the “syllabus of experience.” “Critical pedagogy,” writes social scientist Margaret Ledwith, “is that form of education which emerges from critical compassion; a transcendence of the emotional and the intellectual; the heart and mind learn to see and know in new ways.”6
To examine something critically, one must become aware of one's own interpretative position. This will include being aware of one's response to such aspects of the research as economic class, race, gender, physical or mental characteristics, culture, and religion. The more one is aware of one's own position on an issue, the more easily one can see through a variety of lenses and perspectives. One cannot properly understand any subject when one begins an examination from a highly biased position. In addition, it is not enough to physically experience the “subject”; it also is important to have one's mind and spirit involved in the experience. bell hooks notes that Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh approaches this kind of pedagogy by emphasizing the union of mind, body, and spirit.7 An infiltrator of the ALF might be in a cell for a number of years and feel that he or she understands the ALF, but the essence of critical pedagogy is what Hanh explains as the necessity of the union of the mind, body, and soul, which all have to be engaged in the experience of understanding. One can begin to understand and appreciate ALF actions either through an intellectual understanding of justice, an emotional understanding of animals' suffering, or a spiritual understanding of the unity of all life. When all of these powers are engaged, critical pedagogy becomes possible.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that the crucial element for activism is to engage in one's community in a loving manner.8 This is much like critical pedagogy. King talked about three kinds of love: eros, “a sort of aesthetic or romantic love”; philia, “affection between friends”; and agape, an “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all . . . [an] overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative . . . the love of God operating in the human heart.” He stated, “Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people. . . . It begins by loving others for their sakes.” It “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. . . . Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”9 Dr. King believed that agape could be expressed as involving justice for all. The key to understanding the motivations of the ALF lies in the view that “justice for all” applies to all nonhuman and human animals.
Paulo Freire seems to suggest that critical pedagogy leads to the researcher's own liberation through an experiential form of education that strives for enlightenment or what Gandhi might refer to as the state of seeking the truth. Gandhi believes that the search for truth is the ideal purpose of life. He explains that the struggle to free India was in fact the search for truth on a mass level—and suggests that it is only possible to be in a state of truth if one is willing to give up one's own freedom to stand up to an unjust act or law, or to save or free another being. Such people as St. Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King Jr. would also favor this perspective. Dr. King stated it best: “I became convinced that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” When the oppressed animals—to whom the ALF member is connected in a holistic and emotional manner—are freed, then part of the body and spirit of the ALF member is freed as well. For example, after a liberation by an ALF member or cell, not only do the animals experience freedom, but the ALF member experiences emancipation—from fear, alienation, and perhaps guilt (at not doing enough), and for spiritual development. That is why it is common for a member of the ALF to cry with happiness after liberating an animal. The liberated animals and the ALF member all achieve a piece of the truth of wholeness and union.
The essence of performing an act in the name of the ALF is that love must be present in one's heart. This love allows one to act with respect for all life (even those who exploit animals) and to use one's intellect to its fullest potential. Have acts been committed in the name of the ALF by people in a negative or hostile state? Yes. Should activists in the wrong frame of mind be questioned by animal liberation and rights advocates? Yes. How would one prevent such acts? One should never let go of the true meaning of the ALF, which is to respect all life (the fundamental principle of the animal rights movement as a whole), to the extent that one feels oppressed due to another's oppression. While many say that activists should use their anger and hate toward the enemy, I say it is better to emulate individuals like Jesus, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez or other great peacemakers, and redirect anger and hatred into a state of love.
But one should never confuse nonviolence with weakness. King and Gandhi, though promoters of nonviolence, did not favor cowardice or walking away from conflict. The ALF acts with strength and daring, yet stops at violence, because it acts from love. Its actions are revolutionary and sometimes “extreme” in resorting to property destruction and breaking the law, but to the right-thinking person these acts should pale in comparison to the truly extreme actions that involve not damaging things but injuring and taking life and profiting from killing and death—the routine actions of animal exploitation industries such as vivisection laboratories, zoos, circuses, factory farms, and slaughter-houses. It is only when all people understand that love will create love, and hate will only create hate, that all will be liberated. As the Quakers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, and the ALF believe, love will light the path to liberation.
Thus, if one wants to understand the ALF, one must transcend the false rhetoric of “terrorism” and approach the real purpose of its struggle—animal liberation—through the method of critical pedagogy. One can thereby strive to understand the liberators' motivations as rooted in a concern for the suffering of nonhuman animals and for peace. For when you engage in understanding the ALF, you will understand the need for the liberation of all life.
Notes
1. See “The History and Philosophy of the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs“ Journal of Animal Liberation Affairs 1 (2001), www.cala-online.org/Journal/journal_articles.html#8.
2. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).
3. Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
4. See the ALF Primer, www.animalliberationfront.com.
5. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1997).
6. M. Ledwith, “Community work as critical pedagogy: re-envisioning Freire and Gramsci,” Community Development Journal 36 (3), July 2001, 171–182.
7. bell hooks, Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
8. “Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible Subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination. Domination reveals the pathology of love: sadism in the dominator and masochism in the dominated. Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression it is possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 70–71).
9. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
Open Rescues: Putting a Face on the Rescuers and on the Rescued
KAREN DAVIS, PHD
Using darkness as a cover and compassion as their guide, five members of Mercy for Animals (MFA) covertly entered sheds at Ohio's two largest egg producers . . . following criteria for a recently documented technique known as open rescue.
—Rachelle Detweiler, “Missions of Mercy,” The Animals' Agenda1
When I first started writing this essay I thought I would discuss the ALF practice of concealment versus disclosure of personal identity as a strategy for achieving animal liberation through appeals to public perception and public conscience. But as I sifted through my files looking at the faces of animal liberators both masked and unmasked, as well as at undercover rescue scenes in both video format and verbal evocation, I decided that, important as the mask question may be from the stand-point of public perception, of equal and perhaps more fundamental importance is that of the rescuers' overall body language and the expression of their hands in a videotaped rescue intended for general audiences. When it comes to faces, it seems that the most important ones to be shown in a rescue operation taped for public viewing are the faces of the animals themselves. But those faces and the suffering they express have become increasingly hidden and disguised.
The “Disappearance” of Animals in Western Culture
Attention to the plight of animals raised for food is still relatively new in the United States. In 1987, when the first ALF action at the Beltsville (Maryland) Agricultural Research Center was conceived and carried out, even ALF activists who used the term “animal rights,” according to Ingrid Newkirk in Free the Animals, “had not yet incorporated the systematized abuse of ‘farm animals’ into their agendas, couldn't ‘see’ an attack on the farm industry at all.”2 One reason they couldn't envision such an attack was that they didn't yet “see” the animals entombed within the industry. In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” John Berger discusses the disappearance of nonhuman animals into institutionalized anonymity in Western society, a process that he says began in the nineteenth century and was completed in the twentieth century as an enterprise of corporate capitalism.3 Berger's observations about animals in zoos, which to him symbolizes what our culture has done to animals as part of our overall rupture of the natural world, are equally applicable to factory-farmed animals. By extension, he includes them in his analysis of the cultural marginalization and disappearance of animal life, with the difference that nobody is expected even to pretend to look even at a factory-farmed animal, or to remember that factory-farmed animals were ever “wild” and free, and could be again. “The space which modern, institutionalized animals inhabit,” Berger states in speaking of zoos, “is artificial”:
In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory. Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity. They have nothing to act upon—except, briefly, supplied food and—very occasionally—a supplied mate. (Hence their perennial actions become marginal actions without an object.) Lastly, their dependence and isolation have so conditioned their responses that they treat any event which takes place around them—usually it is in front of them, where the public is—as marginal. (Hence their assumption of an otherwise exclusively human attitude—indifference.) . . . At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.4
This condition—of blind, and blinding, encounters between a potential human audience and the animals involved in a rescue operation—is what the ALF and open rescue teams, insofar as their purpose is winning public sympathy, have to overcome, because as Berger says about animals at the zoo, they “disappoint” the public, especially the children—“Where is he? Why doesn't he move? Is he dead?” As for the adults, “One is so accustomed to this that one scarcely notices it any more.”5
The human onlookers adjust. After all, it isn't their own fate they are seeing, even if, in some essential way, that's what they're looking at. They go to the zoo almost in the same way that they go out to eat—to entertain themselves and their children, like a trip to Disneyland, which succeeds where zoos fail, because, like hamburgers and chicken nuggets, “animated” creatures are more prized by our culture than living animals are. As for the animals, they are imprisoned in an impoverished world imposed on them which their psyches did not emanate and which they do not understand. Factory-farmed animals are imprisoned in total confinement buildings within global systems of confinement, and thus they are separated from the natural world in which they evolved, including their family life. They are imprisoned in alien bodies manipulated for food traits alone, bodies that in many cases have been surgically mutilated as well, creating a disfigured appearance—they are debeaked, detoed, dehorned, ear-cropped, tail-docked, and so on. Factory-farmed animals are imprisoned in a belittling concept of who they are.6 Outside the animal rights community, and the intimate confines of their own lives, these animals are unreal to almost everyone. They are not only prisoners but, in a real sense, they are the living dead. The entire life of these animals is a series of overlapping burials.7
Factory-farmed animals go from being in wombs and eggs in factory hatcheries and breeding facilities to being locked up (until they go to slaughter, unless they die first) in CAFOs—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. They are thus buried in a rhetoric of exploitation equivalent to the layers of material coverup in which their “silent” suffering goes on. The purpose of their existence is to be buried in the gastrointestinal tract of a human being. In the United States, hens deemed no longer fit for commercial egg production are literally buried alive in landfills after being entombed for a year or more in metal cages inside the walls of windowless buildings.8 According to Australian activist Patty Mark, when the manure pits are bulldozed at the end of a laying cycle, “any live and/or debilitated hens still stuck in the manure are simply scooped up with the waste and buried alive on the trucks.”9
The Role of the ALF
The ALF seeks to expose our society's enormous cruelty to nonhuman animals. The ALF is set up to rescue individual animals from specific situations of abuse, with a view to ending all of the abuse, and to wreak economic havoc on animal exploiters with the goal of making it hard, and ultimately impossible, for the exploiters to continue doing business. The ALF also supports property damage on moral grounds: “[W]hen certain buildings, tools and other property are being used to commit violence,” ALF spokesperson David Barbarash explains, “the ALF believes that the destruction of property is justified.”10 In considering these goals I am reminded of what Aristotle said in the Poetics about the goals of tragic drama with respect to audience response. He said that tragic drama should arouse pity and fear in the audience: pity and compassion for the victims, fear and horror directed at the causes of the victims' suffering. Similarly, the ALF seeks to arouse pity and compassion for the animal victims (the audience in this case is the general public, including the news media and the exploiters themselves), and to instill fear of economic destruction—loss of livelihood, funding, business, and credibility—in those who profit from institutionalized animal abuse. “[I]n the end, make sure it's the animal abusers who really pay,” says the ALF.11
Since the public at large is the ultimate cause of all of the animal abuse being exposed, in laboratories, on factory farms and elsewhere, it is morally and strategically appropriate, necessary in fact, to instill a “fear of oneself” in all audiences for having passively or actively contributed to the suffering and abuse taking place behind the scenes. All of us, in our conscience at least, should have to “really pay” more than a mere token of regret. In the brief discussion that follows, I shall concentrate only on the “pity” aspect of what many of us regard as the greatest tragedy on earth—our species' smug and evil treatment of the other animals who share this planet, including their homes and families—and on how to get audiences to identify compassionately with the animal victims and their rescuers. My illustrations are drawn mainly from recent battery-hen farm investigations, in which all of those involved were, in one way or another, “unmasked.”12
United Poultry Concerns Forum On Direct Action for Animals
At a small conference on direct action in 1999, Australian activist Patty Mark introduced many US activists to the concept of open rescues. Most participants in the conference were accustomed to the “traditional” notion that people who rescue animals ought to act clandestinely so they can avoid detection and arrest and continue to free as many animals as possible. So when confronted with the idea that people can freely admit to rescuing animals, many—if not most—of the conference participants seemed somewhat skeptical.—Paul Shapiro, “The US Open,” The Animals' Agenda13
On June 26–27, 1999 United Poultry Concerns held a historic—the first ever—forum on direct action for animals. Speakers included: Katie Fedor, founder of the Animal Liberation Front Press Office in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Freeman Wicklund, an outspoken ALF advocate and founder of the ALF advocacy magazine No Compromise, who in 1997 renounced his support for the ALF in favor of strategic nonviolence based on Gandhian principles;14 and Patty Mark, founder of Animal Liberation Victoria, editor of Action Magazine, and Coordinator of the Action Animal Rescue Team, which conducts non-violent rescues inside Australian factory farms.15 The forum, which I conceived and organized, was inspired in part by a statement by philosopher Tom Regan concerning ALF activities in his essay on “Civil Disobedience” in The Struggle for Animal Rights. Instead of concealment, Regan wrote, “[W]hat I think is right strategy and right psychology is for the people who liberate animals to come forth and identify themselves as the people who did it.”16
During the forum, the question of concealment versus open acknowledgment of one's identity in conducting illegal direct actions for animals expanded into a wider range of issues surrounding this question. This larger focus resulted from the showing of two different videos of recent animal rescues: an ALF raid at the University of Minnesota and a battery-caged hen rescue at an egg facility in Australia.17 The Australian video shows the Action Animal Rescue Team's well-planned rescue of several hens. It documents the conditions in which the hens live inside the battery shed. We see the hens' suffering faces up close. We watch and hear a hen scream as she is being lifted out of the molasses-like manure in which she is trapped in the pits beneath the cages. The video captures not only the terrible suffering of the hens being rescued, but the gentleness and firmness of the rescue team (as expressed, for example, by their hands), who, as an integral part of their videotaped operations, contact the police, get arrested, and explain their mission with the intention of putting battery-hen farming visibly on trial before the public and in the court-room during their own trial for trespassing and theft.
By contrast, the video of the ALF break-in and rescue of animals at the University of Minnesota shows rescuers dressed in black, Batman-like outfits wearing black masks. All rescues are shot at a long-distance angle. The rescuers look and act like remote, stylized figures rather than flesh-and-blood people, and the animals, including birds and fish, are so far away that it is difficult to be sure what kinds of birds, for example, are being taken out of the cages.18 Where the Australian direct action shows suffering, compassion, a trained team, and the highly skilled use of a camera, the ALF video shows a posturing, self-centered rescue—despite the anonymity of the rescuers—in which empathy for the victims, however felt, is visibly lacking. Significantly, there is no involvement between the ALF rescuers and the animals they are liberating, as there is between the rescuers and the hens in the Australian video. The body language of the ALF rescuers is “choreographed” to resemble swordplay, in the style of Zorro or Batman.
The forum overwhelmingly chose the Australian operation and style of direct action over the characteristics depicted in this particular ALF operation. Attendees felt that the Australian video was a model for the kind of activism that, when aired, would move and educate the public, whereas the ALF video we looked at (part of which had recently been televised in Minneapolis-St. Paul), with its focus on the masked and posturing rescuers rather than on the animals and without any show of sensitivity toward them, would have a negative effect, or no effect, on most viewers. Another critical difference was in the settings: on the one hand you see the obviously filthy and inhumane battery-cage facility; on the other hand you see an antiseptic-looking laboratory at the University of Minnesota in which the suffering and cruelty are harder to convey.
Undercover Investigations of Battery-Caged Hen Facilities
Inspired by the Australian model, three undercover investigations of battery-caged hen facilities, including hen rescues, were conducted in the United States in 2001: In January, members of Compassionate Action for Animals (CAA) openly rescued 11 hens from a Michael Foods egg complex in Minnesota;19 in May, members of Compassion Over Killing (COK) openly rescued eight hens from ISE-America in Maryland;20 and in August and September, Mercy for Animals (MFA) openly rescued 34 hens from DayLay and Buckeye egg farms in Ohio.21 All three groups took powerful documentary photographs that can be found on their Websites. In addition, Compassion Over Killing and Mercy for Animals produced high-quality videos of what went on inside the houses: COK's Hope for the Hopeless and MFA's Silent Suffering.22 Both groups published explanatory news releases, provided press packets, and held well-attended press conferences that resulted in significant news coverage by the Washington Post, United Press International, statenews.org: The Ohio Public Radio and Television Statehouse News Bureau, and more. Because Compassion Over Killing held their press conference first, and, in doing so, set the standard for the equally impressive investigation conducted by Mercy for Animals, I will cite COK's investigation to illustrate the characteristics of what I and many others regard as a well-organized open rescue operation with charismatic effects.
On June 6, 2001, Compassion Over Killing (COK) announced that the group would hold a press conference that day to “present findings of a recent investigation into animal treatment at an International Standard of Excellence (ISE) egg facility in Cecilton, Md.”23 According to the news release,
COK's month-long investigation began after the organization was denied a tour of the facility. ISE's Cecilton facility is “home” to 800,000 laying hens, all of whom live in “battery cages” (long rows of wire cages holding up to 10 birds per cage).
The investigators documented in videos and photographs numerous acts of animal cruelty at ISE, including immobilized hens with no access to food or water, hens living in overcrowded cages with the decomposing corpses of deceased hens, and sick and injured hens suffering without veterinary care.
After making repeated nighttime visits to the facility to document abuses, COK investigators requested that the Cecilton authorities prosecute ISE for animal cruelty. But, no action was taken. So, on May 23, 2001, COK investigators rescued eight sick and injured hens in dire need of immediate veterinary care.
On June 6, 2001, the details of the investigation and rescue will be on line at www.ISECruelty.com. Also, COK's new 18-minute documentary on the investigation and rescue, Hope for the Hopeless, will be aired and distributed to media at the press conference.
According to COK investigator Miyun Park, “The animals at ISE are suffering miserably. If consumers knew how animals are abused by the egg industry, they would never eat eggs.”
Expert veterinarian Eric Dunayer, VMD, viewed footage taken from ISE's Cecilton facility and stated, “[T]he videotape shows hens subjected to extremely inhumane conditions that inflict severe deprivation and injury. I have no doubt that these hens suffer terribly under such conditions.”
ISE is an international animal agribusiness based in Japan. Its US affiliate, ISE-America, holds captive 5.6 million egg-laying hens: 2.3 million in South Carolina; 1.5 million in Maryland; 1.3 million in New Jersey; and 500,000 in Pennsylvania.
COK's recent investigation is not ISE's first run-in with animal advocates. On October 17, 2000, ISE was found guilty on two counts of animal cruelty in New Jersey. The case involved two live hens who were found tossed in a garbage can filled with dead hens.
The Drama of Open Rescue
Mirroring the group's investigative procedure, COK's news release is very thorough. It explains the cause, process, and nature of the investigation, while placing it within a context of information about the company, ISE-America. The group did their homework. They provided veterinary validation of their animal cruelty charges (their press packet contains several letters from veterinarians), and they produced a dramatic video documenting their claims. Hope for the Hopeless combines the professionalism of the rescue team with the pathos of the hens. It overcomes a fundamental difficulty in drawing public attention to the plight of factory-farmed animals: the lack of drama. However, when the rescue is visually crafted and deftly narrated, as COK's is, then you have the drama, the dramatis personae, the tension, a story-line, and a “resolution,” in what must otherwise appear to be, as in reality it is, a limitless expanse of animal suffering and horror—an eternal Treblinka, in the words of the Nobel Prize–winning writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, concerning the plight of all other animal species in relation to our own.24 Hope for the Hopeless shows the helpless victims and their heroic rescuers deep in the pit and under the shadow of the “enemy.” These elements, skillfully combined, should elicit public sympathy and outrage.
Otherwise, except for the “veal” calf, whose solitary confinement stall and large, sad mammalian eyes draw attention to him- or herself as a desolate individual, all that most of the public sees in animal factories are endless rows of battery-caged hens, wall-to-wall turkeys, and thousands of chickens or pigs. What they hear is deathly silence or indistinguishable “noise.” They see a brownish sea of bodies without conflict, plot or endpoint. There is no “one on one”—no man beating a dog, say, on which to focus one's outrage. To the public eye, the sheer number and expanse of animals surrounded by metal, wires, dung, dander, and dust renders all of them invisible and unpersonable. There are no “individuals.” Instead there is a scene of pure suffering—worse, suffering that isn't even grasped by most viewers, who are more or less consensually programmed not to perceive “food” animals as individuals with feelings, let alone as creatures with projects of their own of which they have been stripped.
Open the Cages
Each individual life we save means the world to us and to them. Pure bliss is watching a withered, featherless, debilitated, and naked little hen look up at the sky for the first time in her life, stretch her frail limbs, and then do what all hens adore: take a dust bath!—Patty Mark, “To Free a Hen,” The Animals' Agenda25
Revealing the faces of these birds and other animals as they are being compassionately lifted from the dead piles onto which they were thrown, the cages upon cages surrounding them, or the manure pits into which they fell, showing them responding to a little cup of water in a close-up shot after all they have been through—this is what the animal liberation movement as a whole and the ALF and open rescuers, whether masked or otherwise, must try to accomplish. Regardless of what else is involved, as Ingrid Newkirk says in Free the Animals, the emphasis of the story must remain on the animals—getting them out safe and getting them seen.26 The moment of rescue is their moment. It is their “role,” and their right, at that moment to be in the spotlight, and thus also to shed a light on all of their brothers and sisters who, together with them, deserved and would have chosen to be freed, and to be free.
Notes
1. Rachelle Detweiler, “Missions of Mercy,” The Animals' Agenda, Vol. 22, No. 1 (January–February 2002), 11.
2. Ingrid Newkirk, Free the Animals (Chicago: The Noble Press, 1992), 336.
3. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in David M. Guss, ed., The Language of the Birds: Tales, Texts, and Poems of Interspecies Communication (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 275–287.
4. Berger, 286–287.
5. Berger, 285.
6. I examine the cultural practice of belittling nonhuman animals, especially farmed animals, in my book More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality (New York: Lantern Books, 2001).
7. For a Marxist look at the “alienation” of factory farmed chickens (and by extension all factory-farmed animals), see especially pp. 21–24 of my book Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (Summertown, TN: The Book Publishing Company, 1996).
8. “The simplest method of disposal is to pack the birds, alive, into containers, and bulldoze them into the ground. Euphemistically called ‘composting,’ it still amounts to being buried alive,” according to Canadian Farm Animal Care Trust President Tom Hughes, quoted in Merritt Clifton, “Starving the hens is ‘standard,’” Animal People: News For People Who Care About Animals, Vol. 9, No. 4 (May 2000), 1, 8. See also Chris Miller, “Cooped up: Animal rights activists say the transportation of chickens to slaughterhouses remains cruel and inhumane despite an increase in [Canadian] government regulations,” The Vancouver Courier, Vol. 11, No. 29 (July 27, 2001), 1, 3, 17.
9. See Patty Mark, “To Free a Hen,” The Animals' Agenda, Vol. 21, No. 4 (July–August 2001), 25–26.
10. Claudette Vaughan, “The ALF Unmasked,” Vegan Voice, No. (December–February 2002), 9–10.
11. “The Secret Life of Cells: From the Website of the Animal Liberation Front,” Harper's Magazine, Vol. 304, No. 1821 (February 2002), 20–21.
12. The masks worn by open rescuers of battery-caged hens are gas masks, used as a protection against the poisonous excretory ammonia fumes that permeate factory-farm poultry houses.
13. Paul Shapiro, “The US ‘Open,’ ” The Animals' Agenda, Vol. 21, No. 4 (July–August 2001), 27.
14. See Freeman Wicklund, “Direct Action: Progress, Peril, or Both?” in this volume.
15. Mark, 25–26. Contact Animal Liberation Victoria/Action Animal Rescue Team at amag@ihug.com.au, or call 03-9531-4367.
16. Tom Regan, The Struggle for Animal Rights (Clarks Summit, PA: International Society for Animal Rights, 1987), 182.
17. The ALF raid took place in the pre-dawn hours of April 5, 1999. See Erin Geoghegan, “Minnesota ALF Raid Stirs Debate,” The Animals' Agenda, Vol. 19, No. 3 (May–June 1999), 12, 18. The Action Animal Rescue Team video was a 37-minute segment edited from a compilation tape called Pigs, Broiler Chickens, & Battery Hens—1995–1999.
18. More than 100 rats, mice, pigeons, and salamanders were freed. See Geoghegan.
19. See Shapiro, n. 13 above. Michael Foods is the third largest egg company in the US and the world's largest producer of “value-added egg products,” according to Egg Industry, January 2001, pp. 2, 16. Visit CAA's Website at www.ca4a.org or call CAA at (612) 922-6312.
20. See Shapiro, n. 13 above. ISE-America is the tenth largest egg company in the US, according to Egg Industry magazine, 16. Visit COK's Website at www.COK-online.org; also visit www.ISECruelty.com, or call 301-891-2458.
21. See Detweiler, n. 1 above. According to Egg Industry, January 2001, Buckeye Egg Farm ranks no. 5 and Daylay Egg Farm ranks no. 22 among the largest US egg producers. Visit MFA's Website at www.mercyforanimals.org; or call (937) 652-8258.
22. Both videos can be purchased from United Poultry Concerns, PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405, for $10 each including shipping. Visit www.UPC-online.org. To order these videos directly from COK and MFA, see notes 20 and 21 above.
23. This investigation goes back ultimately to a phone call from a volunteer fireman to United Poultry Concerns in December 1993. His crew had been called in to put out a fire at one of the ISE-America complexes in Maryland. He said he had no idea such a horrible place existed, and he would never eat another egg. In the winter of 1995 my then office assistant, Jim Sicard, and I paid a midnight visit to ISE-America, where we took photos and removed 10 hens. When COK codirector Paul Shapiro asked me in 2001 about battery-hen complexes near Washington, DC, I told him about ISE-America and how to get there. For the story of Jim Sicard's and my rescue at ISE-America, see Jim Sicard, “Take the Chickens and Run! How 10 battery-caged hens came to live at UPC,” PoultryPress, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer 1996), 1–2.
24. “In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth. ‘What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.’ ” This passage appears in Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Letter Writer,” The Collected Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). For a comprehensive look at human Nazism towards nonhuman animals, see Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002).
25. Mark, op. cit., 26.
26. Newkirk, op. cit., 350.
From the Front Line to the Front Page—An Analysis of ALF Media Coverage
KAREN DAWN
Every social movement has factions that use different tactics while aiming at the same goal. In the animal rights movement there are those who lobby on Capitol Hill and those who vandalize animal exploitation industries. There are those who will do anything to get any press, those who want only “good” press, and those who disdain the press.
Increasingly, those factions have been attacking and criticizing each other. Stuck in their own trenches—too often shooting at each other—they are dismissing the front line media reports of the war, and missing vital opportunities to help shape the reports and reach the public.
Our Little Civil War
In February 2003 during an interview on the KPFT Pacifica radio station in Houston, ALF spokesperson Rod Coronado described the Animal Liberation Front as employing “the most effective means” in our movement. He said that all of the major groups should come out in full public support of the ALF. Though he sought their support, he disparaged their work, referring to their successes as “winning a few crumbs from the oppressor's table.” He implied that they distance themselves from the ALF in order to win victories to help raise funds for salaries. And he scorned their fear of bringing repression down on themselves—as if repression of these groups would not adversely affect our movement's ability to help the animals. He noted PETA's support of the ALF and expressed no regret about the resulting challenge to that organization's tax-free status. I was one of the hosts interviewing him. I asked him if it were realistic to expect those lobbying on Capitol Hill to come out in public support of the ALF. He replied, “Their not publicly supporting us is leaving us twisting in the wind.”
In that interview Coronado did not acknowledge the value of the work of the mainstream groups, let alone admit the need for some of them to maintain a law-abiding image. I understand he qualifies that view in this volume. We may have caught him on a particularly bad day, a day on which his disdainful tone was unlikely to win allies in the movement mainstream. I found it alienating. I recognized the ALF as freedom fighters for the animals, but I thought the suggestion that the underground arm of our movement should be publicly embraced by every animal protection organization indicated a lack of strategic thinking, perhaps indicating combat fatigue. Should the ALF really be the face of our movement—a face with a mask?
As the 2003 national animal rights conferences approached, I heard that the Humane Society of the United States had cancelled plans to participate. In previous years it had been a sponsor of the conference and was the group that focused most on training activists to lobby in the legislative field. But Senior Vice President Wayne Pacelle felt that the rhetoric of Rod Coronado and Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC)'s Kevin Jonas had become so inflammatory that participation in a conference where they spoke would damage HSUS's mainstream image (which translates into millions of much-needed mainstream dollars in donations) and subvert HSUS's standing in the legislative arena. I respected Pacelle's position but would have preferred he use the platform at the conference to argue against the tactics that he felt were counterproductive and that I presumed brought largely negative press coverage. I suggested that by excusing himself he was handing the conference over to the ALF and SHAC.
Indeed, throughout the conferences, the most vocal positive reaction from the attendees was in response to ALF and SHAC calls for direct action. A video montage played on the last night of the AR East conference that featured photos of most of our movement's leaders included over half a dozen shots of masked ALF rescuers; the ALF pictures got the loudest cheers. I did not find that surprising. The ALF is sexy. It represents the breaking of laws that shield unjust institutions, and the appearance of power in defense of the powerless. As we get discouraged with slow progress and doubt the impact of our movement, the ALF at least appears to be active, to be achieving something.
Good Press, Bad Press?
As one focused on the media, a force disdained by some ALF spokespersons, I found myself often taking an anti-ALF stance in informal debates at the conferences. I compared ALF activity unfavorably with open rescues. Open rescues also save animals, but do so without masks and with minimal destruction. They concentrate on getting “good” press, and they succeed. Media stories on ALF actions had often turned the animal oppressors into victims. They focused on activists rather than on animal suffering, whereas open rescues had received some superb press in recent months, mostly focused on the animals. By superb, I mean both sympathetic and educational. Thanks to the undercover work of Mercy for Animals, the Cleveland Plain Dealer gave front-page placement to a series on egg farming packed with information on animal suffering, including an article headed, “How hens live.” After a chicken rescue in Maryland, the Washington DC–based group Compassion Over Killing got a full-page story in the New York Times (December 2002) detailing the suffering on egg farms, and has since had a huge story on the front page of the Style section (September 2003) focusing, sympathetically, on the activists but including information on farmed animal suffering.
The positive press following open rescues is no accident. Open rescue groups concentrate on getting the good press that the current spokespersons for the ALF shun. On accepting the Animal Rights Hall of Fame award at the 2003 animal rights conference in Los Angeles, Rod Coronado said that when you save 50 dogs from a laboratory, saving their lives is all that matters. But one might note that people will make money from catching or breeding 50 dogs who will replace those saved. What do we say to the replacements—“Sorry, the lives of those we rescued mattered more than yours”?
However, if an action gets “good” press, it can influence public opinion and therefore save far more animals in the long run; it can lead to changes in the system such that the animals are never replaced. Sadly, in the United States, industries that financially support political parties have more power than the public in influencing policy. But the effect on tuna fishing practices due to public outcry over mass dolphin deaths indicates that public opinion can override the power of industry. And media influences public opinion.
How can the ALF disdain the media? Those who doubt the power of the media should consider the American public's response to those dolphin deaths; the reaction is inconsistent with the US public's attitude towards other animals and differs from attitudes towards dolphins in other nations. Why do Americans care so much about dolphins? We all know one obvious factor: His name is Flipper. The current generation of parents buying tuna for their children's sandwiches grew up with him.
Immediately after the AR West 2003 conference, I picked up Ingrid Newkirk's Free the Animals, a book written like an adventure story, which gives terrific information about the ALF raids of the 1980s. I began to see how the ALF could contend that it uses the “most effective means” in our movement; much of the footage that led to early successful campaigns was obtained illegally.
But I learned that the early ALFers had pursued the media, making sure that raids were followed by press conferences. The conferences were held by those not directly involved in illegal activity but willing to accept evidence of animal abuse and share it with the press. Thus the actions generally got great press, as compared to recent ALF activity, which has resulted in largely unsympathetic coverage.
Then, just weeks after the AR West conference, in the space of 10 days in late August 2003, three different actions got so much press that I was driven to reassess my presumption that ALF press was necessarily bad. Certainly, it was not the universally favorable press of open rescues. But, for one thing, it was much more press than those rescues achieve.
Was it good press or bad press? I found myself starting to question the idea of good press and bad press, and beginning to side with the PETA philosophy that, at this stage of our movement, almost any press is good press—or it can be turned into good press. The animals could not be doing much worse than they are. If a story focuses on our movement's bad behavior but at least mentions the suffering of the animals, isn't that better than silence?
Some say no. They assume that unsympathetic press slows our progress. They say it furthers the public view of animal rights activists as crazy radicals with a cause that cannot be taken seriously. They say that violence, even against property, damages the reputation of our movement and will alienate those who might otherwise have been attracted to it. They don't go so far as to suggest that vegetarians are likely to start eating meat again because they don't like animal rights activists, but they say that those who might have been likely to become vegetarian will be less likely to give up meat if our movement is alienating.
Those are not theories that should be swallowed without question. Each ethical vegetarian or activist I know gave up meat upon becoming vividly aware of animal suffering, through footage or literature; his or her impression of animal rights activists was not a factor. And though the vast majority of the population eats meat, I have never met a person who said she was concerned about the suffering of animals but kept eating meat because she didn't find animal rights activists appealing. The change to vegetarianism is made for the sake of the animals, not the sake of the activists.
I have presented (and challenged) the view that an unattractive activist image will hurt the animals; respected activists hold it. Those activists sound alarm sirens when the ALF gets unsympathetic press. But I will now discuss the press achieved by the string of ALF actions on the West Coast in August 2003 and posit that it is difficult to pin-point the harm in such press—for one thing, to assume harm, one would have to believe that anger at activists translates into anger at animals. What the recent media response to ALF activity has definitely achieved is to move animal rights issues more strongly into the lime-light and public awareness. Only with awareness will there be discussion. With no discussion there will be no change.
I am going to focus on three August 2003 actions because they are diverse and wonderfully exemplary. One involves vandalism against property and threats to its owner, the second involves the release of animals, and the third moves into an area almost universally condemned: the use of explosives.
Foie Gras: In the News, Off the Menus
On Tuesday, August 19, the following story broke on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Animal-rights vandals hit chef's home, shop; Activists call French-style foie gras cruel to birds.” In this front-page article, San Franciscans learned that “animal rights vandals” had done about $50,000 worth of damage to a store/restaurant soon to be opened that would specialize in foie gras. The vandals had splashed acid on the chef/owner's car, spray-painted his house, and sent him threatening letters along with a videotape of him and his family at home.
The article covered the suffering of the chef to a greater degree than the suffering of the animals. However, the torture of the birds whose livers become foie gras was not entirely ignored and thus made the front page of a major newspaper. Readers learned of the controversy: “Foie gras—fattened goose or duck liver—has become controversial because of the way it is produced, which involves force-feeding fowl. How much the animals suffer—or whether they suffer at all—has been the subject of much debate.”
They read: “It is created when ducks or geese are force-fed grain through tubes that are put down the birds' throats.” Readers were treated to a quote from a PETA spokesperson, saying that foie gras is “one of the most egregiously cruel food products out there.”
Over the next 10 days, the Chronicle opinion page printed nine letters about foie gras, including one from Ingrid Newkirk noting, “A civilization is indeed judged by how it treats its animals.” Five of the letters took the animal rights position. The first printed objected to the use of the word “terrorism” to describe actions necessary to stop “institutionalized violence” and included the John F. Kennedy quote: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” One letter complained of the lack of media coverage to educate the public about “the horrific treatment of ducks being processed for foie gras.” The writer took it upon herself to provide some reader education: “We only need to imagine a tube stuck down our throat while large amounts of food are pumped through to have a clue as to what these animals go through.” Another letter plugged the PETA Website. And one letter summed up a point I will be making in this essay: “The animal-rights groups are wrong to vandalize or threaten chefs but, unfortunately, it seems to have worked—front page of The Chronicle. It is too bad that the simple truth about factory farms isn't enough to get a front-page story. . . .”
The foie gras action got some national and even international press. A story in London's The Times opened with, “Chefs in California's foodie capital of San Francisco are at war with each other—and animal activists—over the ethics of selling duck or goose foie gras.” How wonderful to see an ethical issue about animal consumption take the lead line in an article in this prestigious UK paper.
Then on Friday, August 22, the Chronicle printed an article headed, “Some rethink menu after violence over controversial fare.” Kim Severson reported, “Elite Bay Area chefs, stunned by the vandalism directed at one of their San Francisco colleagues who serves foie gras, are taking a serious look at what's on the menu.” San Franciscans read that for some chefs “the furor over foie gras has rekindled concerns about the way some animals are raised for the table.” Others said they were less concerned about the animals than afraid of the activists, but either reaction had the same effect: “Whether fearful or angry, Manrique's professional colleagues say the situation has made it clear that writing a menu is becoming a political act.”
The article included an interesting quote from Jardiniere's Traci Des Jardins, who said she plans to discontinue her signature foie gras. She said she did have some concern about being the next target, but her decision was based not on fear but on having visited a foie gras farm in 1995 and having been “haunted by the image of those ducks.” That is a wonderful quote to have in a major paper. But since it took her eight years to stop serving the dish, it is hard to deny that something other than those haunting images had just given her the push she needed to do what she knew was right.
Which leads us back to the question, is bad press necessarily bad? I notice that the bulk of our movement's leadership condemns fear tactics that turn the oppressors into victims. But in San Francisco, fear could be helping to phase out foie gras.
That first front-page foie gras story, which some might have seen as bad press for the movement, inspired more than fear. Television news generally takes its cues from the press—particularly from the front pages. In San Francisco, the Channel 7 “I-Team” took up the story (September 16) but shifted the focus onto the suffering of the animals. The reporter made no attempt to hide that the vandalism inspired the story. He said, “Few people have seen how foie gras is made, and that's the motive behind this recent spree of vandalism.”
He warned viewers they were about to see disturbing images, then delivered those images as he reported, “At least three times a day, a worker grabs each duck, shoves a long, thick metal tube down its throat and an air pump shoots up to a pound of corn into the duck. . . . The tube sometimes perforates the side of the duck's throat, causing scarring and other damage. And, the large amount of food has an impact. . . . The activists found barrels of ducks that died before their livers could be harvested, others still barely alive. They also watched ducks too weak or overweight to defend themselves against the rats at Sonoma Foie Gras. Rats were eating these two ducks alive and you can see evidence of similar battles on several other ducks.”
An open rescue of ducks destined for foie gras was covered, soon afterwards, by the Los Angeles Times (September 18) and Time Magazine (September 29). The coverage was clearly positive and sympathetic, as is typical of open rescue coverage. But Time does not usually cover open rescues. The short Time article noted, “The effort, the fourth attack against the foie gras business in California since July, represents the latest campaign by animal-rights activists.” One has to ask whether the open rescue effort would have been covered by Time if not for its eye-catching precursors.
On September 24 the New York Times ran a huge piece on the front page of the Dining section, headed “Foie Gras Fracas: Haute Cuisine Meets the Duck Liberators.” The reporter opened with the recent attacks on the California restaurant. She noted, “Animal rights activists who claimed responsibility for the destruction—and for an earlier attack on the homes of the cafe's chef and his partner—call foie gras the ‘delicacy of despair,’ born of cruelty to animals.” I have heard from those in the open rescue field that a completely sympathetic article in the works was pulled in favor of this one thanks to the spate of vandalism. However, the topic is now so hot that more articles about the foie gras controversy are likely to run. And, following the Dining story, the Times printed at least the equivalent of a sympathetic article—an extraordinary page of letters to the editor, universally condemning foie gras and giving more details on the brutality involved in its production. The first letter called for vegetarianism; others expressed disgust that the FBI had labeled those trying to save lives terrorists, when the real terrorists are those who torture animals.
As this book goes to press the foie gras controversy continues to make the news. The New York Times has run an anti-foie gras oped headed: “Honk if you hate foie gras” (September 27, 2003). It focused on the personality of geese. The Chicago Tribune ran a shorter version of the New York Times Dining section story (September 29, 2003). The San Francisco Chronicle still pursues the foie gras story, with the focus now on poor conditions at a Sonoma duck farm. And the cover of the Metro section of the Saturday, November 29, Los Angeles Times tells us of a petition presented to the Sonoma City Council, requesting a ban on the sale of foie gras! It is clear that the ALF attacks and the resulting front-page coverage got the ball rolling. Therefore, the mainstream of our movement should not deny that this ALF action has had a positive effect. And the ALF should not deny that the coverage mattered. Because of the media, the attacks on the chef had an effect greater than interference with the targeted store: Chefs throughout San Francisco, such as Traci Des Jardins, are now wary of foie gras. That is because they know what happened to Manrique, because there was press. And the press led to mass education on the cruelty of foie gras thanks to an unprecedented, highly informative, and sympathetic exposé on San Francisco's evening news. All factions of our movement must see the value in that.
Mink: To Free or Not to Free?
On August 25 a week after the foie gras store attacks in San Francisco, an ALF raid of a Seattle fur farm released 10,000 mink into the surrounding environment. That is the sort of action I have not supported in the past. Mink are carnivores, which makes their release into the environment ethically questionable. Moreover, most of the mink were recaptured within a day, many were run over, and many soon died of starvation or dehydration. Neighbors shot many of them because they attacked and killed cats and dogs, exotic birds, ducks, and chickens. The press therefore suggested that the release was cruel to the mink. That argument is weak. Why is life in a tiny cage till certain death by asphyxiation or anal electrocution better for a wild animal than freedom and death elsewhere? Further, it is reasonable to assume that at least a few of the mink have survived and are happy to be free.
But the animals they will eat as they live out their lives in the wild are presumably not so happy they are free. And since the fur farm is still in business and other mink waiting to be skinned will fill their cages, there is perhaps no overall benefit for the animals—except that in this second major August 2003 ALF action, there was again extraordinary press.
The story was on the front page of the Tuesday, August 26 Seattle Times, on local Seattle TV that night, and covered extensively on CNN the following Monday and Saturday. None of that coverage could be considered positive in the traditional sense. It focused on the suffering of the fur farmer, the neighbors, and the released minks rather than the suffering on fur farms. It included no graphic fur farm footage. Yet, again, I must question whether there is really such a thing as negative press on animal rights issues at this stage of our movement. The fur industry is doing well; many see the anti-fur movement as over. But the huge amount of coverage the mink liberation garnered sends a clear signal that it is not.
And some of the press coverage was clearly positive—it discussed the issue. The Sunday, August 31, Los Angeles Times ran a half page story, including a close-up photo of a mink, in its front section (page A19). The story was headed “Freed Mink Unleash a Debate on Cruelty to Animals.” It was sub-headed “In a Washington town, activists release 10,000 farm-raised animals into the wild.” (The same article on the Web was sub-headed “Extremists set loose 10,000 animals, raising havoc and tempers in a Washington town.” What a difference an editor can make!)
The article did describe the havoc created by the loose mink. But then it noted that the release had led, among residents, to “a renewed discussion on the nature of cruelty, the issue at the heart of the debate over fur farming.” It asked, “What is more cruel to the mink: being raised and killed in a cage, or being freed and possibly killed in the wild?”
A neighbor, who lost companion animals to the mink and was furious about the release, nevertheless gave this valuable quote: “I mean, c'mon, it's 2003. No one needs to wear fur coats.” And another neighbor was quoted saying that the worst thing you can do to wild animals is put them in a small cage. She shuddered at the thought of how they are killed.
Theresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission USA was quoted saying that the state's fur farms are on “pins and needles” since such attacks usually happen in strings.
The Los Angeles Times article ended with a superb quote from Mitchell Fox, an animal rights advocate in Seattle: “What those ALFers did was goofily, amateurishly, well-meaningly dumb. What the farmers do is calculatedly, professionally, unremittingly cruel.”
The last line of an article plants the impression with which people are left. So when an action leads to a prominent Los Angeles Times piece that ends with a quote noting the cruelty of fur farming, one has to admit to some uncertainty as to how dumb the action really was. Perhaps few mink from the release survived in the wild, or each one taken from a cage was replaced. But what if some readers of the Los Angeles Times article, reminded of the cruelty of fur farming, declined the mink trim jackets for sale on Rodeo Drive? Then the action might have saved some animals. If those readers included trendsetting Los Angeles celebrities, it might have saved many animals.
Did the press on this action make animal rights activists look bad? Dumb, perhaps. But I doubt that a view of animal rights activists as dumb will cause people to wear fur. Overall, did the action hurt or help animals? It hurt the animals the mink ate in the wild. But the press may have discouraged people from buying fur coats. The action clearly started discussion in the town where the release occurred, and the press spread the discussion elsewhere. Discussion of animal rights issues will no doubt help the animals.
Should We “Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Bomb”?
Do coverage and impact change significantly with the use of explosives? Two small bombs exploded early Thursday, August 28, 2003, at the Chiron Corp compound in Emeryville, California. Chiron had been a SHAC target, due to its past use of Huntingdon Life Sciences to test products and its refusal to rule out future dealings with the company. Days after the attack, a group called the Revolutionary Cells Animal Liberation Brigade took responsibility. It is not a group with which leaders of SHAC or spokespersons for the ALF appear to be familiar.
Some activists have posited that the bombs were actually the work of agents provocateurs who hope to give animal rights activists bad press and would like to encourage an FBI crackdown on SHAC in order to allay the harassment of Chiron. However Rod Coronado told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that the increased use of explosives is likely, as there is a new crop of radical activists who think classic ALF tactics have been too lightweight. Such a statement from somebody who is presumably familiar with the current tenets of the ALF makes it seem less likely that the blasts were the work of agents provocateurs.
The story made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on three different days and has been in over 100 papers nationally and internationally. In this way millions of people have been reminded that there are those who vehemently, even violently, oppose animal testing. Many of the articles mentioned SHAC or Bite Back magazine, so interested readers could find out more. The press made it clear that the FBI was treating the incident as domestic terrorism. But every major article included quotes from ALF or SHAC spokespersons saying that though they supported economic sabotage, violence against humans or members of other species is unacceptable.
Perhaps the most interesting article, because of its timing, less than two weeks after the blasts, appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, September 7. It is hard to deny that the blasts probably inspired the article. It opened with the line, “New technology and the drive to cut research costs could do as much to reduce animal testing in the United States as the intense animal-rights protests that hit Chiron this summer.” Note that it gave at least some credit to the intense animal rights protests. The article discussed a gradual trend towards reduced animal use, “partly out of concern for animal well-being, but also from a practical need to trim expenses.” Since SHAC's tactics have been aimed at making animal experimentation not just expensive but economically unfeasible, the article could suggest that the tactics are on the right track.
If Somebody Dies, Does Our Movement?
SHAC was not responsible for the bombs. Yet it did not condemn the action, since nobody got hurt. The fear that when arson or explosives are used, somebody eventually will get hurt, is realistic. Some would not care if that somebody were a vivisector. But in such a case, there is little doubt that the press coverage would be entirely unfavorable; we could lose much public sympathy. There is a general assumption that it would set back our cause.
For argument's sake I am going to present a radical view: Some say fear is the strongest motivator and that the death of some vivisectors would send the strongest possible signal that vivisection is a bad investment and certainly not a good choice for a promising long-term and lucrative career.
Would the “bad” press around a human death necessarily be bad? Or might it be good for the movement to have a new image—to trade ineffectual virtue for the threat of justice brought by force? Might it announce that the movement must be taken seriously or there will be dire consequences?
I asked feminist icon Gloria Steinem about the effect of violence, and even murder, on the pro-life movement. While she is strongly opposed to all violence and feels in the long run it will harm the prolife movement, she wrote, “Yes, the murder of doctors and other personnel working in clinics—plus a terrorist attack on a clinic on the average of once a month—have been effective in the short-term. Landlords, insurance companies and even neighbors are now reluctant to accept clinics, and most doctors who perform abortions are the older and more idealistic ones who remember the bad old days of illegal abortion.”
The threat of violence from the animal rights movement appears to be having a similar effect. Frankie Trull, from the Foundation for Biomedical Research (quoted by conservative columnist Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 30, 2003) has noted that medical researchers are forced out of business all the time since “People are afraid to step up and help because they don't want to draw attention to themselves.”
Would violent action from our movement turn the public away from the animals? Or, having been given a sure message that animal rights issues can't be ignored, might people run towards the more mainstream groups such as HSUS that publicly and vehemently condemn ALF activity? The HSUS is now anti-circus, anti-rodeo, recommends eating less meat as the first line of attack on the cruelty of factory farming, and encourages the use of alternatives to animal testing. Would it be such a bad thing if violent animal rights activity made the HSUS look very mainstream and if that organization therefore became the public darling, the savior, rather than the well-regarded but less influential group it is now?
I am against any action that could reasonably be expected to result in the death of humans, including vivisectors and other animal abusers. I experimented on rats in college and believe that almost anybody can be shown the light. Indeed, an interesting phenomenon in our movement is the prominence of those whose careers or leisure pursuits involved egregious abuse. They make superb spokespersons. They have knowledge in the fields of abuse, plus an ability to see the issue from both sides, making their choice of sides more compelling. Regret over the suffering they have caused in the past seems to add an extra dose of passion and commitment to their work. Not all abusers will choose to change, but we must find ways other than murder to put them out of business.
Moreover, if an innocent janitor, or one who risks her life to help others, such as a paramedic or firefighter, were killed, most activists would be heartbroken and feel that our movement had surrendered the high ground. We would be distressed, ashamed, and dispirited.
But still, I ask the question at the head of this section, in an attempt not to let my own views on what is right and wrong cloud my analysis of what the impact of the “bad press” might be. We don't know. Rejecting violence against people on moral grounds is not the same as categorically stating that it would set our movement back. I cannot pretend to be able to predict the entirety of the press that would follow a human death, and the long-term impact on our movement.
Recently, in the Netherlands, an animal rights activist killed a right-wing candidate for prime minister who intended to reintroduce fur farming. Though the connection between the assassination and animal rights activism is disputed by some, the press focused on the connection in early reports. Dutch activists have, of course, almost universally condemned the murder, and some have said it set the movement back. But I have asked many Dutch activists to point to direct negative effects and have yet to be given evidence of significant, let alone long-term, effects on progress. Those who aver that such an action must have only negative consequences forget that President Garfield's assassination in 1881, by a disappointed job applicant, spurred Congress to pass the Civil Service Act of 1883.
I personally cannot condone the use of explosives, since they can endanger innocent lives. I am similarly uncomfortable with the setting of fires. They could kill humans and must often kill members of other species living in roofs and under floorboards. But I understand that reasonable people might differ, some feeling that force, even violence, can be appropriate in the defense of the innocent. Looking at the polls taken after 9/11, one can see that most Americans feel that way. So I will focus on the press, and must admit that the Chiron bombing has not led to notable anti-animal press. Further, the press they received has reminded millions of people that animal testing is violently opposed; it has no doubt generated some discussion. We can't know what direction all of that discussion has taken. But, as millions of animals continue to die torturous deaths in laboratories, can we really think that silence is preferable?
ALF and Ronnie Go to Hollywood
Every year Genesis Awards are given to members of the major media who shine the spotlight on animal cruelty. The HSUS Hollywood office now runs the show, which is ironic in the face of the plot line I am about to discuss, since HSUS has such a mainstream image; it seems as far from the ALF as an animal activist can get. Two years ago, however, the dramatic TV series Law and Order won an award for what I think is the strongest animal rights piece ever to appear on prime time television.
The premise is as follows: monkeys are rescued from a vivisection lab; one escapes the cage, can't be quickly caught, and is left behind. In the morning, he bites the vivisector who tries to re-cage him and the man dies. Since the show tries to be as realistic as possible, and occurs in current times when other primates still have no rights, and given that the possibility of the doctor's death might have been foreseeable, the activist is charged with and convicted of murder. What made the show so groundbreaking was the beautifully scripted presentation of the animal rights argument, the highlight of which came in the defense lawyer's speech.
The lawyer presented the activist's act as one of conscience, motivated by compassion. He noted how unusual it is in our society to worry about “suffering other than human suffering.” He argued, “We think nothing of killing animals to mount their heads over our mantels or to test hairspray” because animals are viewed as property, like lumps of wood or coal or hammers or nails. Then, in the most daring pro–animal rights argument I have ever seen presented on television, he drew the analogy with which we are familiar from books such as Marjorie Spiegel's The Dreaded Comparison. He said, “I'd like to remind you of a time in the not-too-distant past when that same distinction was drawn based on the color of one's skin—when Africans were packed into ships like cordwood and brought to this continent as property of their owners, and they had no rights, and their suffering did not matter, and anyone who objected was a kook and outside the mainstream.”
When the writer, William Finkelstein, received his Genesis Award, he gave an enlightening acceptance speech. He told us that his intention, when starting work on the project, was indeed to present animal rights activists as “kooks, hopelessly outside the mainstream.” But he had to do some reading on the subject in order to write a good script, and the reading opened his eyes and shifted the story's direction. That Finkelstein became well-acquainted with our movement is clear, not only from his having penned a speech that many of our leaders would have been proud to write, but also from a delicious “inside joke”—he named the dead scientist Ronald Lee. So the defense speech includes a line in which the jury is asked not to criminalize the defendant's intent just because it “brought about the unanticipated tragedy in the death of Ronald Lee.” One suspects Finkelstein's jab might be a way of asking if the ALF would be willing to engage in actions that risk human life if the lives at risk were their own.
On the one hand, Finkelstein's original intention, to paint animal rights activists as kooks, indicates the general public's reaction to the ALF. On the other, as noted in an article cited above about the mink raid, ALF action generates discussion. And when animal rights issues are discussed, there are opportunities for people to learn. Here, ALF activity caught the imagination of a major television writer who took the discussion to prime time television. Though we wish the simple fact of animal suffering would have the same effect, without lawbreaking or heroes, it is hard to deny that most major media is interested in sex and violence. Therefore, illegal, even violent activity is highly likely to get media coverage and therefore to generate discussion. Prime time, top-rated television drama in which animal rights theory is presented in a gripping manner is about as good as media coverage can get.
Arming the Forces for the Media Ambush
Press generates discussion, and each of the three actions I cite above, and the host of actions that led to the fictionalized Law and Order incident, generated much press. Whether unsympathetic press sets our movement back, moves it forward, or does neither is hard to document. But almost all activists agree that sympathetic press takes us forward. During the ALF raids of the 1980s, the underground arm worked with those aboveground so that press conferences followed raids. Videos of abuse were provided to the press and aired on television.
One wonders how much more educational the TV coverage of the Washington mink release might have been if a press conference had been organized, or if the day after the release the local stations had received video evidence of the appalling conditions on mink farms. What if the attacks on the foie gras restaurant had coincided with the delivery to every major media outlet of photos and film of force-feeding, or of geese who had died when their livers burst? Or if the Chiron bomb blasts had happened in the early hours of a day on which the press received the Huntingdon Life Sciences video of the beagle being punched for misbehaving during his torture? Perhaps that video finally would have made the US news.
Some of the current spokespersons for the ALF have voiced disdain for the media. And some of the leaders of our movement mainstream, in love with the press but disdaining the ALF, won't take advantage of the media inroads made by the underground. Yet ALF action has still managed to inspire loads of press, some of it sympathetic. If that can happen with plain dumb luck, imagine what might be achieved with a real battle plan!