What "non-violent ethic of animal rights"? That is not our definition of animal rights, two bloggers recently exclaimed.

In this article, Lee Hall argues that -- unless it would be caught hopelessly in the quicksand of the very impulses it seeks to guide humanity beyond -- the social movement for animal rights is indeed non-violent.

The two bloggers also considered a suffragist’s arson part of a success story. On the very date they published their remarks, fires ripped through the state of Victoria, and ash rained down on dead kangaroos beside scorched lakes. The world watched the terrible damage done in the February fires, which have involved the largest arson investigation in Australian history. Nearly two hundred humans and hundreds of thousands of other animals – including gliders, wombats and possums, koalas, turtles, little mouse-like antechinuses, spiders, bandicoots and birds -- have died. Those of us in the midst of this unbearable tragedy could not possibly think of deliberate fire-starting with anything but anguish.

– Claudette Vaughan, ed., Abolitionist Online, Feb 2009

PACIFIST BUT NOT PASSIVE: VEGANISM AS DIRECT ACTION
By Lee Hall^[1]

Recently, Steven Best and Jason Miller wrote a blog piece^[2] ridiculing myself, my book  Capers in the Churchyard , and the group with which I work, Friends of Animals. Its title is “Pacifism or Animals: Which Do You Love More?” for those who want to look it up. This Nastygram from Steve and Jason (hereinafter “NSJ”) begins by invoking a person it apparently sees as popular enough to marginalize my view.  “Driven by his profound love of animals, Paul Watson is perhaps the ultimate animal defender…..”  

I’ve no interest in prevailing upon readers to wade through further discussion of Paul Watson. Briefly: I dislike tree-spiking, which Paul brags of inventing. Human hierarchies must be addressed along with human dominion over nature. But rather than build alliances with timber workers, Paul chose to risk breaking these people’s faces, calling them “a rot, a disease and an aberration against nature,” and “ pathetic foot-soldiers to the corporate generals of the logging industry.” Such statements not only provoke; they are also wrong, including in the political sense. They alienate people with solid experience in other social movements.

Steve and Jason next proceed to conflate, in one paragraph, “violence” and “vital forces of ethics and justice” and Rosa Parks. What Parks did by refusing to give up a seat on the bus -- by firmly saying “I don’t think I should have to stand up” -- was non-violent, but it captured people’s imagination, sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and tipped the scales for de-segregation across the United States, giving the civil-rights movement one of its first major victories.

And yet, contra Steve and Jason, animal-rights advocacy is unlike the movement for de-segregation or universal suffrage. It’s unlike the Boston Tea Party. Animal advocates can’t just try to copy other social movements. That’s because nonhuman beings generally cannot organize, make demands, and help free themselves from subjugation and domestication. They rely wholly on humans to make the case for relinquishing our control over them. What other people think of our policies and tactics, then, matters all the time, immensely. And I’ve yet to meet a person who embraced animal rights because their property was set afire or because someone threatened their grandkids, which are the kinds of things I criticize in  Capers in the Churchyard .

The NSJ endorses intimidation and coercion because a particular testing firm, Huntingdon Life Sciences, is “notorious for extreme animal abuse…manipulated research data…senseless brutality for profit”; for example, “on numerous occasions employees have been caught on tape punching beagle dogs in the face, dissecting live monkeys, and other barbarities.” These transgressions are indeed notorious. I wrote about them in my book, observing that the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign is all about, well, stopping Huntingdon’s animal cruelty. Meanwhile, the constant development and marketing of new drugs, chemicals, and procedures keeps thousands of testing labs in business, apart from Huntingdon’s three sites.

A minority of the public disapproves of all lab testing, but polls suggest most people accept it for medical research if they believe there is no unnecessary suffering. By highlighting egregious abuse, the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaigners are not challenging the prevalent public opinion. Arguably, they reinforce it. If its employees didn’t punch beagles, would Huntingdon escape scrutiny? On the surface, SHAC appears to be hip, anti-authoritarian. Dig a bit deeper: It’s attempting to perform a policing role.

Steve and Jason call illegal sabotage “extensional self-defense carried out by human proxy agents on behalf of suffering animals.” At best, that’s fancy talk for rescue work. And rescues, legal or otherwise, make one party dominant; witness the many images of rescuers protectively holding smaller beings in their arms. This is not to say rescue is a bad thing (surely all animal advocates have a responsibility to care for refugees from the system); but veganism works comprehensively. Vegans, by opting out of the system that brings animals into being as commodities, spare animals from being victimized in the first place. So veganism doesn’t lend itself to dramatic flourishes.

This does not mean we advocate simply going into our kitchens and forgetting about the current plight of an animal. We do not shrink from challenging specific kinds and settings of oppression. I am working with other advocates to challenge several proposals that would impose control on free-roaming horses and burros, on deer, and on coyotes; we’re using town meetings, moral and environmental arguments, a variety of media and other outlets to raise consciousness and channel dissent. The same is true for other projects. People can challenge vivisection and other forms of manipulation and control  without bomb threats, and  with  an underlying commitment to refuse to dominate and consume animals ourselves. 

Who are the collaborationists?

Steve and Jason recommend “tactics appropriate to the evils inflicted on animals.” Similarly, as  Capers in the Churchyard  recounts, one press officer for Britain’s ALF called experimenters’ children “a justifiable target for protest,” even while acknowledging that such a view parallels the experimenters’ own beliefs in using animals. The spokesperson stated, “Some say it is morally unacceptable but it is equally unacceptable to use animals in experiments. The children of those scientists are enjoying a lifestyle built on the blood and abuse of innocent animals. Why should they be allowed to close the door on that and sit down and watch TV and enjoy themselves when animals are suffering and dying because of the actions of the family breadwinner?”

There are plenty of models for determined activism that require no recourse to methods “equally unacceptable” to the domineering and using we’d like to get beyond. Yet Steve and Jason refer to activists who refuse to  be what we claim to reject  as “good Germans” and “puppets of the corporate-state complex” and “bourgeois.” Think arson is unacceptable? You risk being accused of feeling “more comfortable with animal exploiters than true animal liberators.” Tough talk, but to be consistent in that approach, the makers of Molotov cocktails would be setting them in their parents’ fridges -- likely repositories of honey-baked hams.

“With nary a nuance in sight,” say Steve and Jason, I’ve dismissed groups such as the Animal Liberation Front and SHAC as “all ‘coercive’ or ‘criminal’…” They don’t quote an actual sentence here. They claim that “apparently in Lee Hall’s world” the history of the ALF is “simply the actions of terrorists and therefore, in Stalinist fashion, just erased from history.” Their words distort -- or maybe they never read  Capers.

Into the eighties, the book explains, “the Animal Liberation Front held fast to pacifist principles”; but the ALF has increasingly been pushed, by Best and others, to promote military-style tactics. And now it’s fairly common to see young activists receive long sentences (a trend from which prison companies and state budgets stand to benefit). And for what?

One of the most striking examples of a supposed militant victory (for which several people are now locked up) was the exhuming of Gladys Hammond’s bones from an old churchyard in order to press Hammond’s living relatives to stop breeding guinea pigs for Huntingdon Life Sciences.  By the time the family finally gave in, they’d converted their farm back to a dairy business, and Huntingdon had procured another source of guinea pigs. Nevertheless, activists held a victory march not far from the church.

They were pelted by local residents with bacon and eggs. 

Frightening activism can easily turn a farmer or university lab into a public victim. In the face of a campaign ranging from hunger strikes to online postings of construction workers’ photos to incendiary devices, Oxford University’s new Biomedical Sciences Building took its first delivery of mice this past November. One long-time vegan, who (in 2003-04) had successfully opposed the building of a primate lab at Cambridge, was accused in 2007 of connections with an ALF fire-bomb campaign at Oxford, and just got jailed for ten years. No mass outcry followed on the part of the general public.  

Asked for opinions of various anti-vivisectionist actions, most people accept educational demonstrations. Almost no one supports property damage, let alone death threats or grave desecrations. Eighty-eight percent think it morally wrong to post online the names and addresses of people in some way connected with animal testing. The NSJ’s “pluralist, pragmatist, and contextualist” endorsement of fear tactics has little to recommend it.

Steve and Jason say vegan education has only impacted 1% of the population whereas SHAC in England “threaten[ed] the economic interests of exploiters and even the capital supply to an entire nation” and caused the “power elite” to “tremble” with “some scintilla of the fear they inflict on their animal victims.” I suspect these parties are in no rush to consider the viewpoint of either lab animals or activists, let alone make connections between human and nonhuman fear. They see fireworks, graffiti, and menacing phone calls as delinquency. Animals get no breaks when their owners fear or loathe their advocates. 

The NSJ says “the rapidly worsening ecological crisis does not allow the long march through the state and the plate and that we have but moments to effect radical change”.  To this,  J. Muir, a vegan activist in Victoria BC, asks: “Is it really credible to suggest that radical ecological change will come through yelling at vivisectionists at their homes or threatening their children or taking a few dogs from a laboratory?”

The only way to guide science and industry to the end of using conscious beings -- I’m convinced there’s no shortcut -- is to work for veganism, defined as a holistic philosophy of ending human dominion over other animals. Getting pissed off that it’s not happening fast enough, and even releasing a few animals here and there, doesn’t challenge the bureaucratic tradition, ingrained for a hundred years now, that requires drugs and chemical be tested on conscious living individuals, or the much older assumption that we have the right to dominate, plunder, and domesticate.

“Perhaps Hall’s pacifism is actually a calculated and deceitful means” of collaboration with “the mortal enemies of the defenseless innocents,” say Steve and Jason, anticipating no limits to the potential gullibility of their audience. A movement for social justice (in contrast to a merely provocative voice) makes hope possible, and envisions culture beyond coercion. Let’s not ridicule the power of people becoming organized, which is the vegan movement’s point. Vegans know about injustice. We know our economic system, which rewards extraction and accumulation, thwarts sustenance of the planet and respect for life. But how many have avoided us, equating us with people who like to handle explosives or feel a sense of control over others?

We can cultivate a cultural shift. The vegan movement, now just six decades in the making, isn’t slow, and it may culminate quite suddenly, as our offer of another way of living meets climate crisis, as respect for our Earth is compared to what happens without it:  millions of environmental refugees, wars over basic resources, and the accompanying barbarism!

In an article on Friends of Animals’ website, I wrote, “Above all, the key change is diet, for it is absurd to discuss the rights of animals as we eat them. The vegetarian movement employs the most direct action of all.” The NSJ calls this “hubris” and evidence of a “Stalinist” move to erase other successes. Move the melodrama aside, says Claudette Vaughan of the  Abolitionist Online , and it’s “simply absurd to consider violent tactics superior to veganism -- that is, not eating the subjects of liberation.” And now we know animal farming (flesh and dairy) impacts the ecology as harshly, if not more, than all forms of transport combined. Some communities are themselves opting out of fossil fuel use, and we should work with them, encouraging them to become conscientious objectors to animal use as well.^[3] We should work in the fair-trade movement, pressing it to encompass the ethic of fairness beyond the species boundary. These are the issues of our time, and I must defend  Capers  as one of the rare animal-rights books that at least begins a discussion on agriculture, the extinction crisis, and climate disruption as urgent issues for a modern animal-rights focus. But Steve and Jason suggest it assumes we have unlimited time. (Again, did they read the book? Although at first glance they appear to quote Capers   when quoting an online essay by a certain Judith Gansen, I found no quotes from  Capers  in this essay of 7000-plus words that’s largely about the book.)

Veganism addresses symptoms -- whether climate change, human illness and hunger, or appalling living conditions for animals. But it simultaneously works at the roots of exploitation, for it interrogates domination itself. How could we challenge any other use of animals as long as we subjugate them because we fancy the taste of their bodies and bodily fluids? Yet Steve and Jason deride vegan recipes, then erroneously frame them as a challenge to the “incredibly violent practice” of “factory farming.” Veganism calls for a far more profound change than that. It doesn’t rank factory farming against free-range farming. It understands them all as subjugation.

Listening and political engagement

The NSJ fails to comprehend Friends of Animals’ decision to invite the Southern Poverty Law Center to communicate with the animal-rights community. Complaining that the SPLC intervened in environmental and animal-rights politics to stop “ the greening of hate ,” Steve and Jason say coercive activists are “not principally about hate, but rather love -- a love of life and sympathy for all sentient beings so great they will risk their own freedom to secure that of another.” For people who claim to be attuned to love and sympathy, these writers have a bizarre way of articulating it. They approvingly quote Paul Watson: “We are a violent species, and we always solve our problems with violence. There have been no exceptions. Nonviolent victories are a myth. Force has always prevailed.” Hence, they screech, “Lee Hall, we have one question for you: just whose fucking side are you on in this war?”  How thoroughly self-defeating -- and what a betrayal to the ones they claim to help -- to live in a world where the cessation of war (and thus the path to animal rights) is thought impossible.

Recently, in California, activists targeted opponents of marriage equality. Someone wrote a letter to an editor backing a ballot measure to outlaw gay marriage; activists posted to the Web personal information about the author’s business and clients. A pastor received death threats. A church was pelted with eggs. It’s not difficult to see how such tactics can be turned against anyone (in a backlash against the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King’s home was bombed in the wee hours of 30 January 1956), and why people of conscience would take no part. If SPLC wants to explain that, the advocacy community ought to give them a room to do so, and hear them out. But Steve and Jason prefer to call the SPLC people “hardened bigots” and ridicule a conference where recycled vegetable oil is recommended as fuel. They’re put off: “No intimidation or sabotage here.” They’re annoyed by our “appeal to humanity’s alleged inner moral goodness” and vegan principles, which they ridicule by calling this view the Joy of Tofu. By doing this they ridicule the basis of a movement for a human civilization which, as Vegan Society co-founder Donald Watson said, would actually deserve to be called one.

Then they want to know who I’d rather see behind bars: SHAC or someone who runs a company that uses animals. The answer is neither. Imagine if our culture could transcend the idea that any conscious individual belongs in a cage.

And no, neither I nor Friends of Animals sees Barack Obama as “a saving grace and Messiah for the animals.”  Yet Noam Chomsky’s thought experiment is relevant here. “What would be the content of the ‘Obama brand’ if the public were to become ‘participants’ rather than mere ‘spectators in action’?” asks Chomsky. “It is an experiment well worth undertaking, and there is good reason to suppose that the results might point the way to a saner and more decent world.” Politicians won’t guide our ethics, but political engagement could prove pivotal in a social movement that challenges the idea of humanity as masters and owners.

In brief: I have raised issues in  Capers in the Churchyard  that Jason and Steve miserably fail to deal with, and their use of phrases like “anarcho-veganist perspective” does not help them in the slightest. Their main complaint is that Capers  “leaves readers with the impression that the movement would be light years ahead” without intimidation and vandalism.  Yes, that was the point. (Actually, about 25 years ahead.) Nor is this a matter of disliking internal debate. This is a matter of disliking foolish provocation that wastes peoples’ lives. It’s also a matter of how we will project the animal-rights movement. In a community that should support egalitarian principles, showy, aggressive-macho bluster is oddly common. (I’ll avoid commenting on the NSJ’s promotion of “the third leg of militant agitation”!) It makes little sense to put a special premium on physical force and destructive displays, and get away with packaging that as radical.

Let’s move on.

Footnotes