ANIMAL SOLDIERS-A RARE AND EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH RONNIE LEE

A RARE AND EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH RONNIE LEE
Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan

Abolitionist: Thank you for starting the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). It forced it’s detractors to take animal liberation and animal rights seriously.

Ronnie Lee: The Animal Liberation Front was not just started by me. The reason why I am so well known as the person who started it is because I am still active within the animal rights movement.

At the very beginning there were actually six of us. I remember we had a meeting at a basement café in London. Most of us had been involved in the hunt saboteurs and we agreed that something more hard-hitting had to be done because in those days there were obviously quite a few organisations campaigning against animal persecution but they weren’t really achieving anything. Vivisection and factory farming and all the other areas of animal persecution seemed to be getting worse.

The tactics of the existing organisations were making very little difference and we had all had experience with a form of direct action so we were thinking along the lines of expanding that and taking it further. We decided that the way to do that was through damage to property of animal abusers to actually hinder them from doing what they wanted to do to animals. We discussed this and we didn’t know where it would all go. We knew it might come to nothing. We could be all arrested and put into jail and that would be the end of it or it might help to ignite something. We didn’t know which way it would go but we knew that something had to be done.

Some of us were influenced by other things and by other movements. One of the big influences on me that was around at the time was a group called ‘The Angry Brigade’. It was a time when Franco’s regime was still in power in Spain in the late 60’s/early 70’s. They took a lot of direct action against all forms of oppression and fascism in society. E.g., they blew up a broadcasting van at the Miss World Contest and they attacked the home of the Home Secretary. None of their actions injured anybody. They were influenced by a radical group called the Situationists who were mainly based in France.

You had to do striking things to wake people up and they created what they called ‘situations.’ For instance they did a direct action in a church in Paris. They wanted to get across about how false religion was so what they did was they got into the church, they tied up the priest, one of them dressed up in his vestments and went out in front of the congregation – so all the people in there thought he was a priest – and then he started saying “God is Dead”, “There is no God”. That got loads of publicity and caused a big scandal. They believed in doing that kind of striking action. That influenced me quite a lot and I was thinking how this could this be applied to animals. Can we take these striking actions to wake people up to animal abuse and to what’s going on.

In the beginning the ALF was called the “Band of Mercy”. In the 19th Century not long after the RSPCA was formed, there was actually an RSPCA Youth Group who called themselves the “Band of Mercy.” This group of young people actually took direct action. One of the things they did was damage some guns that were used for shooting animals. That wouldn’t happen in the RSPCA today but we thought yeah, it would be good to re-ignite the spirit of that group.

We started off by going to hunt kennels and causing damage to the vehicles there. Maybe spraying a few slogans around as well. Then we tried to destroy a vivisection laboratory that was being built. We made 2 attempts by getting into the building and starting fires. It wasn’t destroyed but it did cause reasonable amount of damage. It was built in the end but our actions delayed it. We destroyed a boat that was used for seal hunting and one of the results of that direct action was the seal hunt was cancelled. It was a yearly event and it has never taken place since then. There was a big protest movement against the seal hunting and our action was the thing that tipped it over. After that the Government never gave out any more licenses. That kind of success brought seal hunting in that area to a permanent end.

A couple of us were caught, arrested and ended up being sentenced to 3 years in prison. We were only in prison for a year because we had no previous convictions. One of the things that pleased me a lot when I was in prison was there was a guy who actually broke into a ICI Laboratory and rescued some beagles. He was caught but they ended up dropping the charges against him. ICI didn’t want the adverse publicity of the court case so they refused to press charges. I was really pleased because I was worried that the fact we were put in prison would put other people off taking direct action. I didn’t really know what would happen. I was pleasantly surprised when I got out of jail to have animal rights people coming up to me saying, “I want to get involved in that”. Out of the original 6 people, when we were put in prison, a couple of them dropped out, so that number was cut down. A lot of other new people then wanted to get involved and it was at that time we changed the name to Animal Liberation Front because Band Of Mercy sounded like some sort of religious organisation. It didn’t mention animals or say what we were about so we thought Animal Liberation Front was a good name because that’s what it was all about.

I took a short break away from direct action but soon got back into it again. It was the same thing – causing damage to places and at this time people also started to rescue animals. Up until this point we hadn’t done a lot of animal rescue work but there was one particular place where we broke into a shed belonging to a company that was breeding guinea pigs for vivisection. We had gone there to cause damage to their van but for some reason the van wasn’t there, so we broke into the place and we rescued 6 guinea pigs and as a result of that the place closed down. The woman that ran the place was so worried we would return, she actually closed her place of business. That was our first success. We just took these 6 guinea pigs and ended up with the place closing down so that was great.

The name was changed to Animal Liberation Front in 1976 and we were able to rescue animals such as dogs and cats mainly from places that bred animals. The security at breeding places wasn’t as tight as at the laboratories so they were an easier target. From one place we broke into we managed to get a whole list of these breeders and then we began targeting them and because there were more of us we were able to rescue animals more often, because you need more people to manage large numbers of rescued animals. To do damage to a place you only need 2 to 3 people but if you go in to rescue cats or hens from a battery unit you need as many as a dozen people to carry in and transportation etc. It’s much more complicated. What eventually became known as economic sabotage began at this time. In the beginning, the idea was to cause damage to try and prevent them directly abusing animals. For example; damage to vehicles that were used to transport animals to laboratories and physically trying to prevent that transportation. As time went on that changed to trying to cost the company money. You didn’t necessarily have to damage something directly connected to the animal abuse. If something belonged to that company then that was equally valid. The idea became one of economic sabotage and costing them money became the main reason for causing damage. I got arrested and put in jail for another raid when we rescued some mice from a breeding establishment. I got a 12-month sentence for that and I came out from it thinking I can either take a backseat again from direct action or carry on with it. What happened was because I had been in prison and well known to the media, whenever there was a ALF action I’d get the media contacting me asking me to comment on it. I ended up becoming the ALF Press Officer – it was just something that happened because they keep contacting me and that went on for a number of years. I’d give interviews and go around and give talks to animal rights groups, interviews to journalists and that kind of thing. Also at this time, 25 years ago, the ALF Supporters Group was set up. The idea of that was to enable people who couldn’t be active to help the activists and its purpose was two-fold. One was fundraising and the other was to get people to write letters to activists in prison. In those days it was very blatant. The ALF Supporters newsletter would say give money to finance raids and there was even things like sponsor a crowbar and sponsor a balaclava. If you sponsor a crowbar, you’ll get a picture of the crowbar and information on what raid it was used on. (laughter). It was actually as blatant as that (laughter)

To be honest where the money was needed wasn’t in the causing of damage but more in animal rescue because that was the expensive thing. If we got 15 Beagles out of a place some of them went to animal rescue places and we felt obliged to give some money to these places because they were spending a lot of funds looking after these animals. A lot of the money that we raised from the Supporters Group went into the animal rescue side of it rather than into financing damage raids because really it doesn’t cost much money to break into somewhere and cause damage.

At a later stage I took over the publishing of the ALF Supporters Group newsletter as well as being the Press Officer for the ALF. I eventually got arrested in connection with that. How it happened was some people were arrested in Sheffield. A guy had invented an incendiary device to be used against the fur trade. A lot of big stores all over the country had departments for selling fur coats. The idea was that somebody would plant an incendiary device together with a timer, contained in a cigarette packet, in the department store during the day and set it to go off in the middle of the night, not to cause damage by fire, but to set off the sprinkler system, which would cause hundreds of thousands of pounds of water damage to the store. The mistake they actually made was doing it in their own city. These people put one in a department store in Sheffield and so when the police were looking for the people who did it, they eventually caught the group responsible. When this incendiary devise was invented I got invited up to meet these people. They basically wanted to explain to me what they were doing because they knew I would get the media contacting me about it and they wanted to explain what was going on. I knew about it because they wanted to tell me but they ended up getting arrested and I got arrested as well because the flat where they were having their meetings had been bugged by the police. They were having a conversation and I was mentioned by them in this conversation so the police came and arrested myself and Vivien Smith, who was the editor of the Supporters Group newsletter. Some other people, from various parts of the country, were rounded up as well. I was charged with conspiracy to incite other people to cause damage and that was mainly to do with publishing of this Supporters Group newsletter. We used to publish step-by-step guides on how to do a raid because in those early days for a long time we were able to get away with it. Nobody would dare do that today but in those days there had been less police interest in what we were doing. We’d been going like that for years. Blimey, what we got away with! The police had shown no interest and there was complacency with them so we were able to get away with blatantly encouraging people to take action and began to think that nothing was going to happen to us. In the end, it did.

In the court case they gave everybody ranks. They couldn’t, or didn’t want to, understand that people within the ALF worked autonomously. They had to give people different ranks. I was “The General” and some of the other people were “Area Commanders”. Vivien, who was working in the ALF Press/Supporters Group office with me, was classed as my “Lieutenant” and the other people who actually planted the devises were just “Foot Soldiers”. When I was sentenced I was jailed for being “The General” – a 10-year sentence. Of course it wasn’t like that at all but because they portrayed it like that, the Judge was quite happy to look at it in that way. The people that actually planted the devices got 4 years and I was never accused of actually doing anything except inciting people to do things. They maintained that if it wasn’t for me, all these actions wouldn’t have happened, which was plain nonsense but was what the Judge wanted to believe. I ended up serving 6 years and 8 months of my 10 year sentence.

I don’t know what the situation is like in Australia but over here on a long prison sentence (not a life sentence) you normally only serve 2/3rds of the sentence, unless you break prison rules, when they can make you serve longer. I didn’t get parole and had to serve the maximum 2/3rds. It didn’t deter other people from doing things. ALF actions are still going on. The way it’s focused has changed, but I think it’s more effective now than what it was in those days. When we were doing actions we really didn’t think in terms of it being part of a concentrated campaign. We just lashed out at any form of animal abuse that we could lash out at. It’s all got it’s value, but an ALF action is more effective and has more of an impact if it’s tagged onto an existing campaign. Two big campaigns over here are SHAC (against the Huntingdon Life Sciences vivisection lab) and SPEAK (against the construction of a primate lab at Oxford University). ALF actions have been carried out in support of both of these campaigns. The campaign organisers obviously try to operate within the law, but they can’t stop the ALF from supporting their campaigns in its own way and can’t deny that those ALF actions add weight to those campaigns. It’s a whole lot of different things happening with the direct action being part of it. To me that’s a more effective use of direct action than hitting out at everything. It’s not just with regard to vivisection either. For example, last year a local branch of greyhound protection group Greyhound Action were running a campaign to close the dog track at Glastonbury Stadium. This consisted of demos, leafleting, street stalls etc. Then bang, bang, bang, the ALF carried out three damage attacks on the stadium and the guy in charge there decided to close the track. To their credit, Greyhound Action didn’t condemn the ALF, like other similar “peaceful” organisations have done in the past, but accepted that there was “no doubt that the ALF actions contributed significantly” to the closure of the dog track and even went so far as to say that they were “quite sure such activists would be regarded as heroes” by greyhounds persecuted by the dog racing industry.

Let’s go back to the Situationists for a minute because many people have the misconception that you were influenced by the anarchists. The Situationists was fact were influenced by Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle and you Ronnie were more influenced by Raoul Vanigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life. It’s ingenious what the Situationists were attempting to do and that was they tried to penetrate the façade of life where appearance and routine is taken as the only reality operating and animals are caught up in this false reality too. What the Situationists did, first in France and then elsewhere, was create explosions of new energy happening spontaneously into a previous stagnant arena to attempt to tear aside its reality to awaken people. These people were artists not activists, not terrorists.

Absolutely! I often talk nowadays about the film the Matrix. What happens in our society is very much like that in that people live a falsehood particularly if you look at it in relation to animals. The whole of the existence of human beings is lived alongside this horrific holocaust of animals and everyone is going along their everyday life, doing their little things and being friends with each other and appearing pleasant and all of that and everything seems to be running smoothly and nicey, nicey mostly, whereas underneath it all there’s an appalling massacre that’s going on that most people aren’t aware of and don’t want to know about. There’s this horrific holocaust going on and to me it’s like people live a falsehood and they are cut off from that if you see what I mean. Of course it’s wider than that. It’s the human condition as well. It’s about living this false state of existence.

The term “speciesism” is part of the animal rights movement now but the opposite of speciesism is what’s happening within both the human and animal realm simultaneously and that’s the façade that everything is alright with the world while everybody is being slaughtered. Not only animals in vivisection and on intensive farms but specifically certain groups of people are particularly targeted in life such as Muslims, the poor and people of colour – in their multitudes. In the animal rights movement the ALF was a signal to the established order that certain people weren’t going to take it any longer. Are you happy with that interpretation?

Yeah! That was how we felt. We were going to take action and we weren’t prepared to sit back and allow people to get away with what they were doing, but it was more than just physically doing things. There was always this idea of stirring something up, making people think, making people aware where that had really never been done before.

You have been quoted as saying “Animal persecution will not be defeated by petition, peaceful posturing or the holding of hands around a slaughterhouse.” Does that still ring true today?

Yes I agree with that, I said it and it still rings true today although what I would say is it won’t just be defeated by ALF actions either. I think a wide range of different activities need to come together to actually defeat animal abuse and a hell of a lot of it will come through the use of education, because if you look at the greatest area of animal abuse it’s the rearing and slaughter of animals for food. The best way to combat that is to educate people to become vegan and that doesn’t involve direct action at all. I’m not going to criticize anyone who wants to put a brick through a butchers shop window. I’ve done that many times myself, but a more fundamental way is to educate people. An educational effort won’t change everybody, but it can make a difference with many, many people. When I first became active within the animal rights movement, when I first became a vegan, I don’t think there was a vegan for about 30 miles from where I lived. All the vegans around were like crazy people. They weren’t animal rights people, they were weird people. (laughter) because I’m an ordinary guy really, and I became aware of what happened to animals, I wanted to do something about it so I became vegetarian and then I became vegan. There were so few vegans about in those days that when a new person joined the Vegan Society, it was a huge big deal. It was like get the champagne out kind of thing. (laughter) If that happened now you’d just be permanently sozzled because so many people are becoming vegan.

I got invited to a garden party, that the Vegan Society were holding (rather like the Queen!) and I thought to myself, “Oh great! This will be a chance to meet other vegans”. It was really lucky that my vegan beliefs and principles were very strong, because if they hadn’t been I’d have not stayed a vegan because when I went to this Garden Party, many of the people there were just totally weird. There was a guy who had seven overcoats on and there was another person who was hanging upside down because he believed he had to spend a certain number of hours a day in that position. And none of them were really into campaigning against vivisection or anything like that. They were just strange vegans. I didn’t feel at home at all there and I didn’t feel at home with meat-eaters, so what was I going to do? What happened eventually was more animal rights people became vegan and they were more like me. I then became much more comfortable. We had an anti-hunting group where I lived in North London and people would join because they were against hunting and they wanted to go out and save a fox and those people would invariably be meat-eaters, but within a few weeks we had converted them all to vegan. We’d say, “Look. It’s not enough to care about foxes, what about the other animals?” So all the people that joined our group were converted to veganism and I knew this was happening with different animal rights and protection groups at the time. If there are vegans within a group then one thing leads to another, doesn’t it? Over the years more and more people became vegan so these days you are not isolated any more.

It’s so different now. I don’t think in my wildest dreams I would imagine that things would be as they are now. We still live with the holocaust of animals all around us but nevertheless, things now are so much better than what they were. When I started, 35 years ago, you couldn’t get any of the stuff that’s available now. Today soymilk can be brought everywhere. Imitation meats are available and it’s socially widespread. When I first became vegan the only liquid soymilk you could get was appalling stuff and had a green tinge to it. There was another one in powder form that floated on top of your tea, so I ended up drinking tea black. There was only one make of imitation meats, absolutely appalling stuff that was called Meatless Steak. It tasted like you would imagine shoe leather would taste you know (laughter), so I ended up more or less eating lentils, soybeans and basic things like that. When the first vegan sausage mix and textured vegetable protein came out in supermarkets, we thought we were in heaven. I don’t like supermarkets. I wish there weren’t any, but if there are going to exist, then it’s good they’re selling all of these vegan products to make them easily available to people. It’s much easier to covert people today, because if they can get imitation bacon and turkey and all these things then of course it’s going to be much easier for them to go vegan.

I would say that England embraced veganism and vegetarism because of the sheer amount of damage done to the land that mad cows disease caused over there. Enlightened, many didn’t want to go back to eating meat if it was going to kill them and that was a great boom for the animal rights movement although many thousands of cows and farm animals died horrific deaths. I would also say that the “cattle culture” of today is a very big part of keeping the capitalistic façade going, that is, that capitalism works on their terms, and that is why with specific regards to climate change, not the Greens, nor the climate change writers nor the environmentalists are prepared to attack eating meat as a serious cause of climate change by legislating that reality into manifestation, although the science concurs with what vegans have been saying all along as George Monbiot pointed out. What are your views?

The persecution of animals is fundamentally caused by what I would refer to as human supremacism. Like in the past there have been issues of white supremacism and male supremacism and the persecution of blacks or women, or where a certain group of people think they are superior to other races, like the nazis with their aryan supremacism. I think it’s a false sense of superiority to others. Human supremacism within our own species is an irrational and unjustified attitude that we are superior to other animals, which is so deeply entrenched that it even applies to people who are very radical in other ways, to anarchists, socialists, and people that are really good campaigners on other issues. Because speciesim is so deeply entrenched within us it can be very hard for people to throw off, but I think it’s something that has to be challenged at every turn because it is the underlying reason why animals are being abused. I think, for instance, that our capitalist society exacerbates the system of animal abuse, because everything is treated as a commodity, but capitalism isn’t the root cause of animal persecution. It’s caused by this false attitude that we are somehow superior to other animals. If there is ever going to a liberation of animals it’s that view we must change.

Would you please speak to SHAC US directly about the Huntingdon case as you have spent 10 years in jail – a long, long time. You wouldn’t have had a vegan support group happening back then either, would you Ronnie?

The Vegan Society were actually very good at the time with regard to getting animal rights prisoners a decent diet, but that work has now been taken over now by the Vegan Prisoners Support Group, run by a very dedicated woman called Joanne Brown. It’s wonderful all the hard work she’s done to make sure that vegans in prison get a proper diet and are properly looked after. They negotiate with the authorities to get vegan food into prisons for animal rights people. The very first time I was in prison was in 1974 and then again in 1975 and, at that time, you had no right to a vegan diet, only a vegetarian one. So what happened was I was put on a vegetarian diet, but there were a lot of things that I couldn’t, eat so I ended up more or less eating the vegetables and not being able to have the savoury because it had cheese or eggs in it. After a lot of campaigning myself really, and my Member of Parliament helped to some extent, I sent a petition to the Home Office and I managed to get some sort of a vegan diet. I remember one prison (Canterbury), where I was awaiting a court case, and every single day I had the same thing for dinner. They made a burger out of textured vegetable protein and every day I had to eat this for about 3 months. If someone was a vegan in prison in the early days they really had to fight pretty much alone to get their voice heard. Friends and family members might help, but there was no kind of established organization campaigning on behalf of vegans in prison. That eventually changed and by the 80’s proper vegan diets were being served in prisons. On my last prison sentence the vegan diet was very good. They did come up with some very nice vegan dishes. Sometimes they’d get it wrong and produce something horrible but that wasn’t very often. Things are even better now because it’s gone on from there and there’s even more recognition of the rights of vegans in prison. In the past, to get a vegan diet in prison you had to be a card carrying Vegan Society member and you had to be able to show your card to the authorities. It was good for the Vegan Society, but more complicated for vegan prisoners who weren’t members. What you got was a lot of prisoners who weren’t vegans but went on a vegan diet in prison because it was better food, so the Vegan Society got all these people joining, who weren’t really vegans, but they just wanted the card. (laughter) Now you just say you’re a vegan, and you get a vegan diet and that applies if you are a vegetarian, a Muslim or a Jew. There’s actually been that recognition, the rights of vegans.

My own attitude while in prison was just because I was incarcerated didn’t mean I ceased to be an animal liberation campaigner. You can still campaign in prison for animals. For various reasons, communication is more difficult. For a start you can’t go anywhere apart from the prison grounds, but there are always ways you can help and support. My first priority in prison was to get fit. When I was put in prison in 1986 I was a smoker (about 10 a day) and didn’t really keep myself fit, because I was so involved in doing the animal stuff and didn’t think too much about exercise. It’s very short sighted to be like that so I thought since the System had taken part of my life away, if I got fit I could get some of that back by living longer. To me, keeping fit was a large part of paying them back for what they were doing to me. A lot of people take up smoking in prison but, as you only get one chance a week to buy tobacco once a week, if you have enough willpower not to buy it and then change your mind, you have to wait another week to get it. It’s a good way to give it up because you can’t go to a shop to buy tobacco when you want. I think that helped me and I gave up and I took up running and badminton and things like that. I don’t run as much as I did while in prison but I try to do so at least several times a week and I haven’t started smoking again. If I hadn’t had that prison sentence, I might still be a smoker.

Secondly, education was another thing. You have to do some sort of work but you can do education as an alternative. A lot of prisoners don’t like to do it because it’s not that well paid and they want as much money as they can to buy as much tobacco. Of course if you don’t smoke, you don’t get caught in that trap. I thought I’d educate myself in something that would be useful in for fighting for animals. What I did was learnt different languages so I could write to people from other countries that wanted to communicate with me, but who couldn’t speak English. Computer skills are another useful thing for campaigning that you can learn in prison these days. Also there’s writing letters to people but you have to be careful because you don’t want to be saying anything illegal and end up getting into trouble yourself. The point is if you are in prison and you’re strong and you are undefeated in attitude you can give inspiration to people on the outside to carry on fighting for animal liberation.

Now that Barry Horne, Jill Phipps, Gari Allen, Tom Worby, Mike Hill and a host of others have passed away right through to the activists who walked away from the Movement, who ran away, who turned snitch, who copped out, who gave up the fight, to the one’s who had kids never to be heard of again, to the Movement heads who rode on the “animal rights” ticket as did the welfarists to made their millions from it to further sell grassroots activists out by vampirising grassroot activists’ skills, energy and stealing the thunder of their best campaigns for media and money without being answerable to no one, my question to you is this: Is it possible today to control the ideological direction the Movement will take in the future?

No one has power to control it in terms of any kind of coercive ability. You just hope that people take notice of things you say. People can have influence on the way the Movement proceeds, people can say things that others would listen to and that’s about the best any of us can hope for. If we come up with good ideas, we can hope that people will take them up. All Movements have their traitors and their spongers and it’s not just animal rights. I think we have to remember that. People have told me that Martin Luther-King bemoaned the fact that so few people turned up for protests. With the animal rights movement action is more focused on where it has the most effect now and that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?

What about the forces that are operating in the world today that were once operating covertly but now overtly. It’s easy to see how the Trade Union Movement’s back was broken and I just wonder what happens about people who want to put anything good into the world, instead of portraying animal rights people as the terrorists all of the time. Is this the sole and same formula that brings all Liberation Movements down eventually and can animal liberation be achieved “with rain but without any thunder?”

We are dealing with evil people. I don’t think we should pull any punches on that. What has actually happened in this country is there’s no socialism anymore. It’s a greedy culture that got much worse around the time of Thatcher. I don’t think anything useful will come out of the major political parties, so the Greens are probably the best bet in terms of making things better for animals and obtaining social justice for people too. We now have a political party in England called “The Party for Animals” but they are only single-issue, so, in my opinion, it’s better to support the Greens. I’m no longer an anarchist, like I was in my younger days. I’ve come to the conclusion that, as with all other animals, there’s a very strong pull within most humans to follow leaders. Rather than try to fight this reality, we need to take account of it in our battle for animal liberation. Sadly, those who advocate anarchism allow the bad guy to lead, because they say that not even the good guys should be leaders. Advocates of animal liberation need to seize political power, if we really want to have things our way.

To achieve animal liberation we need to change the way people behave and there are two ways of doing that – education and coercion. Educate those we can educate into behaving properly towards animals and force the others to do so, through legislation etc. Most people will never lift a finger to oppose animal persecution. We have to accept that. They are too busy watching soap operas or Big Brother. However, this public apathy could be advantageous once we seize power, as it would mean that most people would not resist legislation passed by a pro animal liberation government. We need to get active in the political process, in my view through the Green party, with a view to one day forming a government that will pass stringent animal protection legislation. If you succeed in educating people but, at the end of the day, there’s no-one for those people to vote for, half the potential benefit of educating those people is lost.

There is still no protection for non-human animal laboratory victims. They are frequently burned, poisoned, isolated, irradiated, traumatized, shocked and exposed to inhuman cruelties. They are forced to smoke cigarettes, they are deprived of their mother, and they are infected with HIV. They are then killed without fear or favour. Is there life on Earth?

Well, yes it’s a horrific situation but you know there’s a saying it’s better to light one small candle than curse the darkness. I am motivated much more by anger than by compassion. If I see a picture of a person torturing an animal I don’t think, “Oh my God, that poor animal”. I think “That bloody bastard. I want to stop them”. That’s probably the difference between what makes a campaigner and what makes a rescuer. We just want the animals to be left alone.

It’s about changing people’s attitudes and it’s about changing the way that people behave. People only ever change their behaviour for 2 reasons. One reason is because they want to and the other reason is because they are too frightened not to. We have to educate people, so that they want to change, but we also have to make it so they have got to, or else. I know that sounds very stark, but that is the actual reality of what we are up against. We live in the middle of a holocaust for animals. If you begin to think in terms of 1% of what happens to animals, your mind would just explode. You know it’s happening but you can’t go into it because you’d just be destroyed by it but what I think we have to do is concentrate on how to stop it, develop good strategies for stopping it and try to think in terms of what works and not waste time on things that don’t really work. Each area of animal abuse has its weakest link, where we need to exert pressure in order to bring it to an end.

A lot of the ALF’s early focus was on vivisection. At present the figures for vivisection in the UK stand at just above 3 million every year. In the mid 70’s it was 6½ million and you have to ask yourself “what’s changed?” because there haven’t been any new laws made to restrict vivisection. I think it’s the fact that many of those contemplating doing animal experiments feel scared. “I’ll have to find another way to do this experiment otherwise what is going to happen to me?”

It’s all been a voluntary thing by the people doing the experiments. There’s no laws that have compelled them not to do animal tests. That makes me wonder, what has changed? What happened at that time? What happened during that period? And what happened during that period was this radical movement arose of people willing to go in hard against vivisectors and I think that’s what made the difference.

I think what would make a difference now in cutting the figures is to have it stepped up a gear. Obviously it’s reached a plateau where you are down to the hardliners that are harder to stop, but I think personal pressure has to be put on people that carry out experiments and on companies that use animal experimentation – pressure on the company directors, who are the ultimate the decision makers. I think their personal lives should be made uncomfortable. You ask yourself why a company wants to torture animals and at the end of the day it’s because those who run the company want to make money out of it so they can have a nice life. If somebody doesn’t get a nice life out of it, then they’ll start to think “Should I really be doing that?” because the whole reason why they are doing it isn’t working. Despite the draconian legislation that’s been brought in in this country, I still think there are lawful ways of making life difficult for these people. I think people need to explore those avenues. For instance, vivisectors mostly live in secret. They don’t tell their neighbours what they are doing. Campaigners expose those vivisectors for what they are, which, in itself, will put tremendous personal pressure on them.

Obviously I’m happy with how effective the ALF has been, but, if I were back again now at the beginning, I would do things differently. In terms of my input into the ALF there are three things I would do differently today.

This is what I would do personally if I had my time again, not what I would encourage others to do now. I wouldn’t encourage people to do anything now that I wouldn’t do myself. I don’t do direct action anymore because, for personal and tactical reasons, I’m no longer in a position to break the law. Therefore, I don’t advocate that other campaigners should break the law, because I don’t regard it as right to encourage others to take personal risks that I’m not in a position to take myself.

Firstly, if I were back at the beginning now I wouldn’t go to any laboratory, I wouldn’t go to any research place. Where I would go is the homes of the animal abusers and the campaign would be focused on the animal abusers personally, because at the end of the day that is what it comes down to. All these companies are run by people and if I had my time again I would go for those people personally. I’m not talking about killing them, but I wouldn’t rule out a certain level of violence against them. I would use various methods to make their personal lives a misery. Their comfortable home lives are paid for by what they get from vivisection earnings.

So, secondly, the whole non-violent thing associated with the ALF – that would be out of the window. Most animal rights and animal liberation activity needs to be educational, and therefore non-violent, but I don’t see anything morally wrong in using violence against animal abusers.

Thirdly, by and large, I would not take animals out of laboratories. The reason for that is you don’t actually reduce animal suffering unless you do the rescue in a way that causes the laboratory to close down. All that happens is the rescued animals get replaced by others. In addition, those animals you find homes or places in rescue centres for take up spaces that could have gone to other “unwanted” animals. Therefore, by rescuing one animal, you have condemned two others. Also, animal rescue doesn’t normally put anywhere near the financial pressure on these places that is caused by raids that cause property damage.

I have a little bit of a problem with animal rescue anyway. I think it’s praiseworthy in itself and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing (my wife and I have 4 rescued dogs and 10 cats), but it’s got nothing to do with animal liberation. Animal liberation is about changing the way people behave. It’s primarily about people, not animals. What upsets me is when good animal protection campaigners get caught up in rescue and lots of their energy gets taken up by that. Rescue should be left to those who aren’t cut out for campaigning. To make an analogy: Being a heart-surgeon is a useful job and so is being a postal worker. But if a skilled heart surgeon spent all or most of their time delivering mail instead of on heart surgery, we would regard that as a waste of their talents. That’s how I feel about good campaigners who get too much involved in rescue.

The problem with not supporting animal rescue no-kill efforts totally is it gives people like Ingrid Newkirk an open invitation to install a state-of-the-art incinerator and freezer on their property, which they have done so, while still maintaining the illusion to the public and campaigners that they are promoting “animal rights”.

I think that by getting involved in animal rescue, PETA have damaged their ability to campaign effectively. Animal liberation is about campaigning to change the way people behave. Why PETA went into the rescue area is anybody’s guess. It’s appalling that there’s that whole issue about dozens of animals found in a dumpster, which does tremendous harm to any campaigns that are working for animal rights and liberation. It wipes out years and years of campaigning work because people remember things like that. Campaigners should be putting pressure on governments and local authorities to neuter and spay animals, rather than involving themselves in rescue.

In addition, where you have big organisations like PETA having to pay wages, rent for big offices etc., there can be a huge problem in that their priorities change from “what is the most effective way of campaigning” to “how to raise more money” and those two things are not the same. To win an animal liberation campaign you often have to stick at it for a very long period. Some of the campaigns that have been won over here in Britain, like the Newchurch Guinea Pig Farm closing, involved activists working away at it for years. However what brings the most money into organisations is new campaigns. You start a new campaign and let everyone know “This is a new campaign. Give us money”. So what many of the large organisations tend to do is constantly start new campaigns while ending those that have been running for a certain amount of time, even if those original campaigns haven’t achieved their objectives. This is because the main aim isn’t to win campaigns, but to get money. It’s a huge problem, which involves many of the larger national organisations, even some of the better, more radical ones. I’m not fundamentally opposed to people taking wages for animal protection work, but there is a problem with big organisations which have so many staff that they begin to operate like companies.

Finally, though, I would like to state quite firmly that this is a war we are definitely winning. More and more people are becoming vegetarian and vegan, the fur trade has been decimated in the UK and the same is starting to happen in other countries, vivisection is a lot less than it once was, we have a ban on hunting with hounds in Britain (not very effective, but it’s a start), industries that abuse animals for entertainment (in particular, circuses and greyhound racing) are dying, concern about the destruction of the environment is rapidly increasing. We still have a long way to go, but if we are strong, positive, persistent, determined, we will get there in the end.

source:http://www.abolitionist-online.com/_07lee.shtml