Some 3,000 people marched against animal experimentation in Bristol last October resulting in a mass sit-down in the city centre and 44 arrests. Thatcher was sent a letter bomb from a group called 'The Animal Rights Militia' and animal activists claimed the poisoning of turkeys in Harrods in the weeks preceding Christmas. Phil Windeatt looks at animal liberation and its implications for socialists.
Throughout 1982 there were dozens of pickets of fur shops, hunt sabotages, occupations of government and commercial animal experimentation laboratories by the Northern Animal Liberation League, and constant raids of labs and factory farms to remove animals by members of the illegal Animal Liberation Front, now claiming an active membership of 1,000. There have also been animal liberation demonstrations and raids in the USA, Canada, France, and Italy.
This is not a series of isolated occurences but the result of a movement which has been steadily growing since the mid-seventies: a movement for animal liberation that is boldly stating that the mass exploitation of animals in modern society resulting in suffering and pain (not so very different from our own) cannot be morally justified and has no meaningful benefit for human beings.
There have always been people opposed to animal cruelty ('Hole and corner reformers,' Marx accurately observed). The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed in 1824 and has always been very conservative in its activities and respectable in its aims, a moral hobby horse for the British middle classes. The 'traditionalists' are of course horrified by the ascendant 'militants', using radical tactics to inform the public of the plight of animals both wild and domestic, and to embarass the government into passing reforming legislation.
The animal liberation movement did not just drop out of the sky and there are a number of reasons for its growth. For example, the decision in 1974 by Ronnie Lee and a group of hunt saboteurs known as 'the Band of Mercy', to use illegal methods to liberate animals from laboratories and intensive farms. On Lee's release from prison 'the Band of Mercy' became the Animal Liberation Front. Academics and philosophers began to examine the moral implications of animal cruelty once again, and the best of the bunch, an Australian liberal moral philosopher Peter Singer, published a book called Animal Liberation which is still at the top of the animal liberation movement's booklist. It is basically an appeal for animals to receive the same consideration as human beings and argues that animals have fundamental rights not so dissimilar to our own. The most fundamental of these rights being an existence without the deliberate infliction of pain and suffering by human beings.
The emergence of the ecological movement, along with animal lib's first magazine Beast, and a succession of articles and items on television, have kept the subject in the public eye.
In 1982 animal liberation documentaries hit the TV screens following the limited cinema release of The Animals Film. First, BBC's Forty Minutes on the hunt saboteurs and the animal liberation movement, then Anglia TV's documentary on vivisection, and finally The Animals Film being featured on Channel Four's first week of transmission (although censored by five minutes). It is quite obvious that the media consensus allows television producers to be as radical as they like if the programme concentrates on animal oppression. Nevertheless the IBA demanded cuts from The Animals Film, not scenes of animals suffering, but of activists planning and explaining their militant motives and actions.
Why are the activists going to prison and putting their jobs and families at risk? In my experience their actions arise from pure bloody outrage at the exploitation of animals. Although animals or their by-products are all around us as pets or wildlife, the food we eat and the clothes we wear, it's not common knowledge how their by-products reach us, and by what methods. We all have a faint idea — slaughterhouses don't sound too attractive, nor does drug testing on lab animals ('nasty but inevitable') — but a rationale is usually quickly found. The ruling classes' fun 'n' games of hunting anything that moves is only the icing on a very heavy cake. For example, once you are informed how farm animals are incarcerated in darkened and crowded sheds all their lives, or that the vast majority of the millions of laboratory animals die painful deaths often without anaesthesia to test some completely irrelevant substance like a [illegible] spray [illegible] to alleviate [illegible] suffering, then you are forced into taking a position, unless you want to turn your back on your responsibilities. Some people explode into using any means possible to take animals from the place of their suffering regardless of the risks they bring upon themselves. It is moral disgust and sheer anger that leads people to the Animal Liberation Front, plus an impatience and distrust of the state's conception of parliamentary reform as the correct method of protest.
How then should the Left face up to this growth of new activism on behalf of animals? It is obvious that on one level the desire for a society that does not inflict suffering on animals is as hopelessly utopian as hoping that a few parliamentary reforms and films will convince capitalists to stop exploiting the working class. Animals are basically exploited for one reason — profit (and the totals are enormous). A cursory glance through the pages of Farmers Weekly should convince the most soft-hearted rural romantic of the massive capital intensive aspect of modern farming. Our meat comes from pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, calves, rabbits and other animals which spend their entire existence until slaughter in temperature-controlled, automatically fed, darkened and crowded hangars. Farmer Giles has been retired. In the USA sheep are the next candidate for the factory farms. In the UK farm animals have no real protection under the law apart from an outdated 1911 Protection of Animals Act that has very little bite. All attempts to reform intensive farming are stamped on by the powerful agriculture lobby in and out of government, and made ineffective by the indifference of the Ministry of Agriculture which issues 'Codes of Practice' for farmers asking them nicely not to mutilate their livestock too badly by de-horning, castrating, de-beaking, de-snooding and so on.
The multi-million pound pet food industry benefits from the over-production of pets. Charles River Ltd, dubbed the General Motors of the laboratory animal breeders, made $10,839,500 gross profit in 1979 and hundreds of species and sub-species are made extinct every year by the unplanned destruction of jungles and forests. Yet the case against animal cruelty is often put forward, especially in the media, by relatively ill-informed individuals who attack the treatment of a pet animal, or a fox hunt, but disguising the real depth and mass aspect of animal oppression. It is the animal liberation movement that has been campaigning to get the much more complex facts and truth out into the open.
The fight against Thatcher, capitalism and the Bomb will always ensure that animal liberation will be some way down the list of priorities. Nevertheless, that should not stop us considering the validity and implications of those who argue for animal emancipation. No socialist this side of Stalin is for wanton suffering, even for animals. We should not therefore dismiss people who are concerned about this subject. After the screening of the animal liberation documentaries on TV last year most will know of the avid discussions that followed in many workplaces. In fact workers have already acted against animal suffering. A few years ago Hull dockers blacked the loading of 'food' animals for export due to inhumane conditions. Liverpool dockers recently 'blacked' the handling of Sperm Whale Oil and most unions have resolutions condemning bloodsports and calling for their abolition. A socialist perspective on animals must condemn the profits made from their suffering and make it clear that this present society will never consider animals to be anything more than pure profit fodder. In a socialist/post-revolutionary society it is totally utopian to expect that workers will continue to work in slaughterhouses, cram livestock into factory farms, put toxic substances into rabbits' eyes and skin. Faced with a choice no one would choose such non-essential 'dirty jobs'.
The animal libbers will be won to the arguments of liberals, 'Greens' and parliamentarians if socialists treat them with short shrift. Recollect the significant numbers of 'Ban the Bombers' and 'brown ricers', starting back in the mid-sixties, who have been won to socialism — and in many ways animal libbers are even more militant. Their analysis, often based on bourgeois morality of awarding 'rights' leads them into strange and reactionary positions ('rights' for the unborn), many seem to overconcentrate on vegetarianism and personal lifestyle to the point of paranoia! But they are, nevertheless, open to socialist ideas. They are predominantly young, certainly not mainly middle class, and have already clashed with the forces of the state. Don't write them off!
For details of cinema screenings of The Animals Film, narrated by Julie Christie with music by Robert Wyatt contact: Slick Pics International, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. Tel 01-251-3885.
16mm prints of the film are available for hire from Contemporary Films, 55 Greek Street, London W1. Tel 01-434-2623, and: Concord Films Council Ltd, 201 Felixstowe Road, Ipswich IP3 9BF, Suffolk Tel 0473-76012.
PHIL WINDEATT is the author of The Hunt and the Anti-Hunt (Pluto Press £1.95). He is also a member of the Socialist Workers Party.