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Origins

Origins

Band of Mercy

Ronnie Lee founded the Band of Mercy in 1971, which became the ALF in 1976.

In December 1963, John Prestige, a journalist from Brixham, Devon, was assigned to cover a Devon and Somerset Staghounds event, where he watched hunters chase and kill a pregnant deer. In protest, he formed the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA)ith the support of the League Against Cruel Sports, according to The Guardianhich evolved into groups of volunteers trained to thwart the hunts' hounds by blowing horns and laying false scents.

Molland writes that one of these HSA groups was led by a law student, Ronnie Lee, who formed his group in Luton in 1971. In 1972, Lee and a fellow activist, Cliff Goodman, decided more militant tactics were needed. They revived the name of a 19th-century RSPCA youth group, The Bands of Mercy, and set up the Band of Mercy, which attacked hunters' vehicles by slashing tires and breaking windows, calling their direct action "active compassion." Volunteers left notes on the vehicles explaining why they had been attacked, assuring the hunters that the attacks were not personal.

In 1973, the Band of Mercy learned that Hoechst Pharmaceuticals was building a research laboratory near Milton Keynes. On November 10, 1973, two activists set fire to the building, causing 26,000 worth of damage, returning six days later to set fire to what was left of it. It was the animal liberation movement's first known act of arson. Then, as now, it caused a split within the fledgling movement. In July 1974, the Hunt Saboteurs Association offered a 250 reward for information leading to the identification of the Band of Mercy, telling the press, "We approve of their ideals, but are opposed to their methods."

In June 1974, two Band of Mercy activists set fire to boats taking part in the annual seal cull off the Norfolk coast, which Molland writes was the last time the cull took place. Between June and August 1974, it launched eight raids against animal-testing laboratories, and others against chicken breeders and gun shops, damaging buildings or vehicles. Its first act of "animal liberation" took place during the same period when activists removed half a dozen guinea pigs from a guinea pig farm in Wiltshire, which resulted in the owner closing the business, fearing further attacks.

ALF formed

In August 1974, Lee and Goodman were arrested for taking part in a raid on Oxford Laboratory Animal Colonies in Bicester, earning them the moniker the "Bicester Two." Daily demonstrations took place outside the court during their trial, Lee's local Labour MP, Ivor Clemitson, included among the demonstrators. They were sentenced to three years in prison, during which Lee went on the movement's first hunger strike to obtain vegan food and clothing. They were paroled after 12 months, with Lee emerging more militant than ever. In 1976, he organized the remaining Band of Mercy activists and gathered two dozen new recruits, 30 activists in all. Molland writes that the Band of Mercy name sounded wrong as a description of what Lee saw as a revolutionary movement. Lee wanted a name that would, Molland writes, "haunt" those who used animals. Thus, the Animal Liberation Front was born.

Structure and aims

Keith Mann is one of Britain's leading ALF activists.

The movement is entirely decentralized, with no formal membership or hierarchy, the absence of which acts as a firebreak when it comes to legal responsibility. Volunteers are expected to stick to the ALF's stated aims when using its banner. Any direct action that contradicts these aimsnd in particular the provision not to harm human or non-human lifeay not be claimed as an ALF act:

To inflict economic damage on those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals.

To liberate animals from places of abuse, i.e. laboratories, factory farms, fur farms etc., and place them in good homes where they may live out their natural lives, free from suffering.

To reveal the horror and atrocities committed against animals behind locked doors, by performing nonviolent direct actions and liberations

To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human and non-human.

Any group of people who are vegetarians or vegans and who carry out actions according to ALF guidelines have the right to regard themselves as part of the ALF.

Labs raided, locks glued, products spiked, depots ransacked, windows smashed, construction halted, mink set free, fences torn down, cabs burnt out, offices in flames, car tires slashed, cages emptied, phone lines severed, slogans daubed, muck spread, damage done, electrics cut, site flooded, hunt dogs stolen, fur coats slashed, buildings destroyed, foxes freed, kennels attacked, businesses burgled, uproar, anger, outrage, balaclava clad thugs. It's an ALF thing! Keith Mann

The provision against physical violence has triggered allegations of hypocrisy from the ALF's critics, and bitter divisions within the movement about its meaning and importance. Steven Best and Jerry Vlasak, a California trauma surgeon who volunteers for the North American press office, have both been banned from entering the UK after making statements that appeared to support violence. Vlasak told an animal rights conferences in 2003: "I don't think you'd have to killssassinateoo many vivisectors before you would see a marked decrease in the amount of vivisection going on. And I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, two million, 10 million non-human animals."

The nature of the ALF as a leaderless resistance means support for Vlasak's position is hard to measure. An anonymous volunteer interviewed in 2005 for 60 Minutes told Ed Bradley: "[H]e doesn't operate with our endorsement or our support or our appreciation, the support of the ALF. We have a strict code of non-violence ... I don know who put Dr. Vlasak in the position he's in. It wasn't us, the ALF."

Above-ground

The ALFSG raises money for ALF activists in jail.

Although the ALF has no formal existence, a number of "above ground" groups with open memberships exist to support volunteers and publicize the direct action. The Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group adopts volunteers in jail as "prisoners of conscience," writing to them or sending supplies; anyone can join the ALFSG for a small monthly sum. The Vegan Prisoners Support Group, created in 1994 when Keith Mann was first jailed, works with prison authorities in the UK to ensure that ALF prisoners have access to vegan supplies. The Animal Liberation Press Office receives and publicizes anonymous communiqus, including claims of responsibility. It operates as an ostensibly independent organization funded by public donations, though the English High Court ruled in 2006 that it was a vital part of the ALF's strategy.

There are three publications associated with the ALF. Arkangel is a British bi-annual magazine founded by Ronnie Lee and sold internationally. Bite Back is a magazine and a website where activists leave claims of responsibility. In 2005, it published a "Direct Action Report," stating that, in 2004, ALF activists removed 17,262 animals from facilities, and claimed 554 acts of sabotage, vandalism, and arson. No Compromise is a San Francisco-based website that also reports on ALF actions.

Philosophy of direct action

The acronym ALF within the anarchist-A symbol.

ALF activists believe that animals should not be viewed as property, and that scientists and industry have no right to assume ownership of living beings who are each, in the words of philosopher Tom Regan, the "subject-of-a-life." In the view of the ALF, to fail to recognize this is an example of speciesismhe ascription of different values to beings on the basis of their species membership alonehich they argue is as ethically flawed as racism or sexism. They reject the animal welfarist position that more humane treatment is needed for animals; they say their aim is empty cages, not bigger ones. Activists argue that the animals they remove from laboratories or farms are "liberated," not "stolen," because they were never rightfully owned in the first place.

Although the ALF rejects physical violence, many activists deny that attacks on property count as violent action, comparing the destruction of animal laboratories and other facilities to resistance fighters blowing up gas chambers in Nazi Germany. Their argument for sabotage is that the removal of animals from a laboratory simply means they will be quickly replaced, but if the laboratory itself is destroyed, it not only slows down the restocking process, but increases costs, possibly to the point of making animal research prohibitively expensive. This, they argue, will encourage the search for alternatives. An ALF activist involved in an arson attack on the University of Arizona told No Compromise in 1996: "[I]t is much the same thing as the abolitionists who fought against slavery going in and burning down the quarters or tearing down the auction block ... Sometimes when you just take animals and do nothing else, perhaps that is not as strong a message."

Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has argued that ALF direct action can only be regarded as a just cause if it is non-violent, and that the ALF is at its most effective when uncovering evidence of animal abuse that other tactics could not expose. He cites as an example the ALF raid on the University of Pennsylvania head-injury research clinic in 1984, during which footage shot by the researchers was removed, showing them laughing at conscious baboons as severe brain damage was inflicted on them. The university responded that the treatment of the animals conformed to National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines, but as a result of the publicity, the lab was closed down, the chief veterinarian fired, and the university placed on probation. Barbara Orlans, a former animal researcher with the NIH, now with the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, writes that the case stunned the biomedical community, and is today considered one of the most significant cases in the ethics of using animals in research. Singer argues that if the ALF would focus on this kind of direct action, instead of sabotage, it would appeal to the "minds of reasonable people." Against this, Steven Best writes that industries and governments have too much institutional and financial bias for reason to prevail.

ALF activist Barry Horne playing with Rocky the dolphin. Peter Hughes writes that the ALF's attempts to save Rocky "led to a paradigm shift in the UK".

Peter Hughes of the University of Sunderland cites a 1988 raid led by Barry Horne as an example of positive ALF direct action. Horne and four other activists decided to free Rocky the dolphin, who had lived in a small concrete pool in Marineland in Brighton for 20 years, by moving him 200yards (180m) from his pool to the sea, using a ladder, a home-made stretcher, and a hired Mini Metro. They were spotted by police with the dolphin stretcher for which, as one of the activists put it, "we had no legitimate explanation." They were convicted of conspiracy to steal, but continued to campaign for Rocky's release. Marineland eventually agreed to sell him for 120,000, money that was raised with the help of the Born Free Foundation and the Mail on Sunday, and in 1991, Rocky was transferred to an 80-acre (320,000m2) lagoon reserve in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then released. Hughes writes that the ALF action helped to create a paradigm shift in the UK toward seeing dolphins as "individual actors," as a result of which, he writes, there are now no captive dolphins in the UK.

Philosopher Steven Best, a former ALF press officer, has coined the term "extensional self-defense" to describe actions carried out in defense of animals by human beings acting as "proxy agents." He argues that, in carrying out acts of extensional self-defense, activists have the moral right to engage in acts of sabotage or even violence. Extensional self-defense is justified, he writes, because animals are in too vulnerable and oppressed a position to fight back. Best argues that the principle of extensional self defense mirrors the penal code statues known as the "necessity defense," which can be invoked when a defendant believes that the illegal act was necessary to avoid imminent and great harm. In testimony to the Senate in 2005, Jerry Vlasak stated that he regarded violence against Huntingdon Life Sciences as an example of extensional self-defense.

"First wave": 19761996

Main article: Timeline of Animal Liberation Front actions, 1976-1999

Early tactics and ideology

Rachel Monaghan of the University of Ulster writes that, in their first year of operation alone, ALF actions accounted for 250,000 worth of damage, targeting butchers shops, furriers, circuses, slaughterhouses, breeders, and fast-food restaurants. She writes that the ALF philosophy was that "violence" can only take place against sentient life forms, and therefore focusing on property destruction and the removal of animals from laboratories and farms was consistent with a philosophy of non-violence, despite the damage they were causing. Writing in 1974, Ronnie Lee was insistent that direct action be "limited only by reverence of life and hatred of violence," and in 1979, he wrote that many ALF raids had been called off because of the risk to life.

Kim Stallwood, a national organizer for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in the 1980s, writes that the public's response to early ALF raids that removed animals was very positive, in large measure because of the non-violence policy. When Mike Huskisson removed three beagles from a tobacco study at ICI in June 1975, the media portrayed him as a hero. Robin Webb writes that ALF volunteers were viewed as the "Robin Hoods of the animal welfare world."

This glamorization of the movement attracted a new breed of activist, Stallwood writes. They were younger, often unemployed, and more interested in anarchism than in animal liberation per se, seeing it as part of their opposition to the state, rather than as an end in itself and, according to Stallwood, did not want to adhere to non-violence. In the early 1980s, the BUAV, an anti-vivisection group founded by Frances Power Cobbe in 1898, among the ALF's supporters. Stallwood writes that it donated part of its office space rent-free to the ALF Supporters Group, and gave ALF actions uncritical support in its newspaper, The Liberator. In 1982, a group of ALF activists, including Roger Yates, now a sociology lecturer at University College, Dublin, and Dave McColl, a director of Sea Shepherd, became members of the BUAV's executive committee, and used their position to radicalize the organization.

Stallwood writes that the new executive believed all political action to be a waste of time, and wanted the BUAV to devote its resources exclusively to direct action. Whereas the earliest activists had been committed to rescuing animals, and destroyed property only where it contributed to the former, by the mid-1980s, he believed the ALF had lost its ethical foundation, and had become an opportunity "for misfits and misanthropes to seek personal revenge for some perceived social injustice." He writes: "Where was the intelligent debate about tactics and strategies that went beyond the mindless rhetoric and emotional elitism pervading much of the self-produced direct action literature? In short, what had happened to the animals' interests?" In 1984, the BUAV board reluctantly voted to expel the ALFSG from its premises and withdraw its political support, after which, Stallwood writes, the ALF became increasingly isolated.

Development of the ALF in the U.S.

One of the Silver Spring monkeys. One of the first ALF acts in the U.S. was reportedly to remove the monkeys to a safehouse.

There are conflicting accounts of when the ALF first emerged in the United States. The FBI writes that animal rights activists had a history of committing "low-level criminal activity" in the U.S. dating back to the 1970s. Freeman Wicklund and Kim Stallwood say the first ALF action there was on May 29, 1977, when researchers Ken LeVasseur and Steve Sipman released two dolphins, Puka and Kea, into the ocean at Yokohama Bay, Oahu, Hawaii, from captivity in the University of Hawaii's Marine Mammal Laboratory. The North American Animal Liberation Press Office attributes the dolphin release to a group called Undersea Railroad, and says the first ALF action was, in fact, a raid on the New York University Medical Center on March 14, 1979, when activists removed one cat, two dogs, and two guinea pigs.

Kathy Snow Guillermo writes in Monkey Business that the first ALF action was the removal on September 22, 1981 of the Silver Spring monkeys, seventeen lab monkeys being cared for by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), after a researcher who had been experimenting on them was arrested for alleged violations of cruelty legislation. When the court ruled that the monkeys be returned to the researcher, they mysteriously disappeared, only to reappear five days later, when activists learned that, without the monkeys, legal action against the researcher could not proceed.

Britches, a baby macaque, was left alone with his eyes sewn shut at the University of California, Riverside. The ALF videotaped their removal of him.

Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, writes that the first ALF cell was set up in late 1982, after a police officer she calls "Valerie" responded to the publicity triggered by the Silver Spring monkeys case, and flew to England to be trained by the ALF. Posing as a reporter, she was put in touch with Ronnie Lee by Kim Stallwood, who at the time was working for the BUAV. Lee directed her to a training camp, where she was taught how to break into laboratories. Newkirk writes that Valerie returned to Maryland and set up an ALF cell, with the first raid taking place on December 24, 1982 against Howard University, where 24 cats were removed, some of whose back legs had been crippled. Jo Shoesmith, an attorney and long-time animal rights activist in the U.S., says that Newkirk's account of "Valerie" is not only fictionalized, as Newkirk acknowledges, but "totally fictitious."

Two early ALF raids led to the closure of several university studies. A raid on May 28, 1984 on the University of Pennsylvania's head injury clinic caused $60,000 worth of damage and saw the removal of 60 hours of tapes, which showed the researchers laughing as they used a hydraulic device to cause brain damage to baboons. The tapes were turned over to PETA, who produced a 26-minute video called Unnecessary Fuss. As a result of the publicity, the head injury clinic was closed, the university's chief veterinarian was fired, and the university was put on probation; the Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR) found the tape "grossly overstated" the d

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