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198- Running past the animals to liberate the lever-arch files
74 Plays2 days ago
In our third history special this summer, Mark talks to Ant about the short-lived but nonetheless interesting actions of the Animal Liberation Leagues.
As ever, we love hearing your views on the topics under discussion (or anything else!) so do drop us your thoughts via enoughofthefalafel@gmail.com
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Enough of the Falafel is a community of people who love keeping on top of the latest news in the world of veganism & animal rights. With the Vegan Talk podcast, we aim to develop listeners' (& our own) thoughts around key issues affecting veganism & the animal rights movement; giving our opinions, whilst staying balanced; remaining true to our vegan ethics, whilst constantly seeking to grow & develop.
Each week we home in on one topic in particular and pick it apart in more detail. If you have a suggestion for a future show, do get in touch via enoughofthefalafel@gmail.com.
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Thanks everyone for listening; give us a rating and drop us a message to say "hi"; it'll make our day!
Mark & Ant
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Transcript
Introduction and Milestones
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome to another Enough of the Falafel podcast. We've recorded over 200 of these shows now, all relating to veganism and animal rights.
00:00:14
Speaker
And because of all that hard work, each summer we give ourselves just a few weeks off recording.
Summer Break Announcement
00:00:20
Speaker
But don't fret, we're not leaving you in the lurch. You are still going to have twice weekly bits of brilliant content and shows to listen to.
00:00:29
Speaker
They're just going to be a bit different. Coming out on the next few Thursdays are going to be a special history series where Mark and myself look back at some of the lesser reported aspects of animal rights history. And each Monday, we're going to share with you one of our favourite episodes from the Enough of the Falafel Archive, an episode that we've gone back and listened to again and we thought you might enjoy having a second listen to as well or maybe you'll be coming across it for the first time.
00:01:02
Speaker
We really hope you enjoy these special shows that we've put together for you, that you're having a great time whatever you're up to this month while we're having a little bit of time off recording week to week, and normal service will be resumed on the 1st of September.
00:01:18
Speaker
So sit back and enjoy this special episode from Enough of the
Stereotypes and Misconceptions about Veganism
00:01:24
Speaker
Falafel. So I think vegans go looking for trouble even when they're not looking for trouble. That's not what butter's used for.
00:01:30
Speaker
Brrrr! Protein! Take your lab-grown meat elsewhere. We're not doing that in the state of Florida. What about your protein and what about your iron levels? Should I call the media and say, hi, sorry? They're arguing like, oh, poor woe is me, oh no.
00:01:44
Speaker
Hang on a minute, you always pick
00:01:51
Speaker
of social injustice has connection with another. That's just what people think vegans eat anyway. As long as you didn't get the wee brunions with the horns, you'll be all right. Does veganism give him superpowers?
00:02:03
Speaker
No, I cannot fly around the city. I don't have laser vision. Mark, what are we going to be talking about?
Exploring Animal Liberation Leagues
00:02:14
Speaker
today Are you going to keep it a surprise and just start? no hi an and hi listeners so today in inner is stories of animal rights histories i'm goingnna talk to you about the rise and demise of the anumliberation leagues as opposed to the Animal Liberation Front.
00:02:33
Speaker
and The Animal Liberation Leagues were sort of a parallel movement that and took exception to what some of the ALF tactics were all about and decided to do something different.
00:02:46
Speaker
So the Animal Liberation Front, as as we all know, started in the 1970s and their sort of modus operandi tended to be a few small people going around the place at nighttime, and damaging property or liberating animals.
00:03:03
Speaker
And they were they're all about anonymity so that they could do this again and again. they would They would cover their faces with masks or balaclavas. They would confine themselves to small little cell-like structures.
00:03:15
Speaker
And their idea was was to be able to operate again and again and avoid getting caught. The Animal Liberation Leagues ah saw this happening, saw the rise of the Animal Liberation Front, and decided that um the ALF were doomed to be always a small affair because of their...
00:03:37
Speaker
their deeply illegal nature and ah the fact that they just did small things in small groups it was never going to achieve the sort of massive change that some activists thought was so they they the animalette the the the elites uh decided to take things differently and instead of for instance raiding a lab at night time two two or three people, they would invade en masse labs in the middle of the day, ah sometimes hundreds, sometimes up to 300 activists at a time.
00:04:08
Speaker
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read you an extract from book by An ALF activist, a guy by the name of Keith Mann, who wrote a book called From Dusk Till Dawn, an insider's view of the growth of the animal liberation movement.
00:04:23
Speaker
And this is what Keith Mann has to say about the Animal Liberation Leagues. The Northern Animal Liberation League now, on the other hand, positively extolled the virtues of mass participation daylight invasions, and the benefits were there for all to see, not least the wider public who were getting to see inside vivisection labs and factory farms for the first time.
00:04:44
Speaker
Formed in 1980 by activists based in the northwest of England and operating under the slogan, over the wall when they least expect it, the NOW works to bring together all concerned in a coordinated drive against animal abuse.
00:04:57
Speaker
The NOW would do the job of both the ALF and the public campaigning groups. The policy of the NAL was to cause only minimum damage when gaining entry to places in order to focus, press attention on the cruelty and not to steal animals, but to photograph them and recover information.
00:05:13
Speaker
ah The ALF used to slag off the Animal Liberation League as being the ah file liberation front rather than the animal liberation front, because sometimes they would go into these institutions and take away tons of files and leave the animals there, which is sort of sort of the opposite of what the ALF would do.
00:05:30
Speaker
This was about exposing animal abuse to the general public and involving as many people as possible in direct action and giving them a feel for these places. Having this hands-on experience made returning in the dead of night easier for those moved to act by what they'd seen and ill content with causing minimal damage and leaving the animals behind and left the denial with a positive image.
00:05:50
Speaker
The attention drawn to these mass invasions, coupled with an endless flow of images from places seldom before exposed to public view, would inspire the formation of the Central Animal Liberation League, the Southeastern Animal Liberation League, the Eastern Animal Liberation League, and so on.
00:06:06
Speaker
The first and probably most successful NAL action took place one Sunday morning in the summer of 1980 at the notorious government-ran Babraham Agricultural Research Centre in Cambridge.
00:06:18
Speaker
This raid set the pace for the rest of the fledging movement to follow. Dubbed Frankenstein Farm by the media, the former country house was now a house to animals which which were interfered with and altered in a variety of intriguing ways which confuse the average mind but are aimed at increasing the profitability of their exploited bodies for the meat industry.
00:06:39
Speaker
The raiders had hit big time here. Around 100 activists got into the farm buildings unchallenged and split into groups. One small team seeking evidence from the locked windowless buildings, the other larger group creating diversion.
00:06:52
Speaker
They recovered and from a number of building buildings, graphic evidence of the worst excesses of human cruelty. Amongst other freakish things, there were pigs with electrical contraptions fixed to their skulls and wired to the brain, cows with glass portholes fixed into their stomachs, through which hands could the their heartless captors could shove their arms and remove the contents, and goats with udders grafted to their necks.
00:07:19
Speaker
So the Animal Liberation League made full use of the advent of things like the video camera. and would photograph and video themselves going into these places and then sell that video footage to the BBC and ITV and use the money from the sale to finance more operations. So they were very, very professional.
00:07:43
Speaker
and they're They relied on on mass invasions in the middle of the day. and They were there to get as much evidence as they could. Some people inevitably ended up taking animals that they found in distress in these places.
Impact and Legal Challenges
00:07:55
Speaker
But the idea was was to go in en masse and take as much information away as possible and have this information processed into media friendly stories that they would send out to to the media at the same day. So it was a very polished operation, very, very professional. um One of the key the the key the key movers in this in this movement was a guy called Mike Nunn, who was in his 50s when he got got involved in animal rights. He had been a butcher.
00:08:24
Speaker
He had retired a few years earlier and was walking down his hometown of Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex one day, ah had no previous involved in animal rights. As say, he had been a butcher for for all his his our working life.
00:08:39
Speaker
He was handed a leaflet by an activist from Animal Aid, read it, and disbelieved everything that Animal Aid were saying about the conditions of animals in factory farms around Britain. So he wrote to Animal Aid himself, asking them to give him some more information on this because he doubted their propaganda, he called it.
00:08:57
Speaker
And when they sent back tons and tons more stuff, he was he was he was convinced of their case, became a vegan and set up the Southeastern Animal Liberation League and ended up doing time for and for his for his part in the invasion of Wickham labs in 1984 or 5 I think. So this guy had gone, here had the complete 180 going from being a butcher to not to not just someone concerned about animals but a vegan, not just a vegan but an activist and not just an activist but the head of the Southeastern animal Animal Liberation League who were amongst the most prominent of the leagues. Now
00:09:32
Speaker
So i want to talk about some some some of the major raids that these guys did. So in August 1984, 60 SEAL activists carried out a daylight raid on the Buxton Brown Research Forum of the Royal College of Surgeons. It was located in the village of Down in the London borough of Bromley.
00:09:49
Speaker
They uncovered details of dental and diet experiments being carried out on monkeys and other animals. Information obtained led to the Royal College of Servants being prosecuted by the BUAV for causing unnecessary suffering to a 10-year-old macaque monkey called Moan.
00:10:05
Speaker
The Royal College of Serbans, they were fined ยฃ250, but in order for the law to sort of to take its course, in order to obtain the prosecution, one of the activists had to come forward to admit to being present on the day in the research facility and witnessed the documents being removed. So a guy called Mike Huskinson admitted to the to the court that he that that that he had taken part in the raid and had seen the documents being removed was all part of the legal process.
00:10:35
Speaker
So as a result of Mike Huskinson admitting he was there on the day, he was sentenced to prison for 18 months. and the and the Royal College of Surgeons' conviction of 250 pounds was later overturned on a technicality.
00:10:48
Speaker
And this happened a few times where ah information obtained by the animal liberation activists led to prosecutions against these institutions. but the courts managed to turn the whole thing around and send the activists to prison and allow the institutions off scot-free, even though they were up in the dock and not the activists at the time. So the law works in mysterious ways, and it was that they were always out to crush the Animal Liberation Leagues because they were coming up with at prime time telly footage of um animals and in their labs. there was in in In fact, it was one of the things ah um I recall earliest month myself in my and in my animal rights journey was seeing footage, like it even made it over to the very conservative
00:11:31
Speaker
and national broadcaster over in Ireland. they there They were showing footage obtained by Animal li Liberation League activists of them raiding these places. And it was so dramatic. It was such and a new tactic.
00:11:44
Speaker
As I say, it was a very novel use of the of handheld camcorders which were just coming into the market at the time. so that So they had the technology and the wherewithal to get into these places and obtain footage and themselves or steel footage that or steal information that had been ah filed by the institution and take this away and expose the vivisection industry for for what it was doing.
00:12:08
Speaker
One of their main campaigns was to to show how a lot of these animals in these labs were actually stolen pets. And they actually managed to reunite one dog with her owner because the owner was watching BBC News on the night that the BBC showed a lab being raided and she recognised her pet dog and was was was reunited with the dog who had been snatched from the street, bought by the institution from ah dog thieves to be used in vivisection.
00:12:37
Speaker
And there was evidence obtained of zoos selling on their their old animals or unpopular animals to the two labs for experiments. and Obviously, stuff that they kept very, very quiet, but it was going on. So this industry was... So even the zoos and even vets were actually accused. And there was evidence found of ah vets who were meant to be putting animals down, ah cats and dogs. and There were pets that were being brought in by their owners. And the vets were saying that these animals were were very, very ill.
00:13:09
Speaker
I'll put the animal down for you. And then the owner would pay the vet money and go away, assuming that that was what was going to happen. In fact, what happened was that these animals were then sold alive to labs.
00:13:19
Speaker
They weren't actually put down humanely, as as I say, they were sold to labs for torture. Secretly. You can see how there's a big difference between of obviously still direct action if if we're comparing to the ALF.
00:13:35
Speaker
Like still risky. um you know You're describing people doing time and there being court cases and and and things like that. But actually, it's it's sort of information wars, isn't it, versus directly liberating animals. And it's in a sense, it's a um it's a a situation that we still face today.
00:13:57
Speaker
in in Well, any anybody concerned with our particular social justice cause, I'm not quite sure whether it translates to other causes But you've got the situation of do we just try and three free as many lives as we can, knowing that we cannot free them all.
00:14:17
Speaker
And actually, this is not going to stem the flow. Like the the the the source of this is just going to keep coming. So we could have billions of humans trying to liberate all the animals every every day and we still wouldn't be able to stop it.
00:14:34
Speaker
Or do you try and do things that that get to the the core of it? but But equally, that can, as you said earlier, that can come across as as heartless and missing the point when you walk past the suffering animals to go and get something that you think hopefully might, but you can't be sure,
00:14:54
Speaker
might make their their brothers and sisters and their descendants not endure that suffering but it's um it's a it's a gamble and it's a it's a quandary that we all have really if if we're concerned about things like this yeah yeah yeah of course so yeah uh uh spot on there really did the the the The Animal Liberation Leagues saw themselves as playing a longer game, I think, and their their idea was was to expose the hypocrisy and true nature of the vivisection industry in particular. They concentrated mainly on that. They they ah did do a few mass hunt subs where hundreds of them would would go out and sabotage one hunt rather than m every so often rather than it happening a lot with smaller numbers of SABs. So therere their whole ethos was to get as many people involved as you could so that there was a bearing witness, I guess, would would that be the sort of more modern term for it, so that more and more people would be directly exposed to the sights and smells of
00:15:54
Speaker
of the insides of these labs. and So rather than leaving it to a ah small cohort of semi-professional activists who were sort of wide open to hundreds of people of all ages, of all of all our backgrounds who were encouraged to come along on a given day and take but ah part in these mass invasions.
00:16:12
Speaker
There was a A naivety there around the law, there there was an expectation that if a few hundred people ah raided a place and did cause some damage by getting in and ah took away a lot of information, but if they left their tools behind them and they weren't arrested ah on the on the ground at the time, then the police and state couldn't pin anyone individual for being responsible for damaging the fences or doors on the way in.
00:16:41
Speaker
and They didn't understand conspiracy laws, ah essentially. And what ended up happening was as dramatic and as media friendly and public friendly the Animal Rights League's war, so they they sidesteped the more extreme end of animal liberation front activists who at the time were um threatening to to poison food there was a few of them who had been caught um trying to dig up the grave of a dead fox hunter in order to send the decapitated head to princess anne and stuff this so you had really wild stuff going on in the name of animal rights
00:17:20
Speaker
that the media were jumping on because it was so outrageous. And then you had the animal the the leagues were sort of coming along and presenting themselves as more level-headed, a bit more mature, a lot more media savvy, and i trying to get the public on their side rather than trying to outrage the public, which some of the ALF actions were more designed to do.
00:17:43
Speaker
So I think they they saw themselves as an et as an as an evolution of the dar direct action movement, something that was aimed at trying to get a mass participation, less laws being broken, less severe laws being broken, and ah exposure being the main aim, really. What actually happened was within about two years, maybe 18 months to three years, all these leagues, there was about but five or six active in Britain at the time, collapsed because the state really went heavy on them.
00:18:12
Speaker
and arrested hundreds and hundreds of people, sentenced dozens of them or more to, ah looking back, relatively small stints in prison, maybe 18 months, maybe six months, maybe a few guys got three years that have served maybe half that.
00:18:26
Speaker
and So
Law Enforcement and Activism
00:18:27
Speaker
not massive prison sentences, especially when you're comparing them to animal liberation front activists being sent down for 10, 11, 16, 17 years for admittedly a lot more laws being broken around arson and things like this.
00:18:41
Speaker
So they were trying to be the middle ground between the radical ALF and the sort of moribund League of Kings crew sports. They were somewhere in the middle. they were feisty and up for it and weren't afraid to break some laws and take the flack.
00:18:58
Speaker
and but they But they didn't want to be portrayed as as extremists. And it was too easy to portray the ALF as extremists to the opposition. So, yeah, it it was it was a good idea. It was naive, though. And the state came down on them very, very heavily.
00:19:13
Speaker
And that's why they essentially evaporated after about two years. It was a flurry of activity for between, say, 1983 three and five. And after that, they were all gone. and All their leaders were banged up in prison and everyone else had been sort of scared away and either went into just above ground campaigns or retreated back into the relative safety of being ALF small cell operatives who had a lot less.
00:19:39
Speaker
Do we have any kind of ah indication as to whether this coming down heavy by the authorities was because of the nature of the activity that they were doing or to what extent was it an echo of what was happening with the earlier ALF stuff in in that which we see we've seen parallels in the last couple of years with um In the UK, but I do think in other, quote, Western countries, where actually authorities have got, you know, they've they've got the wind up them um from from previous actions, whether it's demonstrations or whatever.
00:20:23
Speaker
And then they've made, they've seemingly made a conscious effort to say, right, we're just going clamp down on anything now. like do do Do you think there was a bit of that that's suffering but from that? So I think the the state's response initially to the animal rights movement generally to the ALF and to the animal liberation leagues was ah slow to begin with and it was uncoordinated.
00:20:45
Speaker
They didn't know where it was coming from. They they hadn't been expecting it. It suddenly arrived on the social media. crime stats, there was this stuff happening. It took a few years for them to understand that it was quite widespread and because the UK, of course, all the police forces are split up into 50-something different forces.
00:21:03
Speaker
So pre-internet days, these forces weren't particularly joined up. you know So if if it was a small scale if was small-s scalele act of vandalism, which most of the ALF actions were, it didn't really get get beyond the sort of local police sort of ah crime stats. So it took them a while to re realize that this was ah a nationwide movement.
00:21:24
Speaker
It was quite prevalent and active, and then they but they theyre were really hard to penetrate. So the police um success rate, their their clear up rate of af actions is very, very poor.
00:21:37
Speaker
Hardly any activists were actually caught and then condemned to prison for their ALF actions. It was was quite rare. So as soon as the leagues started, and because they were they were happening in broad daylight and they were involving sometimes hundreds of people, up to 300 people at a time sometimes, the police felt, right, this this is something that we can clamp down on because the organisers are quite open.
00:21:59
Speaker
We know who they are. they're they're speaking directly to the media We know their names and we know where they live. So they it was easy enough for them to so to keep an eye on those guys and follow them everywhere they went.
00:22:10
Speaker
And it was a lot easier to clamp down on league activities because it was and like it wasn't meant to be ah ah secretive and quiet. It was meant to be really loud and and in your face and loads of people. it was lot easier to contain.
00:22:25
Speaker
was lot easier to arrest those people. It was a lot easier to infiltrate that movement. And around that time, of course, you had the miners' strike going on. So you had a a police force that was very well honed in dealing with ah public public order, as they call it. So every police force, because of the miners' strike and because of Greenham Common and the rise of CND around that time,
00:22:46
Speaker
During the early the the early eighty s was a very active time for the militant left in the UK. The police were had finally honed their response. They had a team, every police force had its own ah response team to respond quickly to any outbreaks of mass disorder, whether it was coming from miners or print workers or animal rights activists.
00:23:10
Speaker
So they they could respond and and be on on the ground very, very quickly. So gone were the old days of like a single copper sort of arriving ah to a mass raid and just standing there scratching his head, unable to do anything.
00:23:24
Speaker
Now it was van loads of riot clad cops with dogs on leashes and their short shields and gathering information with their own camcorders as well. Of course,
00:23:36
Speaker
campcorder usage wasn't wasn't confined to militant vegans, the police also had campcorders and could make arrests after the event, even if there were there was too many activists around them to start making arrests on the ground at the time. they They could record these people, take photographs with increasingly better lenses.
00:23:54
Speaker
and use these as evidence for later arrests and then convictions in court. So the state's ability to respond to ah outbreaks of civil society organizing itself ah got better and better as the years went on. So by the mid 80s, they were just fantastic at it. And the UK police have always been very, very good at crowd control.
00:24:15
Speaker
and they have had many years of it and of sending in spies as well to the various movements that they don't like. So and they're they're they're very good at what they do, I must say, the the yeah UK police.
00:24:28
Speaker
So it didn't take long for them to clamp down very heavy. or what was seen to be as very heavy at the time yeah um um the league and on the leagues. And as I say, within about two years, they had been and gone and there were no more. And and they're what there they're one of these movements that that that that has never had a proper analysis of um of the of that movement done yet. there There is a friend of mine here in in know New Zealand, a guy whose name is also Mark. He's down in Wellington.
00:24:58
Speaker
And he spent three months over in Scotland a few years back and on a ah mission to find out as much as he could ah about the leagues and he's in the process now of writing a book about them and he's done interviews with activists I think including Mike Nunn, the ex-butcher turned the league activist and people like that. So there is a history there to be written. There's been a lot of attention on say the Hun Saboteurs, their tactics, their history, the ALF and all the other movements but and the the The leagues were were so quick in there. There was such a flash in the pan that I'm not sure exactly, but maybe it's because they came and went so quickly that no one really got around to really writing down their analysis. There is one good book called, little booklet called Against All Odds that you can get probably on Google, which is like a pamphlet which goes into the
00:25:49
Speaker
theory behind the leagues and why they were different from the ALF and why they were choosing this path rather than and another path and the sort of the thinking behind it. a lot of the activists involved, especially in the in the Northern Animal Liberation League, were people who had spent many years involved in socialists, trade union, left-wing sort of campaigns.
00:26:09
Speaker
So really knew their stuff and really knew their way around the police and the media and how to get publicity working in your and your direction. and be Because there was such a mass movement, there was the core of experienced activists with hundreds of other people who are often quite young in their mid-teens.
00:26:27
Speaker
who were naive around how the police operated and weren't able to withstand much interrogation in a police cell, for instance, and ended up in criminal incriminating themselves and other fellow activists as well because they didn't know how to react
Modern Movements and Technological Impact
00:26:42
Speaker
to the police station. So in a sense, the leagues were exposing people who who were naive to the to the to the case. They were exposing them to ah police attention that they didn't know how to deal with. And there was maybe a...
00:26:56
Speaker
not an irresponsibility there but there was a naivety on behalf of the League leaders as to the potency of their movement given the amount of um young people, young inexperienced activists who were with them.
00:27:09
Speaker
ah So there will there were some cases of a lab being raided and an hour and a half later when the police finally arrived there were still activists sort of wandering around as if they're in a sort of a you know just wandering around streets shopping or something and and then and they end up getting arrested and getting the Mr. Nice and Mr. Nasty in the police station and it's and it's all very not what they expected you know. It's interesting because you you describe it there as a flash in the pan which like as an organisation like it it clearly was in in terms of its longevity you know it's not spanning decades or anything like that at the same time
00:27:47
Speaker
I can see massive similarities with the concept and some of the strategies there, both kind of tenuously, but also also very clearly. I mean, that there are um things nowadays called open rescues and and um Wayne Shung, I think I'm pronouncing his name right, over in the States is possibly one of them the best known ah sort of advocates of that, where where people are doing a similar thing now. So it's it's still happening now. That could be a coincidence or it could be informed from, from um you know, what we're describing here. But also I'm just thinking of, you know, your Joey Carbstrongs, the different activists these days whose strategy will be to to document what's going on.
00:28:38
Speaker
And yeah, like the, you know, when we report on our ah Vegan Week show that The Independent have got an expose from Viva.
00:28:48
Speaker
or The Guardian is reporting on stuff like that. like They've not gone in themselves. like that is That is activists who are doing this same thing. like do Do you have any sense of how related this movement in the 80s is to to what we're seeing nowadays, um or is it palpably different? um Obviously, there are technological and and cultural shifts that have happened in the last 40 years or so, but like does it does it feel like a natural progression? Yeah, I would say so, in fact. Yeah, it's a good point. So you've got the likes of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion and ah Direct Action Everywhere and the Open Rescue Movement, ah which is really prominent in Australia, actually, during the 90s, I remember.
00:29:33
Speaker
Yes, this is all... I'm not sure if those movements are aware of of the Animal Liberation Leagues, who, as far as I'm aware, were the... first group, a series of groups to emphasize this sort of mass, illegal, daylight sort of type of operation. So I'm not too sure if contemporary movements are aware of that, but they're they arere following on the same sort of trajectory of thought in that they sort of consider that and small groups just doing things at nighttime is good, but it's not enough.
00:30:03
Speaker
And we we want to involve as many people as we can, partly because it's more democratic, part because it's probably the more successful Partly because ah responsibility then is shared amongst hundreds or thousands rather than just a few people.
00:30:15
Speaker
So legally it's a bit easier or a bit less stressful. I think one one of the the obvious reasons for the evolution of groups like Just Up All and Extinction Rebellion is to do with the fact that it's it's not impossible, but it's so much harder these days to for an ALF type type of movement to thrive and survive. Security is like this. this my My phone here, which everyone has in their back pocket or within ah few inches radius of them, is potentially listening to everything that we are saying now.
00:30:45
Speaker
Even if I was to turn it off, as far as I understand, it can still act as a microphone to nefarious people. Right. So just this fact alone negates so much of the ALF tactics. OK, because it's too easy for the state know everything that you're doing.
00:31:02
Speaker
I get the feeling from reading materials back in the old days. It was a case of you sort of do an action and you run around a corner and then walk and pretend you're just the and average Joe on the street and you probably got away with it.
00:31:14
Speaker
You know, these days everything's been folded. You're you're if you're using ah ah live in ah essentially a cash to society here. Cash is very rare. Everything is on credit card, debit card.
00:31:25
Speaker
everything I buy, everywhere I go, if I'm driving, CCTV is ubiquitous. I mean, it's just, it's a different world really, and in terms of security and and what the state can do and listen to is is a world away from how it used to be. So ah that sort of drives the underground either so far underground becomes completely detached from the rest of society and isolates itself to such an a point, to such point it's easy to pick off, like said, with the weather underground in the 1960s over the States, or you continue as sort of a militant approach, but you sort of realise and understand that you will get caught.
00:32:04
Speaker
so So you build in the getting caught and and getting apprehended and getting pushed through the court system. you You build that into the tactic and you know and that becomes part of the tactic to overload the courts, to to make it sensational because there's loads of arrests. You get onto the media.
00:32:23
Speaker
You sort of play the system at its own game rather than trying to defeat the system because just too powerful these days. So I think whether they know it or not, they're responding to the same external pressures and that is dictating. So the direct action everywhere movement, they they know the police will know everything they're going to do pretty much as soon as they've decided they're going to do it.
00:32:44
Speaker
They know they will be arrested and they're they're they were prepared for that. That means that they're very courageous individuals, but the the extent of their actions will be severely curtailed by their self-imposed limitations. But these limitations are imposed from the outside. But they're realization of how big the state is these days and how powerful they're is and it can and will get anywhere and it will have spies everywhere. So secrecy, privacy, autonomy, stuff like that is out the window, whereas up to the maybe 2000s, it was still ah viable option if one choose to do that.
00:33:20
Speaker
but um it it is no more and i think that's reflected in the essentially the demise of the likes of the annum liberation front and um what we see now happening is yeah people going out and deliberately uh and openly uh define the law in the expectation that they will at some point probably sooner rather than later be nicked for it you know and that is part of the strategy essentially ah So yeah, it's it's it's the Animal Liberation Leagues, they have very little
Conclusion and Reflections
00:33:49
Speaker
footprint online. there There's a few things about them, but there's not much and there's no joined together cohesive narrative of this very wonderful group that really did
00:33:58
Speaker
lift the lid on vivisection. In a way, I mean, it was shocking for people looking at the BBC news at nine o'clock and seeing footage of cows with windows in their stomachs, because that people couldn't look inside the workings of the cow.
00:34:12
Speaker
There was a movie at the time, have you ever heard of a movie called oh Lucky Man? Have you ever heard this? No. It's part of the, um i think there's a trilogy, including A Clockwork Orange, which everyone knows about. A Clockwork Orange, If and Oh Lucky Man. And there's a scene in the movie Oh Lucky Man where this guy, the protagonist is wandering around, or turns out to be a research facility, and and goes into a lab and sees all these animals with, all these animals that stuck together in it in these in these grotesque ways, including ah human with a sheep's body leagues were exposing this sort of Frankensteinian levels of horror, pointless experiments that were just done because they could do it on all all all less sorts of animals, camels and horses and pet dogs and people's pet cats and all sorts of stuff. So it it really exposed the reality of vivisection. The Royal College assertions especially were insistent that they're, you know, everything was done as cleanly and and as humanely as possible and they were getting great results from the experiments and nothing could have been further from the truth. They were just grotesque playgrounds for sadists and some in and some cases. you know So it took the league to ah go in there with the camcorder, this newfangled bit of
00:35:29
Speaker
kit and uh take away the footage and show it on bbc it was it was like an amazing um they really punched above their weight they were a group that had very little resources in terms of money and they were very new they had very few members but they really captured the limelight for the few years that they were around you know that's brilliant stuff that's brilliant stuff and thank you at as ever mark for for shining a light on these things and uh I am I'm sure there'll be some of our listeners that have heard of these things before but I think the vast majority of us will be in the same same cases myself and this is new information and they're really interesting is to just in its own sense but also to to relate to the movement that we're that we're part of consciously or otherwise today I'm gonna gonna put you on the spot but I can I can edit out a pause if you want
00:36:20
Speaker
if any listeners have come to this episode first in our history series can you share some of the episodes that might already be on people's feed or might be about to come on to their feed in the next couple of weeks okay so the um point of the series is that is to highlight some of the wonderful and fascinating aspects and maybe sort of unknown aspects of the animal liberation movement across the board ah since its modern day inception so we have covered so far the links between the early iris republican army
00:36:52
Speaker
and the vegetarian scene in Dublin in the at the turn of the 20th century. We're going to be talking about the impact the ban on hunting in 2004 had on the hunting fraternity and the and the impact of that that law has.
00:37:07
Speaker
We're talking today about the Animal Liberation Leagues. We talked about spies as well, didn't we? Spies, and we've did talk about spies um in the animal abortion movement from the 1960s onwards. That's right. Yeah, yeah.
00:37:18
Speaker
And I think there's a few more topics that aren't coming to the top of my mind now. But yeah, it's a fascinating deep dive into these little niche areas of history that that say so much about our movement and the society that that we exist in.
00:37:32
Speaker
And we've got lessons to learn from all these aspects of things to do and things not to do. Both very important. Fantastic stuff. Bring it on.
00:37:45
Speaker
This has been an Enough of the Falafel production. We're just a normal bunch of everyday vegans putting our voices out there. The show is hosted by Zencaster. We use music and special effects by zapsplap.com.
00:38:00
Speaker
And sometimes if you're lucky at the end of an episode, you'll hear a poem by Mr. Dominic Berry. Thanks all for listening and see you next time.
00:38:26
Speaker
This episode may have come to an end, but did you know we've got a whole archive containing all our shows dating back to September 2023? That is right, Dominic. There's over 100 episodes on there featuring our brilliant range of different guests, people's stories of going vegan, philosophical debates, moral quandaries and, of course, around a dozen news items from around the world week.
00:38:51
Speaker
week so check back on your podcast player to hear previous episodes and remember to get an alert for each new episode simply click like or follow and also subscribe to the show thanks for your ongoing support wherever you listen to us from