Animal Liberation, Eco-Sabotage, Trespassing – A Defense of the Animal Liberation Front

The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is a leaderless and decentralized group working towards total animal liberation by employing a variety of tactics and strategies. By using illegal methods, the ALF continues to be controversial within the animal rights movement. Critics of the ALF, generally those who consider pacifist values the only morally acceptable form of political protest, accuse the ALF not only of alienating the non-vegan public, but also of committing the same wrongdoing as animal oppressors in utilizing “violent” tactics. Based on the maxim “violence only leads to more violence“, many people condemn property destruction, intimidation and tresspass.

Can illegal methods never be morally justified? Why does the ALF consider unlawful and “violent” protest to be essential for social transformation? Why do ALF activists wear masks and try to remain anonymous? The underlying motives, ethical standpoints, and reasons for choosing militant tactics are diverse and have not been sufficiently addressed. This article aims to give a differentiated insight into the ideology and goals of the ALF and to criticize the classification of the ALF as a “terrorist” or “violent” organization. First, I will briefly outline the history of the ALF, introduce their guidelines and explain why activists choose to operate anonymously. Then, I will discuss attempts to legitimize direct, illegal and “violent” action. The main emphasis is placed on the question of whether illegal and “violent” means are justifiable if positive change can be achieved for a systemically oppressed group of living beings.

Notes: (1) Whenever I will refer to the concept of “violence” in relation to the ALF, I will refer to property damage, since the ALF rejects doing physical harm to individuals. (2) The article is not encouraging anyone to get involved in illegal activities, I merely discuss strategies and ethical attempts to legitimize protest forms.

If not now, when? If not you, who? The origin of ALF

The origin of the ALF dates back at 1976 when activists split from the Hunt Saboteur Association (HSA) – an organization dedicated to the protection of wildlife by sabotaging hunters. The later founders of the ALF, among them Ronny Lee, criticized the predominantly pacifist tactics of contemporary animal liberation groups, since, according to Lee, non-violent actions failed to achieve any noticeable improvement for non-human animals. Frustrated by the lack of progress, the activists longed for direct results and immediate change. This wish was put into practice with the founding of the “Band of Mercy“, whose main strategy was eco-sabotage: in the early days, the Band of Mercy – because still strongly linked to the HSA – damaged numerous vehicles of hunters. Their attacks soon spread to other targets such as boats used for seal hunting were demolished completely. In 1973, members of the Band of Mercy burned down a laboratory in Milton Keynes, England, that was still under construction causing £26,000 in financial losses. In 1974, Lee and three other activists were arrested in an attempt to set fire to the Oxford Laboratory Animal Colonies.¹ Lee was sentenced to 3 years in prison, of which he was incarcerated for 12 months. To Lee’s surprise, his activism did not go unnoticed. Although he believed that his sentence had a deterrent effect on most animal liberation activists, the opposite was true. Because of the interest activist had in direct action, Lee decided to rename the Band of Mercy to the Animal Liberation Front:

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. – Ronny Lee, Mitbegründer der ALF²

Nonviolence and the ALF guidelines

The ALF is, strictly speaking, not an organization. There are no leaders who monitor activities within the activist groups, nor are there membership lists. Activists achieve affiliation with the ALF by performing a certain kind of action.³ The following conditions must be met for an action to qualify as an ALF action:

1. 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.
2. To inflict economic damage to those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals.
3. To reveal the horror and atrocities committed against animals behind locked doors, by performing direct actions and liberations.
4. 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 these guidelines have the right to regard themselves as part of the Animal Liberation Front.⁴

It can be concluded from the guidelines that ALF actions have the following elements in common:

• Anti-speciesism: Since there is no morally relevant difference between humans and non-human animals, their oppression cannot be morally justified.
• Direct-Action: As mentioned earlier, the ALF’s foundation was based on a pessimistic attitude towards conventional and legal protest methods. Because speciesist practices are institutionalized, politically, economically and socially established and promoted, we cannot be confident that these institutions will take a stand against speciesism if we only stick to legal methods (political campaigns will fail because of state interest, anti-speciesist education is not taught in schools, more animals are killed than ever before, although there are more vegan options available). Direct action aims to achieve direct results by breaking unjust laws. For example, to save animals from a life in captivity and a violent death, activists need to break into farms and “steal” them. Or to put financial pressure on exploitation facilities, activists use illegal forms of political protest such as sit-ins or vandalism. If unlawful or “violent” actions are justified to assist oppressed humans, they also must be justified in the fight for the liberation of non-human animals.
• Non-Violence: The ALF does not see violence against property as violence and considers eco-sabotage as legitimate if property is used to inflict violence on an oppressed group of living beings. The ALF condemns physical violence against humans and non-human animals.

Wear a mask: How anonymity saves lives

ALF activists wear black, neutral clothing and balaclavas to conceal their identities. The ALF favors covert actions, because hiding one’s identity helps to avoid charges, registrations and imprisonment. Thanks to the model of autonomous cells, activists can organize more efficiently or carry out actions single-handedly. The fact that activists do not know other cells makes it more difficult for authorities and police to solve cases. In the U.S., the ALF, along with other militant animal rights and environmental movements, is considered as one of the most dangerous domestic terror threats.⁵ Due to severe state repression, it is essential for many activists to conceal their identities in order to avoid imprisonment and remain active. But this is not their only reason:

Disguising one’s identity can be crucial for the safety of rescued individuals. Revealing the identity – either voluntarily by conviction or through inadequate security precautions – has already led to the police being able to use the activist’s identification to track down rescued animals – most of which lost their newly gained freedom and who were either taken back to the animal exploitation facility or killed.⁶

For some, anonymity is also important form an ideological point of view: Members of the ALF seem to reject personality cult and want to de-center humans as protagonists of the animal liberation movement.⁷ By abstracting the human to a faceless helper, the actual agents of the liberation movement – the animals – are placed in the spotlight and the emphasis shifts to the their struggle for liberation: In every place where animals get exploited, there is resistance and attempts to break free or fight back. Humans merely assist animals in this endeavor.

The following reflections on the liberation of a pig by ALF activists may illustrate the point:

“[…] whilst open rescue could be a useful tactic, we should consider the safety of the individuals helped free and our own freedom to carry on working, and no one should be engaging in open rescue as a tool to grow their social media presence and their business opportunities. It is about time that we shift the focus from our face to the individuals who we are supposedly aiming to help. It is their story, NOT OURS. Doing anything else make us self absorbed and ego driven. Liberation is communal and cannot be achieved by creating saviours and heroes that will “free all the animals”. We need more anonymous, quiet and smart individuals being accomplices in the fight for animal liberation and less pretty faces to follow on instagram. We need active participants not likes on posts.” - Aus: Unoffensive Animal: HOW TO STEAL A PIG AND NOT MAKE IT ABOUT YOURSELF

Reasons for using illegal methods: animal liberation, trespassing, and clandestine investigations

This leads up to the question of how illegal methods can be morally justified. The ALF lists reasons for approving militant actions, some which are further discussed and conceptualized.

1.) Breaking the law and using violence in the name of social justice. Can previous social justice movements strengthen our intuitions regarding the use of illegal methods as political protest?

As we can learn from history, legality often has little to do with morality. Laws can be wrong and harmful, they can be used to oppress or abuse humans and animals while preserving the power of privileged people. Violence against property and illegal actions were an integral component of many movements that fought for social justice. The suffragettes, resistance groups during World War II, various anti-colonial movements and the LGBTQ community used property damage, arson and other forms of economic sabotage to defend themselves, apply pressure or help people in need.

The Suffragettes

The suffragettes have adopted a variety of tactics in the struggle for women’s suffrage. The WSPU – Women’s Social and Political Union – founded by women’s rights activist Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903, took a “Deeds not Words” approach. Facing a government that wanted to deny women the right to vote indefinitely, the WSPU decided that more radical forms of protest were needed to grant women the right to vote. The suffragettes’ activities ranged from simple vandalism to sabotage (e.g. golf clubs) to arson (e.g. houses of well-known and anti-feminist politicians). Through their attacks – directed only against property and not directly against people – suffragettes caused millions of dollars worth of property damage, which increased the pressure on the government to finally act.⁸

The Stonewall Riot

The Stonewall riot was a response of the LGBTQ community to a police raid conducted at the LGBTQ-friendly bar “Stonewall Inn” and is considered a significant historical event for the liberation movement of homosexual and transgender people. In 1969, when the protests took place, homosexual and transgender persons were systematically oppressed – publicly displayed homosexuality was punished and LGBTQ members faced a range of state repressions. The raid led to weeks of rioting, where hundreds of LGBTQ activists clashed violently with the police. Protesters threw stones at police, freed prisoners from custody and tried to set the bar on fire while police were still inside.⁹

Anti-colonialization movements & Black Liberation movements

The Civil Rights Movement in the US as well as India’s struggle for freedom against colonial powers were underpinned by violent actions against their oppressors. It is questionable whether purely non-violent tactics would have resulted in social change. In addition, pacifist movements are used to defame unlawful "violent" protest: The emphasis on pacifist Martin Luther King, for example, as the sole contributor to the success of the civil rights movement, and Malcolm X as an enemy of peace and a divider of society is historically distorted and “whitewashed”. The whitewashing of King as an anti-radical does not correspond with reality, but is often used by right-wing and conservatives to vilify militant protests carried out by black people or their supporters (King defended and favored non-violent tactics, but contrary to common belief, he had radical positions on anti-capitalism, neoliberalism and white supremacy. It is also wrong to consider Malcom X’s movement not a contributor to the movement as a whole.) ¹⁰

Militant actions were often part of liberation struggles. From a historical perspective, identifying pacifism as the only effective form of protest or resistance is highly controversial and seems downright incorrect. People who have fought for the improvement of social conditions did not follow a strict uniform, inflexible tactic to reach their goal. Social justice movements usually do not consist of a selection between violent and non-violent forms of protest – they are much more a combination of the two.

2.) Anything but terror: animal liberation and clandestine investigations

Most normal people would find it unacceptable to see animals have the skin burned off them while they’re alive…to see primates that share the same DNA as humans, cut open while they are still alive day in and day out. I challenge anyone who sees this to go to a farm or a lab to see what happens. I challenge people to look at those videos. If you want to know why we do what we do it’s as simple as watching those videos. – ALF-Mitglied¹¹

The ALF is convinced that the actual acts of terror are not carried out by underground groups. Direct action is much more to be interpreted as a response to the terrorization of non-human animals by the speciesist system. Using illegal methods is necessary to respond to the normalized violence, ruthlessness, and indifference shown to billions of non-human animals around the world.

While the American government and mainstream media have been fond of late of labeling every act of human and non-human liberatory effort as some form of terrorism, there is a far greater amount of terror being committed by hundreds of American citizens on a daily basis. Terrorizing and murdering non-human animals is not currently given much importance in our society, not unlike the lack of seriousness that attended the terrorizing and killing of people of recent African descent here in the recent past. Future generations will undoubtedly condemn our society for the callous way it has treated non-human animals with whom it has come into contact. – ALF-Mitglied¹¹

ALF activists argue that direct action is the only way to save the lives of existing individuals. When talking about ALF actions, it is important to reflect on the various forms of action undertaken by the group. A lot of ALF activists do not use arson or property destruction, they simply assist non-humans to break free.¹² Stealing exploited and mistreated animals can be morally justified the easiest way, although it is also based on illegal methods. Objections to illegal animal liberation through references to ownership rights fail on several levels. First, anti- speciesist individuals do not acknowledge the categorization of non-human animals as property or possessions - just as we do not acknowledge that humans can be in possession of other humans. Secondly, even common-sense morality indicates that we accept certain animal liberations as justified and necessary. If we witness a person trying to rescue a dog from an overheated car - and therefore smashing the window in order to save the dog - we will most likely perceive the removal of the dog not as theft and the smashing of the window not as violence, but as a necessity to save the dog's life. Since caged animals in animal exploitation places are in dire need of help and because no significant difference can be made between the emergency aid of a dog stuck in a car dying and many so-called "farm animals", animal liberations can be justified by the concept of emergency aid or urgent assistance.

The picture shows the rescue of a dog in Little Oakhurst in Kent, UK. The dog’s owner, Tracy Middleton, was convicted of animal cruelty thanks to undercover footage taken by activists. Activists documented numerous dead, injured, starving and neglected sheep on the farm. The dog was kept in a small cage without food or water. The court decided that Tracy can keep the dog. As a result, underground groups needed to intervene and liberate him or her themselves.¹³

23 lambs were freed from Little Oakhurst Fram that night. The action took place before the sentencing of Tracy Middleton. The activists felt that they had watched the suffering of these animals long enough and decided to act now.¹⁴

Another strategically valuable type of action carried out by the ALF is the clandestine recording of animal exploitation. Without underground groups and illegal actions, many atrocities in animal factories and laboratories would have remained hidden. Publication of these recordings were also capable of influencing public opinion and sparking (mostly legal) mass protests.

One of the most famous examples is the liberation story of a bear macaque named Britches. Britches was born in 1985 in a laboratory at the University of California, Riverside, and, along with 24 other young monkeys, was part of a study by Dr. David Warren. The objective of the study was to gain insight into the effects of blindness on child development.¹⁵ As part of the experiment, the monkeys were taken from their mother shortly after birth as well as their eyes sewn shut. People who knew about the experiments informed ALF members, leading the activists to break into the laboratory and liberate Britches and a bunch of other animals. PETA later released the footage.¹⁶ Many people expressed outrage and shock over Britches story. Partly because the recordings revealed the many physical and psychological damages that Britches suffered from, but also because the majority of people were unaware of the fact that this kind of animal experimentation was legally permitted.¹⁷ Publicly exposing Britches mistreatment also brought to light that researchers decided to use animal testing when it was completely avoidable: To study the effects of blindness on child development, scientists could have consulted blind adolescents and children to obtain meaningful data through conversation and neurological tests. But the researchers in charge said they were unwilling to take on the extra work because of difficulties and inconveniences of conducting research in the homes of blind children "in the midst of household activities”.¹⁸

A photo of Britches in the lab. His eyes were sewn shut. Vets sympathetic to ALF managed to remove the strings after Britches liberation without causing permanent damage. Nevertheless, Britches continued to suffer from the consequences of his physical and psychological abuse for quite some time.

Britches with an ALF member. At the age of 5 months, Britches was transferred to an animal sanctuary that provided shelter for monkeys. Shortly after his arrival, he was adopted by a female monkey, who took care of him from there on. Britches spent the rest of his life in freedom and recovered from his unpleasant start in life.

he American Council of the Blind strongly criticized the experiments. The president of the council, Dr. Grant Mack, called the film "one of the most repugnant and ill-conceived boondoggles that I’ve heard about for a long time".¹⁹ As already mentioned, Britches story generated public outrage resulting in campaigns and protests. Pressure on the government and laboratories became so intense that activists managed to force reforms in animal welfare laws as well as some complete shut downs on certain animal experimentation projects.

You can watch the footage on YouTube:

ALF actions have also been contributory factors and one of the main constituents of the SHAC (“Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty”) movement. Similarly, the publishing of clandestine video footage from a Huntington Life Science Laboratory, which was broadcast in 1997 under the name “A Dog’s Life” on Channel 4 TV in the UK, led to an outcry among the public and the desire to take action against the brutal exploitation of animals exploited in laboratories. The video documents not only show how the dogs were repeatedly beaten and mistreated by the staff but also how a toxic liquid was violently injected into their esophagus.²⁰

You can watch the footage here:

Only by using illegal methods, the ALF was able to disclose the lack of transparency in laboratories and animal factories. Throughout its history, the ALF has been able to save thousands of individuals from a life of endless suffering and violent death.

Putting the concept of violence into perspective

The discussed cases show that the ALF has not always been perceived as a dangerous terrorist organization. Furthermore, they indicate that using illegal methods to make the suffering of animals transparent or to save them is neither an act of violence nor an act of terror. Finally, we are confronted with the question what to think about property destruction and eco-sabotage. Is there a way to frame such acts as legitimate forms of political protest.

[…] Sometimes when you just take animals and do nothing else, perhaps that is not as strong a message.²¹

Legitimate, illegal activism is usually identified by non-violent protests such as sit-ins, demonstrations, boycotts, etc., while demanding change through property destruction is rejected. Violence against property as a form of protest pursues the goal of using physical destruction to exert coercion on an opposing side and forcing them to carry out or refrain from performing certain actions. Some people attribute the “violent part” of property damage to the fact that the protection of property is a right which, if not respected, undermines a person’s autonomy. Others believe that coercion constitutes violence.²² Neither of these claims are sound. I will address the second first.

Those who identify violence against property primarily with coercion are required to consider non-violent protests to be violent. For instance, coercion caused by non-violent tactics can end up being as much coercive as the ones involving vandalism. Sit-ins, even if illegal, are unlikely to qualify as acts of violence, although they also use coercion to demand something. Imagine activists blocking the doorway of a company that shows unethical behaviour (e.g. child labour) in its production chain. The activists demand the company to replace the unethical products with ones that are certified Fair Trade and ensure that human rights are respected. Let us further assume that due to the continuing and recurring blockade, the company is unable to accept deliveries and customers start to buy products from more ethical companies. The economic damage caused to the company by the blockade can force the company to meet the demands in order to prevent further loss.²³

In this case, we probably consider the activists’ action to be non-violent and we may even be pleased if the company avoids child labor in the future. As a result, it is not that simple to distinguish between the legitimacy of property damage (a fur store is spray painted to cause coercion) from actions where no objects were damaged (activists illegally demonstrate daily in front of the fur shop to execute public pressure) given the coercion they both cause.

Thus the first interpretation of violence, which claims that damage to property is an act of violence because it disregards a person’s right to their property, comes into play. However, this interpretation is even less plausible, since we believe that certain rights, such as the right to property, cannot be absolute rights which should never be broken, but rather represent prima facie (a right that can be outweighed by other considerations) rights.²⁴ I, for example, have no right to violate another person’s bodily integrity just because I want to, but their right ceases to exist when they attack me and try to harm me. Disregarding the rights of others can even become a duty in certain contexts: It is often argued that people who carried out acts of sabotage during World War II – violence against property or against Nazis – were not only legitimized to do so, but had an obligation to destroy, sabotage and use violence against the regime (and the people in it) as much as possible.²⁵

The philosopher John Morreal presented another intuitively plausible argument in favor of prima facie rights: If we engage a slave owner in a violent fight to help an enslaved person escape, we would – if rights are absolute – be doing something morally wrong. Not only are we breaking a law that dictates that we must help the slave owner capture the enslaved human, but by provoking a fight we would be violating the slave owner’s right to bodily integrity. ²⁶

It seems, however, that we are entitled, and probably even obliged, to provide emergency aid to the fugitive enslaved person and to disobey prevailing laws. In this case, the prima facie right of the slave owner to bodily integrity is replaced by a higher moral claim, namely that slavery is immoral and that people have a right to freedom and self-determination. It is thus evident that we do not condemn every “violation” of prima facie rights of others.

Hence we can conclude that property damage is not necessarily equal to violence. One might establish a princplie like: If a state upholds laws that are unreasonable, oppressive, violent and immoral, I have the moral right to use property destruction as a tactic to change the harmful status quo, since my action to change these unjust laws constitute a higher moral claim than the right to property. Some further specifications are necessary:

(1) Probability of success(?) and motivation: One could claim that the greater the chance of change from the property damage, the more legitimate it is. If a fur store, already suffering financial losses due to the increasing rejection of fur by the public, is covered with graffiti, the property damage may contribute to the shutdown of the store. On the other hand, an action is probably not legitimate if it does not generate pressure and is not part of a larger political context (such as within a campaign). For example, if someone burns down a restaurant that serves animal remains, it is questionable whether this action will have a long-term effect for animal liberation. However, I am not sure to what extent the probability of success criterion should be taken as a basis for legitimacy. Minor offenses that can not be causally responsible for change can still be justified. For example, if a person creates a graffiti on a racist politician’s house or on objects used for animal exploitation, the damage will not have a great impact on systemic change – nevertheless, they represent acts of resistance and make someone understand that their actions are wrong. Even such small, non-system changing actions can have social and symbolic significance and can bring needed relief to certain groups in society (in a strictly authoritarian and oppressive regime, doing oppositional graffiti – while not changing the situation – can have a positive meaning for silenced people or secret dissidents, e.g. “I’m not alone, there are others”, “They can not wipe out the resistance”).

A more important criterion is that the motivation behind the damage to property is the right one. The use of property damage to exert political and economic pressure may be justified in the case of the suffragettes or anti-colonialism movements – but violent protests are also used by religious fundamentalists who destroy abortion clinics and hospitals or by far-right groups. The difference is a substantive one: while the core beliefs of the ALF and other social justice movements are harm reduction and equality, core beliefs of anti-abortionists, for example, stem from distorted metaphysical assumptions and unscientific conclusions. Far-right beliefs, on the other hand, often derive from harmful ideologies that interpret justice and fairness in a biased way, seeking to gain preferential treatment or privilege for only a certain group of people. We therefore legitimize “violence” or illegal methods only if the purpose they are meant to promote is the right one.

(2) The violence carried out against property must be put in relation to the violence carried out against an oppressed group: Intensity and urgency need to be measured. To legitimize property damage or “violence” only as a last resort is difficult because we never know when we have reached the point where we may turn to the “last resort.” The history of the animal liberation movement shows that despite numerous campaigns and the increase of vegan options, there has been no improvement in the destruction of speciesist practices – on the contrary, more non-human animals than ever are being exploited and killed for human purposes today. We don’t have empty cages, we have better hidden ones. The frightening and almost impalpable level of violence inflicted on nonhuman animals because of their species membership can therefore call for a response that goes beyond the legal framework of political protest. This does not mean that any direct action that uses violence against property, intimidation, or threats is automatically justified; rather, from a tactical perspective, it makes sense to resort to multiple and varied strategies – and property damage may well be one of them.

Although many groups and individuals fight animal oppression in legal ways, the stark fact is that every year, more animals are exploited, oppressed tortured and killed than the year before. Members of the ALF and other underground organizations feel that in order to truly liberate animals, the unjust laws that allow their exploitation must be broken. The ALF and other direct-action groups have a history of effectiveness, closing many businesses that exploited animals, hurting many more economically, and freeing tens of thousands of animals, who could spend the remainder of their lives free of torture and suffering. – Jerry Vlasak²⁷

Critical Remarks on the ALF’s Classification as a Terrorist Organization

Animal liberation, vandalism and clandestine documentation of animal suffering have proven to be an effective weapon to disrupt individual instances of various animal industries. As already mentioned, as a result of the increase in militant actions, the ALF was classified as a domestic terrorist threat in the United States in 2001. In 2006 followed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), targeting a wide range of political activities in the name of animal liberation as acts of terrorism – even if those actions are completely non-violent and do not involve any damage to property. However, since the founding of ALF in the early 1990s, neither humans nor animals have been killed or seriously injured by ALF actions.

Animal torture is a business. We do not shut down businesses with petitions and annual protests. We shut them down by destroying their profits and creating the personal detriments that make it too costly for them to continue. We shut them down by preventing the next crop of abusers from ever reaching maturation. Over the last decade, we’ve repeatedly seen the establishment denounce the same actions as the abusers: blowing up a vivisector’s car, burning down a slaughterhouse, intimidating vivisection students into finding other pursuits, forcing local abusers to live with their own 24-hr security surveillance while keeping a close eye on their own spawn. These actions are called revolutionary. They are called effective! – Jerry Vlasak

It is now important to make some critical remarks about the concept of terrorism. First, there is no theoretically uniform definition of the word terrorism. Specifically, what constitutes an act of terrorism is mostly an ideological question and depends on the interpretation of the individual who uses the term. According to the FBI, for example, an act is considered terrorist if it:

(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that— (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.²⁸

ALF actions are not dangerous to human life, nor do they involve tactics such as mass destruction or assassinations. Although the ALF uses property destruction to apply pressure, the destruction is not indiscriminately directed at civilians, but at facilities or individuals that carry out the oppression of non-human animals. The ALF’s attacks on animal factories are attacks on speciesist stances and the pervasive anthropocentrism, and they pose a threat to the capitalist conception of property value. Direct action movements that tactically use the destruction of property as political protest are vehemently met with repression for exposing the unethical consequences of a neoliberal capitalist value systems. This is to be learned from the downfall of the SHAC movement; despite staggering evidence of animal abuse, the state was unwilling to engage in a discourse about the speciesist oppression of non-human animals, rather choosing to crush the movement and save private sector ventures that profit from animal suffering from bankruptcy via state funding.²⁹

Consequently, when the ALF is referred to as a terrorist threat, people refer to a concept of violence that equates violence with the destruction of property, rather than a concept of violence that focuses on the large-scale exploitation and physical and psychological destruction of non-human individuals. As we have seen, this concept of violence can be questioned.

What do these conclusions mean for assessing the ALF’s tactics?

Members of the ALF justify engaging in vandalism and other forms of interference with property rights by referring to the violence done to the individuals they are trying to defend. The ALF acts as a proxy for non-human animals and thus can make use of the concept of emergency relief. What animal exploiters do to animals is violence, and if anything can justify “violence,” it is the prevention of violence against living beings who are systematically oppressed, enslaved, exploited, and murdered.

“The basic premise is that if someone’s property is used to inflict pain, suffering, and death on innocent animals’ lives, then the destruction of that property is morally justified.” – David Barbarash³⁰

These observations do not mean that all militant action can be morally justified. Rather, the thoughts presented in this article should provide an impetus to question what the word violence means and why some forms of property destruction – as long as no one is physically harmed – can be appropriate. For people who are not victims of systemic oppression, it is always easier to point to the supposed illegitimacy of “violent” and illegal forms of protest. However, it should be more frequently wondered why people are not permitted to use illegal or “violent” methods to resist a system that inflicts immense suffering and injustice on them.

Why should people and representatives of non-humans not have the legitimacy to take illegal action against their oppressors, when contemporary laws protect the oppressors and put the oppressed in a more vulnerable position? Why should the main beneficiaries of animal exploitation, such as the meat, dairy and egg industries, scientists or fashion companies, change their minds about the profitable exploitation of non-human animals just because they are confronted with arguments? If an existing system tolerates, perhaps even encourages, practices that deprive members of society (both non-human and human) of their fundamental rights, why should those groups or their representatives always have to comply with obligations of peaceful and lawful action? Why do we owe conformity to a system that is willing to commit the worst crimes against sentient beings?

I cannot provide a conclusive answer to these questions – but I consider them essential for further discussions. They should serve as an idea of how we deal with concepts such as violence, crime and terrorism. Activists and allies who stand up for basic rights, justice and fairness do not use violence against property or illegal methods to oppress. Rather, militant protest is an expression of frustration and a desire for urgent improvement in social realities.

“How can people in our movement have condemned the A.L.F.’s economic sabotage as violence whilst, for example, supporting Nelson Mandela during the ANC’s armed struggle? To do so is speciesist. The simple question is: “Is short-term violence justifiable in pursuit of a long-term peace?” I leave the answer to each individual’s conscience.” – Robin Web³¹