“We have so enslaved the rest of animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feather so badly that beyond doubt, if they were ever to form a religion, they would depict the devil in human form.”
William Ralph Inge
“I argue that there can be no reason - except the selfish desire to preserve the privileges of the exploiting group - for refusing to extend the basic principle of equality of consideration to members of other species.”
Peter Singer
The conditioning starts early. We are taught to distinguish between different types of animal in the same way we are taught to distinguish between different types (classes) of people. Our first cuddly toys are animals. But usually little bears and lions (not cows or sheep). Our pets are non-food animals. (Well conditioned people who eat white veal and battery chickens are often genuinely outraged that other people eat horses and dogs.) We are so conditioned that we see nothing offensive or ridiculous in TV advertisements which show pigs who want to be made into sausages or tuna fish who can't wait to be canned. We are not outraged by adverts and packaging which shows pictures of 'contented' cows and farmyard chickens - images which we know to be a sick parody of the factory farming methods which actually produce the product.
Hardly a week goes by without a TV feature on animals. Spectators again - long shot ... heat haze ... voice over ... lions stalking zebra to the 1812 Overture - after a few you can't tell the wildlife films from the Esso adverts.
The result of this 'educational' television is that now most people know more about the life cycle of the cheetah and the shark than they do about the animals that finish up - every day - as meat on their plate.
Opposition to speciesism has nothing to do with sentimentality, anthropomorphism or cats' homes - it is about simple justice and consideration.
It is nothing to do with being an 'animal lover' - some animals are not very lovable - but would anyone expect that in order to be concerned about equality for a mistreated racial minority you have to love every member of that minority - or regard them as cute and cuddly?
“Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
Henry Beston
We have constructed the world of our own alienation. Every barrier we put up restricts our freedom of movement. Our castle has become our prison, from whose walls we watch the world outside.
“Here in the zoo, in this place of hypnotic fascination, human beings come to see their own instincts caged and sterilised. Everything that is intrinsic to humankind, but smothered by capitalist society, reappears safely in the zoo. Aggression, sexuality, motion, desire, play, the very impulses to freedom are trapped and displayed for the alienated enjoyment of men, women and children. Here is the harmless spectacle in which everything desired by human beings exists only to the degree that it is separated from the reality of human existence ... The condition of slavery automatically poses the question : 'What are the prospects for liberation?' It hardly needs to be stressed that the very notion of the revolutionary transformation of the relations between humans and beasts is all but unthinkable today.”
The Surrealist Group
The Spectacle only offers us the choice of human civilisation or animal savagery. It always offers these choices which are no choice at all. (The current CEGB publicity campaign invites us to choose between going forward to nuclear power or back to the stone age.) We know better. We have to know that there are other ways of doing things.
The possibilities are immense.
There may seem to be a lot of herbs, but apart from the delicious flavour they add, they also help to veil the reality of brains from the squeamish.
Spectacular production is obviously keen to keep the unpalatable side of production hidden from the consumers. In the case of factory-farmed food the consumer has been a willing collaborator in the cover-up.
“Somewhere along the line these long-suffering servants of ours, the food producing animals, have lost out. Their lot has actually worsened, while the others have been treated with more care and respect ... Most of us live with this inconsistency because, although we see the wild creatures and pets, we do not see the unfortunate battery creatures - whether hens, pigs or calves - because they are neatly shut away from view in anonymous private buildings ... The moral of this story, if you happen to be a bird or a mammal, is not to provide mankind with any valuable form of food. If you merely provide companionship as a pet, or beauty as a wild creature, you will be well treated; but if you provide your eggs or your meat for human sustenance - your reward will be a life sentence in an animal concentration camp.”
Desmond Morris
Pork, ham and bacon are also produced by the battery system. Veal calves aren't put in cages. They live in 24" wide stalls in a veal unit. They stay there 24 hours a day. They cannot even turn round. They are fed a low-iron liquid feed to keep the veal a fashionable 'white' colour. Denied the fibre all ruminants crave, they gnaw their wooden crates. After 14 weeks they are led out, many unable to walk or stand properly, and slaughtered.
The latest development in dairying is Alfa Laval's “Unicar”. A Unicar is a crate which runs on a small railway track. At one end of the crate is a feed trough and at the other end is a manure hopper; in the middle is a cow.
Every six hours the Unicar makes a short journey from the 'cow-park'. As it progresses it trips various automatic functions. The manure is dumped and flushed out, the water trough is topped up and a computer calculated amount of concentrated food is dropped into the manger. As the Unicar enters the milking station a cowman attaches the milking machine and removes it again when the unicar leaves the exit behind him. Chopped hay is then released into the manger. The Unicar then returns automatically to the shed where it is parked for another six hours, the cow, of course, remaining in it.
“Cows don't need legs any more!”
Alfa Laval representative
In this happy conspiracy between producer and consumer nothing is more mystified than the process by which living animals become meat. Primary school children are taken out to the country to visit farms and see new-born lambs and piglets. City farms have been specifically set up to bring children nearer to animals and 'nature'. Children are encouraged to feed animals, groom them, watch them give birth. If this is all so 'natural' how come nobody organises primary school visits to the slaugherhouse?
Bernard Matthews that slaughtering is running between 5 000 and 6 000 a day. The normal daily slaughtering rate at both factories is 25 000.
Yesterday morning two lorryloads of live turkeys were driven into Great Witchingham. Once inside, the birds are hung by the feet from a moving track, a heavy and difficult job because turkeys struggle hard, and are then stunned by having their heads dipped into an electric bath.
Their throats are slit while they are momentarily stunned by the shock, because it is considered aesthetically important to slit the bird's throat while it's heart is beating. This allows enough blood to drain away to produce a pale-fleshed carcass.
The men in this part of the factory are paid an extra £11 a week “dirt” money, because their protective clothes are sprayed constantly with turkey excreta and blood. Otherwise the average basic pay is £72 a week for day workers, £87 a week for the night shift. Most of the women, who make up 60 per cent of the labour force, work in the processing and packing department.
“This is what it means to be a slave : to be abused and bear it, compelled by violence to suffer wrong.”
Euripides
A few years ago the Polar Bears at Brookfield Zoo, after heavy rains flooded their lair, swam across the moat, broke into a concession stand and frolicked about as they consumed thousands of marshmallows.
The Surrealist Group
IMG's Tariq Ali added “One is just so involved in fighting for a solution to the problems of humanity that to start taking up issues involving animals is not one of our priorities.”
“Everyone has a limited amount of time and energy, and time taken in active work for one cause reduces the time available for another cause; but there is nothing to stop those who devote their time and energy to human problems from joining the boycott of the produce of agri-business cruelty. It takes no more time to be a vegetarian than to eat animal flesh ... When non-vegetarians say 'human problems come first' I cannot help wonder exactly what it is they are doing for humans that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.”
Peter Singer
Early this century Thomas Edison devised a way of demonstrating, in one blow, the power of electricity and the impact of the motion picture camera. He filmed the public electrocution of an elephant.
Approximately 100 000 animals die every week in British laboratories alone. In theory animals used in laboratory experiments are protected against cruelty by an act of Parliament set down in 1876. However no independent observer, not even an RSPCA inspector, has the right of entry into a vivisection laboratory to witness an experiment on a living animal.
There has only been one successful prosecution under the Act since it became law.
The type of animal experimantaion that the majority of people are willing to justify is that which advances medical science. It may be justified on the basis that the suffering of the few is outweighed by the benefit to the many - but in practice it is animals and not humans who make the sacrifices. It may be argued that this is acceptable because animals are less intelligent and less aware than humans. Although our psychiatric hospitals contain many people who are less intelligent that dogs and less aware than apes, it is rare to hear the proponents of the above view publicly extend their argument to incude conducting painful experiments on the mentally sub-normal. In practice both arguments carry the reservation - “as long as the subject isn't human”.
Before we face the hard questions about animal experimentation for medical purposes we need to clear the clutter. Thousands of animals die and suffer in experiments which, even if they result in a new treatment, will affect a relatively small number of people. While resources and skills are poured into these areas of research, the vast majority of people who die and suffer from disease do so from diseases which we already know how to cure. To massively reduce the toll of human death and suffering on this planet we do not need a new drug or a new surgical technique, but a way of getting the drugs and treatments we already have to the people who need them.
A large number of animals are used in the testing and screening of drugs. In some cases non-animal alternatives are already being researched and developed. But at present a large number of drug experiments have little to do with medical care - they are done for commercial reasons. The drug industry is one of the most competitive and lucrative in the world. To stay ahead companies must expand their market with new drugs and also develop new drug combinations in order to get protected production rights as their 'old' drugs become available to their competitors.
It is estimated that almost 2 000 new chemical products are put on to the world market each year and that about 150 000 different medicines are obtainable, yet according to the World Health Organisation, all known diseases could be treated with about 200 of these substances.
A great deal of industrial disease, stress and anxiety - the daily humiliations of living in a Spectacular society - can be prevented.
Even so : there remain conditions which cause premature death and suffering. There still remains a comparitively small area of research which would become effectively imposible without live animal experimental subjects. A society that has reinvented everyday life will still have to consider how this research can continue - and the consequences if it doesn't continue. there are no easy answers. In the end we each choose the answer we think we can live with.
But this use of animals for medical experimentaion is only part of the picture. Animal experiments are also conducted to test cosmetics, shampoos, household products, cars, industrial chemicals and weapons. On top of that we see spurious research projects and the endless repetition of proven experiments in universities, colleges and schools.
The “Draize Eye Test”, for instance, involves dropping undiluted substances into the eyes of unanaesthatised, restrained rabbits. Observations are made on the damage to the eye membrane, thickening of the cornea, etc, over a period of up to three weeks. If all goes well the world will have what it is crying out for - a new brand of hair shampoo.
To gain legal protection manufacturers commonly use the LD50 test - short for lethal dose 50%, this test involves administering substances to test animals until 50% of the group die of poisoning. Some substances are of such low toxicity that animals die from the sheer physical effects of forced-feeding. The LD50 test is he price of putting NEW on your latest lipstick or floor-polish.
“In the third week of their first term at Bristol University all first year Psychology students are shown a film extolling the virtues of animal experimentation. This is followed by a questionaire asking them whether they believe vivisection is morally justifiable.”
Correspondent
As part of one of their experiments, Ziegler, Green and Lehrer of New York's City College starved pigeons to 70% of their normal weight. Recorded in the Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology for Sept 1971 is their astonishing addition to the sum of human knowledge - “prolonged periods of food deprivation are typically followed by an increased responsiveness to food.”
Curiosity - another reason for vivisection : at Pittsburgh University small rhesus monkeys, caged singly, were taught that the only means of escaping painful electric shocks was to jump on to a shelf, and were then placed in the same cage with only one small shelf between them. Reactions of the 'losing' monkey wre noted : “ appeals, attempts at sharing the shelf, crying and ultimately fights causing deep lacerations ...” etc.
Dogs shut in a box for the first eight weeks of life do not react to pain in the usual way. Being so frightened of 'everything', when inflicted with pain, they made no attempt to escape. So curious was a McGill University experimentor that he tried again with flames, needles and a toy car electrically charged with 1500 volts. These dogs didn't understand the source of their pain.
The John Hopkins University Medical School has developed a restraining chair for the long term study of apes. The chair allows for considerable growth while at the same time preventing the apes from straightening their arms during the delivery of electric shocks. During the two six-hour sessions in every 24 hours baboons and monkeys are subjected to “continuously programmed behavioural events”. A red light signals the onset of electric shocks. If the baboon can press a lever 150 times it can turn off the electric shocks for five minutes. The report states that 22 baboons and rhesus monkeys had been restrained in this manner for 'lengthy periods', 'several' of them for one-and-a-half years of 'continuous experimentation'.
Can researchers help you become a better worker-consumer?
A number of rabbits were subjected to operations in which most of the brain was destroyed. The experimenters found that these brain-damaged rabbits could still learn to press a treadle to get food.
Phys. & Behaviour Vol. 20
Within the peaceful confines of the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down, Dr D M Green puts riot control chemicals in the eyes of guinea pigs. Like his fellow employees variously occupied injecting monkeys with bacteria or shooting rubber bullets at sheep, he was disturbed on the 24th April by several thousand demonstrators at his gates.
Dear Madam,
The last owner of your fur coat died in it.
Dear Marje,
Will hunting make my willy longer?
During the 1975/6 hunting season, USA hunters killed 24 000 bears, 55 000 caribou, 67 000 moose, 84 000 antelpoe, 102 000 elks, 2 600 000 deer, 21 000 000 waterfowl, 27 000 000 rabbits, 32 000 000 squirrels and 94 000 000 upland game birds.
“The Beast”, 1979
An attempt to establish a new record of 1 000 pheasants shot in a single day just failed for the second consecutive year last week.
The fourteen guns hit over 900 birds and despite their record-breaking attempt, they refused to break the established code of sportsmanship by shooting behind or at low birds.
Just 72 hours after setting a new record at the Redlands venue of Hollybush Lane Fishery with a 118lb 7oz haul, Fleet angler Graeme Pullen has shattered his own record with an even bigger catch.
This time he landed a incredible 121lb 4oz bag, consisting of 28 bream, 11 tench and a bonus common carp.
Graeme is now off for a week's holiday - blue marlin fishing in Bermuda.
In August last year four men routed a fox from its earth using terriers. This procedure is commonly used by hunts to 'bolt' foxes after they have gone to ground. In this case one man, Christopher Hardman, an engineer employed by Birmingham University, carried the unconscious fox to his van where it was found by police alerted by a local woman who had heard the fox's screams. The fox was in great pain and later had to be destroyed. Injuries to the fox included : hind quarters and anal tract ripped open and bleeding badly, deep cuts to the stomach, neck and throat, cuts and grazes to back legs, injuries to front leg, testicles ripped off.
Hardman told the police “That fox will get better. It's our sport.” Hardman told the court that he was an 'animal lover'.
Howl 1979
“Horsewhipping a saboteur is rather like beating a wife. Both are personal matters.”
Tim Asplin, Master of Essex Union Hunt
Four years ago there was a burglary at the offices of the Research Defence Society, the body headed by Halsbury which promotes experimental research.
It is not known who was responsible, but it was followed by break-ins and raids on laboratories, farms and kennels up and down the country during 1977 and 1978.
Police arrested about 20 people after windows at Porton Down research establishment were broken as 2 500 anti-vivisectionists rallied yesterday.
A reporter from the New York Times, out with W.A.P.S. on a Jorrocks hunt (Old Surrey & Burstow F.H.) was told by a redcoat; “They're scum, absolute scum ... they're anarchists who are just bent on disruption.”
Later in the day the police threatened sabs with arrest for “coming here and upsetting our people”. They also threatened to circulate the sabs' car number to other police in the area.
Fifteen lorries were immobilised and daubed with blood-red paint outside Fraccenda Chickens at Brackley, Nothants. Damage was estimated at £3 000.
The A.L.F. have been out in force on a variety of missions. Particularly making their point stick to fur shops of Glasgow. Powerful glue was sprayed into the door locks and anti fur trade slogans daubed on walls.
Members of the Albrighton Hunt at a cocktail party were treated to a car spray and elecrtics service. Either the paintwork wasn't dry or was not appreciated because their owners took taxis home.
Members of the Animal Liberation Front have been waging war against David Smarts Super Circus permanently stationed in Battersea Park, South London. South London ALF received nationwide attention when they warned all shopkeepers who advertised the circus in their shops would have their windows bricked. This has already occured on several shops.
The Sea Shepherd II crossed into Soviet waters on Tuesday in its second atttempt to find a Soviet whaling ship and stop its operations, according to a radio operator in Van Nuys, California, who is in 24-hour contact with the ship.
The Sea Shepherd, with a crew of 28 men and women from five countries, is heading north along the Soviet coast towards Lorino seeking the Soviet whaler, the Sevetny.
The anti-whaling ship was in Lorino on Sunday, and Captain Watson and two crew members approached in a dinghy within 10 feet of Rusian soil before they were spotted.
On the way out, Captain Watson twice ignored orders from the Soviet Navy to stop.
Mrs Janet Bridgers, a memberof the Sea Shepherd Foundation, refused to say whether Captain Watson intended to try ramming and sinking the Sevetny if he found it. He has claimed sinking four “pirate whalers” in two years.
During the Sea Shepherd's earlier activity off the Spanish coast, two 'pirate' whaling ships sank mysteriously after unknown divers attached limpet mines to their hulls.
People are laying bets for the seventh, and final, course. A cheer goes up when the beaters succeed in bolting a hare and the dogs flash out of the tent. Spectators scream “Go on, you!” and “Wallop!” as the greyhounds get within feet of the zig-zagging hare. “Rip his back legs off,” yells one. His friends laugh. The hare escapes.
The saboteurs are pursued by two mounted policemen wearing riot helmets with plexiglass visors.
I jump over the ditch separating the wood from the course. A policeman comes galloping towards me. I say I'm Press. “You came in with that lot, you can go back with that lot,” he says, threatening to run me into the ditch if I don't obey.
October 1980
When activists broke into Sheffield University's field laboratory they found animals living in cages that appeared not to have been cleaned for weeks. There was no attendant, minimal lighting, no heating and no food or water available for the animals.
Four mongrel dogs were rescued. Contrary to the University's claim that it only uses specially-bred laboratory animals these animals were clearly former pets. All responded to vocal instructions such as 'sit' and 'stop' and chased after sticks and returned them to their rescuers feet.
The raiders also seized documents which gave the name of the supplier as “McGill”. Localresearch enabled the activists to reunite one dog with its former owner.
Six months later the activists attacked Stanley McGill's kennels at Swinderby, Lincolnshire. McGill and his sons threw concrete and bricks at the advancing activists who fought back with bricks, bottles and smoke bombs.McGill and his sons retreated indoors and the activists wrecked their vehicles and outbuildings. All six kennels were broken into and the dogs rescued.
After half an hour the police arrived but all the rescued animals were well away by then. Then the SPG from Lincoln arrived and tried to arrest four activists but those taken were freed by their comrades. The raiders then lost themselves in the support demonstration which was timed to appear on the scene.
The SPG later attacked the march and after a struggle arrested six supporters. The demonstration then dispersed.
Later that day the police were back at McGill's to protect him from a demonstration by 50 local villagers from Swinderby and Newark. They had heard details of the previous raid on local radio And TV. Many claimed that family pets had disappeared.
Enid Breedon who runs an animal investigation organisation which attempts to reunite 'lost' pets with their former owners esimates that in the Notts/Derby/Leics/Lincoln areathere are on average 40 to 50 'pet snatches' a month involving some 400 animals, mainly dogs and cats but also rabbits and ferrets. Dr Roger Allum of Sheffield University said “Animal dealers have to sign a certificate saying that they are not supplying stolen animals or pets.”
The ALF and the other direct action animal liberation groups have identified their immediate enemies and taken action against them. The press cuttings collected for this issue alone detail attacks on vivisection laboratories and their suppliers, factory farms, fur farms and fur shops, seal and whale hunting ships, experimenters' homes, hunts and circuses. Equipment has been destroyed, vehicles wrecked and disabled, doors superglued shut, boats burned, ramed or blown up.
The number of animals rescued runs into thousabds. The amountof damage runs into millions of pounds. Despite all this activity the animal liberation groups are lagely ignored by other political groups. Perhaps the politicos are ashamed. In the last five years the animal liberation activisats have undertaken more direct action and caused more physical and financial damage to theie enemies than the entire British revolutionary left put together (including those groups who claim to hold 'direct action' as a basic tenet of their philosophy.)
To be safe the Spectacle must recuperate these demands. Groups - even the most active and courageous - who know full well what is happening, but have developed no analysis of why it is happening, are the most vulnerable. The fight to stop what is happening can be so desperate that activists are willing to accept the relief of even the most spectacular alternatives ...
IFAW especially endorses this trip to the seals (approved on a special basis by the Canadian authorities) because we want the seals to be a tourist attraction - not the subject of a senseless hunt.
... and thereby give support to the view that animals only have a right to exist if they can be exploited in some way.
Animal liberation has nothing to do with Spectacular business's idea of 'conservation' (a new word for resource management - ie. it is silly to kill off the resource you are exploiting.)
Tanzania is among the poorest nations on Earth, with an annual cash income per citizen equivalent to a few hundred dollars. The government budget roughly approximates what Londoners spend on ice-cream each year; but of this impoverished national pie, Tanzania allocates a larger proportion of funds to safeguarding its wildlife than can be claimed by, for example, the United States.
At the same time, Tanzania can obviously use much conservation support from overseas. It is plainly looking for conventional forms of aid, in the way of park vehicles, aircraft, radios, and other anti-poaching equipment : two game rangers have recently been killed on duty, partly due to lack of back-up facilities.
Amazing news for zoologists everywhere. Fiat have discovered a way of making Pandas breed like rabbits. You build a car that is tough and practical, as well as incredibly chic. And, just for good measure, a year's membership of the World Wildlife Fund.
The Panda is, of course, the symbol of the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF headquarters in Switzerland suggested that all WWF organisations should 'join' with Fiat in launching hteir new model as it could benefit WWF funds. All agreed except Italy and Belgium. Susanna Agnelli, President of WWF Italy and member of the family which owns Fiat, resigned from WWF Italy shortly afterwards.
WWF Italy has been troublesome to the WWF headquarters before. In 1976 they unsuccessfully called for the resignation of Dr. Luc Hoffman, WWF Vice-President. Hoffman's family owns the drug company La Roche which was responsible for Italy's worst environmental disaster at Seveso.
From 'Private Eye'
When 30 false killer whales were stranded in the Dry Tortugas island, off Florida, one of them - a large male - was seriously wounded and bleeding from one ear. The rest of the herd huddled in a tight wedge around him, holding him up and keeping his head towards the beach.
Tides in the Dry Tortugas are small, so none of the whales was completely high and dry, and all could have left at any time. But although many became severely sunburned, Dr Watson says, the only time any whale moved away was when an oceanographer swam nearby using a snorkel, which presumably sounded like a whale in trouble with a waterlogged blowhole.
Evevry time he swam near one of the whales would detach itself from the herd, slide beneath him and carry him to the beach.
Only when the injured male died, on the third night of the stranding, did the rest of the herd swim away.
“Among the higher species a wide range of activity, even entertainment, is required to keep the animals healthy, and the more clever will invent games of their own. Usually they involve the zoo's visitors. The frustrated or extremely bored chimpanzee throws things at the crowd, the lion endeavours to urinate on them.”
James Dewar
If enslavement begins with humans it must end with the simultaneous liberation of humans and animals from the yoke of commodity fetishism and narcissistic effusions.
The brutal confinement of animals ultimately serves only to separate men and women from their own potentialities, and to make them victims of their own barbarity.
It is the reality of dreams that necessitates the reintegration of humans and animals in everyday life. In the realisation of its deepest desires, humanity will achieve what it has always sought : a universe of the incredible.
The Surrealist Group