William Wilberforce, John Hampden, and other homeland heroes fought injustice of their time, but has the England of today sponsored a new kind of hero, a hero who likewise rebels against injustice but who wears a "domestic terrorist" tag around his neck placed there by the status quo keepers: the National Institute of Health, the American Medical Association, the Meat and Dairy Industry, and the governments of the U.S., Britain, and sundry other nations, all who hope to tighten the noose, decapitating those who champion the rights of the truly defenseless?

What are the "accomplishments" of these valiant revolutionaries or despicable terrorists (depending, of course, upon your perspective)? The destruction of five buildings and four ski lifts in Vail, Colorado on October 18, 1998 so that the habitat of the lynx could be preserved, the latter facing extinction due to the ski resort's plan for expansion. Terminating the funding of a Louisiana State University neurosurgeon whose research involved shooting 125 cats in the head annually in a gunshot wound study. Freeing 4000 animals from a fur farm in Kimball, Minnesota.

These masked, neo-luddites calling themselves the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) (a newly-formed environmentalist branch of ALF) are the most radical factions of the animal rights movement and, in part, owe their existence to the Brits, notorious forerunners in animal welfare and environmental concerns; ALF was officially formed in 1976 in England as an offshoot of the Hunt Sabateurs Association, an organization that diverted fox hunting hounds from their prey. In addition to Britain's instigative role, its isolated countryside remains the locale-of-choice for secret boot camps where ALF wannabes learn how to pick locks, disconnect alarms, obtain fake drivers' licenses, cut telephone wires, disarm assailants, and slow down tape recorders for line taps.

The founder of the first U.S. based ALF, a former British boot camp trainee is a female, ex-police officer who justifies the destruction of cages, locks, decapitators, electrode implanters, and traps in the following way. "I don't think," she says, "that destroying a building can really be classified as violence. I think burning an animal is violent. People burn animals with blowtorches. They immerse pigs in scalding water. They put electrodes into cats' heads."

Members of both ALF and ELF adhere to a credo which disallows injury to any sentient being, including humans, but which strongly advocates the destruction of all tools of torture, be it medical research facilities, fur salons, factory farms, or fast food eateries that cater to carnivores. Bashing equipment or torching animal "concentration camps" is necessary, they insist, because abuse will not cease unless human exploitation becomes a costly enterprise, until insurance decline to write policies for their nemeses, until the funds to rebuild and replace become entombed by the latest cost/benefit analysis.

Surprisingly, the controversial actions of these radicals have been fruitful: bringing violations to the attention of authorities, getting researchers fired, and even gaining a degree of public support as evidenced in a British opinion poll which established that a significant segment of the population favors the insurgent organization: among younger people 25% support their aims and 20% support their methods.

However, detractors and much of the public bemoan the "terrorist" assaults. The scientific community, arguably the most targeted "enemy" of those in the Animal Rights Movement, cite the resulting damage to their profession: a decline in research projects, numerous job resignations, and the loss of important data from ravaged labs, all thwarting the medical establishment's primary objective of saving as many human lives as possible.

In the 1800's the machine-destroying Luddites were sentenced to death for their non-life threatening actions, and today by means of a legislative bill passed in 1990, ALFers and ELFers face life in prison for "vandalism of," or "stealing property (living or nonliving) from" federally funded research institutions.

Life in prison for rescuing a rat? Ironic, considering California Penal Code, section 487g states that any person who steals an animal for medical research (in other words, taking the animal to a federal lab) is "guilty of a public offense punishable by imprisonment...not to exceed one year."

The discrepancy illustrates two points. First, when governmental interests are at stake, the stakes go up, and secondly, taking an animal from a research facility (unlike the reverse) is interpreted as a terrorist activity. The assailant possesses a weapon more dangerous than a gun: an ideology. In fact, the Federal Bureau of Investigation officially stipulates that a "terrorist" is an individual with an ideology, and of course, an ideology is implicitly defined as holding beliefs contrary to the accepted norms of society.

Does this mean that one must shed ones ideology before rescuing a rat? I think not, for to discard ones ideology is to terrorize the self, and in the case of ALFers and ELFers, it is likewise to ignore the voiceless, the powerless, the forgotten, those in pain who hover in the corners of their cages, aching to see sunlight, close to death, awaiting the underground rebels they call heroes.

Back to PHILOSOPHICAL ARTICLES
Go HOME