Shishkoff reaches for a classic appeal to authority fallacy, one that illuminates the dogmatic mindset that characterizes the Franciombe phenomenon. We could just as easily, from an ALF standpoint, declare ex cathedra that a “true” vegan not only eschews animal-derived products, but also raids laboratories and sabotages exploiters’ property. We could just as well say to Shishkoff: “No, you are not a 'true,’ 'real,’ or 'authentic’ vegan, and in fact, nor is your hero, Donald Watson; only the ALF and those who support them are bona fide, card carrying vegans.” Clearly, this would be absurd and authoritarian, but no less so that Shishkoff’s essentialized definition of veganism and Hall’s metaphysical concept of animal rights.
A Dialectical and Contextual Concept of Violence
“A small group of people have succeeded where Karl Marx, the Red Brigade and the Baader-Meinhof Gang all failed.” The Financial Times on the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign, April 2003.
“Although violence is repugnant, there do seem to be times — primarily after all else has been tried — that it might be immoral not to resort to its use. This is why I can’t embrace ahimsa.” Rick Bogle
One wide misconception of our position is that we are somehow glorifying, romanticizing, or privileging violence and that we ourselves are physically violent people who contradict the ultimate goals of “real” vegans and “true” animal rights activists who seek to build on the high road to peaceful One Plate at a Time change. In fact, fear and paranoia seem to have overtaken Priscilla Feral’s mind, prompting her to comment on our original piece on Thomas Paine’s Corner (TPC) with this surprisingly sophomoric admonition to Best: “Buzz off, scary guy.” Feral’s husband, Robert Orabona, is not to be outdone in the ad hominem department. He veers far from the topic of our essay to sling mud and insults at Oatis (who tries to take the high road and keep the discussion on topic), engaging in a sustained personal attack that culminates with this bon mot: “If you want to save money on your suits, try shopping in the Boys Department” (# 58). We are certain such language would not receive the Lee Hall Seal of Approval, for it falls short of her pacifist ideals (inspired by Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King) that demand treating others with love and respect (including animal exploiters!), as opposed to heaping on them a bilious stream of abuse.
Numerous people misunderstood our position on violence, somewhat understandably given our brevity and tacit assumptions in a general polemic, though Best has spoken and written on the issue in many interviews, essays and books.[10] Yet few pacifists seem to read material critical of their viewpoint and outside their box. Non-pacifist is not pro-violence, it is just realist, pluralist, contextualist, and pragmatic. As non-pacifists, we do not champion violence as a goal, a good, or end in itself.
We too seek a peaceful society, especially in the way humans treat other animals. Yet, we do not let ideals blind us to realities, and from our methodological positions, we also believe in (1) the need for, (2) the legitimacy of, and (3) strategic value of illegal actions, sabotage, coercive tactics, and sometimes “violence” as in the use of physical force with intent to cause bodily harm (e.g., as armed Rwandan soldiers protect elephants against poachers).
We don’t absolutely commit to pacifism or non-pacifism in the abstract, but rather apply what seems the best strategy for a given political situation. As contextualists, pluralists, and pragmatists, we look to the context to understand what is violent or nonviolent, we advance a number of resistance strategies, and for the animals’ sake, and we take principles that work in action over flowery ideals and fancy lounge chair philosophies any day. A non-pacifist is someone who sometimes allows the need and value for violence, as do we. We assert as a general principle that violence is the last, not the first, resort for social change.
Whereas advocates of direct action such as Paul Watson, Rod Coronado, and Kevin Jonas are examples of MDA supporters who use inclusive approaches that acknowledge the validity of different tactics in different situations, critics of direct action wield exclusive approaches that deny the need for and validity of a plurality of tactics — legal and illegal, underground and aboveground. If it is to succeed, the animal advocacy movement must embrace a multidimensional and contextualist model of change rooted in the insight that different situations require different and perhaps multiple types of tactics deployed simultaneously. Eschewing dogma and pre-packaged answers, this approach asks: what tactic or combination of tactics is appropriate to a specific situation? It is obvious that not all violence is justified, but it is equally obvious that not all violence is unjustified. Self-defense is one example where it is acceptable and prudent to use force against another person if necessary.
Like fundamentalist pacifists, we hope for a non-violent world achieved through non-violent means. We also grant the crucial role of vegan education and outreach and thus can acknowledge these positive aspects of the work of Hall, FoA, and Francione. Let’s face facts: we live in an advanced military-capitalist-industrialist system of power predicated on the taking and killing of all resources and life. The system’s omnicidal roots trace back ten thousands years, it is now a dying empire imploding in itself, and power and privilege will be defended at any cost.
We believe that a confrontation with the corporate-state complex is inevitable, but our vision is not a shoot-out with the FBI, SWAT teams, and sharpshooters, but rather waging a two-fold war, one belowground (such as the ALF or the Justice Department) and one aboveground, with one approach complimenting the other. To give just two examples of this effective interplay, the ALF was a key contributing force, along with mainstream groups such as In Defense of Animals, in the 2002 closing of the notorious Coulston chimpanzee “research” center in Alamogordo, New Mexico. In 2003, moreover, aboveground groups were able to exploit the media attention brought to the foie gras industry resulting from ALF attacks on French chefs promoting it and using that newly opened space to protest and educate about the horrible confinement and force-feeding method used to produce this “delicacy.”[11]
Only the most doctrinaire and conceptually shuttered individuals such as Hall can deny that MDA tactics have been incredibly important and effective in the struggle for animal liberation, and will always play a pivotal role. Emerging in England in the mid-1970s, the ALF has shut down countless exploiters and liberated countless thousands of animals that otherwise were doomed to a slow and painful demise. SHAC arose in England in 1999, evolving from a pre-history of amazingly successful direct action campaigns designed to close down animal breeders and to disrupt the supply chain to the pharmaceutical industries.[12] In rapid succession, from 1996-1999, militant activists and diverse communities of people in England closed down Consort Beagle breeders, Hillgrove Cat Farm, and Shamrock Primate Farm. Once HLS was exposed for particularly heinous forms of animal torture, and it became clear the government had no intention of enforcing its own welfare laws, SHAC founders Greg Avery, Heather James, and Natasha Dellemagne Avery went into action.
These brilliant activists formed SHAC with the novel intent to target one major drug and chemical testing company, Huntington Life Sciences (HLS). The goal was to rock the foundations of the entire pharmaceutical industry by bringing down a giant, chasing HLS it to all corners of the world with an unprecedented global campaign. And true to their militant spirit and intent, SHAC has had a devastating effect on HLS. They drove them to incorporate in the US so that they could hide the identity of their shareholders and lenders, caused them to be delisted from both the New York and London Stock Exchanges, and have forced numerous lenders, customers, and vendors to cease doing business with HLS. On the verge of collapse from such effective new tactics, HLS would have folded altogether if not for financial bailouts from both the UK and US, and it continues to stagger due to persistent SHAC attacks, even while the founders and other leading members of SHAC have been imprisoned across the Atlantic and here at home. SHAC paid a price, true, but so did HLS, and the war continues. SHAC’s innovative tactics proved so successful that other political groups have adopted them for their cause.[13]
With an ignorance only matched by her arrogance, Hall contemptuously dismisses the SHAC campaign as the hoodlum nonsense of maladjusted youth — a grotesque and ageist stereotype of a large army of militants quite diverse in age and background. In fact SHAC is one of the most intelligent, shrewd, and cunning campaigns ever developed in any social movement. Striking a primary target by attacking secondary and supporting companies, innovative use of websites and the Internet to coordinate campaigns, novel types of pressure tactics such as home demos and public shaming, chasing HLS all the way from England to the NYSE and beyond are just some of the elements that characterize the SHAC campaign as a brilliant tactical breakthrough and potential historic watershed in the struggle for human, nonhuman animal, and Earth liberation.[14]
Written from her US-Eurocentric, middle class, bourgeois, legalist perspective, Hall’s treatise does a tremendous disservice to the dedicated young vegan anarchists who do support or engage in direct action, whether through the ALF, the ELF, SHAC, or some other entity. Disconnected as she obviously is from radical anti-capitalist anarchists, many of whom have embraced veganism and animal liberation, Hall devoted much of Capers to caricaturizing them as uneducated social malcontents looking for ways relieve their ennui and anger, being nothing but lost souls seeking to forge an identity through their militant actions. To better understand how gross a distortion this is, consider an excerpt from an essay written by NYCVeganPunk, a member of a sub-culture Hall’s ridiculous stereotype blithely dismisses:
The rights of animals were brought to the forefront of punk rock thought by European anarcho-punk bands in the early 1980’s. Through their lyrics and outspoken support of direct action campaigns to sabotage foxhunts and end vivisection, these bands issued a “call to arms” for would-be activists and elevated punk beyond the nihilism and shock value of its early history. Bands like the Subhumans, Discharge, Icons of Filth, Riot/Clone, Anti-Sect and many, many others began to explore the possibilities of music as more than just entertainment but as a powerful form of communication. As these bands began to hone their skills, they developed a more articulate political criticism and rejection of the dominant culture of animal cruelty….. Politically and socially conscious punk bands began addressing a range of socially relevant issues, including animal rights. Punks began to organize animal rights benefit shows, released animal rights themed record compilations and published fanzines that tackled the issue as well. Today, in almost every major city in the world, many involved in the punk sub-culture are working hard to further the cause of animals. [15]
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