2. What violence? Hall refers to the incident when Brian Cass ended up with a head injury, and to be fair to her and to Cass, I do not know about the facts surrounding the case other than what is in the press. I do not trust the press to tell the truth any more than I trust Alistair Darling to steer us out of our economic recession. I can find no other example of actual violence from animal rights activists.
Hall refers to letters, stuff on “Bite Back,” and property damage all as violent. She never really refers to those who abuse animals as violent, or those who terrorise native Amazonian peoples, or the police or the prisons as violent. No, just her fellow activists are violent. Suppose someone got injured from a tree which was spiked; this is sad, but just maybe the corporation were to blame: why were they cutting up spiked trees and destroying our collective future? Some whalers got some foam on them from Sea Shepherd’s foam gun; are we supposed to be horrified by this more than the fact that whalers are lobbing explosive harpoons at sentient beings, including Paul Watson? A woman wearing fur gets sworn at; what on earth would she expect, certainly in the UK, where everyone is aware of the obscene cruelty involved in making fur? It is not as though an animal rights activist has read Michael Tobias’ novel, “Rage and Reason” (a book in which the hero Felham visits the exact same violence on people as they inflict on their victims, chefs are boiled to death, vivisectors mashed, the police face anti aircraft missiles, etc.), and then decides to chop off the fur wearer’s hands and feet before skinning her alive, a grotesque fate which she has inflicted on others, and knows she has inflicted on others, and is proud of that fact. No one would ever do such a heinous act apart from fiction.
Hall writes (page 38): “To agree with animal rights mean, at essence, to repudiate violence.” Does it? When exactly did the entire international animal rights movement reach a consensus on this definition of animal rights? I believe in women’s rights the fact that we are all equal regardless of gender, if someone tries to rape me do I not have the right to kick him in the goolies? The same applies if I come across a gay man being hounded because of his sexuality. I have no problem with calling the police to use violence on his behalf, and if they do not respond that leaves me with no choice but to do my best to help, which does not preclude the use of force. Presumably, on Hall’s outlook, I should just allow myself to be raped or just walk past another sentient being getting beaten (be that being a dog or an old person, etc.). What choice is there if someone is holding a knife to a child’s throat? If I call for police assistance and they act to protect someone they will use violence to the extent of killing someone, does it matter if they apply the force rather than I?
Hall omits all mention of animal rights activists being subjected to violence with the exception of Steve Christmas (a sab who nearly died after being repeatedly run over, back and forth, by a land rover). No mention of the murdered William Sweet (League Against Cruel Sports) who was shot, of Fernando Pereira (Greenpeace) who was blown up by the French secret service, of Mike Hill (Hunt Saboteur) who was crushed by a hunt vehicle aged 18, of Tom Worby who was crushed by another hunt vehicle aged 15, or of Jill Phipps crushed by a lorry exporting calves to the continent, to name just some of those now dead for fighting human supremacy. Even though Hall’s book supposedly centres around the campaigns against Darley Oaks farm in Newchurch and against Huntingdon Life Sciences, she deliberately misleads by omitting any mention of attacks on peaceful protestors by the Hall family (and their employees), attacks sometimes severe enough as to cause some activists to need their heads stitched back together.
Nor does she mention the attack on me personally, in which I sustained a smashed face and femur in a protest against HLS. Nor do we find mention of the threats, taunts, unlawful arrests, criminal damage, etc., against SHAC activists and hunt saboteurs. She does not bother to mention the fact that peaceful protestors have successfully sued the police for unlawfully abusing us by using strip searches, beatings, and arrests as “punishments” without any legal foundation. Hall clearly could not be bothered to talk to any English or Welsh lawyers (NB: Scottish law is VERY different), let alone activists, about recent events, all of which astonished me.
3. Gladys Hammond. This annoyed me more than anything as the title of the book and the cover refer to the incident concerning Mrs. Hammond’s remains appear to be the lynchpin, the main outrage, on which her argument hinges. Even if we accept everything the police and press say on the matter, Mrs. Hammond was not killed by animal rights activists, nor was she harmed. She was dead and had been for many years, the corpse was not Gladys, she is hopefully in a far better place than 6 feet under. Entire graveyards are dug up by corporations and the bodies of the dead from tombs overseas are displayed in museums, so please let us get this into perspective, though for the record, common decency prohibits to my mind any tinkering with those who are still mourned for. The way Hall writes about Gladys Hammond, anyone would think that this was the worst single outrage that had ever happened, above and beyond violence meted out against any living creature.
As such out of sheer courtesy I would have expected Hall to have contacted Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs (SNGP) and spoken to those who conducted THE TOTALLY LEGAL CAMPAIGN against the Darley Oaks guinea pig farm. But Hall could not be bothered and instead relied on a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) press release and mainstream media press cuttings.
One journalist called Nicola Woodcock (NOT Woolcock!) from “The Times” (NOT the London Times) is especially relied on as a “reference” and as many UK activists know Nicola was part of the juggernaut of litigation against PEACEFUL protest. For example in 2004-5 HLS were VERY keen to get hold of my house. This was spiteful and unnecessary, as I had virtually left the SHAC campaign, I was recovering from a third operation on my femur (smashed by a police officer), and I was physically and emotionally very vulnerable and was working as a midwife. They chose to put the boot in by a serious attempt to make me homeless and forced me off the wards, thereby leaving my colleagues short staffed (temporarily).
Other activists came to help and to minimise potential damage; the house was remortgaged to the hilt PRIOR to any order made on it. Nicola Woodcock engineered a story about me defrauding HLS after phoning me at home saying that the fraud squad were after me. They were not, and a High Court judge did not look on HLS very favourably, as they failed to gain possession of my house. For Hall to quote Nicola as an impartial source is laughable. But she does. However, Nicola Woodcock at least had the common courtesy to ask my opinion before she slated me, unlike Lee Hall who did not bother to contact any UK activists to my knowledge.
Hall indicates that the point of SNGP was to stop the supply of Guinea pigs to HLS. She omits the fact that SNGP was in existence prior to SHAC and that the point was to close down the operation regardless of who they supplied to, which is why we demonstrated at Safepharm (another contract testing laboratory). Quite why she misleads in this way is beyond me. Of course all animal rights campaigns in the UK, from SHAC to CAFT (Campaign for the Abolition of the Fur Trade), have at their core the belief that other species are NOT for human usage. We are abolitionists although again Hall for some reason tries to persuade her audience that we are only concerned with animal welfare, apparently only those who agree with her are proper vegans and liberationists.
Hall also is scathing about the “victory” parade in Burton on Trent missing the point that first of all the demonstration was already booked and that of course vivisection had hardly been abolished by the closure of Darley Oaks. The fight still goes on. A couple of pissed blokes coming out of the pub and yelling abuse before going back in to finish their pints is translated by Hall as, “locals pelted the parade with bacon and eggs.”
She then says: “And so it was that four protestors were soon charged with conspiring to blackmail the Hall family with grave desecration.” NO, Lee, if you had bothered to actually contact UK activists, instead of relying on corporate media accounts, you would have found that the 4 activists were charged with “conspiracy to blackmail” and that every single unlawful act against the Halls regarding the guinea pig operation was neatly attributed to the 4 through the “conspiracy” bit. By being part of a LEGAL campaign they were linked to “persons unknown” even if they did not know them or even approve of their actions. They were used as scapegoats and are regarded by the state as worse than rapists and murderers simply for being activists!
Let those of us who ventured up to Darley Oaks farm remember that these lovely people who Hall is so concerned about were more than happy to try and run people over with tractors and send them off to A and E with head injuries. One of the Hall brothers even talked of shooting a few activists which Lee fails to mention [see the quote above]. None of their side were ever physically harmed. Once I found a dead mouse sent to SNGP in the post. The Halls and their sympathisers were not such the innocents Lee Hall would have her readers believe. Before guinea pig farming they farmed mink. She criticises UK campaigners for not campaigning against the Hall’s dairy farming. Well there’s an idea....Dear NETCU (National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit): just remember if anyone tries it, Lee Hall incited them!
4. (Mis)Using Joan Court. Joan is an outstanding activist and has spent her life campaigning for women, children, and animals. She was a midwife in India, Pakistan, and the USA and once worked with Gandhi. I first met her outside HLS at camp Rena before the Huntingdon Death Sciences campaign evolved into SHAC. She was outside the gates of HLS to show solidarity with the 7 activists imprisoned in January 2009 and though approaching 90 is still active. Joan does not have a problem with the sort of things Lee Hall has a problem with. Quite why Hall has portrayed Joan as some sort of paragon of virtue to which her followers should aspire is very odd. Joan supported SPEAK (one of the campaigns Lee does not seem to like and whose founder Mel Broughton has just been framed by the police with a 10 year prison sentence for arson) with a hunger strike and is not adverse to being arrested. She has responded to Hall via a letter [included above] and we hope that Hall can answer her questions.
Joan does not want to be the goody to the ALF activist baddy. She is embarrassed by being solely attributed by Lee for the decision not to build a primate lab’ at Girton Cambridge, as many activists were involved and many activists did not stay on the legal path. Again if Hall had done her homework she would know what partly helped win the day was SHAC activists, including Greg Avery and myself, pledging to be very naughty indeed (quoting tripods, tunnels, logistics and stuff) if they tried to build it. Many activists gave such evidence to the planning enquiry, and the police, led by Steve Pearl, said they would not be able to cope, and the planning application was dropped, like a hot brick. We have our uses in this movement.
One of the most sinister passages in Hall’s book occurs on page. 117: “And what would unfold more clearly than ever before, was the terrible conflict within activism, between the hunger strikers and the body snatchers. The latter had become what they despised.”
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