The Koz Post
“Butcher, assassin!”, “Meat is murder!”: radicals in their own words and sometimes violence in their acts, some activists of the cause of animal attack in the last few months to butchers, to the indignation of the meat sector, which calls for the State to counter “terror”.
The nights are usually calm in Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, 50 km south-west of Paris. Then, when Elizabeth parish Priest, who lives above his store, heard the impact of paving stones thrown against the window of the butcher shop to 03: 00 last week, “it sure is”, she “was surprised”.
Strangers have also tagged “stop repression,” “that’s how I knew it was vegan radicals,” says Ms Priest.
His misfortune is the latest manifestation of the wave of degradation and destruction of shop windows, which seeks the butcher’s shops, charcuteries, cheese shops and fishmongers in the whole of France.
In addition to the destruction of shop windows, the damage went from the fake blood on the front of the store to the placement of stickers condemning the “speciesism” and “repression”.
For antispécistes, speciesism (from the latin “species”, species) is an ideology that postulates a hierarchy between species, including between humans and animals. This philosophy, along with a diet vegan (which prohibits any product from animals), has a fortune as rapidly as recent in France.
“Since the beginning of the year, we have 17 windows of butcher shops destroyed and tens of degradation”, breath Jean-Francois Guihard, president of the Confédération française de la boucherie, boucherie-charcuterie, caterers (CFBCT), which represents the 18,000 retail points.
“The State must take the necessary measures”, the judge does it by asking to meet with the ministers of the Interior and of Justice to stop this “form of terror”.
Interviewed at the beginning of the month on RMC-BFMTV, Gérard Collomb, who has already received this summer, assured the butchers-pork butchers that they could “count on (him)”.
In mid-September, six people were arrested in the framework of the investigation into the vandalisation of nine shops, including butchers and fishmongers, in the city of lille.
-“The cow who cries”-
But, if no group has claimed responsibility for these actions, butchers, and authorities are pointing the finger at a fringe minority and violent antispécisme activist.
Among the movements and associations that have made talk of them, L214, 269 Life France and Slaughter Abolition have undertaken actions are the most spectacular.
L214 is known in broadcasting images shock rounds in hiding in farms or abattoirs.
Created two years ago, Butcher Abolition is fighting “for the abolition of the genocide called the butcher shop,” says his spokesperson Solveig Halloin. “A breeder should not be a profession. The routine of farming is the violence and the persecution. The cow didn’t laugh, she cries,” she said.
If she claims no degradation of the butcher, Solveig Halloin do not condemn it, because “the extremists of the brutality, they are butchers”.
Last Saturday, Butcher’s Abolition was held, with 269 Life France of the happenings in front of tens of butcher shops in France. In Paris, Vincent Aubry and another activist of the Butcher Abolition wore a small dead pig they paraded in front of the butcher shops to denounce the shops that “sell murder”.
Vincent Aubry does not condemn the destruction of shop windows, but he said he was “willing to go to jail if necessary”. “Our only limit is the violence against human beings”, he says.
-“No conciliation is possible”-
If in France the emergence of these movements date there are only a few years, the direct actions antispécistes are not “recent” addition in the West, recalls Marianne Celka, lecturer and researcher at the university Paul-Valéry of Montpellier.
As early as 1975, the Australian Peter Singer comes out “animal liberation”, the foundational book of motion of modern animal rights. In the England of the 60’s, the animal liberation Front sabotages hunts with hounds, and then with time some cells attack the butchers.
Since then, veganism has gained ground in France, to such an extent that some large chains offer products that are “100% vegan”… sometimes next to their butcher’s department, ” continues Marianne Celka.
The violent actions would be in the “former activists tormented by the way that the system has had to absorb the criticism (…), or due to other activists who arrived there by way of veganism and that, in digging, came to the critical antispéciste”.
The university does not see “no conciliation is possible” between antispécistes and butchers.
And for good reason: Solveig Halloin Beef Abolition refers to the butchers of the “vandals” and “torturers”. On the other side, Jean-Francois Guihard, who represents and defends, says “fear the worst”.
“It is not our wish, but some butchers may respond to violence with violence,” it warns.