Background


Press Office Directive (click here)
Guidelines of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) (click here)
Introduction to the Animal Liberation Movement (click here)
History of the Animal Liberation Movement  (click here)
Philosophy of the Animal Liberation Movement (click here)
Milestones in Animal Liberation (click here)


For more information see the FAQ’s page



Press Office Directive:
The North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO) was founded to communicate the actions, strategies, and philosophy of the animal liberation movement to the media and the public. Many of these actions are illegal under a current societal structure that fails to recognize the rights of non-human animals to live free of suffering, but validates and promotes the “right” of industries to do whatever they want to animals for profit or research. Within these conditions, those in the underground working for animal liberation often cannot speak out directly. Nevertheless, their actions and message is urgent and deserve to be heard and understood.

Since animal liberation actions either go unreported in the media or are uncritically vilified as “violent” and “terrorist” with no attention paid to the suffering that industries and individuals gratuitously inflict on animals, NAALPO seeks to clarify the motivation and nature of actions taken in defense of animals.

The Press Office also tries to provide a historical, social, and philosophical context for an objective understanding of the nature and motivation of illegal direct actions taken on behalf of captive animals. While the Animal Liberation Front, or ALF, is currently the most active liberation group, the Press Office will report on ANY act of animal liberation, and provide the press and general public with information on the actions and ideology behind them.

Disclaimer: The Animal Liberation Press Officers do not engage in illegal activities, nor do they know any individuals who do. Rather, the Press Office receives and posts communiqués from anonymous parties and provides comment to the media. more…

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Introduction:
The Animal Liberation movement consists of small autonomous groups of people all over the world who carry out direct action. The remainder of the liberation movement evolved from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which in turn grew out of the hunt saboteur movement in England in the 1970s. The ALF, which has been the most active underground liberation group here in the United States, has chosen in the past to operate under a specific set of guidlines, which can be read here.

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Philosophy of the Animal Liberation Movement:
The Animal Liberation movement is a loosely-associated collection of cells of people who intentionally violate the law in order to free animals from captivity and the horrors of exploitation. As activists in one cell do not know activists in another cell, their non-hierarchical structure and anonymity prevents legal authorities from breaking up the organization. Animal Liberation activists break into any building or compound – be it a fur farm or university laboratory – in order to release and/or rescue animals. They also destroy property in order to prevent further harm done to animals and to weaken exploitation industries economically. Their actions have damaged many operations, shut down others, and prevented still others from ever forming for fear of attack. They may also utilize intimidation to prevent further animal abuse and murder.

As the Animal Liberation movement continues to operate and grow, it will inspire and incorporate numerous other direct action and animal liberation efforts. These range from groups such as the Justice Department and the Animal Rights Militia, who unlike the ALF defend and use violent tactics (such as personnel bombs delivered through the mail) to Compassion Over Killing and Mercy For Animals who break into factory farms to free animals in cages but eschew tactics of property destruction.

The men and women of the Animal Liberation movement pattern themselves after the freedom fighters in Nazi Germany who liberated war prisoners and Holocaust victims and destroyed equipment-such as weapons, railways, and gas ovens that the Nazis used to torture and kill their victims. Other comparisons would include the anti-Apartheid movement, led by Nelson Mandela, who used and supported violence in the fight for liberation in South Africa, and the current struggle by Palestinians against their Israeli oppressors.

Similarly, by providing veterinary care and homes for many of the animals they liberate, a comparison can be made to the US Underground Railroad movement, which helped fugitive human slaves reach free states and Canada in the 1800s. Whereas corporate society, the state, and mass media often brand the liberationists as terrorists, the animal liberation movement has important similarities with some of the great freedom fighters of the past two centuries, and is akin to contemporary peace and justice movements in its quest to end bloodshed and violence toward life and to win justice for other species.

On the grounds that animals have basic rights, animal liberationists repudiate the argument that scientists or industries can own any animal as their property. Simply stated, animals have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which contradict the property status that is often literally burnt into their flesh. Even if animal “research” assists human beings in some way, and there are significant doubts that it does (www.curedisease.com for more on this topic), that is no more guarantee of legitimacy than if the data came from experimenting on non-consenting human beings, for the rights of an animal trump utilitarian appeals to human benefit.

The blanket privileging of human over animal interests is simply speciesism , a prejudicial and discriminatory belief system as ethically flawed and philosophically unfounded as sexism or racism, but far more murderous and consequential in its implications. Thus, the liberation movement holds that animals are freed, not stolen, from fur farms or laboratories, and that when one destroys the inanimate property of animal exploiters, one is merely leveling what was wrongfully used to violate the rights of living beings.

Groups of animal liberationists, sometimes called cells, range from one individual to many individuals working closely together. Activists in one cell do not know the underground activists in another because they choose to remain anonymous. Since there is not a central organization or membership guide to underground animal liberation cells, people are driven only by their own personal conscience or cell decisions to carry out illegal actions. These cells are non-hierarchical in their structure, which allows for only those people involved directly in the action to control their own destiny.

Since there isn’t a way to contact any of these individuals (their identity is not known to anyone in the aboveground movement), the use of communiqués is one way the underground communicates with others. Communiqués can be sent directly to anyone, including the mainstream press, underground support groups, and aboveground animal rights groups.

Because the individuals who engage in underground actions cannot reveal their identities to anyone, the North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO) was created to try to answer some of the questions as to why these actions may have been carried out, and to place the actions in a historical and philosophical context. Since we do not engage in illegal activities ourselves, we do not know the details of these actions, but we can try to the best of our ability to provide a better understanding of why a particular action may have been carried out, and to provide a different perspective than that given by animal exploitation industries and individuals from law enforcement agencies.

The liberation movement believes that there is a higher law than that created by and for the corporate-state complex, a moral law that transcends the corrupt and biased statues of the US political system. When the law is wrong, the right thing to do is to break it. This is often how moral progress is made in history, from defiance of American slavery and Hitler’s anti-Semitism to sit-ins at “whites only” lunch counters in Alabama.

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History of the Animal Liberation Movement:
In 1970s England, animal activists turned from legal tactics of hunt disruption to illegal tactics of sabotage when they grew weary of being assaulted and jailed and sought a more effective strategy. A hunt saboteurs group known as the Band of Mercy broadened the focus to target other animal exploitation industries such as vivisection and began to use arson as a potent tool of property destruction. Two of its leaders were arrested in 1974 and released a year later. One, Cliff Goodman, turned snitch and left the movement; the other, Ronnie Lee, deepened his convictions and in 1976 began a new militant group that he called the Animal Liberation Front which would forever change the face of direct action struggle.

Taking shape in the mid-1990s, the numerous anti-vivisection struggles provoking controversy in England can be seen as a second wave of direct action, following the first wave that began in the 1960s with the actions of hunt saboteur groups. The new struggles often overlap with the ALF, but they are also independent of it. Whereas the ALF is an underground movement pursuing illegal tactics such as property destruction, the second wave of direct action is an aboveground presence that disavows the use of sabotage or violence and uses strictly legal forms of pressure.

This second wave of direct action began with attacks on vivisection suppliers. In September 1996, activists began a campaign against Consort Kennels, a dog breeder for vivisection labs. After months of applying intense pressure, they closed the kennel in July 1997 and adopted 200 beagles to loving homes. In September 1997, fresh on the heels of this victory, activists began a campaign against Hillgrove Farm, a vivisection cat breeding operation. The same tactics proved effective and Hillgrove closed in August 1999. Over 800 cats were rescued and re-homed.

From these struggles, the group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) emerged in the late 1990s and quickly became a major force in the UK and US. SHAC’s sole focus is to bring down one of the world’s worst animal testing laboratories, Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). SHAC has pioneered hard-hitting direct action techniques that include jamming email, phone, and fax systems, demonstrations at the homes of targeted individuals, and relentless pressure on secondary companies that provide any services for HLS, be it insurance or laundry cleaning. While SHAC Inc. is an aboveground legal protest movement, the “SHAC movement” sometimes resorts to illegal tactics such as property destruction to exert added pressure on HLS and its clients.

Inspired by SHAC’s success in weakening HLS and driving its stock prices down, numerous other direct action anti-vivisection groups have sprouted up in England. One such group, SPEAK, has been crucial in cancelling plans to build new animal research facilities at Cambridge University and Oxford University in 2004. Similarly, since 1999, the Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs (SNGP) movement waged a relentless battle to pressure the Chris and John Hall family to close their guinea pig breeding farm in the Staffordshire village of Newchurch, which the did in January 2006.

The ALF had migrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s and is now an international movement in over twenty countries. Learning from other liberation movements from around the world, animal liberation activists have now begun to utilize a wider range of tactics shown to be effective, including the use of force to stop perpetrators of massive violence against non-human animals.

Thus, contemporary direct action movements for animal liberation are diverse, powerful, and effective, and they are growing in sophistication and strength. In Britain, animal liberation movements now threaten the viability of the multi-billion dollar vivisection and pharmaceutical industry and therefore pose a serious economic threat. In response to the growing strength of the animal liberation movement on an international level, legal authorities such as the British Home Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are taking increasingly strong and repressive measures against it.

Indeed, the Home Office has seen fit to ban numerous US activists from entering the UK for merely defending animal liberation tactics in their speeches or writings, and in August 2005 created a new “Exclusion Bill” that details numerous “unacceptable behaviors” and grants the state wide latitude to ban non-UK citizens that support the cause of animal liberation. Read the “Exclusion Bill” here.

Whatever actions animal exploitation industries and governments take against the animal liberation movement, they will no more stop it than US soldiers were able to quell North Vietnamese armies or the resistance movement spreading throughout Iraq, or the Israelis can stop the Palestinians in their efforts to acheive their goals.

The animal liberation moement will end when animal exploitation ends. Meanwhile, the movement is the most active and dynamic force of justice of our time. It is vital, therefore, that we monitor and understand it.

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Milestones in Animal Liberation

  • 1972- Band of Mercy formed by HSA hunt sabs. Originally Band of Mercy groups were 1870’s childrens clubs dedicated to fostering kindness to animals. These groups damaged vehicles used to transport dogs to hunts.
  • 1973- Band diversifies and attempts to burn down unfinished vivisection lab in Milton keynes; burns sealing boat in East Anglia.
  • 1975- First conviction. Robin Howard for damaging 2 sealing boats in Lincolnshire. Ronnie Lee and Cliff Goodman given 3 years for damaging animal research equipment in England and Wales.
  • 1976- Lee renames his Band of Mercy group the Animal Liberation Front or ALF after getting out of prison.
  • 1977- Lee serves another prison term for stealing mice.
  • 1980’s- More difficult to break into labs due to security measures. Lee begins speaking out in favor of violence towards people.
  • 1977- First US animal liberation action by the Undersea Railroad; 2 porpoises released from hawaii research lab.
  • 1979- First US ALF raid; 5 animals rescued from NYU Medical Center.
  • 1984- Raid on Univ PA Head Injury Lab, operated by the infamous Thomas Gennarelli. 60 hours of videotape turned over to PETA, which produced Unnecessary Fuss.
  • 1984- City of Hope raid in Duarte, CA resulted in $11,000 fine.
  • 1987- $4.5 million arson at Sacramento vivisection lab under construction.
  • 1989- Texas Tech raid in July.
  • 1990’s- Since 1995, 45 fur farms raided, 80,000 animals released into the wild.
  • According to FBI testimony to Congress in Feb 2002, since 1996 the ALF and ELF have committed over 600 “criminal acts” that caused $43 million in damage to animal industries.
  • Since 2004 the ALF has been labeled the number one domestic terrorist organization in the United States

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Guidelines of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)

The ALF is one of the most active liberation groups in existence, and has historically operated under certain specified guidelines, which many other groups do not. These guidelines were developed long ago and are widely known and published, though they have changed in the past and may do so again:

  • To liberate animals from places of abuse, i.e., laboratories, factory farms, fur farms, etc., and place them in good homes where they may live out their natural lives, free from suffering.
  • To inflict economic damage to those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals.
  • To reveal the horror and atrocities committed against animals behind locked doors, by performing direct actions and liberations.
  • To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human and non-human.
  • Any group of people who are vegan and who carry out actions according to these guidelines have the right to regard themselves as part of the Animal Liberation Front.

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For more information please see the FAQ’s or contact the Press Office