Violent direct action

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There’s a disconnect between those who care about the animal situation and those who don’t. It is much greater than we want to admit. And if we don’t have a plan to improve that connection, where lots of people switch attitude, then we’re left with our dreams and little else.

We might look forward to a great leap forward in consciousness, pray for it, wish hard for it, but we might see nothing much happening. So far the momentum isn’t building enough for a fashion to emerge. We make dolly steps towards the liberation of animals, but the cause doesn’t noticeably seem to thrive. We see the meat trade doing well and people blissfully unaware of anything being wrong with their eating habits. It’s all quite depressing.

Vegan activists might be wanting some action. They up the ante. They do something outrageous, to get the ball rolling. On a farm where mink are caged, the animals are released and the farm torched. The press have a field day with the story, and of course skew it in favour of the mink farmer.

What actually happens is that the animals are released. But being ‘domesticated’ they’re unable to survive in the wild. They raid local farms and kill chickens. The locals hunt them down to prevent losing more poultry. The mink die. Then the media hunt down the arsonists. Soon everyone has forgotten why the activists raided the mink farm in the first place - no one’s interested in conditions for fur-farm animals. As a result, the public remains ignorant and grows even more hostile towards animal activists. The activists are caught, jailed and fined.

The overall effect of a direct action like this might well be opposite to what was intended. Violent protest stirs the blood of both the activist and the activist-haters. So, how can we up the ante, without going to the extreme of doing damage or setting fires? What will bring our message home and make it sink in? How can we bring to the public’s attention about the hell holes in which so many animals are suffering?