Animal rights movement
Members of the abolitionist faction view policy reform as counterproductive and rely on nonviolent education and moral persuasion in their activities.
[6][9] Smaller factions include groups focused around faith-based animal rights theory and veganarchists, whose approach is characterized by a critique of capitalism on the grounds that it has led to mass nonhuman, human, and environmental exploitation.
Public awareness was raised by, for example, Anna Sewell's 1877 novel Black Beauty and by the pioneer Ada Cole who fought for humane conditions for horses destined for slaughter.
[11] Other early influences include: Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, which drew attention to slaughterhouse operations; Henry Stephens Salt's treatises on nonhuman animal rights, which drew from human abolitionist arguments for recognizing the personhood of people considered to be property; and the short-lived Fruitlands agrarian commune, which required its residents to eat a vegan diet.
The Godlovitches met John Harris and David Wood, also philosophy graduates, who were soon persuaded of the arguments in favour of animal rights and themselves became vegetarian.
The group began to actively raise the issue with pre-eminent Oxford moral philosophers, including Professor Richard Hare, both personally and in lectures.
They soon developed (and borrowed) a range of powerful arguments in support of their views, so that Oxford clinical psychologist Richard Ryder, who was shortly to become part of the group, writes that "rarely has a cause been so rationally argued and so intellectually well armed.
[13] They initially thought that a book with contributions from Brophy, Ruth Harrison, Maureen Duffy, and other well-known writers might be of interest to publishers, but after an initial proposal was turned down by the first publisher they approached, Giles Gordon of Victor Gollancz suggested that the work would be more viable if it included their own writing.
In 1970, Ryder coined the phrase "speciesism," first using it in a privately printed pamphlet to describe the assignment of value to the interests of beings on the basis of their membership of a particular species.
Hunters' associations of irrationality with femininity and of inexperience in hunting and wilderness with white-collar positions constituted the reasons for their dismissal of activists' claims.
A content analysis of magazine covers from highly visible animal rights organizations (PeTA and VegNews) revealed that most featured members were white, female, and thin.
Racialized tactics include the appropriation of African slavery and Holocaust language and imagery, and have been deemed insensitive and impugned by nonwhite communities.
Sizeism is used as a tactic to frame veganism as a healthy and positive lifestyle, aligning with a popular association of fatness with moral failure.
[23] In the 1980s and 1990s, it was joined by a wide variety of academics and professionals, including lawyers, physicians, psychologists, veterinarians, and former vivisectionists,[19] and is now a common subject of study in philosophy departments in Europe and North America.
[31] Michael Socarras of Greenberg Traurig told the Association of American Medical Colleges: "There is a very important shift under way in the manner in which many people in law schools and in the legal profession think about animals.
Not sub-human, but just different from being human.Liberationists argue that animals appear to have value in law only in relation to their usefulness or benefit to their owners, and are awarded no intrinsic value whatsoever.
[5] The Internet is also used by activists to build community and avoid stigmatization, and may be a preferred means of activism for marginalized members, such as individuals who are fat.
Countermovement actors have also used ICTs; law enforcement officers have tracked SHAC activists and admitted electronic communications as evidence in criminal trials.
[42] ICTs have facilitated undercover surveillance efforts by activists who use video cameras, Internet, and television to collect and disseminate evidence of cruelty to animals, in order to attract publicity to and mobilize support for the movement.
[43] In 1981, animal rights activists exposed supposedly unhealthy and cruel conditions of monkeys in a research laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland.
[43] SHAC was founded after Zoe Broughton conducted undercover surveillance of vivisectionists and discovered evidence of nonhuman animal abuse.
[42] Footage and images from undercover surveillance activity are often circulated offline and on the Internet and used to deliver a moral shock that will mobilize viewers to participate in the movement.
Groups such as Vegan Outreach and Compassion Over Killing devote their time to exposing factory-farming practices by publishing information for consumers and by organizing undercover investigations.
Nonhuman animals depicted in moral shocks often display characteristics similar to those of human infants (e.g., large heads and eyes, crying or whimpering, small, mammalian).
[48] The movement espouses a number of approaches, and is bitterly divided on the issue of direct action and violence, with very few activists or writers publicly advocating the latter tactic as a justified method to use.
[49] Most groups reject violence against persons, intimidation, threats, and the destruction of property: for example, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) and Animal Aid.
A third category of activists operates using the leaderless resistance model, working in covert cells consisting of small numbers of trusted friends, or of one individual acting alone.
Some arson, property destruction and vandalism has been linked to various animal rights groups[51][52] Activists who have carried out or threatened acts of physical violence have operated using the names; Animal Rights Militia (ARM), Justice Department, Revolutionary Cells—Animal Liberation brigade (RCALB), Hunt Retribution Squad (HRS) and the Militant Forces Against Huntingdon Life Sciences (MFAH).
[53] Some activists have attempted blackmail and other illegal activities, such as the intimidation campaign to close Darley Oaks farm, which involved hate mail, malicious phonecalls, bomb threats, arson attacks and property destruction, climaxing in the theft of the corpse of Gladys Hammond, the owners' mother-in-law, from a Staffordshire grave.
"[61] John Lewis, a Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism at the FBI, stated in a 60 Minutes interview that these groups "have caused over $100 million worth of damage nationwide", and that "there are more than 150 investigations of eco-terrorist crimes underway".
