MKE-IMC interviews ALF writer Dr. Steven Best
Erika Wardle and Nichali Ciaccio, 26.01.2005 14:28
A lengthy interview with Dr. Steven Best, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas-El Paso and prolific animal rights activist. His recent focus has been the Animal Liberation Front, whose actions have caused the FBI to identify them as one of the most dangerous domestic terrorist groups.
And Interview with Dr. Steven Best
by Erika Wardle and Nichali Ciaccio
In the Fall of 2004, the UWM chapter of Alliance for Animals hosted Dr. Steven Best, animal rights activist and professor of philosophy at the University of Texas-El Paso. Best delivered a presentation followed by a question and answer session on the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), prompted by the publication of his most recent book Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals.
1. What is the ALF? Please give a brief introduction of their tactics,
"ideology," and ethical standpoint.
The Animal Liberation Front 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.
Official ALF guidelines are: (1) to liberate animals from places of abuse; (2) to inflict economic damage to industries that profit from animal exploitation; (3) to reveal the horrors and atrocities committed against animals behind locked doors, and (4) to take all necessary precautions against harming any human or nonhuman animals. Anyone who follows these guidelines – and who is vegan -- belongs to the ALF.
The men and women of the Animal Liberation Front 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 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 brand the liberationists as terrorists, the ALF 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.
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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, 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 ALF 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.
The ALF 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.
2. You discuss the Boston Tea Party as historical use of civil disobedience. How is the ALF a result of a history of this disobedience (and direct action) and how is it an entirely new entity?
In 1773, fifty members of the underground Sons of Liberty group dumped 342 chests of British tea into the Boston harbor to protest the high tax on tea and British tyranny in general. Overall, the colonies employed numerous sabotage tactics, acts of violence, and ultimately war to undermine the power of the British, to galvanize the will of the newly emerging nation, and to win independence.
Not merely an act of senseless demolition, property destruction was and still is a legitimate cry for justice and a powerful means of achieving it. Civil disobedience and sabotage have been key catalysts for many modern liberation struggles. From the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, from the Suffragettes to the Civil Rights Movement; from Vietnam War resistance to the Battle of Seattle, key struggles and movements in U.S. history employed sabotage and illegal direct action tactics to advance human rights and freedoms. Now these same tactics are being used on behalf of animals. Anyone who champions them when used for human animals but condemns when deployed for nonhuman animals is guilty of speciesism and needs a logical consistency check. The novelty is not in the tactics the ALF uses, but rather the species the tactics seek to liberate. Animal liberation builds on human liberation, but it redeems humanism from its supremacist values and broadens the struggle for life to the next level.
3. What is the difference between Animal Rights and Animal Welfare?
As long as human beings have evinced concern for the suffering of animals and worked toward its reduction, animal welfare philosophy has been part of our culture. Animal welfare groups were prominent in the UK and US throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but beginning in the 1970s, welfare philosophy has evolved into a rights philosophy designed to offer animals far stronger protection against human exploitation.
Welfarists do not believe animals should be caused “unnecessary” pain, and hold that any suffering caused them be done “humanely.” Like humans, animals have interests – such as not to suffer – and these ought to be respected. But welfarists believe these interests can be sacrificed or traded away if there is some overridingly compelling human interest at stake. Depending on the particular welfarist, animals’ interests may be overridden for any number of reasons, ranging from human entertainment (circuses, rodeos, bullfights, cockfighting, and the like) to meat consumption to vivisection. Animal welfare, therefore, only regulates the details of exploitation and does not end it, and it believes in the speciesist premise that human animals are superior to nonhuman animals and have the God-given right of dominion over them.
Animal rights theorists, by contrast, reject the utilitarian premises of welfarism that allows the sacrifice of animals to some alleged greater utility or consequence. Rights theorists argue that if humans have rights – because they are sentient and subjects of a life – animals have rights for the same reasons. They argue, moreover, that animals’ interests cannot be sacrificed to human interests, no matter what good consequence may result (such as an alleged advance in medical knowledge). Just as many people believe that it is immoral to sacrifice a human individual to a “greater good” if it improves the overall social welfare, so animal rights theorists persuasively apply the same logic to animals. Animal rights demands empty cages, not bigger cages. Animal rights rejects the speciesist hierarchy of humans over animals and argues that all animals are relatively equal in their abilities to experience pleasure and pain, and are subjects of a complex life.
4. You call the AR movement the most dynamic liberation movement in existence, yet groups such as the Zapatistas and Narmada Bachao Andolan have had significant successes in their movements and attract worldwide attention. How can you justify your claim?
I say that because the AR movement is intensely active on a global level and is creating powerful changes in society, ethics, and human consciousness. The direct action component strikes industries every day dozens of times at least, and in England is so powerful that it is costing the economy billions of pounds every year now in lost business with transnational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The direct action anti-vivisection movement in England is thereby considered to be a far greater threat to the economy than any possible Al Qaeda strike. In the US, the ALF and ELF are the top two “domestic terrorism” threats, a charge I cite not because I believe FBI definitions of terrorism but to show the potent threat animal liberation represents to corporations and speciesist values. The animal rights movement does not just attract attention on a global level, it is a globalized movement, and it is transforming human paradigms in ways far more radical than human rights movements. Indeed, it corrects the flaws in humanism which limits ethics to human beings and situates ethics in its proper broader scale (although the Zapatistas have been more advanced than other human rights groups in understanding animal and environmental issues). Animal liberation is the next logical development in moral evolution. Animal liberation builds on the most progressive ethical and political advances human beings have made in the last 200 years and carries them to their logical conclusions.
5. What are some of the major victories of the ALF?
In general, their actions have damaged many thousands of operations, shut down numerous others, and prevented still others from ever forming for fear of attack.
The first wave of ALF actions included the liberation of cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, pigs, and primates from experimental laboratories at Howard University, Bethesda Naval Research Institute, various branches of the University of California, the University of Oregon, the University of Pennsylvania, Texas Tech University, the City of Hope, SEMA lab, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, and elsewhere. One of the most important raids took place in May 1984, when the ALF broke into the University of Pennsylvania’s head injury laboratory, where primates’ heads were strapped in metal helmets and forcefully struck by a pneumatic device in order to research human head injuries. The ALF unleashed $60,000 in property damage and, more importantly, stole 60 hours of researchers’ tapes that documented sadistic acts of cruelty and callous indifference to the suffering of the monkeys. The rescue led to the shocking movie Unnecessary Fuss, which helped to shut down the lab and, with public relations assistance from PETA, spread awareness of animal confinement and torture to the public.
Similarly, liberations in January 1985 at the City of Hope National Medical Center, Los Angeles, exposed an appalling hellhole behind a façade of progressive science and “humane research.” ALF rescues and follow-up media work via PETA news conferences brought national attention to deplorable conditions where dogs and other animals endured sloppy surgeries and inadequate or no post-operative care, and frequently bled to death in their cages or suffocated in their own fecal matter. Newspapers were inundated with letters from an outraged public, government investigations found serious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act, the National Institutes of Health suspended over $1 million in federal research grant funds, and the experiments were stopped. Three months later, the ALF raided the University of California-Riverside laboratory to rescue Britches, a three-week-old macaque monkey separated from his mother, isolated in a wire cage with his eyes sewn shut. PETA filed formal complaints about this extreme abuse to government agencies, urged its members to write their representatives in Congress, and made a moving video of Britches. The “before” and “after” liberation pictures were stirring, and the justice of the action was obvious. Once again, the public learned about the kind of horrors that truly transpire behind the closed doors of “science,” and Riverside received a well-deserved black eye. Eight of the 17 research projects interrupted by the ALF the night of Britches’ liberation were closed forever.
The ALF was able not only to free innocent animals, but also to expose the sadism that masquerades as science, to educate the public about institutionalized animal abuse, to spark public debate about rarely discussed issues such as vivisection, and, in many cases, to bring about welfare reforms or to shut down some operations altogether.
Whereas the early raids concentrated on rescues, the emphasis gradually shifted to property destruction and arson. One of the most devastating blows was dealt in 1987, with the torching of the animal diagnostics lab and 20 vehicles at the University of California at Davis, causing $5.1 million in damage. In February 1992, Rod Coronado and other ALF members set fire to a Michigan State University mink research facility, causing $100,000 in estimated damage and wiping out 32 years of research data accumulated to breed mink in fur farms. In an April 1989 raid on the University of Arizona at Tucson, activists liberated over 1,200 animals, costing the university an estimated $700,000. In May 1997, 10,000 mink were released from Arritola Mink Farm in Oregon, the largest liberation in the US to date. In economic terms, the most costly act of arson destruction was inflicted on the Alaskan Fur Company in Minnesota in November 1996, creating over $2 million in damage to fur coats and other merchandise and over $250,000 to the building.
The list of effective attacks is extensive, and most recently would include the November 2004 liberation of 400 animals from University of Iowa’s hellish labs and attacks on foie gras producers in the Bay Area in the summer of 2003 that sparked a national debate about the evils of this industry.
6. You call their opponents the "corporate-state complex." What do you mean by this?
The old-fashioned Marxist thesis still holds: while it has its own autonomy it sometimes exercises, the state apparatus, particularly at the national or federal level, is the political wing of corporate economic power and does the bidding of corporations. There is a revolving door between Congress, federal regulation agencies like the FDA or EPA, and corporations, such they share the same interests and protect them against whistleblowers and activists. CEOs from corporations like Monsanto, and meat, dairy, and drug industries take jobs in Congress or federal agencies just long enough to pass legislation in favor of their specific interests. U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) is a major drug lobbyist and played a major role in the Medicare prescription drug bill through Congress. This was a huge win for the pharmaceutical industry, preventing the federal government from using its buying power to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs
A recent Frontline documentary revealed that huge pharmaceutical companies are able to fast-track drugs for market approval and ignore their dangerous side effect because of a complicit FDA that protects the drug companies over the consumers. Recent scandals over the deadly drugs Vioxx and Celebrex show the FDA is a corporate lapdog, not watchdog. It is because there is such a monster as the corporate-state complex that direct action and high-pressure tactics are necessary for progressive political change. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. “
7. What do you consider to be "the ethics of nature"?
Throughout Western history (in particular), human beings have elaborated human-to-human ethics, but rarely a human-to nature ethic that regulates human conduct to animals and the earth except throughout their history elaborated. In place of an ethics of compassion and respect for the natural world, Western culture has adopted an ideology of domination and a mechanistic outlook that sees animals as nothing but machines. For this civilization to evolve, and if our entire planet is to survive the current global environmental crisis, advanced technological cultures must adopt a new ethic, one that surpasses the limitations of humanism and defines or community in far larger terms, as a biocommunity.
8. How do you define violence and how does this fit into your moral schema?
I do not include attacks on inanimate objects as violence (vandalism, sabotage, and other terms work better here), but I certainly do include assaults on animals. In our speciesist society, it is no accident that animals are systematically excluded from definitions of violence and terrorism, which concern themselves only with human interests. If the terms violence and terrorism were – most legitimately – expanded to include the interests of non-human species, then we would quickly discern the identities of the real agents of violence and terrorism. Because they attack property, and never life, the ALF is a non-violent organization; non-violence is their core value. It is, consequently, no mistake that in over three decades of action across the globe, no human animal exploiter has even been injured or killed by the ALF, although many hunt sab and direct activists have been victims of violence at the hands of states and animal exploitation industries. If attacks on property are what you mean by “violence,” if the term involves this circumscribed speciesist definition that favors the interests of animal exploiters over exploited animals, then, yes, I support “violence” in any situation where it will liberate an enslaved animal.
9. Do you find property destruction and other forms of sabotage harmful to the movement as a whole, due to its tendency to alienate potential activists?
It galvanizes and inspires just as many as it potentially alienates. Whatever harm sabotage does to the public image of the animal rights cause can be minimized or undone through careful staging of actions and effective press work afterwards – which is the task of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office recently opened by Dr. Jerry Vlasak and myself. While it is a genuine concern how people perceive actions such as sabotage, it is equally if not more important the impact these actions have on animal exploitation industries and their various service providers, and the effectiveness of this impact is very clear with the groups like the ALF and SHAC.
10. Does the ALF consider itself to be a violent organization?
The ALF follows a strict code of nonviolence whereby they carefully avoid causing physical injury to animal oppressors when they attack their property. The ALF claims that in thousands of actions and over three decades of operation, they have never harmed a single human being. According to one ALF statement, “The ALF does not, in any way, condone violence against any animal, human or nonhuman. Any action involving violence is by definition not an ALF action, any person involved is not an ALF member.”
While the ALF renounces physical violence against human beings, it also rejects the claim that destroying property is violence. The ALF is grounded in the principle that laws protecting animal exploitation industries are unjust, and they break them in deference to the higher moral principle of animal rights. As former ALF spokesperson David Barbarash sums up the ethical foundations of the ALF, “The basic premise is that if someone’s property is used to inflict pain, suffering, and death on innocent animals’ lives, then the destruction of that property is morally justified. It is not unlike freedom fighters in Nazi Germany destroying the gas chambers. The ALF believe that life is more important than things.”
11. You mention one justification of the ALF's actions is that they are
following their ideology which you believe to be empowering and morally based. How can you justify this kind of destruction based on that standard while still condemning the acts of other "terrorists"?
The definition of terrorism is not relative, such that one cannot tell the fundamental difference between Al Qaeda, for instance, and the ALF. A terrorist group attacks and kills innocent people to promote its own agenda. The ALF attacks only animal exploiters, it attacks only their property and never their person, and it acts on behalf of oppressed animals. This is not a terrorist group in any sense of the term. Any action, whether sabotage or violence, is justifiable if the group using them is subjugated to the power of another group unjustly, and alternative actions have been tried and exhausted. But let’s put moral outrage in perspective – there is a huge difference between those who break windows in the name of animal liberation and those who smash skulls, blind, burn, mutilate, and kill in the name of “research” that has little scientific credibility and at bottom is about profit.
12. One of the critiques of the ALF is that they are violent and this is
intrinsically wrong. The ALF responds by comparing the levels of violence
between them and, say, Huntington Life Sciences. But doesn't this miss the
point of an 'intrinsic wrong'? Does violence on one side justify violence on the other?
When only violence can end violence, yes. I am not a pacifist or Gandhian. I do not believe we can solve deep conflicts such as the slavery question in the US during the nineteenth century, Nazis such as in Germany, and fascist juntas such as the US supported throughout Central America during the twentieth century by love, compassion, and “passive resistance.” We should never use violence where there are non-violent alternatives, but unfortunately, this is not always the case.
13. Please explain your own ethical standards and the roles of reason,
rationality and sentience.
I believe that one must never cause harm to another living being unless there is a profound reason to do so. Corporations and exploiters have so such reason to injure and kill animals, but those who resist their violence have sound reason to use forceful counter tactics. It is the possession of sentience, not reason, that makes one a member of the moral community and a bearer of rights. Humans have serious obligations to animals they are ignoring and violating, and this can only stop as we move to a larger ethics of nature that will include animal rights (not animal welfare). Humans ought to be able to discern these truths through reason, which remains a crucial moral force in deciding who has moral obligations and the nature of these obligations. I am not an “emotivist” who believes all morality is rooted in feelings, it begins there, and we often have sound moral intuitions, but ethical reasoning and justification for beliefs and intuitions is a matter of reason and logic.
14. Do you extend your ethics to nature or "deep ecology," which doesn't have sentience? Would you defend the Environmental Liberation Front to the degree you defend the Animal Liberation Front?
Yes. One of the problems with animal rights is that it is not an inclusive-enough ethic because it does not have an explicit environmental component. We need a broad ethics of nature that protects and defends all of nature, not only animals. I would absolutely defend the ELF along with the ALF, they are interrelated struggles and sometimes the same action. But like deep ecology, both lack an adequate social theory and social politics, one that interconnects the struggles for human rights, animal rights, and the integrity and preservation of the earth.
 e-mail:: nciaccio@uwm.edu
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