How to Do Animal Rights -

And Win the War on Animals

About

What's This Free Online Book About?

You do not have to scream emotional abuse at people in the street or commit arson
to work for animal rights. How to Do Animal Rights shows you how to work for animal
rights legally. Written concisely in plain English this book briefs you about doing
animal rights as an activity - it is not about arguing for or against animal rights - and
informs you about animal rights ethics so that you can defend your actions rationally.
This book should appeal to novices and would-be activists, from school teenager to
granny, anarchist to city banker, as well as to experienced animal rights
campaigners.

Topics covered include the major problems that humanity is causing animal life, the
moral philosophy underlying animal rights, the major methods of campaigning,
practical activities for promoting animal rights, how to deal with possible clashes with
the police, biographical sketches of well-known animal rights activists from all walks
of life, and statistics on human usage of animals.

Read this book to:

• Recognise how humanity is devastating animals globally (Chapter 1).

• Know what animal rights means and how it differs from other views (Chapter
2).
• Understand activist methods that will further your activism (Chapter 3).
• Discover practical animal rights activities to do (Chapter 4).
• Be aware of potential conflict with the law and how to handle it (Chapter 5).
• Find inspiration from a selection of historical and modern animal rights
activists (Chapter 6).
• Gasp at the numbers of animals humans kill (Chapter 7)
• Add to your armoury topics that the well-rounded animal activist should know
(Chapter 8).

You can work for animal rights low-key or high-key, by yourself or with like-minded
people. But above all - do it!

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 Chapter 1

Introduction to Doing Animal Rights

1. The Broad Setting

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to
despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have
the wisdom to choose correctly." Woody Allen

The Big Problem

Humans have been killing animals for millennia and now scientists acknowledge that
we are living in a mass extinction of life caused by humanity (2). Added to this is an
animal holocaust in which increasing numbers of people endlessly demand animals
to eat, wear, kill for sport, experiment on, and more. In almost anyone's definition
this is a man made disaster - a war on animals - undeclared and devastatingly carried
out. This war on animals shouts for action. Animals need allies and making active
allies for animals is what this online book is about.

Being Active
To be active for animal rights all you need to be is an ordinary person. You do not
have to be an 'animal rights terrorist' (see Chapter 5), the stereotype bogeyman of
the news media. The media's animal rights archetype is a rare creature because for
every bogey animal rights terrorist there is a multitude of concerned people from all
walks of life doing their bit for animals. You, too, whether city financier, unemployed
anarchist or domestic granny, can make your contribution and be a real ally of
animals.

The Best Animal Rights Attitude

As an animal rights activist your attitudes and values will inevitably clash with those
of other people. This is where you have to determine what your beliefs are based on.
Confused beliefs, inaccurate views and misconceptions fill our minds. The
distinguished French writer Francois-Marie Arouet (1694 - 1778), popularly known as
Voltaire, is credited with saying, "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit
atrocities." (3) One of the most disturbing visions in the history of human progress is
the spectre of the early vivisectors nailing live animals onto dissection boards to cut
them open at leisure and see how they worked...before the era of anaesthetics. The
vivisectors conveniently believed that animals do not feel pain even though animals
behave as though they do.

So what is our best attitude for being active for animals? Surely it is always to
question what we know, try to understand what we do not know and keep a healthy
scepticism about what people tell us. Having the right attitude demands that we
constantly question our beliefs, especially when we think we are right, and never be
complacent (for more see Chapter 2). This is especially important when we consider
the moral place of animals.

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The Expanding Circle
Expanding the circle is an evocative metaphor that captures the progress of
humanity as a moral species. It is a phrase coined by the Irish historian and
philosopher William Lecky (1838 - 1903) and means that humanity is enfolding more
beings in its group as worthy of respect and moral consideration. Lecky writes:
"At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle
expanding includes first a class, then nation, then a coalition of nations, then all
humanity and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal
world..." (4)
Lecky's statue stands neglected outside the University of Dublin as his reputation
gathers dust. Yet the moral circle is expanding. Only a few generations ago slaves
were excluded from the core of human society and women were marginalised.
Slavery and domestic servitude were accepted as social norms.

So how close are we to accepting animals within the expanding circle? It is apt that
the distinguished animal liberation philosopher Peter Singer (see Chapter 6) invoked
Lecky's metaphor as the title of his book The Expanding Circle. (5) Singer reasons
that indeed the human moral circle is beginning to embrace animals, confirmed by
the existence of the numerous and growing number of people fighting for animal lib.
Nevertheless, even with Singer's optimism and energy we still have a long way to
journey toward the day when humanity finally accepts animals within its moral circle.

The Great Leap

A good reason for allying ourselves with animals and including them in our moral
circle is for their sake. Looking beyond that, another good reason is humanity is
about to make a great leap into the future. Blasting off into space, deciphering
genomes and implanting synthetic parts in our bodies are some of the signs of this
impending leap. They signal that we are saying good-bye to our organic roots based
on natural selection and are entering a new phase of evolution based on science and
technology. We are shaping a transformation of humanity into a super-being that will
be unrecognisable to present generations (assuming humanity and science survive
the next hundred years). However, we must not allow our future-being to ravage
every creature it meets for its own ends, in the present style of humanity. We must
instil in it an enlightened and compassionate morality to be a powerful force for good
in the universe. To this end we must labour to expand our circle of moral
consideration to encompass all creatures, whatever and wherever they are.

2. Mass Extinction

"Homo sapiens is in the throes of causing a major biological crisis, a mass extinction,
the sixth such event, to have occurred in the past half billion years. And we, Homo
sapiens, may also be among the living dead." Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin (1)

The Sixth Extinction

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We are living in a period of mass extinction of life on Earth. This is the greatest
extinction since the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In the 3.5
billion year evolution of life on our planet there have been five mass extinctions -
when close to all species were nearly wiped out. The most massive of these
extinctions was the Permian Extinction some 250 million years ago: seventy percent
of land species and ninety percent of marine species went extinct in less than a
million years, close to an instant in Earth's 4.5 billion year evolution.

The common name for the present mass extinction is the Sixth Extinction,
popularised in the 1995 book of the same name by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin.
(1) The unique characteristic of the Sixth Extinction is that it is caused by a single
species - us: Homo sapiens. Scientists calculate that within a hundred years half of
Earth's fauna and flora could be treading down the road to mass extinction. Earth,
home to millions of species, may be losing some 30,000 species a year and the rate
is increasing as humanity accelerates its devastation of the biosphere. The problem
is especially grim for rain forests because they harbour the vast majority of land-
living species and humanity is clear-felling forests fast. As the forests shrink away the
animals have no where to go and die out.

The Mega Devastators

Humanity has fashioned three mega-devastators that are causing the Sixth Extinction
and their combined influence is reaching a climax:

1. Global warming - by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

2. Consumption of resources - including habitat change.
3. Human overpopulation - by which every one of us increases the first two
devastators.

The magnitude of what humanity is doing became apparent in the 1970's. But still
the mass extinction crisis is invisible to most people, unaware about it or indifferent.
Many scientists are so worried by this lack of concern that in 1992 over 1,500
prominent specialists, among them several Nobel Prize Laureates, endorsed the
World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. (2) But they have made little progress waking
people to the looming cataclysm. Likewise, the Doomsday Clock has similarly fallen
short. It was originally started in 1947 during the Cold War by a group of scientists
concerned about humanity's potential impending self-destruction and is meant to
wake us up to fight for our preservation. Currently the minute hand is set at five
minutes to midnight - just five minutes before annihilation.

Biocide?
Biocide, the massive destruction of life on a worldwide scale, is the ultimate of all
human practical and moral violations. Sceptics argue that there is not enough data to
support the notion of a Sixth Extinction or that this mass extinction is not of human
origin so we need do nothing about it. Other people accept the impending
catastrophe and argue that humanity can slow the rate of extinction through proper
management of human activity and ecosystems. Still other people maintain that time
has expired and there is nothing we can do. But one thing is certain. The disaster of
mass extinction is so great do we dare not act? We could not have evolved without
animals and they gave our species food, clothing, shelter and tools. It is payback
time. As Woody Allen says, "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a
crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total

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extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." (3)

Learn more: The Sixth Extinction by Niles Eldredge.

The Single Most Effective Thing You Can Do For Animal Life

Stop making babies (or at most make only one).

Seventy thousand years ago there were ten thousand people on Earth. Now we are
approaching seven billion. The more people the more destruction of animal life and
Nature. Being a veggie or vegan is not sufficient.

For estimates of the number of food animals people kill annually see

Chapter 7: For more about human population growth see Optimum Population Trust
web site.

3. The Animal Holocaust

"Their suffering is intense, widespread, expanding, systematic and socially

sanctioned. And the victims are unable to organize in defence of their own interests."
Henry Spira (1)

Mass extinction is not the only human scourge on animals; animals live in a
continuing holocaust. The Animal Holocaust is the mass destruction of animals by
humanity and is a direct comparison with Nazi mass murder, particularly of Jews. The
animals most often referred to in the Animal Holocaust are domesticated animals
that people raise for food. However, more generally, Animal Holocaust victims
include any animals and their populations that humans control, systematically abuse
or destroy, such as fur-farmed animals, laboratory animals and free-living wild
animals.

The Animal Holocaust resembles the Nazi perpetrated Holocaust in the use of
business-like mass slaughter, mediated by transports, factory farms (concentration
camps) and slaughterhouses (death camps). Other pertinent comparisons are
performing experiments on inmates and turning inmates into commodities, such as
skin goods and soap. Perhaps the most telling comparison is the contempt for the
victims' humane treatment and the widespread disregard for their rights. People
today generally do not think of animals as beings who are mutilated, tortured and
slain and see them merely as 'animals', there for the purpose of satisfying human
needs.

No one knows the true figure of how many animals people kill every year, but to get
an idea see Chapter 7: Animal Numbers Raised & Killed. Staggering totals include the
two million pigs killed every week in the United States, the 12 million pigs killed
every week in China (2) and the seventy billion chickens killed worldwide every year.
(3a, 3b) Humanity has killed literally trillions of animals since the Second World War
and we are killing them at an accelerating rate as our population increases and the

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mechanisation for the Animal Holocaust gathers pace. The German philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976), shamed for his membership of the Nazi party, is
cited as saying in a 1949 lecture: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the
same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the
extermination camps..." (4) The Animal Holocaust is treated in modern books such as
Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka. (5) The book's title comes from a quote
attributed to author and Holocaust survivor Isaac Beshevis Singer, "To animals, all
people are Nazis. For them it is an eternal Treblinka."

Some animal rights groups juxtapose imagery of the Holocaust and the Animal
Holocaust to publicise their campaigns and shock people into admitting the scale and
existence of the human abuse of animals. Their message is that animals are not ours
to abuse but that we must treat them with respect. However, the juxtaposition of
Holocaust and Animal Holocaust has angered many people and organisations who
see it as an inappropriate and corrupting comparison, tasteless and trivialising
because of humanity's (assumed unique) moral basis. They say that the Holocaust /
Animal Holocaust juxtaposition may gain the cause of animal rights some attention
but will lose it support in the long-run. Whether or not you agree, the comparison
shows that humanity has the attitude and practical capacity to destroy beings on a
vast scale. It makes some people stop to consider their role in the slaughter and even
act against it.

Chapter 2
Know Your Animal Ethics & Animal Rights

1. Animal Ethics

"Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through,
critically and carefully, what most people take for granted is, I believe, the chief
task of philosophy, and it is this task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity."
Peter Singer (1)

Background
When you are active in animal rights you should know why you are being active and
be able to defend your actions rationally. Simply being emotional about animals is
not enough because the opposition may be equally emotionally back at you, resulting
in a stalemate. However, by stating your case rationally you can convince people of
your cause and win converts and that is surely part of doing animal rights. Even the
most emotional opponents, if they can be made to see sense, are susceptible to
rational arguments.

The chapter sets out the rational background for animal rights so that philosophically
you know where you are and have an idea of where you are going. First it discusses
the broad background of animal ethics, then goes on to what rights are and finally

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compares animal rights with animal ethics and other outlooks.

Ethics
If you methodically question the meaning and purpose of life you are a philosopher,
whether amateur or professional. Ethics is the part of philosophy that asks how
people should live their lives and how they should do good and right to each other.
Animal ethics is the same but includes animals. Robert Garner in his book Animal
Ethics says "Animal ethics seeks to examine beliefs that are held about the moral
status of non-human animals." (2) But you can define animal ethics more broadly by
saying it is about acting for the moral good of animals (including humans) by
understanding animal-human moral issues through knowledge and reasoning. Thus
animal ethics is a practical pursuit as well as a cognitive one.

Importance of Animal Ethics

Our relationship with animals is based on beliefs we absorb from our upbringing and
social customs. We accept these beliefs, often on trust from our elders, without
challenging or analysing them. But unexamined beliefs when acted out can do
enormous harm. Everyone has some contact with animals directly or indirectly,
whether farming or shooting animals, eating them, feeding their pets factory farmed
animals, going to the zoo, using substances tested on animals or washing with
animal-based soap. Yet most people do not realise the suffering and destruction
humanity imposes on animals because it goes on largely out of sight and where it
peaks above the surface it is tolerated as normal.

Here is the point. The harm humans are doing to animals amounts to a holocaust that
we must address and if we are to make civilized progress we must comprehend what
we are doing to animals and think about how we should be treating them. All of us
must justify and defend our relations with animals in light of animal ethics. An ethical
issue is when you think a harm or wrong is happening and something should be done
about it. If we harm people then we must justify why we harm them and if we cannot
justify our actions then we must not harm them. In the same way, with animal ethics
we must critically question our conduct with animals. We must ask what we are doing
to animals, why we are doing it, how should we and how can we do better - and take
action.

Glossary
Before going further, a summary of some key concepts mentioned in this chapter
may be helpful.

• Sentiency: being able to suffer and feel pleasure.

• Moral rights: conferral of protection or privilege.
• Moral status: worthy of moral consideration and moral rights.
• Interests: a stake in fulfilling a life's natural potential.
• Intrinsic value: a value something has independent of its usefulness.
• Equal consideration of interests: giving weight to everyone's welfare.
• Speciesism: (or 'specismo', Italian, pronounced speh-chis-mo) prejudice
favouring your own species.
• Utilitarianism: theory that states an action is morally right if it benefits the
largest number of beings with the greatest good.

Now a Biff From History

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That animals are made for human use is a traditional attitude, at any rate in Western
society, and held at least from Old Testament times up to Darwin (1809 - 1882).
Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) thought animals exist to provide humans with food and other
provisions; Aquinas (1225 - 1274) claimed that killing animals is acceptable and we
can treat them in any way useful to us; and Descartes (1596 - 1650) asserted that
animal are mindless robots which cannot suffer, the corollary being that we can do
almost anything to them.

People have always had to emphasise differences between man and beast to
maintain and defend their belief in human superiority. The rationally inclined assert
that animals lack reason, intelligence, language and creativity. The spiritually
inclined believe animals are not made in the 'image of God' and, although some of
them appreciate and admire animals as God's creatures, many of them are largely
unresponsive to animal misfortune and distress. Generally, people protect some
animals, but only if the animals belong to people as property.

Darwin, however, significantly helped begin the demolition of human centredness by

convincingly arguing that animals and humans evolved from the same ancestors
(although he did not dare write this overtly). Common evolutionary descent explains
why humans share the same appearance as animals, especially with the apes. This
shocked the Victorian public of Darwin's day but his evolutionary theory in outline is
widely accepted today.

Thus an ethical dilemma arose. Animals and humans are similar. So if humans have
moral status then animals should have moral status too. For most of the history of
Western philosophy just about everyone passed off the moral status of animals as a
trivial and insignificant question. However, since the 1970's an energetic debate has
been waging about animal moral status, ignited by firebrand philosophers such as
Peter Singer (see Chapter 6).

The animal moral status debate is founded on basic, common moral principles: it is
wrong to cause suffering and it is wrong to discriminate against others by giving
greater importance to your own group. Apply these principles consistently, says
Singer, and they lead to the logical conclusion that we should morally treat animals
like humans, provided the animals have relevant similarities with humans.

Some animal oriented philosophers say the only really important morally relevant
similarity of animals with humans is that both can feel pain and suffer, that they are
sentient. The great English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832) is often
quoted as writing:

"The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire the rights
which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. ...the
question is not, Can they reason? not, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" (3)

So we must distinguish the relevant similarities of animals and humans (eg

sentiency) and not use inaccurate attributes to justify excluding animals from our
moral consideration. Relevant similarities in moral terms boil down to basic
requirements, such as the right to reproduce and pass on your genes, the right to
liberty and the right to not to be forced to suffer for the gain of others (as in
experimentation and farming).

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However, many people today still cannot accept animals on the same moral level as
humanity, even while acknowledging the contributions of Darwin. But thanks to
Singer and some fellow philosophers it is said that there is more controversy and
discussion about animals today than during all past times combined.

How to Proceed?
When we make a judgement about the rights or wrongs of a situation our views and
actions must be based on knowledge and reason. We must examine our thoughts
and feelings carefully. We cannot rely completely on our intuition or feelings because
people may be manipulating us for their own purpose without our realising what is
happening. We cannot rely on faith, religion, authority, the law, social standards,
tradition, precedent, fashion, immediate impression, emotional illogic, fantasy, magic
and many other reasons that are not necessarily rational.

Reasons for acting ethically can be simple or complex, tempered by intuition or

emotion, or whatever. But our reasons for acting ethically must be consistent,
comprehensive and based on fact, that is on the truth of the matter as far as we
know it. And our reasons for acting ethically must work the 6C Way:

• Clearly - can be understood.

• Concisely - not verbose or diffuse.
• Compatibly - agreeing with basic sensitivity of what is right and good.
• Consistently - without contradictions.
• Constructively - extending our judgement to new or ambiguous areas by
building on what we already understand and accept.
• Comprehensively - not ad hoc but relevant to all kinds of problems.

Ethical Theories
Ethical theories (also called moral systems or moral frameworks) offer ways to
organise your thoughts when you make decisions about which moral action to take.
They also enable you to see other people's position on moral issues better. Ethicists
have developed three influential ethical theories that answer the three moral
questions people have asked down the centuries. Most ethical positions can be
understood against one or more of them. The three moral questions people ask are:
1) What outcome should I aim for? 2) What am I required to do? 3) What should I do
as a virtuous person?

1. What outcome should I aim for?

Consequence Ethics says you should act to bring about the best results or
consequences. This theory is also called Consequentialism and its traditional name in
philosophy is Teleology, from the Greek teleos meaning end or purpose.

Consequence Ethics is goal-directed. It asserts that only the good outcome of your
goal or action is important, not how you achieve your goal. You need not be dutiful or
virtuous - you can even lie, cheat or whatever - so long as the end result is morally
good. Say you see a couple of sheep or pigs escape from a slaughterhouse. You
might believe that taking them back to be killed is immoral, so you snatch and hide
them and lie that you do not know where they are. Your action focuses on results, the
saving of the animals from slaughter. You would believe the outcome is morally more
important than stealing and lying.

2. What am I required to do?

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Duty Ethics says you should do whatever is your duty, even if by doing it you harm
yourself or others by suffering the consequences. For King and country, right or
wrong, is a Duty Ethics dictum. Duty Ethics is also called Deontology.

Duty Ethics opposes Consequence Ethics. According to Duty Ethics doing what you
consider is your obligation (or duty) is more important than the outcome of your
action. As a rancher you might hate shooting predators but accept that you have an
obligation to protect your cattle regardless of your action's impact on wildlife. Or you
might release laboratory animals used in experiments because you see your action
as your duty to animalkind. Alternatively you might condemn releasing lab animals
because you believe your first duty is upholding the law and the standards of society
as you see it (moral theories can work both ways!).

3. What should I do as a virtuous person?

Virtue Ethics says you should act as a virtuous person would act. Virtue Ethics says
you cannot isolate the making of ethical decisions from your personality. Your good
actions are the result of good character. A person of good character is someone who
has admirable personal qualities, such as compassion, kindness, respect, toleration,
honesty and courage. Possessing admirable personal qualities makes you a virtuous
person. This philosophical outlook is also called Virtue Theory or Value Theory.

Virtue Ethics flourished in Ancient Greece. Aristotle (BC 384 - 322) is often cited as its
main philosophical representative. He argued that a virtue is the mean or middle
path between two vices, like courage is better than fearlessness or cowardice. Virtue
Ethics expired in the fourth century AD when moral theories purporting to be given
by God supplanted it. However, the 20th century brought it back to life and
modernised it. Modern Virtue Ethics does not emphasise specific moral traits but says
you should be virtuous in all aspects of your life and be a good person all the time.

Virtue Ethics contrasts with Consequence Ethics and Duty Ethics in that it brings in all
the qualities of being human - like reason, responsibility and emotion - to influence
your ethical consideration. You might, for instance, approve or reprove individuals or
companies, supporting only those that do not harm animals and nature. Are these
individuals or companies advancing or opposing virtue? Are they progressive,
admirable and responsible or insensitive, negligent and dishonest?

Ethical Theories Compared

These ethical theories - Consequence Ethics, Duty Ethics and Virtue Ethics - overlap
with each other, but each focuses on a different principle. These principles reveal
distinct insights into moral problems and suggest different ways for resolving them.
The table below contrasts and highlights the main features of these theories.

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Choosing an Ethical Theory
Which ethical theory (Consequence, Duty or Virtue Ethics) should you follow to help
you resolve an ethical issue?
The answer may partly depend on your personality. You might be more concerned
about the consequences of your action than be oriented to notions of doing your
duty, or visa versa. Or you might be more concerned about being virtuous.
Another suggestion commonly put forward for choosing which theory to follow is to
use one that feels most natural for your particular set of circumstances. For instance
it might be useful to use:
 A Consequence theory - for dealing with large numbers.
You might have to decide to save a majority of some animals at the expense of a

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minority of other animals - good consequences for some animals, bad consequences
for other animals.

 A Duty theory - for dealing with conflicting obligations.

As a livestock farmer you are likely to believe that you have an obligation to send
livestock for slaughter to feed people. Thus your primary duty would be to people
and your secondary duty would be to animals, such as by being as kind to animals as
economics permit.

 A Virtue theory - for dealing with personal decisions.

You would apply the range of your cognitive faculties (reason, experience, logic, etc)
and emotional faculties (intuition, belief, faith, etc) to act as a virtuous person would
act. So, for example, should you eat animals? Your reasoning might go like this: as a
virtuous person you should be compassionate to all creatures; therefore you should
not cause suffering; thus you should not eat animals.

There is a third accepted way for choosing which ethical theory to follow. These
ethical theories (Consequence, Duty and Virtue Ethics) sometime complement one
another. So if two or all three of them support your proposed moral judgement and
action you can feel more confident of being on the right moral track. For instance,
people may want to stop whaling because it will upset the ecosystem (Consequence
Ethics), or because there will be no whales left for posterity (Duty Ethics), or because
enlightened people do not support whaling (Virtue Ethics). Thus you would consider
each ethical theory in turn to find the best overall solution.

Even if you favour one ethical theory over the others, keep in mind all three theories
so that you are better aware of how ethical disagreements can arise, that is when
one person advocates one ethical theory that clashes with someone else advocating
another ethical theory. A foxhunter or bullfighter may defend their actions as a
preservation of tradition. Alternatively, you might claim that no one sympathetic to
animals would kill them for sport. This can be seen as a case of Duty Ethics versus
Virtue Ethics.

Do Philosophical Ideas Work?

Generations of people acquire philosophical ideas and values without realising they
are doing so and without knowing where their ideas and values come from. Many of
our ideas and values originated from individuals who lived, thought and died before
us, examples are John Lock and Karl Marx. Few things in human society are bigger
than revolutions and revolutions are made of philosophical ideas. John Locke (1632 -
1704), English physician, public servant and philosopher, significantly helped lay the
foundations of liberal society. In his lifetime his ideas about government, tyranny and
the rights of man were pivotal in supplanting the English monarch in the 'Glorious
Revolution' of 1688. Even after his death Locke?s ideas played a leading role in the
18th century by helping to guide the American and French revolutions. The other pre-
eminent thinker was a German é©gré ·ho settled in London and spent much of his
time writing there at the British Library. Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) wrote the intellectual
foundation of Communism that fuelled the Communist revolutions of Russia and
China in the 20th century.

Hundreds of millions of people today still live under the ideas of these two thinkers,
ample demonstration of the power and pervasiveness of philosophical ideas. If you
are not convinced, where do your ideas of soul and man's place in the universe come
from (clue: Plato and Darwin)?

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 Chapter 2
Know Your Animal Ethics & Animal Rights

2. Animal Rights

"To spread the concept [of animal rights] beyond our species is to jeopardize our
dignity as moral beings, who live in judgement of one another and of themselves."
Roger Scruton (1)
Alternatively…

"...animal rights must not only be an idea but a social movement for the liberation of
the world's most oppressed beings, both in terms of numbers and in the severity of
their pain." Steven Best (2)

What are Animal Rights?

Animal rights are the rights of animals to be protected from human use and abuse
and can take moral, legal and practical forms. People who support animal rights
believe that animals are not ours to use as we wish for whatever purpose, be it for
food, clothing, experimentation or entertainment. Animal rights supporters also
believe that we should consider the best interests of animals regardless of the usage
value they may have for us.

But what are animal rights specifically, how do animal rights compare with human
rights, and are rights a remedy for all moral problems?

Background to Animal Rights

The concept of human rights is often based on a belief in 'natural rights'. Natural
rights are assumed to be given by God, or were enjoyed when people were living in a
'state of nature' before people were civilized, or are in some way possessed
universally in that rights apply to everyone automatically, indisputably and
irrevocably. The English philosopher John Locke in the 17th century was among the
first to distinguished certain natural rights he thought people were entitled to: the
rights to life, liberty and property.

Alternatively, human rights might be neither natural nor universal. You could argue
that rights are only what people are willing to confer as they see fit on others, being
the granting of particular benefits by people to people. The generally held modern
view of human rights is that they are:
 Natural - rulers do not invent them.
 Universal - they apply to everyone.
 Equal - they are the same for everyone.
 Inalienable - you cannot relinquish them.

Rights are usually contracted between a country's government and its citizens, like
the right to vote, the right to fair trial and the right to free speech, and vary from
county to country. Many states make utterances about giving their citizens rights but

13
do not always grant rights fully.

Major Dates for Rights

 1776 The United States Declaration of Independence recognised the right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This was the world's first major published
statement of human rights.

 1789 The National Assembly of France approved rights for the common man,
including equality before the law, equal opportunity, freedom from arbitrary
imprisonment, freedom of speech and religion, security of property, and taxation
commensurate with ability to pay.

 1948 The United Nations affirmed its Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
setting out over two dozen rights, including the right of individuals to life, liberty and
education, to equality in law, to the freedoms of movement, religion and association
and the right to information.
For progress on a declaration on animal rights see below: Universal Declaration on
Animals.

Animal Rights Theory

The justification for conferring rights on animals is that animals are in many
important ways like humans. Animals are sentient creatures. They feel pleasure and
pain, experience emotions, remember, anticipate and learn. What happens to them is
important for them, unlike what happens to a rock or a stone. So, if you argue that
humans deserve rights, by simple extension you can argue that animals also deserve
rights.

Animal interests, however, are not always the same as human interests. Thus the
range of rights that animals need are not always the same as the range of rights that
humans need. Animals are not in need of equality before the law, freedom of speech,
freedom of religion or fair taxation. Nor do animals have an interest in voting or
getting a high school education. Hence, it would be meaningless and silly to talk of
giving animals the right to these interests. However, this should not prevent us from
bestowing relevant or appropriate rights on animals.

Relevant rights for animals can be any benefits appropriate for animals that people
wish to bestow on them. Relevant rights for animals can include:
 The right to live free in the natural state of their choosing.
 The right to express normal behaviour (eg food searching, grooming, nest
building).
 The right to life (ie not be killed for human food or other human use).
 The right to reproduce (ie pass on their genes to the next generation).
 The right to chose their own lifestyle (eg not be coerced into experiments or used
as entertainment).
 The right to live free from human induced harm (eg hunger, thirst, molestation,
fear, distress, pain, injury or disease).

If you believe animals have such rights then you would have a doubtful basis for
exploiting animals. You would have a moral duty to support those rights and would
be morally corrupt if you did not. If animals have these rights, how could you justify,
say, eating animals, using them for sport or keeping them in zoos? In practical terms
you would have to live your life accordingly, such as become a vegetarian or vegan.

14
Fundamental Animal Ethical Positions
As for the actuality of giving rights to animals there are three fundamental positions:
abuse, welfare and liberation.
1. Abuse: animals have no moral status.
This is the attitude that we owe nothing to animals except to make use of them as
and how we like. It is the position many people held in past centuries and many
people still hold today, especially in China and surrounding countries.
2. Welfare: animals should have welfare.
This view is that animals are a resource for humanity, we should treat animals kindly,
but humans always come first when there is a conflict of interest. Welfarists
acknowledge the need to use animals but try to alleviate 'needless' animal suffering.
It is the position most people in the West support today.
3. Liberation: animals should be liberated.
This is the avant-garde position: animals deserve moral status similar in some way to
human moral status. There are two types of animal liberationist and both want to
abolish the use of animals on moral or other grounds. ‘New welfarists’ regard
abolition as a long-term goal and meanwhile try to ease as much animal suffering as
possible by introducing practical welfare measures. The 'hard-line abolitionists’
believe welfare is a waste of time and pitch straight for abolition of animal use on the
grounds that if there is no abuse there is no need for welfare. Liberationists have a
lifestyle quite different to the majority of people, being vegan or vegetarian and
reject goods and services based on animals.
For a comparison of animal rights and animal welfare (and new welfare) see Animal
Rights vs Animal Welfare, next page.

Variations on Animal Rights

The concept of animal rights has different levels of definition. So to make any
discussion meaningful and avoid talking at cross purposes you need to clarify what
people have in mind when they speak about animal rights. For example you can
distinguish three basic views: absolute, equal and relative.

1. Absolute Animal Rights: you should always protect animals' rights, even when
doing so is troublesome.
Animals have value in themselves independent of their worth to humans (they are
said to have 'intrinsic' value, that is value irrespective of their use to humans) and do
not exist solely for humans. Moreover, people must protect the rights of animals even
when to do so is difficult for human society. For instance, people should not
experiment on dogs to develop a possible life-saving drug for humans even if it
means delaying the drug's development by some years. This view is held by animal
rightists.

2. Equal Consideration of Animal Rights: you should give equal importance to

comparable interests of animals and humans.
Animals have at least some value in themselves irrespective of human values (they
have some intrinsic value), so we should treat them well. Furthermore, people must
give equal consideration to the comparable interests of animals and humans. For
example, when making a moral decision about the sufferings of a dog and a human,
neither want pain inflicted on them, so we should give the same weight of
consideration to the dog as we would to the human. If we are not prepared to make a
human suffer we should not make a dog suffer. This view may be held by people with
a Utilitarian philosophy.

15
3. Relative Animal Rights: you should overrule the interests of animals if you have
good reason.
Animals have at least some value in themselves irrespective of human attitudes
(they have some intrinsic value), so we should treat them well. But although people
should avoid causing animals 'unnecessary' suffering, animal rights are relative to
human rights, so we can cancel the interests of animals for the benefit of humans if
there is justification. For instance, we should use dogs and monkeys in research and
their welfare is important, but the well-being of humans is more important. This view
may be held by welfarists.
You need not confine yourself to these three levels when discussing animal rights.
You can make up nuances as you like, such as broadening animal rights to
apparently non-sentient animals or to the whole of inanimate nature or by coming up
with different definitions of animal rights. But bear each level in mind to make
discussion meaningful.

Are Rights a Cure-all?

Rights should be absolute if they are to protect individuals; they cannot be
suspended or hacked about to fit in with what someone may happen to want. Yet
sometimes there seem to be cases for overriding rights during conflicts of interest.
For example, it might seem right to kill some individuals to save others, such as
killing mice spoiling a harvest and setting off a famine, or killing predators such as
coyotes or foxes eating the last individuals of an endangered species. How should we
react to situations like these? We might react by temporarily adopting another
philosophy, like Utilitarianism - that you should act to bring about the greatest good
to the greatest number of individuals. Thus we should be aware that rights are not a
panacea that can cope with all moral conditions all the time; now and then we may
have to look outside rights for other solutions to guide us when dealing with moral
issues.

Another problem with rights is that sometimes animals are said to have intrinsic
value - have a worth in themselves irrespective of their value to humans. As an
animal rightist you might claim that all sentient beings are entitled to rights because
they have equal intrinsic value. But does intrinsic value really exist? Does it exist
independently of humanity? Intrinsic value may simply be a part of the human value
system that values things that have no value or are said to have no value. If you do
not believe in intrinsic value then you might have to pursue animal liberation via
Utilitarianism, not through animal rights. As a utilitarian you could claim that sentient
animals have interests and therefore no species (ie humanity) is more important than
any other and we should give equal moral consideration to every creature's moral
interests.

Rightist and utilitarian outlooks are similar and different. They are similar in that
withholding rights or withholding equal consideration of interests is speciesism. They
are different in that (according to Utilitarianism but not rights) you may harm
sentient animals and humans, so long as the harm benefits the majority of
individuals.

Universal Declaration on Animals

Questions about human welfare and about nature conservation are addressed at the
highest levels of government. They are debated at international meetings and
agreements among nations are codified in binding Charters. The United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on Biodiversity are
examples. Yet animals have no worldwide protection, presumably because they are
so important a part of human economic exploitation.

16
The lack of success in shaping internationally binding charters on animal rights has
not been for want of trying. People have attempted to identify and advance the rights
of animals at least since the 18th century. Henry Salt (1851 - 1939) is credited with
writing the first book on animal rights, published in 1892 and subsequently, and he
traced efforts back to John Lawrence (1753 - 1839) one of the earliest writers in
modern times on animal rights and welfare. Lawrence argued in his 1796 book, A
Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses and the Moral Duties of Man Towards
Brute Creation, that we have to care for animals and common law should support this
principle in practice. (For more about Salt and Lawrence see Chapter 6.)

The 20th century saw a number of international declarations supporting animal

rights. Perhaps the most prominent venture was the announcement (5) in 1978 by
the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) of the
Universal Declaration of Animal Rights. Among the Declaration's pronouncements are
that all animals have the same rights to existence, no animal shall be ill-treated or
subject to cruelty, animals shall command the protection of law, and dead animals
shall be treated with respect. The Declaration, however, waned and faded away
before it could reach significant levels of international agreement.

More recently some of the world's leading animal welfare organisations have started
campaigning for the United Nations to adopt a new declaration, this time on the
welfare of animals: the Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare. Why welfare and not
rights? Possibly the softer option of welfare is easier for people to accept, so that this
new declaration has a better chance of being endorsed and enduring.

The animal organisations behind this new declaration envisage that signatory
countries to the document will recognise animals as sentient beings. They hope their
Declaration will make animal welfare an important global issue, pioneer the way for
legally binding international agreements on animal welfare and hasten a better deal
for animals worldwide. The Declaration would also underscore the importance of
animal welfare as part of the moral development of humanity. So far a number of
United Nations member states are acting as a steering group to advance the
initiative at the UN. But achieving this Declaration for animals will be a long and
twisting journey. To illustrate, the Convention on the Rights of the Child took thirty
years of effort before the United Nations adopted it.

See Appendix 2 for a draft copy of the Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare.

Arguments For & Against Animal Rights

Listen to people's arguments for and against animal rights. Break down their
arguments into simple statements and add them to these common outlooks to help
argue your own case.
1. Drawing the Line
 Claim: If we grant rights to animals then eventually even insects and plants will
have rights. That would be ridiculous.
 Claim: Animal rights encompass animals who are sentient (chiefly mammals and
birds, but also advanced invertebrates like the octopus, Octopus vulgaris). It is Deep
Ecology (see next page) that makes the case for giving rights to all of nature.
2. Dependency on Animality
 Claim: Giving rights to animals will severely disrupt society. We would have to
undergo enormous changes if we give rights to animals. Every use of animals would
have to stop and we would not be able to live normal lives.

17
 Claim: Most people may want to give absolute animal rights where they can and
relative animal rights where they cannot. We must do this with good intention and
careful consideration.
3. Moral Sense
 Claim: Animals have no sense of morality. So they do not need moral rights.
 Claim: We support animal rights because we are moral. Whether or not animals
have a sense of morality is not the issue.
4. Comprehension
 Claim: Only creatures who comprehend rights can benefit from them. Only
humans understand rights so only humans can have rights.
 Claim: Children and severely mentally impaired people cannot understand rights,
yet we do not deny them rights. Therefore we should not hold back from giving rights
to animals because they cannot comprehend them.
5. Reciprocation
 Claim: Conferment of rights implies reciprocation. If you have the right not to be
killed then you must respect the right of others and not kill them. But animals cannot
reciprocate so they should not have rights.
 Claim: Animal rights are about how humans should treat animals, not about how
animals should treat humans. In any case, we respect the rights of our future unborn
generations and they cannot reciprocate.
6. Biology vs Rationality
 Claim: Humans kill and eat animals because we evolved to survive by exploiting
our environment. It is therefore pointless even to consider giving animals rights and
we should continue to exploit them.
 Claim: Unlike other animals we are not now constrained entirely by biological
evolution. We can reflect on how we should act and can make choices on how to
behave. Therefore we can behave morally and give animals rights.
7. Food & Territory
 Claim: Animals eat each other, so we can eat them. We are all part of the food
web.
 Claim: Animals kill each other because they have to, for food or to protect their
food supply, or they would die. We can decide not to eat animals. Vegetarians do not
die for lack of meat.
8. Mental Capacity
 Claim: People have grater mental capacities than animals and cannot be
compared with them. Therefore we should reject animal rights.
 Claim: We do not use or abuse people who are severely mentally retarded or in a
permanent vegetative state. Many animals have mental abilities better then these
people. So animals also need rights.
9. Species Differences
 Claim: Animals and humans are obviously different, so we should treat animals
differently from us.
 Claim: There is no acceptable difference (whether intelligence, shape, posture or
colour) that can distinguish animals from people morally. People are also different
from each other, so where do you draw the line?
10. Pain & Suffering
 Claim: Animals can experience pain and suffering but this does not mean we have
to give them rights, only that we should not be cruel to them. We can treat animals
well and give them adequate legal protection.
 Claim: All children have rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child, ratified by nearly 200 countries. Mentally handicapped people have
rights as people. Now we must broaden our circle of compassion to animals.
11. Sentience

18
 Claim: Animals are not sentient: they cannot speak, have no thoughts, feelings,
desires, emotions or interests. Therefore we should reject animal rights.
 Claim: We should not make our ignorance of animals a basis for insensitivity. But
we know that some animals at least have ideas and a measure of speech, and that
animals have feelings, like a need to care for their young, remain with their group
and feel safe and well.

3. Comparing Animal Philosophies

Animal Ethics vs Animal Rights

Having discussed a little about animal ethics and animal rights on the last two pages
how do they compare with each other? Table 1 summarises important points.

Animal Rights vs Animal Welfare

Animal rights overlaps with animal welfare and conservation. But although all three

19
share many similarities there are important differences that set them apart from
each other and make them conflicting philosophies, as Tables 2 and 3 indicate.

Animal rightists often disparage of animal welfare because the two philosophies are
worlds apart in important respects. As the radical animal rights academic and activist
Stephen Best (see Chapter 6) says, "Animal 'welfare' laws do little but regulate the
details of exploitation." (1)

Another important difference between animal rights and animal welfare is that one is
subjective and the other is objective. We cannot measure animal rights impartially or
scientifically. It is a concept and a personal moral choice. It resembles the conviction
of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) that we should not harm
humans even in the interests of the majority. Animal rights takes Kant's view (a Duty
Ethics concept, see Chapter 2: Animal Ethics, Table 1) a step further and applies it to
animals. Animal welfare, on the other hand, has the advantage that we can measure

20
it objectively and manipulate it scientifically. For instance, to find which kind of
bedding chickens prefer, we can count the number of chickens who seek to live on a
straw floor or a wire mesh floor. Then we might provide the chickens with their
choice, economic and other constraints permitting. Morally, we can see animal
welfare as part of Consequence Ethics conceptually underpinned by Utilitarianism.

Animal welfare has a variation called new welfarism, in outlook between animal
welfare and animal rights. Like animal rightists, new welfarists support abolishing the
causes of suffering; however, new welfarists argue that it will take a long time to
achieve this and meanwhile we must do all we can to support the welfare of animals
to lessen their suffering. Thus, for instance, new welfarists want to phase out fur
farms and animal experiments but in the short-term they try to improve conditions
for these animals. Critics of new welfarism say this route supports animal exploitation
and therefore is a useless philosophy and the ultimate act of betrayal for animals.
New welfarists counter by claiming that their outlook is more achievable, and
therefore is of more immediate benefit to exploited animals, than the perhaps
impossible goals of animal rights, such as demanding complete closure of anti-animal
industries and changing the deep seated habits of billions of people.

Animal Rights vs Conservation

Animal rights and nature conservation both became popular among the public in the
late 1970's. Both standpoints oppose human-centredness and believe that wild
animals have intrinsic value (although this is not an attitude of all conservationists).
Animal rightists and nature conservationists both support conserving nature,
although for different reasons. Conservationists support nature for the sake of
greater conservation whereas animal rightists support nature for the sake of the
animals who live in it. The differences between both outlooks, however, are deep:

21
Deep Ecology
There is another philosophy that has an important bearing on our behaviour to
animals. It contrasts with animal rights and helps to see it in perspective. Deep
Ecology is concerned with fundamental philosophical, practical and personal
questions about the ways humans relate to their environment. It relates to animals
because of course animals live in nature and are part of our environment. Deep
Ecology opposes the exploitation and destruction of the natural world by materialism
and consumerism. It says we should minimise our impact on the world and it appeals
for a change in the way we think about the world. Deep Ecology predicts that if we do
not shift our basic values and customs we will destroy the diversity and beauty of the
world's life and its ability to support humanity.

The ideas of Deep Ecology came about against the background of the nascent
Environmentalism of the 1960's. Deep Ecology is primarily associated with Norwegian

22
philosopher Arne Naess (1912 - ). The Deep in Deep Ecology refers to a fundamental
or wise questioning of attitudes to nature. Deep Ecology questions the root causes of
the degeneration of the variety and richness of the world. It calls for a more
enlightened approach for humanity to live within the bounds of Nature rather than to
depend on technological fixes as remedies for our exploitation / destruction of
nature.

Naess coined the term Deep Ecology in 1973 in contrast to shallow ecology, a lesser
form of environmentalism and typical of present society. The nature of shallow
ecology has a utilitarian and anthropocentric attitude, based on materialism and
consumerism. Shallow ecology focuses on using the world's natural resources for
unlimited human growth and comes up with technological solutions to offset
environmental problems thus made. For example, shallow ecology promotes
recycling of commercial and industrial waste instead of preventing the generation of
waste in the first place. Again, shallow ecology supports placing ever increasing
demands on the land to produce more food instead of improving human birth control
to reduce human numbers.

The Eight Tenets of Deep Ecology

Eight tenets, composed by Naess and colleagues, form the basis of Deep Ecology
thought. These points are intended to be agreeable to people from any philosophical,
political or religious background. Paraphrased the eight tenets are:
1. All creatures on Earth have intrinsic value.
2. The whole diversity of living beings, simple as well as complex, contributes to life's
richness.
3. Humans should only use other beings to satisfy their basic needs.
4. The health of non-humans depends on decreasing the number of humans.
5. Human interference with the world is excessive and worsening.
6. Human policy (economics, technology and ideology) must change radically.
7. Quality of life is more important than standard of living.
8. Every human who believes in these points must work for change.
The eight tenets of Deep Ecology contrast with shallow ecology, which could be
characterised as:
1. All creatures on Earth have value only for their usefulness to humans.
2. Complex creatures (ie humans) are more important than simpler ones.
3. Humans should use all resources for their material and economic advantage.
4. The human population can increase without restraint.
5. Technological progress will solve all problems.
6. Materialism and consumerism should govern human society.
7. The standard of living should keep rising.
8. Leave environmental problems for the experts to solve.

The philosophy of Deep Ecology is supported by some sections of political parties and
is used as a philosophical basis for change by environmental activists opposing the
human destruction of nature. As a guide for personal growth, Deep Ecology invites
each individual to intermesh with and identify with all living creatures. But we are not
just saving other species and ecosystems, we are really saving ourselves, because
nature is the part of us extending beyond our skin. Deep Ecology says that humans
are not isolated objects but are part of the whole.

A criticism of Deep Ecology from the animal rights viewpoint is that it maintains we
can use animals to satisfy our basic needs (Tenet 3). ‘Deep' animal rights philosophy

23
forbids the use of animals. We would use up a vast number of animals if all the
billions of humans put to use an animal just occasionally. Another problem with Deep
Ecology is that it relies on the idea of intrinsic value (Tenet 1). If you do not believe in
intrinsic value, however, you could still support Deep Ecology and pursue animal
liberation (as opposed to rights) by adopting a utilitarian philosophy (see Are Rights a
Cure-all? in Chapter 2: Animal Rights).

Conclusion
Can you be an exclusive animal rightist, welfarist, conservationist or deep ecologist?
Actually, being exclusively one or the other may be the most difficult course. Another
approach is to see these philosophies, not as necessarily mutually exclusive, but as
reinforcing one another. We can surely be benignly flexible and adopt the best ideas
and activities from each of them depending on the particular circumstances we
encounter. Certainly, knowledge about each of them and their antitheses helps us
understand the outlook of other people.

Chapter 3

Campaigning Methods for Animal Rights

1. Introduction

Each of us has the right to face the powers that be and campaign to bring about
change we think is necessary in society. One half of the key to successful
campaigning is knowing what you want to achieve. But the other half of the key is
knowing how to campaign, which is what this chapter is about. Whether you are
acting in a group or alone this chapter offers you background and some of the
essential techniques for campaigning.

Animal rights campaign tactics are no different from their civil rights counterparts in
this and past centuries. To make their demands heard activists employ techniques
like picketing, lobbying, demonstrating, and so on, although campaigners today also
have some novel tools like email and the Web.

Do not stop at the end of this chapter when finding out how best to campaign for
your cause. Let this chapter sharpen your appetite to inquire further. You can find out
a lot more from fellow activists, from books and the Web. Seasoned campaigners say
there are tried and tested techniques for campaigning based on the experience of
many good activists - but they also say there is no infallible guarantee of results! Get
stuck in and good luck!

2. Campaigning

24
Campaigning can be as easy as writing to your local newspaper’s letters page, or as
elaborate as being at the centre of a busy local group." Animal Aid

Whether you are a student, worker, mother or pensioner we can all campaign to
make our voices heard. Campaigning is about changing society for the better by
persuading and motivating people to act in some way. Do not think you must
campaign by demonstrating at rallies or otherwise by making big noises. You can
accomplish a lot effectively in numerous ways from professional or semi-professional
work to relatively low key activities (see Chapter 4 for examples). The main thing you
need for campaigning is a will to act and drive to keep you going. Winston Churchill
said "Persevere to conquer!"

We have a right to be involved in decisions that affect society and our lives. We have
a right to influence decision makers, especially people in powerful positions. We have
a right to make them do what we think is best, whether we want change locally or
globally, whether our action is high-key or low-key. Much of the change in society
comes from a few largely unknown but dedicated people working hard in the
background. Working alone or in small groups of committed activists they can
stimulate big changes. A few people chucking tea cases into Boston harbour are
widely credited for leading the way to the independence of the United States from
Britain (see Chapter 5 under Terrorism).

Where to Begin?
Sometimes the most difficult part of taking action is choosing what to campaign for
from the many possible issues. As a starting point, unless something has already
fallen into your lap, look at the divisions of animal rights and choose one that
interests you and pick out something. You can categorise animal rights in a number
of ways (which inevitably overlap) and one way is to think about main controversies:
 Attire, eg perfume, jewellery, clothing.
 Entertainment, eg circuses, rodeos, zoos, films, animal baiting.
 Experiment, eg biomedical research, toxicity testing, education.
 Food, eg caged chickens, veal, foie gras, bush meat.
 Hunting & Sport, eg chasing, trapping, canned hunting, baiting.
 Incidental, eg motorist kills, habitat destruction, climate change.
 Trade, eg zoos, pets, quack medicine, body parts, trinkets.
 Zoos/Conservation, eg road-side zoos, national zoos, wildlife 'culls'.

Or try picking out a sub-division of animal rights as in the following examples:

 General Animal Rights. For instance:
Sentience vs the whole of the animal kingdom.
Speciesism vs anthropocentrism.
Animals as property, their legal status as objects.
Exploitation of animals for food, experimentation, trade, etc.
Animal rights vs animal welfare vs nature conservation.
Practical campaigning for animal rights.

 Vegetarianism & Veganism. For instance:

Veganism vs vegetarianism.
Why be a vegan or veggie.
Vegetarian history and demographics.
Nutrition and vegan/veggie recipes.

25
Health and disease, eg salmonella, bird flu, foot and mouth disease.
Social impact of the meat industry, eg Third-world starvation.
Practicalities of organising a veggie/vegan food stall.

 Factory Farming. For instance:

The industrial scale of animals slaughtered annually.
Inhumane housing conditions.
Gourmet dishes like shark fin soup, foie gras, veal and tiger penis.
Mutilations of farm animals.
Pollution of the environment.
Health hazards to humans.
Sweeping use of drugs for disease prevention.
Deformities induced by confinement or breeding.
Factory farming vs traditional farming vs organic farming.

 Wildlife. For instance:

The Sixth Extinction.
Climate change and animal survival.
Habitat destruction.
International trade, eg for body parts, quack medicine and exotic pets.
Bush meat.
Hunting wild or canned animals for sport.
The role of zoos.
Animal rights vs nature conservation.

 Animal Experimentation. For instance:

Biomedical research, diseases and illnesses.
Toxicity testing.
Animal housing.
History of animal experimentation.
The morality and legal history of 'unnecessary' pain.
National and international animal protection laws.
Science and ethics.
The three R's and alternatives to animal experimentation.

 Entertainment. For instance:

Kinds of entertainment, eg film industry, rodeos, circuses, bull fighting, badger
baiting.
History and culture of animal entertainment.
Animals used for entertainment, eg horses, dogs, chicken, wild animals.
Selective breeding of entertainment animals, eg race horses, greyhounds, beagles,
foxhounds, ferrets.
The fate of retired entertainment animals.

 Fur & Skins. For instance,

What is fur and leather?
The fur-bearing animals, eg rabbits, racoons, mink, cats.
Fur farms and farming fur-bearers.
Traps and trapping wild fur-bearers.
Numbers and kinds of pelts traded internationally.
The fashion industry.
The leather industry: cattle, snakes and crocodiles.
The fur industry: for or against nature conservation?
Alternative synthetic materials.

26
 Pets. For instance:
Numbers of animals bred specifically for the pet trade.
Exotic pets: reptiles, birds and mammals taken from the wild.
Animals perishing in transit.
Animals confined in cages and other unsuitable quarters.
Abused, neglected and unwanted pets.
'Controlling' pet numbers: neutering and euthanasia?
Cosmetic surgery or mutation, vanity or tradition?
The billions of animals killed annually to feed pets.

 Animal Ethics. For instance:

Animal moral status.
The moral community.
Equal consideration of interests vs intrinsic and instrumental value.
Consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics.
Moral agents and moral patients.
Moral autonomy and marginal cases.

These are just some areas of interest in animal rights and you can come up with
other topics, among them animal abuse and its relationship with human abuse,
caged hens and open rescue, cruelty-free shopping, xenotransplantation and
zoophilia.

If you are still stumped for an objective to campaign for then contact organisations
you fancy that may want to set up a group in your district.

Keeping Going
Well into your campaigning you could be having fun, but you will also experience
workaday frustration when your efforts appear to be falling flat. At times we all get
fed up, frustrated and think we are failing. But think again and be heartened for you
may simply be going through the normal development of any movement for social
change.

Bill Moyer (1933 - 2002) was an American activist for social change during most of 40
years. Moyer explains that a movement for social change evolves through a number
of stages and outlines several (2). Moyer would say that we in the animal rights
movement are at a particular stage in our development. We have successfully passed
the initial stages: the animal rights issue is on the social and political agenda and is
hotly disputed; citizen groups are growing in number and strength and are educating
the public; and some of the public are being alienated by violent activist rebels.
However, Moyer would say that we have not yet won support from the public majority
(Moyer's stage six) and still have a long way to go before the public will push for
change (Moyer's stage eight). But these stages in the development of movements for
social change are not clear-cut, as George Lakey another old-hand American civil
rights campaigner reminds us (3). Different groups in the same movement for social
change, says Lakey, may in their development go back and forth a number of times
at different rates and overlap each other.

Knowing the prescriptions that make for successful social change will help us keep
going and we will be more likely to succeed. Keep Moyer and Lakey in mind and you
will despair less in your off moments and when rampaging in frustration.

Ten Essential Campaigning Tips

27
Here are important pointers for success common to most campaigns that every
campaigner should know from the start.

1. What Is Your Campaign?

What are you ultimately trying to achieve? If you are not completely clear about what
you are aiming for you are not likely to achieve it. Your ultimate aim must be clear
and precise. A good exercise is to write down your ultimate goal in less than a dozen
or so words. You need to record it anyway and keep it safe so that over time it does
not insidiously change, for it could change into something that seems the same yet in
effect is really different. The route to your original goal may not be the same as the
route to your changed goal so that you just go round in circles.

2. Break Down Goals Into Manageable Chunks

Break down your ultimate goal into small chunks you know you can attain. For
instance, to shut down an animal abusing pet shop or aquarium (ultimate goal), your
sub-goals could be: (1) Itemise how the shop may respond to your attack and how
you will counter each response. (2) Complete a file of facts that supports your case
on the shop. (3) Convince people in the shop's neighbourhood about your cause and
document their support. (4) Lobby and win over your local political representative
(see Chapter 3: Lobbying) to support your case. And so on... Completing each sub-
goal will give you a sense of achievement, keep the momentum going, be good for
moral, boost your credibility and bring you closer to your ultimate goal.
3. Is It Outrageous?
Outrage is what the news media thrive on and what the public love to read. Issues
that may make you fume but for which nothing can be done, or for which everything
possible is being done, are not outrages in this sense. An outrage has to be
something that nothing or little is being done about yet a great deal can be done
about it. Make the focal point of your campaign an outrage and you are more likely to
succeed. People who hear about an outraged may turn into fellow campaigners or
support you in some other way.

4. Do Sufficient Research
You must convince people generally and policy makers in particular that your
campaign issue is important. So get as many relevant and accurate facts that you
can about your issue from different perspectives: background, some quantitative
figures, the major players, relevant legislation and government policy. Write it in a
simple form that people can understand easily. Issues often generate conflict
between people because they get their facts wrong or are biased. The more you
know, the more expert you will become and people will have more confidence in you.
For a regional issue you could get information by carrying out a local survey. For a
wider issue a web search might bring up lots of information. Go for reputable,
authoritative, primary sources, that is first hand evidence, not what someone says
someone else has said.

5. Know Who You Must Influence

Once you know exactly what you are going to campaign on, work out who you need
to influence and whose support you need to win. Influencing and winning over 'the
public' is too vague. Does your issue involve the people in your locality or region, an
institution, a local or national authority, a senator or member of parliament - perhaps
a combination? How are you going to reach them? (See Lobbying, Chapter 3.)

6. Your Resources
Do not worry about money - good actions do not necessarily have big budgets if any
budget at all. However, start campaigning with something within your reach. Do

28
members of your group have complementary abilities and experience? Is anyone
good at organising events, speaking in public, handling the news media or have
expertise in web design? If you do not have what you need and cannot get it , think
up another campaign.

7. Alternative Viewpoints
No matter how you see your issue, how do the people you must influence see it?
Examine the forces, people and organisations at work for and against the change you
want to bring about. See things from their points of view. Say you want to save a
wood for its animal inhabitants and need to persuade your local authority not to
bulldoze it. You might think the wood is important for frogs, owls and weasels, but
the local authority see it as a resource for a recreation park and timber. So
emphasise the issue in their terms – dog walking and renewable wood felling – and
they will be more likely to listen to you.

8. Broaden Your Public

Your campaign is more likely to succeed the greater the number of people who
support you. So find a part of your issue that most people can identify with. Say you
are campaigning against the building of a new abattoir. Most people tolerate killing
animals for food but few willingly endure bad smells. You should therefore
concentrate your campaign on the issue of odours rather than on vegetarianism.
Better to campaign on five per cent of the problem and get 95 per cent support from
the people.

9. Join a Coalition
Individual groups joining together to work toward the same goal make a coalition. By
joining a coalition your group may be able to do more than by working alone. You can
snap a single stick but you cannot break a single bundle of sticks. Look for other
groups and ask what they are doing. Introduce your group to them and give them an
idea of the benefits your group can offer them.

10. Can't Get No...

You might think that you need hope and passion to change things or that you should
have fun and an agreeable time while campaigning. These are important, but what
you really need is a measure of satisfaction. Aim for a dose of satisfaction, that is a
measure of having achieved something, at least weekly, or daily if possible. You can
best get it by setting yourself small goals and achieving them, eg completing a
newsletter, bagging a new member, assembling all the bric-a-brac for a fundraising
drive. These are solid stepping stones on the way to success that should raise your
spirit and keep you going.

More Tips
 Selling yourself and your campaign to the news media is a good and free way of
telling people you exist and getting their support. The more frequently you appear in
the media the more people will know about you and remember your campaign.
 Keep in touch with reality about what you can do. Take off into a world of fantasy
and you will be lost.
 Only make accurate claims you can reasonably prove. Be knowledgeable and
check your sources. People will then learn they can trust what you say and be more
ready to listen to you.
 Do not assume your opponents are depraved. They are likely to be as admirable
as you, so respect them. Put yourself in their position and ask what will move them to
do what you would have them do.

29
 Attack obstacles obliquely if you cannot get past them. For instance, if you cannot
attack your opponents directly, attack their support.
 The practical campaign is primary. Minimise bureaucracy; don't get stuck in it.
 Build on your reputation and history of successes to take on more or bigger
campaigns.
 Bear in mind that you may be mistaken. Someone said, "Don't die for your beliefs
- they may be wrong." So keep an open mind and be prepared to alter your campaign
course of action if necessary.
 Finally, does your campaign pass the SMART test and have you done a SWOT?
See Chapter 4 under Action Planning.

3. Civil Disobedience

"So the point isn't to have a victory over somebody else but rather to effect change.
And change is a lot more rapid and a lot more enduring if you get the cooperation of
what would otherwise be your adversary." Henry Spira (1)

What Is Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience usually entails non-violent actions, such as marches,
demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins or occupation of buildings. Civil disobedience is a form
of protest. The reason for being a civil resister or dissenter is to act on your moral
right and correct an injustice you perceive. Your are trying to reverse or stop some
process or make an appeal to correct or revoke a law. You are a dissenter every time
you deliberately disobey the law or a demand by government, believing that your
action is just and the law or government is unfair or harmful.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), American philosopher, naturalist and writer, is
often cited as articulating the belief that people have a duty not to take part in a
perceived injustice and to resist any government or its agent forcing people to
participate. Thoreau asserted that it is the citizen who grants the state its authority
and the citizen can oppose unjust authority if compelled by conscience.

Dissenters from all kinds of background, including suffragists, feminists, anti-war

demonstrators and nuclear bomb protesters, have engaged in civil disobedience.
Among the biggest and best known practitioners of civil disobedience are the Indian
Mohandas Gandhi (1869 - 1948) and the American Martin Luther King jr (1929 -
1968). Gandhi practised civil disobedience as a weapon in his struggle for
independence for India from British rule. King fought peacefully for black-American
civil rights. Both men were beaten and jailed - even non-violent acts of civil
disobedience risk retaliation and verbal or physical attack by opponents and police -
but attracted huge numbers of supporters and co-civil rights rebels.

Gandhi outlined some key rules when carrying out civil disobedience. They convey
the flavour of his form of campaigning:
 Tolerate the anger and assaults of your opponents.
 Do not get angry, insult or retaliate against your opponents.

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 Submit to arrest.
These are good rules in that they clearly tell you what to do and, all things being
equal, do not jeopardise your cause.

Civil Disobedience & Animal Rights

Some animal rights issues attracting civil disobedience actions are:
 Laboratories experimenting on animals: they invite break-ins.
 Factory farms: they attract open and clandestine rescues (see Chapter 4, under
Animal Rescuer).
 Fur shops: their locks have been super-glued and windows smashed.
 Fox hunting with hounds: hunt saboteurs challenge them.

The last of these, campaigning for foxes against fox hunters with hounds, had a
successful legal judgement in Britain when the sport was outlawed by Act of
Parliament (coming into force in 2003 in Scotland and 2004 in England). This
campaigning for foxes had much effort and a long history spanning at least two
generations of activists. One kind of campaign took the form of hunt sabotage, a
good example of animal rights civil disobedience.

Hunt sabotage began in 1960's Britain and may have been the first methodical non-
violent action to confront organised hunting of animals for sport. The hunt saboteurs
(or 'sabs') engaged hunters with hounds (or 'hunts'). The job of the sabs was to make
hunting impractical by delaying or confusing the hounds to give the quarry (usually
foxes and sometimes deer) a chance to escape. Two sab techniques are blowing
hunting horns and covering a quarry's sent with pungent sprays to mislead the
hounds.

Sabs were not kindly tolerated by the hunts. Hunts reacted to the sabotage by
employing private security firms and their own supporters to take on the sabs,
sometimes violently. Police at hunts became a common sight and policing and public
order problems emerged. Police sometimes pretended not to notice when hunts
attacked sabs, possibly partly because they were unsure of what powers hunts could
legally use. The Conservative government, numbering many hunters in their
membership, also came down on the sabs by enacting laws specifically obstructing
sab action. The sabs replied by disobeying the laws in the field and disputing them
the courts. Eventually, a sympathetic (Labour) government pushed through an Act of
Parliament banning hunting with dogs. The sabs had pulled through and won. Even
so, the hunts continue to engage in superficially outwardly legal activities and the
hunt sabs continue to engage them.

Arguments For & Against Civil Disobedience

Some people have certain misconceptions and criticisms of civil disobedience. Here
are some of the claims and counter claims.
Democracy
 Claim: You cannot excuse civil disobedience in a democracy because unjust laws
can be changed by democratic procedures.
 Claim: Civil disobedience is a democratic activity. Democratic governments hold
power by virtue of the individual citizens who elect them and if change is blocked by
a government then dissenters can unblock it with an appropriate doses of civil
disobedience.
Regular Channels
 Claim: Civil disobedience should be the last resort in a democracy. First you must
exhaust all existing channels of communication for change.

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 Claim: There is a point when appealing through regular channels becomes futile
and delays furthering your cause. Besides, regular channels are often part of the
problem.
Citizenship
 Claim: Being a citizen you enjoy the rights and benefits of your country. Therefore
you must in turn obey its customs and laws.
 Claim: This is every reason for challenging what you see as unjust, in order to
make your country a better place to live.

Anarchy
 Claim: Lawlessness and anarchy would reign if everyone were a civil-disobedience
activist.
 Claim: If we do not challenge government and its laws we could slip into
oppression and despotism.

4. Direct Action

"In moral terms, the granting of rights to animals leads to the conclusion that direct
action in their defence is not only permissible but also a moral duty, although
whether this justifies some of the more extreme actions involving violence is an open
question." Robert Garner (1)

What is Direct Action?

Direct action is activity that fights for a cause dynamically and directly for immediate
change. You can view direct action as a strong form of civil disobedience with a
capacity for acting illegally. Activists employing direct action aim to create a situation
whereby their opponents have to yield significant concessions to the activists' cause.
Direct action campaigners often tend to disown the methods of the less dramatic and
slower mainstream who advance social change through education and legislative
procedures.

Among the issues in addition to animal rights in which direct action is employed are
environmental protection, anti-globalisation, nuclear disarmament and asylum-
seeker support. Direct action has been acted out in labour disputes in Europe and
North America since the 19th century and particularly in the 20th century by workers
challenging government and big employers for social rights and political power.
Strikes, boycotts, picketing, sit-ins, trespass and mass occupation of land or
buildings, property damage and sabotage are some of the tools of direct action, with
a measure of agitation, sometimes even violence by the more hot headed activists.
But employers might also use direct action against activists, like lockouts and mass
dismissal of workers. You might say that governments have also used direct action in
the form of mass fines, mass arrest and mass imprisonment.

Examples of Animal Rights Direct Action

Direct action on animal users by the more excessive or illegally inclined animal rights
activists include:
 Physical assault.
 Posting letter bombs/booby traps.

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 Bomb hoaxing.
 Arson of premises (eg animal breeders, fur shops, laboratories).
 Wrecking equipment (eg at fur farms, laboratories, slaughterhouses, and hunters'
traps and shooting platforms).
 Freeing caged or confined animals from properties (eg chickens, minks, rabbits
and goats. See Animal Rescuer, Chapter 4).
 Ruining fur apparel.
 Burning or damaging motor vehicles (such as puncturing tyres and paint
stripping).
 Breaking or etching windows (eg of pet, fur and butcher shops).
 Painting graffiti or paint bombing (ditto).
 Contaminating commercial products (eg cosmetics, sweets and foodstuff. For
more see under Efficacy of Direct Action, below).
 Door lock super-gluing (eg of fur shops and fast food shops).
 Rowdily demonstrating outside animal abusers' homes.
 Reviling people as animal abusers to their neighbours.
 Sending abusive letters and making threatening phone calls.
 Publishing animal abusers' names and addresses on the Web.
 Disrupting phone and email communication of companies.
 Web site hacking.

All these extreme activities can be carried out by just one or two people and most
probably are in actuality. Possibly the most serious by far of these actions is arson,
which on conviction could land a jail sentence of several years and possibly kill
someone trapped in a blazing building.

However, direct action need not necessarily be illegal. Good examples are the work
of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and the Battle of Brightlingsea (more
below), the disruption of animal hunts (see Hunt Sabbing in Chapter 3. Civil
Disobedience) and assailing company reputations over the exploitation of animals
and nature. One such company assault culminated in the famous case of McDonald's
fast food chain with the celebrated McLibel Two (Chapter 6: The McLibel Two). The
simple fear of being the target of direct action or worse can be enough to make some
companies take a more animal-friendly approach to their trading (more below).

Without going into the morality of illegal direct action a criticism can be made about
it. Unless an action is methodical and long-term against a particular target, such as
with the intention of causing financial ruin and closure of a company, it may bee seen
buy many of the public as wanton vandalism. It is debatable whether such actions
have value for animal rights, although they might publicise the cause and stimulate
discussion.

Individual vs Mass Direct Action

Sustained direct action needs a certain amount of organisation and long-term effort
to be effective. However, you do not need to be a big group or a mass of citizenry to
employ direct action. One activist with a bit of backing can be effective, as
demonstrated by Henry Spira (see Chapter 6: Assorted Animal Activists). Another
example is the Rambo affair. The pilot of an airliner at London airport in 2000 would
not take off when one of the passengers refused to sit down. The passenger was a
member of an activist group protesting the deportation of asylum-seekers from
Britain. The pilot only took off when the activist and the object of the action, a
deported asylum-seeker, together left the plane. (2) The asylum-seeker was Salim
Rambo, a 23-year-old political activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire),
who said he would be killed if he returned to his country of origin. According to later

33
reports, Rambo was granted asylum in Britain.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Sea Shepherd is a seafaring activist organisation based in the United States,
operating three ships and a variety of boats. The society's name comes from its first
ship, a trawler bought in Britain and renamed the Sea Shepherd. The society engages
in direct action to save marine wildlife, especially whales, dolphins, seals and turtles.
Its mission is to execute international maritime laws and agreements meant to
protect sea species and the marine environment.

Among other international treaties that Sea Shepherd invokes in the course of their
work is the United Nations World Charter for Nature (1982). The Charter mandates
individuals to enforce international conservation laws. In particular, under section 21
(c) and (e):

States and, to the extent they are able, other public authorities, international
organizations, individuals, groups and corporations shall:
(c) Implement the applicable international legal provisions for the conservation of
nature and the protection of the environment.
(e) Safeguard and conserve nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

And section 24:

Each person has a duty to act in accordance with the provisions of the present
Charter, acting individually, in association with others or through participation in the
political process, each person shall strive to ensure that the objectives and
requirements of the present Charter are met.

A particular aim of Sea Shepherd, and the one for which it is best known, is halting
illegal whaling. Sea Shepherd's angle is not to protest against whaling as such but to
fight illegal whaling operations. Flying a black Jolly Roger they chase and obstruct
whalers from illegally harpooning whales, they ram their adversaries' ships on the
high seas and sink them in harbour. The organisation's small fleet of ships has
battled with whalers from Spain, Iceland, Norway, Japan and other nations. The sea-
going activists bring back film of illegal killing of whales to show on television around
the world to increase public knowledge of marine issues and the carnage people do
on sea animals.

Policing the seas and oceans of the world has its risks. While documenting illegal
whaling off Siberia in Soviet territorial waters in 1981 they were pursued by an
aggressive Soviet warship. And in 1994 they were fired on by a Norwegian Navy
destroyer that lopped depth charges under their hull and rammed them.

Paul Watson, a Canadian and co-founder of Greenpeace, set up sea Shepherd in

1977. Watson left Greenpeace to be more direct and confrontational in his actions.
His radical property-destruction method of ramming and sinking illegal whalers shows
that, always taking maximum care, you can sometimes use violent action without
endangering human life. Watson is always mindful of the welfare of his and the
whaling ships' crews. Sea Shepherd claim they have never caused or taken an injury.

Watson and his colleagues have inflamed their opponents and been incarcerated and
sued for crimes on the high seas. But all attempts to lock them up permanently have
failed. Sea Shepherd justify their actions by claiming that they always act legally
within the law. They say that the ships they sink are breaking international law by

34
hunting endangered whales and as such are pirates. Sea Shepherd's critics claim the
organisation harasses legal harvesting of the sea's resources and call Sea Shepherd
crews pirates and eco-terrorists. Indeed, two of Sea Shepherd's ships have been
struck off shipping registers, which means they can be boarded and captured as
pirate outlaws.

On the up side, Sea Shepherd has saved the lives of many whales and publicised the
plight of whales around the globe. Sea Shepherd says they are the "most aggressive
and most successful whale-saving organization in the world" and in 2000 Time
Magazine named Watson an Environmental Hero of the 20th Century.

Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty

SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) is an ongoing campaign to close down
Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company north of London with an important branch in
New Jersey, that carries out tests on animals. Huntingdon is said to be Europe's
largest animal testing laboratory and uses cats, dogs and primates, with the majority
animals being rodents. Substances like pesticides, drugs and domestic and industrial
chemicals are tested on the animals to assess their safety for human use. SHAC was
set up in 1999 by seasoned British animal rights activists Greg Avery and Heather
James after activists at the Huntingdon laboratory (secretly working for People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals) shot video of animals being abused. SHAC and its
activities against Huntingdon have since spread to Europe and the United States.

SHAC say they do not support violence of any kind. However, SHAC's methods are
intimidation, harassment and property damage. Targets are Huntingdon itself plus
the company's shareholders and business associates, including suppliers, insurers
and bankers. SHAC also strikes out at Huntingdon's employees and their families.
Thus SHAC targets a wide network of primary targets (Huntingdon), secondary
targets (Huntingdon's business associates) and tertiary targets (families and
investors). SHAC wants to show all of them that any kind of direct or indirect
involvement in animal abuse is a bad investment. (For more about SHAC tactics see
Chapter 5: The Law - United States and Britain, under Britain.)

Because of the fear of attack by SHAC supporters the results so far are that:
 Dozens of companies have stopped trading with Huntingdon.
 Insurers and financial institutions have stopped dealing with Huntingdon (the
British government stepped in by ordering the Department of Trade and Industry and
the Bank of England to help them).
 Thousands of shareholder have sold their Huntingdon shares.
 The value of Huntingdon's shares collapsed.
 Huntingdon was brought to the edge of bankruptcy.
 The public is divided about the image of Huntingdon as a reputable beleaguered
company that should be helped or a contemptible animal tormentor that should be
shut down.

Illegal and violent direct action has its penalties for SHAC activists, however. Legal
actions were brought against SHAC and a small stream of SHAC activists in Britain
were jailed. Six SHAC supporters were arrested in the US by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and sentenced for up to six years imprisonment for violating
Huntingdon's New Jersey facility. Critics of SHAC say they distort the nature of
experiments on animals, excuse and advocate violence and vandalism, use terror
tactics and try to sway public opinion with hysterical emotional nonsense.

35
The Battle of Brightlingsea
The above two examples of direct action were organised and planned. But this
example is one of spontaneous action by ordinary residents of a small town,
Brightlingsea.

Brightlingsea, on Britain's North Sea coast, is hardly on the map, population less than
50,000. But in the early 1990's the anger of animal rights campaigners was growing
at the apathy of politicians to ban live animal export (see The Background, below).
Campaigners were demonstrating at the points where animals were being exported,
such as Coventry airport and the sea ports at Dover, King’s Lynn, Plymouth and other
towns. Patience was running out. Brightlingsea became a flashpoint.

~ Background to Brightlingsea ~

Livestock raisers get better payment for stock sold alive. For the animals this means
transportation over long distances. The US live animal export market (excluding fish)
is worth about $700 million annually. But Australia is the biggest live animal exporter
(about A$1.8 billion annually), transporting about 6,000,000 sheep, 850,000 cattle,
100,000 goats per year, mostly for slaughter in other countries. Voyages for
Australian livestock take as long as three months at sea in specially adapted
freighters (below). Animals are stacked in tiers, each ship loaded with tens of
thousands of animals, to markets in Mexico, the Middle East, south-east Asia and
Japan.

Animals going abroad forfeit the protection of the law in their own country. Instead,
they fall subject to the unenforced humane standards of whatever country they are
sold to. Animals on route face exposure to weather and climate extremes, often stifle
in the heat, cannot lie down or are knocked down and trampled. They suffer thirst
and hunger and if they are provided with food or water cannot always reach them.
Their conditions and handling can be so poor that many animals die or are seriously
injured.

About three million live animals are transported across Europe every year on
journeys that can take days. Britain exports over half a million live lambs, sheep and
pigs a year. Attempts through the legal system to ban the export of live animals
failed after a court ruled that ports cannot refuse to take live animals. In the 1990's
sea and air ports in Britain become centres for animal activists fighting on behalf of
the exported animals.

At Brightlingsea the transport trucks, loaded three tiers high with sheep, had to pass
through the town's narrow streets to reach the port. Some local residents turned out
spontaneously to stand in front of the trucks to impede them. The confrontation
started in January 1995 and no one foresaw that it would develop into a battle lasting
nine months. The residents of a town turning out for animals is an almost singular
development in animal rights. Among the people were ordinary workers, housewives,
school children and grannies, who had never been on a demonstration before.

More transport trucks rolled through the town and more residents turned out to block
them. Residents took to the streets innocently believing that the police would turn

36
the animal transports back. However, the transporters were prepared and over a
hundred police in riot gear arrived to escort the trucks through the town. Protesters
daily confronted the transport convoys from now on and the police always turned out
in force to clear a way to the port. By February the animals were being transported to
the port every day. The issue drew in protesters from much further afield. On some
days up to 2,000 people were lining the streets to heckle and shake their fists at the
transport drivers.

Protesters and police tried to avoid confrontation with each other but tension was
always in the air as the police pushed the convoys forward to the port no matter what
the obstruction. One night some protesters managed to drive a 60-seater bus to the
gates of the port where they removed the wheels and handcuffed themselves to it.

Eventually the police let the protesters walk with the trucks to the gates of the port.
Protesters ahead of the trucks walked slowly to make the exporters miss the high
tide the ferry at the wharf had to catch to sail out to sea. The 'Sea Sabs', a few
saboteurs in a dinghy, tried blocking the route of the ferry, but two police motor
launches saw them off.

Some people voiced fears for safety as protesters press up against the transports in
the narrow Brightlingsea streets. Protesters threw themselves down in front of the
trucks and held a sit-down in the road. The police forced back any protesters who
tried to get in the way and warned them of arrest. People become casualties in the
pushing and were tended by Red Cross medics on hand at the scene. The police
arrested many people, even passers-by, and bundled them into vans to the police
station at the nearest large town, where activists chanted and waved banners
outside the building.

During the Brightlingsea protests activists were carrying out actions at other air and
sea ports around Britain. Transports were taking calves to Coventry Airport for the
European veal industry and local animal rights campaigner Jill Phipps (1964 - 1995)
was crushed to death under a truck she tried to hinder (see Chapter 6: Jill Phipps).
The next day the Brightlingsea protesters held a candle-light vigil for her.

The final convoy left Brightlingsea towards the end of October. In nine months
250,000 animals were exported through the town and 52 sheep died at the port. The
Red Cross treated more than 100 protester casualties. The police made nearly 600
arrests and received a thousand complaints against them. The Brightlingsea
protesters did not succeed in stopping a single one of the 150 or so convoys. But the
cost of exporting the animals in the face of active protest was too expensive and
ceased. The protesters had won. Veal calf exports from Coventry Airport, where Jill
Phipps died, also soon closed down when the firm flying out the calves went
bankrupt.

Comparing Direct Actions

The examples of Sea Shepherd, SHAC and the Battle of Brightlingsea demonstrate
that effective direct action can be organised (Sea Shepherd and SHAC) or
spontaneous (Brightlingsea), with legal standing (Sea Shepherd), mainly law abiding
(Brightlingsea), or pressing against the law and over stepping it (SHAC and
Brightlingsea). And these three examples of direct action share a common motif :
potential financial ruin for the targeted companies. Their message for companies
may be that companies could face ruin if they annoy enough people who decide to
act against them in a concerted fashion. Citizens, not just companies, brandish

37
power.

Direct Action vs Civil Disobedience

Where is the border between direct action and civil disobedience? Civil disobedience
tends to be peaceful and within the law, although not inevitably so. Direct action is
disposed to be stormy, could be violent, and some activists of a militant mind might
decide to cross the line into illegal activity. Some law enforcement agencies, notably
the FBI, choose the view that when your direct action includes property damage you
become a terrorist. But some direct action proponents argue that violence relates
directly to living beings only; property damage is sabotage, not terrorism, because
you cannot scare or terrify property.

So the methods of civil disobedience, direct action and terrorism shade into each
other. When direct action is peaceful it tends towards civil disobedience but when it
is violent it tends towards terrorism. Critics of direct action, like the FBI, are most
vociferous when actions tend towards the terrorism end of the scale. Interestingly,
the FBI do not trouble Sea Shepherd, but hound SHAC. Perhaps this is because the
people at Sea Shepherd cleverly harness the law to their cause. SHAC can only fall
back on moral justification - and additionally goes against vested American economic
interests.
For a discussion and criticism about violence see Chapter 5 under Violence or
Nonviolence.

Efficacy of Direct Action

Some opponents of direct action claim that it is ineffective or at best just an
annoyance, particularly when it is illegal or violent. However, direct action clearly can
work and sometimes work well. No business executives worth their salt want their
company to be a target. Just the idea of being targeted is sufficient for sensible
thinking companies to take steps to forestall a direct action attack.

What sort of direct action would send shivers up and down the spine of company
executives? Product contamination is a style of attack occasionally used by animal
rights activists - but also by the odd individual who is out to make money from
blackmail. In one contamination occurrence shopkeepers throughout New South
Wales withdrew tens of thousands of Mars and Snickers chocolate bars after an
"extortion threat" against the manufacturer suggested that seven bars were
deliberately contaminated with a poison. (3) There was no mention of whether this
was related to animal rights, environmentalism or just to a criminal wanting a
ransom. In another contamination event retailers across Britain cleared Savlon skin
cream from their shops after animal rights activists claimed to have poisoned the
product. (4) The Swiss based manufacturer of this product, Novartis, was believed to
be a client of the animal testing laboratory Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Contamination perpetrators corrupt a few samples of a retail brand, such as food,

drink or lotion, with something harmful like poison or broken glass, then inform the
manufacturer or newspapers what they have done. This leaves the manufacturer and
the product's retailers with no choice but to withdraw the stock from sale, not
knowing the specific batch that was tainted. Some animal activists pick salt as a
contaminant as it does the job without making anyone ill. But merely a hoax
contamination, given credence by sending actually contaminated samples to the
press, is sufficient for a product to be withdrawn.

38
How can companies neutralise a problem like product contamination? Companies, by
anticipating people's sensitivity and by taking preventative measures to reduce the
risk of being struck, may manage to neutralise a problem before it is upon them.
Companies could draw up a relevant ethical code of practice, publish it as widely as
possible and be seen to live up to it. Four animal-friendly and nature-friendly areas
are:

 Animal Ingredients & Testing

A company should state on its product that no animal parts, animal substances or
animal derivatives are used in the ingredients and that the product - as a whole and
in part – has not been tested on animals.

 Ethical Purchasing
A company should clearly state and demonstrate evidence that they get their
supplies from reputable companies, in the sense that their suppliers have a good
record for treating animals, nature and their workers well.

 Environmental Policy
A company should state and demonstrate evidence that they do everything possible
to avoid and reduce any harm to nature, regarding their development of land and
their use of raw materials, their waste generation and waste disposal.

 Ethical Investment
A company should state and demonstrate evidence that their investments are animal
friendly and green and that they do not invest in companies with dubious links.

This book, How To Do Animal Rights, is not just useful for animal activists - company
executives should heed it!

6. Lobbying

"It is the province of honest men to enlighten the government." Attributed to

Napoleon Bonaparte.

The thrust for changing the human governed world for the better for animals is
essentially two-pronged. One prong involves law-making for animals (the other is
educating people). However, in order to go and make laws you must become a
legislator, but we all cannot do this and the next best thing is to influence the
legislators. And this is what lobbying is about. You go lobbying to persuade the
legislators, your political representatives, elected political officials, senators or
members of parliament, to do what you want them to do: change or enact laws that
benefit animals or otherwise support your cause. In the same way you can influence
local or national directors and board members of institutions and businesses to adopt
animal friendly ways for their establishments. The origin of the term lobbying is lost,
but it might be connected with cornering and petitioning politicians in the foyers or
lobbies of their building.

Who Can Lobby?

39
Lobbying is democratic; it is an important process that gives people a say in political,
economic and other polices that influence them. Political representatives in
democratic countries are elected by the people to serve the people. You are one of
the people, so representatives must serve you, especially if you are one of their
constituents, by bringing their political standing to bear on your concerns.

The lobbying field is open to anyone or any interest group. You do not have to be a
powerful business corporation that retains professional lobbyists or employs their
own specialist staff to lobby for them. Nor do you need any particular experience to
go lobbying, just a desire to communicate what you think should be done. No one
and no group is too small to make their voice heard. If you do not make yourself
heard, the policy makers cannot take into account your opinions, laws are unlikely to
change and animals will not benefit. By lobbying for animals you change the way
society acts by harnessing the power of the law for animals.

What & Who to Lobby

What do you want to lobby for? You may want to:

• Prohibit toxicity testing of substances on animals.

• Change the law to prohibit live exports of animals.
• Ban inhumane jaw traps and snares used by animal trappers.
• Proscribe the production or selling of foie gras, veal and other animal body
parts.
• Introduce stiffer and more appropriate penalties for animal abusers.
• Change the law about how animals are transported.
• Prohibit the importation and trade of living wild animals and their body parts.
• Propose new laws to regulate breeders of animals.
• Proscribe the mutilation of animals for cosmetic and economic purposes.
• Regulate or make illegal the keeping of wild, non-domestic, animals as pets.

You will have to address political representatives to lobby for such changes as these.
But although lobbying is often associated with political representatives, you can just
as effectively lobby anyone, such as the figures who have access to the policy
makers and legislators; they hold a variety of positions with different powers from
local to national levels. But you can just as easily lobby institutions and business
companies whose activities affect animals or who have the power to help animals,
like persuading your supermarket to change its policy on selling factory farmed
produce, such as eggs and broilers. Equally, you could lobby your works canteen to
ban factory farmed food and offer choices for vegetarians or lobby your college
professors to organise courses on animal ethics. Representatives of private
organisations, unlike our political representatives, are not obliged to assist you but
they might respond if they want to be seen by the public as honest and caring.

Start Lobbying
First, ask yourself four questions.

1. What specific issue shall I campaign about?

For example, livestock transport, entertainment animals, fur-bearers (for ideas
see Chapter 3: Campaigning, under Where to Begin?).
2. What is my specific campaign objective?
For example, change the law or other procedure governing how animals are

40
 kept or used.
3. Which authority shall I lobby?
For example, the Secretary for Agriculture, the Home Secretary, or a
company's chief executive officer.
4. What lobbying methods will I use to persuade the authority?
For example, write letters, arrange meetings, organise public debates.

Second, find out who your targets are, such as who politically represents you. Good
lobbyists do not just know who their representatives are but get to know about them.
This way you know you are targeting the right people and can make the best
impression on them. For political representatives you should at least know their
political party, political status or rank, past and present campaigns, and their
involvement with animals.

You can most easily find out who represents you by consulting your library or the
Web. Virtually every citizen in the US is represented federally by a member of the
House of Representatives and by two members of the Senate. Most US states have
this same system of representation. Note that you must lobby federal representatives
on federal matters and lobby state representatives on state maters because
representatives deal only within their own sphere. Voters in Britain are represented
nationally by their Member of Parliament and voters who reside in Scotland or Wales
are represented by their member of their particular legislative assembly.

Third, know what your targets can do for you. For example your representative in
your legislative assembly could:

• Write officially to relevant ministers or other representatives on your behalf.

• Convey your issue at a committee meeting.
• Address the whole political assembly about your campaign.
• Ask a question from the floor on your behalf to elicit information from a
minister.
• Propose an early day motion (a petition for representatives to sign) as part of
your campaign.
• Set up a committee to study your issue.
• Initiate a parliamentary debate about your cause.
• Introduce a draft law on animals for debate.
• Attempt to alter an existing draft law.
• Propose changes to statutory law.
• Support or impede legislation.
• Attend your public gatherings and make speeches to support your campaign.

How to Lobby
The primary means of lobbying your targets is writing (letters, email, faxes - and
sometimes phoning), arranging face to face meetings, and using the news media.
Writing
1. Writing a letter to your representatives or other targets is possibly the best way to
make initial contact and state your case. Paper documents give them something to
study at their leisure and refer back to.

41
 • Be concise; one page is probably sufficient. Keep to one subject per letter so
as not to cloud the issue.
• Do not make more than two or three points or there will be too much for your
representatives to handle.
• Put the main points (the who, why, where and when) in the first paragraph.
• Include supporting information, evidence, photos, but do not over do it; if you
have a lot of data, summarise them on a separate sheet.
• Always include your address and zip/post code so that your representatives
can verify that you are one of their constituents, otherwise they may not act
for you.
• End by asking politely for a response to your letter.

Make your letter personal. Put one or two specific questions to your representatives
and ask for their opinion; they will take your letter more seriously. If you do not do
this they might simply forward your letter to somebody who seems to them to be a
pertinent third party, like a government department that handles such matters and
who is likely to send you a bland standard reply.

You will have more influence if you get other people to write as well. Your
representatives might keep count of the letters they receive as a check of public
opinion and the more letters they receive on your subject the more influence you will
have. However, if you are writing as part of an organised group never send a
standard or model letter. Your representatives will give duplicated letters far less
weight and an unfavourable response, even if they get a great many of them on the
same topic. If you do have a group of people using a standard letter get each writer
to subtract some remarks from their letter, add singular remarks of their own, and
mix it all up to make their letter look personalised.

What about emailing, faxing and phoning? Email is quick and cheap but may not be
effective if your representative is swamped by them every day. Your particular email
may not receive the attention it deserves or might simply get lost in the flood. Letter
writing is slow and arduous but is likely to get a better response.

A fax is more solid than an email in that it can be held in the hand, put on a desk and
filed. But faxes are less legible and less attractive than a well printed letter. Sending
a fax can be useful to add further information once your issue is already well know to
your representatives or as a prompt to action, such as before an important vote.
Otherwise always send a letter.

Phoning is fast. But you will probably not be able to speak to your representatives;
they are likely to be out or busy. However, if you are going to phone then jot down
and stick to just one or two points that you wish to make. When you get through say
you are a constituent and keep your conversation short.

2. Lobby by Personal Meetings

Elected representatives expect to be approached by the public as part of the
democratic process, so do not feel inhibited. Go ahead and arrange a meeting with
your representatives to present your case in person. And certainly meet them should
the results of your correspondence be unsatisfactory.

You may visit your representatives alone or, more effectively, as a small group
campaigning on your issue. Each one of you should have a good reason for being at

42
the meeting, with something different to contribute. Decide beforehand who is going
to lead the meeting and who is going to say what. Have all your documents to hand
and ensure you cover all the items you wish to make.

How you come across and how you say what you have to say is important. Dress
casually or conservatively but dress appropriately for meeting an elected
representative of the people. Be rational and objective, not emotional and excitable.
Speak clearly and concisely. Know your background facts well and summarise them
on a single page to hand to your representatives. Give duplicate copies to any of
their staff. Thank everyone before you depart and leave your representatives with a
good impression of what an animal rights activist is.

Representatives in the US fix a number of public meetings through the year to meet
their constituents. At these meetings you should prepare yourself to ask your
representatives questions in front of a public gathering that may also contain news
reporters. Ask your representatives to speak about their stand on your issue and
make things hot for them if they go against you. Alternatively, your representatives
might decide to meet you on the side at a private office and a typical meeting could
last an hour. You could take the opportunity to hand out leaflets about your
campaign to other attendees at the meeting who are not part of your group.
Members of Parliament in Britain hold regular sessions in their constituency every
few weeks when you can sit with them and speak privately. Check your
representatives' web sites for particulars and make an appointment.

3. Lobby via the News Media

Another way of influencing representatives and to strengthen your cause is through
the local or national news media. Use the media to:

• Spur lethargic representatives to action.

• Make your representatives take you even more seriously.
• Pressure your representatives into publicly stating their position.
• Give your representatives bad publicity if they do bad things.
• Give your representatives good publicity if they act well.

Phone or email your newspaper and radio/tv stations and outline what you are doing.
News media interest is often short-term, so get your timing right to approach them at
the best point in your campaign. Politicians and companies love good publicity,
especially at election time. Beware that editors simplify issues as black or white, so
there is no point telling the if's and but's of your case, just make your message
simple and clear. In any case, you should use the media to gain widespread public
support for your cause, especially if you are not able to achieve your objectives
through your representatives. See News Media, in this chapter.

Lobbying Techniques
 Learn the House Rules
You must learn the rules of your legislative assembly to understand their manners
and methods to prepare yourself to influence them.
 Set Attainable Goals
Try for goals that are achievable. Stopping egg farming is too sweeping, but phasing
out the production and sale of eggs from caged hens is attainable, whether from your
supermarket chain or nationally.

43
 Be Flexible & Compromising
If you think you will not be able to make headway, or if you know your
representatives are not in favour of animal rights, simply operate under the banner of
animal welfare and adjust your goal so that it appears welfare oriented. Politics and
influencing people is the art of compromise when you cannot be autocratic.
 Pitch the Right Level of Information
Present your representatives with whatever information is strictly relevant and no
more. They will not want to waste time with excessive and non-essential input.
 Stick to Facts Not Feelings
You have opinions, but base them on indisputable facts and put them across in
reasoned arguments. Know the important arguments for and against your case and
be able to refute the latter rationally.
 Always Go for Clarity
Do not use abbreviations or unusual, obscure or technical terms that your
representatives may not know. Get your message across simply and quickly, so spell
it out fully.
 Always Tell Them
Be specific and clear about what you want your representatives to do. Always tell
them what actions they must take even when it seems obvious to you. It may not be
obvious to them and they will not want to waste time guessing what you want them
to do.
 Do Not Rely on Memory
Always make written notes of what is said, the decisions that are made and the
names of the people you communicate with. Make notes even as you are just
listening as an observer.
 Build Up Your Credibility
You do not need to be an infallible expert, but always be open and tell the truth (or at
least use your words carefully) to build up your credibility. This is the best way to
impress on your representatives that they can rely on your knowledge.
 Get the Weight of Authority Behind You
Individuals acting alone can lobby effectively, but you can be more effective if you
have authoritative associates to bolster your case. Your representatives will be more
ready and better able to act to influence others if they know your issue has weight
behind it.
 Link to Your Representatives' Interests
Try to relate your issue to your representatives' constituency or to their personal or
professional interests. For instance, you might be writing about blood sports and they
are keen countryside ramblers or sit on countryside committees. This is where
knowing about your representatives' backgrounds is advantageous.
 Be Above Party Politics
Eschew party politics when lobbying. Lobby to get the best out of everyone
irrespective of their political alliances, affiliations and the party they belong to.
 Do Not Make Enemies
Your representatives should listen to you but they do not have to agree with you. Be
courteous to them when their views are at odds with your own because you may be
able to influence them another time on a different issue. Make enemies of them and
you may never be able to enlist their help.
 Target Staff
Always be polite, understanding and patient to your representatives' personal
assistants, secretaries and other office staff. They are your potential allies. They
might influence your representatives for you or reciprocate your kindness by giving
you background or other useful information.
 Analyse Your Progress
Monitor your progress and evaluate your results. You can best do this by setting

44
small practicable goals you must reach on your way to total success. See Action
Planning in this chapter.
 Thank People
Thank people who are helpful and if you have the news media involved with your
campaign drop them names in praise.
 Finally...
Keep on going if you do not get the responses you hoped for. Think about reaching
the same goal from a different angle. Be persistent and do not give up easily!

12. Internet

The Internet is a communication tool to exchange ideas, inspiration, information,

statistics, pictures and drawings, and to find people and organisations. Using the
internet is quick, convenient and relatively cheap. Use it to communicate with your
existing and potential supporters to let them know about you, your group and the
issues you raise. The Internet has a number of parts and two of the most important
are the Web and email.

The Web
The Web is short for World Wide Web (the 'www' that precedes web page addresses),
a network of computers around the globe to which anyone can access by connecting
to it with a computer. People began using the Web as a popular medium for
communication in the mid-1990's. Basically the Web consists of millions of web sites,
each consisting of one or more pages where text, graphics and pictures are set out
for people to view.

Acquiring your own web site may be free, cheap or expensive depending on what you
want and how you go about obtaining it. Creating and managing your own web site is
not difficult but takes a little time to learn how to handle it. Benefits of your own web
site are:

• You can tell your web site viewers what you do.
• You can tell your web site viewers what you think they should do.
• You can send people electronic newsletters in addition to or instead of paper
ones sent via the post.
• It is easy to add or delete your web pages and to update, add and delete
information to existing pages.
• It will give your group a sense of professionalism and enhance its reputation,
especially if it is informative and good looking.

Email
Email, short for electronic mail, was invented some years before the Web. You can
use email to exchange messages, graphics and pictures within seconds or minutes to
any internet user with an email account anywhere in the world. Email is so smart that
you will not want to send letters through the post any more and use it preferentially
instead of the phone.

45
When you get a web site you usually also buy an email facility to go with it and your
email address should appear on your web site so that people can contact you.
However, you do not need a web site to have an email address; web sites and email
are separate components of the Internet. To access email you only need get online
using a computer and sign up with a company that provides email, which can be free.
You can then access and send email from anywhere on a computer that links you to
the Internet.

Create Your Own Web Site

You will need a computer to access the Internet, a computer that you own or can use
for a time from a friend, a library, your work place, internet café or some other place.
Best to have your own computer as you will be in command of when and how long
you stay online. Then you will need two things, first a company that will connect your
computer to the Internet, and second a company that will store your web site and
send pages to the computers of people who what to look at it. Either company might
also provide you with email facilities. Both kinds of company can be found online by
searching the Web under 'Internet service provider' and 'web site hosting'.

Designing Your Web Site

Pay someone to design a web site for you or do it yourself. Do-it-yourself will be
cheaper and you will have more and quicker control over it. You do not necessarily
need expensive software or any software to set out web pages. Instead you can learn
to write HTML (short for hyper text mark-up language), the instructions that
professionals type into a computer to lay out pages. If you are not inclined to do this
then you may be able to find a volunteer to build your web site for you. If you do it
yourself, however, here are some tips:

• There is no need to do anything complicated. Keep everything simple and you

will make progress quickly and your work can look pleasing and professional.
• Look around for intelligible, easy to read books on laying out basic HTML. Big
expensive books are not necessary. You can even find most if not all of what
you need free online.
• Read a book about good, simple web page design, or look online for the
information, eg how to break up text, which font to use and the application of
colour.
• Examine examples online of simple, well designed web sites - and the many
web sites with distressingly artless or no design - for inspiration and ideas
about what to include and avoid on your web site.
• Once you have typed in your HTML code and completed your page you may
want to 'validate' it, ie check that the coding is correct. Go online to
TwoCows.com and download the free version of CSE HTML Validator. Follow
the instructions for checking your pages.

Keeping to these points and with a bit of flair and resolve you are unlikely to go
wrong.

Once you have your completed web site you will need to upload it to a 'host', a
company that keeps it online 24h a day to show it to people who want to see it. When
you have found a host you can upload your web pages to them from your computer
using an FTP program (FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol). You can get a free FTP
program from CoffeeCup.com; go to their web site. Alternatively, your host may
supply their own FTP program for the free use of their clients.

46
Capturing Viewers
Whether you design your own web site or have someone do it for you, the first step
to have viewers find your web site is to get it listed on the Yahoo and Google search
engines. Listing is free for non-commercial web sites, such as yours. Go to the Yahoo
and Google web sites and find the link (on or close to their home page - it changes all
the time) to tell them of your new web site; it takes just a few minutes. Even if you do
not do this, they will automatically find your site in due course and record it. You do
not have to inform any other web search engine as these two are by far the biggest
and the other ones should eventually find and record your site anyway.

The other method of acquiring viewers is to find relevant web sites (eg connected
with animals or nature) and exchange reciprocal links. Depending on the content of
your web site this could be the single most important route for attracting viewers.
Email a relevant web site; basically all you have to say is, "Can we exchange
reciprocal web links, please? The name and address of my site is *****, www.*****
and is about animal rights." It might spur them on if you jump the gun and put a web
link to them on your site before emailing them. Let them know the page it is on.

How many viewers see your web site and which pages get most viewers? Register
with a company offering web counters, software that that compute viewer usage of
web sites. An example is StatCounter.com, which is free and excellent. You will be
doing well if you get a hundred viewers a day. A thousand plus would be exceptional.
If you get only half a dozen a day you will need to work on getting more visitors to
your site. And do not be misled by statistics: about 75 percent of viewers to ordinary
web sites (not popular national ones) click off in the first five seconds, having found
the site is not what they were looking for.

Discussion Boards
With your own web site you could offer viewers a discussion board (which are also
called discussion groups, message boards, internet forums and newsgroups). There
are said to be over 100,000 discussion boards online.

A discussion board is a facility for people online to hold discussions by typing in (or
'posting') and reading messages about topics of interest to them. You can raise
questions and answer them with your group members and with anyone viewing your
discussion board pages. Contributors can be anonymous if they like and can email
each other individually for more confidential discussion.

Discussions are displayed for ease of following in chronological order or are

'threaded', that is questions and answers are displayed in a hierarchical structure
along a theme or series of related messages. Discussions are also displayed
permanently or archived so that viewers can return to them.

Setting up your discussion group can be free and takes just a few minutes to register
online. Chose a title and description of what your group discusses. Decide whether
the discussion group is open only to your group members or to anyone (you will be
able to reach more people if it is open to anyone), and whether you want to
'moderate' it (censor messages before you delete or display them online). For
example of discussion boards see Yahoo Groups, Mailbase or GreenNet.

47
 Chapter 4

Activities for Animal Rights

2. Video Activist

"All that you need to become a true video activist is the necessary equipment,
practice to develop your required skills, and, perhaps most importantly, inspiration."
Thomas Harding (1)

The miniaturisation and affordability of video technology has brought onto the streets
the video activist or videographer. Images and sound bites have the power to seize
people's attention and bring home the reality of what is happening around them.
Video activists wield the video camera to defend and promote civil rights. You can
harness the power of the video camera to bear witness for animal rights. Freelance or
work for animal voluntary organisations on their campaigns. Video the odd
demonstration or work on a long-term project setting objectives and targeting
specific audiences. Set yourself up as a lone video activist or gather a team together.
When sufficiently experienced you could train others to be video activists too.

Personal Qualities You Will Need

As a video activist you should or will have to:

• Learn the skills of taking and making a good video. You do not need to be a
film producer or photo journalist to be successful.
• Not mind obtruding on people, asking them probing questions and poking
your camera into their faces.
• Be confident and courageous when approaching rowdy or aggressive people
in hectic situations where you might get hurt physically or when approaching
despairing people in desperate conditions where you might get hurt
emotionally.
• Feel comfortable ears muffled with headphones, staring through your camera,
separate, even alienated, from everyone around you when the action gets
hot.
• Be able to stick to your role as video activist should an animal or anyone get
beaten or trampled. You will miss getting those video shots if you dilute your
task with distractions; you must let others do the aiding.
• Be willing to cope with tedium and frustration. Your mere presence does not
guarantee that interesting incidents will materialise and you will spend days in
the field when nothing of note happens. You have to hang around a lot.

What to Video?
Two basic video activisms for animal rights videographers are recording campaign

48
videos and recording witness videos.
 Campaign videos
You document events and conditions where animals are mistreated, neglected or
abused. Your aim is to raise people's awareness, educate and exhort people to act,
and persuade people to donate money to fight abuse.
 Witness videos
You record at animal rights demonstrations. Your purpose is to capture evidence of
illegal or vicious activity against activist demonstrators by the opposition or police as
evidence in court. Taking shots of demonstrations can also be an important part of
making a campaign video.

The Campaign Video

You will want to tell a story through video. So where do you find stories? You can
easily access some places, like circuses, rodeos and zoos. Factory farms are a bit
more difficult and you will have to use your ingenuity to video them, and laboratories
and research institutions may be guarded and alert (but see the Chapter 4,
Undercover Investigator under the section Surveillance Systems).
Video activists are not in the league of making three-hour documentary films.
Depending on your purpose, a five to ten minute video can be long enough, certainly
for the Web or to screen at a debate. Your object is not to bore your viewers but to
carry across what you want to say and your video should be just long enough for
that. It is said that one picture is worth a thousand words; certainly, one timely five
minute video is worth a three hour film. Examples of campaign videos are:
 A Circus Video
Circus Suffering is a video, produced by the Captive Animals Protection Society, that
juxtaposes circus animals a hundred years ago with circus animals today. The video
carries the message that we have advanced tremendously in our understanding of
wildlife yet 'wild' circus animals still live in shackles. The video was shot at circuses
across Europe, features elephants, baboons, ponies, lions, bears and tigers, and
captures, says CAPS, "the confinement, deprivation and violence in these animals'
lives." A television presenter narrates the twelve minute video, which also has a five
minute Web version.
 A Foie Gras Video
The San Diego City Council was deciding on a proposed law in 2006 to ban the sale of
foie gras. The California based Animal Protection and Rescue League presented the
Council with a 15 minute video as testimony, made in association with two other
animal rights bodies. The Council passed the ban almost unanimously.
 A Rescue Video
Go out on an animal rescue (see the Animal Rescuer, this chapter). Video the rescue
team posing together and show them setting out and arriving at their destination
(you could include a shot of the location on a map). Get wide angle views of the
target premises then close ups of team members getting inside. Show the conditions
of the place and the state the animals are in. Also show the animals post-rescue
being cleaned up at your base and recovering with adoption volunteers. To get the
full story on an open rescue you may want to video yourselves being arrested and
tried, people's reactions, even yourself in prison. Add narration, and music if you like.

When making a campaign video, camera work should only be one of your talents.
Planning the video is the most important skill and may take up eighty percent of
video production time and most of your energy. Professional film makers plan their
films with storyboards, drawing sequences of pictures that will make up the complete
movie. Storyboarding makes a video a lot easier to direct and edit. You could do it
like that or you could sit down, close your eyes and concentrate hard on visualising
what your video will be about, shot for shot, searching for potential problems and

49
thinking through how you will overcome them, then, having sorted that out, make a
list of the shots and finally go out and shoot them.

The Witness Video

Record events at animal rights demonstrations and in particular catch problems
involving the police and opposition against the demonstrators. By videoing at
demonstrations:

• You prevent or restrain by your mere presence any over-reactions and

excesses by the police acting heavily against demonstrators or being idle
when they should be attentive and competent. Police are accountable and do
not want to be caught out on video for the world to see.
• You forestall opposition violence when they see they are being videoed. But
keep an eye open for anyone wanting to 'taking you out', hopefully a rare
occurrence!
• You offer video footage to lawyers as evidence in litigation disputes to acquit
activists and bystanders of spurious or inflated police charges.
• You may capture confrontational fracas to distribute to the news media for
publicity in favour of animal rights.

What you do not want to do is inadvertently record illegal activity that could get
animal rights people into trouble. This might happen should your footage be shown
publicly and wrongly interpreted or the police confiscate your camera and use your
footage for their purposes. Do not think that the police will not seize your video
camera, even if their taking it is illegal, as they can always make up an excuse
afterwards. If the police think you are taking part in the demonstration, rather than
being an uninvolved reporter, they might decide to arrest you on some trumped up
charge, such as trespassing on private property or riotous behaviour. To counter this
it may be prudent to shoot footage of both sides' altercations so that you can claim
to be unbiased. You may also want something that identifies you as an impartial
journalist or as a member of some part of the news media. Ideally you would flaunt
an official press card. Failing that you could devise a business card ('Joe Snapitall -
Freelance Photojournalist - Times Square.'), or have in your pocket a letter from a
video company stating you are on assignment for them.

While shooting your witness video speak a calm, objective, running commentary into
the video camera's microphone. Start with the time, date and place and at
appropriate moments re-state the time and position where you are shooting. Note
the identity numbers of individual police antagonists, the identities of anyone they
arrest, and the name and contact data of witnesses. Follow up possible opportunities
for more shots; find out where arrested or injured people were taken and check other
video activists working close by to swop footage.

When the fur is really flying at a demonstration it is helpful to have one or more
helpers. They can assist you by looking out for good potential shots, protect you by
watching your rear, and sneak your video footage out of the area if the police are
intend on grabbing it. You might be more effective at demonstrations as part of a
team of video activists, each member taking their own footage to make a more
complete record of what is happening. Some team members could shoot close up,
others from a distance, or take footage from opposite sides of an incident.

Interviewing demonstrators can be enjoyable and interesting. Ask open ended

questions, like 'what did you see?' or 'what did you do?' Whenever they stop

50
speaking just prompt them by repeating 'then what happened?' Ask again if what
they say is not clear, they must speak credibly. Elbow your way into someone else's
witness interview; your job is to get evidence, not to be polite. Get phone numbers or
addresses from good witnesses, but expect that they may not want to get involved.

Depending on circumstances you may want to shoot openly or from cover. People are
sometimes shy, so you could act as though your camera is turned off and carry it
inconspicuously while still shooting, or only use its microphone. A shoulder bag is
handy for a lot of covert shooting. Cut a hole for the camera lens at one end of the
bag and tape the camera in position making sure you can see the camera's
viewfinder with the bag open. Cut another hole for your microphone or clip the mic to
your clothes.

You may want to buy a pinhole video camera if your heart is set on covert work (see
Surveillance Systems, in Undercover Investigator, this chapter). These cameras sit on
a dime yet zoom, tilt and pan like their bigger relatives. However, while the camera
itself is not too expensive, you will have to buy a tiny recorder to store the images
the camera takes and that could cost several times the camera's price tag. You will
also need to buy other bits like cables, batteries and battery power adapters.

Basic Video Field Kit

Apart from access to a computer and editing software, you do not need much else
than the basic field kit. The basic field kit of the modern video activist consists of:

• Camera: often a camcorder (a camera with a built-in recording device) that

plays back footage and sound.
• Batteries: they will probably come with the camera, but get a long-life battery
as a spare.
• Battery charger: it will probably come with the camera.
• Headphones: to monitor your sound recording. Buy them as an extra.
• Kit bag: for carrying your kit conveniently and safely. Buy this as an extra, too.

Video cameras are digital and video technology is a growing and fast-changing
industry. Some video cameras record for several hours without needing attention, so
you can keep recording without constantly downloading footage to a computer or
changing batteries. Almost any brand of video camera (or camcorder) will do. But you
may like it to have a good range of manual functions so you can control it by hand
depending on what you want it to do - instead of it choosing automatically and
overriding you.

You will also want to consider what the video camera will record its images and
sound on. A video camera can record on tape (getting outdated), DVD or hard drive.
DVD's are small disks you slot into the camcorder and you can record over them
repeatedly. The newer technology is a hard drive (like a computer's) built inside the
camera. It accepts several hours of recording, easily transferable to your computer
via a memory stick or other device.

Tips For Making Videos

 Buy a cheap video camera if your equipment might get smashed, eg at a violent
demo; but buy quality equipment if you intend your video for television or other
public viewing.

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 Perch your video camera on a monopod or tripod to prevent it (and the footage)
shaking. Otherwise, if you do not want an impediment in a fast moving
demonstration, brace yourself against something, like a lamppost or a helper's
shoulder.
 Get ten seconds or more of footage on each of the important shots.
 Be sparing when panning and zooming. Do not continually move the camera back
the way it came. Your viewers will not want to be motion-sick. Pan slowly and steadily
from one scene or subject to another.
 Your video camera is also a tape recorder. It will record sounds closer to it better
than sounds further away. Experiment with an external microphone. You can point it
at sound sources and filter out peripheral sounds.
 While recording, monitor the sound with headphones to make sure it is not a
jumble of noise.
 Check that you really are recording. You may have been recording when you
thought you had stopped, and stopped recording when you thought you had started.
 Monitor what is going on while shooting by keeping both eyes open, one eye
looking through the viewfinder and the other eye checking your surroundings.
 Learn to shoot while walking backwards.
 Start your video with an overall shot to show the context of your subject, such as
a landmark, a signpost, a building, or something else relevant and unique to that
place.
 Be discrete and unobtrusive. People may feel uncomfortable and object to you
shooting. But sometimes it is worth making a nuisance of yourself for a good shot.
 Prepare for Murphy's Law: if anything can go wrong it will go wrong.

Editing
Nowadays you do not cut celluloid footage into strips then sort them and splice them
together. You do your editing entirely on a computer. Nor is there a need for
complicated editing software. Basic video-editing programs are installed on most new
computers. Even elementary editing programs enable you to add titles, narration,
music and special effects to a video. Choose the best footage and put the bits in
order to make your video flow the way you want it. Get the editing right and you will
have a lot of satisfaction from your completed video. A witness video, however, may
best be left unedited if it is going to be used in court, otherwise it may appear biased
and suspect.

Distributing Your Video

You are not a video activist if you shut your video away in the attic. You must show
your work to influence people and must therefore distribute it.

• Show your video online if you have a web site or post it to a web site that
displays people's videos, like YouTube or Google Video.
• Describe your video to web site owners and ask them for a link from their web
site to the page on your web site where viewers can see it. Give a reciprocal
link to web site owners who link to your site.
• Send out details of your video to potential customers and to anyone who
might be interested in it. Briefly describe it (plus ordering information) and
include a web address where they can see a preview.
• Present your video at events arranged by animal activist organisations where
audiences can view and discuss it.
• After much experience you may find that you are exceptionally good at video
activism. Then you may be in the market to sell footage to television. Who

52
 knows, you might hit the jackpot by catching a sensational event that
television companies fall over themselves to air!

3. Animal-Friendly Traveller

Animal users earn money by displaying animals to travellers and holiday makers. The
animals or their parents are often taken from the wild. They are poorly kept,
neglected or over-worked, eventually die, or their owners kill them when past being
useful. The final indignity is selling their body parts as souvenirs. Untold numbers of
animals suffer like this for the tourist trade and you could witness it anywhere in the
world.
Animal attractions exist because tourists unwittingly support the trade by paying for
it. Many travellers witnessing cruelty to animals abroad would not tolerate it in their
own country. However, each of us is responsible for ensuring as far as we can that
our behaviour does not contribute to animal suffering and we should not accept the
assumed sanctity of another country's customs and culture as an excuse for cruelty
to animals. We can go native while abroad but must keep our compassion.

It is normal to wonder just when you have to step in to try to prevent cruelty.
Mistreatment may not be clearly apparent when you are just a temporary visitor to a
country with strange customs. But we can bear in mind a minimum standard for
animal welfare. Animals must have access to their proper food, to water and shelter,
should look healthy generally and not have physical wounds or obviously be
mistreated, such as whipped or punched.

The simplest thing you can do is to ensure as far as possible that you patronise only
cruelty-free attractions. Avoid paying for entertainment, goods or food that you think
may contravene humane behaviour to animals. Some animal schemes to avoid are:

• Bear dancing: wild bear cubs are caught and trained to stand on their hind
legs to dance and do tricks for onlookers.
• Animal photography: young animals like monkeys, chimpanzees and lion
cubs, are made to let tourists fondle them while the tourists are
photographed. Tourists are also photographed standing next to large exotic
animals, like an adult lion or bear.
• Traditional medicine: eg bears are atrociously farmed for their bile as
'medicine' for ailments and tigers are killed for their penis for people to eat as
an aphrodisiac.
• Eating cats, dogs and other abysmally treated animals: cats are cooked and
skinned alive; dogs are hung slowly by the neck to die, reputedly to make
them taste better.
• Souvenirs and trinkets: made from animal body parts, like bone, ivory,
shells and coral reefs, many from species that are protected by law.
• Selling animals as pets: many of these animals are stolen from the wild
and die during shipment by traders.
• Circuses and aquariums: for fish, sharks, turtles, dolphins, orcas and all
sorts of animals, where their basic needs are not met.
• Roadside Zoos: animals are tethered or caged to attract customers to buy
goods.

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However, a stronger response than avoiding animal cruelty is to object and complain
about these activities. So what can you do?

Before You Travel

Prepare before you go on your trip. Being prepared will make you feel more confident
and take a lot of worry off your mind. Aim to get a good idea of what you could do
should you encounter animal cruelty where you intend to travel. You can do much by
searching the Web:

• Find out what animal mistreatment you might expect to come across. You can
count on certain abuses in particular countries, such as bear dancing in the
Balkans and restaurants in south-east Asia serving tortured cats and dogs.
• List potential helpers in the region where you will be travelling, especially
humane societies and bodies that enforce animal welfare.
• Try to find out animal-friendly laws where you are going so that you can
threaten abusers by referring to the law as a stimulus for action.

You may be using tour operators. Ensure they do not encourage or advocate
activities that exploit animals or deal with hotels that do. Tell them at the outset,
preferably in writing, that you want animal-friendly services. Many operators may not
be familiar with animal-friendly travel, so tell them what animal-friendly travel
means: non-patronisation of animal cruelty – including being able to obtain
vegetarian food. If an operator really cannot accommodate your wishes then think
twice about using them.

While You Travel

Take immediate action while travelling if you see animals being mistreated or you
may lose the opportunity to help them. Perhaps you were the only chance they had
and you may forever blame yourself for doing nothing or being tardy. The least you
can do is find who is in charge, outline your position and ask them to stop what they
are doing. How ever they react, at least you have made a stand and communicated
to them that not all tourists approve of their activity.

A stronger step is also to complain to the local authorities. Legal protection is so

varied that in some countries you may not easily be able to persuade the authorities
to take action. But even in foreign countries you have a right to complain. Use your
right for the animals you see abused. Remind the authorities that the money tourists
spend is an important means of revenue for their country and that animal abuse
turns tourists away and gives their country a bad name.

In serious cases, where you really have to get in touch with the authorities, collect as
much evidence as you can for them. This would be best before you tackle the
abusers themselves about their behaviour.

• Note the date and the place. Record how many animals are involved, whether
young or old, and their species. Take photos or video and keep any freely
available documents (like leaflets). Try to collect written and signed
statements from other witnesses with their addresses. Finally, get the names
of the abusers concerned.
• Lodge a complaint with the local police if you think anything is illegal. Inform
local animal welfare organisations that may be able to help and request they
send an officer immediately to check the situation. The testimony of an expert

54
 witness, such as a vet, can be invaluable.
• Tackle your hotel, tour operator and local tourist office if they have any
involvement. Ask your local consulate or embassy for guidance on what can
be done.
• Ask the other witness of the abuse to follow your example; the more people
who protest, the more serious you will be taken. Give witnesses full details of
who to contact.

Prompt and continuing action is crucial; the more you dawdle the greater the chance
that all the evidence will fade and the authorities will do nothing. Try to keep the
originals of any documents, but first make copies of them if you have to hand them
over as evidence. Stay in the area as long as possible until the problem is settled or
return later. Keep a record of everyone you contact and decisions you make.

Be persistent. If you are not satisfied by enforcement officers tell them you will speak
to their superiors, and do so if need be. If the authority is reluctance to act and you
still cannot get anywhere, try the local dignitaries, such as the local mayor and
councillors. You may find that persuading people to act is easier if they know you
have alerted the local news media about your story; officials want to keep their jobs
and often do not want a bad press.

When You Return Home

If you could not contact local animal organisations where you saw the abuse, write to
them on your return home to say what happened and ask if there is anything they
can do. Also give your tour operator the full story, even if they were only remotely
implicated. Say that as an animal-friendly traveller you can only support and
recommend tour operators if they take positive action to recognise animal abuse
and, if not suppress it, then at least not to patronise its perpetrators.

You do not have to feel you are powerless to help the animals on your travels. Being
an animal-friendly traveller you also help local communities, because in the long-run
they will gain from a healthier respect for animals. A better life for animals will not
come about overnight, but a continual flow of Western ideas about animal ethics and
complaints from disaffected travellers will count.

7. Media Watcher

Most people bathe daily in the words of the television, radio and print. The news
media are powerful shapers and swayers of opinion. They influence both the man in
the street and the decision makers of our society. Nevertheless, although the media
are influential they are not difficult to influence. Journalists and their bosses, the
controllers of media content, are not so remote that we as ordinary members of the
public cannot make them hear us. As a media watcher your task is to influence the
media to try and make them objective, fair and accurate about animal rights and
make them broadcast more animal rights news and stories.

Animals in the News

There is no end of animal-related topics that you can pick up in the media: drug
testing, veal farming, live transport, animal adverts, animals in entertainment, animal

55
racing, activists treated as terrorists, nature conservation, and so on. Even when
animals are not the actual topic, you can make some point by digging up a new
angle, such as connecting a poor diet that is in the news with a contrasting healthy
vegan or veggie diet. Of course, no one can scan all the news media every day, even
with helpers this would be a daunting task. Therefore you will need to specialise, for
instance on what you can find online in your own language or country.
Influencing the Media
Influence the media by searching for animal rights content and getting as many
people you can to send their views to the editors about the material you find. Here is
how it works.
1. Regularly monitor the latest news.
2. Set up your own web site (see Chapter 4: Publicity, under The Internet).
3. Paraphrase or summarise on your web site relevant animal-related news item you
find.
4. Next to each summary place a link to the original news item and the email address
of the editor or journalist responsible for the original. You might also provide their
phone number, postal address or other contact details. (You may want to give details
of where an item was broadcast or published if it does not appear online.)
5. Drive viewers to your web site and invite them to join your email list (ie leave you
their email address).
6. Email everyone on your email list about your summaries with links to them on your
web site.
7. People receiving your email can read your summaries, follow the links to the
original news items and email their views to the editors or journalists.

What do Editors Think?

Well aimed and relevant mailings can influence the news media because editors take
them as a gauge of public opinion. The media want to be popular and rely on
feedback from their audiences. Therefore they take emails and letters seriously and
may act on them. Furthermore, each mail that someone sends has more weight and
worth than might appear. This is because for each email or letter that editors receive
they realise there are several people who would like to send mail but did not for one
reason or another. Therefore editors take each mail to represent many people with
similar views.

What You Need

 Making your own animal news information web site may especially appeal to you
if you have journalistic flair.
 You should be an avid news vulture.
 You would have to have sufficient time and an abiding perseverance for grabbing
most of the relevant news items most of the time and getting them down onto your
web site.

What to Look Out For

In addition to the usual animal items, look out for the sort of perspective, standards,
stereotypes and language the media use when reporting news with animal content.
For example:
 Unbalanced Perspective
Check where stories come from for imbalances. Both sides of an issue should be
represented for a story to be broadcast fairly. For instance, suppose a group of
activists are accused of terrorism by officialdom without a contrasting statement
from a sympathetic animal activist expert. When you find imbalances in perspective
ask the media to widen their point of view.

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 Double Standards
Are the media measuring one party against one standard while holding up another
party to a different standard? Humans alter areas to become largely uninhabitable
for wildlife and when a few wild animals turn up they are seen as causing a nuisance
or as threatening. There is then an outcry of 'infestation!' Many media treat
humanity's ravaging of Earth as normal but take exception when animals appear to
menace human property. Expose the media's double standards.
 Stereotypes
Are the media portraying animals and activists as stereotypes? Wolves, as an
example, are not blood thirsty ravishers of the good and their livestock. Scientists (1)
have shown that the wolf's reputation is a gross exaggeration (eg elephants kill more
people than wolves yet few people decry these giants) and that wolves significantly
contribute to a balanced ecosystem (2). Bring the media up to date with education
about animals.
 Loaded Language
How do the media describe animals? Do sharks really 'infest' swimming beaches? Are
foxes and rats really 'vermin'? Are crocodiles really 'man-eaters'? The most important
message in a story relating to animals may be implicit in the choice of words the
media use. Ask the media to not to apply distorted or indistinct language that fuels
biased opinion against animals.

Mailing Manners
What sort of tone is best adopted when writing to the media? Experts on good
communication say you should:

• Be upbeat and concise and stick closely to the point.

• Be factual, not rhetorical.
• Make only one or two points at most, preferably in your opening sentence.
• Make a good humoured remark. It is more memorable and conveys a better
impact than verbosity.
• Always be pleasant and diplomatic. Be positive and pay complements when
you can, but do not over do it or it will sound false.
• Avoid writing angry or insulting mail or you will antagonise people you might
have won over.
• Give your full name, address and phone number. Newspaper editorial staff will
want to check with you before they print anything you have written for them
to publish.

Standard Form Letters?

You may want to provide sample letters on your web site that your viewers can send
to the media. However, editors who receive lots of similarly phrased letters may
count the lot as one letter. Editors tend to give more weight to mail from individuals
rather than mail that is obviously from a mass writing campaign. So you might wish
to goad fellow writers to make their mail uniquely different from each other. You
could just outline the points they could make, ask them to chose a few of the points
in their letter and write in their own words.

Do not underrate your potential to influence the news media. Show them that you are
a perceptive and caring citizen and they cannot dismiss you as a crude, uneducated
extremist (even if you are). See www.DawnWatch.com for an excellent animal media
watcher.

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 10. Personal Activist

What can you do for animals as a personal activist? Probably the most important
single thing anyone can do is this:

However, should you not be up to this then you can do many other things (although
they are comparatively much less effective). They come at different levels of
convenience and if there is a secret for successful personal activism it is that you
should do what you feel comfortable with and are good at doing.

Some Personal Self-Activisms

Here are four reasonable personal activisms that anyone can do.

1. Let's Stop - It!

Most people call an animal an it, as if animals are unfeeling sticks or stones. They
compound the offence by calling inanimate human creations, such as a car, ship or
country, a she. So let's stop calling an animal an it. Make a contribution to animal
rights by always calling animals him or her, he or she. You are conveying that
animals are beings, with needs of their own. Calling an animal an it makes him an
inanimate depersonalised object. As the philosopher Jeremy Bentham said,
"animals...stand degraded into the class of things." (1) Once a being is
depersonalised down to the level of an it, we feel we can do anything we like to him
without thought about his moral rights. Kicking a stone or throwing away a stick has
no moral consequences (see Chapter 2: Animal Ethics).

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But where do we draw the line? Should we stop at invertebrates? There is no logical
reason to draw the line anywhere in the animal kingdom in that invertebrates are
also males and females. Of course, some animals, like the workers of social ants and
wasps, are sterile and some animals are hermaphrodites, like slugs and snails. But
you can still call them him or her generally speaking.

What do you do if you do not know the sex of an animal? The rule in the English
language is to assume the masculine until proven otherwise. Feminists will probably
object to this rule and might demand political correctness instead. They may try to
give equal weight to both sexes by saying "he or she". But this is clumsy. However,
the Finnish language solves this awkwardness with a neat han. Han in Finnish means
he and also means she: one word for both genders. Let's extend this idea. If we adopt
han in English than we could go one step further to make han additionally mean it.
Thus, han in English would mean he, she or it and would:

• Avoid belittling animals by calling them it.

• Avoid saying only "he" when you mean both genders.
• Avoid unwieldy repetition of "he or she" all the time.

Examples of han:

• Han sat down to tea with scones.

• Han is a thoughtful and independent cat.
• The whale yawned, rolled over then han swam away.
• I gave a banana to a monkey and han ate it.

Political analysts have wondered if the equivalence of the sexes in Finnish has some
connection with Finnish women getting the right to vote long before other women in
Europe. So if we stop calling animals it, might we not start treating them better too?
Another two other good Finnish words are hanet meaning him or her and hanen
meaning his or hers.
If we adopted all these words in English:

• Han would mean he or she or it.

• Hanet would mean him or her or it.
• Hanen would mean his or hers or its.

Alternatively, if these Finnish words are too much to accept into English, we could
recast the English he, him and his respectively as het, hit and hits (that is, combine
them with it or its). The big question is how to make these words catch on
permanently.

2. Speak Plainly
Should we be lulled and sweetened by euphemisms when faced with decisions about
what to do with animals who get in people's way? Or should we speak openly and
honestly about what is happening and not hide behind word substitutions to cover up
what we or anyone are doing? People adopt euphemisms because they sound
impartial, necessary, professional and reasonable, so that consciences are saved and
nobody objects to the action. This table shows some frequently occurring
euphemisms.

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Cull is often employed as a euphemism when dealing with wild animals. It really
means to select and remove some things from other things, especially because of
their inferior quality. But it is almost always used as a polite word whose action is
somehow necessary and officially sanctioned. So we get:

"...the Deer Commission for Scotland flew in a squad of marksmen by helicopter to

carry out the cull of 80 deer on the famous Badenoch estate..." Strathspey and
Badenoch Herald.

"A cull of 5,000 hedgehogs is due to begin on North Uist in the Western Isles of
Scotland on Monday. Scottish Natural Heritage wants to get rid of all the hedgehogs
on the Uist islands because they have been destroying colonies of wading birds." BBC
News.

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3. The Cute Factor & Invertebrate Harmony
The cute factor refers to supporting some animals, such as fluffy animals with big
dark eyes, because they are more attractive than other animals. The opposite side of
the coin is ignoring some animals like rats, snakes and spiders, because they seem
nasty and repulsive. Many people would be outraged by a slaughter of baby seals but
are silent about a 'cull' of rats. Yet rats are as intelligent and as social as seals and
moreover deserve equal consideration. People blame rats for spreading disease; but
in the first place it is poor human living conditions with unsanitary habits that create
the circumstances for rats to multiply and spread disease among people.

Let's learn to love all animals, try to live in harmony with all creatures and treat them
with respect and compassion. So let's practice animal rights at the lowest level, that
of the invertebrate: insects, spiders and other animals without a backbone. They
make up over 99 percent of animals on Earth, are vital to the well being of the
biosphere, and we can learn to appreciate them and the many wonderful things they
do.

People often commit the number fallacy: because there are lots of them it does not
matter if we kill them. But neither number nor body size determine the value of life.
Invertebrates are small, but if we are aware of them and practice invertebrate
harmony even on a small scale, then we will be more compassionate beings.

Here are some things you can do.

• Instead of squashing invertebrates to get rid of them, pick them up carefully

and gently and release them outdoors in a place that is suitable for them.
• It is said that no one is ever more than a metre from a spider. There is at least
one spider next to you now without you knowing it. However, the odd spider
will not harm you and if you get rid of one, another will soon take his place (a
house is like a cave, their natural habitat). So unless they are causing a real
nuisance leave them where they are.
• Let ants trailing into your house have their way if they are not causing you
hardship. They are not harmful, will clean your house of debris and will soon
be gone when the weather cools.

4. Let's Be Vegan or Veggie

Humans eat vast numbers of animals. In the United States alone every week people
slaughter 175 million poultry, 2 million pigs, 700,000 cattle, 60,000 sheep, plus a
host of other animals (2). But vegetarians and vegans opt out of the killing system. If
you become a vegan or vegetarian you might save a pig or two annually, at least
theoretically.

That animals have rights is the most basic reason people have for giving up eating
animals. Specifically, animals have the right to live their own lives and not have
humans kill them for food. In a more practical vein, vegetarians and vegans say their
diet is healthier than a meat-based diet. Veggies and vegans like to claim they have
lower blood pressure and fewer heart and bowel disorders than meat-eaters. People
in the dietary business used to assert that your health would fail and you might die if
you did not eat meat. But generations of healthy vegetarians and vegans are ample
proof that they were wrong. Eating animals is dispensable and largely a matter of
taste.

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As a veggie or vegan you might help slow climate change - provided the veggie habit
leads to farmers rearing fewer livestock. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that
traps more heat than carbon dioxide and the methane belched by the world's
livestock is widely questioned as a factor contributing to global warming. It is
generally claimed that 90 percent of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions come
from the country's 40 million sheep (the human population is five million).

Vegetarianism is a personal commitment to animal life by setting an example to

other people. If you are not already a vegetarian or vegan do not be put off joining
them by thinking you have to give up eating all animals overnight. There are degrees
of vegetarianism, like a freegan does not generally eat meat but might if other
people discard it as waste and a flexitarian eats meat only rarely. Simply cutting back
on meat-eating is a good start. Just eat a more extensive diet of everything else and
more of it. Veganism is just a step removed from vegetarianism; just give up eggs
and dairy products, phase out using leather, feather pillows and other animal
products, and you are there!

More Active Activisms

Here are suggestions to get into the swing of more activisms for animal rights.
 Read Labels
Ask the people who serve you where the ingredients of your food, cosmetics or
medicine come from. Unless they are really knowledgeable they will probably not
know any more than you, but patronise alternative products if any ingredients are
derived from animals. Find up-to-date cruelty-free product guides on the Web to help
you. Some ingredients to look out for are:

o Musk: oil from the scent glands of certain wild animals, in particular the musk
deer. The deer are killed in traps or confined all their lives to cages hardly
bigger than themselves. Quite a lot of the musk in perfumes today is
synthetic, however.
o Rennet: a protein taken from the stomachs of slaughtered calves, lambs and
kid goats. Rennet in the living young converts their ingested mothers' milk
into solids for digestion. Rennet is the chief means for making cheese hard.
Some hard cheeses are made with artificially cultured rennet and may be
suitable for vegetarians.
o Collagen: another protein taken from animals. It is used in cosmetics.
o Gelatin (American English) or gelatine (British English) is derived from
collagen and used in cosmetics and many foods.
o Lactose: a sugar that comes from milk. It is added to various foods, lotions
and medicines.
o Cochineal: extracted from the ground up bodies of insects and used to add a
red colour to foods and lipsticks.

 Watch News
Speak up to defend animals when opportunities arise. Write to the news media when
you think they are acting against the interests of animals. For background about this
see Media Watcher, Chapter 4.
 Spurn Animal Products
Avoid or at least cut down on using animal products, such as leather and feathers in
pillows and duvets. Eschew fur items, not only fur clothing but also cosmetic and
artists' fur brushes. These brushes are sometimes made from synthetic material but
they are also made of animal hair. You can also find brushes with a mixture of

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synthetic material and fur. The labelling is often obscure and misleading.
 Study Animal Ethics
Ask for animal ethics to be taught at your school, college or university. Animal ethics
is a bona fide scholarly pursuit that incorporates animal rights but has broader scope
(see Chapter 2: Animal Ethics.)
 Dissection
Urge your school or college if they are into cutting up real animals instead to 'dissect'
model animals virtually by computer program.
 School Pets
Ask your school not to keep animals at the premises for educating the
children/students.
 Make Menus
You may be a veggie, but not everyone is, so ask for more animal-friendly (or at least
less animal-unfriendly) food at your college or work refectory for the other diners. For
instance, get management to ban eggs from caged hens and offer eggs from genuine
free-range hens and generally to shun factory farmed animals. Persuade
management to provide simple information about the food they offer so that diners
know what they are eating and have a good choice of alternatives - free-range and
organic.
 Suggest Books to Buy
Suggest good animal ethical books (books on animal ethics, animal rights and animal
welfare) that your public or college library can buy for their shelves. Ask your library
to put up a display of these books.
 Stimulate Ethical Policies
As far as you can, trade with companies that have publicly published ethical policies.
For instance, use banks with a stated code of ethics. Pressure companies that have
no ethical policies regarding animals to embrace a code of ethics incorporating
animals. Become a (minor) share holder in animal abusing companies in order to
criticise them more effectively as a share holder. Publicise their response or lack of
one.
 Stir Up Ethical Purchasing
Get your company to make its purchases from animal-friendly companies. If your
company is not animal-friendly, ask them why they are not - with the intention of
putting animal-friendly ideas into their head. Has your company a code of animal
ethics spelling out how the company should act regarding animals and animal
products? Get management or colleagues to compose one.
 Act for the Little Animals on Your Doorstep
The common goldfish brings this home to us that animal rights is not just for big
animals. Every year endless goldfish and other ornamental fish are sold and
countless die. Many people stick their fish in glass bowls. The bowls are symmetrical
and interesting but cause their inhabitants serious problems:

o The water becomes deadly because the fish release liquid and solid waste into
it.
o The bowl has a small surface area, so not enough oxygen dissolves into it
from the atmosphere for the fish to breath.
o Left close to sunlight the water gets too warm and what little oxygen in it
defuses out.
o The fish cannot conceal themselves from staring eyes outside the bowl or
shelter from each other within it.
o The fish cannot satisfy their natural instinct to search for food or swim into
crevices and explore; monotony extends for them 360 degrees all around.

63
 o Artificial life-support systems in bowls are weak, difficult to maintain and are
no substitute for a better home than a bowl.

Goldfish cannot shout and wave placards telling their people what they want. So it is
up to us to point out to our fish-keeping neighbours the demerits of bowling fish.
Point out to them how they can keep their fish happy, that fish do best in a roomy
tank or, if they are outdoor fish, in a well positioned garden pond with lots of
vegetation for aeration and cover.
And what about birds in cages and animals in tiny garden hutches...?

Chapter 8

Extras

5. The Golden Rule

Treat others how you would like to be treated, this is the Golden Rule, a moral maxim
that guides our behaviour toward others. This simple rule can often resolve conflict
and almost anyone can grasp and apply it without any special reasoning or
understanding, which has made it an attractive philosophy for over two thousand
years. Diverse cultures and major religions celebrate and affirm the Golden Rule. In
the Christian tradition it is well know by the phrase: do unto others as you would be
done by.

To apply the Golden Rule you should know or imagine what result your action could
have on the recipient. Ask yourself whether you would be willing to suffer similar
treatment. Finally, you should act accordingly. Someone is about to get a flogging for
stealing a sheep. Putting yourself in their shoes, would flogging be an effective
solution? What might be a better course of action? You can also apply the Golden
Rule to communities. You could appeal to the majority to end discrimination against
the minority. Ask the majority how they would feel if they were second class citizens
living in run-down housing, receiving second rate health care and exposed to the
whims of misfortune. If they would not like to be in this situation themselves, ask why
they should tolerate it for others.

Most people do not think of applying the Golden Rule to their relationship with
animals. But you can. It is particularly easy to do with animals you find empathy with,
such as domesticated animals, mammals and birds. Seeing them in cages prompts
the question of whether the people who put them there would like to be treated the
same way. Their freedom of movement and expression of natural behaviour are gone
forever. They are isolated from their peers and driven to apathy by boredom and
frustration.

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Of course, the Golden Rule is not an unfailing guide to identify the best moral action
to help people or animals. You cannot be certain what someone wants or how they
feel. Fathoming the requirements of animals is more difficult, especially when they
cannot readily indicate their needs. But do not let people misuse the Golden Rule.
People can use the Golden Rule to justify bad action by appealing to the supposed
wishes of the other party. They might incarcerate animals, such as in a zoo, by
assuming that what they or their species want is conservation. Or they might shut
animals away for their 'health', such as in a laboratory that develops drugs usable on
animals as well as people.

2. The Five Freedoms

The Five Freedoms are basic ideals of welfare for farm animals, like livestock and
poultry, wherever the animals may be, such as at farms, markets, slaughterhouses,
or in transit, and should be applied by anyone in charge of the animals or handling
them. The Freedoms make good common sense and are broad enough to apply to all
farm animals anywhere in the world.

The Five Freedoms were first proposed in Britain in the 1960's. The Farm Animal
Welfare Council, established by the British government in the late 1970's to advise it
on legislative and other changes for farm animals, subsequently affirmed them. The
Council was conservatively made up of individuals with connections to agriculture:
farmers, animal farming company directors, veterinary surgeons and academics
specialising in agriculture. Other bodies concerned with animal welfare have
approved the Freedoms.

The Five Freedoms are:

1. Freedom from Hunger and Thirst - by ready access to fresh water and a
diet to maintain full health and vigour.
2. Freedom from Discomfort - by providing an appropriate environment
including shelter and a comfortable resting area.
3. Freedom from Pain, Injury or Disease - by prevention or rapid diagnosis
and treatment.
4. Freedom to Express Normal Behaviour - by providing sufficient space,
proper facilities and company of the animal's own kind.
5. Freedom from Fear and Distress - by ensuring conditions and treatment
which avoid mental suffering.

The Farm Animal Welfare Council say the Five Freedoms are a framework for viewing
and improving animal welfare "within the proper constraints of an effective livestock
industry." The Council stress that well trained and supervised stockmanship is the
key to farm animal welfare: "...without competent, diligent stockmanship the welfare
of animals cannot be adequately safeguarded."

65
However, the Five Freedoms are not inevitably applied being more honoured in the
breach. How much animal farming and stockmanship concede toward applying the
Five Freedoms to animals is demonstrated by the realities of factory farming, such as
the chicken and egg industry. Nor are the Five Freedoms widely applied to animals
farmed for their fur.

8. Think Like an Animal

Our use of language enables us to label ideas and think about them. A widely held
belief is that animals have no language and therefore cannot think. But thoughts
need not be based on human language. After all, how do people think who are
completely deaf from birth and have never heard a spoken word? If you accept that
thoughts can be based on a notion, image, intention, anticipation, insight or voiceless
acknowledgement of a feeling, then you must believe that at least some animals can
think.

How many kinds of thought are there? We are so used to human-style thinking that
you may not realise our language-based system is not the only method. If animals do
not have language and yet think, then they must think without words. They think in
some kind of non-linguistic, non-verbal thought.

Can you think without words, without language? You can. Simply suppress your urge
to think in words. Suppress the stream of words constantly running through your
head by thinking over and over to yourself a short repeating rhythm, like "one, two".
Or if your are musically inclined repeat to yourself two or three musical notes. You
will find that, as long as you keep this up and do not let your mind stray, you can pay
attention to and explore your non-verbal thoughts. Keep going for as long as you can.
You may then be thinking more like an animal, say a cat, horse, whale or an
elephant, than like a human.

Whereas your use of language enables you to excel at abstract thought, your non-
verbal thoughts may incline you to a greater awareness of stimuli external to
yourself, or how your body feels, or to visual images, emotions and notions of
incipient activity. Think non-verbally of an everyday practical problem and then solve
it by non-verbal reasoning or by insight.

We should credit animals for analysing problems and solving them mentally by their
imagining courses of action and then carrying them out. A reason why animals are
seldom credited for thinking is that few if any people master the art of thinking like
an animal.

Appendix 1

World Scientists' Warning To Humanity

66
From Chapter 1, Mass Extinction.
Over 1,500 leading scientists from around the world published this World Scientists'
Warning To Humanity in 1992 to alert everyone to the coming global catastrophe.
Thier Warning is reproduced below.

World Scientists' Warning To Humanity

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict
harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If
not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish
for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living
world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental
changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring
about.

The Environment
The environment is suffering critical stress:

The Atmosphere
Stratospheric ozone depletion threatens us with enhanced ultraviolet radiation
at the earth's surface, which can be damaging or lethal to many life forms. Air
pollution near ground level, and acid precipitation, are already causing
widespread injury to humans, forests and crops.

Water Resources
Heedless exploitation of depletable ground water supplies endangers food
production and other essential human systems. Heavy demands on the
world's surface waters have resulted in serious shortages in some 80
countries, containing 40% of the world's population. Pollution of rivers, lakes
and ground water further limits the supply.

Oceans
Destructive pressure on the oceans is severe, particularly in the coastal
regions which produce most of the world's food fish. The total marine catch is
now at or above the estimated maximum sustainable yield. Some fisheries
have already shown signs of collapse. Rivers carrying heavy burdens of
eroded soil into the seas also carry industrial, municipal, agricultural, and
livestock waste -- some of it toxic.

Soil
Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive Land abandonment, is a
widespread byproduct of current practices in agriculture and animal
husbandry. Since 1945, 11% of the earth's vegetated surface has been
degraded -- an area larger than India and China combined -- and per capita
food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.

Forests
Tropical rain forests, as well as tropical and temperate dry forests, are being
destroyed rapidly. At present rates, some critical forest types will be gone in a

67
 few years and most of the tropical rain forest will be gone before the end of
the next century. With them will go large numbers of plant and animal
species.

Living Species
The irreversible loss of species, which by 2100 may reach one third of all
species now living, is especially serious. We are losing the potential they hold
for providing medicinal and other benefits, and the contribution that genetic
diversity of life forms gives to the robustness of the world's biological systems
and to the astonishing beauty of the earth itself.

Much of this damage is irreversible on a scale of centuries or permanent. Other

processes appear to pose additional threats. Increasing levels of gases in the
atmosphere from human activities, including carbon dioxide released from fossil fuel
burning and from deforestation, may alter climate on a global scale. Predictions of
global warming are still uncertain -- with projected effects ranging from tolerable to
very severe -- but the potential risks are very great.

Our massive tampering with the world's interdependent web of life -- coupled with
the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate
change -- could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses
of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly
understand.

Uncertainty over the extent of these effects cannot excuse complacency or delay in
facing the threat.

Population
The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its
ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers
of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth's limits. Current
economic practices which damage the environment, in both developed and
underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global
systems will be damaged beyond repair.

Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural
world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to
halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth. A
World Bank estimate indicates that world population will not stabilize at less than
12.4 billion, while the United Nations concludes that the eventual total could reach 14
billion, a near tripling of today's 5.4 billion. But, even at this moment, one person in
five lives in absolute poverty without enough to eat, and one in ten suffers serious
malnutrition.

No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we
now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.

Warning

68
We the undersigned, senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby
warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth
and the life on it, is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global
home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.

What We Must Do
Five inextricably linked areas must be addressed simultaneously:

1. We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to

restore and protect the integrity of the earth's systems we depend on. We
must, for example, move away from fossil fuels to more benign, inexhaustible
energy sources to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of our air
and water. Priority must be given to the development of energy sources
matched to third world needs -- small scale and relatively easy to implement.
We must halt deforestation, injury to and loss of agricultural land, and the loss
of terrestrial and marine plant and animal species.
2. We must manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively. We
must give high priority to efficient use of energy, water, and other materials,
including expansion of conservation and recycling.
3. We must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations
recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the
adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.
4. We must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty.
5. We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their
own reproductive decisions.

The developed nations are the largest polluters in the world today. They must greatly
reduce their over-consumption, if we are to reduce pressures on resources and the
global environment. The developed nations have the obligation to provide aid and
support to developing nations, because only the developed nations have the financial
resources and the technical skills for these tasks.

Acting on this recognition is not altruism, but enlightened self-interest: whether

industrialized or not, we all have but one lifeboat. No nation can escape from injury
when global biological systems are damaged. No nation can escape from conflicts
over increasingly scarce resources. In addition, environmental and economic
instabilities will cause mass migrations with incalculable consequences for developed
and undeveloped nations alike.

Developing nations must realize that environmental damage is one of the gravest
threats they face, and that attempts to blunt it will be overwhelmed if their
populations go unchecked. The greatest peril is to become trapped in spirals of
environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and
environmental collapse.

Success in this global endeavor will require a great reduction in violence and war.
Resources now devoted to the preparation and conduct of war -- amounting to over
$1 trillion annually -- will be badly needed in the new tasks and should be diverted to
the new challenges.

A new ethic is required -- a new attitude towards discharging our responsibility for
caring for ourselves and for the earth. We must recognize the earth's limited capacity
to provide for us. We must recognize its fragility. We must no longer allow it to be
ravaged. This ethic must motivate a great movement, convince reluctant leaders and

69
reluctant governments and reluctant peoples themselves to effect the needed
changes.

The scientists issuing this warning hope that our message will reach and affect
people everywhere. We need the help of many.

We require the help of the world community of scientists -- natural, social, economic,
political;

We require the help of the world's business and industrial leaders;

We require the help of the worlds religious leaders; and

We require the help of the world's peoples.

We call on all to join us in this task.

Appendix 2

Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare

From Chapter 2, Animal Rights

Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare

PREAMBLE
The Manila Conference on Animal Welfare recognizes:
That animal welfare is an issue worth consideration by governments.
That the promotion of animal welfare requires collective action and all stakeholders
and affected parties must be involved.
That work on animal welfare is a continuous process

A PROPOSAL FOR A DECLARATION ON ANIMAL WELFARE ARISING FROM THE

MANILA CONFERENCE
RECOGNIZING that animals are living, sentient beings and therefore deserve due
consideration and respect;
RECOGNIZING that animal welfare includes animal health;
RECOGNIZING that humans share this planet with other species and other forms of
life and that all forms of life co-exist within an interdependent ecosystem;
RECOGNIZING that, although there are significant social, economic, religious and
cultural differences between human societies, each should care for and treat animals
in a humane and sustainable manner;
AGREEING that the term nation includes peoples, civil society and the state;
ACKNOWLEDGING that many nations already have a system of legal protection for
animals, both domestic and wild;

70
SEEKING to ensure the continued effectiveness of these systems and the
development of better and more comprehensive animal welfare provisions;
ACKNOWLEDGING that the humane use of animals can have major benefits for
humans;
AWARE that the "five freedoms (freedom from hunger, thirst and malnutrition;
freedom from fear and distress; freedom from physical and thermal discomfort;
freedom from pain, injury and disease; and freedom to express normal patterns of
behaviour) " and the "three Rs (reduction in numbers of animals, refinement of
experimental methods and replacement of animals with nonanimal techniques)"
provide valuable guidance for the use of animals;
RECOGNIZING that the provisions contained in this declaration do not affect the
rights of any nation;

PRINCIPLES OF THE DECLARATION:

1. The welfare of animals shall be a common objective for all nations;
2. The standards of animal welfare attained by each nation shall be promoted,
recognized and observed by improved measures, nationally and internationally,
respecting social and economic considerations and religious and cultural traditions;
3. All appropriate steps shall be taken by nations to prevent cruelty to animals and to
reduce their suffering;
4. Appropriate standards on the welfare of animals be further developed and
elaborated such as, but not limited to, those governing the use and management of
farm animals, companion animals, animals in scientific research, draught animals,
wildlife animals and animals in recreation.

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