A.L.F.- The Ultimate Freedom Movement

Phil

Cathy~Exposing The Truth~



“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the ‘final frontier. ’ ” RobinWebb, British ALF Press Officer..





to take immediate and decisive action.

ALF activists operate under cover, at night, wearing balaclavas and ski masks,

and in small cells of a few people. After careful reconnaissance, skilled liberation teams

break into buildings housing animal prisoners in order to release them (e.g. , mink and

coyotes) or rescue them (e.g., cats, dogs, mice, and guinea pigs). They seize and/or




destroy equipment, property, and materials used to exploit animals, and they use arson as

a potent weapon to raze buildings and laboratories to the ground. They have cost the

animal exploitation industries hundreds of millions of dollars. 3 They willfully break the

law because the law wrongly consigns animals to cages and confinement, to loneliness

and pain, to torture and death. They target a wide range of animal exploiters, from

vivisectors and the fur industry to slaughter houses, foie gras producers, and fast food

restaurants.


Resolved not to harm living beings, motivated by love, empathy, compassion, and

justice, animal liberationists are the antithesis of the “terrorists“ that government,

industries, and mass media ideologues impugn them to be. They are not violent

aggressors against life; they are defenders of the peaceable kingdom. They uphold rights

not covered by law, knowing that the legal structure is defined by and for human

supremacists. The goal of the ALF is not simply to liberate individual animals here and

there; it is to free all animals from every form of slavery that binds them to human

oppressors.







The ALF, and the animal rights movement as a whole, is attacking the entire

institutional framework of animal exploitation along with the domineering values,

mindset, identities, and worldviews of the human species.

Although human slavery has been outlawed in “liberal democracies” (while

industries command new slave trades in domestic and foreign sweatshops) where many

dispossessed and disenfranchised groups gain more rights and respect, animal slavery has

become worse than ever. This is the case in the sheer number of animals killed, the

degree of violation of their natural lives (culminating in the technological manipulations

of genetic engineering and cloning), and the intensity of their suffering (as evident in the

horrors of vivisection, fur farming, slaughter houses, mechanized slaughter, puppy mills,

and so on). Animal "Welfare"” laws do little but regulate the details of exploitation.4







Just as nineteenth-century white abolitionists in the U.S. worked across racial

lines to create new forms of solidarity, so the new freedom fighters reach across species

lines to help our fellow beings in the animal world. In this endeavor, they unleash a

frontal assault on the unquestioned mentality that says animals are objects, resources, or

property, and they advance the modern universalization of rights process that is the key

marker of moral progress. 5



By expanding the definition of the moral community, animal liberationists

challenge long-entrenched prejudices. These relate not only to class, gender, race, sexual

orientation, or specific interest group, but also to the human species itself—to the

arrogant conception of its place in the web of life and its ugly, condescending, vicious,

and violent attitudes toward other species. Speciesism is the belief that nonhuman species

exist to serve the needs of the human species, that animals are in various senses “inferior”

to human beings, and therefore that one can favor human over nonhuman interests

according to species status alone. 6 Just like racism or sexism, speciesism creates a false

dualistic division between one group and another in order to arrange the differences

hierarchically and justify the domination of the “superior” over the “inferior. ” Just as

society has discerned that it is prejudiced, illogical, and unacceptable for whites to

devalue people of color and for men to diminish women, so it is beginning to learn how

utterly arbitrary and irrational it is for human animals to position themselves over

nonhuman animals because of species differences. Among animals who are all sentient

subjects of a life, these differences – humanity’s claim to be the sole bearer of “reason”

and “language” – are no more ethically relevant than differences of gender or skin color,

yet in the unevolved psychology of the human primate they have decisive bearing. The

theory—speciesism—informs the practice—unspeakably cruel forms of domination,

torture, violence, and killing.

The animal liberation struggle is the most difficult battle human beings have ever

fought, because it requires universal consent to abandon what most perceive as their

absolute privileges and God-given rights to exploit animals by sole virtue of their human

status. Moreover, where the stakes of human liberation struggles were largely confined to

particular interests, the failure of human beings to win liberation for animals will havecatastrophic and global consequences for all humanity, if for no other reason than

systemic environmental collapse.