However, despite a public stance against physical violence by the early 1980s, as the Sprinzak delegitimation model suggests, some cells began to carry out car bombings and physical threats and attacks against their ‘enemies’.
Inspired by law student Ronnie Lee the group, drawing on the writings of animal liberationists such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan, began carrying out liberation raids to free animals before progressing quickly to arson against its perceived opponents.
The ALF and its smaller antecedent group the Band of Mercy grew out of a concern that activist actions in trying to prevent ongoing hunting in the UK were not enough and that militant action was needed. 4 According to Best and Nocella, ‘there are two faces of the ALF – the “benign” one that breaks into prisons to release and rescue animals, and the “malign” one that smashes windows, wrecks equipment, and torches buildings’. To its adherents and its supporters, though, the ALF and its more violent nom de guerres – the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty – are willing to put their freedom on the line to defend animals against the ‘vast industries have built up around what Animal Liberators see as the “exploitation” of non-human animals’. 2 Arslan’s research demonstrates that the ALF is still the most dominant radical environmental group with its adherents committing almost half (43.8 per cent) of recorded radical environmental actions. In 1987 the FBI first categorized the ALF as a terrorist group. It is also the most violent group in that they have been willing to directly target their human opponents at certain points in their history.
Of the radical environmental groups examined the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is the oldest and still holds enormous sway today. If people want to stop the ALF it is simple: stop doing unspeakable acts to other-than-human beings! There will be an ALF for as long as tiny chicks feel the pain of that searing wire on their beaks and chained pigs dig hopelessly into the hard cement with their hooves … as long as there are terrorized animal victims of human injustice and callousness.
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