What REALLY Happened in the Churchyard

Steve Best and Jason Miller with Joan Court, Janet Tomlinson, and Lynn Sawyer

I. Background

Anyone who follows the animal rights movement in England knows that the direct action element has become increasingly powerful and controversial. By abandoning what they see to be futile efforts to persuade a government beholden to corporate interests and speciesist ideology to respect the rights of animals, a growing number of activists have taken the fight directly to the animal exploiters themselves. Over the last few decades, groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), SPEAK (originally named Stop Primate Experiments at Cambridge), and Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs (SNGP) have developed highly effective campaigns against all facets of the vivisection industry. While the ALF is an underground network of activists engaged in "criminal" actions involving sabotage, arson, and break-ins, other direct action groups such as SHAC and SPEAK are aboveground organizations and employ legal approaches.

By Steve Best and Jason Miller

For all the political prisoners of the animal liberation movement, for everyone involved in militant direct action for nonhuman animals and the Earth, and for all the nonhuman animals themselves who suffer at the hands of human barbarity.

By Steven Best and Jason Miller

"I am one of those who believe that it is the mission of this war to free every non-human animal in the United States. I am one of those who believe that we should consent to no peace which shall not be an Abolition peace. I am, moreover, one of those who believe that the work of animal liberationists will not have been completed until all the sentient beings of the Earth, shall have been admitted, fully and completely, into the moral circle of humanity. I look upon speciesism as going the way of all the earth. It is the mission of the war to put it down." --revision of a quote by MLK