Animal Rights Movement

The Animal Liberation Front

In 1971, animal rights activist Ronnie Lee founded a Hunt Saboteur chapter in Luton, England. Convinced that more violent tactics should be used in the struggle for animal rights, Lee created another group, Band of Mercy, a year later. In 1973, Band of Mercy committed two acts of arson at a pharmaceutical plant, becoming increasingly violent until 1975, when Lee was apprehended. Upon his release in 1976, Lee created the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), now one of the most recognized radical animal rights groups in the world.

The goal of the ALF was to cause economic damage to people and businesses that exploited animals, with the ultimate objective of wreaking havoc on entire animal-use industries. Lee's cause was greatly assisted by the 1975 release of Animal Liberation, a book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer that has become a veritable bible of the animal rights movement. Singer stated that “speciesism” was akin to racism and sexism, thus linking animal rights to the civil rights and women's rights struggles under way in the United States and abroad, and instilling a previously dormant movement with a sense of purpose and context.

The movement struck in North America at approximately the same time. In 1977, a group called the Underground Railroad released two dolphins from a marine lab at the University of Hawaii, in what is often cited as the first animal rights action in the United States. Two years later, the first North American ALF action occurred, in which one cat, two dogs, and two guinea pigs were freed from New York Medical Center. By the early 1980s, ALF cells were active in both Canada and the United States.

In conjunction with the growing underground aspect of the animal rights movement, in 1980, Alex Pacheco and Ingrid Newkirk founded the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), now the largest and most active animal rights group in the United States. PETA uses legal forms of protest, including sit-ins, marches, boycotts, and propaganda campaigns. PETA later began acting as the mouthpiece for the ALF, distributing press releases about ALF actions and films of stolen footage revealing conditions inside targeted research facilities.

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