Radical Animal Studies

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the publisher Peter Lang Publishing, contributors—David Pellow, Will Boisseau, Erika Cudworth, Richard J. White, Kyle Ramsey-Sumner and Piper Ramsey-Sumner, Jess Ison, and Michael Loadenthal, and those that wrote blurbs for the book—Dr. Johnny Lupinacci, Dr. Jason Del Gandio, S. Marek Muller, Lucas Alan, Jason Bayless, Alisha Page, Marisol Burgueno, and Arash Daneshzadeh. We would love to thank our many organizations we are involved with such as—Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Academy for Peace Education, Utah Reintegration Project, Save the Kids, Wisdom Behind the Walls, Peace Studies Journal, Transformative Justice Journal, Arissa Media Group, Salt Lake Peace and Justice, Poetry Behind the Walls, Eco-Ability Collective, and Utah Alternatives to Violence Project. We most importantly like to thank our friends and family whose love is essential to our being.

Foreword
Burn, Baby(lon), Burn

In November 1997, activists with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) undertook a joint action involving arson at a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) horse corral near Burns, Oregon. Before burning the facility to the ground, the activists released more than five hundred wild horses and burros into the wild. The joint public statement read, in part:

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) claims they are removing non-native species from public lands (aren’t white Europeans also non-native) but then they turn around and subsidize the cattle industry and place thousands of non-native domestic cattle on these same lands. . . . [This action was taken] to help halt the BLM’s illegal and immoral business of rounding up wild horses from public lands and funneling them to slaughter. This hypocrisy and genocide against the horse nation will not go unchallenged!”– Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front.

At a recent national animal rights conference, an activist who had served prison time for his role in releasing thousands of minks from fur farms in the midwestern U.S., discussed the merits of arson in animal liberation: “The first ALF arson action in 1987 was at UC Davis, in the Animal Diagnostic Building. That cost them $4 million. Since then, we’ve seen 106 arsons by ALF. Arson can be very effective. It’s fire, it gets the job done. It’s fast and requires minimal people.”

In November 2007, animal liberation activist Jonathan Paul pled guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of arson for his role in the 1997 burning of the Cavel West horsemeat slaughterhouse in Redmond, Oregon, which destroyed the plant and led to its permanent closure. Even though no one was injured in the fire, federal prosecutors described it as a “classic ←xi | xii→case of terrorism.” Paul was arrested as part of the FBI’s 2005 Operation Backfire. He began serving a fifty-one-month sentence at FCI Phoenix in October 2007.