Growl: Life Lessons, Hard Truths, and Bold Strategies from an Animal Advocate by Kim Stallwood

Author:Kim Stallwood [Stallwood, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781590563977
Publisher: Lantern Books
Published: 2014-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

II

NONVIOLENCE

Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us; it is difficult to judge what we do not share.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF, THREE GUINEAS

7

The PETA Turning Point

During my time at BUAV, I was building up a relationship with the animal rights movement in the United States. I first made contact with American activists when I was at Compassion In World Farming. My colleague Thelma had corresponded with Jim Mason, who with Peter Singer was writing Animal Factories (1980), the groundbreaking follow-up to Harrison's Animal Machines. Thelma and Peter Roberts provided Jim with information about European legislation and farmed animal agricultural practices. Jim and I first met at The Rights of Animals, that epochal RSPCA symposium in Cambridge in 1977, and immediately became good friends and like-minded colleagues.

We kept in touch via airmail, our correspondence critiquing American and British animal advocacy. We shared the same ideas about strategy. We agreed on the need to build a movement within the context of a progressive political, social, and economic agenda. It was an approach that I was to articulate in the January/February 1986 issue of The Animals' Agenda, which Jim had launched as a quarterly. Agenda and CAW Bulletin functioned as companion publications.

In the magazine, I wrote that it was ‘essential that in the next ten years the animal rights movement develop a theoretical understanding of how society has to change to make animal liberation possible. Our movement must increase and refine its campaigning strategies; there must be more positive action on all fronts.’ I continued:

We should model ourselves on other movements and learn from their mistakes. For example, animal rights organizations must work towards creating a national federation for animal rights—which could be internationally based—with an agreed on set of demands and program of action. We must start publishing more critical analyses of animal abuse: why it is happening, how it can be replaced, what is the power that fuels it? We must develop programs of action that are stepping stones to eradicating animal abuse and this action must always take place from the fundamental perspective of ending all animal suffering. We should acknowledge the power of the written word and direct action. We have to open our minds to see the necessary changes we must make in our personal lifestyles to veganism. Animal rights campaigners can no longer fight dogmatically on their own for no one wins who fights alone. The issue of animal rights has to be linked into human liberties and the links made between their suffering and ours. Above all, we have to understand the enormity of the task ahead of us and not be afraid. We should never lose heart as animal exploitation is inextricably interwoven into human exploitation and their liberation is our liberation.

In summer 1980, as I was moving back to Camberley from Brighton and anticipating taking over BUAV, I bought a cheap ticket through the now-defunct Laker Airlines to visit the United States.

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