Jeremy Bentham stated that the happiness of animals was "as much a fit subject fit for our philosophy as the happiness of men". But, according to moderate animal rights groups, the bombing of Bristol University's senate building yesterday may mean that this remains a distant dream as the public is alienated from the idea of animal liberation.
The animal rights movement has been the victim of splits through two centuries, each schism producing more extreme elements that may now have spawned a full-blown terrorist movement.
"We will suffer incalculable damage from those who planted the Bristol device. Terrorist actions are negative and destroy the image of a positive campaign we have tried to build up," says Steve McIvor, of the British Union of Anti-vivisectionists.
The first animal rights organization, the National Anti-Vivisection Society, was founded in 1875 by a Dublin humanitarian, Francis Power Cobbe. The society grew from a handful of friends to about 50 members. Three years later, the group passed the resolution that "while the demand for the total abolition of vivisection will ever remain the ultimate object of the society", it would lobby Parliament for lesser measures, to "save animals from scientific torture". The mixture of idealism, tempered by practical action, did not appeal to Cobbe, who left the society to found the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.
The public's attention was first drawn to the problem of vivisection in 1903, when the Daily News made a cause celebre of the Little Brown Dog at University College London. A medical professor experimented on the pancreatic ducts of the anonymous terrier and held it in a cage for observation for two months. He then gave it to a colleague for a demonstration of saliva stimulation by electric shock. A memorial to the dog was erected in Battersea Park in 1906.
The First World War diverted attention from the anti-vivisectionists and the movement never regained mass popularity until the 1960s.
Animal rights organizations evolved from intellectual pressure groups into more energetic "direct action" cells during the protests against blood sports in the 1960s. As a result of two big splits in the movement, a decade apart, groups committed to increasing violence were spawned.
It was not until the Band of Mercy, re-organized as the Animal Liberation Front in 1972 and led for the next 20 years by Ronnie Lee, burst into ICI's research laboratories and photographed smoking beagles in June 1975, that the public was introduced to militant animal protectionism. The ALF set about inflicting as much economic damage on factory farmers, vivisectionists and furriers as possible. Its philosophy was strictly non-violent to humans and, of course, animals.
Photographic raids on laboratories split the animal rights community into moderate and extremist groups during the 1970s. Organizations such as the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection favoured working within the law, while the ALF set the stage for those who decided that animal liberation would be best served by more spectacular methods.
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s the group had a loose liaison with more moderate organizations. Fearful that organized groups were in danger of becoming bureaucratized, veterans of the 1960s and early 1970s campaigns set up smaller ad hoc cells known as "Leagues", which specialize in publicizing what they think are particularly abhorrent cases of cruelty.
The 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act was the first legislation on animal experimentation for more than a century and was intended to extend the scope of the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act to cover the methods used in modern research.
This was to lead to the second big split in the animal rights movement. All the major groups agreed that the Act did little to protect laboratory animals from abuse but the ALF and the leagues also believed that the legislation proved that the whole system was corrupt and that there was nothing that could be done through the legal system.
The BUAV, Animal Aid, and National Anti-Vivisection Society, severed all contact with the ALF and the leagues. Without this restraint, the militant groups took a further step towards terrorism when they established the "Animal Rights Militia", which claimed responsibility for bombs placed under researchers' cars and incendiary devices sent to laboratories.
According to sources in the animal rights movement, the Animal Rights Militia simply provides individual activists with an "umbrella name" for their more extreme acts.
Butchers were sent letters with razor blades along the edges of envelopes, academics' lives and those of their children were threatened, and fire bombs sent to stores selling animal furs an activity which reached a peak last Christmas when fire bombs at four House of Fraser shops and others caused damage estimated at รบ25 million six months after three ALF activists including Lee, who had retired from active duty, were jailed for their parts in a bombing campaign earlier in the year.
"There are probably not more than a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, people who are active extremists," one source said yesterday. "They seem to pluck titles out of the air to use depending on the severity of their action." Yesterday's explosion has been claimed by the previously unknown Animal Abused Society.
Animal rights experts agree that if the bomb was in fact planted by animal rights activists, we may be seeing a new era of a nationally organized campaign with a sophisticated knowledge of modern explosives. We may also be seeing the end of the "positive" image of animal rights.
THE ATTACKS
The threat to Bristol
August 1988: Veterinary School main door superglued.
October-February 23, 1989: five bomb threats; no devices found.
Raids across the country
February 12, 1986: fur departments in two London and Croydon stores fire-bombed.
May 6, 1986: six Surrey department store vans fire-bombed.
January 15, 1987: three Cardiff stores fire-bombed.
February 13, 1987: razor blades sent to two South Wales butchers.
July 13, 1987: three London stores fire-bombed.
December 19, 1987: two fire bombs in London store.
January 7, 1988: fire bombs in stores in Bournemouth and Milton Keynes.
January 23, 1988: fire bomb in London store.
December 21, 1988: five House of Fraser stores, including Harrods, fire-bombed.
January 19, 1989: Dickins and Jones store in Milton Keynes, destroyed by incendiary device.
