Editor’s note: Animal abuse is a foundational pillar of the modern industrial food system. We stand against factory farming, vivisection, and other forms of animal testing and abuse. As an organization, however, we do not advocate veganism—and in fact, DGR co-founder Lierre Keith wrote a book called The Vegetarian Myth arguing that vegetarianism and veganism are not a political or ecological solution. However, there are vegans and vegetarians involved in Deep Green Resistance, and we overlap on many goals. This article is the story of the Animal Liberation Front, a movement well worth learning from.
By Chad Nelson
It’s about time. Someone has finally written a biography on the real father of the animal liberation movement – Ronnie Lee. Lee’s lifelong work for animals spans five decades and counting. During this time, he has been involved in just about every form of animal advocacy imaginable – direct action, grassroots vegan outreach, political campaigning, public interest campaigns, and animal fostering, to name a few. Perhaps best known for founding the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and being jailed numerous times for illegal direct actions, Ronnie Lee now focuses exclusively on above-ground animal advocacy, having retired from his earlier, extensive underground career.
Author Jon Hochshartner’s access to Lee (and some of his friends and family) provides us an intimate window into Lee’s life as a freedom fighter for animals. Lee’s childhood and early adult years are shockingly unremarkable in the sense that there is little to indicate he would go on to become a pioneer in the animal liberation movement. Although it is clear Lee grew up with a fondness for animals, an aversion to authority, and a keen sense of justice, the same can be said of many people who neither become vegan nor pursue animal liberation. What specifically led Lee to become The Animals’ Freedom Fighter, one can never know. But this unremarkable childhood makes Lee’s segue into full-fledged warrior all the more startling and exhilarating.
Lee’s come to Jesus moment seems to have instead been a confluence of events – no single one having been definitive. One early turning point appears to have been Lee’s innocuous story of how he became vegan. As a teen, Lee, by then a vegetarian, was introduced to veganism by his older sister’s boyfriend – a healthy, robust, vegan athlete. As with many vegetarians, Lee came to understand the hypocrisy of abstaining from 
eating animal flesh while at the same time continuing to consume other animal byproducts. It only took a single vegan role model for Lee to connect the dots and realize veganism is not only just, but healthy too.
Lee’s subsequent entry into the world of direct action gives us an exciting new window into the early 70s-era radical animal advocacy scene in the United Kingdom. Lee’s involvement with the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) began to blossom into more pointed forms of direct action as time went on. In an effort to refine the efficacy of his hunt sabbing efforts, Lee became more and more motivated to declare full scale war on all animal exploiters. While still “hunting the hunters” with the HSA, Lee felt it more impactful to engage in covert, preemptive forms of hunt sabotage, such as disabling the hunters’ automobiles and ransacking hunt lodges. Lee and some of his more daring saboteur partners eventually leveraged their hunt sab experiences, directing similar attacks against other institutional exploiters like butchers, factory farmers, and vivisectors, whose labs Lee would burn to the ground under the cover of darkness.
Lee’s shift to more aggressive tactics are praiseworthy. If the war against animal exploiters is truly that – a war – no options can be taken off the table no matter what the law has to say about them. In the war for animal liberation, there is a role for everyone to play, from the underground saboteur to the aboveground political actor. Some of these tactics may seem at odds, and activists wedded to one or another tactic may accuse the other of setting the movement back. At various times in history, certain forms of activism may prove more beneficial and strategically sound than others. But in the grand scheme of things, any action for animals is an important brick in the wall, and they will all add up to achieve total liberation for animals in the long run. Lee’s life exemplifies the value of this veritable smorgasbord of tactics.
Lee’s willingness to serve hard time for his involvement in illegal direct actions has given way to his more systemic approach. Lee now prefers to focus his efforts on vegan tabling and leafletting, and taking part in Green Party politics. Having spent a considerable amount of his life behind bars, one cannot blame Lee for the shift. Nevertheless, it is hard not to look at Lee’s hard-edged ALF years with great admiration. Hochschartner paints a picture of a tireless Robinhood-for-animals who threw caution to the wind, never missing an opportunity to put a brick through an animal exploiter’s window, rescue an animal from captivity, or burn down a torture chamber. On more than one occasion, Lee tells Hochshartner that he knew his sprees would end in jail time, but that each time he simply sought to extend them for as long as he could. One has to wonder whether animal exploitation could survive if all vegans became this courageous overnight.
Alas, Lee’s direct action did inspire many to become that courageous. As with many social movements, the actions of one or two brave souls can serve as a greenprint for others to follow. The ALF continues to thrive to this day as an anonymous, leaderless movement, as the baton gets passed from one liberationist to the next through a series of direct actions and communiques describing them. Lee’s ALF actions in the UK quickly encouraged others, uncoordinated and unbeknownst to Lee, in all corners of the globe. These actions continue to flourish today even despite a conservative political climate which punishes them increasingly harshly.
Any student of animal liberation would be well-advised to read The Animals’ Freedom Fighter in order to help them determine what role is appropriate for them. The book is a welcome addition, as both a tactical encyclopedia and an important historical account. Lee’s life as an animal advocate has been full and diverse, and one has to wonder what else Lee might have up his sleeve. Hopefully Hochshartner will have no choice but to update Lee’s biography in the coming years.
This article was originally published in Counterpunch.
Several things conspired to radicalize me. The first was being taught to hunt by my seemingly pathological father and uncles. I was given a rifle for Christmas when I was ten, and was praised for shooting almost anything that moved.
When I was about 12, two of them took me jackrabbit hunting at night. While my uncle drove the pickup, my father and I stood in the back. My father shot at any rabbit he saw in the headlights, and my job was to jump out, collect the bodies, and kick to death the few that were only wounded. (My uncle, a farmer, planned to feed the dead rabbits to his hogs.)
Thirty years later, I was still haunted by the memory of one rabbit that bravely but hopelessly tried to fight me, until one savage kick literally disemboweled it.
Decades later, this triggered a nightmare, in which I saw a woman, who had picked up and strangled a kitten her young daughter was playing with.
In the dream, I walked up to the woman as she approached a second kitten, knocked her down, and kicked her to death, while her little girl looked at me in awe, as if I were some sort of god.
The thing that ended my 18 years of deliberate animal abuse was accidentally shooting a fawn, during a deer hunt when I was in college. I never hunted again, and haven’t even fired a gun in more than 30 years.
Now living on a boat, my biggest thrill is animal rescues, and sabotaging the vehicles of duck hunters in the fall, when they’re out on the water, murdering ducks for “sport.” I also enjoy opening the gates of ranches, late at night.
Though I can never atone for the many animals I killed for fun as a child, I’ve found some satisfaction, releasing the fish that fishermen catch, and leave in buckets, or water-filled bags, while they fish for more.
Though I haven’t achieved anything significant, in my seven decades as one of Earth’s “civilized” human parasites, the few things I’m proudest of are the rescues of a handful of animals, when the opportunity arose.
Among my three favorites were catching a possum, stranded in the middle of a freeway in late morning, taking it to a wildlife refuge, and releasing it in a grassy field, next to a stream of fresh water.
Another was when a fisherman caught a shark he didn’t want, simply cut the line, and left it on the beach to suffocate. I pushed the fisherman aside, removed the hook from the shark’s mouth (it was too weak and desperate for air to bite me), and released it back into the ocean, as the idiot fisherman watched in disbelief. (In parting, I looked at him, said “Fuck you,” and walked away.)
The third was a grown doe that had been hit by a car, and left in the middle of a rural road, early on a Sunday morning. After realizing that it had no apparent injuries other than a concussion, I carried it to a nearby field, stood it up, and leaned it against a fence. When I returned and approached it again, about 45 minutes later, the deer looked at me, shook its head, jumped the fence, and walked away.
Along with a few things I’ve written, the decades of personal garbage I’ve sent to landfills, and the gallons of fossil fuels my existeunce has spewed into the atmosphere, that’s about all I have accomplished in life. Like most members of industrial society, I’ve been a major drag on the biosphere.
But at least I can die, knowing that after my first 18 years of total uselessness, I’ve at least been able to give a few innocent creatures a second chance. And in the 26 years since I stopped eating meat, I’m fairly confident that no additional cow, pig, or goat has died for my sins.
“… vegetarianism and veganism are not a political or ecological solution.”
Farming meat, factory or otherwise, is extremely ecologically harmful and cruel to animals. It’s also totally unnatural. Beef is the most environmentally and ecologically harmful common food that one can eat by far. Cattle grazing destroys native ecosystems, and ranchers fence land, cut down entire forests to graze cattle, kill native predators & ungulates to benefit their cattle, and replace native grasses with those more favorable to cattle. The grazing industry has caused more environmental and ecological harm to the western U.S. than any other industry; think about that while considering all the other harms caused by industrial society, including road-building. While eating vegetarian or vegan is not natural for humans, the planet would be far better off if humans didn’t eat meat or dairy. (Dairy is totally unnatural and doesn’t warrant discussion here.) Creating unnatural animals like cattle is so obviously ecologically harmful that I won’t bother listing any reasons. Confining animals then slaughtering them is also cruel to animals.
In nature, humans only eat meat occasionally, and of course only eat wild meat. The only reason that humans need meat is for vitamin B-12, and we need so little of it that we can eat meat once or twice per month and get enough of it. Advocating eating farmed meat, as Lierre Keith does, is very anti-environmental and is in direct conflict with the goals of DGR or any other real environmental group. Environmentalists should be advocating for a total boycott of beef and for greatly reducing the amount of meat that humans consume, not defending the very ecologically harmful practice of eating beef or overeating meat.
That all said, advocating for animal rights and for the natural environment are two different but sometimes related things. Animal rights activists often have different agendas and would be opposed to hunting, while there is no legitimate environmental or ecological reason to refrain from doing that so long as the hunting is limited to natural prey animals and those animals are abundant enough that hunting a few of them doesn’t harm the species as a whole. While advocating for other species is noble and right, animals on this planet eat each other, including humans and other hominids, the latter of which have been eating meat for millions of years, but animal rights activists refuse to acknowledge this fact and don’t advocate for the natural world.
FYI, B12 comes in pills; no slaughter required.