Part Two: SHAC and Modern Protest Tactics

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that we all like animals just to different degrees. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my guest, Shuli. Hi, how are you? Hi. I'm doing all right. I'm really happy to be here, even though there is some bad stuff in this. That's true. And there's going to be more bad stuff in this, and it's going to be fun. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie. Hi. And this is part two of a two-parter that probably should have been like an eight-parter. This is the kind of thing that honestly, like one day, I'm just going to switch to a true crime format and shack and animal rights stuff at the turn of the century. Easily a whole season of all kinds of ins and outs of things. But that's not what I'm doing here. It's a two-parter. We're on part two. So where we last left our plucky heroes and anti-heroes in various combinations, they had just shut down a dog breeding facility that mistreated dogs and sold them to Animal Rights Place that had an animal rights place, an animal testing place that has had a lot of evidence against it being very bad to animals. And then they went and did a very similar thing to a cat, and they did that partly by doing something that I don't think is great. And I was thinking about this while we were on break. I mean, while two days passed, because it's obviously two days later, here we are on Wednesday, you're listening to this live, no matter what time you're listening to this, no matter what year. I was thinking about this. Our coworker, Robert Evans, talks about war a lot and talks about like, look, even in a war where like one side's the good side, they're going to do war crimes. Right. Like people just do that. And that's not good, but that doesn't invalidate the entirety of that side. And I've been thinking about it from that point of view. There are things that I'm like, nah, I probably shouldn't have bombed that building, you know, I'm not talking about the animal rights people now, I'm talking about the like, you know, war or whatever, right? And, you know, you can't actually control every actor within a given thing. But our campaigners moved on and they started a group called Stop Hunting Tin Animal Cruelty, which is not Stop Hunting Tin Animal Cruelty, but Hunting Din. That's how you know it's British. Yeah. Oh, fuck. I actually left out several place names where I was like, oh, I'll say the place name of this. And I was like, no man, this is some British name. It's going to be like opposite land. I mean, I'm not telling the truth about the D means it's British. No, but it could be, right? Again, because you're the professor, so I'm going to listen to you. The stupidity that makes it British. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they decided to stop the place that actually does the vivisection. Maybe they originally started Stop Hunting Tin and then they were like, oh shit, get the spell check out here. Yeah, yeah. And the first thing they did was get a list of shareholders. And they found out that their very own labor party held 70,000 shares because the labor party, that just that last year, maybe two years earlier, I can't remember, had just taken a large donation from the animal testing lobby. And the first thing that Shaq did was publicize this fact. And as soon as they did, the labor party sold their shares. So they're coming out with a strong win right away. And they got company after company to sell their shares pretty quickly with just a few phone calls. I believe these phone calls were a criminal and threatening variety. If you get the party to be caught with their pants down, I mean, I don't know. But I was thinking it'd be kind of funny if the Democratic party was like, oh yeah, they have all these shares in the animal testing. They're using animal focus groups to see if their ideas go. And they're like, oh yeah, the animals, they seem to like this really bad idea that we have. Yeah, totally. Oh God. I would say that is cruelty to animals if you had to sit with like- Send them with Democratic donor messages. Yeah. In addition to a couple of polite and impolite phone calls, there was also a bunch of bomb threats and jammed phone lines and such. So they would like call a place and be like, there's a bomb in your building and they'd have to evacuate the building. I am not, I am describing a thing of history. And a related group with the name, the British Union for the abolition of Vivisection Reform Group, which took me like eight readings to figure out what they're saying. I think they're saying we're for the abolition of Vivisection Reform. It's like being like, we are the group that is against, you know, in animal rights stuff, there's a difference between animal welfare and animal rights, right? Or in animal liberation would be on that. But animal welfare is like, let's make animals be better and take care of them a little better. And animal rights is like, no, animals are people too, right? And so like, these are people being like, our thing is it were against the Vivisection Reformists. So they're bad. No, no, no, no, no, these are the further radical, these are, yeah. Yeah, yeah, no. So these are the people who are like, we want the abolition of Vivisection and therefore we want the abolition of Vivisection Reform. No half measures. Yeah, exactly. But they do this interesting campaign. They send out 1,700 letters to individual shareholders, people who just have like five stocks. I don't know what you call that. Shares, I just said the name, shareholder. And they send out these letters and they basically are like, look, hey, I hate to be a bother. I actually suspect they did do it all British like this. And they were like, look, I hate to be a bother about this, but you have some shares in some people who punch puppies in the face. And so we would like that to change. And the thing that's gonna happen is that we're going to pick some people randomly in a week and we're gonna pick at your house if you don't sell within a week. It'll be picked at random. And they got a bunch of supportive letters back from people who were like, I actually had no idea of supporting that stuff. I had no idea. I sold my shares. And a couple of people sent them donations. But I'm also reading a activist account of this. I suspect there was a lot of like fuck yous in there too. But you know, this is, okay, this is the thing I think about a lot because during the encampments, you know, in solidarity with Gaza, the main demand was divestment, which it made sense to me as a reason to be there. And it's connected to the BDS movement that the Palestinians kind of wanted people to take part in. Yeah. But if you think about the way the stock market works, you can't just like easily divest from Israel, for example, because everything's like intertwined, right? It's not like they're just like, no, we have 10,000 Israel stocks or whatever. So they can be like, oh yeah, we divested, but they just like move the shit around and it looks a little bit better. So it makes sense to me that these people are like, oh, I didn't fucking know. Like, I don't know. Yeah, totally. Like even your pension could be fucking invested in it. Right. And also they're not being like divested in Israel because people would be like, why are you just focused on hunting and life sciences? And they're like, because you have to pick, in order to accomplish anything in this world, you have to pick a thing and then do it. You can't pick destroy fascism. You have to pick do these things that better position people in general to destroy fascism. I gotta change my plan then. Yeah, no, actually I've learned this the hard way. At many sleepless nights being like, all right, how am I personally going to stop fascism? And then you lay there and you like try and math it out and you're like, no, that won't work. No, that won't work. And you're like, oh fuck. So you actually have to just pick something and start. And they picked hunting and life sciences. And so by saying like, no, you have to sell this company. We're going to wreck this company. And then we're going to go on to the next one after that. Spoiler though, although they have already wrecked several companies, they're not going to wreck this one. I will just go on record though to say yet, like I was critiquing the divestment plan, but like also like making people say that they will take out their shares is something. It's not nothing. Oh, totally. No, I think that that is a thing where you're like, hey, you have to drop the following thing and we are going to camp on your lawn until you do it. That is the shack model in a lot of ways, right? And so these people, they send out their 1700 letters and they pick a person at random and it's a 70 year old pensioner and they're like, nah, fuck. Well, we said we'd pick a random. So they wrote them a letter and they're like, hey, you lost the lottery. We're coming to your house to pick it. It's going to be peaceful. It's going to last 12 hours. And the guy is like, all right. And the media showed up and we're like, ah, tell us about these terrible people. And he's like, look, it's annoying. They have a point and they're entitled to their point of view. He served them tea. Yeah. One of the letter writers was charged with a thousand counts of blackmail for this project. But oddly, it wasn't illegal. So the prosecution, it never went anywhere. It was never taken to court. They had actually, I think they ran all the shit past, whatever they call lawyers, barristers or whatever. Whatever they call a lawyer. I have like one thing I can do and it's make fun of British people and it makes no sense because it's actually horizontal. I'm an American. Whenever I see their legal system on like a television show or in a documentary, I'm like, yeah, take off that wig. I'm like, that's weird. Yeah. They've got intense ass libel laws though over there. No, I get very America about free. The first two amendments, I like, I mean, I like kind of all of our amendments, except the one that we got rid of about no drinking. Yeah. I mean, I hear you on that. Two things. What I think of like American pride is that and then like air conditioning. Fuck the world. No, it's great when you live in a country where like all these old people have to die because of the heat wave and no one knows what to do. Like France or whatever. Yeah. Like and with a free speech thing, I'm like, it would be so much harder to be a journalist in the UK. Yeah. Doing this show, I would stick to dead people if I did this show in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. That's why they just put tits on page three. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. They're like, look, no free speech, but here's some movies, which actually, I mean, we're not allowed movies on our page three. So there you go. I actually don't feel strongly about this at all. So meanwhile, Shaq, they're doing this all the time. They have like 500 person strong protests outside of HLS. And these are spicy. People are tearing down fences, they're throwing rocks and stuff like that. Whenever I read about these old protests, I'm like, God, people used to do wild shit and get a couple months in jail. And they would rescue dogs from the facility on a somewhat regular basis. And they would set up tripods, which you've never seen an activist tripod. It's like three poles. They're like 10, 30 feet tall and you sit at the top of them. It's like tree sitting, but you can do it anywhere. It blocks the road. Unfortunately, at one point when they set up one of these tripods, a cop walked up and was like, you're in my way and pulled the leg out of the tripod and dropped the woman about 20 feet onto the ground. She broke her leg. She smashed up her face. She had to have major reconstructive surgery. And she almost died from an infection in her broken leg. So that is whenever I'm like, oh, simpler times. I'm like, again, no, these people were actually risking real things by doing this. And the cop was served justice, right? You know, what's funny is he actually was arrested, which I was like, holy shit. And then he was found not guilty. I think people today look at the way that the stakes were like lower in terms of the punishment that you were facing and then be like, why can't we just do this today without fucking thinking about the intense security state and the violence that we're subjected to. Right. Don't set things on fire in America. Like unless you're going like not just double or nothing, but like order of magnitude or nothing, just stay away from fire. When they're like, oh, they just set the fire on fence, the whatever, get the nouns correct in that sense. And that's what I meant to say. Like don't do that here. Yeah. I try not to tell people what to do, but that's one that I stick to is that that's more serious than you think it is. Yeah. They can do it in France, flaming barricades, you know, whatever, and they get like, you know, they don't get 40 years present or maybe they do, I don't know. It's things change. That is, I mean, again, it's like, you know, it's not that they're not risking things in France. It's just different. I remember talking to someone who I've probably said this before on the show, like when I first went to the Netherlands, I went to a noise demo for someone who was in prison for throwing a, was convicted of throwing a molotov at a cop. She didn't actually do it. She just had one on her person when she was arrested, but she was convicted of doing it. And she served, I want to say six months of her nine month sentence. Yeah. And like in a minimum security prison where she had a typewriter and a guitar and got zines and people went outside and had noise demos for her all the time, that's just different. And... They don't even know what a molotov is here, but they'll charge you for it. Yeah, totally. So they also, and these are things that you can get real time for in England at this time. They set four staff members' cars on fire. And as just we're talking about all the things that they did that didn't go out great, they set those cars on fire. And I believe driveways and people's houses and the fire spread to nearby houses where children were sleeping. No one was hurt. And Shaq came out and was like, oh no, that wasn't us. It probably wasn't even animal people, but like it was. Just your normal car fire that happens randomly. Yeah, of the people that we've been saying people should go fuck these people up. This is, I don't know if you're gonna talk about this later, but as we're getting into this, we're talking about the kind of complexity and the nuance of it. It's like you go down this line, right? Like you go after the facility and then you go after maybe the owners of a facility. But then when you start going down the hierarchy, like the worker and then the wife of the... Yeah, the wife of the worker of the janitorial company that works for the place that gives them their tax forms. Right, and then their neighbors. Yeah. That's where it starts to kind of blur, you know? And I actually think this brings up one of my major tactical issues because there's a lot of this is seen as tactical innovation. I think it is a social problem to create a system by which we allow this like transference of evil, right? And we see this destroying our cultures all the time. We're like, oh, your friends was so and so, don't you know they did something bad? Oh, your friends was so and so, they're still friends was so and so. Don't you know that that person is still friends was so and so and friends was so and so who did something bad. You have to pick in your head, the number of steps removed that you believe is appropriate and then stick to it. You can be mad at the person who did the bad thing. You can be mad at the people who are still friends with the person who did the bad thing. But maybe you shouldn't be mad at the people who are still friends with the person who was still friends with the person who was still friends with the person who did the bad thing. You have to pick in your head and stick to it. Also, it's like just you don't be friends with the... I don't know. There are situations that call for more intense shit, but it's like, I don't know. A lot of this stuff is like, I don't like that person and no one should like... People do shitty things, but... But also, I mean, tactically, I do think that there's something there. It's just they're picking the wrong targets. Like in New York, during the beginning of the Gaza stuff, there was all these like huge, civil disobedient type protests, which I think very quickly lost their effectiveness, but going to Chuck Schumer's house and fucking screaming and yelling outside his house, that's cool. That's a good thing to do. And judges and Supreme Court judges, shit like that. I mean, you can get real fucked up for going to protest the Supreme Court judge. Yeah, yeah. Doing it legally in ways that are legally acceptable. Well, yeah. I mean, that's different than being like, the janitor's wife and their neighbors. Yeah, exactly. And I actually think that some of the people who came through this, think about these same things. I'm gonna read some quotes at the end that I think that, you know, like not everyone is part of this as like, oh yeah, this is totally, everything that we're doing is totally above board. And within months, as I understand it, the campaign drove HLS into insolvency as secondary targets withdrew their support from the group in response to pressure. Like for example, you know, okay, the Bank of Scotland had been letting HLS be 24 million pounds in overdraft, which I suspect they wouldn't let me do, even if I punched dogs. And so people showed up in a public square and burned a copy of the bank's policy of ethics as a protest. And the bank was like, oh yeah, I know you're right. Maybe that's not for us. Maybe we shouldn't support this. The phrase puppy killer was used a lot. And HLS killed a lot of puppies. So it was an appropriate thing to yell at people. Hundreds of animals died in the facility every day. And Shaq was fond of the chant puppy killer leave town. This got under HLS's skin. And there was lawsuit after lawsuit, basically trying to get them to specifically stop like calling them puppy killers. Bible, Bible suits, British level. I know, but also if you're being bullied, you can't say, don't do the one thing that makes me unhappy. So the more they said stop calling us that, that hurts our feelings. The more people called them puppy killers. There was threatening phone calls. There was like classic harassment techniques of the time. Like you buy someone embarrassing shit, like porn or sex toys and have it mailed to their houses or their place of work. 40 pizzas. Yeah. I'm sure there was like black faxes where you fax someone, just a black piece of paper on repeat. Sometimes you even set it up. So it's just a black piece of paper, taped on a loop. And so it just runs through and spends all their toner. Yeah, absolutely tactic. Yeah, I know, right? I've had to send faxes occasionally in my life and it's really funny to me. Yeah, there's still a few places that they're like faxes. Yeah. I don't have a fucking fax machine. Yeah, I'm a millennial, which means I am fucking middle-aged. I am too young to have a fucking fax machine. And they would go and crash parties they would be at and not just HLS, but people who like sold them soda for their cafeterias and shit. And people would show up at the houses of executives, ring the door and then pepper spray them in their face and then break out their windows and shit. And in early 2001, the COO of HLS, and to be fair, the most violent thing that happened, happened specifically their COO. Was beaten with a pickaxe handle and hospitalized. Whoa. Was the pickaxe part, the axe part still attached? No, no. So some reports say baseball bat and some say pickaxe handle. It's like kind of a thing, like I had a hobo friend who you know too, but I'm not gonna say their name on air because they don't like such things. Who when they were hopping trains, they would carry around a axe handle, right? Just like a two-handed axe handle because you're kind of allowed to carry it kind of and you can hit people with it if they fuck with you. And so it's just a club. It's just a way of having a club, you know? And Citibank cut ties not only with HLS, but with anyone who held shares in HLS. But do you know who would never give in to an activist campaign? Who would stand their ground nobly or in nobly. They probably give in activist campaigns all the time. It's actually a very effective tactic, but our sponsors are either upstanding or not. We promise you that. Attention. 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Now, I mean, during the George Floyd uprisings, we saw companies sort of try to make noises towards, you know, Black Lives Matter, but that went away very quickly. Yeah. And it wasn't material in this way at all. Like they didn't actually do anything. They just had an advertisement, and Netflix had a Black Voices series or whatever. Yeah. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, they were like, we don't want to make Copacanda anymore. Oh yeah, I remember that. But that's not a corporation, that's a show. That's like artists as creators. I think on some level, activists have been chasing this high ever since. This high of like, we got Citibank to defund. Like the number of times I've been part of campaigns, like environmental campaigns where people are like, and we're going to get Bank of America to divest from mountaintop removal. I'm like, all right, if we'll meet once, shame on you. And I'm not saying it's not worth doing, but it's kind of like, it's like boycott campaigns. Boycott campaigns work sometimes. And so we always rush to try and do them. And most of the time they don't work, but that doesn't actually mean that it's a bad tactic if it doesn't work all the time, because nothing works all the time. And making social changes incredibly hard, or we would all would have done it by now. But like the thing is, boycotts would go to and protests would go to, but like, if you're going to just take the lesson from this, that like, oh, you can get Citibank to cut ties. The thing is that they like surrounded these people, like with a whole world of protest and attack and like tighten the noose on them. It wasn't just like, you just go and chant or like whatever you sit in your tripod and then they listen to you. And I don't think people are willing to actually go that distance for good or bad. And partly because literally the stakes have changed. Like we are going to talk about later in this episode about how like all of this is now terrorism. They decided in 2005 in the US, 2006, that this is now terrorism, right? And that's the go-to that they've been using. Cause also September 11th happens during all of this. There was one thing I read that was like, the public's appetite for using car bombs to change people's political minds changed dramatically in the wake of September 11th. And as someone who like most of my adult life has been in the wake of September 11th, I'm like, oh yeah, that makes sense. I like take it for granted that people don't approve of that. You know, but people are coming up during a time where you're like, ah, it's all kind of fun and games. I remember actually being in London and being like, why are there no trash cans anywhere? And I was like, oh yeah, cause people fucking put bombs in the trash cans. Rubbish bin, sorry. Oh yeah, rubbish tins. And the government was desperate to stop Shack. If HLS left England, major pharmaceutical companies might follow. And the cops actually tried to infiltrate and largely failed. I think they might have had more success later, but at least in those early days they didn't. And the UK failed at keeping HLS on their island. Unable to find financing in the UK, HLS was bailed out by an Arkansas investment group called Stevens Group run by a billionaire named Stevens. I'm sorry, that was so funny. Oh yeah, it was just the guys like, I'm a billionaire, my group is called my group. Me, by me, for me. Me, me, me, me, me, honey. Sorry, correct me, you read that. Also, I would just like to remark that this is as righteous as the pilgrims, you know, leaving the UK for their religious persecution. Yeah, where they like weren't actually being persecuted at all. And they were just like, eh, we can't tell anyone to stop having Christmas. Yeah, these goddamn plays, so many fucking plays. Yeah, and so HLS didn't actually move to the US, but they legally moved to the US and they kept most of their employees in the UK, but they legally moved to Maryland. And so, Jack found out who bailed them out and was like, all right, we're gonna go fuck with Stevens Group now. And okay, here's where I say that I don't have every piece of information about this group because I had to only write two parts. There's so many ins and outs. There's so many times like Stevens Groups drops them and then other people are dropping them and other people only fake drop them. Like the Bank of Scotland was like, oh, you burned a thing, we're totally gonna drop them. But they're like, ah, just kidding. We were like secretly not dropping them. And like, it just goes back forth a lot. And I'm sure the ins and outs are interesting, but they're not what we're focusing on today. Stevens Group was tied in with a bunch of presidents. Its founder helped the Bushes. Hillary Clinton served as their lawyer. They're from Little Rock, Arkansas. They're friends with Bill. But Shaq kept meeting with victories for a long time. They got a Boston bank to drop 1.5% of the company's stock. They got Merrill Lynch to drop 8 million shares. Why are those two numbers and different numbers? I don't know how many 8 million shares is because why did the book I read give me two different ones? I don't know, I'm annoyed at the, I mean, whatever, I'm not gonna, okay. Maybe it's like in England, they've gone 1.2 million stocks in the news. It's percentages, yeah. It's because it's just all fake. Yeah, totally. Honestly, because I read 8 million shares and I'm like, is that a meaningful number? Is that a lot of shares? Is that a little shares? I can't imagine having 8 million shares in anything. So I imagine it's all of the shares plus four, but it's not. I've never really read about a direct action pressure campaign at the scale before, besides the ones that are kind of tied into wars, like national liberation movements or the fight and apartheid in South Africa or something. Like this level of like, there's like activists in Germany threatening the German companies that are doing this. And this is the kind of thing that people do to try to confront war machines now, right? You have these like international grassroots leaderless, we have the following goal, which is to get people to stop sending weapons to Israel. And so people are going, fuck up the plane that's gonna bring the weapons through Ireland or the weapons manufacturer itself or whatever it is, you know? But Shack started to run into real problems as the campaign ground on and HLS kept not dying. They kept coming so close. They had every reason to believe that they were going to win, which is honestly part of the whole thing is that like part of the reason that there's thousands of people willing to do this, they thought they were winning. I have a question actually that just came up. I'm like, okay, so during all this time, does HLS make any like, oh, well, we'll like tone it down a little bit or something? Like, do they try to feed them anything to get them to stop? Or is it just like they're like, we're gonna fuck up these animals, no matter what you say and we're not gonna listen to you and you can do whatever you want. Everything I've read, and I haven't read everything, everything I read was less, we're going to tone it down and more like they're lying about us. We are actually incredibly moral. This is necessary. Don't you want kids to not die of cancer? We are the reason that kids don't die of cancer. And like, there's some truth in this, right? There is some stuff that animal testing was doing. And the thing is that HLS was the all comers, no matter what you're testing will do it place, right? And so they're focusing on the we do the good stuff and the activists are focusing on you do the bad stuff. And then you have a diehard core who believe even if it saves everyone from cancer, you can't kill this dog, right? And I'm not even, okay, I don't know. It's like a way that people can believe things, right? And, you know, because if animals are people too, then there's a different set of things that you'll believe in ways you'll act, right? And you also have these kind of fake grassroots groups that would be like protect scientists, you know? And some of them might have some legitimate grassroots-y stuff and like scientists and researchers were pretty upset about this happening to them. And there's also like the parallels between this and the anti-choice movement are strong. And both of them are coming from positions where they're like, we are stopping the Holocaust. This is how I lost friends when I was like a baby anarchist vegan in 2002, when I was like, isn't this the same thing? I agree with one and I don't agree with the other, right? Well, I partly agree with one and I completely don't agree with the other, you know? I mean, it's still like around defining like who gets to exist or not or whatever. I mean, that's the way they talk about it, right? Yeah. The anti-choices are like, this is life and you can't take it away. If you believe that that clump of cells is a person, then you're going to behave a certain way. And if you believe that a mouse is a person, you're going to behave a certain way. Which means you go and like bomb people, right? That's the way you behave. Yeah. And honestly, animal rights campaigners are less violent in general, you know? For sure. And I don't want to draw a complete and utter comparison like one to one, samey samey. But I think it is an important way to understand our enemies, right? And also to understand the danger of certain tactics and certain ways of looking at the world and like living within a certain type of echo chamber. And if you find yourself, as you learn about the world, thinking more and more things suddenly seem to make sense and seem justifiable, you should take a step back and really look and try to break out of that echo chamber. I was just talking about this with someone actually and the way I came down, I was like, anyone who's so righteous in their convictions that they like believe that other people deserve violence and death is like, I don't like that, right? I'm like, you shouldn't be so convinced you're right that other people should die about it, you know? Yeah, I mean, chill the fuck out. It's awkward because on some level, I'm like, well, I believe in the great deal of violence necessary to end chattel slavery in the United States, right? And like, ending the Nazi regime took an awful lot of violence, right? But I think that there's a difference between I'm going to stop an immediate problem, but that said, that's what these people think they're doing. Well, yeah, that's true. So I don't know, it's like I'm not a pacifist, but if you decide the following class of people, not based on their actions, but based on their characteristics or beliefs need to die, that's sketch. That's better put, because I'm not like, I'm not a pacifist either, and I wouldn't defend obviously the Nazis or whatever, but it gets into this with Israel stuff that people who are anti-Zionist get very close to like warning all Israelis dead in a way that I'm like, eh, I don't know. Right, you don't control where you're born. Yeah, and then you can start taking on all those anti-Semitic things. So it's just like, yeah. But this is a different situation, right? Like with Iran and all this stuff where it's like, there's the people who live in the place, and then there's the state who does the violence and whatever, like you gotta differentiate to a certain extent. Yeah, and there's a difference between the CEO of a company and the wife of the janitor's best friend. Exactly. And I'm being hyperbolic, but as we get to it later, I'm being a little hyperbolic, not a lot of hyperbolic. Shack runs into more problems as the campaign. HLS keeps not dying. And both the UK and the US passed law after law meant to protect animal agriculture and testing against animal rights activists. So the state is shoring up its power with which to confront shack. While shack is kind of in a holding pattern, the state is gaining more tools by which to come after it. They basically are adding extra car routes, like it's extra illegal to come after vivisectors. There's already a law where you're not allowed to hit someone in the head with a pickaxe handle, right? But actually the guy who did that did years in prison for the attack, as well as rescuing animals and burning empty poultry trucks. Okay, to get into more of the bad stuff, there's a moral quandary involving calling for leaders list resistance, where you say, here's a target, do whatever you want. All sorts of people might answer the call. For example, Robert Moby might answer the call. He's a producer of child sexual assault material. In maybe 2001, his trials in 2002, a man named Robert Moby, he threatened a CEO of a mutual fund. He said, quote, pull out of Huntington Life Sciences now. This week we are going to kill you. We have friends that are following you and we know everything you do. We know that you have a wife and kids. This is for real. Maybe we will shoot you or stun you with a stun gun or run over you. Maybe a bomb. Be warned, this is for real, not a joke or a threat. We will carry out our action. And when I first read about this guy, who got caught for writing this letter, I read that he got 54 months in prison for that threat and quote, other crimes. And I was like, what are his other crimes that he has been convicted of in August 2002? When they raided his house, they found thousands of images of child sexual abuse material on his computer. And he pled guilty to the threats, as well as 17 counts of producing child sexual assault material. And that got him his 54 months in prison. Well, yeah. So this is a guy who's like animals, but not kids. Well, yes. He did not get out of jail and become an upstanding citizen. When I was trying to find out more information about this, I mostly found his recent news, which is that he was back in the news a couple of years ago and based on age location and a photo, I believe it is the same Robert Moby. He went back to prison because he was stalking his 22 year old neighbor. When he got out, the police told the woman that they couldn't guarantee her safety. And so he still lived in her apartment building and she and her kids had to move. They might have ended up homeless. Fuck this guy. Yeah. But this is also very typical of anyone who has to deal with like trying to get protection against like a stalker or an abusive man. The police are like, we can do something after you get killed or shot or hurt. Yeah, we can help you after your dad. Yeah. Which is funny, they sure protected the CEO. Yup. Yeah. Of course, of course, Mack Pie, of course. Shaq denied having anything to do with Moby and I think they are telling the truth. They never coordinated with this man in any way. But he attached himself to their cause, right? He did the thing that people are like, ah, people should just do this stuff and some people might do that stuff. And then there's another case that does not leave a good taste in my mouth. And it's the case that I promised you of grave robbing, blackmail by corpse. Have you heard this movement story? Oh, I don't know this one. I was thinking about grave robbing earlier though. Just in general, just always on your mind, you're just gonna become a resurrectionist. In the back of my mind, yeah. I was like, this is giving me Frankenstein vibes. Well, what's funny is that like a lot of the medical science stuff, grave robbers would sell bodies to medical schools. Right, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, yeah. I once drafted a novel I never wrote called The Resurrectionist. If your job is you are a criminal who rob graves to sell the bodies to medical schools, you're a resurrectionist or a resurrection man. So yeah, they're like, we're not grave robbers. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So one of the most evil and metal things ever written is by Shakespeare. And it is put in the mouth of Aaron the Moor, who's the racist stereotype character in Titus Andronicus. And Titus Andronicus, before he gets hanged, he goes on to say, yes, I've done a lot of terrible things. He talks about raping people and murdering people and all this stuff. And then he says, oft have I digged up dead men from their graves and set them upright at their dear friend's door, even when their sorrows almost was forgot and on their skins as on the bark of trees, have with my knife carved in Roman letters. Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead. Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things as willingly as one would kill a fly, but nothing grieves me heartily indeed, but that I cannot do 10,000 more. And so when Shakespeare is doing the like, what's the most evil thing I can think of? What one of the smartest poets in English comes up with is digging up the body of someone that you love and reminding you about that. Yeah. Fucking carving into them too. I know. And the more it does more than the animal rights people I talk to do, but it's better as fiction is all I have to say about let not your sorrows die, though I am dead. Yeah, that's a violent ass play, but yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah. And the movie is beautiful for my like teenage. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of overlooked, I think, but yeah. But do you know what? May or may not be as evil. You missing out on the products and services that support this show. And we're back. So there was this guinea pig farm in the UK and it was breeding guinea pigs to be used as guinea pigs. Aw, they're so cute. I know. Too bad they were named that way. I know they were like nominative determinism. They're like, oh man, our face fucked. We got named guinea pigs. I always wanted one as a kid. They're so cute. They're so cute. And like, you know, there was like one at school and then like they had you take it home for a week and then take care of it. Ugh, guinea pigs, adorable. One of my friends had a very small apartment and a roommate, but still they're like kind of like sun roomy alcove thing. But it was like half their living room was entirely a guinea pig like series of cages with like tunnels between them and stuff. Fuck yeah, so cool. Yeah. They're like, the guinea pigs live in luxury and we're over here. Yeah, totally, exactly. The conditions at this guinea pig farm were not as nice as they were at my friend's apartment. I watched one of the undercover videos from an ALF person who broke in in 2004-ish. And guinea pigs were resorting to cannibalism in these windowless sheds where they spent their entire short lives if they weren't sold to be cut open while they're alive. One of the daily tasks at this place is to clean up the guinea pig corpses from the little guys who died overnight. And again, this is the place that's breeding them. And also lab animals, expensive. Like a lab rat, an unspecialized lab rat is about $1,000. And I don't think there's a reason you need to, they could have perfectly fine lives until they have a weird, very strange ending. So people were like, we don't like this guinea pig factory, we would like to shut it down. And it was a long campaign, it was six years long. It started in 1999 and it won in the end. And they did all the usual shit, endless death threats, the occasional mail bomb, chasing off employees by writing their names in shotgun shells outside their houses, normal stuff. I think that was the janitor. They left a doll with a knife in its chest on somebody's doorstep. More than a hundred different people were targeted with threats for associations with the guinea pig farm, including women who played darts with one of the owner's wives. No, I say. 450 criminal acts were recorded in just two years of the six year campaign. And then one day in 2004, a group of people dug up the body of one of the owner's mother-in-laws and stole it. What the fuck? I'm just like, imagine they're like sitting somewhere being like, I got an idea. I'm just watching Titus Adronicus and look at that. And everyone's like, that sounds fucking good, man. Nice one. I think that that's what happened. They're also all in their fucking mid-30s. Come on. So no excuse. You don't get that 20s excuse. I know. I know. And they sent a note saying, you can't have her back unless you close the farm. The cops had a likely suspect that they rounded up right away. They showed up and raided this guy's house. One of the public spokespeople for the ALF was this guy named John Curtin. Very serious names they have over there in England. And he had spent two years in prison, 20 years earlier, for an animal rights related grave robbing attempt. In 1984, he had tried to dig up a recently dead Duke to cut off his head to send to the princess. So this is just like your thing, bro. Yeah. No, this is a different guy though at the end. We'll find out. Okay. It was just the inspiration. And I just think it's the most British thing I can imagine is the animal rights campaigner digging up a Duke's to cut off his head to the princess. And this Duke was like specifically a like hunter who would like go and hunt animals in Africa and hunt endangered species and shit. You know, it's like what he did with his like money and power. John Curtin never succeeded. His spade broke. He was like, this is a dumb publicity stunt. What the fuck was I doing? He spent two years in prison for it. They raided his house and they arrest him. And what he has to say about this new digging up of a grave. I have been trying for the past 20 years to get away from the Duke of Bayfort thing. But that was not the same at all as the Yoxal desecration. A few of us had come up with the idea as a publicity stunt. There was a whole dug, but there was no body or bones lifted. I realize now how sick it was to do it. My own mother died a few years ago and I stood at her grave and thought about the Duke and regretted what I had done. But at the same time, he was a man whose entire life was taken up with blood sports. He was a psychopath who killed lions and tigers and protected species on safaris abroad and who was mad about hunting. Mrs. Hammond was different. I find what happened to her revolting and appalling like any normal person, even though that might sound rich coming from someone like me. I would urge whoever has the remains to return them. For me, this grave robbing is like handing everything on a plate to our opponents. It is a disaster, public relations wise. And this is the fucking spokesperson of the ALF. This is the person who's like, man, I don't give a shit what happens to you motherfuckers. You know, like this isn't a milk toast guy. And it really did turn people off this campaign. For 18 months, the owners held out regardless as the campaign dragged on. Finally, they caved. And movement, lore, oral, word of mouth is that they caved because of the dead mom thing. And they announced that by the end of 2005, they would end all guinea pig farming operations and return to like regular, regular farming. And they were like, so can we please have our mom back? Wait, how do you revert from guinea pig farming to regular farming? You're like, now we're gonna plant things? Oh, I mean, I think they were doing animal agriculture, right? And like they had other animals on the farm. So it was just like, they kind of were like, oh wait, there's our shed where the guinea pigs eat each other. You know? Oh yeah. That's interesting though that you said people were like, well, this is the thing that did it. Cause then that means that there are people who are like, this was actually a chill thing to do. Yeah, I know I've talked to a lot of people who believe that this is a perfectly chill thing to do. Yeah. And that makes me feel insane. You know? Cause I'm like, but it's not. There's certain things that you don't do to your enemies. Right? Like even if you could justify violence, I don't, it's just... No, I'm way more supportive of violence than digging up someone's mom. Yeah. What the fuck? That's not even, doesn't even really make sense. I mean, like when you put it in the Titus Andronicus context, it's like, whoa, that's fucking evil. But like as a tactic, if you just think it up for like a protest, right? You're not like some fucking person going to, to fucking lay waste to a city. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. Like what? And the activists didn't return the body. Whoa. And that's where I'm like, any semblance of sympathy. Now you just have no honor. What the fuck happened to that body? I was living in the Nevilleas at the time and I was friends with this kid, like literally a 16 year old who told me the story breathlessly excited. And I was appalled. And then I was extra appalled when I found out they didn't keep their word and return the body. And the kid was like, why would you return the body? That would just get you caught. Yeah. All right. I'm not even trying to make a judgment on this person. He was 16 years old. But the cops caught the grave robbers anyway. And the way they caught them was the cops being really clever. They had some likely suspects, like a bunch of people. I suspect that they were like, oh, these people are involved in the campaign and like are like kind of on the sketchier end of it. We think it might be them. And so they went on TV, probably channel four, I don't know. I got 25% chance again, right? And they went on TV and they were like, well, whoever has the body, I bet they don't even have it. They need to prove it. And they were waiting outside these people's houses. And so then everyone left and got in the car with like a shovel and ski masks and shit and drove off to the woods. And so the cops tailed them and were like, all right, you're the fucking people who did this. That also proves how bad a tactic it is. They feel like, oh, if you fall for that cause you're like so committed to this fucking robbing thing or like, all right. And they were never actually convicted of the grave robbing. They were convicted of the extortion. And so you'll find old posts on the indie media of people being like, it's a conspiracy. The trial is a sham. They didn't steal the body. They stole the fucking body. Later, one of them gave up where it was. Like when they were like caught anyway, one of them was like, go get the body, it's over there. And the 84 year old dead woman was reburied. And there was four convictions total for that. And they spent total of two to five years in prison each. And it may or may not be what shut down the guinea pig farm. And fuck, I just, I hate this. I hate every part of it. Awful. Sort of tells you something, like if you decide that that was why, you know, versus some other reason. It might have been why they shut down the farm. Okay. Because mostly when you threaten people, people are like, well, fuck you then. But if you do it long enough and bad enough, people eventually break. Yeah. And it doesn't make me feel good that that's true. And I don't want to say that this is the exception, but certainly this is the extreme, right? I'm not covering a lot, like hundreds or thousands of actions that are much easier to justify and explain to people, right? Like being like, you invest in this at your bank. So we've broken your windows and thrown red paint. And, you know, like there's like direct action activist ways of doing things. And I'm not covering those in as much detail. And I feel a little bit bad about that by covering sort of the extreme part of it. But you can't not tell this story about the fucking grave robbing, partly because I actually think leaving out the story about the grave robbing and some of the other stuff is kind of doing a disservice even to ourselves and our own movements to say like, everything was fine and glorious. We did nothing wrong, you know? Yeah. You sort of get defined by the like worst thing, I guess in a way. Yeah. Which is also like, I don't know, this isn't making me think about the history of anarchism too, right? Because if you're an anarchist, you'd be like, well, I can't control what other people do. And people are going to do fucked up shit. But then it falls back on everyone, you know? Yeah. Which happened, I think in the beginning of the 20th century with like the bombing shit, you know? Which mostly drove people away from anarchism. Right, exactly. Not everywhere, in Russia it actually probably helped, although it was actually mostly the central Democrats doing it in Russia in like 1905 to 10 or whatever. Right. But like, I remember reading about like, an anarchist killed an unpopular president, McKinley. And it kind of ended anarchism in America as like the dominant force of the left. Right, yeah. Like. No good. So in general, the way that the Shack campaign worked was that while individuals would get caught for individual actions, that's not the whole movement, right? And you know, the people who are saying like, oh, here's stuff that's happening, aren't in charge and aren't criminally liable because of free speech. That's the idea anyway. The US government had different ideas. I know I've jumped back across the pond here and we're back in the US, but the FBI declared eco and animal extremism to be the number one domestic terrorist threat in 2005, despite the fact that they had literally harmed nobody. And if you look at any studies of violent extremism, the right wing regularly kills just several orders of magnitude more people. And in 2006, you get the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which says that causing damage to any animal enterprise is terrorism. Freeing animals is terrorism. Breaking the windows of a factory farm is terrorism. If you spray paint puppy killer on somebody's car, that's terrorism. And the repression worked to be blunt. Protests were criminalized more and more intensely. And in 2006, the Shack 7 were convicted on conspiracy to commit terrorism for running the Shack website. There was actually six of them, but charges were dropped against the seventh person. And so then they were like, well, we've already come up with the Shack 7. So the movement itself is the seventh person. Shack 7 sounds better than Shack 6. It does. And the Shack website didn't actually say, hey, everyone here, go do crime. It just was a clearinghouse for information about HLS and people connected to it, including I believe, like, doxing info. It was then and now generally seen as a free speech trial. Josh Harper, one of the convicted folks said, quote, I understand why home demonstrations and personal targeting is so controversial, but when you take a billionaire like Warren Stevens, he's got this tremendous amount of comfort. Every time he plays golf, there you are. When he goes out shopping, there you are. And when he comes home, there you are. And I think that this is accurate when you're talking about a fucking billionaire, when you're talking about the people who are destroying the world, when you're talking about the person who punches the puppy, when you're talking about the person who owns the punchy pumping comp, good thing. When you talk about the investors, maybe you have to say, like, look, we will pick at you, but we're not gonna protest outside your kid's school just because you invested this company, right? We have to understand that degrees of separation change things about how we handle people. Another defendant, Andy Stepnian, told a reporter from the Intercept, quote, simply because we didn't close Huntington doesn't disqualify the tactics. The question instead becomes, when should these tactics be deployed and with what frequency and is it always right? Because you were like, you know, you don't go to the person's kid's school. When I was thinking like Elizabeth Warren was like at dinner with someone and this Palestinian woman came up and interrupted their dinner and I was like, this is like fucking, that's good, that's amazing. That's Elizabeth Warren, yeah, she's making these decisions. Right, but I guess you could think about protesting outside of someone's house, that there are kids there, they could be fucking scared, but I also am like Chuck Stumer, fucking whatever, these people, I don't know, some of these people shouldn't live in peace is how I feel. Just get off easy with no hitches. But the person who works the front desk at the weapons manufacturer, maybe you shouldn't go to- Right. Maybe you go to our bosses. Yes. You know, like I think the movement has thought about this and does think about it, you know, and I think it's telling in that quote, like someone who went to jail for this being like, yeah, like these tactics work, sometimes they're appropriate in certain situations when where these things, it's not neutral, you have to think about these things. And to end with a bit of a reminder of the thing that they were fighting against, because I think that's really important to consider in this too. HLS continued, it has changed names and bought out a couple of times, Shaq didn't take it out, they came close again and again, and also I think that they like, they changed the conversation about this, they really fucked with the Overton window about this, and I think a lot of the understanding about what happens with animal testing and like making people justify it, making people justify every single act of animal testing, instead of being like, whatever, it's just a fucking animal, I could do whatever I want, has happened because of people who are like more extreme, right? But HLS didn't stop being fucked up. And Vigo, which is what they changed their name to for a while before they got bought out by someone else, another dumb, weird corporate sounding name. It was found in 2021 to have more than 60 animal welfare act violations at one facility, and these aren't like 60 individual acts. One of these 60 was not investigating the death of 300 puppies. Dogs were being euthanized for minor injuries without anesthesia, nursing mother dogs were denied food, dogs were found to be kept in tiny cages covered in bugs and literal shit, there was one veterinarian at the facility for thousands of dogs. This is in 2021, because I started with being like, oh, but things kind of got better. And they like, you know, help pave the way for more, like people who are using animals for money are going to just maximize profit. 446 animals were seized when the facility in Virginia was closed, or it was more than 4,000, depending on your source. I get really annoyed at this kind of stuff. That is an order of magnitude. There's a four in there. Yeah, the company pled guilty to conspiring to violate the Clean Water Act for letting feces discharge into the creek. And they had to pay $22 million in damages. And what's interesting is that these are criminal charges, including felonies against this corporation, and it just has to pay a fine. If corporations are people, go to fucking jail. You just shouldn't, it's not even how I want to set up society, I don't want corporations or laws, but you have some consistency here. If a corporation gets to count as a person and has rights, it should be fucking put in a goddamn cell if I have to. I'm turning around. I'm like, you know, give the prairie land defendants fines. Just be like, yeah, totally. All right, all felonies, fines now. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Yeah. And I have to say credit where it's due. I know I'm just kind of talking shit on everybody in all sides of this, the whole fucking episode. Pita led the investigation that revealed the horrors at that place. So Pita, less sexist billboards and focus on undercover investigations into animal abuse. You're good at that. And Brigitte Bardot is dead. So Pita is like Scott Freen out because they don't have this fascist as their spokesperson. Oh my God, I didn't even know that. I did. Yeah. Brigitte Bardot, who is like, you know, this sexy French actress from the 60s did some cool songs with Starr's Gemsworth. Then became a Pita spokesperson and a fascist. And a giant fascist. Yeah. Whoa. What's funny is that the animal rights and environmental communities, you do get a lot of like celebrities involved. Yeah. And like one of the people who was cut from the script because it was just too much of a side quest and the episode was already running long, the original voice of Lucy from an animated Peanuts movie and was also on Lassie and was a... Lucy Lassie. Some other classic. I think her character was named Lucy in the Lassie show too. But she's an animal rights activist who was getting beat up by cops and suing them and doing all this stuff, you know? I just, I can't remember her name because I cut it from the script. I'm terribly sorry. And if you did listen, I don't know, whatever. And I will say, I'm glad animal testing seems to be on its way out. And don't fucking keep animals in conditions like that, you motherfuckers. And I do think it's important to kind of end on remembering that this is the thing that they are fighting against, even if there are some examples in here that I am not happy with. Yeah. Sometimes I think about this, like anarchism in a way lays the groundwork, I think, for any movement that's been at all successful or like visible. You know, it doesn't necessarily need to be people who are like self about anarchists, but like the anarchist way of doing things. And then, you know, it's like, okay, so the successes that we've seen end up being reforms that are reversible, right? And so is the best thing that we can do with the most radical, you know, actions to get reforms that are reversible, then what the fuck are we doing? Is it anarchist, you know, like, that's not what we want. No, it is interesting. But I also am like, what we do is we participate in our lives as fully and genuinely as we can and actually say what we want and be against the things we're against. And also like anarchism is more of a verb than a noun, right? I mean, anarchism is a noun, but you know, like it implies action and it matters about like how we go about things. About halfway through, I was like, why the fuck did I pick this topic? I'm gonna make everyone unhappy. And I also like, there's so much more to this. It's like, and everything I'm reading about it is so biased, including biases that I often share, but that's where I have to look the hardest, you know? When I read something and I'm like, yeah, yeah, right on. I'm like, oh fuck, I better find some other fucking point of view about this, you know? That doesn't really answer your question, but it just... I think you're right, like anarchism, I share the same idea of like anarchism is the way you... Oh, I probably got it from you. I got it from you, babe. Oh, thanks. Well, what if people wanna get more from you? What if you have a worker on collective of writers who collect shiny objects? Yes, I belong to a murder of crows named Kaugh. It's a writer collective with Carla Joy Bergman, Danny Burleson and Vicky Osterweil. We've like collectivized our writing and output to share with the world, so you don't have to subscribe to like a million different things. And if you subscribe to us, you get all of our work, plus the Discord community, where we do book clubs and writing workshops. And yeah, you can write us advice questions. I also host a podcast, The Breakup Theory, where you can also ask me questions if you wanna hear me say things. And also I just wanna plug this book that I'm finishing called Live Through This in Anarchist Antidote Despair. We're just coming out with Pluto within the next year, which touches on some of the stuff that we're talking about, about how anarchism actually could work in our lives, because we know what the fuck we're doing. And politics sucks us into a spectacle of shit. Well, yeah, we don't need to know all the time what we're doing. I mean, No, no, no, I know, yeah. But yes. Fuck yeah. Well, thanks for having me on too, because this is awesome and I love your show. And you know, I love your writing. Thanks. Yeah, for anyone listening, well, not how we met, but early on in hanging out, I would get to go to Shule's classes and they would have read A Country of Ghosts, which is the thing I'll plug. I wrote a book once called A Country of Ghosts. It is an anarchist utopian novel set in an alternate early 20th century, late 19th century. There's a war in it. Some people get shot. It's really good. You like envision a world that has some really important points that, yeah, I recommend it highly. Thanks. And all your other books too. Oh, Sophie, you guys think you want to plug? Ah, just Cool Zone Media. Hell yeah. All right. See you all soon. Bye. Bye. Bye. Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.