Latest Issue of the Animal Lib Press Office Newsletter

Some people need to be frightened by the way they live their lives.
- Lobo Siete Truenos (shaman)

The early months of 2008 have seen a major spike in underground direct action, perhaps driven by increasing repression of known animal rights activists by US law enforcement at the behest of affected industry. Accordingly, support of the Press Office has flourished, and Press Officers continue to conduct dozens of interviews with the mainstream media, providing the animals' side of the story in news articles and accounts, deliver inspirational and informative talks all over the world, and hopefully inspire many more people to join the struggle against those who abuse, exploit, torture, and murder non-human animals.

There have been those who have criticized the Press Office for reporting on, and refusing to condemn direct action taken on the behalf of animal liberation that harmed or threatened to harm human beings. Not innocent humans but those complicitous in the torture, enslavement and murder of non-human animals. The Press Office has tried to maintain the perspective not of the privileged, predominantly white participants who so commonly make up the soldiers in the struggle for animal liberation, but that of other historical movements that seek to end the obscenity and egregious violence perpetrated on innocent victims. Other struggles, including the fight against apartheid in South Africa, the fight to free black slaves here in the US and the fight for the rights of indigenous cultures, have not had the luxury or the option of avoiding the use of physical force to protect themselves, and have always used reciprocal violence as one tool in an arsenal of tactics to alleviate oppression. In a battle for the moral and ethical high ground, in the fight on behalf of the animals, the most oppressed, abused and tortured beings the world has ever known, the possibility of further human casualties exists.

Indeed, many animal rights campaigners have already been killed in the struggle. We do not encourage or call for the killing of (non-innocent) human beings, only state that we believe it may be part of the struggle for animal liberation, just as it
has been an important factor in every other successful, and no less important, liberation struggle.

Thus far, the animal rights movement is and has been the most peaceful and restrained movement the world has ever known considering the amount of terror, abuse and murder perpetrated upon innocent animals for greed and profit. If by chance violence is used by those who fight for non- human sentient beings, it must be looked at in perspective and in historical context.

For the animals:
The Press Office

Never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way. ~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.