They would follow hunters for miles, blaring noisemakers to keep their prey moving and putting out false scents to throw off the dogs. In the U.S., Paul and other activists focused on Big Horn Sheep hunts in the Mojave Desert. The project he made the most enduring commitment to was founding the American version of the Hunt Saboteurs, an organization that had been physically disrupting fox and deer hunts in England since the '60s and which was a precursor to the original Animal Liberation Front in the United Kingdom. In the '90s, he helped shoot undercover video footage of the brutal killing of minks on fur farms, and derailed shark hunts off the coast of Santa Cruz. In 1989, Paul and another activist executed the largest raid in the ALF's history at the University of Arizona at Tucson, freeing and re-housing about 1,200 animals. That same year, he broke into a research facility at Loma Linda University in Southern California, removing dogs and research documents. The next month, he cut a section of a wooden fence at a wild horse corral run by the Bureau of Land Management in California, freeing the captured horses. In 1987, he participated in the first ALF arson in the United States, at an animal research laboratory under construction at the University of California at Davis. He quickly became one of the most prolific underground animal rights activists alive. It always begins on the fringes and, if allowed, creeps steadily towards all forms of dissent."įollowing the University of Oregon raid, Paul's life became animal liberation. "This is how political repression operates. "Now, the same corporate and political interests who were calling for a crackdown on the ELF are calling for a crackdown on undercover investigators and on people like Tim DeChristopher who is in prison for non-violent civil disobedience," Potter continues. Potter sees a continuity of this pressure campaign in both the government's recent aggressive prosecution of climate activist Tim DeChristopher and in the passage of laws this year in Utah and Iowa criminalizing undercover investigations of animal abuse on factory farms. Potter, who has himself been questioned by the FBI in the past for legal protest activity, discerns in the terrorism label a campaign of pressure by law enforcement agencies, at the behest of animal enterprise and resource extraction industries, upon licit groups to curtail their Constitutionally protected advocacy activity. "The FBI's pursuit of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, including Jonathan Paul, was the largest domestic terrorism investigation in history," says Will Potter, author of Green Is The New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege. A few days later, the "Animal Liberation Front - Equine and Zebra Liberation Network" faxed a communiqué to Craig Rosebraugh, ALF spokesperson, detailing the steps taken in the action and claiming responsibility for it.Īctivists who have been in the FBI's sights tend to disagree. They stopped at a pre-determined location to dispose of their clothes, gloves and masks and destroy them with muriatic acid. After the ignition timers were set, the perpetrators fled the scene in Tubbs' van. Ferguson carried the fuel, and Dibbee planted the devices.
#Animal liberation front terrorism software
The other three participants in the arson were Kevin Tubbs, a Nebraskan transplant who had moved to Eugene to work for the Earth First! Journal, Joseph Dibee, a software engineer at Microsoft, and Jacob Ferguson, who later turned into an FBI informant. Paul, along with an activist he had recruited named Jennifer Kolar, had mixed the fuel. An incendiary device consisting of a mixture of glycerin soap and diesel fuel nicknamed "vegan jello" accomplished what a decade of legal means had failed to achieve.
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