The Complete X Ultra-Militance X
2020-11-07
BUAV Liberator
2020-11-01
The Complete The Beast
2020-10-31
The Beast International Times Supplements 1-2, The Beast 1-10 (1978-1981. London, England)
The raw stuff of history: An incomplete, unfinished Ronnie Lee manuscript.
2013-01-31
Unfinished Manuscript (Early to mid 1980s, England)
A few months ago we contacted our friend Robin Webb to borrow some of his animal liberation publications for scanning. Robin cheerily agreed to send us a package, and when it arrived it included some of the rarest publications we have yet received. We gingerly pulled one gem after another from the box, and just when we thought we couldn’t be more excited we found this unfinished history of the ALF written by Ronnie Lee.
Drafted almost thirty years ago, this publication spent decades in police custody before ending up in the possession of the ALF Press Office. After its trip through the evidence room the manuscript is missing over a hundred pages, but still bristles with history.
We are still investigating the story behind this document, but felt it would be unfair to our readers to keep it out of circulation any longer. Here, distributed to the public for the first time, is the story of the Animal Liberation Front as told by one its founders.
Against All Odds
2012-06-05
Against All Odds (1986, London, England.)
Editors note: The TALON Conspiracy endeavors to archive the best, most complete copies available of all publications in our collection. Although Against All Odds had previously been posted on March 14, 2011, we have since found a higher quality copy from the original publisher. Our first posting had been a Canadian reprint with bad generation loss that was also missing several photos printed in the British edition. The Canadian version can still be found here.
Originally published in England as a book 25 years ago, Against All Odds was regularly distributed in North America as a low cost zine. It remains one of the best publications documenting the rise of the Animal Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Leagues in England.
In many ways, the 1980s was the high water mark of the Animal Liberation movement. In 1984, thousands of people in England participated in direct action against vivisection, staging large scale raids against six labs. Multitudes of people would overwhelm security in broad daylight and remove the oppressed creatures inside, often causing minor damage along the way and taking out valuable footage which was used to grow the movement. Many dozens of arrests followed these raids, but it is arguable that police response was not the cause of death of this mass militant movement taking shape in the UK.
Around this same time we saw the emergence of groups such as the Hunt Retribution Squad and Animal Rights Militia. Rather than rejecting the idea that animal rights activists were fanatics, HRS and ARM embraced that term and seemingly reveled in the negative imagery presented by the media. The Hunt Retribution Squad went so far as to release images of masked activists wielding clubs, chainsaws, and even pavement cutters. The front pages of newspapers widely reported on threats made by HRS to harm hunters if they attacked human opponents of hunting. In the end these counter-assaults never took place, but the damage was done. This type of macho posturing was repellant to many in the movement, and it provided great fodder for the police, courts, and conservative PR teams to use in the war against direct action. Certainly, the few acts of violence taken by the Animal Rights Militia could not outweigh the value of the mass raids and rising public consciousness taking place in England at the time and largely contributed to the recession of a growing struggle for non-human emancipation.
Written in accessible language and unafraid of nuance, its tactical analysis and historical documentation remain valuable to this day. Against All Odds is essential reading for the modern animal liberationist.
Outfoxed
2011-07-01
OUTFOXED (1983, Mike Huskisson, London, England)
After participating in a series of high profile actions, including the famous “smoking beagles” liberation, early animal rights activist Mike Huskisson went on to pioneer the field of investigations into abuse and torture. Outfoxed was the product of that first investigation. It remains an important documentation of the early days of our movement and the type of undercover work that makes groups such as Mercy for Animals so prominent today. Conflict Gypsy is proud to share this classic, complete with a new introduction from the author.
My book Outfoxed is primarily an account of my undercover work for the League Against Cruel Sports to expose the cruelty inherent in the bloodsports of fox hunting, stag hunting, hare hunting, mink hunting and hare coursing in England over a two year period from April 1981 to May 1983. Outfoxed was written immediately after the investigation ended and published before the end of that year. At the time it was quite a novel idea to join the world of hunting, a pastime that the author wholly opposed, simply in order to film, photograph and report the cruelty that occurred so as to bring that cruelty to the attention of the outside world.
This was all in a different age. It was before video cameras and hidden cameras. The movie film that was taken during this investigation was taken with a Super-8 mm cine camera. This meant the sequences were limited to just a few minutes each before the film had to be turned over. All filming had to be done in good light. The highest quality of lens was chosen in preference to having sound.
The film cameras were exactly that – 35mm Nikon film cameras. Unlike modern digital cameras you took 36 images on a single film and then had to change your film. There was no opportunity to immediately preview your images to check the quality. You chose your film and the ASA setting for it and that was that for the whole film; there was no opportunity, as there is with modern cameras, to change the film speed settings from image to image. There was also no built in flash.
Finally, this investigation was carried out before the day of the mobile phone and the hand-held GPS device. When I was in the field with the hunting fraternity I was on my own. There was no opportunity to nip behind a hedge and make a secret call for back-up, or send a text message. If my opponents worked out who I really was and sought to take me to task I would have to talk my way out of it or else! If I needed to call for help I had to find a phone box. To know exactly where I was I had to be map-aware.
Before I carried out the investigation and wrote the book I had on several occasions been in trouble with the law for animal rights activity and had been imprisoned. The investigation and subsequent book was a plea to colleagues to see that animal rights could be advanced effectively entirely lawfully. I did not want then and do not want now to see kind compassionate people imprisoned. We can beat the animal abusers and bullies by using brains rather than brawn and by acting always within the law. It is the animal abusers who should be imprisoned not those who seek to protect life.
By showing the world what our opponents get up to, the barbaric way in which they use and abuse animals when they think they are out of sight, we really can generate the public anger that can force an end to these cruelties.
Knowing that Outfoxed was about to be published the hunting fraternity made all manner of threats that they would take libel action against the author and publisher. In the event to this day I have not received so much as a single letter of complaint as to the truth of anything that I wrote. After publication and following extracts being printed in the News of the World I did receive a letter from a young girl saying that when she was photographed at one of the hunts she had been raised by her parents to enjoy hunting but with growing older she had distanced herself from the pastime and was actually now working to improve animal welfare. Curiously in subsequent years some of the hunting people that I had befriended and infiltrated also told me, strictly off the record of course, that my account was a very factual record of hunting and one Hunt Master even asked me for a copy of my book!
Some of the pictures that I took during the investigation that were published in Outfoxed were widely published by the media at large including the likes of Stern magazine and the National Geographic Magazine.
All the bloodsports that I exposed in the course of my investigation were subsequently banned in England by Parliament through the Hunting Act 2004.
I now run my own campaigning animal welfare group: the Animal Cruelty Investigation Group. This was set up in June 1989 to fund the expenses of investigation work. You can find our web site at: www.acigawis.co.uk
Mike Huskisson,
Suffolk, England February 25th 2011
e-mail: acig@btinternet.com
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Against All Odds
2011-03-14
Originally published in England as a book 25 years ago, Against All Odds was regularly distributed in North America as a low cost zine. It remains one of the best publications documenting the rise of the Animal Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Leagues in England.
In many ways, the 1980s was the high water mark of the Animal Liberation movement. In 1984, thousands of people in England participated in direct action against vivisection, staging large scale raids against six labs. Multitudes of people would overwhelm security in broad daylight and remove the oppressed creatures inside, often causing minor damage along the way and taking out valuable footage which was used to grow the movement. Many dozens of arrests followed these raids, but it is arguable that police response was not the cause of death of this mass militant movement taking shape in the UK.
Around this same time we saw the emergence of groups such as the Hunt Retribution Squad and Animal Rights Militia. Rather than rejecting the idea that animal rights activists were fanatics, HRS and ARM embraced that term and reveled in the negative imagery presented by the media. The Hunt Retribution Squad went so far as to release images of masked activists wielding clubs, chainsaws, and even pavement cutters. The front pages of newspapers widely reported on threats made by HRS to harm hunters if they attacked human opponents of hunting. In the end these counter-assaults never took place, but the damage was done. This type of macho posturing was repellent to many in the movement, and it provided great fodder for the police, courts, and conservative PR teams to use in the war against direct action. Certainly, the few acts of violence taken by the Animal Rights Militia could not outweigh the value of the mass raids and rising public consciousness taking place at the time, and contributed to the recession of a growing struggle for non-human emancipation.
Written in accessible language and unafraid of nuance, its tactical analysis and historical documentation remain valuable to this day. Against All Odds is essential reading for the modern animal liberationist.
