Animal Liberation, Punk & Direct Action: An Interview with ALF Founder Ronnie Lee

A vegan for more than 50 years and a relentless animal rights activist throughout that entire time, Ronnie Lee is best known as the founder of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the United Kingdom.

Ronnie Lee’s activism began when he joined the Hunt Saboteurs Association in the early 1970s. He then formed a direct action group called the Band of Mercy, named after an 1824 animal rights youth group. Lee and another activist were arrested in 1974 for raiding an animal testing facility, and he was sentenced to three years in prison. He was released after one year and founded the ALF. He later found himself in prison again for his involvement with the ALF.

Today, at the age of 72, Ronnie Lee’s focus has shifted from illegal forms of direct action to vegan education and animal rights advocacy, with the goal of transforming the current speciesist culture into a vegan one built on the principles of compassion and freedom for all species. But were Ronnie Lee and the other founding members of the ALF influenced by punk and its DIY ethic? Let’s find out in this interview.

Well, let’s start at the beginning. When did you become vegan and what was your first involvement with animal liberation activism?

I became vegan in the spring of 1972. My first involvement with animal liberation-type activities was with the Hunt Saboteurs, and that was pretty soon after that. I saw a news item on television about the Hunt Saboteurs and I immediately wanted to join them and get involved in protecting wildlife. So I got in touch with them and they put me in touch with my nearest Hunt Saboteurs group. That’s how I got involved and began sabotaging hunts.

Animal liberation became a major theme in the anarcho-punk scene. Which came first? The ALF or the punk scene? Was there a connection between the two in the early days?

The ALF came first, because the ALF didn’t really start out as the ALF. What happened was that I was involved with the Hunt Saboteurs, but we really wanted to take stronger action against the Hunt. The Hunt Saboteurs Association tried to operate within the law, but we wanted to do things that broke the law.

Then six of us had a meeting, this was in 1973, we formed a group called the Band of Mercy (named after a 19th-century RSPCA youth group). The first thing we did was to go to the hunt kennels, the hunt headquarters and damage their vehicles so they couldn’t go hunting. We were actually trying to stop them from going on a hunt, rather than stopping them once they were underway. That’s how it really started, and then we started attacking all the targets, like we tried to destroy an animal research laboratory that was being built, we badly damaged two boats that were used for seal hunting, and we caused a lot of damage to both vehicles and buildings where animals were bred for experiments. And that group was called the Band of Mercy, but in 1974 two of us got arrested and then sent to prison. We spent a year in prison.

When I got out of prison, it was 1976. There were a lot of other people who wanted to be involved in this kind of activity, but they weren’t happy with the name because it didn’t mention animals. So we changed it to the Animal Liberation Front. And so the name Animal Liberation Front dates back to 1976. And that was really a little bit before punk happened.

The first time I heard about punk was when I was sent back to prison. I was involved in a raid on a place in South London that bred mice and supplied them to laboratories for animal experiments. So a group of us caused damage to their vehicles and we rescued over a 100 mice from this place. But I was arrested for it and sent to prison. I spent eight months in prison because it was my second sentence. And it was during that second sentence that I first heard about punk. That would have been in 1977.

There was a lot of coverage in the newspapers about punk and it was really quite negative coverage. They said these people, these punks, they spit and they fight, they are not very pleasant people. It wasn’t very positive coverage of punk. So I didn’t really know what to think, I still haven’t heard any of the music. But when I got out of prison, a friend of mine who was involved in Hunt Saboteurs and the ALF was really into punk. He played me, I remember going to his house and he asked me how come I never listened to punk music and I said no, I didn’t. So he played me the Ramones, it was an LP by the Ramones he played, and I thought it was fantastic. I really, really liked it. So that’s really how I got into punk. I was living in London at the time and a lot of my friends who were in the Hunt Saboteurs and the ALF liked punk music and we would go and see bands. The band we went to see the most was The Clash, but we went to see lots of other bands. We saw The Jam, we saw the Buzzcocks, I think I saw the Sex Pistols once. And you know, we were really into punk music.

The guy who introduced me to punk, his name was Gary Treadwell, he was a guitarist and he suggested to me that we should form a punk band where the members would be people from the Hunt Saboteurs or the ALF. So that’s what we did, the few of us got together and we formed a punk band (called Total Attack, listen to their only demo here). We only really went for about two years, probably 1979 and 1980. It was only a two-year period when we were playing. But almost all our songs were about animal liberation and we played mainly in the London area and I knew a lot of people in other punk bands who were also in the Hunt Saboteurs, who were active as the Animal Liberation Front, or very often they were both. There was a lot of involvement of animal liberation activists from the punk scene.

What did you think about Crass? Are they important for spreading the message of animal liberation or at least vegetarianism in your opinion?

Well, there was Crass and also Conflict as well. I thought their lyrics were very good, but I wasn’t that keen on that kind of music. I didn’t really find it very tuneful. (laughing) So I didn’t really like their music, but I thought their lyrics were good.

There was actually some difference, at least in the lyrics, between anarcho-pacifists like Crass and those who advocated militant direct action like Conflict, Anti-System, or The Apostles. Anyway, I guess you liked the Conflict’s song “This is the ALF” from 1986, what do you think made punks important to the ALF and the Hunt Saboteurs in the ‘80s?

Well, I think about various things. I think one thing that punk shared with the Hunt Saboteurs and shared with the ALF was this kind of grassroots nature, these weren’t slick bands that had a lot of money behind them. They were just people doing it themselves. It was very grassroots, very DIY. There was almost a feeling that anyone could do it, if you could play an instrument to some extent or sing, you could really get involved in punk music. You don’t have to have money, you don’t have to be slick. You don’t need to have expensive equipment.

It was a similar philosophy to the ALF and the Hunt Saboteurs. These organizations were very autonomous. They were kind of very anarchist in a way. There was no leadership in a sense. There’s no one at the top giving orders. These were only some local groups doing their own thing. That autonomous nature of it, the grassroots nature of it, it was all very similar to the punk movement. And there was a lot of crossover, a lot of punks got involved in animal liberation activities. And a lot of people who were involved in animal liberation activities really got into punk music. Punk was really quite a big part of the animal liberation scene.

Punk music came from the poor, restless and angry youth embracing the DIY ethics, but I believe you were also inspired by anarchist action groups like The Angry Brigade, Class War, the Anarchist Communist Federation, Direct Action Movement, etc.?

Yeah, a lot of our inspiration actually came from a group called the Situationists, and I don’t think they identified as anarchists, but they were very close to anarchists. The Angry Brigade was sort of very motivated by the Situationists. I was also very influenced by the Angry Brigade, because they did actions in the early ‘70s, and what was interesting was that they didn’t just attack targets that were traditional left-wing targets, so to speak. They were attacking targets that were symbols of oppression in a broader sense and I liked that, and I thought, well, we can broaden that and we can attack targets that were connected with the oppression of other animals.

So in that sense the Situationists and the Angry Brigade were big influences on me, but when it comes to the broader anarchist movement, I was involved in writing for Peace News, which was kind of an anarcho-pacifist publication. There was also an anarchist group called Freedom based in East London and there were some people involved in Freedom who were also involved in animal liberation and I know one of them was vegan. So I used to write articles about Hunt Saboteurs and ALF activities for both Peace News and the Freedom group magazine, which was also called Freedom.

It’s great to hear about these two traditions of anarchism and the DIY punk scene clashing with animal liberation direct action since its early activist days. Do you think the punk scene is still a hotbed of activism as the music gets faster and angrier? Do you have any insights into today’s hardcore punk scene?

I don’t know much about the punk scene today, to be honest. But certainly, if punk still has this idea of autonomy, like a do-it-yourself culture, then that would fit very well with animal liberation activities, I think. Because I see that there’s a lack of willingness among people to take autonomous action these days, and certainly here in the UK. And I think that has to do with a number of factors, including the kind of government we’ve had.

People tend to wait to be told what to do by some kind of large organization. People are no longer organizing and carrying out their own actions, and I think that’s a thing we kind of lost in the movement. In the general movement for animal rights and veganism, that’s something we’ve really lost. And that’s something I’d like to see come back, and I’m sure when it comes back there will be more action. If people carry out their own actions instead of just waiting around to be told what to do, then a lot of more actions get carried out.

Yeah, that was actually my next question. If you have some kind of criticisms on the current animal rights and vegan movement. Do you have any things you would like to say to the modern punk rock and hardcore kids who are getting into vegan outreach, animal rights organizations, or taking direct action?

I think it’s very important that we change the culture of society. We’re not going to achieve animal liberation as long as the vast majority of people don’t believe in it; as long as the vast majority of people are speciesists, as long as the vast majority of people are human supremacists. We’ve got to change the culture of society. I think the most important way of doing that, or probably the only way of doing that, is to educate a lot more people to go vegan. By going vegan I don’t just mean food, I don’t mean the diet, but I mean the general philosophy of humans not oppressing other animals. We have to change the culture of our society. And I think that although there are many ways to spread this message of educating people about veganism that don’t involve direct action, for me direct action has a role to play in terms of raising awareness, because I think awareness can be raised through direct action. Through the publicity that direct action creates far and wide, it can wake people up. 

There are several groups that do this sort of thing. There’s Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). I don’t know how many countries in the world they operate in, but I know they’re mainly in the USA and just a small amount here in the UK. They will go to places, let’s say McDonald’s, where animals are being oppressed and they will cause a stir in those places and generate publicity and sort of raise awareness in that way. And we have another group here that goes to farms in large numbers. They are doing occupations, and maybe sometimes rescuing some animals. I mean, they rescue a small number of animals. We call it open rescue, it’s different from the ALF. These people don’t bother that much about getting caught, whereas we always try to get away afterwards. And they are very open about it, while very often the actions that we have taken have been very serious in terms of the penalties that we have received for them. You know, the kind of actions that we have done have resulted in prison sentences; sometimes in long imprisonment, as I have experienced myself. Whereas the kind of actions that people like DxE are doing these days, it’s not like that, it’s still against the law, but the penalties for it are nowhere near as severe as the penalties for the kind of actions that we’ve carried out.

In the UK, we have a group called Animal Rising, they were previously called Animal Rebellion. They take direct action in relation to the oppression of other animals. They staged blockades of dairy depots, these are the depots that supply dairy products. They staged these blockades last September, but the previous year they blockaded some of the McDonald’s distribution outlets. They rescued some beagle puppies from a place that breeds animals for experiments, they also tried to disrupt horse racing, etc. So these are groups carrying out direct action in a different way to how we carried them out, and in some ways I think they have to do it that way. It’s now very difficult, especially in the UK. It’s very difficult to do direct action, especially the way the ALF used to do it, without getting caught. And the reason is that we have so much surveillance, there are CCTV cameras everywhere. Nowadays it’s very difficult to do something and then walk away. It’s completely different from when I was an ALF activist, because then it was very rare for a place to have an alarm. But now it’s everywhere because of the digital age, it’s so much less expensive to install alarms and surveillance. So what people are doing now is doing things without trying to get away. In terms of illegality, it’s kind of a low level, so if they get caught, it doesn’t matter so much. And I think in terms of awareness it is actually better.

I mean, our main goal with the ALF was to cause damage to various companies that were involved in the oppression of other animals. Our main targets were animal testing and the fur trade. There were others, but those two were our main targets. And what we were really trying to do was to cause economic damage to these companies, to put them out of business, so to speak, to force them to change. So we weren’t really focused on raising awareness. We weren’t really doing what it takes to change the culture, because to change the culture you have to raise awareness. But now, the kind of direct action that is being done today has much more potential to raise awareness. Much more potential to change the culture. So in many ways it’s somehow more important in terms of achieving animal liberation. But I think this kind of action could be more autonomous. There’s still a lot of centralization, in organizations like Animal Rising there’s still a lot of things they do centrally, whereas I’d like to see them work more autonomously. If they had local autonomous groups, I think they could do a lot more, a lot more awareness-raising would come out of that. So that’s how I see direct action these days. It’s very different from the way it used to be.

Thank you for sharing all that, much appreciated. Anything else you’d like to add?

I don’t know if there’s anything more I could say. It’s just that punk was very important to us at the time. It was a big thing in the animal liberation movement. There was a band, they were actually a pre-punk band—a band called Flamin Groovies. They were kind of an early ’70s band, and they had a song called “Shake Some Action”. So we had an ALF group in North London and before we went on a raid we used to play this song. We used to play it all the time because basically what we were doing was shaking some action. It kind of resonated with us. For our ALF group it was kind of our anthem, but I think the Flamin Groovies were ahead of the punk scene. But I still think their music is kind of similar to ’77 punk.

Source: diyconspiracy.net