Our arrest was sudden and unexpected, but not dramatic. I was walking with another activist in the city centre, the police car came to a stop, without any screeching of brakes, and within a few moments we were inside the police car. The experience didn't feel very momentous. A complete contrast with the description of arrest in Chapter 1 of Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago.'

'Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

'...If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

'But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?" '

The two of us were told by the arresting officers exactly 'what for.' Going equipped for criminal damage, for possession of paint to attack fur coats.'

The ride to the police station took very little time. Conversation flagged on the way. The silences weren't too awkward, though.

At the police station, I was put in a cell on my own and the door clanged shut. Initial impressions were very favourable. It was immaculate. I knew, though, that I hadn't had to leave my shoes outside the door to avoid treading any dirt on the spotless floor, or r so that my shoes could be cleaned, as when shoes are left outside the door in high-class hotels. It was so that I couldn't hang myself with the shoe-laces.

I explored the cell. There wasn't a great deal to explore. I found en-suite toilet facilities, again, scrupulously clean. If ever I write a 'Good Cells Guide' I would give this cell five stars. There weren't the inconveniences of a one-star cell: grey hordes of lice waiting to leap out and fasten their jaws on you, cockroaches scuttling across the floor, fresh or faded bloodstains on the walls, graffiti scratched laboriously, "Liberty or death!" nothing but toilet paper available on which to write poetry (although I suppose that usually, toilet paper isn't available in a one-star cell), thuds and screams from a neighbouring cell, from further off last shouts of defiance, a volley of shots followed by the crack of the coup de grace. There weren't twenty or so others crammed in the cell. Instead, silence, stillness and that clinical spotlessness. The only thing that put me off was the bench - hard, unyielding, uncompromising. Not a thing you'd wish to lie on for a life sentence.

Before long, a police officer came to the little opening in the door, opened the flap and said something or other. All I can remember is the phrase 'When you appear in court.' If this was an attempt to unsettle me, to make me panic, it didn't have the desired effect. I've done nothing wrong! I'm completely innocent!

After two hours, it was clear that the police agreed. We'd been searched, nothing had been found. We were released and able to experience again that beautiful, blissful state, comparative freedom. I didn't gain a criminal record, and still don't have one. The only disadvantage is that it makes it harder to enter the U.S. Being arrested, even if you've done nothing wrong, counts against you. As I've no wish to visit The Land of the Lethal Injection, this doesn't matter.

A few days after my release, I joined Amnesty International. One of the novels which means the most to me is Kafka's 'The Trial.'

I received an email recently which originated with Amnesty International about conditions in Mississippi at the state penitentiary. It puts my own very short and pleasant incarceration in context:

'Over recent years, conditions on Mississippi’s death row have been severely criticized, including in relation to the psychological impact of these conditions and the poor mental health care provided. In May 2003, a federal judge ruled that the conditions in the State Penitentiary offended “contemporary concepts of decency, human dignity and precepts of civilization which we profess to possess”. Judge Jerry Davis found that death row inmates were being subjected to “profound isolation, intolerable stench and filth, consistent exposure to human excrement, dangerously high temperatures and humidity, insect infestations, deprivation of basic mental health care, and constant exposure to severely psychotic inmates in adjoining cells.” Among other things, the federal judge found that: the filthy conditions impacted on the mental health of inmates; the probability of heat-related illness was high for death row inmates, particularly those suffering from mental illness who either did not take appropriate steps to deal with the heat or whose medications interfere with the human body’s temperature regulation; the exposure to the severely psychotic individuals was intolerable; the mental health care provided to inmates was “grossly inadequate”; and the isolation of death row, combined with the conditions on it and the fact that its population are awaiting execution, would weaken even the strongest individual. In 2004, the US Court of Appeals “agree[d] that the conditions of inadequate mental health care… do present a risk of serious harm to the inmates' mental and physical health. Again, the obvious and pervasive nature of these conditions supports the… conclusion that [Mississippi Department of Correction] officials displayed a deliberate indifference to these conditions.” While the authorities have recently improved the environmental conditions on death row following the lawsuit brought against them, there has been an ongoing struggle to ensure adequate medical and mental health care."

A long time ago, I wrote a long letter of protest - reasoned protest, I think - to the Warden of the Mississippi state penitentiary at the time, Don Cabana, who supervised the execution of Edward Johnson. The steps leading up to his execution were shown in the documentary 'Fourteen days in May.' I did hear later that Don Cabana had turned against the death penalty and speaks against it. His change of heart is recorded in his book 'Confessions of an Executioner.'

To return to my case, the allegation that the two of us were carrying paint to deface fur coats came from the manageress of a fur department in a department store. We were members of a group which in a short space of time succeeded in closing down every fur department in the city. I think we can be certain that it was our actions that achieved this. If the manageress feared for her job, or that particular job, she was right.

The main tactic was for forty or so activists to descend on a fur department, sit down and refuse to leave, as simple as that. Subjecting the department store to intense inconvenience and unfavourable publicity. We also arranged one or two demonstrations outside the stores. I remember addressing a very large crowd of activists, shoppers and police through a megaphone.

What of the issues? I do claim that I did everything I could to investigate these issues, to ensure that my position was based on exhaustive evidence. My information about the fur trade came amongst other sources from the book 'Facts about Furs,' by Greta Nilsson and others, published by the Animal Welfare Institute and distributed in this country by the RSPCA. Of course, it's written from a particular perspective, but the accumulation of evidence, the detailed statistics, the many references, the examination of legislation in a great variety of countries, the fair-minded attempt to state and address the arguments of the pro-fur lobby - all of these are very impressive. The book even contains, in the Chapter on 'Alternatives to Fur,' a detailed examination of the energy costs of fake fur, trapped fur and ranched fur prepared by an engineer at the Scientific Research Laboratory of the Ford Motor Company in Michigan. He calculates that the energy costs of a real fur coat in the units he uses, BTU (1BTU = 1.055kJ) is 433 000, more than three times that of a fake fur (120 300 BTU), whilst the energy costs of a ranched fur are very much greater (7 965 800 BTU.)

The images in the book are shocking, but the book doesn't make the mistake of suggesting that an image can be any substitute for rational argument, the presentation of evidence, although now, when I'm no longer involved in the struggle to end the fur trade, the images do linger in the mind particularly. Above all, the images which show the cruelties of the leghold trap (banned in this country in 1958 but still permitted in most American states and Canada): a beaver which chewed off both its front paws to escape the leghold trap, a raccoon hanging by one leg from a trap, a large hole dug by a badger trying to escape a leghold trap, a coyote dead of apparent starvation in a trap, an animal with all its teeth broken, its jaw bone eroded in the struggle to escape, a golden eagle, a swan and many pets caught, losing limbs or their lives, a bobcat with protruding bones, a trapper killing a coyote by trampling on it. Methods of killing trapped animals aren't regulated in most American states. The cruelties involved in farmed fur are less obvious but real - keeping animals in barren cages until the time comes for their asphyxiation, and all for a completely unnecessary product.

At this period, I travelled the country to take part in demonstrations, very large demonstrations, to oppose factory farming or testing upon animals (I wasn't demonstrating against all animal experiments. I didn't oppose all animal experiments at the time and since then, I've become more sure than ever that some experiments can be justified.)

'Lightwater valley' in Yorkshire had a particular impact. Rows of pigs, in clean but barren compartments, as barren as the cell I was in for such a short time, and with far less space - with no room to turn, in fact. A completely indefensible way to keep an animal. We didn't break into the unit. It wasn't, as might have been expected, hidden from view, out of shame, but open to the public, intended for family visits. But bad as conditions were, it was after all a kind of show home for factory farms. Others, not open to the public, inflict the same cruelty of close confinement, the thwarting of an animal's needs, but in conditions which are vastly worse, not simply barren but filthy, physically disgusting as well as morally disgusting. A battery hen, a broiler hen, a pig living in an intensive unit, suffer conditions which are may be far more extreme than the ones on the Mississippi death row, and of course, all the animals are on death row as well. Here, I'm simply stating the obvious. I've been a vegetarian for thirty years, but I have no strong objections to meat-eating, provided the animals have been treated humanely up to the time of slaughter and are slaughtered humanely.

One of these demonstrations was organized and led by Peter Roberts, a remarkable man, one of the greatest of animal welfare campaigners - amongst the greatest of all his contemporaries, I would claim. He's the founder of Compassion in World Farming, which campaigns against factory farming. He died in 2006.

Of course, then, as now, people who wanted to attend a demonstration could attend a demonstration. There were always people attending these demonstrations who weren't an asset to the animal welfare movement. Peter Roberts did his best to put a stop to one idiotic chant, endlessly repeated: 'XY - whatever the name was - torture town, burn, burn burn it down!' The chant 'What do we want? Animal Liberation! When do we want it? Now!' was just as idiotic.

There was extremism then, and there's extremism now, but it was more prevalent then, I think. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) carried out countless attacks, some of them small-scale, nuisance activities, some of them large-scale. Some attacks were far more pointless than others - attacking shops selling leather goods, for example. Compassion in World Farming and other mainstream organizations (but not the RSPCA) have achieved far more for farm animals than the ALF, by means of the patient campaigning which has led to "real legislative changes and real achievements" - as a politician might phrase it. It's work which may sometimes be tedious, routine, testing patience and stamina to the limit. It doesn't have the dramatic thrill of breaking into a factory farm under cover of darkness whilst wearing a balaclava. But the ALF vastly misjudges, vastly underestimates, the power of a modern state, including its economic power. I stress, though, the fact that vast policital and economic power may be contrasted with negligible moral authority. ALF members would benefit by reading about something vastly different from their own concerns, the history of the allied bombing offensive in the Second World War. Targets which it was thought had been pulverized were often in production very soon after, production hardly affected. The power of the ALF to inflict economic damage is not even puny.

To some extent, it's a matter of temperament. There are people who object to the fur trade or factory farming who couldn't possibly spend their time writing letters, contacting local politicians, attending committee meetings. Direct action has infinitely more appeal. It still appeals to me, but I include in 'direct action' making a scene, drawing attention to an abuse by abrasive, but legal, action. I and others did just this when a circus with animal acts came to town. This action could very well have led to violence, but the violence was threatened by one or two circus workers against activists. Our action was non-violent.

I know that in a democracy, people should try to oppose abuses by persuasion within the law, by the ballot box, by legitimate campaigning, but I apply limitation. I think that direct action which involves more than making a scene, direct action which involves breaking the law, can be defended and has a place, a limited place, in a democracy. But never, at any time committing acts of violence, or defending people who commit acts of violence. In a totalitarian state, limitation has to be applied again, but now a limitation on purely non-violent protest. Stauffenberg planted a bomb in an attempt to kill Hitler and he was morally justified in his act.

The time needed for change for the better can be so protracted that for some people, particularly, perhaps, young people, this is intolerable. Why not do something now? But if action is taken, the 'something' has to be made concrete. There's no guarantee that the 'something' will be effective, more effective than the long and patient campaigning methods which Peter Roberts amongst others have used.

People who are not activists, in some cause or another, aren't inferior to activists. Activism is simply one sphere amongst many. Poets, scientists, engineers, scholars, mothers, fathers, whoever they may be, have their own demanding sphere, and it may leave them little or no time for much more. They include people who do have a concern, a great concern, for abuses inflicted on humans, animals - or the environment, of course.

There are various alternatives for people who can't be activists, for the time being or at any time. (I doubt if activists can be activists indefinitely. They can always return to activism later.)

'Cheque book activism' is very valuable - giving money, when it can be spared, to causes. I'd strongly argue the case for finding out about the activities of smaller organizations as well as the very large organizations which are household names, although some of the large organizations are more effective than others.

Not-activists can take part in boycotts. Boycotts are usually not effective as a form of economic pressure, but they are a natural expression of a conscience - directed and informed, it's to be hoped, by an adequate study of the facts. The continued use of the death penalty in most of the American states, the continued use of the leg-hold trap in nearly all the American states, the scale of factory farming in all the American states (the European Community has done far more to control the abuses of factory farming) leads me to a personal boycott of American products. If I were about to buy wine, it would never be Californian wine - or Spanish wine, in view of my opposition to bullfighting. The hardest thing can be to avoid Chinese goods. China's success in feeding its vast population is beyond praise, but its disregard for human rights and animal welfare is beyond belief.

 

 

 

 

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