REVIEW: CAPERS IN THE CHURCHYARD
Animal Rights Advocacy In The Age of Terror
By Lee Hall
Nectar Bat Press
Reviewer: Claudette Vaughan

The ontology of the animal rights movement is love of life – a nonhuman subject’s life is as precious to her or him as ours is to us. There’s no question about this. There’s no counter argument if we are to explore Hall’s main thesis in a reasonable and self-correcting light.

To be serious. To be political. To keep the pressure on consistently, the animal rights movement must continue to be visible, vocal, committed and perhaps more importantly it must protect the interior life of its movement and her people. Did it ever attempt to do this? Was it ever their intention? Did it fail when we see generations of good activists now scattered to the wind, older, wiser and more nauseous than ever with what constitutes “activism” today?

Hall identifies two seemingly opposite influences having played upon the Movement since its genesis – the animal welfare movement and the smaller militancy side of sole operators working within the Movement.

Moving the Movement further towards welfarism was a hole-in-one for animal rights detractors and those who would bring the animal rights movement down as institutionised welfarism has neither the inclination or power to cross over to an animal rights perspective, and so notes Hall neither will violent actions on behalf of animals. Hall takes it further and says, “swashbuckling is one of the most effective silencers of the ethically consistent activist’s voice”.

Retrograde and dowdy though it is, institutionalized animal welfare is much more violent towards animals behind the scenes- much more sustaining a death culture - that what people are lead to believe. Hall knows her welfarism v abolitionist approaches back to front. If there are forces operating in the world today ready to destroy the animal rights movement it’s because it’s being allowed to happen – that ethical aspect of the movement is being replaced in its internal body with ineffective and unethical practices. It’s happened before. We’ve seen the disintegration of other Liberation Movements notably the Black Liberation Movement, the Black Muslim Liberation Movement and the Socialist Movement immediately spring to mind and it’s occurred with one tactic and one tactic only –split up the critical mass of people and the rest will fall like dominoes.

The critical mass is the threat, not those on the periphery – whether it be the animal welfarist periphery or the animal militant periphery of the animal rights movement. Both welfarism and violence have twin effects when let loose on a critical mass of non-violent and busy animal rights activists and that is it smashes up all the good work both in the eyes of the public and chips away quietly at the interior infrastructure within the animal rights movement itself. The overflow from that means very soon afterwards the Movement will accept any old tenet as its ethical guidelines. Animal rights discourse detached from its consciousness produces hoarse rhetoric.

Lee Hall actually cares about this critical mass of people. See our interview with her. It’s as simple as that. Organised groups of activists are radical to the established order and a very real threat to the same. When PeTA iron fistedly centralised its actions for control over the individual action of localised grassroots activists, it effectively killed off the individual action of hundreds, perhaps thousands of students who were drawn to do something in their area for animals. Their support structure was pulled out from under them and it never, to this day, recovered from that loss. Protesting is now banned in Bush’s Amerika. Did PeTA start chipping away at an internal structure, to have Bush finish it off? It’s an intriguing notion.

To be fair to Lee Hall she doesn’t discuss this particular aspect in her book but she does have a fresh perspective that places this book ahead of the rest. It’s a sophisticated read. Readers sensitive to the forces that have entered the animal rights movement since its inception intuitively know that the animal rights movement isn’t what it used to be, what it could have been and what it still might be again if the axis relies on ethical consistency and rests independently upon a critical mass of people.

Nothing can ever replace the good solid efforts over a long period of time of animal rights education, veganism and cruelty-free activism. Hall’s work here could be easily be misconstrued from this point on and it has been from lukewarm reviewers to those more openly spiteful in their efforts to relegate her to a mere spectator’s platform.

The big surprise of this book was to find the writings of Lee Hall herself. Has she been hiding her light under a bushel all these years? Hall understands that the nilist approach of welfarism and the nilism of violence denigrates rights based actions in their essence. Rights based actions are the revolutionary practice, are the revolutionary discourse and are the revolutionary project.

Hall’s background in law positions her well to write generously about a consistent ethically based rights polemic and she does so with intellectual rigor, flare and gusto.

Lee Hall highlights a few other central tenets to the animal rights movement that are worthy of note since we are 30 years into it displaying a particular form and design that, to a certain extent, will determine its future outcome. Hall tells us her book “will not just provide a chronicle or an analysis of events, although it does do that. It will not just talk about distinguishing pragmatic action from counterproductive activities, but it will do that. The book will not talk only about the significance of civil liberties and the enormous public interests served when a society has the strength to respect critique, dissent, and protest.” Although it does do that, it goes on to provide ethical guidelines.

There is plenty to challenge and stimulate here with Capers… It’s definitely a book for the early part of the 21st Century, pressing forever forward yet unafraid to look back to where we’ve been yet fully confident of the potentiality of what is yet to come.

If we are to achieve peace on earth, let us begin with ourselves and our own veganism. If we are to clarify and refine our own perspective, let’s start with Capers in The Churchyard Animal Rights Advocacy In The Age of Terror.

Read the Abolitionist-Online interview with Lee Hall