Strangely absent from the extraordinary recent events in the British countryside have been the animal rights activists. If an animal life has similar value to a human one, then cutting that life short on a foot and mouth pyre for the sake of a trivial export industry might have been expected to arouse the movement's righteous anger. There has been the occasional demonstration but no show of force. Having studied the movement for some months for a television documentary, I think I understand why.
Animal rights activists argue that in the modern world we witness the exploitation of animals for three main human ends, for pleasure (hunting, fishing, circuses), for science ("vivisection") and for nutrition (farming). And the greatest evil of these is the exploitation for pleasure. Never mind the fact that the sheer numbers involved in farming are vastly disproportionate to the numbers involved in hunting or vivisection-the average human will, in the course of their lifetime, consume 550 poultry, 36 pigs, 36 sheep and eight oxen, while less than four laboratory animals are sacrificed per human life. The comparable number of foxes killed by hunts per human lifetime is 0.02. Never mind the fact that pleasure, science and nutrition all inconveniently overlap (was that extra chicken sandwich pleasure or nutrition? Does not science prolong and preserve human life basically for pleasure?) And, above all, never mind that a hunted wild animal or even an animal in a laboratory has an incomparably better life to that of a broiler chicken.
The mainspring of the animal rights conscience is less to do with animals than with humans; activists are focused less on the quality of life than on the dramatic shock value in the manner of death. Their arguments-and this applies especially to the radicals in the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)-are cobbled together from the memories of past campaigns against slavery, for the liberation of women and against racism, which they see as similar in spite of the offence that these parallels give to many people.
Don't imagine that the campaign against the exploitation of animals will end with hunting and vivisection however. They are the tip of the iceberg. There is a hierarchy of exploitation. "Once we've dealt with the hunters and the scientists, we can turn to other issues," is the argument usually voiced. On those grounds alone, perhaps, the move to ban hunting should be permanently postponed.
As foot and mouth spread across the country, some animal rights groups did belatedly start campaigning to ban livestock farming in Britain altogether. Viva, a radical vegetarian group, and The Vegetarian Society claim that they have had more hits on their websites than ever before. Whether intensive arable farming (which would be set to expand in the event of an end to livestock) is kinder to animals overall is highly questionable given the depletion of wild areas that this would mean. And that's the trouble with farming, from an animal rights point of view-it's all too complex. Conversation is drawn ineluctably into the variables of the food chain, the degree of comfort in a pig stall, and the CAP whose nuances are all quite against the grain of the absolutist posturing of the ALF and others for whom an evil is an evil.
One of the founding members of the ALF agreed to be interviewed for the programme (in a black hood to avoid recognition). It was at the home of one of the martyrs to the movement who was flattened by a veal crate at the protests against live exports in 1995. Her mother keeps shrines to the memory of her daughter around the flat. Their network operates as if it is an early Christian cult, bruised and abused by an ignorant public, but zeal burns in their eyes, in the confidence that one day their kingdom will come. Their language-they talk of "the struggle" and so on-owes more to revolutionary Marxism than Christianity. But they have an advantage over their communist counterparts: animals will never turn round and say you are talking nonsense and they will never betray you as the proletariat does.
Another activist had agreed to a meeting at his own house. His house was orderly in the extreme and there was a pervasive smell of violet- flavoured air freshener. On the walls were a row of coquettish pictures of baby foxes in silver frames. He told me that he had personally saved one of them from the jaws of a Hampshire hunt when it had escaped into his animal sanctuary in the 1980s.
Conversation with the activist roamed freely and seamlessly from issues such as the immorality of keeping pets (which is akin to slavery) to the odiousness of the hunt and the evil of vivisection. The talk was on a long leash. He reined it in. What he wanted to do is to "ban suffering," he said.
A fly flew into the room, he scurried off to accompany it back to the outside world. When he returned, he showed me his book. The opening statement read "Martin Luther King had a dream... I too have a dream-to ban suffering and abuse amongst animals."
"But what about the 98 per cent of all wild animals who die a brutal death?" I asked. "What should we do about that?" "Yes, you're right," he replied. "Basically it's a brutal world out there, and we should really try to cull as many animals as possible to save them from the realities of life. "
Perhaps one of the reasons there are few ALF activists campaigning against the foot and mouth culling policy is that deep down they know that the only happy animal is a dead one.
