The radical animal rights movement started by secretly feeding dogs, but escalated quickly
Disrupting hunts eventually became burning down laboratories
Well before PETA and throwing red paint on mink jackets, radical animal advocacy started at the hunt.
In the late winter of 1963, freelance British journalist John Prestige was assigned to cover a deer hunt by the Devon and Somerset Staghounds, a pack of dogs that had “managed deer populations” since the 16th century. During the hunt, Prestige watched as hounds chased a pregnant deer into a village and cornered it. The trailing hunters then shot the doe. To everyone else there, the kill was routine, but the reporter was disgusted.
Prestige immediately established the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) and informed the press of his plans. He told The Daily Herald, “We aim to make it impossible for people to hunt, by confusing the hounds.” The Guardian wrote that Prestige was “willing to make available all the latest know-how on how to sabotage a hunt.” It would be one of the first acts of “direct action” animal advocacy. One hundred members enrolled in the first week.
The HSA’s first act of “sabbing” was planned in advance of the Boxing Day fox hunt, held every year on the day after Christmas. Members fed the dogs in order to lessen their instinct to hunt and kill. “The local butcher gave us 50 pounds of meat and we fed it to the hounds,” said Prestige, without irony. “We used hunting horns. Nothing like that had ever really happened before and it caused absolute chaos…The police were completely bemused.”
Over time, however, acts of sabotage would become more extreme. Clashes between hunters and “sabs” would end in violence and even death. Eventually, the movement would inspire the formation of the Animal Liberation Front, one of the most radical animal rights groups, which the FBI has classified as a terrorist group.
On February 15, 1964, a few months after the Christmas fox hunt, the HSA experienced its first arrest. Norman Redman, leader of the Littlehampton chapter, was caught feeding hounds before a hunt. He was fined £15 for “insulting behaviour” and sentenced to two years probation.
But the movement was growing. Protesters set off smoke bombs in Whaddon Chase and the Surrey Union. Sabs laid false scents, wired gates to slow hunts, and learned complex horn calls and whistles in order to misdirect dogs. A year after its first fox hunt foil, Prestige estimated the HSA had initiated 120 strikes across the region. He predicted that on Boxing Day 1964, more than 700 people would be out sabotaging hunts.
The following year marked the beginning of a series of violent standoffs. Hunters attacked saboteurs with axes and poles, and smashed their car windows. Though HSA insisted its members remain non-violent, that didn’t always happen. Police made arrests, as Prestige reportedly became more and more disillusioned with the “left-wingers” who joined the resistance.
By the 1970s, other anti-hunting organizations and leaders sprung to power. In 1972, the Band of Mercy was formed, modeled after a Victorian children’s society of the same name, which pledged kindness to animals. Only now it would practice “active compassion.” One of its founders, Ronnie Lee, a former HSA member, would insist on changing its name to the more strident “Animal Liberation Front” in 1976.
The ALF targeted institutions beyond the hunt, particularly those using animals in the production of pharmaceuticals, fur, and meat. It slashed tires and set fires to laboratories known for animal testing. In January 1977, three members of the group vandalized the crypt of legendary British hunter Robert Peel, digging up his tomb and tossing a stuffed fox head inside. In a 1979 issue of the anarchist biweekly Freedom, Lee admitted, “The ALF is destructive, but only to property used to inflict, promote, or transport animal exploitation.”
When he wasn’t leading ALF, Lee spent the decade serving time. In 1975, he was arrested for damaging equipment at animal research labs. During his one year in prison, Lee went on a hunger strike to demand vegan food and clothing. A year after his release, he returned to prison for stealing lab mice.
The media was enamored of the activists, who tended to be young, unemployed, and increasingly anarchist. By the 1980s, ALF numbers were boosted by mass unemployment, and according to the 2004 book Terrorists or Freedom Fighters, these people “placed animal liberation within a larger context of opposition to the state, the military-industrial complex, capitalism, and socialism. They did not embrace nonviolence.”
Hunters fought back, however. In 1976, the Joint Master of the Essex Union Foxhunt was widely quoted, bragging, “Horsewhipping a hunt saboteur is rather like beating a wife — they’re both private matters.”
What started as playful protest, with false scents and flour bombs, had become all out class warfare.
Radical “direct action” animal rights confrontations peaked in the 1990s. In 1991, Mike Hill was killed while sabotaging a hunt in Cheshire; his was the first casualty of the movement. The ALF also spread to the United States during this time, where the FBI classified it “a serious terrorist threat.” Between 1992 and 2002, the bureau estimated that ALF criminal actions caused more than $45 million in damages.
After an arson attack at the University of Arizona in 1996, one ALF activist compared the movement’s tactics to the Underground Railroad, doing “much the same thing as the abolitionists who fought against slavery going in and burning down the quarters or tearing down the auction block … Sometimes when you just take animals and do nothing else, perhaps that is not as strong a message.”
Today in Britain, technology makes direct action easier than ever. British sabs fly gyrocopters above hunts to distract hounds or document illegal activities. In 2010, the practice turned lethal. Hunter Trevor Norse, 48, was killed when he confronted an anti-hunter gyrocopter operator while the latter was refueling. Norse was fatally sliced in the head by a propeller.
By then, the hunting of wild mammals had been outlawed in Britain. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair helped push through the Hunting Act of 2004. It didn’t accomplish much. In his 2010 memoir, A Journey, Blair wrote, “I became determined to slip out of this.” The law was “a masterly British compromise” that meant hunting was “banned and not quite banned at the same time.”
Today’s hunters “do exactly now what they used to do before the Hunting Act,” says Lee Moon, current spokesman of the HSA. “Some of it changes slightly when we or the police are there, but we believe that when there’s no one watching them — and often when we are there — they continue to hunt illegally.”
On the other side, pro-hunt voices call today’s sabs “masked thugs” whose “mere mention prompts bitter memories.” In particular, they point to a 2015 video, which shows masked saboteurs beating a huntsman unconscious with iron bars—a far cry from secretly feeding a few hounds.
