Portrait of an Activist as a Young Man
The New Zealand Police Threat Assessment Unit, formed after 9/11, has been busy arresting animal rights activists. Peter Malcouronne meets Jesse Duffield, vegan, physics teacher and a man who doesn’t even like animals that much.
Jesse Duffield doesn’t look much like a terrorist. Tall, stick-thin and excitable, the 23-year-old has a habit of drumming his fingers on his thigh, betraying nerves and, perhaps, a restless mind.
A physics teacher by profession, Duffield is also a committed animal rights activist. He has picked pellets out of wounded ducks at Lake Ellesmere, contracted mild hypothermia during a mid-winter protest at Waikawaiti, New Zealand’s largest battery hen farm, and rarked up Parnell matrons by picketing Sabato, a Mt Eden delicatessen that sells foie gras, the French pate produced by force-feeding geese.
He’s been hit in the head by a golf-ball during a demo outside Whirling Brothers’ circus at Pukekohe, which has left his jaw with a disconcerting click. And he’s accumulated an impressive collection of arrest warrants, court summons and trespass notices. (For a while, Duffield kept his “outlaw notes” on his bedroom wall, alongside an Animal Liberation Front poster of balaclava-clad activists cradling rescued beagles, but he soon took them down, embarrassed by his own display of bravado).
The Unit, set up in 2002 to fight terrorism, was taking no chances: along with Duffield’s laptop computer, floppy disks and screeds of animals rights literature, they seized an anti-GE t-shirt, three drink bottles and a Coronation Street video.
Late last year, several members of the New Zealand Police’s Threat Assessment Unit turned up at Duffield’s Henderson Valley home with a warrant for “hay, straw, rubbish bags or nylon sacks and anything related to animal rights”. The Unit, set up in 2002 to fight terrorism, was taking no chances: along with Duffield’s laptop computer, floppy disks and screeds of animals rights literature, they seized an anti-GE t-shirt, three drink bottles and a Coronation Street video.
The raid followed an action by Auckland Animal Action, an animal rights organisation to which Duffield belonged. Several members of the group entered the Tegel head office in Grafton just after lunch on October 2, 2003 and spread straw over the floor and desks to protest the strawless state of intensively-farmed Tegel chickens. They were there for less than a minute. Duffield, aware of the consequences a conviction can carry for a teacher, handed a letter of explanation to a startled secretary and walked straight out. He was subsequently charged with unlawfully being in a building, intentional damage and burglary, charges carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
The charges were later dropped although Duffield is still waiting to get his stuff back. “I was quite shaken at first,” he says. “I was worried about losing my job and I don’t think I’d fare too well in prison.” He chuckles. “But then I became angry. Freedom of speech matters, and I have always stood up for what I believe is just.”
Duffield’s activist career, if you can call it that, started five years ago when he was a student at the University of Canterbury. Volunteering for SAFE, Save Animals From Exploitation, his first protest was against a conference of the International Union for Physiological Sciences in Christchurch in 2001. “Basically these were the world’s worst vivisectors,” he says of some of the scientists in attendance. “Guys like Michael Stryker from the University of California.
His gig was sewing kittens’ eyelids shut, drilling holes in their skulls, then inserting electrodes into their brains to test sleep deprivation.” (For his part, Stryker has said that the knowledge gained from his work on anaesthetised kittens has helped in the treatment of developmental vision disorders in human infants.)
Since then, Duffield has participated in numerous protests, mostly against the use of animal fur. “Most of the fur in New Zealand is rabbit from China,” he says. “They are farmed in extremely cruel intensive conditions. Their deaths are ghastly: they’re either gassed or electrocuted — electric rods are shoved in their anus and mouth and they’re fried from the inside out. That keeps the fur intact you see.
“These are very primitive methods — often the animals are skinned alive and conscious.”
A recent anti-fur protest outside Newmarket’s swanky Belucci store saw Duffield get in more strife with the police. Five of Duffield’s fellow activists were arrested several weeks after the May 10 demonstration and a warrant was issued for Duffield’s arrest. Afraid that his house might be raided again, he hid his computer at a mate’s place, then turned himself in. He was charged with intimidation and was due to appear in court in late July, after this magazine went to press.
The Holmes show got wind of the young activists’ plight and ran a story. Unfortunately, for Duffield, his 7.5 minutes of fame coincided with his first week at a new school. “I advised the principal that I was going to be on Holmes,” he says. “Understandably, he was a bit concerned, but he understands that what I do in my own time is my own decision. So long as I don’t discuss this with my students.” Duffield asked that his school — a state co-ed on the Auckland isthmus — not be identified in this story.
While he believes it possible to be both teacher and activist — “John Minto is proof of that” — he accepts that his animal rights activism may hinder his professional development further down the line. It seems a considerable risk for someone who says he doesn’t even like animals. “I have no pets and have very little affection towards animals. But I can see, rationally, that the way we treat non-human animals is morally wrong and I am, therefore, morally obliged to do something about it.”
He says the fact he’s not an animal person makes it easier for him: “It’s because I don’t feel emotionally attached to animals that I’m able to comprehend the suffering we inflict upon them and not be overwhelmed by it.”
Duffield has been a vegetarian since he was seven. Before then, he and his family only occasionally ate fish. He has never eaten red meat, never touched chicken. Growing up in Waipu, a rural farming community, this was unusual. “We were known as the vegetarians on the hill,” he says.
“ I used to get into arguments every day on the school bus on the way home. Kids would moo and baa at me. Point out the window at sheep and cows and say how much they enjoyed eating them.”
He’s heard all the arguments against vegetarianism and considers most of them facile. “Don’t vegetables feel pain: that’s the most stupid. Meat tastes good: actually that’s the most stupid. Then you have people saying that God gave us dominion over animals.” He scoffs: “This from heathens who’ve never been inside a church in their lives.”
Jesse Duffield: “I have no pets and have very little affection towards animals. But I can see, rationally, that the way we treat non-human animals is morally wrong and I am, therefore, morally obliged to do something about it.”
People often say to me: ‘Well, what about the suffering of humans in the world? Isn’t that more important?’ This usually comes from people wearing sweatshop clothes on their way to McDonalds.”
It’s a fair point he concedes. “There are extreme injustices going on to humans in this world — a person starves to death every 3.6 seconds. But very little compares to the intensive factory farming of animals. The 60 million chickens who live and die each year inside the Tegel and Inghams broiler sheds in New Zealand would love to be free to escape and starve to death.”
Duffield realises what he’s up against. “I went through a very pessimistic stage once. I began to realise what a mess the world was in and what little impact, if any, my efforts made. But now I feel a hint of optimism. Because I’ve seen, even in my lifetime, more and more people become aware of what they consume and eat.”
Still, he knows his battle will never be won. “I think we’ll see an end to intensive factory farming in the West,” he says, “though I cannot foresee a vegetarian world. But I intend to fight animal abuse for as long as it’s around.
“Sadly that’ll be for the rest of my life.”
First published in Metro magazine, January 2007.
