Announcements - Animal Rights Zone2024-03-28T16:19:09Zhttp://arzone.ning.com/forum/categories/announcements-1/listForCategory?xg_raw_resources=1&categoryId=4715978%3ACategory%3A105&feed=yes&xn_auth=noThe Pollination Project 2017 Lisa Shapiro Awards Winners ARZone Interviewstag:arzone.ning.com,2017-10-02:4715978:Topic:1645112017-10-02T23:39:39.849ZAnimal Rights Zonehttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/admin
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: impact, chicago;">The Pollination Project</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: impact, chicago;">2017 Lisa Shapiro Awards Winners</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: impact, chicago;">ARZone Interviews</span><br></br> <span style="font-family: impact, chicago; font-size: 24pt;">_______…</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: impact, chicago;" class="font-size-7">The Pollination Project</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: impact, chicago;" class="font-size-7">2017 Lisa Shapiro Awards Winners</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: impact, chicago;" class="font-size-7">ARZone Interviews</span><br/> <span style="font-family: impact, chicago; font-size: 24pt;">_______</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 24pt;" class="font-size-4"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038399399?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="400" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038399399?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="400" class="align-center"/></a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 24pt;" class="font-size-3">The Pollination Project Lisa Shapiro Awards acknowledge the quiet achievers of the Global Animal Advocacy community, people who work humbly behind the scenes, creating a world in which other animals are seen as individuals, as beings who are worthy of respect and justice. <br/> <br/> ARZone are delighted to work with The Pollination Project to bring you these interviews with the five extraordinary advocates who have been named as the 2017 winners of the Lisa Shapiro Award. <br/> <br/> These awards are The Pollination Project's way of acknowledging and uplifting the dedication and hard work being done on behalf of other animals, every day, in every corner of the world. <br/> <br/> The awards are named in memory of Lisa Shapiro, one of the original winners in 2014 who, sadly, passed away in 2015. </span></p>
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<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 24pt;" class="font-size-3">Please click on each of the winners' names below for their ARZone interview. The 2017 winners of the Lisa Shapiro Awards are:</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span class="font-size-4"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/09/lisa-shapiro-awards-winners-dawa-dolker.html" target="_blank">Dawa Dolker liebe</a> (India) <br/> <a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/09/lisa-shapiro-awards-winners-dawa-dolker.html" target="_blank"><img width="150" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038399346?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="150" class="align-center"/></a></span><br/> <br/> <span class="font-size-4"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro_1.html" target="_blank">Katrina Krīgere and Aivars Andersons</a> (Latvia) </span></span></font></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro_1.html" target="_blank"><img width="150" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038408547?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="150" class="align-center"/></a><br/> <br/> <span class="font-size-4"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro.html" target="_blank">Chia-Pei (Jessi) Chang and Yu-Sheng Tai</a> (Taiwan) </span></span></font></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro.html" target="_blank"><img width="150" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038418099?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="150" class="align-center"/></a><br/> <br/> <span class="font-size-4"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro_95.html" target="_blank">Ms. Socorro 'Sukie' Muller Sargent</a> (Texas, United States) </span></span></font></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro_95.html" target="_blank"><img width="150" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038418258?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="150" class="align-center"/></a><br/> <br/> <span class="font-size-4"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro_78.html" target="_blank">Anonymous - Unparalleled Suffering Photography</a> (United States)</span> </span></font></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.com/2017/10/the-pollination-project-lisa-shapiro_78.html" target="_blank"><img width="150" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038425167?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="150" class="align-center"/></a></span></font></p>
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<p style="text-align: left;"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Each of the individual interviews with these inspiring advocates can be found by clicking on their name. We hope that you find them as inspiring and uplifting as we did. </span></font></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: impact, chicago; font-size: 24pt;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038435097?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038435097?profile=original" width="675" class="align-center"/></a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span class="font-size-4"><font face="Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Please click <a href="https://archive.org/details/ARZoneInterview91MattBall" target="_blank">H E R E</a>, or visit <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/arzone-animal-rights-zone/id555064645" target="_blank">this webpage to subscribe using iTunes</a>, and please remember to <a href="http://arzone.ning.com/page/podcasts" target="_blank">visit the podcast page</a> to view a complete listing of all ARZone podcasts.</font></span></strong></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"></p> ARZone Remembers Tom Regantag:arzone.ning.com,2017-02-28:4715978:Topic:1620312017-02-28T21:48:47.262ZAnimal Rights Zonehttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/admin
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: impact, chicago;">ARZone Remembers Tom Regan </span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I first became aware of…</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: impact, chicago;" class="font-size-7">ARZone Remembers Tom Regan </span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: impact, chicago;" class="font-size-7"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038396943?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="350" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038396943?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350" class="align-center"/></a></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">I first became aware of Professor of Philosophy Tom Regan, Ph. D. and his work when I watched <a href="http://arzone.ning.com/video/tom-regan-a-case-for-animal-rights" target="_self">a video</a> in which Tom opened the debate at the Royal Institute of Great Britain. The topic was “Does the Animal Kingdom Need a Bill of Rights?” That video changed my life. I had been vegan for only a short time, and was new to social media, so I wasn’t familiar with Tom’s work. I asked my friend, the sociologist and long-time vegan activist Roger Yates, “Have you ever heard of this man called Tom Regan?”. Of course he had, and Roger introduced me to even more of Tom’s work. Later, through my own work at Animal Rights Zone, I came to know Tom as a friend, and that is the memory that I will cherish the most.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Tom and his wife Nancy came to Animal Rights via their work in Human Rights. Being concerned with the well-being of others, and trained as a philosopher, Tom became interested in just what it was that grounded our whole idea of Human Rights and whether some Rights belonged to those other than human. Tom reasoned that if some of us have dignity and are worthy of respect, then all who have such dignity must be worthy of the same respect. He realised that those who have dignity and deserve respect are those who, in his words, “have a biography and not just a biology”. In other words, when what happens to us matters to us, regardless of whether it matters to anyone else, then we are the subject of our own life and we deserve respect and the Rights which protect it. As a result of this thinking, Tom came to care in a new way for all living beings, and he began a lifelong mission of advocacy on their behalf.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Tom’s seminal work in his book, The Case for Animal Rights was truly ground-breaking, changing forever the terms of the debate about other animals. A rigorous exploration of Rights in general and why they haven’t, at least up to now, been applied to other animals, “The Case” was the first and still one of the very best analytical treatments of the question. While not everyone is satisfied with the answers Professor Regan developed, no one doubts the keen curiosity, intellectual honesty or complete sincerity with which he sought them. It was and remains a landmark for the Animal Rights movement.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Tom was the first Animal Rights theorist in the modern Animal Rights movement to use the term “abolitionist” as the only acceptable solution to such horrific practices as vivisection, the fur trade and animal agriculture. As he said, it’s not bigger cages, but empty cages that other animals deserve. This notion of abolishing entire systems of the use of other animals by humans motivated a generation of advocates and activists, and his work continues to influence many Animal Rights thinkers and advocates to this day.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">But Tom was more than just an Animal Rights philosopher, he was a person who never forgot his early work on Human Rights and who remained committed to compassion and justice throughout his life. He lived his philosophy, showing great respect for all human beings, especially those with whom he had personal dealings. Tom Regan possessed a quiet grace and displayed what can only be described as class, even when he spoke with those he most certainly disagreed. That was the Professor Regan I saw in the video-taped debate that introduced me to his work, and that is the Tom I eventually came to know personally. He represented the Animal Rights movement as a movement of thinkers, of compassionate caring people, of those committed to fairness and to just treatment for all others. Tom Regan displayed humility, he was always courteous and grateful, always willing to listen closely to those who held different convictions, and above all, he remained a kind and decent human being.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Tom will be missed for the unparalleled philosophical, theoretical contributions he has made to the Animal Rights movement, but he will equally be missed for the example he set for all of us – an example of decency and fairness toward all others, of humility, of compassion, of justice and of respect. We should never forget this part of Tom’s legacy.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">For my own part, I’ll always appreciate the influence Tom has had over the way I try to conduct myself, how I interact with others, and how I try to deal with those with whom I disagree. Tom showed me, by his example, how to be the change I wish to see in the world, helping me to learn the lessons that he had taken from Gandhi. Even in his passing, I know that his theories of Animal Rights will continue to inform my thinking, and that his personal dignity and grace will continue to influence how I carry myself through years to come.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">I’ll miss you, Tom. You were respected and appreciated by so many, and loved by them too. I’ll be proud to do my small part to carry on your legacy, to make the case for animal rights, with your important work and personal example to guide me. Thank you, Tom Regan, for everything you will continue to do on behalf of both humans and other animals.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><em><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><br/>A celebration of Tom Regan's life will be held on March 4th from 3-5pm at Tir Na Nog Irish Pub in downtown Raleigh. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions can be made to the Culture & Animals Foundation, 3509 Eden Croft Drive, Raleigh, NC 27612.</span></em></p>
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<p></p> Norm Phelps 1939-2014 Rest in Peacetag:arzone.ning.com,2015-01-03:4715978:Topic:1490372015-01-03T01:24:59.410ZCarolyn Baileyhttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/CarolynBailey
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="font-size-5" style="font-family: 'arial black', 'avant garde';">Norm Phelps 1939-2014 Rest in Peace</span><br></br></span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br></br> We've all lost a kind and caring friend, Norm Phelps. Paul Shapiro shares the news of Norm's passing, and some of his thoughts on Norm's life and…</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><span style="font-family: 'arial black', 'avant garde';" class="font-size-5">Norm Phelps 1939-2014 Rest in Peace</span><br/></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><br/> We've all lost a kind and caring friend, Norm Phelps. Paul Shapiro shares the news of Norm's passing, and some of his thoughts on Norm's life and work:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><br/></span> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038391240?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038391240?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>It's with sadness that I report </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/norm.phelps" target="_blank">Norm Phelps</a></span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is no longer with us. Many know Norm from his impactful writings about animal protection, and many others knew him as a humble, kind-hearted friend. Here are some of my thoughts on Norm's life, along with an announcement about the upcoming celebration of that life at the </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/CompassionOverKilling" target="_blank">Compassion Over Killing</a></span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> office.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">It’s with a heavy heart that I report that one of the best friends animals have had, Norm Phelps, has passed away at the age of 75. He died in Meritus Health Hospital in Hagerstown, Md. on December 31, 2014. Norm is survived by his loving, devoted wife and fellow animal advocate Patti Rogers, along with their beloved cats.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Many in the animal protection movement knew Norm as a thoughtful, pragmatic advocate and the author of three influential books, including <em>The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA</em>, as well as two important books on major religions and their views on animals. A list of his books and essays is available <a href="http://www.animalsandethics.org/" target="_blank">on his Web site</a>.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Norm was a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians and served during his retirement as volunteer outreach director for The Fund for Animals.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">I first met Norm when he began volunteering for Compassion Over Killing in the mid-1990s, and then I was honored to become his coworker in 1998 at The Fund for Animals. He acted as a mentor to both young and old in the office, and he exhibited such a deep empathy that when a member would call to express their despondence at some horror that was afflicting animals, they would always be transferred to Norm so that he could comfort them. Norm was widely beloved by those who knew him, and even those who may have occasionally disagreed with Norm respected him tremendously for his integrity and intelligence.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">For decades Norm was a fixture at major animal protection events: the Hegins pigeon shoot in Pennsylvania, conferences at which he spoke about the history of the animal protection movement and faith-based issues, vigils, leafleting events, and more. While the first part of his life was spent, as he used to joke, as a government bureaucrat at the Department of Transportation, the latter portion was devoted to creating a kinder world for animals. You can read about Norm’s transformation <a href="http://www.animalsandethics.org/aboutus.html" target="_blank">on his web site</a>. He even retired early from the federal government so he could devote more years of his life to full-time animal advocacy.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">The final years of Norm’s life were lived at the mercy of an illness that prevented him from engaging in much physical movement. However, this challenge led Norm to devote himself to his writings on behalf of animals. Were it not for the selfless and loving care of Patti, who provided for Norm with great devotion during this cruel chapter of his life, many of his essays and books that contributed so substantially to the animal protection literature would have never been written.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">There’s no shortage of positive adjectives one could use to describe Norm: gentle, erudite, compassionate, empathic, and dedicated all come to mind. But perhaps <em>humble</em> is the word that’s most fitting for him. Norm was always giving credit to others, regularly open to the possibility that he could be wrong, and constantly seeking to shine a spotlight on what others were doing to give animals a voice. It’s in that spirit that he dedicated <em>The Longest Struggle</em> “to the unknown animal activist.” Norm wrote of them:<br/> <br/></span> <em style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">“They do not seek recognition, and certainly not money—often they donate themselves into perpetual poverty. They seek only to relieve the suffering of the weakest, the most defenseless of those who live at the mercy of our merciless societies. They are the pride and hope of the human race.”<br/> <br/></em> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Norm requested that he not have a funeral, but that people remember him by more fully devoting themselves to the work of ending our species’ domination of the rest of the animals on the planet. Per the request of Patti, if animal advocates would like to make a donation in Norm’s memory, they can do so by </span><a href="https://www.givedirect.org/give/givefrm.asp?CID=4434" target="_blank" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">contributing to Compassion Over Killing</a><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">.<br/> <br/></span> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’m honored to have called Norm a friend and colleague, and very much hope he’s resting in peace.<br/> <br/></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;" class="font-size-4"><em>Originally posted at <a href="http://cok.net/norm-phelps/" target="_blank">Compassion Over Killing</a>, where you can find more information about the celebration of Norm's life, and reposted here with the kind permission of Paul Shapiro.</em></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><em>Paul Shapiro is the founder of Compassion Over Killing and vice president of farm animal protection at The Humane Society of the United States.</em></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><em><br/> <br/> <br/></em></span></p> 3000 ARZone Memberstag:arzone.ning.com,2013-02-09:4715978:Topic:1236192013-02-09T06:08:21.835ZAnimal Rights Zonehttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/admin
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: impact, chicago;">ARZone Reaches Another Milestone</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ARZone would like to welcome our 3000th member, and take this opportunity to thank all of our valued members who, by utilising and contributing to the many resources available through ARZone, have been the reason for our continued…</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: impact, chicago;" class="font-size-7">ARZone Reaches Another Milestone</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">ARZone would like to welcome our 3000th member, and take this opportunity to thank all of our valued members who, by utilising and contributing to the many resources available through ARZone, have been the reason for our continued success.</span> <br/><br/><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">ARZone will only ever be as successful as our members allow us to be, and we sincerely appreciate all of our valued members helping us to highlight and discuss pressing issues concerning our relations with, and responsibilities toward, human and other animals.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038388101?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="320" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038388101?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="320" class="align-center"/></a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"></p> Remembering Dian Fosseytag:arzone.ning.com,2012-12-29:4715978:Topic:1211052012-12-29T06:55:13.930ZCarolyn Baileyhttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/CarolynBailey
<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Dian Fossey was brutally hacked to death during the night of 26-27 December 1985 in her mountain cabin at Karisoke, Rwanda. Without Dian, there would probably be no mountain gorillas left to protect. </span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In April 1986 a special issue of IPPL News was issued. It contained a touching tribute by Colin Groves, "She Loved Gorillas and…</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Dian Fossey was brutally hacked to death during the night of 26-27 December 1985 in her mountain cabin at Karisoke, Rwanda. Without Dian, there would probably be no mountain gorillas left to protect. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">In April 1986 a special issue of IPPL News was issued. It contained a touching tribute by Colin Groves, "She Loved Gorillas and Mountains,"</span> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">and the fun "Boot Story," which was in a letter from Dian to Heather McGiffin.<br/><br/>Dian was a great letter-writer, and she used an old manual typewriter. Some of the letters she wrote to <span>Dr. Shirley McGreal</span> were 8 pages long, single-spaced! The newsletter also contains "His Name was Digit," a loving tribute by Dian to her favorite gorilla, Digit, who was killed by poachers who removed his head and hands. <br/><br/>At Dian's request IPPL ran side-by-side photos <span>of Digit as a happy young gorilla and of him as he was found - Dian staged these photos to try to get the message of the horrific event to the world. As far as I know, only IPPL agreed to run them.</span></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-5"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038387128?profile=original" target="_self">Dian Fossey Special Tribute.pdf</a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">(The scan is difficult to read in places, if you require a sharper copy, please let me know.) <br/><br/><br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038396391?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038396391?profile=original" width="314" class="align-center"/></a></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">With much gratitude for this information to: </span><br/><br/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Dr. Shirley McGreal, OBE, Executive Director International Primate Protection League</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><a href="http://www.ippl.org">www.ippl.org</a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"></p> Twice as many Visits and Visitors to ARZonetag:arzone.ning.com,2012-07-01:4715978:Topic:1021622012-07-01T21:21:27.797ZAnimal Rights Zonehttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/admin
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; color: #000000; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Compared to 2011, traffic to ARZone as measured by…</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; color: #000000; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Compared to 2011, traffic to ARZone as measured by Google Analytics has doubled in 2012!!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; color: #000000; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">As of yesterday, June 30, ARZone has been visited by as many unique visitors in the first 6 months of 2012 as it was in the entire 12 months of 2011. ARZone has had visitors from 153 countries across the globe with India, Germany, South Korea and Latvia all placing in the Top 10. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; color: #000000; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Thank you to everyone for your continued interest and support. Please don't hesitate to offer suggestions, comments and critiques of the site and its content. ARZone believes in continuous improvement and welcomes the valuable input of its members.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; color: #000000; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; color: #000000; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; color: #000000; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">~ Your ARZone admin team</p> Open Rescues: Putting a Face on the Rescuers and on the Rescued ~ Karen Davis. Preface by Dr. Steve Besttag:arzone.ning.com,2012-03-04:4715978:Topic:856632012-03-04T03:04:06.981ZAnimal Rights Zonehttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/admin
<p style="text-align: center;"><em><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ARZone is pleased to present, in conjunction with our interview of Patty Mark, Karen Davis’s essay “Open Rescues: Putting a Face on the Rescuers and the Rescued.” Patty Mark pioneered Open Rescues and Ms. Davis’s essay offers valuable insights into the practice. Dr. Steve Best, who, along with Anthony Nocella II, commissioned Ms. Davis’s essay for inclusion in their co-edited book Terrorist or Freedom…</span></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ARZone is pleased to present, in conjunction with our interview of Patty Mark, Karen Davis’s essay “Open Rescues: Putting a Face on the Rescuers and the Rescued.” Patty Mark pioneered Open Rescues and Ms. Davis’s essay offers valuable insights into the practice. Dr. Steve Best, who, along with Anthony Nocella II, commissioned Ms. Davis’s essay for inclusion in their co-edited book Terrorist or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals, has graciously provided ARZone access to this great resource. Dr. Best offers the essay, and his prefatory remarks newly written for ARZone members, both to recognize the great contributions made by Patty Mark to the movement for other animals as well as to situate our discussion of Open Rescues within that movement. In addition, Dr. Best has also provided ARZone with the introduction to Terrorist or Freedom Fighters which we have published in its entirety online <a href="http://arzonetranscripts.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/behind-the-mask-uncovering-the-animal-liberation-front/" target="_blank">here.</a></span></em><br/> <br/> <em><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ARZone wishes to thank Steve Best, Anthony Nocella II and Karen Davis for making this vital information available. Thanks as well to Lantern Books, the publishers of Terrorist or Freedom Fighters (copies of <a>the book are available here</a> and <a href="http://www.lanternbooks.com/detail.html?session=c32abc2c66e748c06e1e9ecee4eab92c&cat=16&id=9781590562710">the introduction is available here</a>).</span></em></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;" class="font-size-5"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Preface: by Steve Best Ph.D </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In honor of Patty Mark’s chat on ARZone, I am happy to share, as background information, Karen Davis’s essay “Open Rescues: Putting a Face on the Rescuers and the Rescued,” which was originally commissioned for and published in <i>Terrorist or Freedom Fighters</i>: <i>Reflections on the Liberation of Animals</i>. I am delighted with Karen’s essay because it was, and remains, unique in contrasting two different styles of illegal animal liberation tactics.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">These are (1) the “closed” and underground approach of the ALF, pioneered by Ronnie Lee in the early 1970s, and which spawned a new animal liberation movement that since its founding in 1976 has spread globally to over 30 countries; and (2) the “open” and aboveground approach developed by Patty Mark in the late 1980s, and which has subsequently spread to the US, Spain, and other countries. The former approach is clandestine, involves wearing masks and anonymity, and aims to destroy as much property of animal exploiters as possible (to end or undermine their ability to injure and kill animals). The latter approach, in contrast, is defiantly open, strips off the mask to expose the face of the liberator, and uses the most minimal amount of property destruction possible (e.g., it might be necessary to break a lock to gain entry to a factory farm, but an open rescue activist would not proceed to smash equipment and machinery and would never employ arson tactics).</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It is important to note that both methods are illegal, both claim to be nonviolent, both seek to expose conditions of animal exploitation with an educative message, and both are forms of direct action undertaken to liberate animals from cages and confinement. It is crucial as well to appreciate that the ALF is an avowed “nonviolent” organization that has never injured a single human being, that ALF actions typically free many more animals than open rescues (often exceeding hundreds of animals taken from laboratories or thousands of mink released from fur farms), and that the ALF wear masks for a reason. The reason for the closed, anonymous, and masked approach which takes action under the cover of night is not that liberators are ashamed of what they do, quite the contrary; it is rather to protect their anonymity, in order to stay free to liberate another night.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">While the open rescue approach is closer to Gandhi-style definitions of nonviolence, as it minimizes property destruction and activists take full accountability for their actions, and can be effective in exposing abominations such as factory farming in ways in which ALF tactics may not, there are also some disadvantages with this approach, especially in countries like the</span> United States<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">. In the post-9/11 era of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and the USA PATRIOT Act (with its insidious category of “domestic terrorism”), and the increasing number of ways in which the US state has criminalized dissent and stripped away civil rights, open rescues are no longer as tolerated by the state as they once were, and activists who choose these tactics open themselves up to serious legal charges (via violation of the AETA) that could rival the penalties activist have received through closed rescue tactics.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Moreover, it is important to point out that while</span> Davis <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">makes an important critique of one overly theatrical “Batman” style ALF liberation, it would be absurd to reduce all actions to silly bravado, narcissistic theatre, or crude machismo. For the people who undertake ALF actions are quite serious and dedicated individuals, their purposes are self-sacrificing not self-serving, they carefully study their targets, they use sophisticated techniques and knowledge to penetrate into high-security buildings, and they include both men and women.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I finally wish to emphasize that one should see open and closed rescue tactics not as incompatible, one being superior to the other, but as <i>complimentary</i> tactics that are important additions to the strategies the animal rights/liberation movement has evolved over the last few decades and, indeed, are some of the most effective tactics that we have ever developed and utilized. Nor should we construct false oppositions between legal and illegal, or between mainstream and underground tactics, as if both do not serve their purposes and each is not a necessary and valid strategy and model for this movement.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">But whereas ALF and militant direct activists do not condemn “pacifist” legal and aboveground approaches (indeed, many underground activists and most militants also work in these ways and do plenty of vegan outreach, etc), unfortunately, the respect and understanding has not run equally or as graciously in both directions. What must occur, I suggest, is that people who chose legal and mainstream paths of action at least <i>not disparage</i> those who work underground and who undertake the complex, difficult, and dangerous actions they undertake; for without the ALF, countless thousands of animals would have suffered weeks, months, years, or decades more and people otherwise would never even know that animals such as Britches suffered in the kind of hellholes exposed by the ALF.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It was indeed a central purpose of <i>Terrorist or Freedom Fighters</i> to try to educate activists in the animal advocacy movement about the origins, ethics, tactics, and politics of the ALF, so that they might have a better understanding of the true purpose, nature, and importance of the ALF, and thereby to show them greater respect. Regrettably, I have only had limited and partial success in this goal, as I constantly hear or read disparaging remarks and false claims about the ALF that to my mind are symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome (whereby activists show more attention to respecting the “humanity” of animal exploiters such as sealers (!) than the militants in their own movement) and evidence of deep historical ignorance of the irrevocable contributions and successes of the ALF. It is, for instance, a <i>pernicious myth</i> that animals, equipment, and buildings are “always replaced” and ALF actions are “counter-productive.” Time and time again, the ALF has permanently closed down ghoulish operations; this is simply an irrefutable fact proven in countless dozens of cases. None of my remarks is meant to close debate or enforce a party line, but to ensure that debate proceeds with historically accurate facts and proper understanding.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">As I emphasized toward the end of my introduction to <i>Terrorists or Freedom Fighters</i>, there needs to be a greater respect for the plurality of tactics needed in this movement, especially if their effectiveness is proven. To condemn ALF actions simply because one does not like them, nor has any comprehension of their historical importance and practical effectiveness, and especially to <i>demonize</i> the ALF in the corporate-state language of “violence” or “terrorism” – this is one of the greatest betrayals possible of those with the courage to undertake these actions, of the animals, and of every liberation movement in history.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In this light, I strongly urge people to read Kevin Jonas’s essay, also published in <i>Terrorists or Freedom Fighters</i>, entitled “Bricks and Bullhorns,” which very convincingly makes the case that a strong movement, like a healthy ecosystem, operates through plurality and diversity. Indeed, if you have not yet read the entire book, for there is much to be learned from the diversity of perspectives expressed in it.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally, I personally wish to pay homage to both Ronnie Lee and Patty Mark, for they have each made innovative and permanent contributions to the animal rights/liberation movement. History, as should we all, will acknowledge and respect them accordingly. Both have my greatest respect and admiration, they are <i>freedom fighters</i> in the deepest and fullest sense of the term and are enduring sources of inspiration.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Steve Best</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-5">Open Rescues: Putting a Face on the Rescuers and on the Rescued</span></span><br/> <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-5">Karen Davis, PhD</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Using darkness as a cover and compassion as their guide, five members of Mercy for Animals (MFA) covertly entered sheds at Ohio’s two largest egg producers . . . following criteria for a recently documented technique known as open rescue.</em> —Rachelle Detweiler, “Missions of Mercy,” The Animals’ Agenda<sup>1</sup></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">When I first started writing this essay I thought I would discuss the ALF practice of concealment versus disclosure of personal identity as a strategy for achieving animal liberation through appeals to public perception and public conscience. But as I sifted through my files looking at the faces of animal liberators both masked and unmasked, as well as at undercover rescue scenes in both video format and verbal evocation, I decided that, important as the mask question may be from the standpoint of public perception, of equal and perhaps more fundamental importance is that of the rescuers’ overall body language and the expression of their hands in a videotaped rescue intended for general audiences. When it comes to faces, it seems that the most important ones to be shown in a rescue operation taped for public viewing are the faces of the animals themselves. But those faces and the suffering they express have become increasingly hidden and disguised.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><u>The “Disappearance” of Animals in Western Culture</u></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Attention to the plight of animals raised for food is still relatively new in the</span> United States<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">. In 1987, when the first ALF action at the Beltsville (Maryland) Agricultural Research Center was conceived and carried out, even ALF activists who used the term “animal rights,” according to Ingrid Newkirk in <i>Free the Animals</i>, “had not yet incorporated the systematized abuse of ‘farm animals’ into their agendas, couldn’t ‘see’ an attack on the farm industry at all.”<sup>2</sup> One reason they couldn’t envision such an attack was that they didn’t yet “see” the animals entombed within the industry. In his essay “Why Look at Animals,” John Berger discusses the disappearance of nonhuman animals into institutionalized anonymity in Western society, a process that he says began in the nineteenth century and was completed in the twentieth century as an enterprise of corporate capitalism.<sup>3</sup> Berger’s observations about animals in zoos, which to him symbolizes what our culture has done to animals as part of our overall rupture of the natural world, are equally applicable to factory-farmed animals. By extension, he includes them in his analysis of the cultural marginalization and disappearance of animal life, with the difference that nobody is expected even to pretend to look even at a factory-farmed animal, or to remember that factory-farmed animals were ever “wild” and free, and could be again. “The space which modern, institutionalized animals inhabit,” Berger states in speaking of zoos, “is artificial.”</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory. Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity. They have nothing to act upon—except, briefly, supplied food and—very occasionally—a supplied mate. (Hence their perennial actions become marginal actions without an object.) Lastly, their dependence and isolation have so conditioned their responses that they treat any event which takes place around them—usually it is in front of them, where the public is—as marginal. (Hence their assumption of an otherwise exclusively human attitude—indifference.) . . . At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a <strong>central</strong> place in their attention.<sup>4</sup></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: left;"><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> This condition—of blind, and blinding, encounters between a potential human audience and the animals involved in a rescue operation—is what the ALF and open rescue teams, insofar as their purpose is winning public sympathy, have to overcome, because as Berger says about animals at the zoo, they “disappoint” the public, especially the children—”Where is he? Why doesn’t he move? Is he dead?” As for the adults, “One is so accustomed to this that one scarcely notices it any more.”<sup>5</sup></span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> The human onlookers adjust. After all, it isn’t their own fate they are seeing, even if, in some essential way, that’s what they’re looking at. They go to the zoo almost in the same way that they go out to eat—to entertain themselves and their children, like a trip to</span> Disneyland<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">, which succeeds where zoos fail, because, like hamburgers and chicken nuggets, “animated” creatures are more prized by our culture than living animals are. As for the animals, they are imprisoned in an impoverished world imposed on them which their psyches did not emanate and which they do not understand. Factory-farmed animals are imprisoned in total confinement buildings within global systems of confinement, and thus they are separated from the natural world in which they evolved, including their family life. They are imprisoned in alien bodies manipulated for food traits alone, bodies that in many cases have been surgically mutilated as well, creating a disfigured appearance—they are debeaked, detoed, dehorned, ear-cropped, tail-docked, and so on. Factory-farmed animals are imprisoned in a belittling concept of who they are.<sup>6</sup> Outside the animal rights community, and the intimate confines of their own lives, these animals are unreal to almost everyone. They are not only prisoners but, in a real sense, they are the living dead. The entire life of these animals is a series of overlapping burials.<sup>7</sup></span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> Factory-farmed animals go from being in wombs and eggs in factory hatcheries and breeding facilities to being locked up (until they go to slaughter, unless they die first) in CAFOs—Confinement Animal Feeding Operations. They are thus buried in a rhetoric of exploitation equivalent to the layers of material coverup in which their “silent” suffering goes on. The purpose of their existence is to be buried in the gastrointestinal tract of a human being. In the United States, hens deemed no longer fit for commercial egg production are literally buried alive in landfills after being entombed for a year or more in metal cages inside the walls of windowless buildings.<sup>8</sup> According to Australian activist Patty Mark, when the manure pits are bulldozed at the end of a laying cycle, “any live and/or debilitated hens still stuck in the manure are simply scooped up with the waste and buried alive on the trucks.”<sup>9</sup></span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><u>The Role of the ALF</u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The ALF seeks to expose our society’s enormous cruelty to nonhuman animals. The ALF is set up to rescue individual animals from specific situations of abuse, with a view to ending all of the abuse, and to wreak economic havoc on animal exploiters with the goal of making it hard, and ultimately impossible, for the exploiters to continue doing business. The ALF also supports property damage on moral grounds, “[W]hen certain buildings, tools and other property are being used to commit violence,” ALF spokesperson David Barbarash explains, “the ALF believes that the destruction of property is justified.”</span><sup style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">10</sup> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In considering these goals I am reminded of what Aristotle said in the</span> <i style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Poetics</i> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">about the goals of tragic drama with respect to audience response. He said that tragic drama should arouse pity and fear in the audience: pity and compassion for the victims, fear and horror directed at the causes of the victims’ suffering. Similarly, the ALF seeks to arouse pity and compassion for the animal victims (the audience in this case is the general public, including the news media and the exploiters themselves), and to instill fear of economic destruction—loss of livelihood, funding, business, and credibility—in those who profit from institutionalized animal abuse. “[I]n the end, make sure it’s the animal abusers who really pay,” says the ALF.</span><sup style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">11</sup></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> Since the public at large is the ultimate cause of all of the animal abuse being exposed, in laboratories, on factory farms and elsewhere, it is morally and strategically appropriate, necessary in fact, to instill a “fear of oneself” in all audiences for having passively or actively contributed to the suffering and abuse taking place behind the scenes. All of us, in our conscience at least, should have to “really pay” more than a mere token of regret. In the brief discussion that follows, I shall concentrate only on the “pity” aspect of what many of us regard as the greatest tragedy on earth—our species’ smug and evil treatment of the other animals who share this planet, including their homes and families—and on how to get audiences to identify compassionately with the animal victims and their rescuers. My illustrations are drawn mainly from recent battery-hen farm investigations, in which all of those involved were, in one way or another, “unmasked.”<sup>12</sup></span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><u>United Poultry Concerns Forum On Direct Action for Animals</u></span><br/> <em><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">At a small conference on direct action in 1999, Australian activist Patty Mark introduced many</span> US</em> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>activists to the concept of open rescues. Most participants in the conference were accustomed to the “traditional” notion that people who rescue animals ought to act clandestinely so they can avoid detection and arrest and continue to free as many animals as possible. So when confronted with the idea that people can freely admit to rescuing animals, many—if not most—of the conference participants seemed somewhat skeptical.</em> —Paul Shapiro, “The</span> US <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Open,” <i>The Animals’ Agenda</i><sup>13</sup></span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">On June 26–27, 1999, United Poultry Concerns held a historic—the first ever—Forum on Direct Action for Animals. Speakers included Katie Fedor, founder of the Animal Liberation Front Press Office in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Freeman Wicklund, an outspoken ALF advocate and founder of the ALF advocacy magazine <i>No Compromise</i>, who in 1997 renounced his support for the ALF in favor of strategic nonviolence based on Gandhian principles;<sup>14</sup> and Patty Mark, founder of Animal Liberation Victoria, editor of <i>Action Magazine</i>, and Coordinator of the Action Animal Rescue Team, which conducts nonviolent rescues inside Australian factory farms.<sup>15</sup> The forum, which I conceived and organized, was inspired in part by a statement by philosopher Tom Regan concerning ALF activities in his essay on “Civil Disobedience” in <i>The Struggle for Animal Rights.</i> Instead of concealment, Regan wrote, “[W]hat I think is right strategy and right psychology is for the people who liberate animals to come forth and identify themselves as the people who did it.”<sup>16</sup></span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> During the forum, the question of concealment versus open acknowledgment of one’s identity in conducting illegal direct actions for animals expanded into a wider range of issues surrounding this question. This larger focus resulted from the showing of two different videos of recent animal rescues: an ALF raid at the</span> University of Minnesota <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">and a battery-caged hen rescue at an egg facility in Australia.<sup>17</sup> The Australian video shows the Action Animal Rescue Team’s well-planned rescue of several hens. It documents the conditions in which the hens live inside the battery shed. We see the hens’ suffering faces up close. We watch and hear a hen scream as she is being lifted out of the molasses-like manure in which she is trapped in the pits beneath the cages. The video captures not only the terrible suffering of the hens being rescued, but the gentleness and firmness of the rescue team (as expressed, for example, by their hands), who, as an integral part of their videotaped operations, contact the police, get arrested, and explain their mission with the intention of putting battery-hen farming visibly on trial before the public and in the courtroom during their own trial for trespassing and theft.</span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> By contrast, the video of the ALF break-in and rescue of animals at the</span> University of Minnesota <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">shows rescuers dressed in black, Batman-like outfits wearing black masks. All rescues are shot at a long-distance angle. The rescuers look and act like remote, stylized figures rather than flesh-and-blood people, and the animals, including birds and fish, are so far away that it is difficult to be sure what kinds of birds, for example, are being taken out of the cages.<sup>18</sup> Where the Australian direct action shows suffering, compassion, a trained team, and the highly skilled use of a camera, the ALF video shows a posturing, self-centered rescue—despite the anonymity of the rescuers—in which empathy for the victims, however <i>felt</i>, is <i>visibly</i> lacking. Significantly, there is no involvement between the ALF rescuers and the animals they are liberating, as there is between the rescuers and the hens in the Australian video. The body language of the ALF rescuers is “choreographed” to resemble swordplay, in the style of Zorro or Batman.</span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> The forum overwhelmingly chose the Australian operation and style of direct action over the characteristics depicted in this particular ALF operation. Attendees felt that the Australian video was a model for the kind of activism that, when aired, would move and educate the public, whereas the ALF video we looked at (part of which had recently been televised in Minneapolis-St. Paul), with its focus on the masked and posturing rescuers rather than on the animals and without any show of sensitivity toward them, would have a negative effect, or no effect, on most viewers. Another critical difference was in the settings: on the one hand you see the obviously filthy and inhumane battery-cage facility; on the other hand you see an antiseptic-looking laboratory at the</span> University of Minnesota <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">in which the suffering and cruelty are harder to convey.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><u>Undercover Investigations of Battery-Caged Hen Facilities</u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Inspired by the Australian model, three undercover investigations of battery-caged hen facilities, including hen rescues, were conducted in the United States in 2001: In January, members of Compassionate Action for Animals (CAA) openly rescued 11 hens from a Michael Foods egg complex in Minnesota;<sup>19</sup> in May, members of Compassion Over Killing (COK) openly rescued eight hens from ISE-America in Maryland;<sup>20</sup> and in August and September, Mercy for Animals (MFA) openly rescued 34 hens from DayLay and Buckeye egg farms in Ohio.<sup>21</sup> All three groups took powerful documentary photographs that can be found on their Web sites. In addition, Compassion Over Killing and Mercy for Animals produced high-quality videos of what went on inside the houses: COK’s <i>Hope for the Hopeless</i> and MFA’s <i>Silent Suffering</i>.<sup>22</sup> Both groups published explanatory news releases, provided press packets, and held well-attended press conferences that resulted in significant news coverage by the <i>Washington Post,</i> <i>United Press International,</i> statenews.org: The Ohio Public Radio and Television Statehouse News Bureau, and more. Because Compassion Over Killing held their press conference first, and, in doing so, set the standard for the equally impressive investigation conducted by Mercy for Animals, I will cite COK’s investigation to illustrate the characteristics of what I and many others regard as a well-organized open rescue operation with charismatic effects.</span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> On June 6, 2001, Compassion Over Killing (COK) announced that the group would hold a press conference that day to “present findings of a recent investigation into animal treatment at an International Standard of Excellence (ISE) egg facility in Cecilton, Md.”<sup>23</sup> According to the news release,</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">COK’s month-long investigation began after the organization was denied a tour of the facility. ISE’s Cecilton facility is “home” to 800,000 laying hens, all of whom live in “battery cages” (long rows of wire cages holding up to 10 birds per cage).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> The investigators documented in videos and photographs numerous acts of animal cruelty at ISE, including immobilized hens with no access to food or water, hens living in overcrowded cages with the decomposing corpses of deceased hens, and sick and injured hens suffering without veterinary care.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> After making repeated nighttime visits to the facility to document abuses, COK investigators requested that the Cecilton authorities prosecute ISE for animal cruelty. But, no action was taken. So, on May 23, 2001, COK investigators rescued eight sick and injured hens in dire need of immediate veterinary care.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> On June 6, 2001, the details of the investigation and rescue will be on line at <a href="http://www.isecruelty.com/">www.ISECruelty.com</a>. Also, COK’s new 18-minute documentary on the investigation and rescue, <i>Hope for the Hopeless</i>, will be aired and distributed to media at the press conference.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> According to COK investigator</span> Miyun Park<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">, “The animals at ISE are suffering miserably. If consumers knew how animals are abused by the egg industry, they would never eat eggs.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> Expert veterinarian Eric Dunayer, VMD, viewed footage taken from ISE’s Cecilton facility and stated, “[T]he videotape shows hens subjected to extremely inhumane conditions that inflict severe deprivation and injury. I have no doubt that these hens suffer terribly under such conditions.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> ISE is an international animal agribusiness based in</span> Japan<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">. Its</span> US <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">affiliate, ISE-America, holds captive 5.6 million egg-laying hens: 2.3 million in</span> South Carolina<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">; 1.5 million in</span> Maryland<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">; 1.3 million in</span> New Jersey<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">; and 500,000 in</span> Pennsylvania<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> COK’s recent investigation is not ISE’s first run-in with animal advocates. On October 17, 2000, ISE was found guilty on two counts of animal cruelty in</span> New Jersey<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">. The case involved two live hens who were found tossed in a garbage can filled with dead hens.</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><u>The Drama of Open Rescue</u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Mirroring the group’s investigative procedure, COK’s news release is very thorough. It explains the cause, process, and nature of the investigation, while placing it within a context of information about the company, ISE-America. The group did their homework. They provided veterinary validation of their animal cruelty charges (their press packet contains several letters from veterinarians), and they produced a dramatic video documenting their claims. <i>Hope for the Hopeless</i> combines the professionalism of the rescue team with the pathos of the hens. It overcomes a fundamental difficulty in drawing public attention to the plight of factory-farmed animals: the lack of drama. However, when the rescue is visually crafted and deftly narrated, as COK’s is, then you have the drama, the dramatis personae, the tension, a storyline, and a “resolution,” in what must otherwise appear to be, as in reality it is, a limitless expanse of animal suffering and horror—an eternal Treblinka, in the words of the Nobel Prize–winning writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, concerning the plight of all other animal species in relation to our own.<span class="font-size-1"><sup>24</sup></span> <i>Hope for the Hopeless</i> shows the helpless victims and their heroic rescuers deep in the pit and under the shadow of the “enemy.” These elements, skillfully combined, should elicit public sympathy and outrage.</span><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> Otherwise, except for the “veal” calf, whose solitary confinement stall and large, sad mammalian eyes draw attention to him- or herself as a desolate individual, all that most of the public sees in animal factories are endless rows of battery-caged hens, wall-to-wall turkeys, and thousands of chickens or pigs. What they hear is deathly silence or indistinguishable “noise.” They see a brownish sea of bodies without conflict, plot or endpoint. There is no “one on one”—no man beating a dog, say, on which to focus one’s outrage. To the public eye, the sheer number and expanse of animals surrounded by metal, wires, dung, dander, and dust renders all of them invisible and unpersonable. There are no “individuals.” Instead there is a scene of pure suffering—worse, suffering that isn’t even grasped by most viewers, who are more or less consensually programmed not to perceive “food” animals as individuals with feelings, let alone as creatures with projects of their own of which they have been stripped.</span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><u>Open the Cages</u></span></p>
<p><em><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Each individual life we save means the world to us and to them. Pure bliss is watching a withered, featherless, debilitated, and naked little hen look up at the sky for the first time in her life, stretch her frail limbs, and then do what all hens adore: take a dust bath!</span></em><br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">—Patty Mark, “To Free a Hen,” <i>The Animals’ Agenda#</i></span><br/> <br/> <span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Revealing the faces of these birds and other animals as they are being compassionately lifted from the dead piles onto which they were thrown, the cages upon cages surrounding them, or the manure pits into which they fell, showing them responding to a little cup of water in a close-up shot after all they have been through—this is what the animal liberation movement as a whole and the ALF and open rescuers, whether masked or otherwise, must try to accomplish. Regardless of what else is involved, as Ingrid Newkirk says in <i>Free the Animals</i>, the emphasis of the story must remain on the animals—getting them out safe and getting them seen.# The moment of rescue is their moment. It is their “role,” and their right, at that moment to be in the spotlight, and thus also to shed a light on all of their brothers and sisters who, together with them, deserved and would have chosen to be freed, and to be free.</span><br/> <br/> <span class="font-size-1" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-1">Notes</b></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">1. Rachelle Detweiler, “Missions of Mercy,” <i>The Animals’ Agenda</i>, Vol. 22, No. 1 (January–February 2002), 11.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-1">2. Ingrid Newkirk, <i>Free the Animals!</i> (Chicago: The Noble Press, 1992), 336.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">3. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in David M. Guss<i>, ed.</i>, <i>The Language of the Birds: Tales, Texts, and Poems of Interspecies Communication</i> (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 275–287.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-1">4. Berger, 286–287.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-1">5. Berger, 285.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-1">6. I examine the cultural practice of belittling nonhuman animals, especially farmed animals, in my book <i>More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality</i> (New York: Lantern Books, 2001).</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">7. For a Marxist look at the “alienation” of factory farmed chickens (and by extension all factory-farmed animals), see especially pp. 21–24 of my book <i>Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry</i> (Summertown, TN: The Book Publishing Company, 1996).</span></p>
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<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">8. “The simplest method of disposal is to pack the birds, alive, into containers, and bulldoze them into the ground. Euphemistically called ‘composting,’ it still amounts to being buried alive,” according to Canadian Farm Animal Care Trust President Tom Hughes, quoted in Merritt Clifton, “Starving the hens is ‘standard,’” <i>Animal People: News For People Who Care About Animals</i>, Vol. 9, No. 4 (May 2000), 1, 8. See also Chris Miller, “Cooped up: Animal rights activists say the transportation of chickens to slaughterhouses remains cruel and inhumane despite an increase in [Canadian] government regulations,” <i>The Vancouver Courier</i>, Vol. 11, No. 29 (July 27, 2001), 1, 3, 17.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">9. See Patty Mark, “To Free a Hen,” <i>The Animals’ Agenda</i>, Vol. 21, No. 4 (July–August 2001), 25–26.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">10. Claudette Vaughan, “The ALF Unmasked,” <i>Vegan Voice</i>, No. 8 (December–February 2002), 9–10.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-1">11. “The Secret Life of Cells: From the Website of the Animal Liberation Front,” <i>Harper’s Magazine</i>, Vol. 304, No. 1821 (February 2002), 20–21.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">12. The masks worn by open rescuers of battery-caged hens are gas masks, used as a protection against the poisonous excretory ammonia fumes that permeate factory-farm poultry houses.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-1">13. Paul Shapiro, “The US ‘Open,’ ” <i>The Animals’ Agenda</i>, Vol. 21, No. 4 (July–August 2001), 27.</span></p>
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<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">14. See Freeman Wicklund, “Direct Action: Progress, Peril, or Both?” in this volume.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">15. Mark, 25–26. Contact Animal Liberation Victoria/Action Animal Rescue Team at <a href="mailto:amag@ihug.com.au">amag@ihug.com.au</a>, or call 03-9531-4367.</span></p>
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<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">16. Tom Regan, <i>The Struggle for Animal Rights</i> (Clarks Summit, PA: International Society for Animal Rights, 1987), 182.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">17. The ALF raid took place in the pre-dawn hours of April 5, 1999. See Erin Geoghegan, “Minnesota ALF Raid Stirs Debate,” <i>The Animals’ Agenda</i>, Vol. 19, No. 3 (May–June 1999), 12, 18. The Action Animal Rescue Team video was a 37-minute segment edited from a compilation tape called <i>Pigs, Broiler Chickens, & Battery Hens—1995</i>–<i>1999</i>.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">18. More than 100 rats, mice, pigeons, and salamanders were freed. See Geoghegan.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">19. See Shapiro, n. 13 above. Michael Foods is the third largest egg company in the US and the world’s largest producer of “value-added egg products,” according to <i>Egg Industry</i>, January 2001, pp. 2, 16. Visit CAA’s website at <a href="http://www.ca4a.org;/">www.ca4a.org</a>. Also visit <a href="http://www.banbatterycages.org">www.banbatterycages.org</a>, or call CAA at (612) 922-6312.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">20. See Shapiro, n. 13 above. ISE-America is the tenth largest egg company in the US, according to <i>Egg Industry</i> magazine, 16. Visit COK’s website at <a href="http://www.cok-online.org/">www.COK-online.org</a>; also visit <a href="http://www.isecruelty.com/">www.ISECruelty.com</a>, or call 301-891-2458.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">21. See Detweiler, n. 1 above. According to <i>Egg Industry</i>, January 2001, Buckeye Egg Farm ranks no. 5 and Daylay Egg Farm ranks no. 22 among the largest US egg producers. Visit MFA’s website at <a href="http://www.mercyforanimals.org/">www.mercyforanimals.org</a>; also visit <a href="http://www.eggcruelty.com/">www.EggCruelty.com</a>, or call (937) 652-8258.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">22. Both videos can be purchased from United Poultry Concerns, PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405, for $10 each including shipping. Visit <a href="http://www.upc-online.org/">www.UPC-online.org</a>. To order these videos directly from COK and MFA, see notes 20 and 21 above.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">23. This investigation goes back ultimately to a phone call from a volunteer fireman to United Poultry Concerns in December 1993. His crew had been called in to put out a fire at one of the ISE-America complexes in Maryland. He said he had no idea such a horrible place existed, and he would never eat another egg. In the winter of 1995, my then office assistant, Jim Sicard, and I paid a midnight visit to ISE-America, where we took photos and removed 10 hens. When COK codirector Paul Shapiro asked me in 2001 about battery-hen complexes near Washington, DC, I told him about ISE-America and how to get there. For the story of Jim Sicard’s and my rescue at ISE-America, see Jim Sicard, “Take the Chickens and Run! How 10 battery-caged hens came to live at UPC,” <i>PoultryPress</i>, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer 1996), 1–2.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">24. “In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth. ‘What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.’” This passage appears in Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Letter Writer,” <i>The Collected Stories</i> (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). For a comprehensive look at human Nazism towards nonhuman animals, see Charles Patterson, <i>Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust</i> (New York: Lantern Books, 2002).</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1">25. Mark, 26. <i><br/></i></span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-1">26. Newkirk, 350.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-1"><br/></b></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><b class="font-size-1" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br/></b></span></p>
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<p> </p> Promoting ARZone - Visitors & Visits in 2011tag:arzone.ning.com,2012-01-21:4715978:Topic:786572012-01-21T03:52:26.601ZAnimal Rights Zonehttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/admin
<p><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ARZone promotes itself online, by alerting people on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets about upcoming interviews. ARZone also posts links to the various content available on the main ARZone website, as well as that on the <a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">podcast</a> and <a href="http://arzonequotes.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Thoughts for the Day</a> sites. The…</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">ARZone promotes itself online, by alerting people on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets about upcoming interviews. ARZone also posts links to the various content available on the main ARZone website, as well as that on the <a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">podcast</a> and <a href="http://arzonequotes.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Thoughts for the Day</a> sites. The content on the main ARZone site includes transcripts of every guest "chat" and interview (currently numbering more than 80, including interviews and chats with Tom Regan, Will Tuttle, Carol Adams, Melanie Joy, Colleen Patrick-Goodreau, Gary Francione, and Gary Yourofsky), forum and blog posts, videos and photos, and much more.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Why do we promote ARZone? Does ARZone generate any revenue of any kind for anyone? Is ARZone part of any other organization, or do any of its administrators derive any financial or career benefits from ARZone?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><b>Why do we promote ARZone?</b></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">We promote ARZone because we think that ARZone provides something unique within the community of advocates for other animals. There are many websites and blogs that promote one person's views, or that exist to provide a particular view of human obligations towards other animals. That is not what ARZone does, and it is not what ARZone is for. ARZone, as an entity, is committed to the liberation of other animals and to building an anti-speciesist society. It exists to provide an online space where advocates can talk to and learn from each other, in an atmosphere of respect and openness. Without specifically endorsing any one particular strategy or set of tactics, ARZone is committed to an ongoing discourse that will lead to the most lasting and meaningful change in the least amount of time. ARZone cannot fulfill this commitment with the participation of its members, so therefore, ARZone must promote ARZone.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><b>Does ARZone generate any revenue of any kind for anyone?</b></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">No. ARZone is an advertising free zone, and it receives no financial support of any kind from anyone or any organization. All site maintenance and operating expenses are gladly paid by the administrators.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><b>Is ARZone part of any other organization, or do any of its administrators derive any financial or career benefits from ARZone?</b></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">No. ARZone is a stand alone, volunteer-run enterprise, with no organizational or structural ties to any outside company, group, organization or people. Neither ARZone itself, nor any of its administrators derive any financial or career benefits from ARZone's activities; they receive no endorsements, endowments, or other material rewards of any kind as a result of what ARZone does.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><b>Is ARZone making any difference for other animals?</b></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">This is a difficult question to answer - how would ARZone measure its impact? One way, perhaps the only way for an online social network to measure its results is to look at the numbers. Here they are:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Since its founding 2 years ago, 2,422 members have joined.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">In 2011, the various pages on the main ARZone website (not including the <a href="http://www.arzonepodcasts.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">podcast</a> or <a href="http://arzonequotes.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">quotes</a> site) were viewed a total of 207,016 times, by 29,399 unique visitors during a total of 71,586 visits. More than 40% of those 29,399 visitors were new visitors in 2011, meaning that nearly 12,000 people saw the work ARZone does for the first time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">So, in 2011, everyday eyes were set on 567 pages of content on ARZone, and almost half the time those eyes were seeing this content for the first time. What impact did ARZone have in 2011? ARZone cannot say, but perhaps, if we could survey the 29,399 visitors who spent some time here, they could tell us.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Thank you to all those people who have supported ARZone - the dedicated activists, advocates, and educators who have taken their time to answer our questions, the interested and loyal members who contribute so much in so many ways, and the new visitors, who may not become members, but who hopefully learn something new about what we all owe to each other and to other animals.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">ARZone is continually evaluating all of its efforts, and is always open to suggestions and ideas from anyone committed to doing what is right by other animals. ARZone will always remain a place rational discourse. We cannot form honest opinions about that which we do not understand, and we cannot understand that which we do not carefully consider.</span></p>
<p> <a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3807309497?profile=original"><img class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3807309497?profile=original" width="261"/></a></p>
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<p align="center"></p> ARZone Contest Winnerstag:arzone.ning.com,2012-01-15:4715978:Topic:777352012-01-15T05:12:58.061ZCarolyn Baileyhttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/CarolynBailey
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038376291?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038376552?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Congratulations to the following people who are the first lucky winners in the ARZone "Dang!" competition. Thank you for listening to our podcasts, and participating in the contest. …</span></p>
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<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038376291?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038376552?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-center"/></a></p>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">Congratulations to the following people who are the first lucky winners in the ARZone "Dang!" competition. Thank you for listening to our podcasts, and participating in the contest. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3">We hope you enjoy your prizes as much as we enjoy bringing the podcasts to you. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-3"><font size="3">Please continue to participate, as each winner is now going into the draw for a big prize, as well as receiving the very first issue of <span style="color: #3366ff;"><a href="http://www.livingvegan.com.au/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3366ff;">Living Vegan</span></a> </span>magazine. </font></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><br/> <span style="color: #333399;"><em>Lucas Hayes</em></span></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #333399;"><em><span class="font-size-3">Sky Church</span></em></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #333399;"><em><span class="font-size-3">Mo Orr</span></em></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #333399;"><em><span class="font-size-3">Billy Lovci</span></em></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><br/></span></p> ARZone Reaches Another Milestonetag:arzone.ning.com,2011-12-28:4715978:Topic:749692011-12-28T07:54:48.982ZCarolyn Baileyhttp://arzone.ning.com/profile/CarolynBailey
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038379742?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038385010?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="500"></img></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="color: #333333;">Animal Rights Zone (ARZone) is celebrating our 2 year anniversary this week and we would like to thank all of our members who, by participating in our guest chats, workshops, write and take part in forum posts, blog posts, and contribute in numerous other ways, help to make ARZone…</span></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038379742?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="500" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3038385010?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="500" class="align-center"/></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="color: #333333;">Animal Rights Zone (ARZone) is celebrating our 2 year anniversary this week and we would like to thank all of our members who, by participating in our guest chats, workshops, write and take part in forum posts, blog posts, and contribute in numerous other ways, help to make ARZone successful. </span><br/> <br/> <span class="font-size-3" style="color: #333333;">ARZone will only ever be as successful as our members allow us to be, and we sincerely appreciate all of our valued members helping us to highlight and discuss pressing issues concerning our relations with, and responsibilities toward, human and other animals.</span></p>
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