Animal Rights Advocacy and Legitimate Public Deliberation
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12105 |
| Date | 01 August 2015 |
| Author | John Hadley |
| Published date | 01 August 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 5 V O L 6 3 , 6 9 6 – 7 1 2
doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12105
Animal Rights Advocacy and Legitimate
Public Deliberation
John Hadley
University of Western Sydney
In this article I offer a response to recent debate over direct action animal advocacy and legitimate public deliberation
in liberal democracies. Mathew Humphrey and Marc Stears and Stephen D’Arcy have argued that liberal democracies
ought to tolerate direct action animal advocacy in the interests of promoting the right of proponents of non-
mainstream views to inform public deliberation and decision making. I argue that the precise scope of Humphrey and
Stears’ and D’Arcy’s analyses is unclear and important parts of their theory are under-described. I highlight the logical
and practical implications of their claim that direct action is useful as a means of overcoming the stifling influence of
conventional wisdom. I conclude by arguing that tolerance for direct action advocacy ought not to extend to
controversial animal rights campaigning tactics such as making threats, using incendiary devices and damaging
property.
Keywords: animal rights; direct action; deliberative democracy; political violence; just
war theory
In the course of debating whether deliberative democracy theory can allow the space for
recent animal rights advocacy, Mathew Humphrey and Marc Stears (2006) and Stephen
D’Arcy (2007) draw attention to the controversial issue of ‘direct action’ political cam-
paigning. Humphrey and Stears and D’Arcy claim that direct action helps to promote the
political equality of citizens who would otherwise struggle to exercise their rights to inform
public deliberation and decision making. By making citizens and policy makers more
receptive to the political speech of proponents of non-mainstream views, direct action,
Humphrey and Stears and D’Arcy argue, makes public deliberation more inclusive and,
thereby, democratically legitimate. Because direct action promotes political equality and
legitimate public deliberation, Humphrey and Stears and D’Arcy argue that democratic
theory and liberal democracies ought to tolerate direct action campaigning by proponents
of non-mainstream views such as animal rights.
In what follows, I offer a response to Humphrey and Stears and D’Arcy. In the first half
of the article, I demonstrate that the precise scope of their analyses is unclear. Do their
claims about the usefulness and acceptability of direct action extend right through the
broad range of animal rights advocacy to the more controversial and, arguably, violent
forms of recent animal rights campaigning? In other words, are they suggesting that the use
of threats and property damage by animal rights advocates serves a useful purpose and
ought to be tolerated? Based upon their explicit remarks it is just not clear; logically,
however, their analyses can be readily extended to threats and property damage.
In the second half of the article, I offer two arguments against tolerating the use of
threats and property damage by proponents of non-mainstream views. First, I argue that
making threats and damaging property fail to satisfy two conditions for the permissibility
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of the use of violent campaign tactics in liberal democracies. Second, I argue that tolerating
the use of threats and property damage by animal rights advocates would set a dangerous
precedent and open the door to the use of such tactics by all manner of groups who hold
non-mainstream views. To conclude, I discuss the likely implications that tolerance of the
use of threats and property damage by animal rights advocates will have for freedom of
information requests by animal protection organisations. Far from promoting transparency
and accountability, threats and property damage more likely serve to constrain public
deliberation and decision making about the use of animals in biomedical research.
Direct Action Animal Rights Advocacy and Violence
Political campaigning on behalf of animals ranges from mundane tactics, such as petition-
ing and peaceful picketing, to controversial and, arguably, violent direct action tactics, such
as making threats and damaging property. The wide variety of campaigning strategies
reflects that the animal advocacy movement is a broad church encompassing moderate
animal welfare reform-orientated groups, such as the RSPCA and the Humane Society,
and abolitionist animal rights-orientated groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front and
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). For almost 30 years, abolitionist elements of
the animal advocacy movement have been waging a concerted direct action campaign of
property damage and intimidation against individuals and organisations involved in animal-
based biomedical research (Best and Nocella, 2004; Hadley, 2009). One particularly
controversial direct action tactic is a form of intimidatory protest known as home visits.
Typically, during a home visit protesters will distribute graphic material to passers-by and
harass family members and neighbours as they go about their daily lives. People and
organisations only indirectly associated with the use of animals will be the target of
threatening phone calls and hate mail in another direct action tactic known as tertiary
targeting. In addition to making threats, the most common direct action tactic is property
damage − setting fire to vehicles, breaking windows, spray-painting walls, ransacking
offices and damaging equipment. As distasteful or inappropriate as such tactics may seem to
observers and people unfamiliar with animal rights, and despite how distressing they may
be for victims, it is important to note that in almost all instances of such activity no human
person suffers physical harm; instead, the relevant kind of harm is the imposition of
emotional and financial cost. But if direct action animal rights advocacy does not involve
serious physical harm – killing, maiming and assault – ought it to be classed as violence?
This is an important question because, like the term terrorism, the term violence has
pejorative connotations. The worry is that describing activists as violent, or classifying their
actions as violence, may unfairly discredit their cause and cloud any assessment of the
usefulness of direct action or its acceptability in liberal democracies and democratic theory
(see Mansbridge, 1996). Leading proponents of animal rights give different answers to the
question of whether direct action animal rights advocacy qualifies as violence. It is disin-
genuous of animal rights advocates to argue that damaging property does not constitute
violence, Tom Regan (2004, p. 188) argues, because violence necessarily involves the use of
force and animal rights advocates who damage property clearly use force with the intent to
harm. Mark Rowlands (2002, p. 188) takes an opposing view, arguing that violence is an act
that can only be done to sentient individuals who can feel pain. In line with Rowlands’ view,
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J O H N H A D L E Y
as property is not sentient it has no interests that are harmed by being damaged or destroyed.
But Rowlands’ view is insensitive to what John Morreall (1976, p. 38) argues is distinctive of
all forms of interpersonal violence – directly or indirectly its aim is to ‘get at’ a person. People
who have their personal effects scattered around their workspaces are likely to perceive such
actions as a personal attack. Likewise, the grievance felt by property owners who have to bear
the cost of replacement will to some degree be tied to ordinarily uncontroversial moral
notions traceable to individual autonomy such as desert and liberty. Perhaps if the ownership
of the property damaged by animal rights advocates was in doubt there would be grounds for
claiming that such cases of vandalism do not qualify as violence (see Morreall, 1976, p. 38); but
clearly there is an identifiable owner in cases of property damage by direct action animal rights
advocates as the damage is done precisely to ‘get at’ someone by imposing a cost upon them.
Labelling property damage as violence reflects how some forms of direct action are
deeply controversial in comparison to other forms of direct action. In contrast to threats
and property damage, the use of humour, gossip, rhetoric, artistic representation and
graphic imagery does not test the boundaries of acceptable political campaigning. While
such actions may be coercive by the lights of orthodox rationalist deliberative democracy
theory, they are not coercive in a controversial way that warrants labelling such actions as
violent.1 Even if such actions warrant being labelled as violent in virtue of being deceptive
or psychologically manipulative, given the prominent place that rhetoric and imagery play
in modern political campaigning, it seems appropriate to classify these actions as instances
of acceptable violence. Part of the controversy surrounding campaign tactics like making
threats and damaging property is that as far as appropriate standards for political campaign-
ing in liberal democracies are concerned, such actions are functionally equivalent to cases
of unacceptable violence. In any event, what really matters for the purposes of the
following analysis is not whether certain forms of direct action animal...
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