History has taught us that we must NEVER use violence.
Because violence inhibits progress!
Talking about the use of non-violent means, especially to our Romanian friends who are facing injustice, corruption and indeed applied violence by their authorities - by those who are supposed to upheld the law - is a very difficult topic. If you are human, these topics spark strong and deeply held emotions.
Talking about it, and giving advice by telling people to exercise restraint when facing violent attacks, is an enormous and seemingly impossible ask.
But we HAVE to come back to this topic yet again and we have to share our thoughts regarding it with our Romanian friends because that is their only hope of a change and building more alliances in the EU, and in Europe.
Have you ever considered that violent resistance could be exactly what the corrupt and criminal Romanian authority ASPA would like to extract from you?
So that you can be branded as extremists? And so that any support you had in other EU-countries will very quickly evaporate and then you will be left at the mercy of the Romanian authorities and police?
Applying violence, and even violent resistance, is a futile and counterproductive response!
The rule of law exists in the EU. The EU will wake up - but they need to wake up seeing people who respect the law and care for the animals being oppressed. Then the EU and its citizens will react. If the people who care - become the extremists - we will ALL fail!
Talking about it, and giving advice by telling people to exercise restraint when facing violent attacks, is an enormous and seemingly impossible ask.
But we HAVE to come back to this topic yet again and we have to share our thoughts regarding it with our Romanian friends because that is their only hope of a change and building more alliances in the EU, and in Europe.
Have you ever considered that violent resistance could be exactly what the corrupt and criminal Romanian authority ASPA would like to extract from you?
So that you can be branded as extremists? And so that any support you had in other EU-countries will very quickly evaporate and then you will be left at the mercy of the Romanian authorities and police?
Applying violence, and even violent resistance, is a futile and counterproductive response!
The rule of law exists in the EU. The EU will wake up - but they need to wake up seeing people who respect the law and care for the animals being oppressed. Then the EU and its citizens will react. If the people who care - become the extremists - we will ALL fail!
European History has taught us this lesson
Of all the globe’s continents, Europe is home to the most comprehensive legal protections of animals. Europeans created modern animal law at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and, two hundred years later, remain its most advanced practitioners. Recently, the law they created has spread outward, to the United States and other nations, some of which have seen rapid progress forward on legal protections for animals. In the face of this growth across the globe, however, it is worth inquiring how animal law has been growing in its birthplace, Europe, in recent years.
HISTORY OF THE MODERN ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Today’s animal rights movement stems from roots that extend deep into the past—to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [5] England was the birthplace of the first animal rights legislation. There, the first animal protection law—a bill to abolish bull-baiting, a practice in which a bull was tied to a stake and then immobilized by a pack of dogs for a crowd’s entertainment—was proposed in 1802, though it did not pass. Three decades later, England successfully passed other animal protection measures—first protecting cattle, and then other animals. [6] Later in the nineteenth century, legal reform on behalf of animals spread outward from England—across the Channel to continental Europe, [7] and across the Atlantic to the United States, where the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was founded in 1866. Following a slower period for animal welfare legislation in the early to mid twentieth-century—a period that witnessed, in the wake of World War II, the birth of the factory farm [8] - the modern animal rights movement got its start in the 1960s.
In the modern movement, Britain served once again as the birthplace for reform. [9] By the 1960s, England had been home to animal protection NGOs for decades, and its population was well primed for a small revolution in outlook. Small groups of animal rights activists that opposed hunting with hounds helped bring animal issues to the forefront of public consciousness. But more responsible for triggering this development than anything else was Animal Machines, [10] a book that detailed the grisly realities of factory farming for the British public. Ruth Harrison’s book on factory farming galvanized Britons on the issue of animal suffering—both on and off the farm. [11] This drive for reform led to the formation of a parliamentary committee on farming practices, and the eventual passage of farm animal welfare legislation guaranteeing animals the “five freedoms.” These consisted, in the words of the Committee, of the animal’s freedom to “have sufficient freedom of movement to be able without difficulty to turn around, groom itself, get up, lie down, [and] stretch its limbs.” [12] As the animal rights movement spread, the “five freedoms” were later incorporated into legislation in European and other Western nations. [13]
If there was any group that helped keep the animal movement alive in its fledgling early days, it was philosophers. As activists were getting things in motion, philosophers promptly started publishing works on animal ethics and lent the movement intellectual credibility. Philosophers, as James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin have put it, “served as midwives of the animal rights movement in the late 1970s,” [14] helping activists prevent the movement from, in one authority’s words, “being stillborn.” [15] Much of the academic activity on animals was conducted outside of Europe, with most of the leading philosophers on the animal issue—Peter Singer, an Australian who has taught for years at Princeton; American law professor Gary Francione; the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick—based in the United States. Though the intellectual home base of the movement established itself fairly quickly in American academia, however, the core of the activist and legal movement remained firmly in Europe, where, to this day, overwhelming majorities profess concern with protecting the welfare of farm animals, [16] and wide swaths of the population voice dissatisfaction with current farming conditions. [17] The animal rights movement, in short, has flourished most in the place where it got its start: Europe.
EUROPEAN LAW
The relatively high levels of activism and public support for animal welfare seen in Europe have, as citizens of democracies would expect, manifested themselves in relatively progressive animal laws. Europeans have spoken out, and European politicians have in large part listened. [18] Two authorities on animal law recently have put things plainly: “The protection given to farm animals is much stronger in Europe, where most countries have banned several of the practices still common in the United States.
CRACKDOWN ON ANIMAL RIGHTS ADVOCATES - Violent and Nonviolent Alike
In recent years, much of the focus of European animal legislation has shifted away from improving conditions for animals toward pursuing violent animal advocates. England, for instance, home to the first violent extremist groups, became so terrorized by their campaigns against new testing facilities that in 2004 it decided to pursue them with a new vigor. Parliament tightened up laws such as England’s Criminal Justice and Police Act of 2001 and the Protection from Harassment Act to give police more power to crack down on activities such as intimidating demonstrations outside people’s homes or other kinds of harassment. [83] The reform proved, by empirical accounts, quite effective; attacks on peoples homes plummeted. [84] England continued its crackdown on extremists afterwards—for instance, going after street vendors it claimed were funding extremist activity in 2007. [85] The result of the English crackdown—widely reported by the press—was that the extremists took their intimidation tactics abroad, to continental Europe, where continental governments had to initiate crackdowns on their own turf. [86] As European legislators have been increasingly forced to deal with the fallout from, and pursue, violent animal extremists, it has been understandably difficult for them to pass meaningful animal welfare legislation.
For an example of how inimical this shift in focus—from animal welfare reform to animal extremist crackdown—has been on animal rights movement, one need look no further than Austria, without question one of the most animal-friendly regimes in Europe, where a government crackdown in 2008 targeted the very set of nonviolent, law-abiding activists responsible for effecting the spectacular social change just a few years before. Martin Balluch, the leader of the campaign that resulted, among other things, in a total ban on battery cages and the inclusion of animals in Austria’s constitution, found himself in prison, along with nine other leaders of nonviolent animal welfare organizations—all of them the objects of a government crackdown on animal welfare leaders on the eve of a new initiative for even stronger legislation in favor of animal welfare.
The new Austrian government used a law aimed at the mafia to storm their homes in the middle of the night, arrest them at gunpoint, confiscate computer files, and imprison them. Ultimately, Balluch was held in jail, under no charge or evidence of illegal activity, for over 100 days before his release. Many, including Peter Singer, interpreted the government actions as a conservative reaction to the reforms Balluch had initiated just years prior. [87]
Regardless of what motives lay behind this investigation, the inescapable truth was that just a few years after the mass mobilization of 2006, Austria’s government was in a much different place - where the focus was not on improving conditions for animals, but on cracking down on activists it perceived to be criminals. From where the country stood just a few years before, advancing rapidly along in favor of animal rights under the leadership of animal activists, it was a remarkable shift in direction.
In many ways, it was reflective of a shift taking place across Europe. The truth is that for all the reform that has been made in recent years—some of which, at the domestic level anyway, has been quite significant—there has been a slowdown in legislation at the EU-wide level. In an important sense, the EU has come to more closely resemble the United States, with a federal government taking little new action to protect the animals at the federal level, and isolated individual states—like Austria on one side of the Atlantic, or California on the other—taking the initiative to keep pushing the animal welfare envelope. Without question, an enormous divide continues to separate the U.S. and the E.U. But the rate of change in the two entities has become much more similar.
THE INCREASINGLY WEAK REPUTATION OF ANIMAL NGOs
Another minor factor slowing the wheels of progress in Europe has been a related but distinct issue: the increasingly negative public image of animal activists. This factor is largely a consequence of the extremism discussed above. When they strike, extremists tend for obvious reasons to receive far more press attention than does the incremental, lawful advocacy pursued by the vast majority of European animal groups. And after enough attacks, animal rights activity of any kind is increasingly associated not with justice, but with criminality. It is not, therefore, simply the damage done by isolated instances of violence and the reactions to them that impedes reform on behalf of animals; it is also the lingering damage that such attacks do to the broad reputation of animal activists as a whole. Indeed, so pervasive has the reputational harm done by these organizations been that in Europe “animal activist” has become more or less synonymous with “extremist”—or even “terrorist.” In a Google search of “European animal rights activist groups,” for instance, nine of the first ten entries relate not to the Humane Society, or PETA, or other mainstream organizations, but to extremists organizations such as the ALF. [106]
And the close association between activist and terrorists is not limited to search engines. By 2004, so deep was the British public’s aversion to animal organizations bent on destruction that, to take just one reflective example of newspaper coverage, Britain’s The Guardian—a reform-minded publication for which Peter Singer has frequently written—linked animal activists, in an article on some of their recent vandalism from the summer of 2004, with “al Qaida terrorists.” [107]
When reformers are well regarded by the public—as was the case in Austria’s broad animal reform movement of 2003-2004, they wield immense power to change policy. When, on the other hand, reformers are frequently lumped in with violent radicals, it makes it difficult for them to open minds and change laws. This latter situation is the one in which modern European activists find themselves today.
The entire article, including the list of references, can be read on the website of the 'Legal and Historical Animal Center'
In the white hot heat of emotive battle, under the eyes of a watching world, we exhort those in Romania who feel the fires of outrage burning inside them, to exercise restraint and in doing so you will contrast with the aggressive, illegal, immoral activities of those whose abusiveness covers the nation!