HUNT SABOTEURS WERE OUT IN FORCE OVER THE HOLIDAY PERIOD TO MONITOR AND DISRUPT HUNTS ACROSS THE UK ~ punkacademic ~ With a ban on trail hunting looming, sabs reported that hunt organisers were in melancholic mood — though this didn’t prevent the usual carnival of death taking place in numerous locations including Devon, Dorset, Kent, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, and the Isle of Wight. Trail hunting — the supposed practice of hounds following a scent rather than a live animal — has long been a cover for actual fox hunting since the official ban on hunting with dogs was became law in 2004. Last week the government announced plans to ban the practice, immediately opposed by Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party. Farage himself attended a hunt in Kent on Boxing Day. Attendance at some hunts was paltry, with South Hampshire Hunt Sabs reporting only seven riders for the Hursley Hambledon hunt at Chilbolton Down, albeit accompanied by four “quad bikes with masked terriermen”. This mirrored an intimidatory posture by a number of hunts across the country, with masked terriermen a constant presence despite a ban on their attendance at events by the British Hound Sports Association. The 3 times convicted Seavington Hunt invade Crewkerne. Image: North Dorset Hunt Saboteurs on Facebook Spectacular successes were achieved by sabs in the Severn Valley, where the Dummer Beagles were prevented from hunting altogether, and in Dorset, were two foxes were saved by sabs from the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale Hunt. The hunt in question had seen four of its number convicted in April for illegal hunting. Peterborough Hunt Sabs also forced the Fitzwilliam Hunt to pack up early at Stilton. Sadly, animals were harmed and killed up and down the country, with a deer mauled to death in Dorset, a badger sett destroyed at Okehampton, and hunters filmed whipping their own hounds in Wiltshire. Traffic was endangered in multiple locations as horses and dogs raced across roads. The use of drones by sabs has been particularly effective in disrupting hunt activites, and providing evidence for potential prosecutions, though sab groups are quick to note that in many areas the police are uninterested in pursuing breaches of the hunting ban. With legislative action on trail hunting now part of the government’s proposed animal welfare strategy, hunting advocates including the Countryside Alliance were accused by sabs of the ‘gaslighting of a nation‘, as they employed a rhetorical strategy of pitching rural against urban. Claiming that a trail hunting ban amounted to a ‘war against the countryside’, pro-hunting groups ignored the reality that the majority of Britons, urban and rural, oppose hunting. Sabs know however that to trust in government would be foolish – legislative action over two decades ago failed to eliminate the persecution of foxes, and with Labour’s penchant for u-turns there is no guarantee a ban on trail hunting will ever make it into law. Instead, sab groups across the country are continuing to watch and disrupt hunts wherever they raise their heads, utilising tried and tested methods of direct action to rid the country of a vile elite practice which garners the support of nationalists and far-right figures as an emblem of ‘tradition’. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top image: Weymouth Animal Rights on Facebook       The post Sabs confront annual foxhunting carnage appeared first on Freedom News.

THE GREAT GEOGRAPHER AND THEORIST OF ANARCHIST COMMUNISM WAS PART OF A RADICAL MILIEU THAT ENGAGED A WIDE RANGE OF SOCIAL ISSUES, FROM CAPITALISM AND COLONIALISM TO FREE LOVE AND ANIMAL RIGHTS ~ Spencer Beswick ~ In his classic essay “On Vegetarianism” (1901), Élisée Reclus wrote a stirring defense of it as an ethical and aesthetic necessity with the potential to end colonial violence by transforming humanity’s relationship with the world. Reclus’s anarchism sought to “mak[e] our existence as beautiful as possible, and in harmony, so far as in us lies, with the aesthetic conditions of our surroundings.” This includes our relationship with animals. Reclus decried abattoirs as well as the display and consumption of dead animals as ugly and violent. These disquieting displays are interwoven into everyday life in a manner which cannot help but deaden our senses and diminish the beauty of our lives. Like the unsightly scar of a concrete dam blocking a river, the slaughter and consumption of animals dams the potential of a life well lived. Reclus called to end violence against animals and instead recognise them as “respected fellow-workers, or simply as companions in the joy of life and friendship.” Violence against animals was intimately connected to the violence of colonialism. The slaughter of colonised people was justified by their dehumanising reduction to the level of animals. Reclus argued that brutal treatment of animals at home thus enabled colonial violence around the globe through “direct relation of cause and effect”, for “the slaughter of the first makes easy the murder of the second” and “harking on dogs to tear a fox to pieces teaches a gentleman how to make his men pursue the fugitive Chinese”. If Europeans could learn to relate ethically to animals at home, he maintained, it would destabilise the practice of colonial violence abroad. Vegetarianism would transform humanity’s relationship with the world in a way that precludes all violence and exploitation directed at both human and non-human animals. While the argument may have appeal, it rings somewhat hollow to our ears today. The Israeli military, for example, uses its self-proclaimed label of “most vegan army in the world” as proof of its ostensible dedication to peace, wielding veganism as a shield to justify its violence against the supposedly “backwards” (in part because non-vegan) Palestinians. Some activists thus add veganwashing to greenwashing and pinkwashing as “progressive” justifications for colonialism. It seems clear from our vantage point in the twenty-first century that Reclus was overly optimistic in his belief that ending animal exploitation would end colonial violence. Yet there is still power in Reclus’s call for an ethical and beautiful life free of exploitation of human and non-human animals alike. He reminds us of the importance of what some veganarchists call total liberation: dismantling all of the interconnected forms of oppression and domination that demean humans, animals, and the natural world. To end with Reclus’s words: “Ugliness in persons, in deeds, in life, in surrounding Nature — this is our worst foe. Let us become beautiful ourselves, and let our life be beautiful”! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Digital Museum of Learning The post “Let us become beautiful ourselves”: Élisée Reclus on vegetarianism, anarchism, and colonial violence appeared first on Freedom News.