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TALON Conspirator #5: Vancouver Animal Defense League
08.06.14 | Permalink | Comment?

Editors note: Since this site’s inception, the volunteers at TALON have felt that our purpose is not to catalog the past, but to inform the present. We do not exist as activist nostalgia, but to guide new generations by sharing information about the errors and victories of those who came before them. Our hope was always that modern campaigns would be built with these lessons, and that we could share their own errors and victories as a long term effort to refine our movement’s tactics and strategies.

The TALON Conspirator posts will highlight our favorite organizations and the facets of our shared history that inspire them. Our fifth post in this series is written by volunteers from the Vancouver Animal Defense League.

Since 2008, the Vancouver Animal Defense League (VADL) has been undertaking ongoing grassroots campaigns that, in our view, are advancing the cause of animal liberation. I’d like to share updates on three particular recent campaigns, and how we believe they advocate for animals effectively.

Canada Goose

In the interest of fashion, the outdoors-wear company Canada Goose has activated trappers to torture and slaughter millions of coyotes over time, so that canine skins can decorate the tragically iconic Canada Goose jacket. The coyotes are seized in leghold traps, whose steel jaws crush down upon the animals’ limbs, slicing through flesh and clamping on bone. Coyotes desperate to escape this agony will often try to wrench or chew off their foot. If they do not “succeed” in self-amputating, the animals languish for hours or days, until trappers shoot, beat or stomp the coyotes to death.

This is why in 2013 the VADL launched a campaign to pressure 14 known Canada Goose retailers in Vancouver to drop Canada Goose fur-trimmed jackets and accessories. Typically, our campaigns employ two fundamental tactics: weekly or greater frequency, and high-volume chanting (without use of megaphones). We also employ email and phone saturation campaigns, and leveraging stores via lobbying their landlords, among other tactics. Broadly, our strategy is to leverage every victory toward influencing ensuing targets.

To date, 2 of the 14–Hills of Kerrisdale and Grouse Mountain Outfitters–have terminated retailing of Canada Goose fur products following VADL campaigning. These were the first two stores in Canada to drop Canada Goose following animal rights campaigning.

Target 3 is Brooklyn Clothing, a high-end menswear boutique in Vancouver’s affluent Yaletown neighbourhood. We began weekly protesting in November 2013, and during busier retailing periods have escalated to twice weekly. Store owner Jason Overbo is fighting back, including an obnoxious “anti-bullying” campaign that strives to cast the store as victim and we as villains. We remain oblivious to any public sentiment that buys into this manipulation, and persist in full-throttle chanting that has elicited hundreds of complaints and a media blitz that largely sympathized with the store and neglected any mention of animal suffering. Ironically, we believe this villainizing of the VADL only empowers our work for animals, as ensuing targets will be more fully aware of our disruptive tactics and so may be more swiftly leveraged.

This fall we will escalate our campaign at Brooklyn via secondary targets. The VADL is committed to continuing its campaign until Jason Overbo announces termination of fur retailing.

Vancouver Aquarium

The Vancouver Aquarium (VanAqua) imprisons a range of marine animals, including dolphins and beluga whales. But unlike other marine prisons, VanAqua is situated on municipal park property, and so the Vancouver Park Board holds their lease and regulates whether VanAqua continues breeding and importing cetaceans.

Intervention by the Board on the cetaceans’ behalf is presently vital, as VanAqua is only months away from starting a multi-million dollar expansion of their whale and dolphin pools, which would enable them to incarcerate more belugas and dolphins. This is why numerous local organizations, including the VADL, have coalesced to pressure the Park Board and aquarium. The VADL strategy within this campaign focuses, in significant part, on striving to generate media coverage with protest actions that are designed to be timely and captivating. One example is our staggered unfurling of posters by activists posing as patrons inside the facility. The coalition’s overall campaign has garnered international, animal-sympathetic media attention, consequently increasing pressure on the Board.

After months of campaigning, on July 31, 2014 the Board took historical measures to combat animal abuse at VanAqua. They voted unanimously to:

“ … prohibit the breeding of captive cetaceans in Vancouver parks unless, in each particular instance, the captive cetacean is a threatened species and the Oversight Committee, the Board and the Society agree that captive breeding is necessary for the survival of such threatened species.”

“ … establish an Oversight Committee, consisting of animal welfare experts with the mandate to provide public oversight to ensure the well-being of all cetaceans owned by the Society. This Oversight Committee will prepare a bi-annual report to the Park Board on the status and well-being of all the cetaceans owned by the aquarium.”

Depending on who forms the Oversight Committee and whether they are given the authority to refuse the importation of cetaceans from other facilities, this transformation could result in a phase-out of cetacean captivity at the Vancouver Aquarium without referring to it as such. Meanwhile, the coalition’s campaign continues.

Calgary Stampede Lockdown

The Calgary Stampede is one of North America’s largest rodeos, attracting over a million tourists to Calgary annually. Within this vast animal-abuse-fest, the chuckwagon races (“invented” at the Stampede almost a century ago) are the deadliest for animals. In this sordid spectacle, each race comprises several wagons pulled by four thoroughbred racehorses apiece in front of several mostly inebriated spectators, racing at breakneck speed. In the past 28 years, this madness has led to 63 horses being killed, including horses every year for the last decade. The horses usually die from shattered limbs or hemorrhaged blood vessels in the lungs, kidneys or heart, as a result of spectacular crashes and cardiovascular stress. As result of this widely publicized carnage, the races have suffered declining public support and are thus a vulnerable target for activism.

On July 4, 2014, two VADL activists locked down on the inside railing of the chuckwagon track before the inaugural race was set to begin. Marley Daviduk and Samantha Baskerville infiltrated the track 30 minutes before the races, and locked their necks to the railing using kryptonite u-locks. It took authorities an hour to remove Marley and Sam, and by that point the lockdown had already made headlines due to the coordinated action of the VADL support crew, which was immediately forwarding pictures and video to media. By the next morning, the event had garnered national media coverage, with VADL spokespeople hammering home the high horse-mortality numbers and calling for termination of this annual bloodbath.

Following this action, the VADL has initiated a pressure campaign vs. GMC Canada, sponsor of the chuckwagon races. Initially we are undertaking a telephone pressure effort, and are developing further tactics.

Marley and Sam were taken into custody, questioned and released, on a promise to appear in court on August 20.

The Vancouver Animal Defense League will continue defending animals via campaigns that are sustained and pressuring, which we consider a proven formula to advance animal liberation and liberate animals.

Thank you for taking time to know more about our efforts, and we hope you’ll join our Facebook page and community. And thank you so much, TALON, for this opportunity and forum.

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News
In loving memory of David Hayden
02.01.14 | Permalink | Comment?

On Friday, January 31st 2014, our movement lost a dedicated, gentle warrior by the name of David Hayden. It would be impossible to summarize all of the ways that he worked on behalf of animals, partly because there were so many ways, and partly because his humility kept us from knowing them all. Behind the scenes he was the primary driving force at No Compromise magazine, a brave frontline activist at demonstrations, and a man who, despite limited financial resources, always gave what he could to sanctuaries, conferences, and activist projects. I shared a jail cell with him on a few occasions, marched by his side on others, and loved him not just as a comrade in the struggle but as a generous friend who stood by me even when I didn’t always deserve it. His passing is a reminder that the best fighters are also the best people: kind hearted, soft spoken, humble, and ready to raise hell when injustice rears its ugly head. We will miss you, David, always.

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News
The Bunny Alliance Announces Gateway to Hell Tour
11.21.13 | Permalink | Comment?

The Bunny Alliance will embark on the Gateway to Hell Tour this holiday travel season to demand that Delta Air Lines end its support of animal research and help stop the transport of animal to laboratories.

On December 26^th, the founders of The Bunny Alliance will set out on a nationwide tour to hold Delta Air Lines accountable for its role in the vivisection industry. During this Gateway to Hell Tour, The Bunny Alliance will coordinate demonstrations at every Delta U.S. airport hub and at the Delta Headquarters in Atlanta, GA, as well as organize activist trainings for each tour stop.

The Bunny Alliance is targeting Delta Air Lines because it is in a strategic partnership with Air France and is its North America representative—and Air France is one of the last commercial airlines to continue the practice of shipping animals to labs. The campaign against Delta is to demand that they force Air France to place a permanent ban on the transportation of all animals being shipped to vivisection labs across the world.

The tour demonstrations will call on Delta Air Lines to stop Air France’s transport of animals to labs, garner media attention about the role of the airlines in vivisection, and educate holiday travelers about the animal cruelty that Delta supports. Additionally, the trainings at each tour stop will teach local activists about the campaign and how they can be involved. The trainings will also include “know your rights” and other activism tips, as well as information about how to act as a legal observer and deal with law enforcement at demonstrations to keep activists safe.

The Gateway to Hell Tour is being organized by the co-founders of The Bunny Alliance, Amanda Schemkes and Jordan Ezell. Amanda and Jordan have both been involved in the animal liberation movement for several years and have extensive experience with activism tours and anti-vivisection campaigns.

The Bunny Alliance is asking for the support of the greater activism community to help make the Gateway to Hell Tour a success. People can learn more about the tour and make a donation at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-bunny-alliance-gateway-to-hell-tour. The Bunny Alliance also asks people to watch for additional tour information to be released and to get involved in the tour and broader campaign against Delta Air Lines. Visit http://thebunnyalliance.com/ and email thebunnyalliance@riseup.net.

Tour Schedule

December 27: Demonstration at Salt Lake City International Airport and Activism Workshop

December 29: Demonstration at Denver International Airport and Activism Workshop

December 31: Demonstration at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and Activism Workshop

January 1: Demonstration at O’Hare International Airport and Activism Workshop

January 2: Demonstration at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport

January 3: Demonstration at Detroit Metropolitan Airport

January 5: Demonstrations at John F. Kennedy International Airport & LaGuardia Airport and Activism Workshop

January 6: Demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange

January 7: Demonstration at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Activism Workshop

January 8: Demonstration at Delta Headquarters

January 11: Demonstration at Los Angeles International Airport

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The Bunny Alliance is a grassroots organization dedicated to working for the liberation of all.

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News
TALON Conspirator #2: Resistance Ecology
07.27.13 | Permalink | Comment?

Editors note: Since this site’s inception, the volunteers at TALON have felt that our purpose is not to catalog the past, but to inform the present. We do not exist as activist nostalgia, but to guide new generations by sharing information about the errors and victories of those who came before them. Our hope was always that modern campaigns would be built with these lessons, and that we could share their own errors and victories as a long term effort to refine our movement’s tactics and strategies.

The TALON Conspirator posts will highlight our favorite organizations and the facets of our shared history that inspire them. Our second post in this series is written by the Resistance Ecology collective and details Portland, Oregon’s latest contribution to the earth and animal liberation movements: their new publication.

Resistance Ecology is an organization based in Portland, OR. We want to
build a movement for animal and ecological liberation and resistance
that is multi-layered, unified, diverse and intersectional. Animal
liberation and radical ecology do not need to be isolated, disparate,
ahistorical, and fragmented movements. They can and must become part of
the language and dialogue of social justice. We consider ourselves
allies to a broad spectrum of social and political struggle. We focus on
education and analysis, networking and resource sharing, opening and
maintaining channels of communication, identifying strategic
movement-wide targets and campaigns, and most importantly sustaining
relationships within and between movements. Currently, Resistance
Ecology is working on a movement publication, organizing an annual
national conference, creating a news website, and planning organizing
tours to lay the foundation for future networking.

The first issue of our publication serves as a “teaser”, preliminary
copy. Because we do not yet have the readership or reach that we hope to
have in the near future, we wanted to create something that gives a
glimpse of what Resistance Ecology has the potential to be, with your
participation. This issue is a short collection of essays and analysis
that captures the spirit of our work, but it is by no means a complete
work. We need your contributions, your action reports, your insights,
your critiques, and your ideas to get this project off of the ground.
Our publication project was created in the spirit of the movement
periodicals No Compromise, Earth First! Journal, Resistance, Do or Die,
Arkangel, the SHAC USA Newsletter, Species Traitor, and 2600. We want
to capture movement-wide participation, inter-movement appreciation and
respect, self-critique, reports from the trenches, news, analysis, and
most importantly, dialogue. Like during the initial issues of No
Compromise, our movement is at a pivotal and vulnerable moment, and like
No Compromise, we want Resistance Ecology to serve as a means of
connection, hope, and a creative future.

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News
TALON Conspirator #1: Marineland Animal Defense
04.08.13 | Permalink | Comment?

Editors note: Since this site’s inception, the volunteers at TALON have felt that our purpose is not to catalog the past, but to inform the present. We do not exist as activist nostalgia, but to guide new generations by sharing information about the errors and victories of those who came before them. Our hope was always that modern campaigns would be built with these lessons, and that we could share their own errors and victories as a long term effort to refine our movement’s tactics and strategies.

It is with great pride that, after two years, we are seeing evidence that our plan is working! The TALON Conspirator posts will highlight our favorite organizations and the facets of our shared history that inspire them. Our first post in this series is written by Dylan Powell and details one of North America’s most dynamic struggles against non-human slavery: Marineland Animal Defense.

It is an honour to write about this campaign for this site because it was so heavily inspired by it. Around the same time this campaign was developing I was filling in the website gaps for Talon – then Conflict Gypsy – and much of the campaign structure and function came from immersing myself in the material on this site.

Marineland Animal Defense began as a pressure campaign in early 2011. It was originally made up of a handful of people who were already organizing or active in opposing the park, but who wanted to move from the symbolic to something measurable. Marineland, a captive animal marine park in Niagara Falls, On, has had an opposition almost as old as it’s 50+ year history, however, as is common with our movement there was never a single dedicated campaign, and as many folks burned out or dropped out, people were constantly left to re-invent the wheel. We wanted to end that process and create a dedicated multi generational campaign that was solely focused on the park and on the long term transition of the park. Many of the folks involved were also active in other movements, and the park itself begs a coalition type response, so we also add a coalition focus to the pressure campaign model typical in AR.

Our first summer we moved the amount of demonstrations on site from 2-3 year to 15 or more. We battled an aggressive response from local police, park owner John Holer and the City of Niagara Falls. Our demonstrations, the largest that year being around 80 people, were some of the best attended in Southern Ontario and we had a bit of momentum around us. This park was hated and we were channeling that rage.

As we entered 2012 the City of Niagara Falls declared the land we demonstrated on a surplus and leased to Marineland. This came out of months of back door meetings between the City of Niagara Falls, John Holer and the Niagara Regional Police as to how to “get rid of us.” We shifted our next demonstration to John Holer’s house (Possibly the first home demonstration in Southern Ontario AR history) and moved our on site demonstrations across from the walk in gate to the park. We got a bunch of megaphones and we got loud.

Not long after, 8 park employees came forward detailing systemic abuse and neglect at the park. In August of 2012 our demonstrations grew from 100 people to 500. We knew we had hit a major break through, but now were tasked with channeling this immense public outrage into something substantive. Marineland had seen waves of pressure like this before, but never over multiple years. We set the closing day as a large demonstration to work towards – with many smaller events in between – and managed an 800 person presence with around 200 folks taking it upon themselves to jump the gates and shut down the final dolphin show of the year.

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With the power of that action came the full legal weight of a large business that has had success in the past silencing advocates. To date, three people have been served with Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) – two ex-trainers and myself. My suit seeks a $1.5 million penalty – the largest SLAPP suit against an animal advocate in Canadian legal history. Luckily, we had poured through the TALON archives numerous times and knew that we could expect such a response – and also that it could be considered a sign of effectiveness! We have been busy illustrating back to Marineland that this attempt to chill us through the courts will only strengthen our base and grow our reach.

In the background to all of that, we are also organizing for opening day – May 18th, 2013. We hope to top previous records with this demonstration and are organizing to place 1,000 people outside of the park on that day. These are numbers which have not been seen in Canada since the 1980’s and they are a direct representation of our model – multigenerational, intersectional, coalition based. It is our broad based politics and our ability to create space for a wide range of people that is making these demonstrations possible – even as the media begins to walk away from the issue.

Although our campaign is serious and militant, we do not do balaclavas or macho posturing. You would be amazed what you can do with candle lit vigils sometimes! Although animal liberation is the primary focus for many of the organizers – we strive to have a solid critique of whiteness, settler colonialism, heteronormativity and more. We are proud to be a campaign endorsed by queer liberation organizations, trade unions and migrant justice advocacy organizations and also do not hesitate to take a stand against oppression within our movement. We also believe in a diversity of tactics – ensuring that the pacifist police won’t us rely on tactics that are comfortable and convenient instead of effective.

We welcome any and all support and call on folks from everywhere to get to Niagara for May 18th – but our real call to action lies in relaying the blueprint that we learned from this archive. Our movements history was built and shaped by pressure campaigns – by finding real life targets (not abstract ones) and building community and tension around them. As that pressure built – so to do regional and then national networks. This model has lead to the liberation of thousands of real living-breathing animals and also had a serious effect on the dominant economic system that governs our lives and relationships – capitalism. This is our strength – and the broader our politics, the stronger the model. In an age of online shock campaigns, desk preachers (academics), and aimless “educational” approaches, this is the spirit we need to rekindle – and this is the spirit you will find hidden in the pages of this archive. – Dylan

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