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Periodicals
Frontline News – The Complete Set!
09.19.20 | Permalink

ALF Canada Frontline News #1-4 (1985-1987 Toronto, ON. Canada)
Frontline News was the predecessor to Combat and Underground as well as the popular 1990s website animal-liberation.net. The early issues were typed and mimeographed newsletters, while issue 3 and 4 were more professional and moved to newsprint. It has taken us 9 years to find issue #2. Special thanks to Matthew Jones for tracking it down and sending the scans.

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Audio / Music, One-off publications
Still Angry?
11.07.15 | Permalink

Still Angry? The Compilation Tape and Fanzine: A Benefit for the Toronto ALFSG (1987, Toronto, Canada)

The Toronto ALFSG released many of the publications on this site and were one of the best sources of information on direct action for non-humans in the 1980s. In order to financially support their work, they released this cassette and zine compilation in 1987. After searching for it since the start of TALON, we finally found a copy just a few short months ago.

Hailing primarily from Europe, North America, and South Africa, the bands on this compilation run the gamut of punk sub-genres and fans of fast, loud music should find something they enjoy. The zine and liner notes are typical of their era- cut and paste style graphics, juvenile interviews, and plenty of righteous frustration with law and order.

Due to a file error, we currently only have Side A of the cassette digitized. Please accept our apologies, we will post the full cassette soon.

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Periodicals
Animosity #3
07.03.15 | Permalink

Animosity #3 (1984, Stafforshire, England)

We rarely post a single issue of a periodical to TALON, preferring instead to post an entire year or run so that readers can watch as stories develop and politics evolve within a publication. In this instance we are making an exception. For the last several years we have tried, without luck, to track down further issues of Animosity- a publication of the Keele University Animal Rights Group. Our hope is that one of our readers might help us to obtain the rest of this student-militant zine.

Animosity appears to have been written largely by anarchists with an insider’s knowledge of the animal liberation movement, and broad, anti-capitalist politics. If anyone can help us to discover the authors or more issues of this intriguing publication, please contact us HERE.

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Books
The Hunt and the Anti-Hunt
05.31.15 | Permalink

The Hunt and the Anti-Hunt (1982, London, England)

“It is not difficult to understand why animals are treated so indifferently in a society where the powerful minority holds the majority in similar contempt.” Philip Windeatt

Grounded firmly in a traditional British left-socialist critique, The Hunt and the Anti-Hunt is Philip Windeatt’s classic treatise on opposition to bloodsports. Written shortly after the author worked as a researcher on The Animals Film, each page drips with anger at both the act of sport hunting and the economic class that perpetuates it.

Anyone seeking a better understanding of the history of the animal liberation movement would do well to read this short book. Tracing bloodsports back to the domestication of canines for hunting purposes, the book continues by describing the founding of early animal welfare societies and the eventual emergence of the Hunt Saboteurs Association and Animal Liberation Front. Along the way expect a refreshing analysis of the pillaging of public lands, human alienation from wilderness, corporate governance, and many other subjects that were too often missing from the animal lib literature of the 1980s.

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Campaign newsletters, Periodicals
N.A.L.L. Newsletters – Summer and Spring 1985
03.26.15 | Permalink

N.A.L.L. Newsletter – Summer 1985, Spring News 1985 (1985, Manchester, England)

Every time we receive a NALL related donation everyone at TALON can’t wait to read it, even if it is just a small newsletter or leaflet. Our fascination with the group stems from their early socialism, their insistence that mass-militancy trumps individual direct-action, and their acts of solidarity with other movements. While their publications don’t always touch on those factors, fans of the Leagues will not be disappointed with these two issues of the NALL Newsletter, especially the Spring News, which comments on the unstrategic militarism happening at the time, specifically the Mars bar poisoning hoax and publicity stunts of groups like the Hunt Retribution Squad.

The excitement doesn’t end there, however! Despite the poor editing, these volumes contain many clues as to the organizing model, rhetoric, history, and strategies employed by NALL- and then there are the small tidbits that will make you love them even more! An embracing of ecological politics, a tendency towards anonymity for the sake of rejecting the big egos that cause so much damage to movements, the fact that NALL was originally called Manchester Animal Liberators, the mention of a cafe run by three NALL members… If you are as fascinated with this classic organization as we are you will absolutely love these two dispatches!

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Videos
Heart of the Matter: South East Animal Liberation League
01.23.15 | Permalink

Heart of the Matter: South East Animal Liberation League (1984. London, England)

Recently the South London Flying Column YouTube channel has been posting video of old news coverage of animal rights related direct action. There are many, many gems on there, but we were particularly enamored of this piece, a 20 minute episode of the program Heart of the Matter. Besides containing never before seen footage of raids carried out by SEALL, it also contains unbelievable footage of an unmasked ALF planning session! And if you find yourself disliking the SEALL spokesperson, it’s okay. He didn’t actually turn out all that well…

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Campaign newsletters
Action for Animals #1
12.17.14 | Permalink

Action For Animals # 1 – (1989, Essex, England)

While there isn’t much stand-alone importance to this particular publication, the critical role played by grassroots newsletters in the 1980s in undeniable. Prior to the popular use of the internet local groups were run by a small core of organizers who communicated with their own membership and the broader public using these cheaply produced zines. Ideology, protest dates, campaign information, news from other organizations, fundraising efforts, and prisoner support were all shared, and with results that often dwarf what we see from Facebook based organizing.

Action for Animals produced a newsletter very typical of its era and geography. Those of you who take the time to look closer at this publication will notice excerpts from the London Greenpeace leaflet (co-written, as it turns out, by an undercover cop) that lead to the McLibel case. Also of note are AFA’s anti-capitalism sentiment, and the diversity of actions embraced by their group- from Christmas carolling to support for underground direct action.

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Periodicals
Turning Point #7-8
11.30.14 | Permalink

TURNING POINT – Issues 7-8 (1987, Oxford, UK)

Turning Point only produced two issues in 1987 due to a delay in an NAVS report claiming (probably erroneously) that AIDS was an unintended result of vivisection. The editors of Turning Point believed (absolutely erroneously) that the report was going to be “devastating,” and “the most important campaign that the anti-vivisection movement has ever undertaken.” By 1988 the campaign had fizzled out, but sadly pseudo-science conspiracy nonsense in the world of animal rights didn’t die with it.

Fortunately, plenty of other content made it into these pages, much of it worth reading. Direct action campaigns from around the world are covered, with mentions of Earth First!, the Central Animal Liberation League, and the Animal Liberation Front. Investigations, essays, and photographs of liberated donkeys take up the rest of the real estate in this brief volume.

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One-off publications
Flamethrower
11.12.14 | Permalink

Flamethrower (1986. London, England)

We recently received this publication from another archivist but have very little information about its origins. Still, with a flame throwing, angry feminist on the cover how can you go wrong?

The interior pages are a pastiche of radical thoughts and images varying greatly in quality, but even in the paper’s more juvenile moments I sense the work of people sincerely concerned with creating a free society. How they thought rioting alone would get them there is another matter…

If you have any information about Flamethrower please contact us HERE.

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Earth First! Journal, Periodicals
Earth First! Journal 1987
11.03.14 | Permalink

Earth First! Journal (1987, Issue #1-8. Tucson, AZ.)

Writing about Earth First! during its 1980s heyday is a delicate matter. I want to celebrate their best tendencies without ignoring their worst. 1987 is a particularly difficult year to do the former.

After the publication of an article called “Alien Nation” called for a closing of the US border to immigrants (strictly for environmental reasons we are told, not because EF! icon Ed Abbey advocated the use of the term “wetback” and used “cultural chauvinist” to describe his particular brand of racism) anarchists challenged the authors at a gathering in late 1986. So began a years worth of letters to the editor defending the piece. More than one missive in this volume praised AIDS as a positive development for the environment, and various racist, classist, and macho arguments bleed into many of the pages. Given these facts it feels callous to point to the positives that this volume also contains, so I will leave it to our readers to discover those for themselves.

Earth First! is a complex non-organization that has gone through many incarnations, changes in direction, and has never had a political consensus on any issue during the entirety of its history. If I can point out one mitigating factor for these eight issues it is that at least some Earth First!ers fought back in print and in person against the most backwards opinions of their peers, something still needed in the movement today.

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