Your Positions

• We should all be vegan. Animals should never be exploited, because they are sentient and have the capacity to suffer. (Start over)

• Buying leather, honey, meat, dairy, and sweatshop-produced goods is never OK. Paying to go to a circus or zoo for the purpose of entertainment is never OK. We should be more-or-less devoting our lives to protesting and working against these practices, even when it makes other people feel bad or comes with personal sacrifice. (Go back)

• We should never use physical violence against people, but we should engage in property destruction like burning down labs and slaughterhouses to cause economic damage to people and industries exploiting animals. (Go back)

Things to Consider

Property destruction often carries with it a risk to both people and animals. You also have a high risk of going to jail if you commit such acts, or being classified as a terrorist if you join groups which support them. If done irresponsibly, arson can lead to both human and non-human animal deaths. On the other hand, property destruction and other forms of direct action have an immediate, concentrated economic impact on individual organizations in a way that a gradual consumer shift towards a vegan diet will not. ALF (Animal Liberation Front) actions have successfully shut down research groups responsible for atrocious animal rights abuses.

A number of ALF actions have involved the threat of harm, rather than harm itself. For example, one ALF action called in a threat to the Mars candy company claiming they had poisoned Mars bars in stores around the country, forcing them to pull them from shelves and causing millions in damages. In fact no Mars bars had been poisoned. Such actions are, of course, still just as illegal as physical property destruction. However, such actions illustrate that if the goal is punishing companies who exploit animals, in the hopes of changing their behavior, they can be quite effective: they do not require a lot of effort to pull off, can cause a lot of damage placing financial pressure on companies.

One way to conceptualize such actions is as a privately-enforced tax/fine on companies that exploit animals. This tax corrects for the negative externalities (largely borne by animals) which are otherwise unaccounted for by our current government, yielding a fairer market. Although it would be wrong to think of the monetary cost to the company as somehow compensating for the harm caused to the animals they exploited, it is nonetheless a practical tool, in the same way large fines for workplace accidents are good practical tool, despite not really compensating for the deaths or serious injuries workers sustain.

An alternative which is not illegal, which could have a similar practical effect, would be to pass laws imposing strict financial penalties to companies which engage in animal exploitation.

Select the Position that Best Represents Your Views

1. I think direct action including property destruction can be done completely safely, and we should focus our legal effort in helping those who are caught doing it, not trying to reform the system to get these penalties instituted in law.

2. Direct action involving property destruction carries some risk. Who knows if a fire you set might not accidentally spread, or if you might miss someone in a building you thought was vacant. We should try to minimize the risk, but we should nonetheless take these risks, because in the balance of things the potential benefit outweighs the risks. We should focus our legal effort in helping those who are caught doing it, not trying to reform the system to get these penalties instituted in law.

3. What matters most is making sure people profiting from animal exploitation suffer financially so they lose the incentive to do it. We should absolutely be focusing most of our effort onto getting financial penalties for animal exploitation codified into law, and extra-legal property destruction should be considered just a stop-gap measure until such legislation passes.