By Lee Hall

Reviewed by Laurel Long, age 21


"[I]f any domination is reinforced so is the whole culture that's based on hierarchy and that teaches hierarchy," writes legal scholar and animal advocate Lee Hall, in Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror. Released July 2006, Hall's book is essentially about domination and subordination (primarily of nonhumans, but also of human animals) that has become pervasive throughout the animal rights' movement.

Drawing a compelling comparison between the non-abolitionist sector of animal rights' activists-that is, those who do not ask for nonhuman animals' complete freedom-and those who use violence to attempt to achieve the end goal of animal rights, Hall's work states that neither of these groups believe true animal freedom can be achieved in our lifetimes. And that, apparently, is enough to give up on the goal of even working towards it.

Hall challenges those who believe violence works, asking, "Copying the activities of war-makers or soldiers forcing people to behave or not to behave in certain ways-this perpetuates the daily social control by some authoritative force. Other people are not the enemy of animal rights; if there is an enemy at all, it is the tendency to depersonalize them." In other words, violence has been the mainstream for so long that peace would be the truly revolutionary change.

Both participating in violent solutions and working towards getting animals' bigger cages are ways of working within the system. What we need is a radical change where hierarchies are abolished, whether that means man over woman, white over black, or human over nonhuman.

Does throwing a flower pot at a bunch of clerks or digging up a grave really work if our end goal is to eliminate hierarchies and the violence that contaminates them? Hall, and writer-psychologist Jeffrey Masson, who authored the book's foreword, do not believe so. Indeed, Masson writes, "I have an old and very strong opinion about emotions: they cannot be forced." Masson than goes on to say the best method for convincing others is persuasion. After all, if a person truly changes how he or she is thinking, he or she can convince others of what he or she has learned. "If he merely desists out of fear, he will not carry any kind of message to others, but will feel resentment, which is sure to find expression is some different act of cruelty."

Masson and Hall ask us to think seriously about the best in activism and how to model a completely new idea for others who might have never thought about it. When our own diets and our whole lives stand for treating others with respect, we are in the best position to convince others we're on to something big.

Buy this book now!