A case can be made that 'covert' rescue meets the requirement that civil disobedience must be made public. With covert rescue, civil disobedience is not just action with a communicative dimension, but is essentially or primarily communicative action. In the case of the rescue of lab animals, it does deliberately send a message to practitioners of experimentation that their actions are deemed indefensible. When it is accompanied by subsequent publicity, it sends a message to the experimentation establishment as a whole that their most publicity-sensitive practices may be exposed to public view.
TONY MILLIGAN: The two dominant forms of animal rescue, in this militant and challenging sense, are covert rescue (with identity concealment) and open rescue (with identity disclosure on the part of at least some of those involved). Covert rescue, in its systematically organized form, has been practised since at least the 1970s and is strongly associated with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Sporadic instances of open rescue also date back to (at least) the later 1970s, but in its systematic and regular form this kind of rescue dates only to the 1990s. Specifically, it dates back to a sustained campaign of animal rescue initiated in 1993 and spearheaded by various Australian animal rights organizations, the best known of which is Animal Liberation Victoria (ALV). Open rescue is still practised in Australia and it is also practised by animal rights groups in Europe and in the US but more sporadically and with far less media coverage.
Open rescue is quasi-respectable, and has been linked (by activists) with Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha which, for simplicity, we may understand as the non-violent struggle for justice and truth. (An implication of this is that satyagraha for a bad cause would not be possible.) Covert rescue has a less favourable image. It has been associated (at least in the US) with domestic terrorism and attempts have been made to cluster legal responses to covert rescue together with responses to Islamic extremism.5 While this may make the distinction between open and covert appear to be a rigid dichotomy, it nonetheless holds only up to a point. An open rescue on the ALV model will typically involve some covert information gathering prior to the (similarly covert) removal of a relatively small number of easily portable animals such as laying hens. Removal is also, ordinarily, carried out at night in order to avoid the risk of discovery and confrontation. The media and/or police will then be informed and no attempt will be made to conceal the identity of key activists. However, safety masks are sometimes worn (e.g. in laying sheds) and this does give opportunities for some identity concealment by some participants. We may, as a result, suspect that the authorities are given the identities of only a sample of activists and not everyone. There are also issues of concealment with regard to the broader networks of sympathizers who help to relocate and provide homes for rescued animals. Even so, open rescue does involve a strong element of genuine openness that covert rescue lacks. We might also struggle to associate the latter with Gandhian satyagraha, although this on its own need not rule out a classification of such action as civil disobedience given the demanding nature of Gandhian dissent. Indeed, there may be good reason for keeping the concepts of civil disobedience and satyagraha distinct in order to avoid a charge of excessive demandingness…
The absence of a critical mass of support for an extensive open rescue movement, there are at least two significant reasons why some animal rights activists continue to find covert rescue an attractive option, or at least a more attractive option than open rescue. Firstly, the open rescue model is largely inapplicable in the case of laboratory animals whose special predicament has always formed a lure for animal rights activists. The animals rescued in an open manner by ALV (and by other open-rescue operations such as Animal Liberation New South Wales) are typically deemed by their owners to have a low monetary value. Subsequent identification of rescued animals is also difficult. To the undiscerning eye of those who encounter thousands of birds every day, one low-priced chicken may look much like another. The upshot is that the recovery of animals is generally not attempted. Owners may want compensation or (an option we need not discount) something close to payback or revenge. Or they may, more ambiguously, want something to be done. But they are not usually interested in the actual return of the rescued animals. By contrast, when lab animals are rescued from research facilities, they can represent several months of work and in the case of primates they may be expensive to acquire and difficult to replace. Individual lab animals are also, typically, tattooed for identification and this facilitates subsequent recovery. Even where efforts are made by rescuers to conceal tattooing, the presence of scarring and of any unusual injuries that have been inflicted upon an animal can also facilitate identification. From the rescuer’s point of view, recovery can be a real concern. Sympathetic vets may have to be used by those who wish to prevent it from taking place. Because of this concern about recovery, covertness has a practical rationale that has nothing to do with the image and ethos of underground organization…
Given that there is a special rationale for covert rescue, particularly where lab animals are concerned, open and covert rescue (or at least some radically modified version of the latter) may begin to look like complementary activities. And, to some extent, this is not an entirely misleading impression. However, beyond both being instances of rescue, they still do not look like the same sorts of activities. While here is no obvious and good barrier to regarding open rescue as civil disobedience, it may still seem intuitively obvious that covert rescue simply cannot qualify, irrespective of how it is carried out. Its sheer covertness may seem to be an insurmountable obstacle. And one reason for this is that civil disobedience has typically been regarded (at least in the literature of the past couple of decades) as public and, even more strongly, necessarily public. Again, the Rawlsian account has set the tone for a good deal of writing on this theme. For Rawls, ‘civil disobedience is a public act. Not only is it addressed to public principles, it is done in public. It is engaged in openly with fair notice’; similarly, it is ‘a public, conscientious yet political act contrary to law’.16 But exactly why this must be the case is not altogether clear. The Civil Rights Movement and successive campaigns for Indian independence were public but they were also religiously inspired and guided by a sense of spiritual values. Yet we do not consider the latter to be essential to civil disobedience. (Although Gandhi’s commitment to regarding civil disobedience as a branch of satyagraha seems at times to entail precisely this.) Moreover, none of the more obvious reasons for insisting upon the restriction to public acts look simultaneously strong and sufficiently fine-grained to exclude covert rescue without also excluding non-controversial instances of civil disobedience. The reasons for exclusion, if they prove anything, seem to prove too much…
Requiring that civil disobedience must be public, those who wish to defend the possibility that covert rescue could be civil disobedience (even though it often, perhaps even always, fails to qualify) have two options: firstly, an argument may be made that some instances of covert rescue could be sufficiently communicative to qualify; and secondly, the communication thesis may itself be challenged. Both options have something going for them. It can, for example, be argued that covert rescue genuinely is communicative, albeit only up to a point. In the case of the rescue of lab animals, it does (deliberately) send a message to practitioners of experimentation that their actions are deemed indefensible by the rescuing agents (or whichever constituency they believe themselves to represent). And when it is accompanied by subsequent publicity it sends a message to the experimentation establishment as a whole that their most publicity-sensitive practices may be exposed to public view. Given this, what may be required for a comprehensive exclusion of civil disobedience claims is some stronger version of the communication thesis such that civil disobedience is not just action with a communicative dimension but is essentially or primarily communicative action. One way to make this shift would be to say that the primary intention of the agents involved has to be the communication of a message. This would, admittedly, count against a good deal of covert rescue. While rescues are sometimes filmed, it would be odd for a rescue, in full flow, to be called off because a camera had ceased to function.
No doubt it is hard to disentangle the multiple intentions of agents. There is ambiguity and indeterminacy in what any of us may be trying to accomplish at any given point in time. Even so, there does seem to be at least some sense in which the immediate and primary aim of covert rescue tends to be the rescue of the animals themselves. However, even in the face of such a strongly formulated version of the communication thesis it may still be pointed out that at least some rescues, and particularly some of the earliest ALF actions if not later actions, may well have been carried out with something close to a primarily communicative intent, as a signal that the ALF was alive and thriving. In spite of covertness, such rescues would still seem to qualify as communicative acts and hence would still be candidates for civil disobedience in spite of their covert dimensions. SOURCE…
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