Jolley: Five Minutes With Sarah Hubbart

Jolley: Five Minutes With Sarah Hubbart, Communications Coordinator, Animal Agriculture Alliance & The Animal Rights Movement

CattleNetwork 08/27/2010

I bet you’re looking for the usual picture of the person being interviewed. You won’t see it and that’s a decision I made for security reasons. Sarah is a perfectly normal human being who should be able to drive home at the end of the day without worrying if someone tampered with her car or booby-trapped her front door. If you think I’m kidding, let me reproduce a statement sent to me by a good friend. He found it on an animal rights blog:

“It's time to stop waving signs at cars or trying to enlighten the apathetic. The fight for the rights of non-human people is urgent and requires us to act outside the box. Being vegan is the first step in being an ethical human being. Beyond that, I believe that negotiating with abusers is an exercise in futility. While education is a key factor in any social revolution, civil disobedience, sabotage and militant direct action are equally important; I embrace & defend all effective avenues. We need to tear down the hierarchical structures and the capitalist system, all of which demand exploited classes to perpetuate themselves. We need to take veganism out of the domain of the lily-white middle class and make it accessible. There is no weaker segment of society than the nonhuman animals who’s voices have been silenced. NIO seeks to address the scope of issues that foster classism, exploitation, slavery and, obviously, the holocaust. I am philosophically a Militant Abolitionist/Animal Liberationist.”

I don’t know about you but that kind of rhetoric scares the hell out of me. And when I read about what people of that mind set are prepared to do, I fear for the life and property of anyone involved in animal agriculture.

The reason I posed a few questions to Ms. Hubbart, was a press release issued by the Animal Agriculture Alliance about two conferences that took place in Washington this summer. The Animal Rights 2010 Conference and HSUS’ Taking Action for Animals was an opportunity for their leaders to drop their public posturing and really bare their teeth. And what they showed were some pretty fearsome canines and bicuspids; ready to tear the heart out of animal agriculture first, animal ownership second. Make no mistake; cows and chickens are their primary targets, cats and dogs are next.

Read more of this excellent and informative interview at the link