Capers in the Churchyard (book)
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| Capers in the Churchyard | |
| Author | Lee Hall |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Animal rights |
| Genre(s) | Non-Fiction |
| Publisher | Nectar Bat Press |
| Publication date | 2006 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-9769159-1-X |
Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror is a book written by U.S. lawyer Lee Hall, concerning both the fundamental theory underlying animal rights and the history of the methods of its proponents.
The book was published in July 2006, by Friends of Animals’ Nectar Bat Press, and includes a foreword by the psychologist and author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.
The book's title refers to a six-year campaign to end the breeding of guinea pigs at a family-run farm in Newchurch, England. The cover is designed with a photo of the churchyard where the body of the guinea pig farmer's mother-in-law was exhumed by activists. Before going into the specifics of these incidents in the heart of England, the book provides the background that enables the reader to connect them with other campaigns carried out internationally.
In “Activism as Integrity,” a review and commentary on the book for the magazine Philosophy Now, Professor Joel Marks, an Adviser to the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, points out the unique quality of the book’s approach, stating, “Ostensibly about tactics in the animal rights movement, the book is in fact a manifesto for thinking about nonhuman animals in a wholly different way from what we have become accustomed to.”
Humans in general, activists included, are accustomed to a stewardship model of interacting with animals, Hall asserts. This model involves addressing claims of cruelty in institutions while tending to ignore free-living animals and the importance of the biocommunity to a viable concept of “rights” for nonhuman life. Rather than modifying pain -- a natural survival mechanism in all conscious life -- Hall urges advocates to focus on why humans dominate other animals, and whether humanity is capable of transcending this history.
Rather than limit the idea of animal rights to nonhuman beings’ interest in not being property, Hall’s focus (invoking the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis) is on the “right to be let alone” -- for the dignity of one's private life, habits, acts, and relations is essential, as Brandeis explained, in a way property rights are not, to the 'inviolate personality.' Whereas Brandeis called the right to be let alone the most comprehensive of rights, Hall examines the ramifications of applying this to nonhuman beings, deciding that animal rights is the quintessential ground for the concept, given that nonhuman beings are not asking to be freed in order to be enfranchised into human society.
A “big surprise” of Hall’s book, according to Professor Marks, is the link it shows between coercive tactics and the traditional anti-cruelty movement that accepts the use of animals in the main, but decries egregious abuses. In Hall’s analysis, activists can be managed and their energy turned against their movement both by negotiating (usually with corporations) adjustments in the way animals are handled within the social institutions that use them and by systematically employing intimidation in their campaigns, thereby enabling corporations and lawmakers to paint animal and environmental activists as anti-social and capable of violence. Here, Marks suggests that Hall’s is the first book to offer an analysis of compromise with industry and coercive activism as part of an interrelated dynamic. It also looks at the legal trends impacting activism following the infamous September 2001 attacks.
Marks finds the book more thorough in its analysis of strategy than an alternative world the “right to be let alone” would bring about, and calls on the author to supply more of the latter. Marks nevertheless notes that the book sees a reliance on coercive tactics as “a betrayal of the proper end of an animal rights movement” and adds: “That end is one that would encompass all animals, which is to say, humans included; and it is nothing less than the elimination of domination and hierarchy from the relations of humans to humans as well as of humans to other beings.”
