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Animals, lies and videotapeAn Animal Rights Investigator's story(Texte paru dans le numéro 27 du magazine Arkangel) There are those in the movement who regard undercover
investigators with an element of suspicion and condemn them for not
intervening when they see an animal being brutalised. The truth of the
matter is that without the evidence gained by these people, campaigners
would not have the ammunition to stand their ground against the animal
abuse industry. It takes an enormous amount of courage and strength of
will to be able to stand silent while seeing an animal being tortured or
killed if you truly care but believe that your presence there is for a
greater good. The toll on individuals in this line of work can be heavy
and they do it often at great personal cost; we should commend those
among them whose genuine compassion compels them to take this route, and
we should remember that past campaigns and those like SHAC today have
been given enormous leverage through information acquired by such means.
The account below by one individual recalls how his life was shaped by
events which culminated in his becoming a professional investigator. As I
looked down from my post on the goat "mountain" which I was
engaged in cleaning, I could see the bears "dancing", which
was how parents described the bears' stereotypic behaviour to their
concerned children; at no time was it clearer to me than at that moment
that it was time for a change. The only
thing I had wanted my entire life was to work with animals and I thought
the best way to get really close to them was to become a zookeeper. I
left school early to work at a small zoo in Warwickshire, but within six
months I was back at school. I had become increasingly disenchanted with
the way the animals were being kept and finally quit the job along with
a co-worker after discovering that the owner was using an air gun to
move chimpanzees from one cage to another. Soon after I walked out, the
zoo was closed down. At school, I completed my exams but I still
believed that zoos were my vocation. I put my past experiences down to
bad luck, convinced that a larger zoo would not have the problems I had
witnessed in Warwickshire, so I was thrilled when a letter came through
from London Zoo informing me that my job application had been accepted
and that I was assigned keeper to the bears, sea lions, seals and
mountain goats. Within
about three months, my enthusiasm had waned, and I began to question the
environment in which the animals were being kept, why they were there in
the first place and how some of them were treated. Why were the
elephants swaying from side to side? Why were the big cats pacing
endlessly up and down their enclosure? Why were the bears rocking and
pacing, tossing their heads in the selfsame repeated perpetual motion?
Stories circulated amongst the keepers that elephants who had "misbehaved"
were taken behind the canteen where there were no cameras, and beaten
into submission and/or chained outside all night. Rumours abounded that
wallabies were being taken from the zoo and sent to an adjoining
Wellcome laboratory where they were decapitated as part of routine
vivisection experiments. But rumour it was not ‑ it was a fact
known only to a few keepers. As the months went by I felt increasingly
that I was no more than a prison warden and not someone genuinely caring
for animals which I had naively believed were being bred to be returned
to the wild. Indeed, to date I could count on the fingers of one hand
the animals that zoos have successfully reintroduced into the wild. One year
on, my dreams shattered, I decided to leave, unable to continue working
in an environment where no one questioned the conditions in which
animals were kept nor the unnatural behaviour displayed by many; these
animals were caged for no other reason than to provide living exhibits
for the uncaring and ignorant visiting paying public. So it was lime to
move on, but to what? I loved animals and knew I wanted nothing else but
to work with them. Soon I was to discover that there was a great
difference between working with animals and working for them. I had
spent several months on the dole when I saw a poster on the London tube
advertising the Animal Aid Living Without Cruelty Exhibition and I went
along to see what it was about. It was to prove instrumental in changing
the course of my life. Although I had worked on day release from school
at the RSPCA Harmsworth Animal Hospital of Rolf Harris fame and had seen
victims of animal abuse, nothing could have prepared me for what I
discovered at the AA exhibition. I hadn't realised just how many forms
of animal abuse existed. Walking
around the stands, I came upon one called "Zoo Check", where I
talked for an hour with its representative; I felt a great sense of
relief at finally having found an organisation that dealt specifically
with the zoo issue and knew from that moment what I wanted to do. I
wanted to work for animals. I wanted to put my time and effort into
helping animals which, it had become clear from looking around the
exhibition, were in great need. I began working voluntarily for Zoo
Check and after a few months was invited to work at their offices in
Surrey in the accounts department but although my official duties were
to keep the accounts in order, I found I was spending more time visiting
zoos and reporting on their conditions than at the offices. As a result,
I got behind with the accounts and after a year, since there was no
position within the organisation for an official zoo researcher/observer,
I moved on. What to
do now? Well, during a successful campaign to free Missie and Silver
from Brighton Marina, I had made some friends in Brighton and so moved
down to the seaside where I became involved in sabbing fox hunts. Being
chased by violent animal abusers, witnessing animal suffering and being
harassed by the police were all experiences which proved invaluable
preparation for the work that I was soon to undertake. The first of my
forays into undercover work came not more than a few months after I had
settled in Brighton when I was approached by a friend who informed me of
a job vacancy at a place called Shamrock Farms where animals were bred
for experiments: would I be interested in applying? I was and did and
was accepted - maybe it was fortuitous that the head technician had been
a keeper at London Zoo! Shamrock
was a place to which animals were being imported from Mauritius, the
Philippines and Indonesia. Here they were screened and the sick filtered
out before being sent to labs all over the world. I witnessed, filmed
and photographed daily abuse and the general suffering of the primates
for nine months, then moved to a lab in Yorkshire where Shamrock
primates were used in experiments. I worked in the same room where, some
years before, the famous smoking beagles had been forced to smoke dozens
of cigarettes at a time. Not much had changed except that the dogs had
been moved to adjoining labs to be replaced by primates which were being
forced to inhale toxic gases and drink toxic chemicals instead of
cigarettes. I had
been working in the monkey lab for five months; one afternoon I left
early, on the pretext that I had a dental appointment. I never returned
and that very evening a campaign was launched. It was hard to drive away
and leave behind the many primates that I had got to know and would
never see again. I knew that within a few weeks they would all be dead.
After working nearly a year in the primate vivisection business, I was
finally out. I think I cried all the way to London. It is true to say
that not a day went by for weeks that I didn't think of those primates
because their dosing with poisons was a daily routine. I knew when the
terrified animals were being carried into the lab for their forced
inhalation procedure and would look at my watch and remember. I will
always remember. After
the BUAV launched "Paradise Lost", the campaign which
highlighted the international trade in primates for research, Shamrock's
days were numbered. Using footage and film taken at Shamrock, the
campaign went from strength to strength and showed images of brutality
inflicted upon, and the daily misery suffered by the primates which the
Shamrock firm could not refute. Mounting pressure, political lobbying
and local direct action took their toll and within a relatively short
time after the campaign's inception, the largest primate importing
company in the UK shut its gates for good. Well,
that's how I got into the investigation business. Since those days I
have witnessed a great deal. I have seen animals having their throats
slit without any stunning, animals being beaten to death, animals forced
to perform tricks through pain and starvation, animals being gassed to
death, animals living in such appalling conditions that they mutilate
their own bodies out of boredom and frustration, animals being
transported in ways that leave them disembarking the vehicle with broken
limbs, animals being hung from trees as part of a "tradition",
animals being taunted and finally killed as part of a
"tradition" and animals being electrocuted (I have to add that
a lot of what l've just described was legal in those countries at the
time of my investigations). I am not proud of the fact that I have
witnessed all this. It is a catalogue of death and misery that I will
never forget and am not allowed to forget even when I sleep. How do I
do it? How can I stand and watch the animals which I claim to love and
care for so much, be brutalised and killed? There is only one simple
answer to that and that is because I can and someone has to. It's
because I care for those animals so much that I am able to watch them
suffer, to record their pain as evidence. It has to be done or we
wouldn't have the ammunition to fight our campaigns. No photographs and
no film. We continue to need fresh evidence and material to campaign
with and through this evidence. It is used for political lobbying to try
effect changes in the law and for campaigning to try to educate the
public about what goes on. As the
years have gone by I admit that the work has made me a harder person. I
am not so emotional when it comes to animal cruelty. I have been
deprived of certain normal feelings and I sometimes wish this were not
so. I hold back my emotions when I am witnessing animal suffering mainly
because I am concentrating on recording the events; interference with or
attempts to prevent animal abuse would end in either being thrown out or
beaten up. The animal that I was attempting to save would still suffer
and I would no longer be able to expose any more suffering. It is very
important to me that any animal that I see suffering or dying does not
die in vain. The way I see it is that it will suffer anyway whether I am
there or not and its best that someone who cares is there to observe,
record and report what is going on. I think that some believe those
investigators that watch animals suffering are cold and even possibly
heartless. I can assure you that I am neither of these. I save my anger
and my tears for later, away from the abusers. I try not to reflect in
an emotional way too much on what I see. When I witness animal suffering,
I always try to ensure that that suffering has not been in vain and that
people will get to know of it and when the opportunity has arisen, I
have helped save animals from abuse even persuading some abusers to hand
over animals for re-homing. If I am
in a situation where l'm caring for animals then I will give them as
much as I can and that includes love and affection. I get satisfaction
from knowing that people are moved to take action, in one form or
another, when they see what I have filmed, photographed or in some other
way recorded. I suppose its also gratifying when animal abusers who
believe that they can't be touched and think that no one knows what they
are doing to animals, are exposed to the public. This hurts them I know.
They believe that they are safe, as they probably have been for years,
abusing animals behind closed doors and in some cases with the added
protection of the security forces or the police. My
advice for anyone who is thinking of investigating animal cruelty
overtly or covertly is to go for it. If you think that you are capable
of standing by, without showing any emotion whilst an animal is abused
then you are needed! Think about this. As you read this article,
somewhere an animal or animals are being abused in some way and no one
is there to record it. That animal or those animals have suffered and
died in vain. As long as abuse goes on then we MUST be there to record
it in order to help stop it. Although
I have been doing this job for years, it doesn't get any easier. The
work can be dirty and hard and depending on the project, you can forget
a social life as this job can frequently take you away from home.
Through the years I have lost many friends because I am absent. It can
be a lonely job so it’s really important to have the support of one or
two trusted people who can help you cope with its inevitable stress. If
you are still interested then I would advise that you contact one of the
larger organisations who possess the equipment, knowledge and contacts
etc to take the investigation work to its full potential. I hope
that some of the material that I have obtained in the past has
contributed to motivating more people to get actively involved in the
animal rights movement. I hope also that my reports, photographs and
films have been used successfully to persuade MPs to campaign for or to
help influence change. I know that we could be throwing out sensational
exposes every day and still things would be frustratingly slow. I am
frustrated by just how slow change is and maybe more so because I watch
the animals first hand as they suffer. I look into their eyes as they
die. I was once naïve enough to believe that if we exposed
establishments of abuse that they would be closed down or their
practices would stop. I now know that things don't work like that. We
are all chipping at a large stone block. We are all working together for
the same end. Some chips are bigger than others and sometimes it looks
as though all the chipping that we have done has not made much of a
difference to that stone, but slowly the stone block begins to form
letters. We can see the A and a bit of the L. We are making a difference
to the block now as long as we keep chipping away. Eventually the words
will form and they will read ANIMAL LIBERATION. Sometimes I wish I were
ignorant and didn't know of the misery, but I do and having turned that
corner, there is no turning back for me. Let me
just say one more thing which I think is important. As you have read, I
have worked in many places where animals are being abused and if there
is one thing that frustrates me more than the slowness of change, its
when l'm working inside a place, witness to so much suffering and I hear
from friends that x has fallen out with y or one group has fallen out
with another and they refuse to work and cooperate with one another any
longer. I often think about this as I look at the animals petrified
behind bars staring out at me and I wonder sometimes, is there any hope... Danny Traduction française par International Campaigns : Animaux, mensonges et témoignages vidéo.
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