Month: February 2020

These past few weeks have been intense and wonderful all at the same time. We had a conversation with everybody putting together LoD and published the event online, we gave talks in Germany, Austria and Slovakia and we filmed stuff with Michal Kolesar and his team.

You folks are already aware of our workshop project and know how it works; people contact us wanting to organise a talk, we try and fit it in the calendar and with the help of local humans a venue is found and promotion is done and we spend a few hours talking about whatever the fuck people want to talk about. Pretty simple isn’t it? We put a pot out for donations, but the workshops are ALWAYS free. We tend to always lose money on those talks, but we do not care, education should always be free.

What you might not know is how we are operating in relation to the microdocumentaries we are filming. The idea is simple, we find people that are not normally in the spotlight but that are doing awesome work and we work with them to tell their story via video. The aim is to publish one every six weeks, but we will see how it actually develops. At the moment we have two episodes of the series that we are working on, one of Michal Kolesar and his team and another one on Kent Animal Defenders. We do not know when we will be able to start releasing the project, but we are putting a lot of effort into creating something that is educational and inspiring, so others feel empowered to also take action whilst learning from folks who are at it already. 

In the next few days we are going to bring you a few posts on arrest support and prison support as because we’ve been very busy it has been a little more difficult to get them sorted. And that, really, brings us to the main point of this post.

Throughout the past three years, we’ve had three main focus points as a collective; educating the public, bringing direct action news to social media and doing prison and arrest support. We used to have a lot more support when we started, and slow and steady that has gone down. In fact, we send HALF the amount of money to prisoners than we used to  send just a year ago. And there is more and more actions were folks are being arrested and we are struggling to help with fines.

We have tried producing different merch, doing discounted merchandise (on items where people can already choose how much they pay), we plaster Patreon and PayPal in many posts… But the reality is, we must be doing something wrong, because it isn’t working. We do not do this job for the money. None of us in fact gets any money for their personal life out of Unoffensive. We don’t have wages or buy food or clothes or pay rent with the money from the collective.

So we are struggling and we fail to see why. We can imagine that many of the folks who used to support us a couple of years ago have grown towards the mentality of “support sanctuaries not individuals” and we also believe that concept to be true. What we don’t think to be true is that Unoffensive falls under the “waged full time activist” that people are avoiding to fund. In fact, different people from the collective do different things to survive, and none of us have a wage from Unoffensive.

So it would be wonderful if you could tell us what we could change to make things better. Should we be posting more content? Or more diverse stuff? Should we be trying to reach out to bigger platforms that might be able to help us out with promotion? How can we convince *just* a 10% of our followers to drop ONE dollar a month on Patreon? Whatever it is, we are open to criticism and to learning more because we would not want the project to die out.

For anyone interested, our PayPal address is unoffensive_animal(at)tutanota(dot)com and our patreon is:
www.patreon.com/animalliberation

See you in the next riot

UA. 

Read below an open letter that some humans who went to prison after the SHAC campaign want people to read. This is an important change in legislation that everybody should be aware of and actively opposing. Share far and wide, contact the media and start working towards stopping this backwards law.

“In a knee-jerk reaction to an act of terrorism, anti-terror measures are being introduced in the UK which will end automatic release (EDITOR’S NOTE: automatic release is a measure in the UK ‘justice’ system that releases people serving prison for the first time half way through their sentence) for terror offenders and will also apply to animal rights prisoners. It is a dangerous and slippery slope when non-violent activism begins to be equated to terrorism.

There has been a sinister update regarding the recently proposed amendments to automatic early release for those detained on terror charges.

Whilst there has been much attention to these laws being aimed at stopping those who would cause very real and violent harm to citizens in our streets, what has not been mentioned is how these laws will also target non-violent political prisoners of all stripes. 

A non-violent animal rights activist, currently serving a prison sentence has already been informed that they will be affected by these changes and will not be released as expected.

This prisoner has never, and would never, caused harm to anyone. They are certainly not the kind of knife wielding terrorist that these legal changes are claimed to be targeting.

Concerned that Prevent have included peaceful campaign groups such as Extinction Rebellion on their watch lists, we approached Minister of State for Justice, Robert Buckland to ask whether activists from such campaigns would also be affected. He has refused to comment, and blocked us from his social networks as well as silencing legitimate dissent by turning off commenting. 

It is clear that protestors who pose no threat to the public, but who the government find inconvenient, are due to be rolled into this new terror legislation, not by unfortunate oversight, but as a deliberate decision by senior politicians and the police.

It is outrageous that an act of terrorism is being used to gratuitously punish political prisoners who pose no physical threat to members of the public.

The signatories of this letter are all ex-animal rights prisoners who were released from prison between 2010-2012. Had this law change happened then, it would have also affected us.

As it was, we were all released halfway through our sentences, none of us have reoffended, and have all started successful ventures, which would have been much harder had we not been released from prison when we were. 

In love and liberation,

Tom Harris,

Nicola Tapping,

Gerrah Selby,

Jason Mullen,

Alfie Fitzpatrick.