As every year, the badger cull is in full swing in the UK. For anyone who is not aware, the badger cull is a government organised murder of badgers. The government says they do it to reduce bTB in cattle and they allow for the trapping and shooting of badgers as well as the free shooting during the night.
Thousands of people organise to stop the killing of badgers in many different ways, from groups walking footpaths and keeping tabs on badger setts to folks who will sabotage traps or find the shooters to politely ask them to fuck off.
A few years ago, some folks within UA set up a little splinter group called Underground Badger Syndicate that focused on sabotaging the badger cull, like many other groups around the country. Now, a collective in its own right, Underground Badger Syndicate is a direct action group sabotaging the murder of wildlife not only in the UK but throughout Europe. During the badger cull, they spend every day and night sabotaging the cull activities in whatever manner they believe is right, and they always need our support.
We have in the past supported UBS with gear and funding, but certainly, during the cull, they are in constant need of economic support.
For anyone who has not heard from them, you can find their socials here: Instagram: @undergroundbadgersyndicate Facebook: When The Wild Things Come At Night.
They genuinely could do with more followers on their social media, so if you are not following them, get on it! If you are, make a little post and ask folks to have a look at their socials. It doesn’t get any crustier than that!
And if you’re able and can afford it, consider sending them some fuel money. UBS keep saying money is for outrageous stuff like submarines and torpedos. In reality, their funds constantly disappear due to the sheer amount of kilometres they drive every day to stop wildlife from being murdered. www.paypal.me/fuckthecull1
Always defend direct action. FOR THE WILD!
Photo: By Underground Badger Syndicate, posing with a couple of badger cages.
Many of you have been requesting the shop to be back open, so today you can head back to our website and buy some merch again!
Not only the shop is open, but we have a bunch of new stuff you can grab! Tote bags, recycled face snoods, Wildfire Vol. 2 and a bunch of high quality art prints in collaboration with JaviFuego, Praxis, PDuthie and NoBonzo!
There are two new tshirts and hoodies coming in within a month as well as a general restock of all our classics, but for now you can grab youself some stuff before the snoods or flags sell out once again!
Remember that all profits we make from donations, patreons and shop sales help us carry on doing our work, but more importantly support prisoners, folks facing court trial and grassroots campaigns around the world. We are not for profit and we have zero intention to make money out of Unoffensive.
Please be aware that Unoffensive is not a business. For that reason, we do not parcel/send merch straight away. Any orders placed will be posted within 2 weeks of ordering.
If this is tempting to you, pop into the shop here:
We have received a new influx of followers on all our social media platforms so there is a need to reintroduce ourselves once again! Unoffensive Animal is a collective project focused on prisoner and arrest support, on education for activists and on working as a platform for underground actions that are reported anonymously.
We are not the ALF, we do not take part in illegal actions (regardless of how righteous they might be) and we are unable to put you in touch with people that do as the reports we receive are anonymous.
Folks can send reports through our website and should never do so via private message on social media.
Some of you might’ve noticed that our merch shop has been shut for a couple of months. This is due to redistributing responsibilities and finding a manageable workload. We certainly have felt the change considerably and it is only thanks to patrons and some private individuals that we have managed to still send some of the donations we normally do to different prisoners or folks that have been fined during actions.
It would be very useful to hear from you about our merch store. Have you missed it? Would you like to see it re open soon? Do you think we need new designs, or we should reprint our classics?
Unoffensive has always run as a not-for-profit initiative. We are not interested in financial gain and we don’t pay our lives with it. The project has always been an outlet of mutual aid and an attempt to empower activists to keep fighting for animal liberation and for human liberation.
All money made through Unoffensive Animal is used to upkeep the infrastructure necessary to exist on the internet (website, servers, domains and whatnot), it is sent to different prisoners serving time for being involved in the fight for a better world and occasionally (when we can afford it) is put towards projects of active overground groups fighting for animal liberation.
If you like the work we do, you can support us. As well as our patreon where you can donate as little as you want every month, you can make donations over PayPal, and as of today, you are also able to send donations with crypto. We currently accept both Bitcoin and Monero, but would recommend the use of Monero to keep transactions as private as possible.
Here are our links, you can also find them on our website!
Wildfire is back with the recent release of its long anticipated second volume. Brought to you by fellow dirty anarchists with a much needed focus on direct action relating to animal liberation.
Their zine includes an ALF highlight, info on post-liberation vet care, an exclusive interview with huntingleaks.is, another brilliant Black Mask comic by @praxis_vgz and much more.
It is really cool to see people working on projects like this so be sure to support and if you want to contribute with a write up, your art, photos, campaign, whatever them email them at: [email protected]
You can purchase volume I and II from @wildfire.zine on Instagram. Contact them to get an individual copy or buy bulk! Grous can buy bulk from them to help with the next print and to be able to resale and fund their own projects. Drop them a DM and get ordering! We will also be selling both volumes of their zine once the UA shop is up and running again.
Keep reading and keep fighting. Be inspired to make what you’ve read on the page a physical reality.
We received a very elocuent submission writing about the current anti vivisection campaign hitting the UK and about the history of social change as well as specifically the history of anti vivisection. It is a fantastic read and we think you should give it ten minutes of your time!
—————————–
“How inspiring it is to the see the wave of activists who have spent more than fifty continuous days so far trying to free the MBR Beagles. Sure, some correct-discourse “anti-speciesist” literature would tell you there are more important fights in the struggle for animal liberation. And clearly my feelings are tinged by a personal history and my love of collective community based spikey grass roots direct action. But this is an historic opportunity for the animal rights movement, and it provides us with a vital component for social change: momentum.
Previously, the hunger strikers, blanket men and women and political prisoners of Long Kesh and Armagh held my inspiration. The example that the prison cell, and the sacrifice of a gaol sentence, can be turned on it´s oppressors and used to heighten political conscience and militant action. When I found myself in a lonely prison cell, I remembered the thinking of such prisoners: “The first priority was escape, after that was education.” With my relatively short sentence escape was unrealistic but education was a privileged use of my time. Where else can people afford the time, lack of distraction and clarity of mind to study in the UK these days anyway? Through the prison library and correspondence from those amazing people that write to animal liberation prisoners I became somewhat evangelistic about education. University followed prison and as for my dissertation I researched the history of the animal rights movement, looking at campaigning against vivisection and in particular the emergence of radical and popular but planned, organised and intelligent direct action. Whilst my research into such a grand and glorious history is finite, I formed the opinion that in the late 1960s and early 1970s a core group of people emerged inspired by third-world and post-colonial liberation struggles. With a mother´s love for the animals and unstoppable desire akin to a revolutionary´s spirit – they were serious about helping those trapped in such unimaginable circuits of torture. Richard Ryder´s Animal Revolution documents elements of this history quite well, but only the original 1989 edition, as the millennial reprint did´t survive censorship.
These activists had an idea about what they wanted to achieve, and they were committed to realising that goal. It was one of the most noblest apologies a human can make to animal – to liberate them from the miserable enslavement humanity has inflicted upon them. This was their goal, and they never lost sight of it. Whether this could happen in our current social media dominated world is a question for the historians. But political activism in the social-media age can appear to be so based on slogans, attention or reaction, devoid of the principled, heart-pulling beliefs and pure empathetic feelings of solidarity that are essential for realising the goal of animal liberation. Remember the war; loose lips sink ships, walls have ears and I´ll keep mum! These activists hit their targets, and they hit their targets hard and often. They gained press coverage, and they engaged with that press coverage on their own terms. They provided a reasoned and rational explanation for their actions, in which their so-called “crimes” against property were contrasted against such an endless catalogue of human-on-animal violence. They used it to get across their message, not appeal for whatever support that floats by with the clouds or build relationships with politicos that would have lead them down the garden path. They were unapologetic and spoke from the heart. And they gained support.
When they first started to get persecuted by the law and imprisoned for defending the voiceless they understood it for the victory it was. Sure, they were imprisoned and there would be smug grins from petty men in grubby suits, but the movement blossomed. They inspired people to take action. They inspired the press to discuss the long ignored issue of institutionalised and systematic murderous scientific curiosity. And they made animal rights and animal liberation a serious, political and social issue once and for good. There will be no going back. It was not the philosophers in the university, or the social media influences with their theories and commentaries. It was the people in the streets, in the fields, getting ridden down by horses and bashed over the head by bumpkin scum, getting pushed around by odious police officers at the docks as babies were being freighted off to their continental death, getting strip searched and spat on in police stations up and down the country, and it was the anonymous, often talked about but rarely seen, moving around and hitting those people where it really fucking hurt. Animal liberationists could no longer be dismissed as hippie cranks or sentimental old women, middle-class liberals, weak, soft or overly sentimental. They were out there in the streets, they were getting arrested and imprisoned and they were disrupting the public consciousness and the official narratives on human-animal societal relationships. They were placing the importance of animal liberation among the most important life decisions a human can make. They were making trouble like all those glorious troubles makers who made history in making the world a better, kinder, more empathetic and intuitive world. They were serious, sincere, credible political activists for a righteous cause – and they became this because of the actions and experiences they were prepared to go through.
As I said it is so inspiring to see the development of this new campaign, and what an incredible thing to see a group of mostly women, presumably from different communities across the country, act so obstinately dignified in the face of scumbag-moron-cops. But be sure for sure, as I write, the state and industry, with a big shit-fingered poke from the police are calculating long winded and carefully planned strategies to eradicate your campaign, not to mention the side attractions of bad press publicity, scandal and gossip which can´t help but draw the attention away from your goal and gain the commentors and rubber-neckers who suck the life out of action like a leach sucks blood from the body. But remember this, you have rightness and justice on your side. Your fight is just, you are in the right and as long as you remember that, then you can withstand anything and you can achieve anything. The grass roots animal rights movement has the power to finish this disgusting business. In fact, it is the only force that can do it.
The British campaign to free the beagles bred for vivisection in MBR Acres keeps rolling at full steam. With more and more folks joining the campaign, specially new people who have not been involved in animal liberation before, the campaign seems to be just starting.
On the 1st of August, a 300 strong demonstration kept pressure at the front gates of the Cambridgeshire farm. Even with 70+ police on site, protestors managed to keep the workers stranded inside their cars in the middle of the road for more than two hours, creating multiple lines to protest their involvement in vivisection. A couple of arrests were made and folks have been remanded away from the site.
Meanwhile, Camp Beagle has kept MBR on their toes daily by keeping tabs on workers’ ins and outs and by holding daily demonstrations by the gates.
Sadly, not all is great news. On the 10th of August and after 40 days of siege with no dogs coming out of the facility, a huge contingent of police ensured that two transport vans would drive into the farm, only to be escorted out some time later with dogs crying inside of the vehicles. This seemed to be an important eye opener by many folks who were hoping the police were anything more than spineless puppets.
There is another national demo happening this Sunday, 15th of August, and things are growing. The demo has been called for MBR Acres, but also for those living in the north of the UK who want to visit its sister vivisection breeding facility B&K Universal.
Both demos start at 8am and you can find more information about them on the campaign’s Facebook page:
We are aware of folks who have expressed they have not felt safe at the demos due to transphobic comments as well as peace policing and bootlicking. When a campaign like this gains attention it is bound to attract many folks who do not tend to align politically, or who have not experienced the full oppressive power of the police. Our suggestion, as always, is to keep fighting. Ensure that you surround yourself with folks who take care of you and who will take care of others. Ensure you call out bad behaviour when it is needed and ensure you create an environment that is welcoming for those who constantly experience oppression by society, but most importantly, ensure that racists, transphobes and bootlickers do not hijack the movement in the name of “animal liberation”. We only lose the fight if we stop fighting. Let’s not forget that animal liberation only works with total liberation.
And let’s never leave without the beagles.
Dress black. Mask up. Be no one. Be ready for anything. Be the catalyser for their liberation.
Since the campaign started and we last wrote about it, Free the MBR Beagles has gone through quite a few things.
For anyone who still hasn’t heard about it, MBR Acres is a British beagle breeder that sells the dogs to vivisection laboratories. After undercover footage of workers transporting beagles in crates was released, a nationwide campaign started to shut down the farm and release all animals from the premises. A camp was also set up outside of the gates of the farm, with people living there 24/7.
Last week, about three hundred people joined a demo to put even more pressure. Folks travelled from around the country just to join for the day, but also many locals who had no idea about the farm being so close to them decided to participate in the demonstration. Whilst the demo was very calm and it did not kick off, it was a good turnout that will only translate into even more folks joining the next one.
On Sunday some information about a worker loading dogs in a car started circulating. This was big news as since camp was set up, no dogs have been officially taken out of the facility. An urgent call for support was sent and many people arrived in camp to an odd standstill between the police, the workers and folks barricading the exit. In the end, the police allowed the workers to move and so did the external barricade, and whilst folks on the ground do not believe animals were taken out on Sunday or any other previous day, it is difficult to know if workers are sneaking dogs out of the factory farm. It is unknown why anyone would take the dogs out of the factory in a personal car and the most plausible explanation is for rehoming purposes, but that is an unconfirmed guess. For that reason, more daily support has been called.
To appeal to the workers of the facility there is a whistleblower number as well as an email address for anyone to give inside information anonymously. If needed, you can find those contact details on Free The MBR Beagles. At the same time, a recruitment company has offered the workers an alternative job that matches or beats their current salary to get them out of that facility.
From other frontlines and showing support to the campaign, the ALF released two communique in solidarity with the MBR Beagles. In one they explained how they took 33 hens from a factory farm. In another, how they liberated 400+ guinea pigs. We can only guess that ALF actions directly targeting MBR or in solidarity with the campaign will be on the rise.
The next national demo called is on Sunday, 1st of August. It starts at 8 am and the postcode is PE28 2DT. It is organised as a protest and “funeral-vigil”, so they are asking for people to dress accordingly. Masks are recommended.
If you live in the country, we cannot recommend you more to join this campaign. It is a breath of fresh air in the animal liberation movement that could bring back the strength and uncompromised fight that once was. If you’re not, you probably have an MBR near you. Find them, gain information about them and target them! Bring the company down!
WE ARE NOT LEAVING WITHOUT THE BEAGLES
Video by @misartressmel, filmed during the last demo.
The UK is seeing a resurgence of action against vivisection and it seems they have chosen a target. MBR Beagles is a factory farm breeding and selling beagles for vivisection. They have existed for almost fifty years and have continuously operated under different names including Harlan and Interfauna.
Interfauna was a previous target of the ALF. More than one raid was carried out in the past, including the notable 82 beagles and 26 rabbits liberated from the place in 1990.
During the SHAC campaign, MBR Acres was also the target of heated demonstrations and a relentless campaign to shut down the factory farm.
For over a year, local campaigners have run “Stop Animal Cruelty Huntingdon”, which focused on demonstrations against MBR Acres and Covance. Since undercover footage captured with a hidden camera was released showing beagles transported from the sheds and into vans, the campaign has become a lot more than just a local effort.
Multiple national newspapers published reports on the farm and printed the photos obtained by the activists. Politicians and public figures publicly announced their support for the campaign.
Their next demo became heated. Aided by newspapers publishing about the farm and the campaign, on the 27th of June, there was an unexpected shift. More and more people kept arriving at a demo that was not expected to grow that big. People were furious, upset and emotional. The fences were kicked off the entrance to the farm with police not knowing what to do with themselves.
Since then, the campaign has evolved. It’s now called “Free the MBR Beagles”, singling out their target and showing determination to close down the farm whilst being able to show it is no longer a local campaign, but a national one. At the same time, folks have set up “Camp Beagle” on the verge of the road, meters away from the double-gated entrance of the puppy factory farm. Camp Beagle said, “We are NOT leaving without the beagles” and they seem to be pretty serious about it.
After some time of relative silence against vivisection by the wider animal liberation community, it seems like the fight against animal laboratories is back.
You can help. For anyone reading in the UK, Camp Beagle actively encourages folk to join and camp with them or even just visit for the day. Their address is MBR Acres Ltd, Sawtry Way, Huntingdon, PE28 2DT. You can get in touch with them online over their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/campbeagle199
For those who cannot leave everything and move to camp, there still are opportunities to join. The next big demonstration organised by Free the MBR Beagles is on the 9th of July at 8 am, at the same address mentioned above. To follow The campaign, check their Facebook page:
For all of those outside of the UK, luckily there are still things we can do to help. MBR Acres is owned by Marshal BioResources. The company is registered in the US but they have subsidiaries in multiple different countries around the globe. Notably, the Italian Green Hill puppy farm was owned by them until it was shut down for animal cruelty in 2016. Marshal BioResources also owns Marshal Pet Products, a company that is widely stocked in the US’ PetCo and that even sells ferrets to the pet superstore bred in the Marshal BioResources farms. More information on the subsidiaries of Marshal BioResources as well as locations in countries around the world will be welcomed by the wider animal liberation movement and the campaign to shut down MBR Acres.
The comrades at Wildfire have reached out to let us know that the magazine will be printed next week and that numbers of printed mags depend on bulk pre-orders as that is the only way they are funding the costs.
If you’re part of a group and would like to stock up on magazines, this weekend is your chance to help fund a radical, animal liberation magazine! If you know of any groups who would be interested, tag them or share it with them!
For anyone wanting to place bulk orders (minimum 30 magazines), you can contact Wildfire on wildfiremagazine(at)riseup(dot)net
We will be ordering a good bunch ourselves, so for small orders we will be able to provide, but for anyone wanting to raise some funds for their projects and plans this is a fantastic opportunity!
The folks at Wildfire Magazine have reached out to let us know that the next issue of their magazine is fast approaching but that they need some support in order to finalise it. They are collecting pre-print bulk orders from groups, collectives, bookstores and shops that want to order a bunch of mags to raise funds for their projects. These groups can be worldwide.
Bulk orders of the magazine are at 1 GBP per magazine and minimum order is 30 magazines. If your group or collective wants to raise some funds by selling the magazine, or simply they want to create culture and share an animal liberation based magazine with peers, you can contact Wildfire Magazine for more information.
To contact them send an email to WildfireMagazine (at) riseup (dot) net
If you don’t think you can afford to bulk order, but know grassroots groups, or collectives, or campaign organisers and even bookstores and radical shops, tag them, let them know you’d like to see the magazines stocked by your nearest group, share it with them and encourage some orders!
PLEASE NOTE: Whilst we support the work of Wildfire Magazine, we are in no way connected to the organising, printing or making of the magazine. Please do not direct your questions towards us as we can only redirect you to the email mentioned above.
SOLIDARITY
UA.
We now accept Bitcoin and Monero as donation methods! Please visit "Support Us" page to find out how.
