Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets
Ronnie Lee helped pioneer radical animal activism, and spent nearly a decade in prison for it. Today, he sees power in another kind of resistance.
In 1970s Britain, as animal welfare campaigns struggled for mainstream attention, a young, soft spoken trainee lawyer named Ronnie Lee was quietly radicalizing. Fox hunting, factory farming, and vivisection weren’t abstract issues to him—they were atrocities demanding a response. What began with a switch to vegetarianism and then veganism quickly progressed to direct action. Lee’s transformation was both ideological and deeply emotional; the more he learned about the suffering of animals, the more he saw everyday society as complicit in their exploitation.
In the early 1970s, Lee joined the Hunt Saboteurs Association, a group that employed legal tactics to disrupt fox hunts across the British countryside. Members would use false scent trails and distraction techniques to prevent hunters from killing their prey. While certainly effective to a degree, the limitations of these methods became apparent to Lee, as hunters continued their pursuits despite the intervention. (The HSA is still active in the UK today, where fox hunting remains widespread despite legal challenges from animal rights groups.)
In 1973, this frustration catalyzed the formation of the Band of Mercy. Lee, along with fellow activist Cliff Goodman and four others, expanded beyond breaking up hunts to target the tools of the hunters’ trade. “We would go to the hunt kennels—the headquarters where they kept the hounds, the dogs they used for hunting, and the vehicles used to transport the dogs and horses—and we’d sabotage their vehicles,” Lee recalls. “The idea was very much preventative—we wanted to prevent them from going out hunting later that day.” Often, the damage wasn’t severe; it was simply the minimum damage necessary to prevent the hunt from taking place.
The group eventually progressed to other actions: they badly damaged fishing boats used to kill baby seals off the eastern coast of England, and attempted to destroy an animal research laboratory under construction. “Once again, you can see these things as preventative—we were trying to stop something from happening,” Lee explains. “And when [we] had our initial meeting, we agreed that any form of human oppression of other animals could be our target, not just fox hunting.”
Band of Mercy’s most significant action occurred in November of 1973, when the group launched multiple attacks on a building under construction near Milton Keynes—a research laboratory owned by Hoechst Pharmaceuticals intended for animal experimentation. The facility represented the accelerating institutionalization of animal experimentation—a sign that, despite growing public awareness, the industry was expanding, not retreating. The attacks caused £46,000 in damage (equivalent to approximately £710,000 today) and delayed the facility’s opening by several months. More importantly, it established a template for future actions: strategic property destruction aimed at imposing economic costs on industries profiting from animal suffering. Between 1973 and 1974, the Band of Mercy conducted a series of operations targeting hunting equipment stores, pharmaceutical laboratories, and seal hunters’ boats.
The British authorities soon took notice. In August 1974, Lee and Goodman were arrested after being observed conducting reconnaissance at Oxford Laboratory Animal Colonies (OLAC), a facility that bred animals for use in experiments. Both received three-year prison sentences; while Goodman would later become a police informant, Lee emerged from his own incarceration in 1976 more committed than ever to the cause.
The Animal Liberation Front Emerges
Upon his release, Lee assembled a new group of activists under a new name: the Animal Liberation Front. The shift was more than symbolic. Where the Band of Mercy had framed its actions as preventative resistance, the ALF signaled something broader—an organized, international movement dedicated to the total liberation of animals from human exploitation. The name carried both urgency and militancy, aligning with the growing conviction that animals were not just victims but an oppressed class in need of direct intervention. As the group evolved, so did its tactics. “The idea arose of economic sabotage,” Lee says. “Rather than doing the minimum damage necessary to prevent them from doing what they were doing, the idea was to cause maximum damage, to cause them economic loss and put them out of business.”
The ALF also differed from previous animal rights groups in that it operated as a decentralized network rather than a hierarchical organization. Anyone who followed the group’s guidelines—which included taking direct action to liberate animals or sabotage industries that exploited them—could claim affiliation with the ALF. Additionally, the ALF established strict ethical parameters for its actions: no harm to human or non-human animals. Property destruction was acceptable, but violence against living beings was explicitly forbidden. This was fundamental to the practice of veganism.
This ethical framework was revolutionary in its approach, distinguishing the ALF from many other militant groups of the era. The ALF sought to confront what they saw as institutional violence against animals with targeted property destruction—attacking both the means of production as well as individual producers, such as the cars and homes of corporate executives involved with animal experimentation.
“We were riding on a crest of a wave, and we had this idea that … we’d end the fur trade, end animal experimentation, and then move on to animal farming and destroy that through direct action,” Lee recalls. “We got away with it for a while—it took the authorities a while to catch up. This was a new thing, and it was made more difficult for them because it was leaderless. There was no central committee, and no leadership at a national or international level.”
By the late 1970s, ALF cells had spread throughout the United Kingdom and were beginning to appear in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The movement’s expansion was fueled by exiled British activists, sympathetic journalists, and underground publications that circulated ALF communiqués worldwide. Their actions ranged from breaking into laboratories to free research animals to destroying meat delivery trucks and vandalizing butcher shops. In the U.K., ALF operatives targeted fur farms, releasing thousands of mink into the countryside, and carried out arson attacks on slaughterhouses. In the U.S., the group raided university research labs, exposing footage of animal experiments to the media. Australia saw similar actions, with break-ins at factory farms and the destruction of animal transport vehicles. These cells operated independently, often unknown even to one another, following the guiding principle of inflicting economic damage on industries profiting from animal exploitation.
The impact was significant. The negative attention contributed to fur shops and fur sections in large department stores across the country closing down. Research facilities and slaughterhouses were forced to invest heavily in security, and in some cases, abandoned animal experimentation or shut down controversial operations due to sustained public pressure. Media coverage of ALF raids brought unprecedented attention to industries that had long operated in secrecy, sparking broader debates over animal welfare.
As the ALF’s influence spread, so too did its notoriety. News outlets ran sensational headlines and TV segments denouncing the group as extremists, often framing their actions as domestic terrorism rather than activism. Governments and corporations, increasingly alarmed by the financial toll of ALF operations, intensified their efforts to dismantle the movement, ramping up their efforts to suppress it through surveillance, infiltration, and increasingly severe legal repercussions.
Years of Conflict and Consequences
The period between 1979 and 1990 represented the zenith of ALF activity under Lee's influence. During this time, the group executed increasingly sophisticated operations, including coordinated raids on multiple targets simultaneously and the tactical use of media to publicize their actions.
One of the most significant actions occurred in December 1984, when ALF activists infiltrated the University of Pennsylvania’s Head Injury Laboratory, removing 60 hours of videotapes that documented experiments on baboons. The edited footage, released under the title Unnecessary Fuss, revealed inadequately anesthetized baboons subjected to violent head trauma experiments, where researchers use crude tools to remove helmets stuck to the animals’ heads and making callous jokes about them, showing a shocking disregard for animal suffering. The ensuing public outcry led to the clinic’s closure, several firings, and a temporary suspension of federal funding.
In the UK, the ALF targeted Huntingdon Life Sciences, one of Europe’s largest contract animal testing companies. A series of raids between 1982 and 1985 liberated dozens of beagles and other animals while causing millions of pounds in property damage. These actions eventually spawned a dedicated campaign against the company known as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which would continue into the 2000s.
For Lee personally, the consequences of his activism were increasingly severe. In 1986, following an extensive police investigation codenamed “Operation Genesis,” he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy to commit arson and various other offenses connected to ALF activities. (He’d end up serving nearly seven years.) It was one of the harshest sentences ever imposed on an animal rights activist in the UK.
“The authorities were bound to catch up, particularly when powerful industries like the animal research industry—which has close links to the pharmaceutical industry—were being attacked,” Lee says. “The fur trade went under because it was weaker in terms of its influence and financial power, but the animal experimentation industry was very powerful, so the authorities really geared up to crush the ALF. Eventually, they succeeded.”
Prison as a New Front
Incarceration didn’t come as a particular surprise to Lee. “I think I always realized that I’d eventually go to jail,” he says. “I was realistic about that, so I was prepared.” In prison, one of the ways he coped was by considering the plight of animals that were being oppressed and persecuted. “Even though I was in prison, their situation was hugely worse than mine. And so I felt I had no right to feel down or complain about my situation, because it was far nevertheless far better than that of so many animals—and even many humans in some parts of the world who weren't in prison.”
While incarcerated at HMP Long Lartin and later HMP Channings Wood, Lee also focused on fitness as a way to counteract the imposition of the state. “Before I went to prison I wasn't a particularly fit guy—I was a smoker and hardly [did] any exercise. When I got that [10-year] sentence, I thought, ‘They’ve taken these years away from my life, and so how do I get some years back?’ I decided that if I got myself really fit and managed to live longer because of that, then I’d get some of those years back. So that really motivated me. A lot of guys take up smoking while in prison whereas I gave it up [laughs]. I started running and going to the gym, and getting myself fit to claw back some of the time they’d taken away from me.”
Lee also continued his activism through writing and education. He was in communication with a number of activists around the world, using the time to learn several languages in order to better communicate with them. “I had to be careful what I wrote because letters were often read by the prison authorities, so I couldn’t write anything that encouraged anything illegal. But I tried to help and advise people … on lawful campaigns, ideas for what they could do.” He also launched Arkangel, a magazine dedicated to animal liberation that would become influential in the movement.
Lee refused to eat the meat and dairy products the prison provided, and was an early instigator for mandates that vegan food options were provided to prisoners. He engaged fellow inmates in discussions about veganism and animal rights, which proved surprisingly effective. “I had this discussion with a guy who was adamant that he would never go vegan,” Lee recalls. “He believed that we needed to consume animal products, that we were meant to consume animal products, so he'd never go vegan. I kept very calm and polite, very friendly.” The two eventually agreed to disagree and went their separate ways, and wouldn’t see each other again for several years.
It was while serving a subsequent prison sentence that Lee ran into the inmate again. “He came up to me and said, ‘Remember that conversation we had about veganism, and I strongly disagreed with you? Well, a couple of weeks after that, I went vegan. I thought about what you said, and decided you were right, and I went vegan.’ He hadn’t stopped his life of crime, but he'd gone vegan! [laughs] But if I'd been unpleasant to him and sworn at him or something like that, I'm sure he wouldn't have, because he wouldn’t have thought about what I had to say afterwards.” It’s an interaction that informs Lee’s approach to this day.
The Changing Landscape of Activism
By the time Lee was released from his final sentence in 1992, the landscape of activism had changed dramatically. Governments in the UK and US had implemented extensive counterterrorism measures that specifically targeted animal rights extremism. In the US, the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 (later strengthened as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006) established harsh penalties for actions that interfered with animal enterprises. In the UK, the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 expanded police powers to deal with “domestic extremism,” with animal rights activism frequently cited as justification.
The surveillance state had also evolved significantly. CCTV cameras became ubiquitous in urban areas, and police forces developed specialized units focused on monitoring activist groups. The National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU), established in the UK in 2004, devoted considerable resources to infiltrating animal rights organizations. This new reality forced a reconsideration of tactics within the movement, and while underground ALF cells continued to operate, the risk-to-reward ratio had shifted dramatically. Activists faced longer sentences, more sophisticated surveillance, and increasingly negative public perception fueled by media portrayal of animal rights advocates as extremists.
“Direct action … has had to change because of increased sentences for actions, special police units being set up to investigate, pursue and arrest activists,” Lee says. “And primarily because of surveillance … it’s really difficult. For many ALF actions I was involved with, most of the planning went into how to get away afterwards. We were doing some really serious stuff, and so we didn’t want to be caught. Now, with surveillance, if you do something really serious—they [will] catch you.” (The ALF still operates today, though at a much smaller scale than it once did.)
As such, direct action has evolved to focus on less severe forms of criminality, with many activists no longer attempting to evade arrest. Lee speaks highly of the tactics used by groups like Direct Action Everywhere (DXE, which now include open rescues where participants remove suffering animals from factory farms and openly admit to their actions, as well as actions like handcuffing or gluing themselves to objects to ensure arrest. Lee says the participants’ willingness to be detained for the cause carries a stronger emotional impact; it reflects a strategic move toward actions that emphasize visibility and accountability, aiming to engage and educate the public more effectively.
A Tactical Evolution
In response to the heightened security state, Lee's own approach underwent a significant transformation. Recognizing that the authorities were watching him closely, and that further property destruction would likely land him in prison for the rest of his life, he redirected his efforts toward grassroots education and community outreach. “I realized I couldn't go back to direct action the way I had before,” he explains. “But what I could do was get people to think differently.”
For the past 15 years, Lee has focused on what he terms “community vegan outreach”—establishing local groups that distribute information about veganism and animal rights through leafleting, information stalls, and one-on-one conversations. His aim is to see such groups spring up throughout the UK and the rest of the world, emphasizing the importance of consistent presence in communities. “Often, people need to see and be exposed to that information several times before they act on it,” he explains. “[One person] might be more interested by a video than they are by reading something. So, I'm all in favor of all these different ways of spreading the message.”
Lee’s approach is rooted in the belief that change comes from changing minds, but his approach isn’t forceful—he doesn’t raise his voice, and avoids confrontation or even arguments as much as possible. “I think people have to make their own decision to become vegan,” he says. “It’s not something you can force people to do, particularly when we regard it as a philosophy. You can’t force anyone to adopt a philosophy. They have to come to that belief themselves. So, the best we can do is provide people with the information to enable them to make that decision.”
Continuing the Struggle
The ALF has inspired thousands of actions worldwide and dramatically sharpened the focus on animal exploitation in the public consciousness. The ethical framework Lee helped establish—direct action without harm to living beings—created a template for radical activism that has influenced environmental, anti-capitalist, and social justice movements far beyond animal rights. The ALF demonstrated that direct action could be militant without being violent in the conventional sense, challenging us to reconsider what constitutes harm in a society where mass institutional violence to animals is normalized.
Lee continues to organize, to speak, and to engage with communities throughout the UK. His schedule at the age of 74 would exhaust many half his age—running information stalls, giving talks at various events, universities, and online, mentoring younger activists, writing, and creating videos. “The ALF was effective in hugely reducing the number of animal experiments in the UK and devastating the fur trade,” he says. “But it only achieved so much, then it hit the buffers. Realistically, that's all it could ever achieve. Now that in itself is valuable—many millions of animals were spared because of the actions of the ALF, and I'm proud to have been part of that. But the ALF was never going to bring about animal liberation, and the main reason for that is that it did nothing to change the minds of ordinary people. It was a direct war against those corporations, those businesses that oppressed animals. The ordinary public were just on the sidelines, watching this go on.”
Today, you might find Lee on a quiet street in any number of British towns, standing beside an information stall, handing out leaflets on veganism to passersby. There’s no grand spectacle, no cloak of darkness. His revolution has become a quieter one, fought through polite conversation rather than force. Yet in his mind, this work is just as vital as the ALF's boldest actions—perhaps even more so. Each person who stops to talk represents potential transformation.
“My message to all vegans would be to become activists,” he says. "I think the problem we have with the vegan community is that most people who identify as vegans aren't activists. They don't do anything to actively go out and promote veganism. They may have the odd conversation with friends and family, but they don't actually push themselves to go out and spread the message. And I think that’s key. It's really important that we somehow find a way of persuading more vegans to become activists. Because to me, that widespread outreach is key to everything. That's key to eventually obtaining really fundamental change and real progress.”
He continues: “If we live in a society where the vast majority of the population don't believe in animal liberation, then how is animal liberation going to be achieved? It's not. Direct action can achieve things, can be successful to some extent, but there are limitations on it. That's what happened with the ALF. It [achieved] so much, and then was brought to an end by the state. We've got to think about how to change the nature of the state. I'd like to see the end of all nation states, to be honest, but in the meantime, how do we change the nature of the state so that we have an animal liberationist administration—or, really, a total liberationist administration? Because we want the liberation of humans from oppression as well, which is consistent with veganism. The only way to do that is by changing ordinary people. So, I've become more fundamental in my approach to things.”
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