Roger Yates
Encyclopedia
Roger Yates is a lecturer in sociology
at University College Dublin
and the University of Wales
, specializing in animal rights
. He is a former executive committee member of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
(BUAV), a former Animal Liberation Front
(ALF) press officer, and a co-founder of the Fur Action Group.
Yates was sentenced to four years' imprisonment in 1987 for conspiracy to commit criminal damage on behalf of the ALF. He absconded during the trial, and was on the run for two years before being apprehended and serving his sentence. After his release in 1990, he began an academic study of animal protectionism and social movements, obtaining his PhD
in 2005 on the subject of human/non-human relations. His current work focuses on the social transmission of speciesism
.
(HSA), but failed to find fellow "sabs" near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. By 1979 he had moved to Essex and had become active as a vegan
animal rights advocate.
He was one of a group of activists associated with the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group (ALF SG), who tried in the early 1980s to gain control of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, a group founded in 1898. Yates became a member of the BUAV's executive committee in 1982, along with Dave McColl, a director of Sea Shepherd
, and they used the position to radicalize the organization, which meant that significant campaigning funds became available to activists for the first time. He co-founded the Fur Action Group with others from the BUAV, and created the largest data bank on fur-bearing animals in the country, later handed over to the Lynx anti-fur organization. Kim Stallwood
, BUAV's national organizer from 1981–1986, writes that the ALF activists who wanted to take over the BUAV believed all political action to be a waste of time, and wanted the group to devote its resources to direct action
. The BUAV had been supportive of the ALF, and had allowed the ALF SG to use free office space in the BUAV's London offices, but in 1984 the board reluctantly voted to expel the ALF SG and to withdraw its political support from the ALF.
Yates moved to Liverpool to become a main organizer of the Merseyside Animal Rights Committee, along with Hunt Saboteur Association co-ordinators Dave and Fiona Callender. He helped with the HSA's annual campaigns against the Waterloo Cup
hare coursing event and the Northern grouse shoot sabotages, and joined the Merseyside Sea Shepherd's campaigns against seal killing in the Orkney Islands. He also devised the "fur pledge" campaign targeting Manchester-based furrier, Edelson Furs, which had a number of franchises in large department stores; the pledge involved members of the public vowing to boycott entire stores while they had fur departments. He initiated public showings of videos such as Victor Schonfeld's The Animals Film, and opened and ran the first "Animal Rights Shop" in Liverpool City centre, selling merchandise from a range of national animal protection organisations. Throughout this period, Merseyside activists were active members of the Northern Animal Liberation League (NALL), culminating in a daylight raid on ICI in Alderley Park, Cheshire, involving 300 activists.
, the co-founder and national press liaison officer of the ALF SG, asked Yates to act as the organization's northern press officer. This coincided with a dramatic change in ALF activity from direct rescue of animals to committing acts of economic sabotage, and in the government and police response to direct action. During this period, homes for animals rescued by animal liberationists were drying up, so Yates founded the Rescued Animals Sanctuary Fund.
In February 1987, he was one of 12 defendants convicted at Sheffield Crown Court, including three ALF SG press officers, after police raided a house in which they found evidence that incendiary devices were being created from fire lighters, batteries, and broken light bulbs. Similar devices hidden inside cigarette packets had been used in fur stores and department stores selling fur throughout England and Scotland, with the intention of setting off the sprinkler systems. Yates was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for conspiracy to cause criminal damage, along with another activist, Sean Crabtree, while Ronnie Lee received a ten-year term. Lee's sentence coincided with the jailing for six and seven years of two defendants in the Ealing Vicarage rape case—where two men raped a woman in front of her boyfriend and father, who were badly beaten—prompting Conservative MP Steven Norris
to declare in 1987 that, "sentencing at the moment seems to suggest that a woman’s body is less valuable than property or the right of experimenters and mink farmers to live in peace."
Yates absconded during his trial and spent three years on the run. He writes: "While we were getting to the end of the trial our barristers told us that Ronnie [Lee] could expect something like 16 years in jail and the 'lieutenants' in the case, such as Brendan, Vivian Smith and myself, might get 10 years each. I was the only defendant with children at the time and I realised we were talking about most of their school years...." While on the run, he helped launch the Federation of Local Animal Rights Groups. He was arrested in north Wales in 1989 after a bomb exploded in the Senate House bar of Bristol University, an act claimed by the "Animal Abuse Society," an unknown group. The attack was followed by a series of car bomb attacks. Yates became a leading suspect in the Bristol attack. His mug shot was widely distributed and he was arrested within three weeks. He appealed to activists from his prison cell in a statement to The Guardian that they take no life-threatening action, in line with ALF policy. The car-bomb attacks continued, claimed by the "British Animal Rights Society," another unknown group. After a nail bomb attack on a Land Rover, the car's owner, a huntsman, was charged with having blown up his own car. He was jailed for nine months, reportedly telling the court that he had done it to discredit the animal rights movement.
and a representative of the Irish Animal Education Trust, which gives talks about animal use and treatment to Irish schools and colleges. While working on his Ph.D at the University of Wales, Yates began public events called Animal Rights Month; for example "Animal Rights November" in 2000. He has continued such events in Ireland, organizing "Animal Rights July" in 2009 and Animal Rights November in 2010. The latter features professors Gary L. Francione and Robert Garner discussing themes from their 2010 book, The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation.
, and how and why modern human societies exploit and harm animals. He has called for a strategic audit of the animal protection movement. As part of the abolitionist approach
to animal rights, and inspired by the writing of Gary L. Francione
, he makes a "plea for a philosophical animal rights stance." Francione's abolitionist critique of the property status of animals is reflected in Yates's investigations in 2001 into horse maiming, or "horse ripping."
A recurring theme in his work is the exploration of the so-called "movement-countermovement dialectic" involving social movements and their opponents as claims-makers. Piers Beirne and N. South write that Yates explores the "extent to which the general public, pet owners, dog show advocates, and other 'pro-use' interests, learn and recycle countermovement message(s) about the theories of change and their advocates. Do the arguments laid out by the countermovements act as 'scripts' to aid those who oppose the ideas of the pro-animal movement?" Commenting on his "Rituals of Dominionism in Human-Nonhuman Relations: Bullfighting to Hunting, Circuses to Petting," Richard White writes that Yates "skilfully develops a persuasive critique which seeks to contextualise the powerful role of social rituals in shaping humans' speciesist relationships with other animals." In 2010, Yates published a paper on "Language, Power and Speciesism" which was critical of the failure, in his view, of the animal protection movement to adequately challenge "the dominant language forms of human-nonhuman relations."
His MA thesis was an examination of the British animal protection movement, and his 2005 PhD dissertation, "The Social Construction of Human Beings and Other Animals in Human-Nonhuman Relations. Welfare and Rights: A Contemporary Sociological Analysis," was a work of non-speciesist zemiology
. He maintains two blogs, "On Human-Nonhuman Relations," a sociological exploration of speciesism, and "Animal Rights Violations," and helps administrate the global social movement network Animal Rights Zone (ARZone) which encourages rational discourse within the animal advocacy movement and invites prime movers of the movement, such as Dr. Will Tuttle, Dr. Melanie Joy, Professor Gary Francione and Captain Paul Watson
, for live Q&A "chats" with ARZone members which are then transcribed and published on the site.
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
at University College Dublin
University College Dublin
University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...
and the University of Wales
University of Wales
The University of Wales was a confederal university founded in 1893. It had accredited institutions throughout Wales, and formerly accredited courses in Britain and abroad, with over 100,000 students, but in October 2011, after a number of scandals, it withdrew all accreditation, and it was...
, specializing in animal rights
Animal rights
Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings...
. He is a former executive committee member of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection is a British animal protection and advocacy group that campaigns for the abolition of all animal experiments...
(BUAV), a former Animal Liberation Front
Animal Liberation Front
The Animal Liberation Front is an international, underground leaderless resistance that engages in illegal direct action in pursuit of animal liberation...
(ALF) press officer, and a co-founder of the Fur Action Group.
Yates was sentenced to four years' imprisonment in 1987 for conspiracy to commit criminal damage on behalf of the ALF. He absconded during the trial, and was on the run for two years before being apprehended and serving his sentence. After his release in 1990, he began an academic study of animal protectionism and social movements, obtaining his PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in 2005 on the subject of human/non-human relations. His current work focuses on the social transmission of speciesism
Speciesism
Speciesism is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. The term was created by British psychologist Richard D...
.
BUAV, Merseyside Animal Rights
Yates became involved in the British animal rights movement in 1979, following a false start two years earlier when he joined the Hunt Saboteurs AssociationHunt Saboteurs Association
The Hunt Saboteurs Association is a worldwide organization using direct action to stop the hunting of animals. HSA activists use a model of leaderless resistance and have been using the same basic tactics since their inception in 1963; the underlying principle being to directly intervene in a...
(HSA), but failed to find fellow "sabs" near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. By 1979 he had moved to Essex and had become active as a vegan
Veganism
Veganism is the practice of eliminating the use of animal products. Ethical vegans reject the commodity status of animals and the use of animal products for any purpose, while dietary vegans or strict vegetarians eliminate them from their diet only...
animal rights advocate.
He was one of a group of activists associated with the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group (ALF SG), who tried in the early 1980s to gain control of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, a group founded in 1898. Yates became a member of the BUAV's executive committee in 1982, along with Dave McColl, a director of Sea Shepherd
Sea Shepherd
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is a non-profit, marine conservation organization based in Friday Harbor, Washington in the United States. The group uses direct action tactics to protect sealife...
, and they used the position to radicalize the organization, which meant that significant campaigning funds became available to activists for the first time. He co-founded the Fur Action Group with others from the BUAV, and created the largest data bank on fur-bearing animals in the country, later handed over to the Lynx anti-fur organization. Kim Stallwood
Kim Stallwood
Kim W. Stallwood is a British animal rights advocate. He is European director of the Animals and Society Institute, an animal rights think tank...
, BUAV's national organizer from 1981–1986, writes that the ALF activists who wanted to take over the BUAV believed all political action to be a waste of time, and wanted the group to devote its resources to direct action
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...
. The BUAV had been supportive of the ALF, and had allowed the ALF SG to use free office space in the BUAV's London offices, but in 1984 the board reluctantly voted to expel the ALF SG and to withdraw its political support from the ALF.
Yates moved to Liverpool to become a main organizer of the Merseyside Animal Rights Committee, along with Hunt Saboteur Association co-ordinators Dave and Fiona Callender. He helped with the HSA's annual campaigns against the Waterloo Cup
Waterloo Cup
The Waterloo Cup was a coursing event. The three day event was run annually at Great Altcar in Lancashire, England from 1836 to 2005 and it used to attract tens of thousands of spectators to watch and gamble on the coursing matches...
hare coursing event and the Northern grouse shoot sabotages, and joined the Merseyside Sea Shepherd's campaigns against seal killing in the Orkney Islands. He also devised the "fur pledge" campaign targeting Manchester-based furrier, Edelson Furs, which had a number of franchises in large department stores; the pledge involved members of the public vowing to boycott entire stores while they had fur departments. He initiated public showings of videos such as Victor Schonfeld's The Animals Film, and opened and ran the first "Animal Rights Shop" in Liverpool City centre, selling merchandise from a range of national animal protection organisations. Throughout this period, Merseyside activists were active members of the Northern Animal Liberation League (NALL), culminating in a daylight raid on ICI in Alderley Park, Cheshire, involving 300 activists.
ALF press officer
In 1983 Ronnie LeeRonnie Lee
Ronnie Lee is a British animal rights activist. He is known primarily for having founded the Animal Liberation Front in 1976. He also founded the magazine Arkangel in 1989.-Founding the ALF:...
, the co-founder and national press liaison officer of the ALF SG, asked Yates to act as the organization's northern press officer. This coincided with a dramatic change in ALF activity from direct rescue of animals to committing acts of economic sabotage, and in the government and police response to direct action. During this period, homes for animals rescued by animal liberationists were drying up, so Yates founded the Rescued Animals Sanctuary Fund.
In February 1987, he was one of 12 defendants convicted at Sheffield Crown Court, including three ALF SG press officers, after police raided a house in which they found evidence that incendiary devices were being created from fire lighters, batteries, and broken light bulbs. Similar devices hidden inside cigarette packets had been used in fur stores and department stores selling fur throughout England and Scotland, with the intention of setting off the sprinkler systems. Yates was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for conspiracy to cause criminal damage, along with another activist, Sean Crabtree, while Ronnie Lee received a ten-year term. Lee's sentence coincided with the jailing for six and seven years of two defendants in the Ealing Vicarage rape case—where two men raped a woman in front of her boyfriend and father, who were badly beaten—prompting Conservative MP Steven Norris
Steven Norris
Steven John Norris is a British Conservative politician. He was the official Conservative candidate for Mayor of London in 2000 and 2004, losing in both races to Ken Livingstone....
to declare in 1987 that, "sentencing at the moment seems to suggest that a woman’s body is less valuable than property or the right of experimenters and mink farmers to live in peace."
Yates absconded during his trial and spent three years on the run. He writes: "While we were getting to the end of the trial our barristers told us that Ronnie [Lee] could expect something like 16 years in jail and the 'lieutenants' in the case, such as Brendan, Vivian Smith and myself, might get 10 years each. I was the only defendant with children at the time and I realised we were talking about most of their school years...." While on the run, he helped launch the Federation of Local Animal Rights Groups. He was arrested in north Wales in 1989 after a bomb exploded in the Senate House bar of Bristol University, an act claimed by the "Animal Abuse Society," an unknown group. The attack was followed by a series of car bomb attacks. Yates became a leading suspect in the Bristol attack. His mug shot was widely distributed and he was arrested within three weeks. He appealed to activists from his prison cell in a statement to The Guardian that they take no life-threatening action, in line with ALF policy. The car-bomb attacks continued, claimed by the "British Animal Rights Society," another unknown group. After a nail bomb attack on a Land Rover, the car's owner, a huntsman, was charged with having blown up his own car. He was jailed for nine months, reportedly telling the court that he had done it to discredit the animal rights movement.
Irish Animal Education Trust, Animal Rights Month
Yates is a co-founder and contributor to Vegan Ireland: The Vegan Society of IrelandVegan Ireland: The Vegan Society of Ireland
Vegan Ireland: The Vegan Society of Ireland is a nonprofit and voluntary organisation formed in 2009 by a group of vegans concerned with the promotion of the vegan philosophy and lifestyle in Ireland...
and a representative of the Irish Animal Education Trust, which gives talks about animal use and treatment to Irish schools and colleges. While working on his Ph.D at the University of Wales, Yates began public events called Animal Rights Month; for example "Animal Rights November" in 2000. He has continued such events in Ireland, organizing "Animal Rights July" in 2009 and Animal Rights November in 2010. The latter features professors Gary L. Francione and Robert Garner discussing themes from their 2010 book, The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation.
Academic work
Yates focuses on the social transmission of speciesismSpeciesism
Speciesism is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. The term was created by British psychologist Richard D...
, and how and why modern human societies exploit and harm animals. He has called for a strategic audit of the animal protection movement. As part of the abolitionist approach
Abolitionism (animal rights)
Abolitionism within the animal rights movement is the idea that focusing on animal welfare reform not only fails to challenge animal suffering, but may prolong it by making the exercise of property rights over animals appear acceptable. The abolitionists' objective is to secure a moral and legal...
to animal rights, and inspired by the writing of Gary L. Francione
Gary L. Francione
Gary Lawrence Francione is an American legal scholar. He is the Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law & Philosophy at Rutgers School of Law-Newark....
, he makes a "plea for a philosophical animal rights stance." Francione's abolitionist critique of the property status of animals is reflected in Yates's investigations in 2001 into horse maiming, or "horse ripping."
A recurring theme in his work is the exploration of the so-called "movement-countermovement dialectic" involving social movements and their opponents as claims-makers. Piers Beirne and N. South write that Yates explores the "extent to which the general public, pet owners, dog show advocates, and other 'pro-use' interests, learn and recycle countermovement message(s) about the theories of change and their advocates. Do the arguments laid out by the countermovements act as 'scripts' to aid those who oppose the ideas of the pro-animal movement?" Commenting on his "Rituals of Dominionism in Human-Nonhuman Relations: Bullfighting to Hunting, Circuses to Petting," Richard White writes that Yates "skilfully develops a persuasive critique which seeks to contextualise the powerful role of social rituals in shaping humans' speciesist relationships with other animals." In 2010, Yates published a paper on "Language, Power and Speciesism" which was critical of the failure, in his view, of the animal protection movement to adequately challenge "the dominant language forms of human-nonhuman relations."
His MA thesis was an examination of the British animal protection movement, and his 2005 PhD dissertation, "The Social Construction of Human Beings and Other Animals in Human-Nonhuman Relations. Welfare and Rights: A Contemporary Sociological Analysis," was a work of non-speciesist zemiology
Zemiology
Zemiology is the study of social harms. Zemiology gets its name from the Greek word zemia, meaning harm.It originated as a critique of criminology and the notion of crime...
. He maintains two blogs, "On Human-Nonhuman Relations," a sociological exploration of speciesism, and "Animal Rights Violations," and helps administrate the global social movement network Animal Rights Zone (ARZone) which encourages rational discourse within the animal advocacy movement and invites prime movers of the movement, such as Dr. Will Tuttle, Dr. Melanie Joy, Professor Gary Francione and Captain Paul Watson
Paul Watson
Paul Watson is a Canadian animal rights and environmental activist, who founded and is president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a direct action group devoted to marine conservation....
, for live Q&A "chats" with ARZone members which are then transcribed and published on the site.
Selected works
- "Criminalizing protests about animal abuse: Recent Irish experience in global context", in Crime, Law, and Social Change, Jan 2011.
- "Language, Power and Speciesism" in Critical Society, issue 3, 2010.
- "Rituals of Dominionism in Human-Nonhuman Relations" in Journal for Critical Animal Studies, vol 7(1), 2009.
- "Debating animal rights online" in Beirne, Piers and South, Nigel. Issues in Green Criminology, Willan Publishing, 2007.
- "A Movement Toward a Movement for Animal Rights?", ArkangelArkangel (magazine)Arkangel is a British-based bi-annual animal liberation magazine, first published in the winter of 1989. The magazine, which is sold internationally, covers global aspects of underground and overground animal rights campaigning, and promotes a vegan lifestyle.The magazine was the idea of Ronnie...
, 2006. - "Fowl Play", Arkangel, guest editorial, 2006.
- "The Social Constructions of Human Beings and Other Animals in Human-Nonhuman Relations", 2004.
- With Powell, Chris and Beirne, Piers. "Horse Maiming in the English Countryside", Society and Animals, Vol 9, issue 1, 2001.
- "Welfare Woes and Political Problems," Arkangel, No. 23: 16-20, 2000.
- "Are the Animal Rights Militia Genuine?," Forum, Nottingham: Veggies Catering Campaign, 1999.
- "A Strategic Audit for Animal Rights, Uncaged, No. 21, March–May: 16-17, 1999.
External links
- Human-Nonhuman Relations.
- Animal Rights Violations.
- Staff profile, University of Bangor.
- Yates's podcasts.
- Schonfeld, Victor. The Animals Film, accessed August 31, 2009.