was by taking non-violent direct action: organising raids and freeing animals from captivity.
Most of the early liberationists were university students and professors, so it was natural that their first actions were staged on university campuses, freeing animals that were being used for scientific experiments.
These first raids by a few dozen activists were an extraordinary success. The media loved telling stories of idealistic youngsters breaking into laboratories and freeing defenceless animals from cruel scientists. The activists took photographs of the mangled and disturbed animals they had rescued and the dreadful conditions in which they frequently lived.
Newspapers printed horrific photographs taken by activists during the raids. They showed animals that had been subjected to major brain operations without anaesthetic, or had had their eyes burned out in tests on the toxicity of household chemicals.
The public was shocked by its first glimpse into the unseen world of animal experimentation and the liberationists?campaign gained significant popular support.
Over the next few years, the number of liberationists taking part in direct action grew from single figures to several hundred. Hunt saboteurs disrupted fox hunts and hare coursing events, anti-fur campaigners released tens of thousands of animals from fur farms and launched advertising campaigns that made wearing animal fur socially unacceptable.
The publicity given to these early British liberationists inspired others around the world. By 1980 animal liberation was a global movement, with activist groups taking direct action throughout mainland Europe, Australia and North America.
TROUBLES
But after their early success, things became much tougher for animal liberationists.
While the British government introduced new controls on animal experimentation, it also passed laws that made it easier to send activists to prison and asked the police to create special task forces to crack down on the liberationists?illegal activities.
Hunters, scientists and fur farmers began to defend their livelihoods vigorously. Many laboratories installed hi-tech security systems that made breaking in as hard as cracking a bank vault.
The scientists also won back a lot of public sympathy by hiring public relations experts, who emphasised advances in medicine that would not have happened if new drugs and vaccines hadn't been tested on animals. Activists who broke into laboratories, vandalised equipment and released animals now frequently stood accused of wrecking valuable research that could have saved thousands of human lives.
But most importantly, the liberationist campaign lost its shock value. Media interest waned, as people who were horrified by their first sighting of pictures of animal experiments became blases such as eating meat, drinking milk, fishing and wearing leather.
SCHISM
These setbacks caused a crisis within the animal liberation movement. Many of the less committed activists buckled under police pressure and gave up the fight. Some were arrested and imprisoned for up to ten years on charges of theft, arson and criminal damage. Others became radicalised by the setbacks and decided that using violence was the only way forwards.
All of the early liberationists were against violence. Their argument was simple: humans and animals are equal. Therefore, violence to humans is just as unacceptable as violence towards the animals they were campaigning to protect.
But a new band of more radical liberationists put forward a different argument: if humans and animals are equal, then is it not right to kill or threaten one human in order to save the lives of many animals?
RYAN QUINN
Ryan Quinn was one of the first animal liberationists. Born in Belfast in 1952, Quinn refused to eat meat from the age of ten when his fathert car hit and killed a sheep during a family outing.
Soon after becoming a student at Bristol University he took part in what many regard as the first large-scale liberationist raid, when sixty-eight rabbits were freed from a laboratory conducting electric shock experiments on their spinal cords.
Quinn was arrested, and while the police dropped charges for lack of evidence, he was one of twelve student liberationists expelled from the university.
A quiet figure, who was happier working in the background than making grand speeches, Quinn steadily got to know almost all of the hundred or so hardcore activists within the British animal liberation movement. He gained a reputation as an expert in planning sophisticated raids and was involved in setting up camps that trained hundreds of liberationist volunteers from all around the world.
ZEBRA 84
In September 1984, Ryan Quinn was released from prison after serving a three-month sentence for stealing videotapes of animal experiments while working undercover at a Royal Navy research laboratory. Quinn had used his time inside to consider the future of animal liberation and decided that its big problem was a lack