After having carefully removed the âAnimal Liberationâ sticker from her carâs rear window, Christine Townend often travelled outside of metropolitan Sydney to visit what she described as the âdarker sideâ of farms. 1 The year was 1977, and these were the intensive farms of modern agriculture: pigs and poultry in their thousands reared and confined in sheds, destined to be killed for human consumption. On one country drive, Townend , aged in her early thirties and a mother of two, arrived at a place that sold their âfarm fresh eggsâ and chickens direct to the public. She was led into a large shed that contained tier upon tier of small wire cages, each overcrowded with egg-laying hens . Upon entering, her senses were assaulted by the clucking cacophony and the pungent smell of urine, faeces, and cracked eggs. Out of love, compassion, and a sense of curiosity, Townend purchased three hens. She took them back to her suburban home, where, uncaged and free, they would live out the rest of their natural lives. Townend named one miserable-looking featherless hen, who had been confined in a cage for over a year, âMiss Chookâ. As part of her efforts to generate publicity and awareness of the plight of farmed animals, Townend took the emaciated Miss Chook to television interviews, hoping that the sight of her would shock and signal that there was something gravely wrong with the modern farming of animals. 2
Decades later, in 2011, Lyn White travelled to Indonesian abattoirs to investigate the live export of Australian cattle. One night, White, a retired twenty-year veteran of the South Australian police, filmed five local slaughtermen struggling to drag an imported Australian steer from a holding pen to the kill floor. When the steer collapsed, the slaughtermen applied various cruel methods to coerce him up the ramp into the Australian designed restraint box: they jabbed him with a stick, jumped on his back, broke his tail by hand, and gouged his eyes with their fingers. Despite all this, he was unable to stand or move. Frustrated and impatient, workers released another steer that trampled him. More workers came and physically dragged him up the ramp by rope to slaughter him. Across six nights and four cities, White documented Indonesian slaughtermen, some trained and equipped by the Australian livestock export industry, abusing Australian cattle and killing them in ways that many would consider inhumane. White believed that she had the evidence needed to stop the Australian export of half a million live cattle to Indonesia. 3
Stories like these make up the history of the Australian animal movement. They are examples of what sociologists call âcontentious politicsâ. Contentious politics occurs when ordinary peopleâlike Townend , White , and many othersâjoin forces to confront âelites, authorities and opponentsâ. 4 They are political interactions in which actors make claims that affect anotherâs interests. Rebellions and revolutions, conflicts and civil wars are examples of contentious politics. But social movements also sustain this form of politics. Social movements engage in public performances and collective action and make concerted displays of worthiness, unity, group membership, and commitment. 5 They activate âdemocracy-promoting processesâ that widen the issues under public debate, expand the political agenda, and influence the decisions and actions taken by government and other sectors of society. 6 More so than political parties or formal institutions, social movements offer critical avenues of representation for socially excluded and disadvantaged groups. 7 Ultimately, movements can fail woefully or succeed spectacularly; they can stimulate political, social, and cultural change.
Foreshadowed by the anti-war cause, womenâs and gay liberation, aboriginal rights, and environmental conservation, a fresh wave of animal activism emerged in Australia in the mid-1970s that has endured until this day. 8 The long Sixties was a âdecade of transit and of transition, of comings and goings, of cultural trafficâ. 9 Animal rights were part of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that struggled for peace, equality, liberation, and justice. The animal movement focused on the wellbeing and rights of animals and broadly contested the politics and culture of animal use and exploitation. 10 It revitalised a cause that began internationally in the nineteenth century with the emergence of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals but that had stagnated or was in a state of decline throughout the early twentieth century due to wars, economic depression, or political turmoil. Following the mobilisations of the 1970s, new animal movement organisations campaigned on several neglected yet critical issues, around farmed animals, animals in research, animals in sports and entertainment, and wild animals. As one of the great social justice issues today, animal rights have at times been at the forefront of politics.
However, historians have unfortunately ignored the form and meaning of the Australian animal movement. To date, most of the literature on the movement has focused on Britain and the United States and has tended to miss the transnational connections between Australia and its counterparts. 11 Lyle Munro is one of the few scholars who provides a comparative sociological account of the Australian movement. 12 While there is great merit in his work, it is limited in its historical account. 13 Munro himself argues that the movement remains âone of the most misunderstood and understudied social movements of our eraâ. 14 More broadly, general scholarship on social movements and Australian history has mostly overlooked the animal movement, even though animal rights intersected with other great causes. This is arguably because academia is largely anthropocentric. As Erica Fudge argues, the humanities, as the name suggests, have mostly been concerned with humans and the human perspective, and leading to what Fudge argues is the writing of only âpartial historiesâ and only a âpartial understandingâ of the past. 15 Until recently, animals have been a largely invisible subject.
Against the dominance of anthropocentrism, however, the growing interdisciplinary field of humanâanimal studies (HAS), which broadly explores the intersections of human and non-human animal lives, has defined itself. 16 In addition, scholars of the closely related disciplin...