North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO)

Established in 2004 to “communicate the actions, strategies, and philosophy of the animal liberation movement to the media and the public,” the North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO) acts as an information clearinghouse and propaganda machine for the secretive Animal Liberation Front (ALF), detailing and glorifying the philosophies, strategies, and destructive deeds of ALF’s mostly anonymous activists.  At the forefront of NAALPO’s agenda is the complete “liberation” of animals from the meat, fur, dairy, pharmaceutical-testing, and entertainment (e.g., circus and zoo) industries—all of which are, by the organization’s reckoning, among the “myriad monstrous atrocities” inherent to a profit-driven “corporate society” that routinely engages in the mass “murder” of animals. The deadliest enemy of animal rights, according to NAALPO press officer Jason Miller, is “the sh*t-laden toilet of the speciesist capitalism system,” which Miller desires to “smash” with a proverbial “sledgehammer” into “a million shards of porcelain.” Capitalist society, NAALPO elaborates, egregiously “fails to recognize the rights of non-human animals to live free of suffering, but validates and promotes the ‘right’ of industries to do whatever they want to animals for profit or research.”

NAALPO likens contemporary ALF activists to “the U.S. Underground Railroad movement, which helped fugitive human slaves reach free states and Canada in the 1800s”; to “the freedom fighters in Nazi Germany who liberated war prisoners and Holocaust victims and destroyed [Nazi] equipment”; to those who “used and supported violence in the fight for liberation in [apartheid-era] South Africa”; and to jihadists engaged in “the current struggle by Palestinians against their Israeli oppressors.”

Jerry Vlasak

More than once, NAALPO officials have advocated the use of physical violence as an appropriate weapon in the war for animal liberation. For example, NAALPO co-founder Jerry Vlasak says that “violence in our movement … can be an effective” and “morally acceptable” strategy.

Jason Miller

Similarly, NAALPO press officer Jason Miller says: “Destruction of property, equipment, buildings, machinery, laboratories, and virtually any inanimate human construct or ‘resource’ used in the exploitation, oppression, maiming, raping, or murder of human animals, other animals, or the Earth is not violence. It may be illegal under a system that fetishizes property and profits, but it is not unethical. In fact, in many cases it is the right thing to do.”

Walter 
Bond

In January 2011, the Colorado-based animal-rights activist Walter 
Bond became NAALPO’s national press officer. Just a month later, however, Bond was sentenced to five years in prison for an arson conviction; nine months earlier, he had burned down the Sheepskin Factory in Glendale, Colorado, a business that sold pelts, furs and other animal-based products. At his sentencing on February 11, 2011, an unrepentant Bond told the court: “I am not sorry for anything I have done. Nor am I frightened by this court’s authority. Because any system of law that values the rights of the oppressor over the downtrodden is an unjust system.” Denouncing, further, “a society that values money over life,” Bond called it “an honor to be a prisoner of war, the war against inter-species slavery and objectification!” And in remarks directed specifically to the owner of the Sheepskin Factory, Bond, vowing to “never willingly pay you one dollar” in restitution, thundered: “I hope your business fails and you choke to death on every penny you profit from animal murder! I hope you choke on it and burn in hell!”

NAALPO seeks to promote its radical views regarding animal liberation via its website, where the organization regularly posts press releases and ALF “communiqués” as well as a monthly newsletter.

NAALPO Press Officer Will Hazlitt (center) with EF! Hudson Valley volunteers.