Camille Marino is the founder and Senior Editor of Negotiation is Over and is on the Advisors and Speakers Panel of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. NIO strives to be an instrument of defiance, disruption, disobedience, subversion, creative and aggressive grassroots action, and a catalyst for revolutionary change. NIO’s belief is that “Total liberation — human animals, nonhuman animals, and the earth — will not happen by politely asking abusers to be decent.”
Camille and many of her above-ground activist allies recently made a decisive break from vegans who are content to alleviate their own guilt through personal veganism and baking vegan goodies. Several activists in NIO Florida (her local grassroots group) — as well as many national and international associates — are now targeting biomed students who are on their way to becoming animal experimenters, on the assumption that there is still hope to change them before they become entrenched in careers involving animal exploitation and prolonged animal suffering.
NIO has also gained notoriety by advocating violence against those who are so entrenched, though Camille has remained non-violent in her approach.
Does simply eating a vegan diet and not buying animal products do anything for animals?
In order to be an ethical and decent human being, one must be vegan. There is no gray area here. You are either vegan or you are complicit in the war on animals.
But, no, being an ethical vegan does absolutely nothing to relieve animal suffering. In the real world “free market,” when demand for meat/eggs/dairy declines, the government subsidizes a given exploitation industry and buys any excess supply of animal products, thus ensuring that the suppliers’ profits as well as the economy remain intact. The government buys the surplus and generally diverts it into schools and welfare programs or the surplus is exported to other countries to satisfy federal debt.
I believe that we are wasting enormous amounts of the vegan community’s time and energy by advocating vegan outreach. The animals are dying in exponentially greater numbers.
Why does Negotiation is Over focus on vivisection more than factory farming and the meat, diary and egg industries?
There are many activists associated with NIO who are doing everything from targeting hunters/trappers to launching creative and aggressive campaigns against slaughterhouses.
Personally, I focus on vivisection because in my community the University of Florida is a beacon of institutional animal torture. More importantly, it is where I believe I will realize my greatest impact. It’s a mistake to choose campaigns simply because they’re available. We need to direct our energies where we can realize quantifiable gains and seize victories and we need to be willing to adapt and evolve our tactics and approach. It is clear to me that animal liberation demands that we subvert and undermine the foundation upon which animal abuse rests in universities. That means biomed students need to be dealt with now before they become fully-entrenched professional sadists.
