Abstract
Nonhuman animals are regularly killed for pleasure / ‘bloodsport’ in England, both legally and illegally. This illustrates the deeply entrenched political acceptability of harming nonhuman animals for human enjoyment. Those who seek to destroy the physical infrastructures that uphold this harm, sabotaging the enactment of the killing are often physically assaulted by hunters and police officers, and frequently also face prosecution and criminalisation for their actions. Hunting and trapping themselves are hugely destructive and deadly enactments of the (classed, racialised and gendered) human supremacy that underpins the contemporary ecological social order. Against this backdrop and drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with eight hunt saboteurs/animal liberationists, we illustrate the productive potential of sabotage to enact different human-nonhuman and human relationships, to empower people to stand up to injustice and confront harm and configure futures of autonomy and direct action. We argue that sabotage acts as an embodied, affective politics of refusal and connection-building, that helps dismantle infrastructures of human supremacy in both material and psychological ways. In doing so sabotage prefigures anti-speciesist relations in the present. We therefore advocate for understanding sabotage as a legitimate political expression of revolutionary joy, closely connected to strategies of future-making.
Introduction
Foxes, grouse, stags, pheasants, minks, hares, and other nonhuman animals are regularly hunted for pleasure or profit in the British Isles, despite the Hunting Act of 2004 and other legislation prohibiting many types of hunting. The illegal chasing and killing of foxes by hounds, directed by the hunt master, continues to be very common (Black, 2024; Cox and Donovan, 2020; Wiltshire Hunt Sabs, 2024). Hunt saboteurs have even recorded live foxes buried underground in a bag, the hunt mimicking an ‘artificial earth’ designed to draw other foxes to the area (HSA, 2023). This illustrates a deeply entrenched political acceptability of harming nonhuman animals for human enjoyment, and, as the article will also explore, the lack of policing points to the closeness of hunters to political elites and police forces. The exact number of animals killed every year is difficult to quantify, although in just one hunting season (2022–2023) there were at least 526 examples of illegal hunting with over 400 foxes chased (Thompson, 2023). These figures are probably vastly under-representative, demonstrated in the regular monitoring of hunts by hunt saboteurs in evidence uploaded to social media on a weekly basis.
Hunt saboteurs monitor, challenge and interrupt legal and illegal hunts. Focusing on the sabotage of blood sport as a manifestation of human supremacy 1 , in this article we explore and theorise sabotage as an important liberation practice and strategy. Drawing on recent work in anarchist political ecology (Clark, 2021; Springer, 2021), this article explores and theorises sabotage of the physical manifestation of hunting – traps and snares – as well as of the very practice and enactment of human supremacy, hunting itself, dating from historical land/animal ownership laws including the enclosures. We also draw on examples of other types of what we consider sabotage of human supremacy, including the disruption of infrastructures of exploitation and incarceration of nonhuman animals – machines, cages and sites of operation, from industrial farms to fur factories and slaughterhouses.
The sabotage of the infrastructures that uphold nonhuman suffering and ecological harm, including hunting explored in this article, and the violence exercised against saboteurs, receives limited media and academic attention apart from notable exceptions (Evelyn, 2023; Graham et al., 2022; Thompson, 2024). When they do, the highly political liberatory act of hunt sabotage is often dismissed as ‘thuggery’ or posing a ‘danger to the public’, or mere trespassing, disrespecting farmers and property rights (Silverman, 2024). Due to the diffuse and necessarily secretive nature of these acts of sabotage, it is difficult to assess their full extent or frequency. We can however confidently estimate that over the past few decades, thousands of acts of sabotage have disrupted animal harm infrastructures. Hundreds of animal liberation sabotage acts alone are documented online annually (Stephens-Griffin, 2022; Unoffensive Animal, 2025), hunt saboteurs uploading weekly ‘hit’ reports to social media accounts (HSA, 2025), whilst many take place without being publicised. Such acts sit within a long and rich history of sabotage – from anticolonial resistance to labour struggles in the industrial revolution.
Rejecting the conventional positioning of sabotage as destructive (Aalders and Kioko 2025, other articles in this Special Issue), we turn this argument on its head. Hunting and trapping – like many contemporary and historical infrastructure projects explored in this Special Issue – are themselves hugely destructive and deadly enactments of the (classed, racialised and gendered) human supremacy that underlies the contemporary ecological social order; creating and maintaining hierarchies between and among human and nonhuman animals that allow for unimaginable suffering in the name of progress, profit, ‘culture’ or simply enjoyment. We explore sabotage and its political manifestations: the political entanglement between the state, police and hunters, and the land inequality and exclusion that are so deeply written into the English countryside and make hunting possible. Against this background, we illustrate the productive potential of sabotage to enact different human-nonhuman and human relationships, to empower people to stand up to injustice and confront harm and configure futures of autonomy and direct action. In so doing, we argue that sabotage acts as an embodied, affective politics of refusal and connection-building, that helps dismantle infrastructures of human supremacy in both material and psychological ways. In doing so sabotage prefigures anti-speciesist relations in the present. We therefore advocate for understanding sabotage as a legitimate political expression of insurrectionary joy, which is connected to strategies of future-making (Aalders and Kioko, 2025; Swain, 2019; Yates, 2021). In other words, sabotage can be an enactment of prefigurative politics 2 , normalising direct action and building direct relationships that are not mediated by state structures or capitalism. Normalising direct action allows us to live the future we want to see, and empowers us to make change happen, rather than relying on state and corporate structures, NGOs, and others who lobby or act on our behalf, communicating the moral irrelevance of concepts of legality or crime (Canning and Tombs, 2021).
Methodology
As engaged social scientists, we position ourselves with those who actively fight to destroy systems of oppression, beyond ‘nonviolent’ environmental defenders (Gelderloos, 2022; Stephens-Griffin and Brock, Forthcoming), firmly situating ourselves on the side of struggle (Dunlap, 2020). The aim of this paper is thus not to make visible the motivations and strategies of sabotage, but to explore sabotage as legitimate politics of resistance and expression, as future-making. Through participant observation and ‘activist criminology’ 3 (Canning et al., 2023) – or saboteur criminology (Stephens-Griffin and Brock, Forthcoming) – is one such route. To do this, we draw on data generated from in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted with a purposive sample of eight hunt saboteurs/animal liberationists, countless informal conversations and observant participation (Sullivan, 2001). These took place in the South of England over the summer of 2024. Participants were very diverse in terms of age and gender, some with three and four decades of hunt sabotage experience. All participants shared animal liberationist values. This is a relatively small sample size, but, in line with our interpretivist epistemological approach to knowledge production, our intention is to produce a level of validity only achievable through rich and in-depth interviews with those who have direct experience of hunt sabotage and animal liberation. Drawing on grounded theory methodology to ‘theorize with radical social movements’, not about them (Kass and Dunlap, 2025, emphasis added), such an approach honours the ‘insurgent knowledges’ contained in radical struggle (Kass and Dunlap, 2025, drawing on Mullenite, 2021: 208). Researching with those who participate in direct action in defence of nonhumans poses significant challenges, not least because this is a group regularly subject to repression and violence from hunters and agents of the state alike, including attacks at their home addresses. All interviews were conducted anonymously, and no other identifying information was collected or recorded. Participants have been assigned pseudonyms to protect and preserve their anonymity and where necessary other identifying information has been changed for the same reason. The research gained ethical approval from the University of Sussex Ethics Committee. Participants gave their informed verbal consent to participate and were informed of their right to withdraw from the project up to a given date. Interview data was transcribed and thematically analysed (Braun and Clarke, 2006).
Having introduced our analysis and argument, the next section introduces hunting and hunt sabotage in Britain, before exploring some relevant literatures related to our work. This briefly introduces our framework to understand and theorise sabotage, titled ‘anarchist political ecology meets animal liberation’. We then develop our argument, drawing on our interview data, before offering some concluding thoughts and questions.
Sabotaging hunting, sabotaging human supremacy
While ‘hunting’ has existed for millennia and continues today for myriad reasons (e.g. profit, commerce, the killing of ‘unwanted’ animals/‘pests’, subsistence 4 , ritual, or even as part of political propaganda (Howell, 2018)), we focus on hunting for pleasure (or ‘bloodsport’) in Britain. While proponents rarely conceptualise hunting as harmful, instead viewing it in ‘sporting’ terms (rule-bound practices, specific codes of honour, etiquette, conceptions of ‘fairness’ among competitors (Beirne, 2018)), the ‘pleasure’ element is particularly important. Wadiwel (2015: 6) describes hunting as being ‘perhaps the most openly ‘pleasurable’ expression of joy in killing animals’. This is echoed by Marvin (2006) who argues that committing oneself to the visceral and emotional pleasures of hunting is absolutely core to the practice.
Nevertheless, pleasure hunting has never enjoyed unchallenged support even in rural areas in Britain (Cowburn, 2017). Hunt saboteurs (‘sabs’) take direct action to sabotage and stop the killing and suffering of nonhuman animals, and the physical infrastructures that uphold animal harm and enact human supremacy. This might involve more overtly criminalised forms of destruction (e.g. of traps, snares, machinery, weapons, vehicles); obstruction of routes taken by hunters or other forms of physical intervention (e.g. literally putting oneself between the hunter and the hunted); or through the use of horn calls and whip sounds or the laying of ‘decoy’ scent trails to divert, distract and confuse foxhounds. These examples of ‘sensory’ sabotage show that hunt sabotage can be quite complex and nuanced in practice.
Sabs are frequently subjected to violence, intimidation, harassment and criminalisation by hunters, private security and police (Black, 2024; Davanna, 2025). In the 2022/2023 hunting season alone, there were 211 publicly reported incidents of people connected to hunts carrying out attacks on sabs/monitors (Black, 2024). Organised violence by hunters and hunt security has long been documented on video; including beatings, assaults (Egret, 2024) and even stabbings (Elvey, 2015). Body camera capture has shown a female sab punched in the head by a hunt supporter who turned out to be a local parish councillor (West Kent Hunt Sabs, 2023). Vehicular hit and run attacks are shockingly common, and whilst data suggests violence against sabs is rising (Black, 2024), this is not an entirely new phenomena. In the 1990s two sabs were killed when hit by hunters’ vehicles (HSA, n.d.), and sexualised violence aimed at female sabs, rape threats and indecent exposure also are commonplace (Devon County Hunt Sabs, 2024).
These examples demonstrate the underlying misogyny and intersectional violence against sabs. Despite this, police officers frequently turn a blind eye to assaults, including when caught on camera. Indeed, all too often sabs experience police violence as well. NetPol (2023) reported a ‘campaign of harassment’ by local police against West Midlands sabs that has seen police allegedly smashing windows, assaulting sabs and making unlawful arrests. All of this demonstrates how violence is not only inflicted on non-human animals but those who attempt to disrupt hunting. Underlying this violence is the political closeness of hunters to those in power – politicians and high-ranking police officers, as we will explore below. Importantly, this upholds the infrastructures of human supremacy to which we now turn.
Conceptual framework: sabotaging the infrastructures of human supremacy
As anarchists we reject all forms of hierarchy, including human supremacy – we will not make this argument here (see, for instance, Schmitz, 2021). We take the political nature of ecological degradation and destruction for granted. We remain sensitive to the wider systems of oppression within which infrastructures are embedded and acknowledge intersectional hierarchies, such as class, gender (Adams, 1990), race (Dominick, 1997), and more. This framework allows us to explore the political ecology of sabotage with ‘an understanding of insurgency that goes beyond the spectacular wreckage of “ecotage” to encompass fugitive strategies outside the hegemonic publics and orthodoxies of environmental politics’ (Campbell and Carter, 2023: 239) and understand the essential nature of sabotage as a legitimate political strategy for future-making. In the spirit of a ‘political ecology of resistance’ (Dunlap, 2020) we challenge human supremacy, question the private property and class system, and support radical political action.
We share an understanding of anthropocentrism as systemic, not merely an issue of individual worldviews. Individualizing it means losing ‘the notion that certain social, economic and legal logics are set in place that perpetuate animal exploitation at a deeper level within the social order’ (Torres, 2007: 71, drawing on Nibert). We recognise complicity and power; economic exploitation/competition (as evident in class relationships, even within hunting); unequal power (control of state, upper classes, relationship to police), and ideological control (through narratives of anthropocentrism and cultural/psychological dimensions) (Nibert, 2002). We therefore respond to Clark's call to ‘keep political ecology honest’, by challenging the anthropocentrism within it; remembering its anti-essentialist, anti-dogmatic and anti-ideological roots and challenging the academic domestication process that allowed it to become institutionalised (Robbins, 2020). Instead, rejecting managerial, justice- and rights-based frameworks (Clark, 2021; Springer, 2021), we aim to foster an anarchist spirit of liberation and revolt (e.g. Reclus, in Clark and Martin, 2013), partly by using Pellow's (2014) ‘total liberation’ approach – grounded in a commitment to anti-oppression that includes humans, nonhuman animals and ecosystems; an explicit embrace of anarchism and anti-capitalism; and support for direct action tactics; complemented with ecofeminist ethics of care (Salleh, 2017).
Infrastructures of human supremacy
Infrastructures are not simply banal and technical (LaDuke and Cowen, 2020). Scholars show they do not just create, enable and direct ‘the flow of goods, people or ideas’ (Larkin, 2013: 328), but are also essential to understanding infrastructures of necropolitics (e.g. the practical enactment of ecocide and genocide). Infrastructures provide a vital means for those in power to control life and death (Astolfo & Allsopp, 2024; Benharrousse, 2023; Mbembe, 2019; Rodgers & O'Neill, 2012; Truscello, 2020). They are key to upholding capitalist colonial modernity, to which mobility and the smooth functioning of infrastructures – for some and not for others – is central, maybe nowhere better exemplified than in border regimes (Mbembe, 2019; Wilson et al., 2023).
Hence, modern infrastructures are also designed to keep things static/in place, and to prohibit the flow of substances, people or ideas (Aalders and Kioko, 2025); to stop political (economic) change and proliferation of radical ideas and alternative political ecological futures. Aalders and Kioko (2025: 1751) argue that ‘infrastructure always and necessarily impedes’ or ‘facilitate[s] a particular movement or flow’, thus maintaining the dominant social ecological order (Stephens-Griffin and Brock, Forthcoming). Indeed, Dunlap argues that infrastructures are themselves processes of socio-ecological conquest that spread through ‘infrastructural colonisation’, not only of human and nonhuman habitats but also ‘habits, social relationships and political action’ (2020: 6). As such, the systematic killing of animals, enabled by infrastructures, can also be understood as inextricably entwined with capitalism and colonialism (Nibert, 2017). Research has shown a direct connection between hunting infrastructures and colonialism apparent in practices globally today (Batavia et al., 2019; Duffy, 2016; Sullivan, 2022, 2023). Ownership of the large private estates where hunting frequently occurs in rural Britain is directly tied to wealth amassed through both enclosure at home and colonisation abroad (Christophers, 2018; Hayes, 2020).
‘Infrastructures of human supremacy’, especially anthropocentrism, are key features of the modern social ecological order. In short, they describe an ideology grounded in the innate human superiority over nonhuman forms of life, assigning an inherent value only to human animals. Springer critiques human supremacy as ‘planetary atrocity… in the name of science, industry, labour, and food’ (2021: 235), manifest in the disappearance of wildlife and domestication. ‘The mammalian world is now overwhelmingly dominated by humans’ (Clark, 2021: vii) – we constitute 96% of the world's biomass. The infrastructures of human supremacy are upheld through physical, political, economic and psychological effects that allow for animal harm and exploitation. Given the depth of human supremacy as foundational but not reducible to capitalism and state power, it is not surprising that the effects that hold it in place are everywhere around us – from the physical manifestations in the form of dairy farms and slaughterhouses (Cudworth, 2015; Stephens-Griffin and Griffin, 2021), but also in the practices and behaviours that maintain it, such as everyday derogatory language we use (Adams, 1990). Cities contain myriad infrastructures that harm nonhumans (and other ‘undesired subjects’), such as anti-pigeon spikes (resembling anti-homeless spikes) and other ‘hostile architectures’, traps and poisons. Often the infrastructures that allow rural hunting are less visible but can be divided again into both the physical infrastructure of hunting and the practices/behaviours/effects that sustain this.
We therefore also explore practices and behaviours that sustain human supremacy, what Aalders and Kioko (2025) identify as keeping in place and naturalising human supremacy and associated forms of oppression. These are important to discuss as they not only identify what is required to sustain the physical, but also where weaknesses/challenges might exist to saboteurs and those who seek to dismantle sites of human supremacy. This necessarily entails understanding hunting's commodification (e.g. revenue streams), its ideology (speciesism) and discourse (who, where and when people can utilise the countryside). As our interviews reveal, the ability to challenge these practices is also psychological, drawing on internalised discussions saboteurs hold with themselves about challenging infrastructures of harm. These more ‘emotional’ and psychological elements of sabotage tend to be overlooked in discussions of direct action but drawing them out helps underscore the embodied nature of sabotage.
Acknowledgements of the importance of emotions like joy (and indeed rage) to radical and insurrectionary direct action are nothing new. Bonanno (1977: 24) outlines the necessity of joy within militant revolutionary struggle, imploring the reader to take up arms to defend their ‘right to enjoy life’ and in doing so, work to ‘obstruct capital's death project’. Such work directs us towards the emotional and embodied aspects of infrastructural sabotage, especially in the context of ‘insurrectionary political ecology’ (Dunlap, 2020). This further connects to the notion of ‘affective infrastructures’ and how they might be disrupted/broken down (Bosworth, 2022; Street, 2011).
Sabotaging infrastructures
Sabotage is often defined in relation to material objects; deliberate action to damage, destroy or displace physical objects to achieve a social/political aim (Dubois, 1979, cited in Martin, 2001), underlining the centrality of property in a capitalist system (Martin, 2001) 5 . However, we suggest that it can also target activities and social relations – or infrastructures. In fact, it is these social relations, at times mediated through objects, that are of particular importance and illustrate the political nature of sabotage. A brief look at the history of sabotage helps understand this. According to Rid (2011), the word ‘sabotage’ comes from a French railway strike in 1910 where workers removed and damaged the wooden devices known as ‘sabots’ that held rails down, thus sabotaging the rail network infrastructure. Sabotage often focuses on negating the benefits of a practice and increasing the costs. That might come in economic terms by removing direct profit incentives, but it might also involve making a practice less enjoyable, less worth doing, or indeed, more expensive (Manson, 2024). Famously, the Luddites used sabotage to destroy technologies that destroyed commonality; technologies which dispossess workers and restrict human freedom.
Sabotage can be understood as being the enactment of prefigurative politics – a key concept of revolutionary theory (Gordon, 2018). Living the future one wants to see; embodying ‘alternative forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, belief systems and direct experience’ (Monticelli, 2021). Prefiguration and future-making are closely related concepts that overlap to an extent. We see ‘prefiguration’ as relating more to conceptualising and living desired futures now, where ‘future-making’ relates more to materially shaping those futures in practice. Sabotage, both prefigures anti-speciesist futures, and materially makes them, by disrupting and destroying the infrastructures of speciesism.
Historically, sabotage has been important for anticolonial struggles. ‘[Enslaved people] engaged in a variety of acts designed to ease their burdens and frustrate the masters' wills’, James Oakes wrote: ‘They broke tools, feigned illness, deliberately malingered, “stole” food, and manipulated the tensions between masters and overseer’, in addition to running away, physical resistance, and organised rebellion (1986: 89). The sabotage of foxhunts formed part of an overlooked anticolonial struggle in Ireland following the Easter Rising of 1916. As the intensity and bloody nature of the conflict against the British Empire increased, supporters of Sinn Féin used sport as a leverage, calling a nationwide boycott of all sporting events that cascaded to foxhunting, ‘identified with “English Irishmen”’ which also extended to sabotaging/physically disrupting the hunt (Murphy, 2013: 115). While anthropocentrism sat outside their concerns, it is an interesting example of foxhunting being entwined with anticolonial struggles.
Focusing on sabotage as resistance ‘from below’, Aalders and Kioko (2025) argue that we should understand sabotage as destructive and constructive; as future-making and visibilising struggles. Infrastructure and sabotage both constitute practices that can destroy materialities and particular visions of the future – deconstructive future-unmaking – and practices that produce things or create new relations or visions of the future – constructive future-making. Both infrastructure and sabotage are therefore powerful symbols that operate through both visibility and invisibility. This antagonism shouldn’t be understood as a binary, they argue (Aalders and Kioko, 2025), but rather as a process of transformation, of visualisation or revelation. Infrastructure and sabotage each have powerful, material effects expressed in their capacity for either facilitating or blocking material flows, and a capacity for redirection. We might also therefore consider the idea of sabotaging imaginaries and illusions, for example, sabotage of Tesla cars, which both interrupts the use of such vehicles, whilst also helping dismantle widespread myths of Tesla as being green and sustainable, causing material damage but sabotaging politicised narratives.
Sabotage as legitimate political strategy, sabotage as future-making
In this section, we discuss our interview data. As we illustrate via participant testimony, hunt sabotage can be understood as deconstructive future-unmaking as much as it is constructive future-making – they are mutually constitutive. First, we show how hunt sabotage helps reveal the injustices that capital and state power create (Aalders and Kioko, 2025), by visibilising speciesism, class relations grounded in the ideology of private property and exclusive land use, and the political closeness of the establishment with hunters that helps maintain the right to exploit nonhuman animals. We show how sabotage deconstructs, interrupts and challenges these hierarchies. Secondly, we show how sabotage can be world making – by building different human-(non)human relationships, valuing insurrectionary joy and rage, and empowering people to take direct action to build the world they want to see.
Deconstructing hierarchies, power and the sacredness of private property
A dominant theme to emerge from our interviews is participants’ understanding of speciesism and how that informs their knowledge of hierarchies and power. Speciesism is often the basis from which they challenge hierarchies and turn to sabotage. As Ash
6
demonstrates:
If you want a world where there are no hierarchies, speciesism is the most pervasive and the oldest hierarchy there is… For me, animal liberation means freeing animals from human oppression, in situations where humans negatively impact on the lives of other animals.
It's what radicalised/changed my life. Led me to question the existence of the state and the police. Led me to question lies: the difference between kicking a cat and eating a bacon sandwich. Taught me about complicity… recognising one oppression leads to the recognition of many others. (Charlie)
You can’t empty a farm, but you can break it… Without sabotage we don’t have a chance because we don’t have possession of all the land and resources. And we don’t have the capacity to care for all of the animals. Stopping the wheel is the only way.
[Sabbing is] fun in a subversive way because you’re going up against rich people who are used to the idea that they have exclusive access to the land, and they have the power to eject other people from the land… You can stop them doing what they paid lots of money to do… And partly because when they say ‘get off my land’, I say ‘fuck off’ and they are not used to people saying NO to them.
[Hunting] is an entertainment industry, exclusive for the wealthy, those who… fence off large amounts of the countryside… vast amount of land taken and used solely for bloodsport, taken away from the general public and… lower classes.
Participants understand hunt sabotage as deeply connected to broader, hierarchical power structures and struggles beyond speciesism (e.g. around class and gender) and as such, the ‘destructive’ practice of sabotaging a hunt can also be understood as a process of resisting and unsettling these broader hierarchies too, thus echoing Pellow's (2014) total liberation approach. Where the physical infrastructures of foxhunting tend to relate to access to stables, kennels, vehicles, areas of rural land and the logistics of moving human and non-human animals around, these are all deeply connected to the wider structural factors around who owns land, capital and who has access, which is especially important in discussions of property. Hunt sabotage therefore acts as a gateway to other anti-oppression movements and the ‘complicity’ between the state, as demonstrated by Jo:
Speciesism is not just part of the system, but protected by the system. Slavery is not inherently capitalist either, but system keeps them both alive… They also hunt on military-owned land, and National Trust land. Wealth and connection affords power.
The people making the laws and the police receive money from those who benefit from hunting. The royal family hunt, [they’re] top of social class… High ranking police officers and judges hunt… especially at pheasant and grouse shoots. I’ve been told directly: ‘I’m a big deal at the Met, I’m a cop, you don’t want to mess with me’.
Fox hunting is symbolic of wealth, builds relationships and networks… [It is] an apparatus that allows for fox hunting, police decide not to prosecute, told by bosses, judges, politicians, who side with the hunt in trial.
In hunting we see… landowners holding the highest positions of power all the way down to those who work for the hunt as terrier men at the lowest end of the spectrum. It really is extraordinary to see. (Alex)
As the above demonstrates, sabotage is as much about challenging and confronting societal norms as it is about the destruction of physical infrastructures. This links some of the points made above to the next section, the need to challenge internalised ideas of what is acceptable to challenge and deconstruct physical infrastructures, and focusing on and building alternative relationships, emotions and attitudes that enable sabotage. Sabotage is worldmaking, prefigurative of the world we want to see, and empowers people to work towards this world.
Constructing the world we want to see: building relationships, direct action and insurrectionary joy
In our analysis of the ‘constructive’, future-making, dimensions of sabotage, two themes stand out: the ways in which sabotage helps build unmediated relationships and fuels insurrectionary joy and rage. We critically discuss each below, before exploring how they inform prefiguration and a world of direct action in our final section.
Building unmediated relationships
Hunt sabotage builds relationships that are not mediated by state or capitalist structures, that is, market relationships or relationships of authority. Direct action bypasses unmediated powers to yield immediate results, enabling individual and group action to disrupt harmful practices. This was demonstrated firstly in how people chose direct action outside the ‘norms’ of behaviours:
[Sabbing] is empowering because it's not something you are told is an option. The histories we are told are so watered down, we’re told that this is not an option… [You] need to sabotage social conventions and norms, psychological barriers. (Charlie)
This quote demonstrates sabotage as a means of opening up previously blocked off or hidden possibilities. Through it we can start to understand the role sabotage plays in disrupting psychological infrastructures, providing a potential foundation for insurrectionary emotion (Bonanno, 1977; Dunlap, 2020) and a means to break down affective infrastructures (Bosworth, 2022; Street, 2011). This illustrates the layers of normalisation embedded in mediated relationships and how we’re presented with limited ‘options’ for change. Importantly, participants demonstrated how actions could inform different relationships, antithetical to capitalism, commodification and consumerism. Along with their unmediated nature, these relationships were also informed by questioning authority, connected to direct action that again sits outside the possibilities we are told are available to us. This is demonstrated by Charlie who states: ‘it made me a questioning person. Taught me not to trust the state, and ask myself, what other oppressions have I overlooked? It took me down the path of anarchy’. Participants also discussed the immediacy/unmediated nature of hunt sabotage: ‘we can immediately make a difference and save lives. It's about challenging the cruelty immediately’ (Blake).
These relationships help overcome alienation, distancing and separation that are foundational to capitalist modernity and anthropocentrism. It also demonstrates how the participants’ conversations appear to ‘make space’ for deconstructing, interrupting and challenging the hierarchies that hold in place the modern social ecological order. ‘Making space’ is explored in degrowth literatures, described as ‘interconnected, multilevel, and multidimensional processes that make space for radical alternatives to modern capitalist socioecological configurations’ (Feola, 2019: 977). The conversations – internalised/external – draw attention to the importance of places for alternatives, ‘not end points, but rather means inscribed’ (Feola, 2019: 988) and how they can be localised to ‘transformation, the “performance” including individual, social and social-ecological’, pre-empting and driving forward sabotage as legitimate.
Whilst capitalism, commodification and consumerism all demonstrate a need to construct relationships with society and communities that alienate, distance and separate them from violent, damaging and harmful processes, practices and outcomes, relationships constructed around sabotage were very different. They included ‘making space’ by understanding and removing the distance between violence and the brutality of practices enforced over others. This is demonstrated by Charlie who explains:
There is the invisibility element. You see it from a distance. You don’t see the dead bodies. We are emotionally distanced because we categorise animals. Although so many people have interpersonal relationships with cats and dogs, most people don’t interact with chickens or cows. Don’t have a face of who we’re oppressing. The main interaction is with their bodies when oppressed and processed. (Charlie)
In engaging in direct action, sabs make visible the violence and abuse of animals that would otherwise stay hidden, reducing physical and emotional distance between humans and other species. Taking these unmediated routes for action in turn helps opening further questions through which to challenge interconnected hierarchies, as Charlie states: ‘If we’re not asking “why do cows produce milk?” then we are also not asking other questions. Like, “why are we not allowed access to the river?”’ The struggles for species and land justice are connected and questioning one helps us to question the other.
Participants emphasis on the different ways visibility is revealed to them connects with Star's (1999) concept of the invisibility of infrastructures. However, Larkin (2013: 336) argues that visibilities change, giving rise to ‘a range of visibilities’ that fluctuate. As the quotes above suggests, when infrastructures are distanced from us – physically and through discourse – or if we don’t ‘make space’ to understand their functions, it restricts visibilities. Likewise, hierarchies and oppressions also control what sits within political consciousness and what we’re willing or enabled to see. The closed nature of elitist hunting practices, and the illegality of the kill in certain contexts, means that most people never truly witness the horrors of hunting. This reinforces Clapp's (2014) insight into relations deliberately constructed within animal agriculture and animal harm, where human animals are ‘distanced’ from the pains, violence and brutality of large-scale industrial farming. Hunt saboteurs bridge the space and its invisibilities by seeking out and acting on information and sharing knowledge, challenging discourse and thus removing distance. This draws attention to future-building through direct action. Here we locate the beauty of directness, unfiltered experience and immediacy. Relationship-building is beautifully represented in relationships constructed through emotions, attachments and unity with communities, particularly in identifying a need to rebuild and reunite communities with their ecosystems and non-human animals. In the next section, we turn to these relationships.
Insurrectionary joy and rage
The new worlds being built in the shells of the old encourage expressions of joy and rage which are not just valid but revolutionary in a wider world shaped by hierarchy, anthropocentrism, coloniality, class and authority (Bosworth, 2022; Street, 2011). Here, we discuss strategy versus insurrectionary joy. Not joy as (initial act of) insurrection (Solnit, 2009), or joy as hope, but joy through and triggering insurrection. This was evident in many of the participants’ conversations, put succinctly by Charlie's: ‘There is so much joy to be had in sabotage’. The ‘joyful’ aspect of direct action is often connected to the simplicity of acts of sabotage and direct action:
Someone can own so much land, sheds, equipment worth millions and millions of pounds and some bolt cutters and a hammer have just fucked everything up… It's really empowering to see how feeble the system can be when we don’t go along with it. (Charlie, smiling)
Joy and rage are not simply side effects but can play a role in disrupting and breaking down systems of obedience (or psychological infrastructures) on an emotional level (Bonanno, 1977; Dunlap, 2020). Even if non-strategic, opportunities to destroy and dismantle parts within a wider system are vital and deeply entwined with emotion. Jo is candid about what they see as the strategic futility of their action as a means of spurring change:
We can’t change people, we can’t change the system. It's all about radical joy… I don’t believe we can change the system. [But] you’re not living if you’re not fighting… I no longer do something because I think it will change the fucking world. I just do what I think is needed. The monster is way too fucking big to win anything.
Human relationships built upon shared recognition of the constructive, positive role of sabotage are therefore ones of emotion: joy, anger, friendship and camaraderie.
It's so amazing to be with sabs when a fox has been saved, particularly when you see that fox. Imagine a kind of direct action where you immediately see the benefit. Hanging out with other sabs too, you immediately bond with them as they’ve got the same goals as you and want to do something about it. It's not a hardship, instead it's really amazingly positive!. (Blake)
In choosing unmediated routes not common in certain societies, it also helps reduce isolation amongst sabs. As Jo describes: ‘A feeling of “I am not alone”… Building solidarity… Also, “we care about you”’. Just as joy is a feature of many conversations, so too is the notion of anger and even vengeance. Describing their relationship to sabotage, Jo notes: ‘It feels morally right. [It's about] personal justice, not ethical or moral or social justice. Revenge’. Revenge against those who spend their time killing animals arguably sits far away from more strategic approaches, but these elements of sabotage are just as valid in their enactment of a better world in the present (although not expressed by all participants). As Jo continues: ‘[A] driving force [is] revenge. So many people deserve it… An important driving force is that “I want you to be sad”’.
This also demonstrates the emotional, non-strategic dynamics of hunt sabotage as a way to honour the participants’ own feelings:
I have emotions. And I have the choice: to find an outlet for these emotions, to pay homage to these emotions… Action is personal. A lot of action is ‘I feel this upset, I need to do something’. It's about the impossibility of doing nothing. (Jo)
Dunlap's (2020) understanding of direct action resembles that of our participants, who challenge the harmful and violent political and economic logic through choosing strategies and relationships built on positive emotions:
Rooting struggle in joy and love, means emphasising qualitative dimensions of relationships and struggles, connecting means and ends and rejecting the quantitative logic of the economy, political parties, unions and their monopolistic armed wing. A different (qualitative) logic, relationship and method of struggle is what would undermine capitalism and the society of the spectacle. (
Dunlap, 2020
: 999–1000)
Prefiguration and a world of direct action
Our participants see sabotage and direct action as prefiguration, evident in it normalising direct action and allowing them to live the future they want to see, and empowering them to make change happen. Rather than relying on the state, corporate structures, NGOs or others who are meant to ‘ask’, lobby, or act on our behalf, direct action provides a direct route to prefigurative futures. Part of this was through the analysis and practice that leads people to question concepts of crime and legality upholding the status quo, providing a gateway into understanding and acting against other hierarchies and systems of oppression. It therefore legitimises and normalises breaking the law, as the following quote demonstrates:
Sabotage is essential to prevent harm from being committed, whether the harmful activity is legal or not (e.g. the badger cull). My view of the law is that I will obey it unless I disagree with it morally. (Alex)
This reflects an anarchist and anti-speciesist rejection of hierarchical power (Clark, 2021), which is also reflective of total liberation values (Pellow, 2014). Jo similarly identifies the futility of following the ‘rules’, stating: ‘The system is rigged against you, there is no point in playing according to the rules’. Similarly, Charlie explains: ‘Sabotage revolutionised the impacts I can have and the possibilities I can achieve… Things only seem impenetrable and unbreakable when you don’t try’.
Sabotage is therefore identified as prefigurative and, as the above quotes demonstrate, about normalising direct action to build futures allowing us to live how we want to. As seen above, part of this is about how it: ‘creates a culture of questioning authority’ as Ash puts it, further stating: ‘Being able to go onto someone else's land, doing something that is illegal, something they don’t want you to do, and getting away with it’. This is further demonstrated by Blake: Nothing else works, so sabotage is vital. The state doesn’t care, in fact it actually upholds cruelty. Therefore, we have to step in. I think the more people are aware of this, the more people will get involved.
Animal liberationists and (hunt) saboteurs often use ‘hit reports’ or communiqués to document and publicise their actions (Johnston and Johnston, 2017, 2020; Loadenthal, 2018; Stephens-Griffin, 2022), taking ownership of the framing of such actions in relation to state, corporate and media narratives. Communiqués allow actionists to politicise acts that might otherwise be assumed to be apolitical – dismissed as ‘vandalism’ – and even help in revealing the ‘prefigurative’ character of ‘petty’ crimes (AAA).
Here we can see how joy intersects again with honouring participants’ own feelings in choosing sabotage, examined above, and further demonstrated by Ash who mobilises James C. Scott's principle of ‘anarchist calisthenics’:
Doing small pieces of insubordination so you get used to breaking the rules and it destroys the mythos of property rights and speciesism. So that when you break the bigger rules, you’re already comfortable with transgressing boundaries.
This points to the importance of ‘ownership’ over the discourse and narratives of (hunt) sabotage, as mentioned above, in creating space for internal and external discussions, but also in extending it to the state's control of narratives. Where the state or media may use terms like ‘terrorist’ as a means of delegitimising action in defence of animals, direct action groups may see such labels as an opportunity to highlight the ‘terror’ associated with animal industries, redirecting the ‘violence’ towards those involved in such industries (Stephens-Griffin, 2022). Small actions that can be shared online and be easily reproduced by others can help demonstrate the joy involved whilst helping the concept of ‘becoming ungovernable’ – a core facet of anarchist and insurrectionary organising (Batko Group and Sasha, 2005).
Conclusion: non-anthropocentric future-making?
Rather than narrowly conceptualising sabotage in purely strategic terms, here we have demonstrated the ways sabotage can represent a form of insurrectionary joy and enactment of alternative futures. We have demonstrated that sabotage acts as an affective and embodied politics of refusal and connection-building, that helps sabs dismantle infrastructures of human supremacy in both material and psychological ways. Doing this prefigures anti-speciesist futures in the present. We have advocated for an understanding of sabotage as a legitimate political expression which is connected to practices of future-making (Aalders and Kioko, 2025; Swain, 2019; Yates, 2021). We have also demonstrated its power in providing opportunities to build relationships that are not mediated by state structures or capitalism, commodification and consumerism, between humans as well as between humans and nonhumans. This means remembering, as Leanne B. Simpson (2014: 9–10) explains, that humans are ‘dependent upon intimate relationships of reciprocity, humility, honesty and respect with all elements of creation, including plants and animals’ (see also Dunlap, 2023). Human activity should therefore be ‘rooted in a practice of relationality that understands human and more-than-human life as kin, as familial relations’ (LaDuke and Cowen, 2020: 253; see also Simpson, 2014). Applying this critical analysis to sabotage as a concept helps reveal the unique directness in these relationships, perhaps through direct liberation (e.g. human relationships with nonhumans) or in experiences of violence, repression, force, stress, trauma, but also joy and camaraderie (e.g. relationships amongst humans). These relationships are useful in helping overcome the forces of alienation, distancing and separation that are integral to capitalist modernity and anthropocentrism.
We have sought to demonstrate how sabotage can be prefigurative, through the normalisation of direct action, and in allowing us to live the future we want to see, and empowering us to make change happen, rather than relying on state and corporate structures, or NGOs and others who are meant to ‘ask’, lobby, or act on our behalf. Sabotage can therefore help communicate the ethical irrelevance of the concept of crime, prefiguring futures where these old, state-centric ideas dissipate. Sabotage is also valuable as an expression of emotion in and of itself, beyond strategic considerations.
Sabotage therefore not only saves lives but works to destabilise hierarchies and class relationships – especially relationships of property – as well as assumptions of who ‘belongs’ in the countryside and has the right to be ‘in nature’. In other words, sabotage is legitimate and constructive both strategically, building futures, and as an expression of joy and rage which is not just valid but revolutionary in a world shaped by hierarchy, anthropocentrism, coloniality, class and authority. It also challenges and deconstructs our own deeply held norms and values about property, ownership, species and ecological relationships, and solidarity. Instead, sabotage helps build non-anthropocentric futures with non-exploitative human-nonhuman relationships, which don’t see nonhuman (and many human) lives and ecosystems as expendable and dispensable, as commodities to be traded and financialised, but value individual lives and ecological health, directness and radical care; subverting ideas of ‘progress’ away from anthropocentric colonial enlightenment informed understandings towards radical futures.
Footnotes
Consent to participant
Prior to data collection, participants were informed about the purpose and scope of the study, and verbal informed consent was obtained in accordance with ethical research practices.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical considerations
This research was approved by the University of Sussex Ethics Committee, #ER/AB660/6.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.