by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
Owner:
Doors are often protected by alarms. If in doubt, you can always try going through the door itself, but the cutting operations will be noisy.
Roofs can provide numerous access points. Watch for heating and air conditioning ducts, ventilation fans, attics, and crawlspaces.
Avoid open areas, especially around factories and of&ces: they are likely to be under camera surveillance.
In winter of 1992, my cell of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) was waging a direct action campaign against the North American fur farm industry. Our targets were the half-dozen recipients of funding from the Mink Farmers Research Foundation, a fur industry group sponsoring research to enable the intensive confinement of mink. The recipient of the greatest amount of funding was Richard Aulerich, the head of Michigan State University's Experimental Fur Farm program. For the past thirty years, he had addressed the problems of disease encountered by the nation's then 600 fur farms.
No one in our group had ever been on MSU's campus; for security reasons, we kept all the information we gathered on paper. Our goal was to destroy as much research as possible, thereby setting back the efforts of mink researchers intent on further domesticating and enslaving a native North American predator. If we decided it was safe, we would
Account
Sabotage 447
employ property destruction, specifically arson, to accomplish this end. We planned a reconnaissance mission for late February, when we would be driving across country-After a short visit with family friends in Michigan, another cell member and I cruised the MSU campus on a Sunday afternoon when it was less populated. A staff directory gave us the location of Aulerich's oflBce in Anthony Hall. I entered the stone building and walked around until I discovered that the rooms of the hall were separated from adjoining research offices by the old building's brick walls. This fact, and the general emptiness of the building during odd hours, indicated that it was safe to use arson to
destroy the records. You can use a small and easily j /r
concealed pair of tin snips, N^^' ^^ ^^^^^^ off campus to the surrounding countryside of East Lansing, where
available at all hardware stores, to most of MSU's agricultural research facilities were located. At Oregon State University,
cut barbed wire, razar wire, and ^^ had found the Experimental Fur Farm near the poultry research farm, and in Michi-cnain-lml< fences; use bolt cutters . r / >
for larger locks. 8^^ ^^ ^^^ the same: the long barns of the poultry and mink farm were hidden against
nearby woods, only a hundred yards from a state highway where a person or team could
be dropped off and picked up.
We decided that the action could be carried out with only two people. Security was lax enough that minimal reconnaissance could determine our entry and exit points, as well as the frequency of security patrols and the direction from which a response would be mounted from the police station. We rented a car similar to those in MSU's own motor pool, and watched Anthony Hall all night from a parking lot on the same day of the week that we planned to carry out our action. I noticed numerous ground floor windows in the building that could be unlocked from inside easily and wdthout attracting any attention.
Earlier the same night, 1 had been dropped on the shoulder of the state highway adjacent to the wooded area behind the Experimental Fur Farm and research bam. In the dead of Sabotage ^nter, the facility had no electronic or physical security beyond the nightly random patrols 448 of campus police, who we never saw entering the long dirt road leading to the facility.
As I neared the complex of buildings, I began by scouting the perimeter for signs of sophisticated motion detectors or infrared detectors; there were none. Next, I examined the construction of the research bam that we wanted to enter. Avoiding windows and doors, the most likely places for alarms, I climbed onto the roof of the building and discovered that the corrugated sheet metal panels comprising the roof could be partially removed, enough to allow me to crawl into the attic space and then into the building via an access door in the ceiling.
The heart of our target was Aulerich's office, which we knew would contain the records of his ongoing research. Nonetheless, this might be the only time his research would be attacked, so we decided we should cause as much damage as possible by also removing the breeding records of the 250 breeder mink Aulerich had on the farm, destroying farm research equipment, and, if time permitted, rescuing a few hostages.
