Help publish the biography of Josh Harper!

Question

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"One of the things the animal-rights movement often has a hard time with is remembering its own history. Jon Hochschartner wants to help change that by writing a biography of American activist Josh Harper, who was deeply involved in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign. He and others were arrested for their activism, in what became known as the SHAC 7 case, and were ultimately sentenced to prison."

betterMonica · Answer

Jon Hochschartner: I know she‟s working with a different time period, but will your book
be different in tone than Diane Beer‟s work? I don‟t know if you‟ve read her history.
Josh Harper: Did she write “For the Prevention of Cruelty?” I did read that actually. I read
that in prison. Yeah, it will differ. The thing is that I wanted, first and foremost, to tell the
story of people who really put their lives on the line, who saw this as an issue that was worth
taking deep physical risks for, the type of risks that could end in injury and then incarceration.
That‟s the aspect of the story that is really fascinating for me. And not just because of some
sort of adventuristic sense or glorification of direct action. But when you really consider the
history of human and animal relations, to have this sudden turnaround where these people
looked at the tide of history, thousands of years of domination and exploitation, and were so
disgusted by it that they were willing to leap in and try to physically intervene. That to me is
fascinating, that something like that could even occur after such a lengthy period of apathy
towards animals.
I totally respect the work of the early welfarists. I also recognize that even back to the 1960s
you had people who started talking about things in more of a rights context. But I also feel
that their stories have been documented. I feel like that story has been told. Meanwhile, we
don‟t know very much about the history of the more protest and direct action oriented
movement in the United States.

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