In the event and in support of the International Week for Antispeciesist Action, we communicate the performance of a sit in, planned for the 30th of October, from 9 a.m., at the courthouse of Milan in solidarity with the comrades who, on that day, are going to be subjected to the second hearing regarding the occupation of the animal facility of the Department of Pharmacology of the State University of Milan, that occurred on the 20th of April of 2013, and that led to the liberation of 400 mice and a rabbit, in addition to the disclosure of the documentation, intended to bring down the wall of silence which still allows to excuse the exploitation of animals.
The cages are not just that four heavy walls that contain the animals, forced to suffocate between the narrow gears of the conveyor belt, prisons without light, labs closed between walls that have been stripped for years by lacerated nails, mutilated paws, but they are every room that has bars, even mental ones. Freedom is a moral duty that urges the individual to extend it to the multitudes, without limits or barriers, regarding the species, the skin, the color or the scent. As long as there is still one of us who is imprisoned don’t talk to us about rights. Our rights have the shape of the blade which denies them to others. Labs are full of beings who are massacred and stoned to death for our rights, to extend, up to a day, our chained lives, the lives of the “Us” who are shortsighted, and have the convictions of brotherhood and respect, a controlled and dosed kind of respect. Furthermore, scientific research through the suffering of non human animals carried out within the walls of universities, has many valences: considering individuals as tools, objects, goods which can be used as it wishes, makes university a place where speciesism is taught and instilled in students’ minds; very often research performed at the universities is carried out in collaboration with big pharmaceutical groups and grants from companies and private foundations like Telethon: where university should be the base of free and democratic knowledge, there this knowledge, along with students’ minds, is sold off and commodified.
We are complicit and in solidarity with the ones who are victims of a repressive system that criminalise liberators, legitimising those who make their weapon of control and social manipulation out of the prevarication of non human and human animals; and who are subject to imprisonment or reduced to a mere commercial item. For total liberation, against any form of slavery and exploitation of Earth by humans, of animals by humans, and of humans by other humans, as long as there is submission there will be rebellion: in memory of Barry Horne, Jill Phipps, Clement Meric, Remì Freise and of all the victims of fascism, capitalism and speciesism.
The sit in is independent, self-determined and self-organised with a grass-root approach, free from any symbol of parties and associations, based on the principles of antifascism and, therefore, antispeciesism.
Hierarchical and discriminatory attitudes are not going to be tolerated, consequently those who don’t respect the values of an initiative which aims to total liberation are going to be banished.