We were very please to get the opportunity to speak with Non-Humans First Declaration supporter Camille Marino from the USA about her hard-hitting and exciting work against the vivisection industrial complex! In this interview she explains in her own words the strategies, tactics and ideas that drive her dynamic activist approach.

Hi Camille, an honor to speak with you. Could you tell us a bit about
your work?

Thank you, Aran. The honor is all mine. I founded Negotiation is Over (NIO) in 2008 and Eleventh Hour for Animals in 2010. My vision for NIO remains one of exposing abusers and shaming them publicly. If you torture animals from nine to five, you should not expect to go home and enjoy any semblance of peace and anonymity. Vivisectors hate my approach. And they should. I think what shocks me more is that welfarists hate my work more because the vivisectors don’t approve. I find it difficult to understand how some in our community are more concerned with gaining the approval of the enemy rather than fighting for their nonhuman victims.

 
What is your campaigning strategies and why?

Eleventh Hour for Animals, as opposed to NIO, is a very focused campaign to expose the crimes committed against approximately 10,000 animals inside the University of Florida every day. After three successful lawsuits, we gained access to the records documenting these atrocities. They fought us for years because they knew that we were unafraid to use the information to their detriment. They’ve had the laws changed in Florida twice to shield their vivisectors from being identified. I think it’s clear that UF vivisectors, like all abusers, fear having their animal-torture industry exposed. Their crimes cannot withstand the light of day.

But unlike the conventional model of focusing on the occasional violation of welfare laws, I am more concerned with documenting the 99.9% of animal torture that is conducted fully within the law. We need to disarm them of their welfare propaganda mantras. This is how we will shut them down. The welfarist approach only serves to perpetuate the vivisectors’ talking points and give the public the impression that most “research” is “humane.” These contingents in our community work hand in hand with vivisectors. It’s utterly disgraceful.

In my mind, this is very simple. Institutional animal abuse is a business. I am far less concerned with changing hearts and minds than I am with affecting abusers’ profits, exposing them, and making it a liability to continue. Animal Liberation will be achieved when the detriments of animal abuse outweigh the benefits.

 
Could you tell us a little about the oppression from the state you have suffered?

Five weeks after winning my first lawsuit against UF on December 30, 2011, I was arrested for the first time in my life at an anti-vivisection demo. UF orchestrated my arrest and subsequent extradition out of the state. All told, I have been arrested 6 times, extradited to Michigan twice, had my house raided once and all my computers seized, I spent over 8 months in jail, 3 months on house arrest, and 7 months banned from the internet and all activism. But I was never fazed. There is nothing they can ever do to me that remotely compares to what the animals endure.

But is the traitors within our movement – those that align themselves with vivisectors, those that promote their talking points, and those that adopt the state’s repressive language to neutralize frontline activists – that pose a far more insidious threat to the animals than the state ever could.

What is your message to those outside of the animal rights movement?

I have little tolerance for those who understand there is a holocaust, understand factory farming, yet refuse to go vegan. And I have little faith that the human race will ever relinquish its privilege over all other species without being forced to do so.

But I am currently in negotiations with a mainstream publisher to repackage my first book about my experience as a political prisoner. I believe I will be able to reach a much larger audience because this book will focus on the extraordinary betrayals by former friends as well as the emotional upheaval in my own life, it will focus on going to jail for another’s actions and never snitching. Because people will relate to my human experience, I want to believe that this will serve as an instrument to expose the University of Florida’s animal-torture industry and the inherent culture of corruption that surrounds vivisection to people who otherwise would never be exposed.

I guess I am going to use whatever vehicle is available to deliver the animal holocaust into their living rooms, with or without their consent.

 
What is your message to the animal rights movement?

My message to the animal rights movement is that I am here for the animals and the animals alone. You can love me. You can hate me. But you will never moderate me.

We need to continually escalate our actions and that means working outside the box if we are ever to realize Animal Liberation.

 
What are your views on the Non-Humans First approach to animal rights?

After having wasted so much time listening to nonsense about total liberation and trying to form alliances with other social justice movements, I believe the Non-Humans First approach is the only logical, honest, and practical manner in which to achieve Animal Liberation.

From wasting many years, I know that when animal activists try to ally ourselves with human-issue activists, our energies for the animals are co-opted and diverted and there is rarely, if ever, any reciprocity. Why would we think that speciesists are going to support the animals simply because we support them? It’s absurd!!!

We need to make our own movement more formidable and confrontational, and we need to create our own momentum. And then if other social justice movements want to support us because we are focused and uncompromising, then I will welcome them. I will welcome anyone who relinquishes their human privilege to fight for the animals above all else. Otherwise, I am generally unconcerned with the problems of the oppressors.

I’m not fighting for better working conditions for Nazis. And those who promote such drivel present nothing more than distractions and are betraying the animals.

 
What projects are you currently involved with and how can people help?

Thank you so much for asking. For many reasons, I am currently engaged in creating a base of community support around the unconscionable puppy and horse experiments inside UF. Sadly, I have found that potluck vegans are of little, if any, value to the animals and so I am turning my attention outside of our community. I fully understand that where civilians are concerned, they make speciesist distinctions between horses, dogs, or other “domesticated” animals… this allows people to love horses and eat cows. Nonetheless, if I can bring people into the movement around an issue about which they feel strongly (e.g., horses), I have a far greater opportunity to recruit them into the vegan Animal Liberation movement than I would otherwise. And the animals need us to become a machine. We must cultivate warriors the same way the profit-motivated capitalist industries cultivate mercenaries. Abusers don’t have a moral checklist that they require their recruits to fulfill before they may become vivisectors. I do not understand the mentality in our movement that holds a sociological and political checklist that vegans have to fulfill before we are qualified to fight for liberation.

So while I am recruiting and creating an atmosphere against vivisection in different segments of the community, I would strongly urge everyone to join Eleventh Hour for Animals on Facebook and participate in our cyber actions to support our on-the-ground efforts.

The other project in which I am deeply involved is in trying to get a focused and dedicated campaign off the ground to counter a proposed new primate breeding facility in Florida. I don’t want to elaborate because it would jeopardize our efforts. But it is imperative that we direct our energies at campaigns that will have a significant effect on compromising the infrastructure of the global vivisection complex.

 
Do you have anything more you would like to add?

I would like to add that the animals are imprisoned inside a man-made hell on earth. Liberating them should be our only objective.

It is my only objective! And I’m not winning any popularity contests for it.