Sabotaging Hunting, Prefiguring Anti-Speciesist Futures

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.