The difference between Animal Freedom and the Animal Liberation Front

Animal Freedom is not an action group

Animal Freedom (AF) has no relation with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), but their basic ideas are similar.

Both Animal Freedom and the ALF declare that animals have a right to freedom, while the ALF thinks that some animals should be literally liberated. AF says that this should be done on a basis of legal actions to end the industrial keeping of farm animals; the ALF says that animals that are now kept in deplorable circumstances should be freed immediately, even if that means using illegal methods. The ALF's main concern is laboratory animals and animals kept for their fur; AF's primary concern is factory animals kept in industrialized animal husbandry methods (factory farming).

Another way to express the difference is that AF's main interest is passively mistreated animals while the ALF mainly deals with actively mistreated animals. That is why the people of the ALF sometimes are in somewhat more of a hurry.

The reason for AF to stress the fact that Animal Freedom wants to use only legal methods has to do with the following expectations:

1. Activists exchanging ideas and working together can develop many legal methods.
2. Once factory farming is banned, a gradual phase-out can be organized in less than a year; our aim is not to set farm animals free, but to lower their number and to improve the circumstances of the remaining livestock.
3. The chances of factory farming becoming banned become greater when there is more public support.

Our approach

Animal Freedom thinks that its considerations are honorable and are shared by many people. That is why they can best be made public.

Animal Freedom shares ideas about legal actions for animal rights and against factory farming. It advocates ecological farming; realistic (higher) prices of animal products with all reasonable costs included; the ending of the export of meat and poultry produced in factory farms and the export of living animals; founding animal rights on the same grounds as human rights (i.e. freedom); restoring the natural balance in nature.

We support the Party for the Animals.

The Party for the Animals is a Dutch political party that aims to improve the position of animals in Dutch society. The party was founded to promote an awareness of the way in which humans treat animals and to emphasise that this needs to change - in the interest of not only the animals themselves, but also humans and the environment in which we all live.

Since then, parties for the animals have also been founded in other countries.