“We are the voice of the voiceless,” read a placard attached to the railings on Marsham Street in central London. The text was superimposed over an AI-generated image of a dog, a cat and a horse. Another sign read “taken in the most cruel way by the worst people drive free fur babies in memory of 41 over the rainbow bridge”. Later, protesters would unfurl a more direct banner: “Out you sadistic scum.”
It was an overcast Friday afternoon and a few meters from the Home Office, young British animal rights activists were staging a protest. They had come because of the sentence given to Oaveed Rahman, a man who had run what was supposed to be an animal rescue center in Billericay, Essex. In reality, his rescue center was severely abusing the dogs in his care, the remains of 41 of which were found on his property. Rahman was sentenced to 38 months in prison: the protesters are all outraged by this, considering it too short. This informed the main policy demands of the demonstrators. They wanted an extension of the minimum sentence for animal abuse, which is currently five years (increased from six months by a 2021 act) and, according to their petition, “for those who abuse multiple animals, we want to require separate charges for each abused animal, rather than a single charge.” Currently, one protester told us, there is “no ban” on animal cruelty. “They say the prisons are full,” she said with a grimace of disbelief. “All people are getting is a slap on the wrist,” said another.
Tracey, the organizer of the march, was not local to the incident. She had seen the case on Facebook and decided to get involved, attending every day of the court case, bar one. She first got involved by warning other Facebook posters about flouting court laws when the proceedings became active, aided by her background as a former legal secretary.
Despite the horror of the crimes – one attendee showed us their drone footage of mummified dog remains being stuffed into bin bags by police officers – there was an uncanny familiarity between the protesters and the criminals. The culprit and his girlfriend were referred to by their names. A chairman had regularly exchanged Facebook messages with him. “Come tomorrow for a barbecue, we’ll eat one of the dogs,” she said she had texted him. She had even offered him £1,000 of her own money to secure the release of the two dogs, but after he refused to provide proof of life, she rescinded the offer.
All 24 people who appeared on Marsham Street were women. Perhaps not unrelatedly, the event had a buzz that evoked a chicken-made-in-a-train-station feel. Passers-by were greeted in a joyful, if somewhat intense, manner. A man in knee-high leather boots, leather shorts and a see-through shirt was wolf-whistled into a megaphone by a band leader, then instructed to pick up a leaflet in the middle of his ‘catwalk’. He smiled and obliged. Disinterested civil servants walking through the protest on their lunch break were greeted with “keep ignoring us” through a megaphone, while a man who refused a leaflet was given a sign of distress as he turned his back on the group, to laughter from those present.
While Friday’s protest had a sharp focus on the specific crime, the demonstration was part of a broader pro-animal movement that has been galvanized since the XL harassment ban.
There were eight fatal attacks involving XL bullies in the 12 months before the ban, and the blow hit owners hard. Alienated from friends and with their dogs herded into police-run kennels, the owners waited for a judge to decide whether their dogs could stay in the community. In the years after the ban, XL online bully support groups became a safe space for the community, and it was in such online spaces that people here today talked, shared stories, and organized.
One dog whose name was mentioned several times was Ghost. An XL bully killed by police in Sheffield, Ghost seems to have become a sort of popular canine martyr, as if William of Norwich were a dog. “The family saw him die,” said one volunteer protester. “He was a kind, warm, beautiful dog.” When asked if she knew the dog personally, she said she had seen photos on Facebook, maybe even a video. But his legend in this world was such that he felt familiar to protesters (by legend and at Sheffield Magistrates’ Court late last year, Ghost’s owner was convicted of keeping a dog out of control and malicious communications over social media posts about the officer who had killed her pet).
Another woman told us that it was the deaths of Marshall and Millions that first brought her into this world. The two dogs (either Staffordshire Bull Terriers or XL bullies, depending on whether you ask a dog lover, a dispute that opens up to wider questions about how you define dogs) were shot dead by police on a canal path after attacking a woman defending her dog. After the shooting, the IOPC cleared the police officers involved and the owner of Marshall and Millions was served with a second restraining order, running concurrently with one he had already obtained.
Since then, Marshall and Millions have risen to martyrdom. At the march, some protesters wore Marshall and Millions T-shirts; Facebook has dozens of groups with names like “Marshall & Millions’ Army” and tens of thousands of members. A children’s book Marshall & Millions Adventure with Dadwas published by Grosvenor House last year. “I’m not very political,” a woman in a Marshall and Millions shirt told us. “Except for Tommy’s marches,” she said, noting with approval that people brought their dogs on them. “And the pink ladies“, she added.
Cases like Ghost and Marshall and Millions show a view of the police as too incompetent when it comes to handling dogs. Police need to “be trained, learn how to use a stun gun,” one woman said. “If you had a Yorkshire terrier next to a corgi, I bet half the coppers wouldn’t know the difference,” said another. There is a general feeling that the police over-police and over-react to some cases (especially those involving XL bullies) and neglect others, and that those who deserve punishment get off easily when they face any consequences at all. “Look what happened to poor Lee Rigby,” one woman tells us, noting that the soldier’s killers are still alive and she says have a good standard of living behind bars. “But a dog only has to make one mistake” and it can be killed, she notes (another issue of concern to this participant is the testing of laboratory animals: “If they want to test drugs, there are enough people (in prison) who do so-called life sentences”).
These views characterized by distrust – or perhaps more accurately by an assessment of profound failure, even collapse – extended from the police to the state as a whole. It was a particularly palpable sentiment because most of the women we spoke to work in or are retired from public sector jobs. One pointed out that not only did the police not follow up on the case of a decapitated local dog, it barely got any coverage in the local paper. Another woman told us she doesn’t trust “the government we have at the moment”, especially, she says, given that the Prime Minister was “head of the CPS when a certain Jimmy was running it”. She thought Larry the cat should be in charge: he’s “the only smart one going in and out of Downing Street”. Another woman told us she thinks the laws around animal abuse are just “bad” and that things are generally “getting worse” in the country. She thought that the government “is for foreigners”.
According to them, the authorities have failed. Therefore, the protesters often took matters into their own hands. A woman used her free time to offer free transport to dogs in pounds across the country to prevent them from being put down. Others told a story of how they used two different forms of surveillance, which were almost certainly illegal, on two suspected animal abusers after calls to the police went unanswered.
We asked some protesters why they thought only women had turned up. “It hits women harder,” said one; “It’s over 80 percent men who abuse animals,” another volunteer participant. For women, animal abuse is clearly closely related to child and domestic abuse, echoing what appears to be a general blurred distinction between vulnerable humans and vulnerable animals in the protestors’ worldview. “You have to be seriously broken as an individual to abuse an animal or a child,” as one woman told us. Throughout the protest, the topic of protecting women, children and animals came up almost interchangeably. There was a shared sense of deep injustice and absolute certainty that is common to small protests.
“A society is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable,” we were told over the megaphone, by one protester who also noted, “Study after study has shown the link between animal abuse and violence against people.” A woman who was local to the Billericay case said a number of the dogs sent to the shelter had been taken there by women fleeing domestic violence. Much of the anger of the protesters was reserved for Rahman’s partner, who avoided punishment or detention to care for the animals. The women not only treated her as complicit in the wider abuse, but in some cases seemed more upset by her actions than Rahman’s.
The short speech included a round of cheers: the staple of the protest, “what we want, justice, when we want it now.” However, while they may have preferred urgency, the women were clearly prepared for a long fight. “We will not be silent”, concluded the speaker. “We will continue this fight until this government wakes up and sees that we are an animal-loving nation.” It was time for the organizers to collect the miniature tombstones from off Marsham Street and pack away their banners before deciding whether to have coffee before or after their march to Westminster. Some of them had met at a protest over the killing of a dog in Brazil in April; in May, some had marked the third anniversary of the murders of Marshall and Million. Whatever animal rampage happened next, they were ready.
(Further reading: Will Henry Nowak’s death lead to a summer of disorder?)
