In LOVE with Humanity

Hero #069: Jill Phipps
Born in 1964, Jill Phipps became a British animal rights activist at the early age of
11, when she joined her mother's active campaigning against the fur trade. After herself
adopting a plant-based diet, Phipps persuaded the rest of her family to join her. By her
late teens she had joined the Eastern Animal Liberation League, a group affiliated to the
Animal Liberation Front. Thereafter, a local campaign in Coventry supported by Phipps
and her mother succeeded in closing down a local fur shop and a local fur farm as well.
Jill continued actively advocating the rights of animals even after the birth of her son
(who she raised as a single mother), and later -- in January of 1995 (one month before her
death), she walked almost 100 miles from Coventry to Westminster to protest the use of
Coventry Airport for the export of veal calves.
And so it was that on February 1st of 1995, Phipps was one of 35 protesters at that
airport, and she was one of ten protesters who broke through police lines and tried to
bring a lorry carrying veal calves to a halt by sitting in the road. The lorry refused to stop,
and Phipps was crushed to death beneath the lorry's wheels. Veal calf exports from
Coventry Airport ended months later, and the level of protest after Jill's ultimate sacrifice
was so extreme that several local councils and a local harbor board banned live exports
from their localities as well.
―The best way I can illustrate [Jill]
is to recount a little story that she
recorded in her diaries. She was out in
the Swanswell Park when she came
across a man throwing stones at the
swans there. She dived into action and
stopped him but he still continued to
lurk around the park. She rang the
police - not surprisingly, they did
nothing. What Jill did next goes to the
heart of what I want to convey about
her -- she went home and got a
baseball bat and went back to the park
where she carried out a 3 hour vigil.
Here she was this slim-built dreadlocked
punky princess patrolling up
and down the pond, alone in the dark,
armed with a baseball bat, protecting
the swans.‖ ~ via John Curtin
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