SOLIDARITY FOR THE CONSTRUCTION WORK AT THE SITE OF THE NEW SANCTUARY!

We never quite know how to ask you for money, notably because we imagine that the vast majority of you don’t throw cash out of your windows every morning; but if we want to continue creating and arranging spaces of resistance for animalized individuals, your help is absolutely necessary.

All the tremendous energy invested in building this new sanctuary expresses our desire to anchor the anti-speciesist struggle in concrete places and singular experiences, to “start from where we are” to move away from an abstract, generic fight, to give birth to a powerful, revolutionary "commune" inhabited by accomplices who will no longer leave each other, to experiment with a new form of emancipatory politics and to guarantee autonomy, self-management and self-defense to our oppressed comrades.

Thanks to your past solidarity, we can now have a larger, better-suited plot to welcome liberated animalized individuals, but our collective 269 Libération Animale must now finance the significant works needed to fit out this space and move in as quickly as possible.

The fence is almost finished but the hardest part remains: we must now build the shelter for the sanctuary residents and install an agricultural tunnel to store equipment and hay. We are desperately short of funds and are again appealing for your help. Even a few euros will allow us to buy some wood, contribute to renting a van to transport materials, etc. There is no small gesture.

While we always try to limit the cost of these works by relying on mutual aid and, above all, salvage, there is unfortunately equipment we are forced to buy on the market.

-> After several requests for quotes, we were thus able to roughly estimate the construction costs for the main shelter, detailed below:

1) WOOD:

- Main building frame

18 posts of 4m (20cm x 20cm): 1400 €

8 posts of 4m (10cm x 10cm): 200 €

76 m of “ramasse”: 450 €

34 rafters 6/10 at 5m: 350 €

34 rafters 6/10 at 3m: 200 €

- Main building cladding

200 m2 of cladding: 3000 €

2) ROOF:

- Sheet metal (160 m2): 2000 €

- Gutter and downspout: 310 €

- Collars, downpipes, hooks & elbows: 200 €

-> The acquisition of a storage greenhouse will also be essential to store equipment and especially hay:

Storage greenhouse (9m x 6m): 3500 €

Why is creating sanctuaries so important? Because any struggle whose aim is to help oppressed beings emancipate is doomed to fail if it keeps them at a distance. This is undoubtedly the greatest flaw of the anti-speciesist fight today (and what explains its impotence): the distance from those we say we want to help, the gap between the “them” and the “us” that characterizes the political strategy we use to respond to speciesist oppression.

For who can we really help if we place them from the outset at a distance, if we refuse to meet oppressed beings halfway, if we reduce the struggle to ephemeral episodes of protest in spaces where the oppressed are absent? By doing so, activists can of course pity the victims with all their might, but they do so from far away, ultimately remaining distant from them.

From this observation, we have tried to imagine and experiment with a new way of practicing emancipatory politics.

We want to move beyond paternalistic anti-speciesism based on politics done “in place of,” that “speaks on behalf of.” We want to rid the struggle of this political outlook that reveals a strategy in which animalized individuals are only poor extras, both weak and powerless in their bodies and absent as concrete subjects.

The sanctuary is a space where other ways of inhabiting the world are invented here and now, full and sharing. This hope is rooted in a common history, enriched by the impulses of dozens of rebels and by bonds welded over time. It is essential direct action because freeing the oppressed is not cowardly tossing them into an oppressive world; it is building enclaves where they can emancipate themselves sustainably.

In three years, the sanctuary founded by our collective has become a rallying cry, an anchor point that reaches far beyond its perimeter and from which habitable barricades continue to emerge. Since its creation, the collective 269 Libération Animale has exfiltrated and taken in more than 421 animals liberated from slaughterhouses, laboratories and farms, survivors whose world has changed radically overnight. 90% of the donations we receive today directly finance the sanctuary and the care of animals placed in foster homes.

That said, we are not going to play the violins to try to make you shed a tear and then a coin because we are on the verge of psychological and financial collapse. We believe enough in the importance and necessity of the work we accomplish every week to sustain us for many years.

We therefore appeal to both your generosity and your solidarity. If you think, as we do, that it is essential to build an anti-speciesist struggle with the oppressed, we strongly encourage you to part with a few euros. What you can be sure of is that we will put them to the best possible use!

⚠️ Every gesture counts and there is no small contribution. 2 euros is the price of a fence post to build the enclosures; it is also the price of a bale of hay and a few screws to fix a board. If the effort is collective, those 2 euros will make the difference!