Hero #069: Jill Phipps … (03/26/16)
Born in 1964, 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 (which is an AWESOME group, by the way). Thereafter, a local campaign in Coventry supported by Phipps and her mother succeeded in closing down a local fur shop and local fur farm as well. She 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. 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.
I would say “God bless you, Jill” at this point, and yet that seems almost a waste of breath, for if God truly is both good & kind … then He already has.
“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 dread-locked punky princess patrolling up and down the pond, alone in the dark, armed with a baseball bat.” ~ John Curtin
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