Early practitioners of open rescue intervened in the process of animal exploitation by entering facilities where animals were being used and killed, where they took photographs and video to document conditions, and then rescued a small number of animals from the facility. The "open" part of open rescue pertains to the fact that these activists made no attempt to conceal the nature of their activities, their identities, or the identities of the facilities they had entered. In fact, the goal was to make all of this information public, for the purpose of exposing and protesting the reality of animal exploitation. Open rescue has played an important role in dispelling misinformation disseminated by the animal-using industry, including information pertaining to "humane" agriculture which has been shown time after time to be predicated on shocking falsehoods. Open rescue was pioneered in Australia by Animal Liberation Victoria in the 1980's. For more information, see openrescue.org. and open rescue pioneer Patty Mark's statement for this web site.
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