Rod Coronado is a legend in the animal and Earth liberation movements. In the 2009 book “Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War To Save American Wilderness,” Dean Kuipers takes readers behind the scenes.
In 1990, we learn from Kuipers, Coronado went undercover to obtain footage that would generate negative publicity for the fur industry. On a mink farm in Lakeside, Montana, he finally got what he needed.
Coronado watched as dozens of minks were slaughtered and pelted while another activist filmed the gruesome scene. In keeping with his undercover persona, he acted friendly toward the mink farmer. Wanting to hide his revulsion, he picked up a 5-gallon pail and caught the bodies. Without thinking, he even prevented a mink from escaping.
Overcome with guilt, feeling he’d betrayed the animals, Coronado made a silent promise.
“Destroying this industry would not mean passing legislation,” Kuipers writes. “He would blow it off the face of the earth — using any tactic that didn’t physically harm animals or people. Sabotage. Theft. Cleansing fire. Whatever it took. He would stretch the definition of nonviolence to its breaking point.”
Renouncing sabotage
Kuipers, a Los Angeles Times editor and longtime environmental journalist, followed Coronado’s story for about 20 years. “Operation Bite Back” documents a personal journey from daredevil activist to threatened fugitive to private person.
To keep his promise to destroy the fur industry, Coronado founded an Animal Liberation Front cell called the Western Wildlife Unit. In 1992 he destroyed 32 years of fur industry research data at Michigan State University as part of Operation Bite Back — a series of strategic attacks on university laboratories that were using captive wild animals.
He eventually spent four years in prison for arson after pleading guilty to setting the fire at Michigan State, under an agreement that allowed him to avoid prosecution for the other raids. He refused to turn in any of his fellow activists.
Later, Coronado renounced sabotage. In 2006, in a letter to his supporters, he wrote, “Let our opposition who believe in violence carry the burden for its justification, but let those who believe in peace and love practice a way of life that our society sorely needs now more than ever.”
When I read “Operation Bite Back” years ago, I wondered if that change of heart was sincere. I also asked myself who was right — the Rod Coronado of the 1990s or the Rod Coronado of 2006?
Heroes or vigilantes?
The Animal Liberation Front has been a point of contention in animal rights circles for decades. Not an organization but an underground movement, it consists of anonymous activists who act alone or in small groups to rescue animals or inflict economic damage on animal exploiters. Detractors call it “violent,” even though the activists target inanimate property. Furthermore, many animal advocates who condone other forms of illegal direct action would condemn the Western Wildlife Unit’s arson attacks.
Kuipers paints a generally positive picture of Coronado, but he stops short of idealizing him or defending every Bite Back action. While rejecting the “terrorist” label for Coronado, he believes a few Bite Back actions were failures that either harmed living beings or came very close. Unlike most journalists who cover these issues, Kuipers isn’t smug or condescending when he makes these statements — that’s why it’s hard to dismiss his conclusions.
“Operation Bite Back” also calls attention to the rise of draconian “anti-terrorist” legislation in the United States, where offenses that once brought only a few years’ imprisonment for vandalism or mischief can result in decades-long sentences under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The deciding factor, Kuipers points out, is whether the accused person believes in a cause such as animal rights or Earth liberation.
Coronado dedicated his young life to both causes and succeeded in damaging the fur industry. If Kuipers is correct, the use of sweeping anti-terrorism laws to intimidate and harass activists is a direct result of that success.
No remorse in 2000
Coronado got out of prison in 1999 and appeared on the Toronto-based radio program “Animal Voices” in 2000. He expressed no remorse for choosing confrontational methods. When host Mirha-Soleil Ross asked why he’d targeted the fur industry, he talked about his Indigenous heritage as a descendant of the Pascua Yaqui people of northern Mexico.
Calling fur traders “the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the ‘new world,’” he told Ross the fur industry represented “cultural genocide.”
“So for me, I have an incredible empathy with the animals that are on fur farms and in the wild in steel-jaw leg hold traps because they are my relations and they are suffering just as my ancestors suffered,” he said. “And the fur trade today is the modern incarnation of those very same people who murdered and destroyed my people and my homelands.”
He also told Ross he’d never tried writing letters or signing petitions.
“There was no time for those animals suffering in labs and fur farms and factory farms to wait to exhaust more legal means,” he said.
Worn down
By 2003, Coronado had put his warrior days behind him but continued to participate in legal activism, giving talks to community groups around the United States. During one talk, someone in the audience asked how he’d made his incendiary devices and he picked up a jug of apple juice. He briefly explained how it could be filled with gasoline and turned into a cheap, effective arson implement.
In 2006, when he was busy raising two young children, he was arrested for destroying a mountain lion trap while out hiking. The trap was government property, and he was behind bars again.
That’s when the 2003 lecture came back to bite him. He was accused of promoting terrorism and threatened with 18 years in prison under newly introduced “sentencing enhancements.”
In 2007, his trial for “demonstrating how to make a destructive device with the intent that someone would commit arson” ended in a hung jury. But he’d delivered the same speech many times, in different states. The authorities “could just keep prosecuting him into oblivion,” Kuipers writes.
Worn down, Coronado pleaded guilty in exchange for a one-year sentence and was released on probation in 2009.
That is, until he accepted a friend request from an environmental activist on Facebook and went back to jail for four months for violating his parole.
Digging up an old book review
I reviewed “Operation Bite Back” for a graduate course in 2010 and posted my review on the website Animal Rescue Korea in 2011. Last year I contacted the site owner and obtained permission to reuse my old work. Upon rereading, I realized the piece needed an overhaul.
I didn’t reread “Operation Bite Back” — I’ve moved many times since 2011 and must have given my copy away — but I found other information about the case:
- a transcript of Coronado’s “Animal Voices” interview in issue No. 17 of the animal liberation newsletter Underground
- a first-person account of his Operation Bite Back experiences, written from prison
- a video of him speaking in 2003
- a 2010 interview with Kuipers on “Democracy Now” as Coronado was heading back to prison over the Facebook incident
- a 2017 report from the Detroit Free Press, looking back on the 1992 action at Michigan State
- footage of a 2009 lecture in which Kuipers talks about the book
- archived articles from Kuipers’ website
The 2017 story also mentioned Coronado’s role as the founder of Wolf Patrol, a group that monitors hunts in Wisconsin and reports illegal practices. The 2021 film “Operation Wolf Patrol” shows how Wolf Patrol operates and how “hunter harassment laws” make it easy for hunters to break the law. Before seeing the film, I was unaware that so many hunting dogs were killed by wolves in Wisconsin and that hunters regularly killed wolves to retaliate.
The filmmaker interviews Coronado’s parents, who continued to fear for his safety, since his advocacy for wolves often put him face to face with angry hunters. In one particularly moving scene, the middle-aged Coronado recalls how he turned his back on hunting as a teenager.
Reflecting on Operation Bite Back
Animal activists who’ve engaged in illegal direct action have argued persuasively against arson. Roger Yates and Ronnie Lee, vegan activists since the 1970s with a history of prison time for their confrontational tactics, assert in numerous podcasts and social media posts that it’s impossible to prevent harm to living beings in an arson attack, no matter how much care is taken.
Both Yates and Lee continue to stand up for animals through vegan outreach and remain dedicated to a rights-based ethic.
With that said, Kuipers is absolutely right when he says Coronado isn’t a terrorist and never should have been treated as one.
Kuipers’ warnings about civil liberties are more relevant now than ever. Bogus anti-terrorism laws are still being used to silence animal activists in many parts of the world, and “ag-gag laws” are in force across much of North America. These laws are designed to prevent activists from going undercover, and in some cases they even criminalize peaceful vigils outside slaughterhouses.
Coronado today
In a 2020 interview with vegan fitness podcaster Brenda Carey, Coronado talked about nonviolence, animal advocacy, environmental advocacy, Indigenous rights and Black Lives Matter. He said a lot of admirable things, but he also hinted that he’d stepped away from the animal rights movement.
A 2021 episode of the Cinematalk podcast, in which he appeared alongside Joe Brown, the filmmaker behind “Operation Wolf Patrol,” made his position clear:
“Wolf Patrol has never been an animal rights organization,” he told the podcaster. “We’ve always recognized responsible wildlife management is a valuable tool in preserving habitat.”
Coronado went on to explain why he thought the “subculture of hound hunting” was different, but he’d already lost me.
My thoughts as a reader
As an animal person who wasn’t part of any activist movement, I read the book with mixed feelings. As much as I shared Coronado’s rage for the victims, I wasn’t sure how to feel about Operation Bite Back.
On the other hand, I was incensed to read about the erosion of civil liberties — a problem that has only worsened since the book came out, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world.
By the end of “Operation Bite Back,” Coronado is no longer vegan. The revelation comes in 2006, when he’s looking at a possible 18-year prison sentence and has chosen to withdraw from the public eye. He not only renounces direct action but eats an omelet in front of Kuipers, who doesn’t press him for an explanation. Readers are left to make sense of it on their own.
Obviously I’m not about to judge Coronado as a person based on something that happened almost 20 years ago. (And the “Operation Wolf Patrol” blog mentions Coronado and the other members of Wolf Patrol starting the day with a vegan breakfast.) But that scene in the book, combined with his endorsement of hunting on the Cinematalk podcast, as well as other statements attributed to him over the years, leaves me scratching my head.
Direct action at sea
Maybe this is a good time to revisit my review of “Operation Bite Back.” Coronado’s childhood hero was Paul Watson, a founding member of Greenpeace who broke from the organization in 1977 and went on to found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society before starting his own foundation. Watson spent decades sailing the world to protect sea creatures — some might say enforcing vigilante justice. Coronado joined the Sea Shepherd’s crew as soon as he got the chance. In 1986, he and a colleague sank two whaling ships in an Icelandic harbor and Watson took responsibility.
No one was charged, Kuipers writes, because Iceland didn’t want to call attention to its whaling activities.
As of this writing, Watson is in detention in Greenland in connection with anti-whaling activities in the Antarctic in 2010. He faces the possibility of extradition to Japan and could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Letters and petitions aren’t enough, but sometimes they’re the only way to make our voices heard. This week I signed a petition to free Paul Watson and wrote to Mélanie Joly, the Canadian minister of foreign affairs, asking her to put pressure on the Danish authorities.
Paul Watson doesn’t deserve to be locked up, and supporting him now is the least we can do.
