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Drawing upon Niklas Luhmann's theoretical work, this article considers the strategic and tactical use of contingent communication within Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty's (SHAC) communication subsystem network. While acknowledging the importance of system stability to the functioning of social systems, the article pinpoints Luhmann's underestimation of uncertainties within communication as a significant error in theorizing relationships between systems and their environments. It also considers how new media and information communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled SHAC, a British-based though internationally renowned animal rights protest group, to both reinforce the universal connections existing between all its communicating agents and maintain the operation of communication within the social subsystem. Through a critical examination of the eight stages of SHAC's communication subsystem network, the article underscores how these communicative forms are constantly displaced by context, user, medium and receiver, because indeterminacies are constitutive of communication.

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This article reflects upon the experience of conducting research into a UK-based, though internationally-renowned, animal rights group. The article firstly rationalizes the ethnographic research methodology used to approach Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). Secondly, it describes the effect of unforeseen factors (from adverse media attention to ongoing criminal investigations) on the Author's ability to forge research relationships with informants within the movement, and how these challenges were overcome. Given the interdisciplinary focus of the project, this manuscript will be of interest to scholars wishing to investigate ‘hard-to-reach’ social groups, and particularly those who have written on reflexivity and power in research relationships.