Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) is an international animal rights campaign to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory. HLS tests medical and non-medical substances on around 75,000 animals every year, from rats to primates. It has been the subject of several major leaks or undercover investigations by activists and reporters since 1989.
SHAC was started in November 1999 by three British animal rights activists — Greg Avery, Heather James, and Natasha Dellemagne — after video footage shot covertly inside HLS in 1997 by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) showed HLS staff shaking, punching, and shouting at beagles in their care. The footage was broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK, the employees were dismissed and prosecuted, and HLS's licence to perform animal experiments was revoked for six months. PETA stopped its protests against the company after HLS threatened it with legal action, and SHAC took over as a leaderless resistance.
The campaign has used tactics ranging from non-violent protest to the alleged firebombing of houses owned by executives associated with HLS's clients and investors. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors US domestic extremism, has described SHAC's modus operandi as "frankly terroristic tactics similar to those of anti-abortion extremists," and in 2005 an official with the FBI's counter-terrorism division referred to SHAC's activities in the United States as domestic terrorist threats. In 2009 and 2010, 13 members of SHAC, including Avery, James, and Dellemagne, were jailed for between 15 months and eleven years on charges of conspiracy to blackmail or harm HLS and its suppliers.
Read more about Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty: Background, Convictions and Legislation
Famous quotes containing the words stop, animal and/or cruelty:
“They can stop me from being ordained, but they can’t stop me from being a priest.”
—Nancy Small (b. 1963)
“... these great improvements of modern times are blessings or curses on us, just in the same ratio as the mental, moral, and religious rule over the animal; or the animal propensities of our nature predominate over the intellectual and moral. The spider elaborates poison from the same flower, in which the bee finds materials out of which she manufactures honey.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)
“What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what
Is a theatre? are they two and not one? can they exist separate?
Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion,
O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!”
—William Blake (1757–1827)