In Your Neighbor Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement author Tom Harris has written a comprehensive history of the battles won and lost in the UK, US and around the world as animal rights activists fought to free animals from testing laboratories and put the vivisection industry out of business. Harris is an authoritative voice on behalf of the activists having participated firsthand in many of these battles.
Harris begins with the origins of the movement, in 1996, when Gregg Avery and Heather Nicholson began a campaign to shut down Consort Bio Services near Hereford, England, a lab that bred beagle puppies for vivisection laboratories. Through protests, vigils, and leafletting, their organization grew in numbers and effectiveness until Consort could take no more, shutting down a year later. This victory was preamble to a much-larger foe: Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), an animal testing lab with high-level ties to the UK government.
Activists branded the campaign Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which would last more than a decade and prompt governments on both sides of the Atlantic to respond with draconian laws that continue to silence peaceful protests today.
SHAC was endlessly creative in its efforts — targeting politicians, animal transporters, banks — anyone with connections to HLS. HLS eventually established a lab in New Jersey as one way of escaping home-grown resistance. Which led to the formation of SHAC USA, founded by Kevin Kjonas. In the inaugural newsletter he wrote:
We’re a new breed of activism. We’re not your parents’ Humane Society. We’re not Friends of Animals. We’re not Earthsave. We’re not Greenpeace. We come with a new philosophy. We hold the radical line. We will not compromise. We will not apologize, and we will not relent.
And they did not relent. While some may take issue with the techniques these activists used nobody could argue that animals weren’t being put through unimaginable forms of torture.
As in the UK labs, the New Jersey lab was no less cruel. Violence to animals had become so institutionalized that fatal mistakes were awarded with “diamond club” membership. Meaning if you inserted chemicals into a beagle’s lung instead of stomach resulting in death, you were rewarded in this perverse way. Psychologists could not doubt teach a seminar in how seemingly normal humans turn evil in environments in which empathy is viewed as a liability. Much like working in a slaughterhouse, I can only imagine the trauma that employees, who simply needed a job, had to endure. And, yes, they could have quit. Many did, but it took outsiders — some acting as insiders — to shine light on the systemic abuses.
Kim Basinger used her fame to rescue 36 beagles from the New Jersey lab “due to be mutilated on behalf of the Japanese pharmaceutical company Yamanouchi.” Specifically, the lab would have forcibly broken the dogs’ legs in order to learn whether a drug would have affected bone healing. As the author notes, these animals don’t get put back together in the end; they get put down.
While reading this book I kept thinking that the animal activists would soon emerge victorious. Huntingdon was running out of friends in high places and was financially hanging by a thread.
Then came 9/11.
From that day forward, any animal rights protestor could be labelled a terrorist. And in a few years the US government, pressured by the animal and pharmaceutical industries, passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The law effectively turned peaceful protestors into criminals so long as they were protesting an “animal enterprise.” Even handing out leaflets could be cause for prosecution. The FBI arrested 7 activists who came to be known as the SHAC 7.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that so many animal lives were sacrificed not for saving human lives but for checking boxes. An increasing number of scientists have since gone public with data that prove animal testing adds little to no scientific value, that it does not actually protect humans. Harris writes: “A career vivisector told me data from animal research is easily manipulated, and that the industry relies on that susceptibility to meet goals and metrics.”
This 400-page book can feel overwhelming at times with the many names and protests and places, but I felt it was important to document everyone involved as they sacrificed so much: jobs, relationships and, at times, their freedom. Harris writes:
Amidst hundreds of arrests and prosecutions across the globe, between 2000 and 2020, there were just twelve weeks without an anti-HLS activist in prison; in 2010 over a dozen campaigners languished in jail in the UK alone.
Sadly, HLS did not go bankrupt. Animal testing did not come to an end. HLS was acquired by a company that you may be familiar with: LabCorp. LabCorp claims to treat animals “humanely” — which is not the word I would use. The lab was fined $9,000 last year by the USDA for a crime better left unmentioned here.
One might say that all those years, all those protests, all those years in prison were for nothing. The bad guys won.
I would say the bad guys might have won the battle, but the war is still being fought. This book documents a critical period in the evolution of animal rights — one in which the public could no longer be in denial about what happened to animals within these laboratories. Ultimately, this book is a call to action for the next generation of animal activists.
John is co-author, with Midge Raymond, of the Tasmanian mystery Devils Island. He is also author of the novels The Tourist Trail and Where Oceans Hide Their Dead. Co-founder of Ashland Creek Press and editor of Writing for Animals (also now a writing program).
