Animal Rights Activists, branded terrorists and sold to bounty hunters

international | animal rights | news report

Saturday July 24, 2004 11:21

by Akrasia

Britains richest vivisectionists attempt to buy the freedom of concerned activists

There is now a £25,000,000 bounty on information leading to the conviction of 'animal rights fanatics' to 'sow dissent' in their ranks

(from "The Times" 24/07/04)

£25m bounty to combat animal rights terrorists
By Ingrid Mansell

City grandees offer cash reward for information leading to arrests

THE City is preparing a counter-attack on animal rights fanatics by offering a £25 million cash reward for information leading to the conviction of extremists.
A leading City organisation, whose members control pension funds worth £650 billion, is assembling a “steering committee” of six leading businessmen to prevent a repeat of the type of campaign that drove Huntingdon Life Sciences, the animal testing group, to the brink of bankruptcy and out of Britain.

The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) is expected shortly to announce the names of the six who are believed to include chief executives and bankers.

A City lawyer close to the NAPF said that the offer of a huge financial reward would “sow the seeds of dissidence among the ranks”. He said that the City is also planning other tactics to combat the extremists.

The committee is considering multimillion-pound civil lawsuits against extremists who threatened company shareholders and executives, and extremists who destroy company property. “This is intimidation, which is a criminal offence, and should be dealt with by the police,” the lawyer told The Times.

“We are not trying to be an alternative to the police force, we are going to work to complement the efforts of the police and the bioscience industry. However, the option of civil remedies is still open to us.”

The lawyer, who asked not to be named, said that the NAPF had been looking at the problem of animal rights extremism for several years, but had finally “resolved to do something about it” in the face of the growing threat of animal rights terrorism.

Senior police officers have told The Times that an increasing number of animal rights supporters have passed on information about extremists inside their ranks who are planning attacks on leading figures in the research field.

Disillusioned supporters oppose the tactic of harassing opponents and their families at their homes, and fire-bombing companies that support or supply research centres.

This revelation comes as hundreds of animal rights activists are expected to stage their biggest demonstration in years at Oxford University today. The university is the latest target for their increasingly violent campaign as they try to stop building work on a research centre there.

This week Montpellier, the construction company, pulled out of a contract to build the £18 million research laboratory as a result of the campaign.

The move came after Cambridge University abandoned plans to build a neuroscience centre in January.

Montpellier was targeted by extremists last month, when a letter purporting to be from company directors threatened its shareholders with “prompt activity by the animal rights movement” unless they sold their shares. The shares then fell by 19 per cent to a four-year low of 18p.

RMC, the building materials supplier that was providing concrete for Montpellier, was also subjected to a series of attacks by the extremists.

Attacks on companies with links to animal testing research centres have risen in recent months, and more people’s homes have been targeted. Extremists pick on anyone who has anything to do with controversial projects, including shareholders of construction firms.

In the first four months of the year, the Home Office said that there were 117 arrests of animal rights extremists compared with 15 for the same period in 2003. There were 148 cases of damage done to property last year compared with 60 in 2002.

Perhaps the biggest worry for those working in this field is that visits by extremists to the homes of company directors and employees doubled last year to 259.

By April this year there had been 54 such attacks on people’s homes.

Groups such as the Research Defence Society want the Government to introduce new laws to protect those working in this field.

Mark Matfield, director of the Research Defence Society, said: “Extremists are terrorising people and getting away with it.

“While the Home Secretary threatens draconian moves against football hooligans and victims of race crime, those targeted for being involved in this vital field of research are never mentioned”.