The Animal Defense League organized a 100-person strong protest outside a Huntingdon Life Sciences facility in New Jersey just one day after 14 dogs were stolen from the lab. The Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility for the theft.
Three people were arrested at the protest including Adam Weissman, 23; Nicholas Hensey, 22; Justin Kelley, 18; and an unidentified juvenile. Police said Darius Fullmer, 24, would be served with a summons after he was released from the hospital. Fullmer was one of about a dozen protesters who police sprayed with pepper spray to subdue.
Fullmer — one of the main organizers the protest — told an Associated Press reporter that the ADL fully supported the ALF action. “Fourteen innocent creatures have been rescued from a short life of pain and a brutal death.”
In a press release, Frankie Trull of the Foundation for Biomedical Research condemned the theft of the dogs,
This burglary and theft is the act of misguided, uninformed radicals who respect neither the law nor the vast body of medical and scientific knowledge that animal research has contributed to the field of human and animal health.
Unless the general public firmly rejects this criminal malfeasance and the hooligan perpetrators behind it, all medical and scientific progress is at risk. The anti-research cell of the animal rights movement would have you believe that pets are being subjected to painful experiments with no scientific validity but nothing could be further from the truth.
At the New Jersey protest, many of the activists joined in chanting, “We know where you live” to the occupants of the laboratory. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, activists opposed to HLS are successfully using terrorist tactics to go after companies attempting to work with HLS.
Winterflood Securities, one of only two firms in Great Britain willing to deal in shares of the troubled company, recently dropped HLS after animal rights activists engaged in an intense campaign of abusive and threatening calls to Winterflood employees’ homes combined with picketing outside their homes.
The Daily Telegraph quoted an unidentified Winterflood executive describing the firm’s problems,
[The wife of the chairman of the company received threatening phone calls.] She had never heard such abusive language. They were phoning other employees as well. They said we know where you live. We know where your children live. We know where your friends live.
It became too difficult. one director returned to his home on Sunday with his seven-year-old and two-year-old and found 60 protesters there. His kids were in tears. His wife was terrified. The 80-year-old mother of one employee received threatening phone calls. It is all right for us to be brave, but different for our wives and kids.
Feeling it had no choice after the government refused its request for the level of police protection it felt it required, Winterflood Securities announced it would no longer trade HLS stock. Shortly afterward, the only other brokerage house dealing in the stock in the United Kingdom, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, also announced it would no longer handle trades of the stock.
Sources:
Extremists terrorise animal lab brokers. Richard Alleyne, The Daily Telegraph (UK), March 30, 2001.
Four activists arrested. Lori Hinnant, Associated Press, April 3, 2001.
Foundation for Biomedical Research Condemns Theft Of 14 Dogs From The Huntingdon Life Sciences Facility. Foundation for Biomedical Research, Press Relesae, April 2, 2001.
Dogs taken from frequently protested lab. The Associated Press, April 1, 2001.