In 1999, animal rights activists claimed they would shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences with three years. Last year, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty issued claim after claim that HLS was on its last legs and its demise was imminent.
Which is odd considering that HLS recently reported that for the first three months of 2002, its orders were up 46 percent and its revenues increased 15 percent. HLS still had a pre-tax loss of $4.1 million, but that compares quite favorably to its pre-tax $6.1 million loss during the same period of 2001.
HLS marketing director Andrew Gay told the Financial Times of London that May 2002 was the best month ever for the company and that it is gaining more business as, “A lot of pharmaceuticals companies are realizing that they need to improve their drug development pipelines and we are benefiting from that.”
As Mark Matfield noted in an op-ed for Chemistry & Industry, SHAC seems to have won the battle for media attention, but lost the war to shut down the company as HLS has rebounded over the past year.
And certainly part of that has been SHAC’s increasingly extremist tactics causing other companies to realize that if HLS does fail, the SHAC folks will take that as an indication that their tactic work and move on to harassing other companies.
Sources:
Corporate recovery for drugs testing company. Patrick Jenkins, Financial Times of London.
Animal rights & wrongs. Mark Matfield, Chemistry & Industry, June 17, 2002.