On Monday 27th July, animal rights campaigners occupied a piece of land near the entrance of the now infamous Highgate rabbit farm in Lincolnshire and set up a small protest camp that lasted for seven days. The aim of the Highgate Camp was to protest against the farm’s breeding rabbits and ferrets for the vivisection industry. Highgate Farm is known to have supplied several animal testing laboratories, including the notorious Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). In conjunction with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), the campers called for the closure of the farm and for the farm’s owner, Geoffrey Douglas, to hand the animals over to suitable organisations for rehousing.

Despite the presence of a riot police van and a helicopter hovering overhead, the camp was largely peaceful - except for an intimidating member of the South Yorkshire police intelligence gathering unit, who spent his time surreptitiously trying to take pictures for, as some campers put it, “his activists Top Trumps collection”.

On the second day of the camp, representatives from the local council went to the camp site and threatened the campers with court and forcible eviction. Yet the following day, the council representatives returned with seemingly changed ideas and appeared happy for the campers to stay , even providing them with bin bags.

On the third night, a shot rabbit with a rope tied around its neck was thrown at the camp from the direction of the farm. Campers reported the incident and detectives from the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) arrived at the farm to question the farmer. A defiant statement from one of the campaigners read: “This kind of pathetic intimidation doesn’t put us off; it just makes us more angry with what [the farmer] does.”

To the surprise of many, the camp was met with a rather positive reception from local residents, some of whom apparently put up posters calling for a national demonstration against Highgate Farm around villages in the area. Stafford police were reportedly concerned by such local support, ‘worrying’ that Highgate could be the beginning of ‘a new Newchurch’, in reference to the six-year campaign to close a guinea pig farm in Newchurch, Staffordshire. The camp also received some positive coverage in the local press.

Highgate Farm first came to light in January 2008, when animal rights activists entered the farm and released 129 rabbits, allegedly causing £70,000 worth of damage to the farm and its vehicles. As previously reported by Corporate Watch, the farm stopped supplying rabbits for animal testing after the action and was planning to close the business down. However, the police seemingly put pressure on the farmer to resume supplying rabbits to laboratories, including Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), to prevent campaigners claiming that their actions resulted in victory.

On 13th October, 2008, four people were arrested after their car was stopped in Lincolnshire, with CCTV footage later showing that they had trespassed on the property of Highgate Farm. The four were later charged with ‘conspiracy to commit criminal damage’ and the new controversial Section 145 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA), ‘conspiracy to interfere with contractual relations so as to harm an animal research organisation’. In May 2009, one of the defendants was found not guilty, while the other three pleaded guilty to reduced charges and await sentencing.

As part of a global week of action against vivisection breeders, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) has called for a national demonstration, dubbed ‘Operation Liberation’ at Highgate Farm on 26th September, in an attempt to save the rest of the animals and close the business down. Highgate Farm is one of only five known remaining breeders of animals for laboratories in the UK.

Despite concerted police repression, the campaigning against HLS has been gathering strength across the world. Earlier this month, the hunting lodge of the Chairman and CEO of Novartis, a top HLS customer, in Austria was destroyed by fire. A group called the Militant Forces Against HLS (MFAH) claimed responsibility for the arson in an anonymous communique, calling on the pharmaceutical multinational to sever all ties with HLS. MFAH had previously targeted Novartis in France and Germany.

More recently, a group called Win Animal Rights (WAR) launched a campaign to put pressure on another top HLS investor in the US, Morgan Stanley, to divest from LSR, HLS’s trading name. On 1st August, peaceful demonstrations were held at the homes of five Morgan Stanley executives, as well as the two co-presidents of the company. Five days later, a large demonstration was held at the Morgan Stanley headquarters in New York, followed by visits to the homes of a number of senior executives. Within a week of the campaign, Morgan Stanley sold all its 679,225 shares in LSR.

The campaigns and actions are clearly creating difficulties for HLS, to the extent that the company’s CEO, Andrew Baker, has recently announced his plans to acquire HLS and make it a privately held company. It would, therefore, be delisted from the NYSE stock exchange, which has been a central target of the campaign. As an update posted on the SHAC website put it, the announcement “makes it abundantly clear that activists have had a tremendous impact on LSR/HLS’s financial predicament[...] limiting their options for the future.”