Huntingdon Life Sciences

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Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) is a contract animal-testing company founded in 1952 in England, now with facilities in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and Eye, Suffolk in the United Kingdom, New Jersey in the United States, and Japan. The largest such commercial operation in Europe, it conducts tests on around 75,000 animals every year — mostly rats but also 750 dogs and 190 primates [1] — testing pharmaceutical products, agricultural chemicals, industrial chemicals, and foodstuffs on behalf of private clients worldwide.

Huntingdon has been under intense pressure since 1999, when a group of British animal rights activists set up Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), an international campaign to close the company down. The campaign was started after film shot secretly inside Huntingdon, and shown on British television, showed staff punching and laughing at the animals in their care. [2] (video) Since then the company has suffered a severe financial downturn and several of its staff and customers have been subject to direct action that has sometimes been illegal and even violent.

1 History
2 Controversy
- 2.1 Direct action
- 2.2 Effect of campaign
3 Further reading

[edit] History

Originally the company concentrated on nutrition, veterinary and biochemical research. An expansion of services in the late 1950s led to the testing of pharmaceuticals, crop protection products, food additives and a variety of industrial and consumer chemicals. This set the company on its present path to becoming a leading provider of toxicology testing.

HLS's managing directory, Brian Cass, was awarded the CBE in 2002 for services to medical research and in May 2003, the company was accredited by the Association For Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC). [3]

[edit] Controversy

Huntingdon is criticized by animal rights and animal welfare groups for documented instances of animal abuse and for the wide range of substances it tests on animals, particularly non-medical products.

The company's labs have been infiltrated by undercover animal rights activists several times since the 1980s. In 1997, film secretly recorded inside HLS in the UK by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) showed serious breaches of animal-protection laws, including a beagle puppy being held up by the scruff of the neck and repeatedly punched in the face, and animals being taunted. The investigation led to the company's Home Office licence being revoked in April 1997 for six months. At the time, the company's shares stood at £1.13: within three years they were worth 2.5 pence. Huntingdon officials claimed, in their defence, that these breaches were isolated cases [4] and that the staff responsible were sacked and prosecuted.

Since then, the company's labs have been accused by animal-rights supporters of a similar offense in the United States, with film shot inside HLS in 1997 in the U.S. purporting to show a monkey being dissected whilst alive. [5] [6] (video)

Huntingdon appears to be supported by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A spokesman for Blair told the BBC: "The prime minister is very pro-science in relation to this." [7] The company has argued that if their research is stopped in Britain, it may be moved elsewhere, to a country with less rigorous animal-protection legislation and with a loss of British jobs.

[edit] Direct action

Main article: Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty

The Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, (SHAC) campaign is based in the UK and U.S., and aims to close the company down. According to its website, the campaign's methods are restricted to non-violent direct action, as well as lobbying and demonstrations. It targets not only HLS itself, but any company, institution, or person doing business with the laboratory, whether as clients, suppliers, or even disposal and cleaning services.

Despite its stated non-violent position, SHAC has been accused of encouraging arson and violent assault. Huntingdon's managing director, Brian Cass, was attacked in February 2001 by three men armed with pickaxe handles and CS gas. [8]. SHAC and Animal Liberation Front activists are known to have been responsible for harassment; trespass; vandalism; and intimidation, with death-threat letters and hoax bomb threats. [9] The Daily Mail cites as an example the sending of 500 letters to the neighbours of a company manager who did business with HLS. The letter warned parents to keep their children away from the man because, it alleged, he had raped the letter writer when she was a child. The police informed all 500 households that the allegations made were false. [10]

The results of the direct action have sometimes been more serious. Threats have been made against the Chiron corporation which animal rights groups say has connections with Huntingdon. The corporation received an e-mail from a group calling itself "Revolutionary Cells," which said "We gave all of the customers the chance, the choice, to withdraw their business from HLS. Now you all will have to reap what you have sown. All customers and their families are considered legitimate targets." This was followed by two bomb blasts at the corporation's headquarters in Emeryville, California. [11] There is no proven link between Revolutionary Cells and SHAC.

Animal rights supporters have been served with a High Court injunction preventing them from harassing Chiron's UK staff in or around their homes. [12]

[edit] Effect of campaign

Campaigns against Huntingdon claim to have succeeded in harming the company financially. In 2000, SHAC obtained a list of HLS shareholders, including the names of beneficial owners: anonymous individuals and companies who bought shares in the name of a third party. These included the British Labour Party pension funds, Rover cars, and the London Borough of Camden.

The list was passed to the Sunday Telegraph, which published it on December 3, 2000, and several beneficial owners disposed of their shares, including the Labour Party. Two weeks later, an equity stake of 32 million shares was placed on the London Stock Exchange for one penny each and HLS quotes crashed. The Royal Bank of Scotland closed HLS's bank account and the British government arranged for the state-owned Bank of England to give them an account, because no other bank would do business with them. The British Banking Association said "Huntingdon Life Sciences are in a nightmare situation," (Huntingdon Life Sciences, financial report 2002). [13] (pdf)

On December 21, 2000, HLS was dropped from the New York Stock Exchange because of its share collapse: its market capitalization had fallen below NYSE limits and the NYSE did not accept HLS's revised business plan. [14] On March 29, 2001, Huntingdon lost both of its market makers and its place on the main platform of the London Stock Exchange.

HLS later decided to move its financial centre to the United States to take advantage of stricter U.S. securities laws, which allow greater anonymity for shareholders. It incorporated in Maryland as Life Sciences Research, Inc. and was saved from bankruptcy when its largest shareholder, American investment bank Stephens, Inc, gave the company a $15-million loan. HLS's position remains unstable, as is shown by its $87.5-million debt and by documents leaked to SHAC. [15] On September 7, 2005, the New York stock exchange asked Life Sciences Research/HLS to delay its listing. The company had been listed on the junior OTC bulletin board since its move out of the UK. The NYSE offered no reason for the delay, [16] and on February 4, 2006, the company lost its only listed market maker, Legacy Trading. As a result, it can no longer trade on the OTC Bulletin Board.