The single biggest SHAC takeaway is that it’s best to build campaigns and movements that can be at least tolerated, if not supported, by the wider public. The MBR Suppliers campaign and CAFT’s wins demonstrate that the power of pressure campaigning remains as fertile as ever. Focusing on these winnable, single-issue campaigns is great for building our skills and strength as a movement. By removing the low-hanging fruit, we change public opinion on the wider issue and clear a path for bigger fights and bigger wins. Toppling not just fur, testing on animals, and racing of greyhounds, but pulling down the entire empire of farming animals.
TOM HARRIS: It started with undercover footage of a beagle being punched in the face by a laboratory worker. It was some of the first footage from inside a UK lab that tested on animals. The story was all over the media. The public were outraged. Protest marches were held involving thousands of animal lovers. And share prices of the laboratory went into free-fall.
Many of us within the animal freedom movement saw this as the unique opportunity that it was – a chance to close down the largest animal testing laboratory in Europe. And so SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) was formed.
While many of the laboratories HLS owned remain open, SHAC did close down HLS as a company. They also saw many secondary victories along the way, including the Bank of England being forced to do something it has never done before or since – it stepped in to bail out a private company.
Despite extreme state crackdown that saw many organisers jailed for legal protest (myself included) and the subsequent crumbling of the grassroots in the years that followed due to state repression, SHAC still offers the modern animal freedom movement many lessons we can learn from…
There were two key strategies that made SHAC such an effective model: Firstly, SHAC made it their business to understand every cog that was needed to keep the facility open. Rather than simply shouting at the laboratory itself, we took the protest to secondary targets: customers, suppliers, shareholders, and investors who HLS needed but who didn’t need them…
Secondly, SHAC recognised that a company – whether HLS or its collaborators – is simply a collection of individuals. Among those individuals are those making bad decisions, as well as those with the power to undo them. SHAC took the protest directly to these individuals, outside their homes, at their theatre nights, to sporting events they sponsored, and even, in one case, their swimming pools…
While SHAC didn’t close down all of HLS’s laboratories, we did close down HLS itself. The firm never recovered from SHAC and was forced into a merger, then a complete buyout. While, in practical terms, this is a loss, it does demonstrate the power of the SHAC model. A small group of volunteers, backed by a few thousand supporters, shut down a multinational corporation…
What went wrong? SHAC became a victim of its own success. By challenging Big Pharma and their financiers with influence in international government, SHAC lit a fuse. Governments decided SHAC had to be shut down, and using a network of police spies, planted evidence, and state violence, they crushed the anti-vivisection movements across the US, UK, and Europe. In the UK alone, campaign organisers were collectively sentenced to over 100 years in prison…
The biggest mistake of SHAC was focusing entirely on the fight in front of us rather than winning the public’s hearts and minds. The reason for this oversight was simple: SHAC was entirely unfunded, with a small team of volunteers who devoted every waking moment to the campaign. With such a bold vision, we simply didn’t have time or capacity to focus on PR. Nonetheless, mobilisation remained in the thousands until the government crackdown. The main failure was that SHAC allowed the state to isolate us from the public and natural allies in the progressive left, meaning when laws were changed and activists rounded up en masse, no one spoke out in our defence…
How can we apply these lessons now? We have a model that gives us the power to close down companies, sever sectors of industry, and change the law. It feels critical that we seize it and harness it.
The single biggest takeaway is that it’s best to build campaigns and movements that can be at least tolerated, if not supported, by the wider public. SHAC existed before social media. Even the internet and mobile phones were still in their infancy. The grassroots space was unfunded, populated by volunteers, and the concept of veganism was alien to most of the public. Their ‘any means necessary’ attitude was driven by necessity…
The MBR Suppliers campaign and CAFT’s wins demonstrate that the power of pressure campaigning remains as fertile as ever. Focusing on these winnable, single-issue campaigns is great for building our skills and strength as a movement. By removing the low-hanging fruit, we change public opinion on the wider issue and clear a path for bigger fights and bigger wins. And for many in our movement, there are dreams of more. Of toppling not just fur, testing on animals, and racing of greyhounds, but pulling down the entire empire of farming animals. SOURCE
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