Animal Wrongs

In all of the hoo-hah over the inauguration of Barack Obama, and the continued fall-out of Israel’s war crimes and atrocities in Gaza, the media in the UK hardly mentioned the sentencing of the SHAC activists, the people from the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty web site who were jailed for various terms between four and eleven years.

Heather Nicholson was jailed for eleven years. Gregg and Natasha Avery for nine years apiece. Gavin Medd-Hall for eight years; Daniel Wadham, five years; Gervals Selby and Dan Amos, four years each.

Now, you can well argue that these people were behind a vicious campaign against individual staff members of Huntingdon Life Sciences and its suppliers and sub-contractors. (Though, as a side-bar, some of the defendants claimed that they only pleaded “guilty” because they knew they wouldn’t get a fair trial anyway.) But even so, even if they were guilty of every last jot and syllable of the prosecution’s case, you have to also ask yourself: are these prison sentences just and proportionate?

According to the sentencing guidelines for manslaughter published by the Department of Justice, a review of 50 reported Court of Appeal sentence appeals between January 1990 and July 2004 showed that out of 50 cases, only two received sentences of more than ten years for manslaughter and the commonest sentence band was between three and five years. So how have we arrived at a situation where a handful of animal activists are given harsher sentences for letter-writing, demos, and general harassment than if they had committed manslaughter? Of course, you may feel that it is the manslaughter sentence which is too light, while the “SHAC 7” got what they deserved. That is, however, a different argument, and if you want tougher sentences all round, what are you going to use for prisons, since all the existing ones are fit to bust?

Returning to the disparity in the sentencing, I doubt that the judge sentenced the SHAC 7 to the terms he did as the first step in a nationwide campaign for stiffer sentences. The whole ethos of the trial, right from the start, right from the decision to charge them with conspiracy to blackmail, seems to have been motivated by just one aim: to teach these pesky activists a lesson. The judge even mentioned, in his summing up, balancing the right to protest with HLS’s “right to conduct animal experiments”. The inference we must inevitably draw from that is that it’s OK to protest, as long as you don’t become too effective at it. And there is no doubt that SHAC and its various hangers-on and adherents have been a thorn in the side of HLS.

But anyone hoping that this is the end of the matter is sadly mistaken. By his heavy-handed, disproportionate, that’ll-learn-them sentencing, the judge has handed SHAC an enormous boost. Already events have been held in support of the SHAC 7 and more will undoubtedly follow, as a whole raft of previously moderate people like me are motivated by the sheer injustice of the sentences to take part in the campaign to free them. It is the same process by which previously moderate Muslims become radicalised by seeing attacks on people of their faith in Iraq and in Gaza. Let us hope it does not have the same outcomes.

And the sentencing of the SHAC 7 will fail for another reason. Because, as with so much other state-sponsored repression, it only treats the symptom, not the disease. Why is no-one asking what failures in the democratic process led the SHAC organisation to take direct action in the first place? Many of us voted Labour in 1997 because we thought we were going to get a Royal Commission on Vivisection. Twelve years later, we are still waiting, and in the meantime the government has shown itself willing to act as the backer of last resort not only for HLS but also for the new Animal Experiments Laboratory in Oxford. The only significant Act in favour of animal welfare in twelve years of Labour rule has been the ban on fox-hunting, and even then Blair had to be virtually anaesthetised to get it through Parliament, and it has been policed and enforced half-heartedly ever since.

Is it any wonder, then, that SHAC take the view that it is morally indefensible to sit and wait decades for politicians to take action, and do nothing while animals in laboratories continue to suffer and die? You may not agree with their conclusions or their actions, but you would have to have the intellect of a breeze-block not to see how the situation has come about.

I believe (and therefore it is Bolshy Party Policy) that there are viable alternatives to animal experiments and all that stops their being developed, overall, is the lack of political will, and the fact that money and funding favours the status quo. Who in the scientific community is going to risk their research grant, their nice car, their house in the leafy suburbs of Oxford or Cambridge, by going out on a limb against animal testing?

If we want a truly just society, then justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. It would be a just outcome if the sentences of the SHAC 7 were reduced or rescinded on appeal, and it would be even more just if we were finally allowed the Royal Commission which we have so long been denied.

Small footnote: since I originally posted this, Mel Broughton, who was accused of conspiring to firebomb the new animal research labs at Oxford University, was sentenced to 10 years on 13 February at Oxford Crown Court. Convicted mainly on the links between improvised devices which failed to explode, and his DNA profile, Mel Broughton was the founder of the group Speak, which consistently demonstrated against the new labs and which used similar tasctics to those employed by SHAC against Huntingdon. The bomb which did go off caused £14,000 of damage.
If Mel Broughton was guilty, then however sympathetic one may feel to his motives, nevertheless he should be punished, because no one can be bigger than the law. But in return for our respect for the law the legal system and the establishment, as with the cases of the SHAC7, must ensure that sentences passed are proportionate and are not seen as punitive collective punishment, because otherwise a whole new set of activists will be incentivised by the thought that they have nothing to lose.