Animal rights activists are a stain on our society. Whatever the public sympathy for their cause, they dissipate it with their violent and repugnant methods. Who could support those who dug up Gladys Hammond’s body because her relatives ran a farm breeding guinea pigs for medical research? After years of hate mail, malicious telephone calls, hoax bombs and arson attacks, the theft of her remains was a terrible crime. The farm has stopped breeding the animals but her body has yet to be returned. Or what of Leapfrog Day Nurseries? It was threatened with violence for operating a childcare scheme for Huntingdon Life Sciences, the activists’ bête noire.

The tactics of the Animal Liberation Front, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty and others should concern us all. From targeting the companies themselves, they gradually spread the net. In the case of Huntingdon, they successfully went after its bankers. The home of a GlaxoSmithKline executive was firebombed, with his wife and daughter at home, because of his firm’s links to Huntingdon. The effect is to damage Britain commercially and to hinder research that is essential to medical breakthroughs. It also drives scientists away from this country. Activists last week planted incendiary devices at Oxford University in protest over the proposed South Parks Laboratory. The government, which has repeatedly emphasised its commitment to science and to defeating animal rights terrorism, has done little to protect the victims of these actions.

Yet scientists and these companies can be their own worst enemies. An activists’ target is a Scottish laboratory testing the safety of breast implants by sewing them into rabbits’ bodies. Is this necessary? It smacks of the smoking beagles of the past, or of concentrated shampoo being dripped into the eyes of defenceless animals. Testing drugs on animals that can be used to save lives or stop debilitating diseases is justified. But we should ask serious questions about making animals suffer purely for cosmetic reasons.

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