The horrors inside HLS
I saw no signposts to the place: Huntingdon Life Sciences. It isn't supposed to be found. It took us quite a while to get there after leaving the town of Huntingdon, having taken a few wrong turnings. The road leading to HLS has been off-limits for four years, but the injunction permits access past the police barriers once or twice a year, I believe, for national protests.
We crossed an archaic bridge in a pretty hamlet and were shortly on the highway when all of a sudden the countryside and all that is natural about it seemed to have called a halt. Winds blew instead over a landscape of sparse open fields with no trees or anything in sight on either side except for what appeared on the horizon to be two thin chimneys rising against the skyline and, beneath these, some low, flat, barrack-style buildings. This was Animal Auschwitz, in the middle of nowhere. I had grave and sombre feelings as I knew we were getting close and hoped that the place would not appear over the next bend. I didn't want to see it, knowing what takes place there. The vast majority of drivers past this monstrosity are as ignorant of it as its absence from any signposts would have them to be. Those of us in the know cannot help but be overcome with revulsion at the very thought of it, let alone the sight.
The presence of police vehicles alerted me to the fact that we had now arrived. The wind starting to batter, we parked, and walked the thirty minutes or so down the long winding lane to the death factory. Our parked vehicles stretching into the distance showed us our numbers - several hundred people not about to stay silent in the face of the obscene existence that is HLS. I thought, shame on the silent and the passive, whose cowardice underpins this place.
Then the razor-sharp barbed wire atop the steel barriers and the ditches bear testimony, only feet from where we stand, to the nature of what goes on within; what is going on, only feet from us, as we stand there, looking at this dead place. I glimpse a dirty old rag hanging on a peg through a grimy window. Eerie silence and the imagination testify to whatever else lies within. (The only thing to differentiate the place from its human-holding equivalents is the absence of machine-gun nests). The wind blowing. Silence. Nothing. Death. And we hear the facts:
Thousands of animals lie cowed within at any one time. The flat, barrack-style buildings contain rodents here, beagles there. There are primates too; all manner of sentient, suffering beings lie in cages within: bloody, poisoned, fearful, terrorised, alone, dying slowly from inflicted wounds in the name of "research". Around 500 every day are killed when their tortured bodies have no room for further abuse.
Even most vivisectors and most companies will not touch HLS; will not dare to defend it. It is known as the lowest of the low. Secret footage taken by former employees of HLS, sickened and repelled by what they saw, showed other, laughing, employees swinging beagle puppies by the scruff and punching them in the face. These puppies are wrenched still unweaned from their mothers at the Interfauna breeding and supply facility near HLS and handed to HLS for vivisection and abuse for the remainder of their brief lives before they are killed and dumped in the incinerator. HLS staff have the audacity to invite schoolchildren and their parents inside on special days to play with these puppies as a sick PR tactic. (The children can then get into mum and dad's car and be driven home with "happy memories" as, behind them in HLS, the tubes are driven down the throats of the puppies they've played with, who are then injected with toxins - on an average of nine times a day - poisoned, wounded, and finally killed.)
HLS also places ads for staff in the local press to attract young employment hopefuls with wording such as: "Would you like to work with animals?" The young and desperate unemployed are targeted because they can be more easily moulded, brutalised and desensitized from the moment they set foot in HLS, where they are taught disrespect for life and indoctrinated with the callousness which accompanies such an attitude. HLS hence produces thugs and potential criminals out of the raw material of young minds and hearts, poisoning them and crushing their souls as they set out on life. The social consequences of this alone don't bear thinking about.
Most UK investors have now pulled out of this foul enterprise and HLS now relies largely on foreign investments. Nonetheless, as Round 3 of the fight against HLS begins (and the presence on this Saturday, November 10th, of hundreds of demonstrators, proves opposition has far from dissipated as HLS would have us believe), with this monstrous institution at last on the ropes, we cannot and must not ease our vigilance. Anti-HLS marches took place likewise on this day on the west coast of the USA, in Holland and in Spain, sending a clear message that this institutionalised animal abuse will not be tolerated by ethical, thinking, feeling people of the 21st century. The shame lies with those in Britain who harbour HLS in their very midst and do nothing.
Are you in? Or are you in denial? Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.
Join SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty): www.shac.net
SHAC, c/o FRIEND, 89 Bush Rd, E. Peckham, Tonbridge, Kent, TN12 5LJ. Tel: 0845 4580630.