The Complete Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty UK Newsletters

Since the release of The Animal People documentary there has been a renewed interest in the legacy of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. Unfortunately the film’s focus on the trial of the SHAC 7 in the United States has left many people with no knowledge of the international campaign. Luckily Tom Harris, a former SHAC prisoner from England, is righting that wrong with a new written history of the various campaigns against HLS. He has taken the effort to scan a number of newsletters during his research and has kindly shared the documents with us.

It is difficult to contextualize this publication for newcomers. The SHAC UK newsletters were at once an internal and external mode of communication written with a tongue in cheek militancy and that tabloid style so specific to England. The campaigners who received the newsletter were in on the joke: the customers of HLS who had their information published in each issue were not. The layout, design, page count, and paper quality of the magazine changed every so often, not only due to new staffing and equipment over its run, but also due to arrests, raids, budget constraints, and the problem of finding printers who had not yet been put off by police inquiries and harassment.

Buried in these pages are the day to day protests and mischief that, added together, made up years of global campaigning against a multinational animal abuser. Mistakes were made, new tactics were developed, and along the way company after company fell to the onslaught of a movement united in a single goal. This collection is a time machine that allows us to watch history as it was made.