“Your Neighbour Kills Puppies,” by Tom Harris (vegan), Part 1 of 2

British animal-people rights activist, artist, and author Tom Harris has been involved in the animal-people liberation movement for over 20 years. His first book, “Your Neighbour Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement,” tells the remarkable story of the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign to close Europe’s largest contract animal-folk testing laboratory. Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) is Europe’s largest contract animal-people testing company, conducting experiments on about 180,000 animal-individuals annually, including rat-, rabbit-, pig-, dog-, and primate-folks. HLS came under scrutiny in 1989 when the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection exposed its practices, followed by several undercover investigations from groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

In 2001, Tom Harris, then still a teenager, experienced what he described as the most emotionally traumatizing time of his life when he went to a company that supplied animal-people to laboratories like HLS. “We went to Interfauna on this day, which is now known as MBR Acres, and they breed, 2,000 dogs a year for the research industry. I climbed in, and I spent two hours in there with the dogs. Spending time with them, and looking them in the eyes, and knowing what’s going to happen to them, and in that position being completely powerless to help. I saw one dog had clearly tried to chew her way out of the bars and had lost all her teeth. Most of the dogs were just terrified to see a human being. I looked her in the eye, and I promised her that I wouldn’t ever stop until vivisection was gone at the very least. That’s definitely a moment in my life that will always stick with me.”