Barry Horne

When it appeared that Horne might die, the Animal Rights Militia (ARM) issued a statement through Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Press Office, threatening to assassinate four named individuals and six unnamed scientists, should Horne die. The named targets were Colin Blakemore, a British scientist who studies vision; Clive Page of King’s College, London, a professor of pulmonary pharmacology and chair of the animal science group of the British Biosciences Federation; Mark Matfield of the Research Defence Society; and Christopher Brown, owner of Hillgrove Farm in Oxfordshire, who was breeding cats for laboratories.

This time, Horne's demands were extensive and specific. He asked for an end to issuing licences for animal experiments, and that no current licences be renewed; a ban on all vivisection conducted for non-medical purposes; a commitment to end all vivisection by 6 January 2002; an immediate end to all animal experimentation at the Porton Down defence establishment; and the closure of the Animal Procedures Committee, a government advisory body that Horne regarded as a "Government sponsored front for the vivisection industry." He issued a statement, now quoted by the movement as a rallying cry:

Horne did not recover his physical health. Mann wrote that he continued to go on countless hunger strikes in prison without any cohesive strategy and with little support. It got to the point where no one apart from the guards knew whether he was eating or not. He embarked on his final hunger strike on 21 October 2001, and died 15 days later of liver failure. He had signed a directive refusing medical treatment, and was regarded by psychiatrists as of sound mind, which caused the prison authorities not to intervene.

Horne's longest hunger strike began on 6 October 1998 and ended 68 days later on 13 December. It brought the issue of animal experimentation to the forefront of British politics, while his deteriorating condition made headlines around the world, as activists threatened further disruption should he die, with some issuing death threats against several scientists.

By day 63, Horne was deaf in one ear, blind in one eye, his liver was failing, and he was in considerable pain. A meeting was arranged for day 66 at noon with his supporters to show him the documents that were being faxed through by the Home Office regarding offers the government might be willing to make. It was agreed that, if there was any substance to them, Horne would call off the strike. Early on the morning of 10 December 1998, the 66th day of his hunger strike, Horne was moved out of hospital and back to Full Sutton Prison. The Home Office said that, because he was refusing treatment, there was no need for him to be in hospital. By now, Horne was hallucinating and could no longer remember why he was on hunger strike.

There are two versions of why Horne ended the hunger strike. Mann wrote that Horne called it off without explanation two days after being moved back to prison, and was promptly returned to the hospital. The media reported that a Labour MP had arranged for Michael Banner, the chair of the Animal Procedures Committee, to agree to attend a meeting with Ian Cawsey, head of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Animal Welfare, to discuss animal testing practices in the UK. This was interpreted by Horne as a concession on the part of the government, and he agreed to start eating again on 13 December 1998. His friends suspect that something happened to him during the two days he was back in Full Sutton out of contact with them. Mann writes: "Whatever happened to him between leaving the hospital and returning to prison may never be known, but all those close to him suspect something did and he was never the same again."

Horne's trial for arson began on 12 November 1997, six weeks after the end of the second hunger strike, at Bristol Crown Court. He pleaded guilty to attempted arson in Bristol, but denied involvement in the Isle of Wight attacks. Although there was no direct evidence to link Horne to the Isle of Wight incidents, the prosecution argued successfully that the devices used in Bristol and the Isle of Wight were so similar that Horne should be regarded as responsible for both. He was put through 14 ID parades but was picked out in none of them.

Judge Simon Darwall-Smith described him as an "urban terrorist," though he also said, "I do accept that you did not intend an attack on human life." On 5 December 1997, the judge handed down an 18-year sentence, the longest given to any animal-rights protester. Because of the similarity between the Bristol devices and others used on the Isle of Wight, Horne was also accused of having caused damage estimated at £3 million in 1994 by destroying a branch of Boots the Chemists in Newport, because the company tests its products on animals. He was further accused of having set fire to department stores on the island that sold fur coats. At his trial, he admitted the Bristol charges, but denied involvement in the Isle of Wight attacks, which had been claimed by the Animal Rights Militia. Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Press Office writes that he himself narrowly escaped a conspiracy charge over the same incidents.

On 6 January 1997, six months after being jailed on remand for the firebombings, as a Category A prisoner, Horne announced that he would refuse all food unless John Major's Conservative government pledged to withdraw its support for animal testing within five years. Because Labour was regarded as likely to win the next general election, due to be held in May 1997, Horne ended his action on 9 February after 35 days without food, when Elliot Morley, then Labour animal welfare spokesperson, wrote that "Labour is committed to a reduction and an eventual end to vivisection."

The second hunger strike began on 11 August 1997. Horne's aim was that the new Labour government withdraw all animal testing licences within an agreed timeframe. There was another increase in animal-rights activism in his support. On 12 September 1997, protests were held in London and Southampton in the UK, in The Hague, in Cleveland, US and at Umeå University in Sweden, where activists tried to storm the university's laboratories. Four hundred people marched on Shamrock Farm, a primate-holding facility near Brighton, 300 on Wickham Laboratories, a contract testing facility, and Labour Party offices were picketed, as was the home of Jack Straw, the Home Secretary. Activists set up a camp opposite Huntingdon Life Sciences on the A1 in Cambridgeshire, digging tunnels to make eviction harder. Newchurch guinea pig farm was raided in September and 600 guinea pigs removed.

A number of night-time firebomb attacks, using home-made incendiary devices, took place over the next two years in Oxford, Cambridge, York, Harrogate, London, Bristol, as well as Newport and Ryde on the Isle of Wight. The attacks targeted Boots stores, Halfords, stores selling leather goods, and stores run by cancer research charities. Some of the attacks were claimed by the Animal Rights Militia, a name used by activists unwilling to abide by the Animal Liberation Front's policy of non-violence. Mann writes that it "wasn't rocket science" to deduce that Horne had something to do with the attacks, because very few activists were willing to plant incendiary devices, and Horne was known to be one of the hard core who would. The police were therefore watching him closely. According to Mann, Horne knew he would be caught, but he saw animal rights activism as a war, and he was willing to become a casualty. Police raided his home in Swindon, Wiltshire after the bombing campaign on the Isle of Wight, and reportedly found material advocating such attacks, but he was not charged. Police kept him under surveillance, and he was arrested in July 1996 and charged with planting two incendiary devices in the Broadmead shopping centre in Bristol—one in a charity shop and the second in British Home Stores, set to explode at midnight, when he assumed they would be empty. Police found a further four devices in his pockets.

After his release in 1994, Horne reportedly began to operate alone. Keith Mann noted that the nature of police interest in animal rights activists was such that working alone was safer, and Horne was anyway a reserved man, happy to go out alone and "do stuff," as he put it.

In 1991, Horne was sentenced to three years for possession of explosive substances. His attitude appeared to harden while in jail. In June 1993, he wrote in the Support Animal Rights Prisoners Newsletter: "The animals continue to die and the torture goes on in greater and greater measure. Peoples' answer to this? More vegeburgers, more Special Brew and more apathy. There is no longer any Animal Liberation Movement. That died long ago. All that is left is a very few activists who care, who understand and who act ... If you don't act then you condone. If you don't fight then you don't win. And if you don't win then you are responsible for the death and suffering that will go on and on."

Together with Keith Mann and Danny Attwood, Horne was part of a small Animal Liberation Front cell that raided Harlan Interfauna, a British company in Cambridge that supplies laboratory animals and organs, on 17 March 1990, Horne's 38th birthday. The activists entered Interfauna's animal units through holes they punched in the roof, removing 82 beagle puppies and 26 rabbits. They also removed documents listing Interfauna's customers, which included Boots, Glaxo, Beechams, and Huntingdon Research Centre, as well as a number of universities. A vet who was an ALF supporter removed the tattoos from the dogs' ears, and they were dispersed to new homes across the UK. As a result of evidence found at the scene and in one of the activists' homes, Mann and Attwood were convicted of conspiracy to burgle and were sentenced to nine months and 18 months respectively.

Horne and the others continued with their mission to free Rocky, and in 1989 launched the Morecambe Dolphinarium Campaign, picketing the dolphinarium, handing out leaflets to tourists, organising rallies, and lobbying the local council. Losing ticket sales, the management of Marineland eventually agreed to sell the dolphin for £120,000, money that was raised with the help of a number of animal charities, including the Born Free Foundation, and supported by the Mail on Sunday, which launched the "Into the Blue" campaign to free Britain's captive dolphins. In 1991, Rocky was transferred to an 80-acre (320,000 m) lagoon reserve in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then released, and within days was seen swimming with a pod of wild dolphins. Peter Hughes of the University of Sunderland cites Horne's campaign as an example of how promoting an animal rights perspective created a paradigm shift in the UK toward seeing dolphins as "individual actors" who should be viewed in the wild if tourists want to interact with them. As a result, Hughes writes, there are now no captive dolphins in the UK.

Horne first came to public attention in 1988, when he tried to rescue Rocky, a bottlenose dolphin captured in 1971 off the Florida Panhandle then kept for 20 years, most of the time alone, in a small concrete pool at Marineland, in Morecambe, Lancashire. Horne and four other activists planned to move Rocky, who weighed 650 lb (290 kg), 200 yards from the pool to the sea, using a ladder, a net, a home-made stretcher, and a hired Austin-Rover Mini Metro.

Horne became interested in animal rights at the age of 35, when his second wife, Aileen, persuaded him to attend an animal liberation meeting. After watching videos of animal testing, he decided to become a vegetarian and hunt saboteur. He became active with Northampton Animal Concern in the spring of 1987, which organised a raid of a Unilever laboratory, and picketed Beatties, a department store that sold fur coats.

Barry Horne (17 March 1952 – 5 November 2001) was an English animal rights activist. He became known around the world in December 1998, when he engaged in a 68-day hunger strike in an effort to persuade the government to hold a public inquiry into animal testing, something the Labour Party had said it would do before it came to power in 1997. The hunger strike took place while Horne was serving an 18-year sentence for planting incendiary devices in stores that sold fur coats and leather products, the longest sentence handed down to any animal rights activist by a British court.