Drive through the villages and everything seems normal: 30 mph road signs, tidy lawns, a window cleaner up a ladder. There’s a couple, retired probably, moving bins, and an Amazon Prime van neatly parked at the pavement’s edge. But the civility is a façade. A few miles from here, across the fields, is a living hell – and few in these hamlets appear to care. The geography at the villages’ edge is one of cruelty and terror, and it serves as a marker of depraved human dominion over non-human beings. Still, at night these orderly homes draw their curtains and close their doors, shutting out what’s in plain sight.
MBR Acres
The B1090, linking Sawtry and St Ives in Cambridgeshire, is an exceptional road. Every year approximately 2,000 beagle dogs, mostly puppies, travel the B1090 to so-called testing facilities, where all will die prematurely having been violently assaulted.
Drive the B1090, and around the mid-point you will come across an entrance. It is set back and neglected: a cracked driveway, overgrown verges. There is silver rail fencing either side and a black and yellow speed bump in front of a gate wide enough to take lorries. The twelve-foot-high gate has a plastic banner running across it and reads: ‘Thriving dogs bred here for human and animal health.’
Something isn’t right. The propaganda-style communication seems completely out of place. Look closer and you can see barbed wire on the side fencing. There are jagged vicious looking metal teeth on top of the gate, and multiple security cameras dangle from above. This doesn’t appear to be a place that stimulates thriving. Listen carefully and you can hear bark-like shrieks, piercing shrieks that suggest fear and panic, anxiety and stress.
The compound behind the gate belongs to MBR Acres, whose registered office is in Hull and whose nature of business is ‘raising animals.’ Two officers are listed at Companies House: One lives in France and one, Andrew Smith, lives in the US. MBR are importers of suffering.
The MBR model is as simple as it is immoral and wicked. Take a handful of metal sheds, drop them in a field away from the public gaze and breed beagles, factory style, for so-called laboratories. Separate the puppies from their mothers as early as eight weeks, pen them in metal cages, apply minimal care and ship them as chattel to certain death. And choose beagles because they are small, placid with a natural desire to please, and even-tempered.
But thankfully MBR’s model is being challenged.
Camp Beagle
“Can you hear the dogs? That’s going on all the time. You’re in an acoustic bowl here so we hear it, but it hides the sound for those further away.”
John Curtin is showing me around Camp Beagle, Europe’s longest running animal rights protest camp. The camp is delicately perched on the side of the infamous B1090, next to MBR’s entrance. As heavy lorries hurtle by, John walks me along the road explaining how he is now restricted from entering an area directly in front of the gate. It’s a punitive strike by MBR, who took out an injunction against John and ‘persons unknown’ – a loose catch-all for anyone who MBR or the police want excluded. The injunction is some forty pages long and displayed on a notice board on the opposite side of the road.
“It cost them [MBR] three million pounds in legal fees, and if I stand there, I go to prison.” John points to the entrance area.
John walks me around the side of the compound. The barking shrieks follow us, but we see no beagles through the mesh fencing. They are permanently locked inside corrugated metal sheds. There are no windows, only small glass slots near where the walls join the roofs. It has a prison-like feel to it. As we walk, a security guard in a hi-vis vest trails us – he is inside the fence, radio crackling. The shrieks are now loud, scream like. It is painful to hear. I drop my head, stare at the ground, and follow John.
“See the lights?” John asks pointing towards the letter box windows on the sheds.
“They will turn off this evening at one minute past six, and on again at one minute past six in the morning.”
John mentions how the Home Office are entrusted with the beagles’ well-being, how a recent site inspection made only two recommendations, bizarrely both related to trolleys used to move the beagles, and how the civil service oversight introduces a peculiar dynamic that favours status quo.
Having been here since June 2021 John knows this place better than most. Every day he is exposed to the desperate sounds of the beagles, to the high fences and razor wire, and the darkness of the sheds, and to the soulless people who traffic in pain and suffering. We walk towards the back of the compound where the sheds are more spread out. What I hear next haunts me – it’s a lone puppy yelping.
“That’s sad. An individual puppy alone. Imagine it’s just missing its mum” John says.
We turn back towards the road passing several trees decorated with paper hearts carrying messages addressed to the captive beagles. A few branches have leashes draped over them.
John is a life-long animal rights campaigner, having spent four years in prison for the cause. Today, he is sleeping in a tent on the side of the road. He is regularly visited by the police and occasionally harassed by passers-by. Over a cup of tea, we discuss Buddhism, Islam, pesticides, the pharma industry, punk music and of course the beagles.
“We’re here to close the puppy farm down. To stop the beagles being sold into testing” John promised me as I left.
It is estimated MBR Acres breed 2,000 beagles a year for so-called testing purposes. They also have applied for a ‘bleeding licence’ which will enable them to legally ‘harvest organs for order or sale, drain blood for sale, and carry out full terminal bleeding (bleed to death).’
Andrew Smith, one of the two MBR officers listed in Companies House, was involved with a sister facility in Montichiari, Italy, which had its operations suspended in 2012 by court order after allegations of ill-treatment. As part of the order 2,500 beagles were permanently re-homed.
In a subsequent trial two employees received eighteen months sentences while a third was sentenced to twelve months. The three were found guilty of the killing and mistreatment of dogs.
Love and Libby
Two others who have experienced the MBR Acres facility are Love and Libby.
Tuesday 20th December 2022, was a day when justice was being pursued. In the US, the committee investigating the 2021 attack on the Capitol building recommended prosecuting former President Donald Trump; in Los Angeles, a jury found Harvey Weinstein guilty of rape; and in the Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologised for his country’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. A few miles outside of Huntingdon, on the B1090, campaigners gathered to begin their quest to find justice for the thousands of beagles bred by MBR for so-called testing.
It was 6am, dark and cold. Two groups from Animal Rising gathered at either side of the MBR compound, driven by a need to act. There was sufficient information to be concerned about the welfare of the beagles inside the sheds, and the very real risk to welfare warranted intervention.
One team cut the barbed wire at the top of the fence and climbed over, while a second team used an angle grinder and bolt cutters to cut through the bottom of the fence. Within minutes twelve rescuers were inside the compound. A shed door was wrenched open, and an alarm sounded. MBR security ran towards the shed.
“I had been on the premises before when we did an occupation, and I had looked through the vents but going inside the shed I was hit by the sounds and smells. There were hundreds of puppies, cage after cage with metal fencing around them.”
One of the rescuers jumped into a cage and started passing the puppies over. Each beagle was placed into a bag and hurried outside. Security staff intervened.
“Some of the security began pulling the beagles from us. It was like a tug of war with the puppies. Some security were quite violent and aggressive.”
Those rescuers with puppies ran back towards the fence and into the darkness. A total of eighteen beagles were rescued that morning. Two only made it as far as the fence, where their rescuers were arrested by Cambridgeshire police, who returned the puppies to MBR. At the time of writing, the puppies are either imprisoned in a so-called testing lab or deceased. During their brief freedom, which lasted only minutes, they were named Love and Libby.
Footage of the rescue (animalrising.org)
By day’s end, the remaining rescuers returned to the site and voluntarily handed themselves into Cambridgeshire police.
MBR have since increased their security to include extensive CCTV and motion detectors and have installed additional barbed and razor wire. They sought an injunction prohibiting ‘persons unknown’ from gathering at their entrance and most ironically, they have deployed patrol dogs.
MBR Acres Fallacies
In addition to being cruel and vicious, MBR’s model is also corrupt. It is premised on two fallacies which any reasonable person would reject – that animals should be deemed solely as property and can only be valued in simple economic ‘replacement’ terms, and that animal testing is effective.
The notion of animals as property only reaches back a relatively short time, and its primary purpose was to facilitate their exploitation at an institutional level. The construct of animal-as-property is not a highpoint in our domestication as a species, nor has it proved a wise step in our civilisation. In fact, quite the contrary – it is a constant reminder of just how mean and barbaric we can be as a species if we go unchecked. It’s a marker of our psychopathic tendencies – we represent approximately 0.01% of all living things, and yet humanity has caused the loss of eighty percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants.
The Non-Human Rights Project (NHRP) is a much-needed framework. It proposes empowering animals with legal personhood, allowing them to exercise certain legal rights and to enjoy certain legal protections. Be careful not to dismiss the argument too fast, for the idea is not nearly as radical as you might suspect. As early as 800 BC, legal personhood was granted to guilds and associations that operated in the public interest, the Romans granted legal personhood to municipalities and public works, and since the 17th century personhood has been bestowed on corporations and business entities.
Personhood-related rights for animals would protect them from sadistic exploitation while constraining our homicidal tendencies. They are long overdue.
The Flawed Science
The group from Animal Rising had two aims on that chilly December morning. The first was to rescue as many puppies as possible. The second was to get arrested.
“We handed ourselves in because we honestly believe that saving the puppies was the moral thing to do, and our aim is to put animal testing on trial. We want to go to court.”
For too long the science put forward by the multi-billion-pound animal testing industry has gone unchallenged. We are spoon-fed polished sound bites and warned off by official-sounding terminology. Try and gain proper access to a so-called testing facility – it’s near impossible.
The supply chain, with its multiple players, has created a money-making machine that can be gamed time and time again. Animals are bred in captivity at minimal cost. They are sold to so-called testing labs, where they are violated repeatedly until the so-called tests are manipulated sufficiently enough to produce a permissible statistic that a national regulatory agency will accept. But here’s the rub: the vast majority of test results are not transferable to humans because animal testing is a poor and unreliable indicator for humans.
Michael Leavitt is not someone who is normally described as sentimental. Puppies in cages are unlikely to illicit much of a reaction from this American Republican politician who served in George W. Bush’s administration. And yet Leavitt, who is a data geek, publicly questioned whether testing on animals is appropriate: “Nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.”
Leavitt is not alone. As early as 2014 The British Medical Journal found that ‘even the most promising findings from animal research often fail in human trials and are rarely adopted into clinical practice.’
An article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine concluded ‘most experiments on animals are not relevant to human health, they do not contribute meaningfully to medical advances, and many are undertaken simply out of curiosity.’
The National Institutes of Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, warned: ‘Not only do medications that work on animals fail in humans, there are also probably some—perhaps many—drugs that would help humans but are discarded because they fail in tests on animals.’
A widely published survey of 4,500 experimental cancer drugs developed between 2003 and 2011 found that ‘more than 93% failed after entering the first phase of human clinical trials, even though all had been tested ‘successfully’ on animals.’
The plea hearing for the Animal Rising rescuers is in Cambridge on the 25th of July. If it goes to Crown Court it has the potential to not only put MBR Acres on trial, but to shine a spotlight on the murderous animal testing industry, its flawed science and its warped practices. (CAUTION – THIS LINK CONTAINS DISTRESSING IMAGES OF ANIMAL CRUELTY)
Leaving MBR Acres was difficult. For the first time I properly understood why John moved from a comfortable home into a tent on the side of the road, and why rescuers from Animal Rising scaled fences, faced arrest and now risk being imprisoned. The barking shrieks and screams of the beagles are cries for help. Once they are in your head, how can you turn away?
I would like to thank Tom Harris, animal liberator and social justice activist, for his help with this article.
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©2024 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
