Hillgrove Campaign Victory Issue (1999, Oxford, England.)

The late 90s in England saw a series of hard hitting, successful campaigns against companies that bred animals for vivisection labs. The first was against a beagle breeding farm known as Consort. At one point the farm had surrounded its premises with a brick wall in order to protect the grounds from invasion by protesters. Famously, the wall got torn down brick by brick during a national demonstration. After 10 months of nonstop action, the farm closed and the beagles were released to activists for re-homing.

The momentum achieved at Consort spilled over into the next big breeder campaign, a cat farm owned by the infamous Christopher Brown. The protests which occurred against his establishment were epic, and involved everything from encampments on the surrounding property to the cattery areas being raided. Legend has it that so many rocks were thrown at his house that the roof collapsed from the weight. The British government and local police had vowed to keep the Brown’s in the cat killing business, but the tenacity of campaigners proved to be too powerful. Hillgrove closed, and this publication was how the campaign celebrated and told people to be on the lookout for their next target. Within months of the publication of this final dispatch that target was made public: Huntingdon Life Sciences.