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| - Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) is an international animal rights campaign to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory. HLS tests household cleaners, pesticides, weedkillers, cosmetics, food additives, chemicals for use in industry, and drugs for use against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. It conducts tests on around 75,000 animals every year, including rats, rabbits, pigs, dogs, and primates (marmosets, macaques, and wild-caught baboons).
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abstract
| - Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) is an international animal rights campaign to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory. HLS tests household cleaners, pesticides, weedkillers, cosmetics, food additives, chemicals for use in industry, and drugs for use against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. It conducts tests on around 75,000 animals every year, including rats, rabbits, pigs, dogs, and primates (marmosets, macaques, and wild-caught baboons). SHAC was started in November 1999 by British animal rights activists Greg Avery and Heather James after video footage shot covertly inside HLS in 1997 by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was aired on British television. The footage showed staff shaking, punching, shouting, and laughing at beagles in an HLS lab . The employees were dismissed and prosecuted, and HLS's Home Office licence to perform animal experiments was revoked for six months. Along with the British video, footage shot in the U.S. appeared to show technicians dissecting a live monkey. PETA stopped its protests against HLS after being threatened with legal action, and SHAC took over as a leaderless resistance campaign. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors U.S. domestic extremism, has described SHAC's modus operandi as "frankly terroristic tactics similar to those of anti-abortion extremists." The campaign has used tactics ranging from non-violent protest to the alleged firebombing of houses owned by executives associated with HLS clients and investors, and several SHAC activists have been convicted for their role in the campaign. In May 2005, an official with the FBI's counterterrorism division included SHAC in a list of what he called special-interest extremist movements that he said are the "most serious domestic terrorism threats" in the U.S. Later that month, the Animal Liberation Front issued a warning in support of the campaign that threatened further violence: "If you support or raise funds for any company connected with Huntingdon Life Sciences we will track you down, come for you and destroy your property with fire."
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