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Thanks for listening. On the 1st of May 2007, 700 police officers in three countries kicked down 32 doors and dragged

dozens of activists screaming from their beds.

Operation Achilles, named after ancient Greece's famously indomitable warrior,

summoned the combined strength of several states to defeat what seemed like an unstoppable political force, the animal liberation movement.

Though at least a century old, the movement experienced a resurgence in the mid-90s

when a group of UK activists decided they wanted to end the practice of vivisection,

or operating on live animals for medical and commercial testing.

Weielding placards of deformed puppies and screaming monkeys testing. campaigns against laboratories across the UK and with incredible success.

Consort Bio Services shut down. Hillgrove Family Farm, shut down.

Shamrock Monkey Farm, Regal Rabbits, New Church Guinea Pig Farm, all shut down.

And that was just the warm-up.

In 1999, the Resurgent Animal Liberation Movement set its sights on the biggest and most powerful

animal testing laboratory in Europe, Huntington Life Sciences, HLS for short. Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty or Shag pursued the lab with a ferocity rarely seen in social movements before or since.

The group was famed for its use of secondary targeting.

It went after not just HLS itself, but its accountants, lawyers, shipping companies, and clients.

Everyone even remotely connected to them.

So regularly did Shaq protest in the City of London to pressure HLS's shareholders to

divest that city workers began becoming informants to Shack,

and the Met had to write to their employers asking them not to leak financial information.

Even the letter was leaked.

...