How scarves and woollies slaughtered a trade

Animal libbers, radical vegetarians, soppy pet-lovers and RSPCA die-hards have joined forces to cripple Britain's £200m livestock export business. Paul Vallely reports

They did not look as advertised. Clad in tweed jackets and wrapped in Laura Ashley shawls against the chill seaside air, Ann Baskerville, a 56- year-old antiques dealer from Petworth, near Chichester, and her friend Beryl Ferres-Guy, an accountant from Brighton, stood holding a placard made from a flattened cardboard box. They were typical of the 300 protesters who turned up on Wednesday night for what had been billed as the Battle of Shoreham.

It was not what might have been expected from accounts of the violence the night before at the West Sussex port. Then, police and demonstrators had clashed in a protest which forced a convoy of trucks carrying animals for export to the Continent to turn back. Demonstrators had squatted in the road then climbed on to the roof of one of the lorries and smashed its windscreen. Several trucks were damaged.

On Wednesday, a thousand police, mostly in riot gear, were deployed along the port's main entrance. "Operation Overkill", local demonstrators dubbed the response. In the event, lorries carrying sheep and calves entered the port through a side entrance.

Mrs Baskerville was there, she explained, because she had seen a Compassion in World Farming video about a pig which had its legs broken and paralysed in transit. "A man just stood there and was kicking and kicking it," she said. "The pig was screaming because it could not move."

Not far away stood Laurie Finucane, a 70-year-old who was taking part in a demonstration for the first time in his life. "It takes a lot to get me out and protest on a night like this," he said.

Is it people like this who have succeeded in crippling a £200m animal export trade over the past six months? The curbing of the trade, the National Farmers' Union has predicted, will lead to a glut of beef on the domestic market in 1997. British farmers,unable to compete with their European counterparts, will suffer.

"You can't stop a lawful trade merely on emotion," said the NFU president, Sir David Naish, yesterday. But maybe, if you have the right alliance alongside, you can. And there is a formidable, and peculiarly British, alliance of interest between animal liberationists, radical vegetarians and sentimental animal-lovers.

Their activities have been co-ordinated with remarkable precision. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals began the campaign to raise awareness of the fate of British animals in Continental Europe about five years ago. It has regularly publicised the findings of its Special Operations Unit, which has tracked animals on journeys of up to 60 hours without rest, food or water. But it was when Eurotunnel first announced that, for technical reasons, it would not transport animals that theactivists made the shrewd move of playing on the anxieties of ferry companies who feared unfavourable comparisons with the tunnel. Last June one of the most uncompromising of the activist groups, Respect for Animals, launched a campaign to boycott the ferries.

Fed by a series of powerful ads from the RSPCA - which pronounced that before lamb is marinaded in rosemary and garlic it has already been steeped for days in its own excrement - the pressure grew. "We received hundreds of thousands of letters," said Br

i an Rees, of Stena Sealink, which followed P&O in deciding to end its role in the trade. "By spring 1994 there were demonstrations at the ports but it was letters from Mr & Mrs Ordinary which persuaded us to stop." Brittany Ferries soon followed suit.

"The hassle factor just outweighed the benefits," said one Stena insider. "Around 1,200 trucks pass through us in Dover every day; and only three or four a week were live animals. It wasn't worth the bother."

But there was more to it than that. Animal rights activists had been conducting a nationwide arson and bombing campaign for years. Pig farms were burnt down, refrigerated meat lorries destroyed, butchers attacked, and firebombs placed in chemists, sport

s and leather stores and even in a cancer-research charity shop. Scientists had long been subjected to their exploding Jiffy-bags, mailing-tubes, videotapes, devices containing razor-bladed traps capable of amputating fingers and hypodermic needles allege dly dipped in HIV-infected blood.

In the summer these hard-line activists turned their attention to the ferry companies. A letter-bomb addressed to a senior executive of Stena Sealink exploded at the company's head offices in Ashford, Kent, injuring a secretary. A number of farmers and hauliers were attacked, too. Soon after, Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch, SO13, issued a warning to all police forces about the emergence of "The Justice Department", a sinister new offshoot of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Police began offering 24-hour protection to ferry executives.

The Yard's Animal Rights National Index, established in 1989, began to show an average of about 18 incidents of animal rights violence a week. Special Branch detectives claimed animal rights activists were trying to buy plastic explosives on the black market and had infiltrated the Territorial Army to obtain weapons and explosives. Police estimate that there are some 2,500 activists prepared to engage in a range of illegal activities along with tens of thousands of supporters who fund them.

Those prepared to engage in crime are particularly difficult to track down because of the wide spectrum of activists which stretches between the first-time local protestors and those who engage in terror tactics. "Often you feel very wary of some of yourallies in a broad movement like this," said one prominent activist who is not prepared to go further than civil disobedience. "Around you are the well-heeled innocents and, on the other hand, a motley group which draws on Class War, anarchists, and evenneo-fascists who try to recruit with slogans like `if you care for animals hate all Muslims'. They can be a very strange combination of people."

As with all single-issue groups this uneasy coalition is particularly prey to those with fanatical tendencies who are prepared to perpetrate the kind of violence that brought the movement into such disrepute at Shoreham on Tuesday. "Some don't even seem

to like animals," a more moderate activist claimed. "Their stance is ideological. They talk of species-ism in the way others speak of racism. Many won't have pets. Some are anti-people as much as pro-animal."

Most are less extreme. Mark Glover, of Respect, who was a key activist with the anti-fur trade campaigners Lynx, insists that he would not resort to smashing up lorries. Many involved in Compassion in World Farming, the group which called for the Shoreham picket, describe themselves as "radical vegetarians". Some see banning the export of live animals as the first step towards national vegetarianism but they, too, insist that their activism must always be pacifist; they called off their members on the third night at Shoreham when the battle was predicted.

The bulk of the county-set who abhor cruelty to animals still work within the RSPCA, which sees its role as fighting within the establishment. "People speak of live animal export as a traditional trade but it isn't," insists its campaigns director, Jerr

y Lloyd. "It has grown phenomenally since we left the ERM and the currency differences gave British farmers an advantage. It's also grown because of the closing down of small slaughterhouses in this country, as EC regulations have been enforced in a way t hat they aren't elsewhere in Europe."

He is even happy to talk in terms of benefiting the British balance of payments: "Why is there no decent marketing of British lamb abroad? And Danish bacon doesn't come here alive. We're like a Third World country exporting raw materials and exporting British jobs in the process," he says. "And it is very bad PR. When British sheep leave the farm they are the best in the world but when they arrive at the other end they are in bad condition. It is not a good advert for British goods."

Lloyd is not prepared to be dogmatic about vegetarianism. "All we will say is that if you want to eat veal, eat British veal which is not produced in cruel veal crates as it is on the Continent."

There are echoes of patriotism that would appeal to the old pensioner Laurie Finucane on the picket line in his winter woolies. "I've fought in a bloody war and I have never seen police behaviour like this. I object to paying for it through my council tax."

Beryl Ferres-Guy was slightly more communautaire. "I have every sympathy with the French farmers who also oppose the trade," she said. "The whole thing is a fraud - because the animals are slaughtered in France and then sold as French lamb."

She straightened her thick jumper and tightened her scarf against the midnight wind. Around her the other members of the animal alliance steeled themselves too. Resolve is the other thing they have in common.

Additional reporting by Danny Penman.