Barry Horne (17 March 1952 – 5 November 2001) was an English animal rights activist. He became known around the world in December 1998 when he engaged in a 68-day hunger strike in an effort to persuade the government to hold a public inquiry into animal testing, something the Labour Party had said it would do before it came to power in 1997. The hunger strike took place while Horne was serving an 18-year sentence for planting incendiary devices in stores that sold fur coats and leather products, the longest sentence handed down to any animal rights activist by a British court.
The hunger strike left Horne with kidney damage and failing eyesight, but it was neither the first nor the last he embarked upon, and when he died of liver failure three years later, he had not eaten for 15 days. Media reaction to his death in the UK was hostile, where he was widely described as a terrorist by journalists and politicians. He is viewed as a martyr within the more radical wing of the animal rights movement.
Horne was born in Northampton, the son of a postman. He left school at 15 and took a series of jobs as a road sweeper and dustman.
Horne became interested in animal rights at the age of 35, when his second wife, Aileen, persuaded him to attend an animal liberation meeting. After watching videos of animal testing, he decided to become a vegetarian and hunt saboteur. He became active with Northampton Animal Concern in the spring of 1987, which organised a raid of a Unilever laboratory, and picketed Beatties, a department store that sold fur coats.
Horne first came to public attention in 1988 when he tried to rescue Rocky, a bottlenose dolphin captured in 1971 off the Florida Panhandle then kept for 20 years, most of the time alone, in a small concrete pool at Marineland in Morecambe, Lancashire. Horne and four other activists planned to move Rocky, who weighed 650 lb (290 kg), 200 yards from the pool to the sea, using a ladder, a net, a home-made stretcher, and a hired Austin-Rover Mini Metro.
Horne and his friends had already been visiting the dolphinarium secretly at night, getting into the pool with the dolphin in an effort to get to know him. On the night of the action, after arriving at the poolside with their equipment, they realised the logistics of the operation were beyond them, and they left without Rocky. A police car stopped them on the way back to their car, which contained a large dolphin stretcher for which, as one of the activists put it, "we had no legitimate explanation." After a five-day trial, they were convicted of conspiracy to steal the animal. Horne, Jim O'Donnell, Mel Broughton, and Jim Buckner were fined £500, and Horne and Broughton were given an additional six-month suspended sentence.
Horne and the others continued with their mission to free Rocky, and in 1989 launched the Morecambe Dolphinarium Campaign, picketing the dolphinarium, handing out leaflets to tourists, organising rallies, and lobbying the local council. Losing ticket sales, the management of Marineland eventually agreed to sell the dolphin for £120,000, money that was raised with the help of a number of animal charities, including the Born Free Foundation, and supported by the Mail on Sunday, which launched the "Into the Blue" campaign to free Britain's captive dolphins. In 1991, Rocky was transferred to an 80-acre (320,000 m2) lagoon reserve in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then released, and within days was seen swimming with a pod of wild dolphins. Peter Hughes of the University of Sunderland cites Horne's campaign as an example of how promoting an animal rights perspective created a cultural shift in the UK toward seeing dolphins as "individual actors" who should be viewed in the wild if tourists want to interact with them. As a result, Hughes writes, there are now no captive dolphins in the UK.
Together with Keith Mann and Danny Attwood, Horne was part of a small Animal Liberation Front cell that raided Harlan Interfauna, a British company in Cambridge that supplies laboratory animals and organs, on 17 March 1990, Horne's 38th birthday. The activists entered Interfauna's animal units through holes they punched in the roof, removing 82 beagle puppies and 26 rabbits. They also removed documents listing Interfauna's customers, which included Boots, Glaxo, Beechams, and Huntingdon Research Centre, as well as a number of universities. A vet who was an ALF supporter removed the tattoos from the dogs' ears, and they were dispersed to new homes across the UK. As a result of evidence found at the scene and in one of the activists' homes, Mann and Attwood were convicted of conspiracy to burgle and were sentenced to nine months and 18 months respectively.
Early 1990s, Horne was one of a number of protesters who attacked an animal research conference at Exeter College, Oxford. They overturned tables and smashed 50 bottles of vintage claret, after fighting with police to enter the conference hall. Horne and five others were charged with violent disorder.
In 1991, Horne was sentenced to three years for possession of explosive substances. His attitude appeared to harden while in jail. In June 1993, he wrote in the Support Animal Rights Prisoners Newsletter: "The animals continue to die and the torture goes on in greater and greater measure. Peoples' answer to this? More vegeburgers, more Special Brew and more apathy. There is no longer any Animal Liberation Movement. That died long ago. All that is left is a very few activists who care, who understand and who act ... If you don't act then you condone. If you don't fight then you don't win. And if you don't win then you are responsible for the death and suffering that will go on and on."
After his release in 1994, Horne reportedly began to operate alone. Keith Mann noted that the nature of police interest in animal rights activists was such that working alone was safer, and Horne was anyway a reserved man, happy to go out alone and "do stuff," as he put it.
A number of night-time firebomb attacks, using home-made incendiary devices, took place over the next two years in Oxford, Cambridge, York, Harrogate, London, Bristol, as well as Newport and Ryde on the Isle of Wight. The attacks targeted Boots stores, Halfords, stores selling leather goods, and stores run by cancer research charities. Some of the attacks were claimed by the Animal Rights Militia, a name used by activists unwilling to abide by the Animal Liberation Front's policy of non-violence. Mann writes that it "wasn't rocket science" to deduce that Horne had something to do with the attacks, because very few activists were willing to plant incendiary devices, and Horne was known to be one of the hard core who would. The police were therefore watching him closely. According to Mann, Horne knew he would be caught, but he saw animal rights activism as a war, and he was willing to become a casualty.
Police raided Horne's home in Swindon, Wiltshire, after the bombing campaign on the Isle of Wight, and reportedly found material advocating such attacks, but he was not charged. Police kept him under surveillance, and he was arrested in July 1996 and charged with planting two incendiary devices in the Broadmead shopping centre in Bristol — one in a charity shop and the second in British Home Stores, set to explode at midnight, when he assumed they would be empty. Police found a further four devices in his pockets.
Horne's trial for arson began on 12 November 1997, six weeks after the end of the second hunger strike, at Bristol Crown Court. He pleaded guilty to attempted arson in Bristol, but denied involvement in the Isle of Wight attacks. Although there was no direct evidence to link Horne to the Isle of Wight incidents, the prosecution argued successfully that the devices used in Bristol and the Isle of Wight were so similar that Horne should be regarded as responsible for both. He was put through 14 ID parades but was picked out in none of them.
Judge Simon Darwall-Smith described him as an "urban terrorist," though he also said, "I do accept that you did not intend an attack on human life." On 5 December 1997, the judge handed down an 18-year sentence, the longest given to any animal-rights protester. Because of the similarity between the Bristol devices and others used on the Isle of Wight, Horne was also accused of having caused damage estimated at £3 million in 1994 by destroying a branch of Boots in Newport, because the company tests its products on animals. He was further accused of having set fire to department stores on the island that sold fur coats. At his trial, he admitted the Bristol charges, but denied involvement in the Isle of Wight attacks, which had been claimed by the Animal Rights Militia. Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Press Office writes that he himself narrowly escaped a conspiracy charge over the same incidents.