Court bars two animal rights protesters from being within 100 metres of Charles River facility at Manston

The protest at the Charles River facility last Summer

Two animal rights protesters who were arrested after a demo outside the Charles River Laboratory in Manston last Summer have been made the subject of a two-year exclusion order.

The order prevents them from going within 100 metres of the site where the protest took place.

Kent Police officers were called to the facility in Manston Road, in August 2020 following a report of a protest where campaigners are understood to have concreted their arms into a cement block.

The protest was to object to the use of animals in medical research. The Charles River site in Manston is a breeding facility.

Michelle Foreman, 43, and Christine Robinson, 42, were arrested at the scene.

At Maidstone Magistrates’ Court on December 11, 2020, Foreman, of Wellington Road, Westgate, pleaded guilty to obstructing a person engaged in a lawful activity.

At Folkestone Magistrates’ Court on Monday, May 17 2021, Robinson, of Austen Gardens, Dartford, pleaded guilty to the same charge.

On the same day, Robinson was sentenced to a two-year community order, including 120 hours of unpaid work, and Foreman was sentenced to a 16-week curfew order.

Both women were also made subject to the exclusion order.

46 Comments

  1. They should have gone to prison. Medical research helps to save the lives of humanity and sick animals. I myself have been a volunteer to medical research in the past for Pfizer and Smiths medical industries.

    • Good for you, but the key word being volunteer-you know the risks & choose to subject yourself to them & have top notch care, the animals have zero choice & aren’t given care or any pain relief. Also you aren’t kept in a cage & have poisons pumped into you, crap put on your shaved skin etc until you expire, or are killed after the experiment ends.

    • That’s poppycock. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that animal research has any benefit to humans. For a start, other species have a totally different constitution to ours so the experiments are useless. There have been plenty of drugs that were tested on animals that have caused an adverse reaction in humans. Most experiments are patent ones, repeated torture just to renew a product patent. Its all on the name of profit I’m afraid and until people like yourself do proper research and realise the truth, the pharmaceutical industry will continue to make huge profit in an abhorrent, fraudulent practice. Kind regards.

    • No, the callous so-called animal testers masquerading as real scientists should be sent to jail for wasting funds on unreliable research methods (ie vivisection). They’re the ones that are putting lives at risk!

  2. 100 mtrs away is not very far. They will probably stand back and still shout and be heard. Judge needs to buy a tape measure.

  3. The right to peaceful protest is long established in our legal system. Animals have no voice to protest cruel treatment. There is alternatives to animal testing. The sentences are indicative of the inconsistent judicial process.

    • Indeed, maybe if they had infiltrated the premises & caused damage there might be a case, but a peaceful protest outside where the only people they are potentially hurting are themselves? We can see who the justice system is protecting-wonder how many politicians have shares in these companies or companies that supply equipment to them?

  4. Should have just left them in their concrete, maybe just pushed them to the side of the road, don’t want any cars hitting the concrete.

  5. If animal experiments worked the hospitals would be empty and quite clearly they are not. Drug companies are there for one reason and one reason only – to make money for their shareholders just like any other business. They need you and I sick as possible as there is no profit from healthy people. Drug companies create customers not cures….Cancer UK started life as Imperial Cancer Research over one hundred years ago. Still not one form of cancer has been cured. No money in cures…this is why is is known as the “Cancer Business”

    • Rubbish. If there had not already been many drugs and medicines developed partly by animal testing, then animal testing would have been abandoned years ago.

      • Over 100 years of animal experiments for cancer “research” yet not a cure. Animals do not get human cancers. Where are all these drugs for those who have suffered strokes? What about those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease? Damaging animals brains will not produce a cure. My mother was a sufferer and we were told in the 60’s “just a few more rats, just a few more mice” A cure was on the horizon but never appeared. Can you explain to me the benefit of putting animals in cages and giving them “choices” and if they make the wrong choice they get an electric shocks. Plenty of info on the Internet….please Google.

    • Exactly-pharma companies don’t bother with research for anything other than the most common diseases, they are there purely to create blockbuster drugs for maximum profit, then the reps go out & sell this product to the doctors who become the pushers to people who shouldn’t be on them-Oxycontin & Oxycodone being probably the worst. The reality of curing cancers is a myth-since there are so many variants & that people’s bodies will not respond the same to them or treatment as each other anyway.

    • Your comments are absurd.
      Polio, leprosy, smallpox to name but three are no longer a threat to us, on a world-wide basis, because of the efforts of the pharmaceutical industry.
      Researching and producing new and effective drugs is a very long and expensive process. For every successful product, scores are abandoned after years of expensive research because they’re either harmful, not efficacious, or both.

      • 1. Digitalis, insulin and penicillin would be banned if results from animal experimentation were accurate.
        2. At least 450 methods exist with which we can replace animal experiments.
        3. Morphine puts humans asleep but excites cats.
        4. We use aspirin for aches and pains. It causes birth defects mice, rabbits and rats.
        5. Researchers refused to believe that benzene could cause cancer in humans because it failed to in animal tests.
        6. Heart bypass surgery was put on hold for years because it didn’t work on dogs.
        7. Less than 2% of human illnesses (1.16%) are ever seen in animals.
        8. Polio researchers were mislead for years about how we catch the disease because they had experimented on monkeys.
        9. When asked if they agreed that animal experiments can be misleading 83% of doctors agreed.
        10. Rodents are the animals almost always used in cancer research. They never get carcinomas, the human form of cancer, which affects membranes (e.g lung cancer). Their sarcomas affect bone and connecting tissue: the two cannot be compared.
        11. In America, 100,000 deaths a year are attributed to medical treatment. In one year 1.5 million people were hospitalised by medical treatment.
        12. In the court case when the manufacturers of Thalidomide were being tried, they were acquitted after numerous experts agreed that animal tests could not be relied on for human medicine.
        13. Blood transfusions were delayed 200 years by animal studies.
        14. Despite many Nobel prizes being awarded to vivisectors, only 45% agree that animal experiments are crucial.
        15. The Director of Research Defence Society, (which exists to defend vivisection) was asked if medical progress could have been achieved without animal use. His written reply was ‘I am sure it could be’.
        16. 92% of drugs that test successfully in animals fail during human trials (sometimes “9 out of 10 drugs fail”).
        17. Adverse Drug Reactions show that animal research does not screen out dangerous drugs
        18. Dr. Albert Sabin, who developed the oral Polio vaccine, said”…work on prevention [of polio] was delayed by an erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease, based on misleading experimental models [of polio] in monkeys.” when he testified to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs in 1984
        19. Only 0.004% of all animal experimentation is of any direct benefit to human health
        20. Penicillin is toxic to guinea pigs but not to humans

  6. 96% of drugs that pass animal trials fail at human trials. The only way to know if a drug works in a human is when a human takes that drug. Rodents are nothing like humans. A drug can even differ from one human to another human. How many useful drugs have been discarded and lost as they failed animal tests?? No doubt people will be posting on here that animal experiments saved my grans life but when asked which animal experiments they are referring to, all goes quiet. We only know if something will work, is when carried out on a human.

  7. Linda you are talking rubbish, Steve there is not a tablet you have taken in your life that has not been given to animals to test first. Also animals don’t talk our language if the did we could have a conversation with them.

    • She isn’t-animals & humans differ in many ways, there is no real need for animal testing any longer-it just boils down to money. I don’t take any tablets-but even if I did the argument is totally facile-Thalidomide for one example was tested on animals. Again, this point is ludicrous-they don’t speak our language so we cannot ask them, by this logic you would be fine with kidnapping peasants from South America, the far east etc (just as animals are kidnapped from the wild for these experiments) & experimenting on them, because they cannot understand English.

  8. Most animals used in drug testing are bred for the purpose. How does “kidnapping peasants” who don’t speak English have anything to do with Bill’s statement that animals cannot speak any human language?

  9. Steve I’m sorry but you talk out of your backside!!

    Maybe you should step in and take the place of the animals.

    I suppose you’re one of those that are never wrong and expect everyone to believe the same nonsense that you brainwash yourself with!

    • All factual, unless you would care to rebut the points made rather than just shouting they are wrong. I suppose the name humans first is a giveaway.

  10. Well , apropos “humans first”, if I had to choose between trying to save the life of an animal and that of a person, I would try to save the person.

    • Seeing how most people behave these days I would probably choose the animal. It is of course not relevant anyway-what he is studiously ignoring is that there are humane alternatives to animal experiments that actually have better results, so the only reason animal testing still exists is because there is a lot of money in it.

      • Despite all you’ve said Steve, we’d still like to thank you for your continued support of the pharmaceutical industry by taking medication/ giving medication to your loved ones when they’re Ill.

          • There’s just no point in insulting people who disagree with you. The way to change their opinions is to use rational arguments which can be backed up by impartial factual evidence.

  11. That’s poppycock. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that animal research has any benefit to humans. For a start, other species have a totally different constitution to ours so the experiments are useless. There have been plenty of drugs that were tested on animals that have caused an adverse reaction in humans. Most experiments are patent ones, repeated torture just to renew a product patent. Its all on the name of profit I’m afraid and until people like yourself do proper research and realise the truth, the pharmaceutical industry will continue to make huge profit in an abhorrent, fraudulent practice. Kind regards.

      • (Replying to Andrew, though rather late in doing so. “People should”,etc- a new sentence.)

  12. Of course drugs in the process of development will at some stage be tested on human beings.

  13. These brave activists risked their liberty to hilight the utter futility and inhumane practices of vivisection I applaud and truly support them and the direct action they took last August, the draconian measures the courts took just goes to show the power behind this multi billion pound industry..peddling death and destruction onto innocent sentient animals absolutely barbaric archaic outdated pseudoscience rubbish

  14. Stop painful torture to animals sick medieval…do the trials and experiments on voluntary humans were it works not animals in cages monkeys etc terrible

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