Vortrag Tierversuchsproteste in Italien

After Morini, a small breeder who sold beagles to Italian laboratories for 50 years, had been closed, the same group of activists began a campaign to close down Green Hill in 2010. Green Hill is the biggest facility of Marshall BioResources breeding beagles for laboratories all over Europe.

The campaign lasted three years and gained attention and media exposure like never before. Many things happened during this campaign: Demos were attended by thousands of activists, beagles were liberated by the ALF at a lab that purchased the dogs from Green Hill, a roof of the breeding facility was occupied by activists, internal informations were leaked from a worker of Green Hill and last but not least there was an open liberation in broad
daylight occurring during a big demo in front of Green Hill. This was followed by the seizure of the facility and of the beagles, so the dogs could be given to a new home in loving families where they still live now.

From here the „Coordinamento Fermare Green Hill“ is going ahead on its campaign to make people aware of the vivisection and the animal issue in our society. The last action happened on April 20th, when five activist occupied the animal facility of the animal lab in the Department of Pharmacology and Translational Medicine in the University of Milan. For ten hours they locked themselves in there, spreading pictures and videos, documents of the researches carried on the lab, and telling the stores of the animals encaged in there. The action ended in the evening with the incredible liberation of about 500 mice and a rabbit, and rekindled the public debate about the legitimacy of vivisection.

But not all that glitters is gold: we have encountered also a lot of problems during this campaign. We had to prevent the infiltrations of right wings group, we had to face many politicians who tried to take personal advantage from our struggle, we had to fight to keep our struggle away from big associations looking for publicity and money. Our work was made harder from the time that, in the last two years of campaign against Green Hill, someone used private informations to start a parallel campaign, pretending to be us, clearly open to anyone who we were trying to keep away. Many of these problems are more than actual, and we are facing them everyday.

In the presentation all these acpects of the anti-vivisection campaigns in Italy will be discussed. Pictures and Movies from the protests will illustrate the fascinating and complexe history of the closure of Green Hill.