Barry Horne
| Barry Horne | |
|---|---|
| Born |
17 March 1952 Northampton, England |
| Died | 5 November 2001 (aged 49) Ronkswood Hospital, Worcester, England |
| Cause of death | Organ failure, hunger strikes |
| Resting place | Northampton |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Refuse collector |
| Years active | Active as an animal rights advocate for 14 years |
| Known for | Animal rights activism, arson, urban terrorism |
| Spouse(s) | Aileen (second wife) |
| Children | Two |
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 British 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 by some within the animal rights movement.
Horne was born in Northampton. His father was 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 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.
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