Heather Nicholson
| Heather Nicholson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Heather Shirley Barwick 30 January 1967 North Yorkshire, England |
| Other names | Heather James |
| Known for |
Consort beagles Save the Hill Grove Cats Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty |
| Spouse(s) | Greg Avery (divorced c. 2002) |
| Parent(s) | George Barwick, Shirley Barwick, née Nicholson |
Heather Nicholson (born Heather Shirley Barwick, 30 January 1967), also known as Heather James, is a British animal rights activist.
Nicholson is known for having co-founded three animal rights campaigns in the UK in the 1990s with her husband at the time, Greg Avery. In 1997 the first campaign, Consort beagles, closed Consort Kennels, which bred beagles for animal-testing labs. In 1999 Save the Hill Grove Cats closed Hill Grove Farm, which bred cats for laboratories, after a two-year campaign led by Nicholson and Avery. That year Nicholson, Avery and Natasha Dellemagne set up Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) to close Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract animal-testing company. That campaign was unsuccessful and closed in 2014.
In 2009 Nicholson was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment for conspiracy to blackmail in connection with the SHAC campaign. Six other senior SHAC activists, including Avery and Dellemagne, were jailed for the same offences. All were alleged by police to be key figures within the Animal Liberation Front.
Nicholson was born in North Yorkshire and grew up in Killay, Swansea, the daughter of George Barwick, a teacher and vegan and his wife, Shirley Barwick, née Nicholson. She attended Olchfa Comprehensive School. A lifelong ovo vegetarian, then vegan, she spent time as a teenager working for the RSPCA in Singleton Park, Swansea, but left because of her opposition to the animals being euthanized.
Nicholson became involved in the animal rights movement when she was 26, after attending a demonstration at Swansea airport to protest against live animal exports. During a similar demonstration at Coventry airport, she met her husband, Greg Avery, also an animal rights activist. She joined Avery to found Consort beagles, a campaign against Consort, a company in Ross-on-Wye that bred beagles for laboratories, which closed 10 months later. Nicholson and Avery co-founded a subsequent campaign, Save the Hill Grove Cats, which saw the closure two years later of Hill Grove Farm near Oxford, which bred laboratory cats.
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