SPEAK (animals)
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| Founded | 2003 |
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| Founder | Mel Broughton |
| Type | Leaderless resistance |
| Focus | Opposition to animal testing |
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Area served
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University of Oxford, England |
| Slogan | "The Voice for the Rights of Animals" |
| Website | SPEAK website |
SPEAK, the Voice for the Animals is a British animal rights campaign founded in 2003 that aims to end animal experimentation in the UK. It has to date fought against two projects. The first was a proposed non-human primate research facility at the University of Cambridge, which was abandoned in 2004, in part because of the protests. Its current campaign is focused on a new animal testing centre at the University of Oxford, the Biomedical Sciences Building, which SPEAK has opposed since it was first publicly proposed in 2004. The centre was officially opened on November 11, 2008 and was designed to house a variety of animals, mainly rodents, fish and ferrets, and will include non-human primates.
The campaign was born out of Stop Primate Experimentation at Cambridge (SPEAC), which in 2004 halted the construction at the University of Cambridge of a new primate research facility. Had it gone ahead, the facility would have been Europe's largest primate testing centre. Cambridge announced in January 2004 that the facility would not be built as a result of delays caused in part by animal rights protesters.
After this announcement, the coalition of activists involved in SPEAC learned that the University of Oxford was planning to build a new biomedical research facility to house research animals. In response, the activists announced the formation of "SPEAK, the Voice for the Animals," declaring that their campaign against Oxford would be the second stage in their efforts to end all animal testing in the UK. The activists said that talks between Oxford and Cambridge resulted in Oxford agreeing to conduct some of the brain experiments that were lost at Cambridge.
The spokesman for SPEAK in Oxford is Mel Broughton, who has served time in prison for possession of incendiary devices with intent to bomb Huntingdon Life Sciences, Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory, in connection with the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign. Other activists who have been named publicly are Robin Webb, who runs the Animal Liberation Press Office, and Amanda King, who was involved in the Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs campaign.
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