While the clergy remain aloof it is left to compassionate people as at Huntingdon Life Sciences and Hillgrove Farm, and similar dens of iniquity. Peaceful protests have been tried i.e. letters, petitions, meetings etc, but have found to be in the main ineffective as the Government ignore or resort to standard letters. This is unacceptable to campaigners who want constructive action taken to end the misery of the lab victims. As the demos and information exposures gain momentum and support so the Govt retaliate by imposing devious restrictions on protesters at Hillgrove Farm. They also impose a smear campaign aided by the commercial interests, press barons and others which in effect brands the campaigners as thugs intent on creating anarchy. Many are arrested on trumped up charges, searched, under some obscure law hastily drawn up or revived to restrict our right to protest. The police are always out in force of which many are hidden in vans, fields or other diverse places on call as reserves. While they highlight the violence of protesters, complaints against their handling of demonstrations do not seem to proceed very far. The most potent question of all - why should Hillgrove Farm proprietor Chris Brown whose evil trade of selling cats and kittens to vivisection labs at home and abroad arouses so much revulsion be subject to so much police time and protection which wastes ratepayers money while others find it so hard to get a spark of interest from the authorities on other matters has never been satisfactorily answered.
It is against this background that the deplorable clergy silence must be condemned. As disciples of our Lord they should be supporting the campaigners and shouting from the rooftops against the Government imposing restrictions on the right to protest and their continued support for Brown’s hideous commercial orientated atrocities to the cats at Hillgrove Farm. Jesus if he were here would not be silent, he opposed oppression and cruelty from whichever source it came that is why the authorities rose against him. It would seem that the clergy are more concerned in regard for a law and order in which evil prospers than the suffering of the laboratory animals. Nor are they concerned with the hypocrisy of Home Secretary Jack Straw and Thames Valley chief Constable Charles Pollard who like Brown are prominent church members. It was the Pharisees who were the chief instigators in crucifying Jesus it is the clergy of today who are still crucifying him by their appalling silence over Hillgrove Farm, animal abuse in general and other moral issues of our time. Though unseen Jesus is at Hillgrove, why are the clergy so conspicuous by their absence?
John Cowen