HUTCHEON: In the grounds of Oxford University, a storm brews.

MEL BROUGHTON: [Addressing crowd] .... against this stinking, rotten, corrupt institution.

HUTCHEON: Animal rights activists gather in the shadow of their latest target, a giant animal testing laboratory.

MEL BROUGHTON: [Addressing crowd] If we need to we can tear that place down with our bare hands.

HUTCHEON: Two years ago, campaigners stopped a similar facility going ahead in Cambridge and now they want to do the same at Oxford. They’re led by activist Mel Broughton, once jailed for conspiring to cause arson.

MEL BROUGHTON: [Addressing crowd] You can stop your discipline, you can stop it. I’ve had enough of them. This is about anger, pure bloody fury and you’re going to feel it Oxford University. You’re going to feel it like you’ve never felt it before. The war starts here.

HUTCHEON: Despite a court injunction restricting their movements, protestors are urged to storm the half finished lab. Flustered the police move in. This is the moderate core of an increasingly radicalised animal rights movement. Behind the scenes is a hard nucleus of militants. British Police say they’ve evolved into extremist cells and are prepared to bomb animal researchers into submission.

Oxford University and the British Government can’t afford to let this fifty million dollar laboratory be stopped by protestors. At stake are multi billion dollar industries from research to pharmaceuticals but the animal rights movement has also drawn a line in the sand and so the genteel city of Oxford is bracing for a long hard battle.

Oxford is one of the oldest and most respected universities in the world. From its ranks have sprung twelve Nobel prizes for medical science but those breakthroughs according to some of Britain’s leading scientists were achieved only through the use of animal research.

PROFESSOR COLIN BLAKEMORE: [Executive Director, Medical Research Council] It is difficult to think of a treatment or a preventive measure that’s been developed in the past that hasn’t involved animals – anaesthetics, pain killers, vaccines, treatments for heart disease. The only way to test new surgical procedures of course is on animals and anybody who has a novel procedure and think of the miraculous procedures we’ve got now for transplantation, for operation inside the eye, for heart operations, by-pass and so on, all of those had to be developed on animals.

HUTCHEON: Neurobiologist Colin Blakemore left his Oxford research post three years ago. He now heads Britain’s Medical Research Council which last year dispensed the equivalent of more than a billion dollars of public money.

Professor Blakemore is a passionate communicator, keen to inspire a new generation of scientists and doctors but his outspoken support of animal research made him a key hate figure for more than a decade.

PROFESSOR COLIN BLAKEMORE: Two letter bombs were sent to my home. One of them a very potent device half a pound of explosive packed with needles that they said had HIV infected blood in them in a mailing tube, arranged so that if the cap had been taken out of the mailing tube it would have exploded. That was delivered to the home, to my home when I and my wife both happened to be out and it was taken from the mailman by our teenage daughters. Thank God they didn’t open it to have a peep inside to see what it was and they left it and I discovered it late at night and realised what it was likely to be.

HUTCHEON: Paul Bolam’s research is funded by the Medical Research Council. An expert on Parkinson’s disease, his research, which he hopes may one day produce a cure, entails studying the brains of mice. Though many prominent scientists have been harassed into silence, Professor Bolam chose to speak out because he believes animal testing is carried out only under the strictest guidelines.

PROFESSOR PAUL BOLAM: [Scientist] They’ve not suffered in the slightest throughout their life and of course they have to be terminated at the end of the experiment.

HUTCHEON: Terminated. So they die at the end of the experiment?

PROFESSOR PAUL BOLAM: Yeah they die at the end of the experiment. Yeah that’s probably a bad word to use. We put them down at the end of the experiment so they’ve not suffered at all during that time.

HUTCHEON: Oxford University says its new lab will consolidate several older ones spread out around the campus. The University wouldn’t allow us to film inside the laboratory but they gave us this recent video.

If there is no problem, why is there such secrecy about what goes on in these laboratories?

PROFESSOR PAUL BOLAM: Very simply it’s extremists. People have been targeted, individuals have been targeted, their families have been targeted and their neighbours have been targeted.

HUTCHEON: Last year throughout Britain, nearly three million procedures were carried out on lab animals, labs must be licensed and scientists are legally obliged to use alternatives to animals whenever possible. Since 1997 it has been illegal to use animals for testing on cosmetics.

KEITH MANN: [Watching video with Hutcheon] Most people just couldn’t stomach this kind of footage. There’s so many horrors out there.

HUTCHEON: Three years ago Keith Mann broke into a lab and freed six hundred mice he believed were being used to test botox, the world’s favoured wrinkle smoother. He views any kind of animal research as extreme cruelty and believes scientists lie about the benefits of testing and use animals because they’re cheap.

Is it your understanding that almost any test that involves animals now could be done without using animals?

KEITH MANN: [Activist] Absolutely, absolutely. They’re misleading us. They’re taking us up the wrong path. You know we’re putting billions and billions of pounds into experimenting on animals and we’re ignoring human beings. We’re passing as safe very dangerous chemicals and drugs in laboratory animals, putting them on the market and then they’re causing people harm so you know it’s a fallacy that by experimenting on another several hundred million animals over the next twenty years, we’re going to find these cures for human illnesses that we haven’t found in the last hundred years by experimenting on a hundred million animals or more.

HUTCHEON: Linked to a militant group called the Animal Liberation Front, Keith Mann spent more than six years in prison for crimes he committed in the name of animal rights. Released from jail a few months ago, he’s still deemed a risk by the police.

Do you have a problem with committing a crime in order to get your message across?

KEITH MANN: No. How else do we get our message across? There isn’t a democracy in this country anymore. There’s no other legitimate way.

HUTCHEON: Exactly how far would you go to get your point across?

KEITH MANN: Well I’ve gone as far as I need to go to get my point across I think. I broke the law and I exposed the reality to the public and I you know I would implore if I was able to, more people to do exactly that.

HUTCHEON: He says animal rights activists have exposed extreme acts of cruelty over the years. This disturbing video secretly recorded nine years ago, revealed workers abusing Beagles during a laboratory procedure and a warning it’s difficult to watch [playing of video].

The video was filmed at one of the biggest commercial laboratories in the world, Huntington Life Sciences based in Cambridgeshire. It incensed those both for and against animal testing.

BRIAN CASS: [CEO, Huntington Life Sciences] Every time any member of our staff witnessed that video I’m sure they feel physically sick as we all do. You know what you saw there should never ever happen in a laboratory, it shouldn’t happen in a breeding kennel, it shouldn’t happen in the home.

HUTCHEON: The technicians were convicted of cruelty and sentenced to community service. Huntingdon changed management but years later the repercussions continue.

BRIAN CASS: We’re ten years on now and yet it’s still being brought up because it was such an awful thing to have occurred so you can understand that but please you know we have moved on, the company’s moved on, the culture has moved on, let’s put it behind us.

HUTCHEON: But activists weren’t prepared to move on. To them, Huntington Life Sciences became public enemy number 1. The campaign then broadened its strategy, targeting businesses and individuals that often had only remote links to the lab. Tactics included so-called “home visits” in the middle of the night, arson attacks and hate mail.

Do you feel it’s legitimate to harass people?

KEITH MANN: Absolutely yeah. If they are not prepared to listen to reasonable arguments to stop the violence they are using, then of course it is.

HUTCHEON: In January a farm breeding guinea pigs for research was forced out of business after a six year hate campaign. The owners of Darley Oaks, as well as workers and neighbours, were targeted with threats and violence. The final straw was the desecration of a grave in October 2004. The remains of Gladys Hammond, a relative of the farm’s owners, were stolen. Five people have since been charged with blackmail related offences.

KEITH MANN: For me the gloves are off you know, the fact that they’ve stolen some bones out of a graveyard in order to highlight those facts and do something about it, I would commend, I’ve got no problem with that.

HUTCHEON: Five years ago, British Police established a national unit to combat animal liberation extremism. After extensive surveillance, they’ve pinpointed up to five hundred hardcore activists.

SUPERINTENDENT STEVE PEARL: [Nat. Extremism Tactical Co-ord Unit] The typical profile of them would be anarchist type tendencies, they will be vegan – nothing wrong with that of course – and they will be full time committed.

HUTCHEON: Working from a secret location, Superintendent Steve Pearl heads the extremism unit. He says at the core of the activists, are 40 to 50 extremists prepared to break the law.

SUPERINTENDENT STEVE PEARL: They’re set up in a quasi-terrorist cell like structures and they use the website to communicate their targets to each other once they’ve done the research on who they’re going to target next.

KEITH MANN: It makes my blood boil I must admit. It makes my blood boil we can do that to other species and just accept it. People like me are criticised and called terrorist and violent and all this and we don’t hurt anybody. Yet all this time the cruelty and violence is carrying on every single day and we accept it as some kind of normal behaviour.

HUTCHEON: Every fortnight protestors gather in the heart of London’s financial district known at the City. For seven years they’ve been campaigning to close down the Huntington Research Lab.

FEMALE PROTESTOR: If you take away the lifeblood of the companies, then no business can operate if there’s nobody to work with them.

HUTCHEON: So do you know what this company in particular does?

FEMALE PROTESTOR: I don’t particularly know what this company is other than financiers so they’re probably some sort of brokers or something. I don’t really know. We target even companies like Thomas Cooke the holiday companies and that, because they send people to Mauritius where they breed the monkeys that are sent to these laboratories so we will target anybody - most of the companies you see have pulled out because they realise and they don’t want the hassle.

HUTCHEON: Such pressure has rendered Huntington a financial pariah.

BRIAN CASS: We do not have a chequing account. We cannot get a chequing account for the company at any High Street Bank in the UK. We cannot find an insurance company that will actually take on our cover. So this is where the Government particularly have been very supportive and have actually stepped forward in order to provide us with those kinds of facilities.

KEITH MANN: [Handing our leaflets on street] Hi darling can I give you a leaflet about Oxford University putting a lot of money into trying to open a new laboratory to carry out experiments on animals.

WOMAN: They’re not.

KEITH MANN: They are.

HUTCHEON: Spurred on by their successes, activists like Keith Mann vow to continue the fight.

KEITH MANN: Absolutely we can’t call ourselves civilised while we’re behaving like this can we?

WOMAN: No it’s wicked isn’t it?

KEITH MANN: It is. Thank you.

HUTCHEON: Under the terms of his conviction he’s barred from approaching the Oxford Lab but in Dorset more than a hundred kilometres away he does his part.

KEITH MANN: It’s about Oxford University. They’re trying to open a new laboratory to carry out more experiments on animals.

WOMAN: I’ve got cats.

KEITH MANN: Yeah they’re doing some awful things. We’ve got some footage of one cat - they’re taking its brain out when it’s actually alive, still outside the body of the cat. They’ve kept the cat alive with its brain outside its body.

There’s a vast movement growing across the world of people who are violently opposed to what they’re doing without using violence to stop them and whether they build that lab or not, you know they’re going to suffer the consequences for it.

HUTCHEON: In Oxford it’s another day of confrontation. As ever, the animal rights movement is here but today marks the birth of a new campaign, one which supports the Oxford Lab.

PROTESTORS: Human beings come first, build the Oxford Lab! [Crowd chant]

SPEAKER AT PROTEST: My message today and my message to the extremists is that you will never win! [Cheering] Every vile action of harassment, of intimidation or of violence undermines any legitimacy your cause ever had.

HUTCHEON: Fed up with abuse and harassment, this group of students, academics and residents outnumbers the animal rights campaigners. For Professor Colin Blakemore, it’s vital that scientists continue to speak out explaining the benefits of animal research.

PROFESSOR BLAKEMORE: I made a decision right at the beginning that I wouldn’t just keep my head down and keep silent on the issue. I was so outraged by what was being said about me, my work and scientific and clinical value of my work, I just wanted to stand up and shout in my defence.

HUTCHEON: Last year in response to the animal liberation campaign, the British Government introduced new penalties, those convicted of economic damage will now face up to five years jail but the activists are unfazed. They know that if Huntingdon or Oxford are forced to close, it would be the end of Britain’s multi billion pound biomedical research industry.

MEL BROUGHTON: [To crowd] The only thing that matters is us. The only thing that matters is that we finish this job. The only thing that matters now is we stop that animal torture lab from ever opening its doors and you can do it. You can do it because you believe in it.

FEMALE PROTESTOR: We will be back time and time and time again.

MALE PROTESTOR: Animal abusers!

PRO LAB CROWD: Stand up for science! Stand up for research!

HUTCHEON: This is a battle where the outcome won’t be based on compromise. If the Oxford Lab eventually opens its doors, it’ll be a future steeped in controversy and possibly violence at every turn.