Oh God, back when I was an active Hunt Sab, some of the Animal Rights activists around that scene were fecking hardcore! I had a midweek day off work so my then mate invited me to a demo, turns out it was outside a now infamous farm breeding guinea pigs for experimentation right out in the middle of nowhere. It was pissing down with rain, but my mate said activists were there every day, regardless of weather. Turned out there were only four of us, including one old fella, standing just outside an injunction imposed exclusion zone and one of 'em got out one of those annoying megaphones with a built in siren and began blasting it out non-stop. You could see it was really getting to the farmer. Locals were driving past in cars, spitting at us and screaming abuse and throwing bricks and stones, the old fella got hit on the leg with a stone iirc, pouring with blood, but he refused to leave. Then the farm workers came over and started threatening us and trying to run us over on quad bikes (and believe me they meant it) then the cops turned up hassling us as well. Honestly, it was awful, I wanted nothing to do with it tbh and never went back.
I also went to a demo outside a massive hare coursing event somewhere up by liverpool and as luck would have it, hare coursing was banned the week or so before so it was to be the coursers the last legal event, so to put it mildly they weren't in the best of moods before the AR lot turned up, taunting and laughing at 'em. There's been a few anti-fascist demo's and loads of hunt sabs where i thought i was gonna get a bad beating but that day i thought we were gonna get killed, it was just mental. The coursers were pelting us with anything they could get their hands on, including big clumps of wet mud so after a while we were all plastered head to toe in mud. They then started charging at us with various weapons, but for once i was glad the horseback cops were there to half-heartedly beat them back. It lasted hours of them attacking us, it weren't much fun after a while i can tell you. I had some mad stuff happen when sabbing as well, including being attacked by 20-30 odd massive blokes in balaclavas with baseball bats and chains and all sorts of other craziness. Say what you like about the early AR activists, they were in it to win it, completely dedicated to their goals. I knew a lot of the more prominent activists over the years, including loads who did significant prison time and they were very serious people, still are i assume, i wouldn't know nowadays.
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