Animal rights activists target Axa as part of protests against Huntingdon

Animal rights activists protested outside the London office of Axa, the French insurer, yesterday as part of a campaign to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences, the animal testing firm.

About a dozen protesters from Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac) gathered outside Axa's UK head office in Old Broad Street in the City of London, and at its general insurance operation on nearby Aldgate.

Huntingdon is one of the world's biggest contract research companies, conducting experiments on rats, monkeys and dogs for drugs and chemical companies.

The protesters are targeting Axa because the French insurer is a major investor in companies on the New York Stock Exchange, where the shares of Huntingdon's parent company are listed. Shac wants Axa and other investors to press the NYSE to delist the shares.

Shac has campaigned for eight years to close Huntingdon and has targeted investors and suppliers to put pressure on the company, whose shares collapsed as a result. Extremists have firebombed cars and intimidated staff and shareholders.

Shac claims that Huntingdon kills 500 animals a day in tests for products such as weedkiller, food colouring and drugs.

Huntingdon was founded in 1952 in Cambridgeshire and expanded internationally. Intimidation from protesters drove the company out of Britain in 2002, when it moved its headquarters to New Jersey in the US and started trading as Life Sciences Research. But its main laboratories remain in the UK.

In June, Shac protested outside the Paris offices of Euronext, which the NYSE bought in April.

In March, three Shac members were jailed for intimidating employees of suppliers to Huntingdon under a law designed to crack down on protesters interfering with companies going about their business.