My friend Karl Garside, who has died aged 59 of heart disease, was an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activist, hunt saboteur and animal rights investigator. Across four decades of direct action he was involved in more operations claimed by the ALF than any other individual, making him Britain’s most prolific ALF activist.
Karl was born in Birkenhead in Merseyside to Sheila (nee Morton), an office worker, and David Garside, an electrician. The family settled in Altrincham in Cheshire in the mid-1970s, where Karl went to Wellington Road school. In 1983, aged 17, he bunked off South Trafford College in Altrincham to take part in an invasion of the Grand National at Aintree racecourse.
By the mid-80s Karl had joined the Northern Animal Liberation League and Manchester Hunt Sabs. Ahead of a major 1984 raid, he posed as a job applicant to case ICI’s Alderley Edge laboratories, which were later stormed by 300 activists. On that occasion the goal was not to rescue animals but to document and expose the extent of animal experimentation.
In August that year he also took part in a daylight raid on Unilever’s research facility in Sharnbrook, Bedfordshire, with similar aims. The action led to the conviction of 25 people, and Karl served eight months in prison for conspiracy to burgle and conspiracy to commit criminal damage.
Despite being jailed, he remained deeply involved in direct action throughout the 80s, 90s and noughties, playing a key role in campaigns against Consort kennels in Hereford, where he freed a number of beagles, at Shamrock farm in West Sussex, which was the UK’s only commercial primate importation and quarantine centre, and Hillgrove farm in Oxfordshire, which bred cats for laboratories.
He later played a key role in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign, which targeted the Huntingdon Life Sciences animal testing laboratory in Cambridgeshire and became one of the largest anti-vivisection efforts in British history. Most of his activity for the campaign was clandestine, trying to pressure the company and disrupt its relationships with suppliers.
He also took part in the Surrey Anti-Hunt Campaign, sabotaging countless fox hunts by calling the hounds off or getting between the fox and the hounds. In 2014 he founded the Hunt Investigation Team, which went on to expose cruelty at hunts, farms and abattoirs across Britain. His investigative work featured on ITV News and on the BBC, and in the Guardian and the Independent. Shortly before his death he had become an investigator for the League Against Cruel Sports.
In the later part of his life, Karl was a full-time freelance animal rights investigator, including for Tracks Investigations. In the years before that, he worked variously as a firefighter, an electrician and a nurse.
He is survived by a daughter and two granddaughters.
