Activists cleared of “burglary” after rescuing beagle puppies bred for laboratory testing
10 March 2026
On 09 March 2026, following a seven-day trial and over nine hours of deliberation, a jury at Peterborough Crown Court acquitted five defendants involved in rescuing 18 beagle puppies from a facility that breeds them for animal testing.
The author of this blog post appeared as counsel for D1 and D2. It is prepared from rough notes taken in court and not an exact transcript.
Factual background
MBR Acres is a facility that breeds dogs. Most of these are sold to laboratories where they may be used in scientific, medical, pharmaceutical and veterinary research, as well as toxicology testing for household products, in the United Kingdom
As well as its establishment licence, MBR Acres is named on a project licence. As set out in the Agreed Facts of the case,
This licence allows the holder of the project licence to “harvest…bio-products” from either live dogs or from dogs following their “humane killing”. The licence also permits the “terminal blood sampling” of dogs, which is conducted under a “general anaesthetic from which the animals are not permitted to recover”.
Each defendant in the case had agreed to take part in an action which was carefully planned and executed by a group called Animal Rebellion (now known as Animal Rising). The action was coordinated and involved renting cars and multiple Airbnb’s, using burner phones, putting information barriers in place between different teams.
Some members of the group cut through the fence at MBR Acres or went over ladders. They took 20 puppies and were successful in taking 18 of them away. Two puppies were recovered from MBR Acres and returned to MBR Acres. Some members of the group acted as runners, some as drivers.
In total, 18 defendants were charged. Some of the group had been arrested as they carried dogs away, some waited at the scene to hand themselves in, some handed themselves in later to police stations explaining that they had been involved, and some were identified later by police.
Defendants were split into four trials for administrative purposes largely due to court space and the inability to fit them into a single dock. Since December 2025, these four trials have been heard with two at Cambridge Crown Court before HHJ Grey and two at Peterborough Crown Court before HHJ Enright.
The trial that finished on the 9th of March was the fourth and final trial arising out of the incidents of 20th December 2022. Significantly, it was the trial group which included the director of Animal Rising: the woman alleged by the prosecution (and candidly admitted in evidence) to be the organiser.
The trial indictment contained a single count of burglary. Although only one of the defendants in this trial group had entered the building, all agreed to playing a role in a joint mission in which the building was entered as a trespasser, property (beagle puppies) were taken which belonged to MBR Acres, and that the intention was to permanently deprive MBR Acres of that property.
The defendants each gave evidence of the research they had conducted and the kinds of sources they had considered (although they were not permitted to adduce or describe the contents of these sources). The defendants each gave evidence that they believed the dogs at MBR Acres were not being properly cared for and that they believed the conditions were immoral (the defendants said they believed illegal too).
Defendants said they believed they had a moral right (and some defendants mentioned a legal right) to rescue the dogs.
This left a single issue before the jury: dishonesty.
Directions on law to the jury
In relation to dishonesty, HHJ Enright directed the jury to apply their minds to the usual test:
You must first decide what each defendant knew and/or believed about the circumstances at the time of the alleged conduct. The beliefs do not have to be correct or reasonable, but you must decide whether they were genuinely held. You have heard that the prosecution does not dispute that the defendants’ beliefs were genuinely held.
You must then decide whether, in the light of that knowledge and those beliefs, ordinary decent people would regard the defendant’s conduct, in taking the dogs as dishonest.
In answer to jury questions about the directions, they were later also directed that “dishonesty” was an ordinary English word to be given its ordinary meaning.
Arguments before the court
In closing, Mitchell Cohen of 187 Fleet Street for prosecution argued that “there is no place for sympathy in a criminal courtroom. What is needed is a cold, hard look at the evidence” and that “the charge in this case is not a question of morality”. He invited the jury to ask what the “reasonable person on the Clapham Omnibus” would think, and what they would do in the defendants’ shoes. He asked “would you take direct action by breaking the law, relying on a jury of your peers later, to excuse you on the basis of your beliefs?”
Closing for D1 and D2, I accepted that parliament makes the law but stressed that they had included the word “dishonesty” and left it to the jury to define where it was, and where the limits lay. I suggested that the prosecution arguments were “circular” and started from the position that the law had been broken, when that was not true until and unless the prosecution made a jury sure of dishonesty. I invited them to agree that dishonesty is a “morally charged” word and that “a person with no regard to morals and compassion is neither ordinary nor decent”. I accepted that the jury must not decide the case on their emotions, but stressed that was not the same thing as assuming the person on the “Clapham omnibus” is a psychopath. Referring to examples of honest defiance from history and fiction, I invited the jury to find that a person who, with integrity, does something pure of heart and pure of mind, without lies, deceit, threat or force, then that is not dishonest.
Danielle Manson of Matrix Chambers, closing for D5, drew a distinction between “disobedience” and “dishonesty” and invited the jury to consider that a number of the elements that the Crown relied upon to show dishonesty might be better described as mere disobedience.
On day 7 of the trial after over nine hours of deliberations, the jury returned not guilty verdicts in respect of all five defendants.
Comment
From an animal rights perspective, this was a landmark case. It follows a series of high profile so-called “open rescue” cases in the US, but to my knowledge this is the first widely reported open rescue case in the UK. “Open rescue” is a term used to describe a form of non-violent direct action that involves openly removing suffering animals from those causing their suffering and leaving the rights and wrongs of the matter to a court if necessary.
As a first instance case, none of these trials will set any legal precedent. Nevertheless, they seem to suggest that, where appropriate circumstances are known or believed to exist, taking steps to rescue animals is at least capable of amounting to a defence to dishonesty offences… although it also appears different juries reach different views.
The case is interesting in light of the passage in R v Ghosh [1982] Q.B. 1053 where, explaining the old test for dishonesty, the court said
“It is dishonest for a defendant to act in a way which he knows ordinary people consider to be dishonest, even if he asserts or genuinely believes that he is morally justified in acting as he did. For example, Robin Hood or those ardent anti-vivisectionists who remove animals from vivisection laboratories are acting dishonestly, even though they may consider themselves to be morally justified in doing what they do, because they know that ordinary people would consider these actions to be dishonest.”
The examples used did not relate to the facts of that case and were merely illustrative. At best they were obiter with no reasoning was given for why such actions would be necessarily dishonest. Dishonesty is a matter for the jury, and it is interesting to see that now that such facts have come before actual juries, two juries have not taken the same view as the Court of Appeal assumed they would.
After four trials arising out of the same incident, two juries convicted all defendants before them, and two juries acquitted all defendants before them. A topical outcome at a time where the future of the jury system is being fervently debated.
Non-dwelling burglaries, even when placed into the highest categories for both culpability and harm, have a starting point of a 2-year custodial sentence. Accordingly, this type of alleged offence is exactly the level of case in which, if current proposed reforms go through, defendants would be stripped of the right to a jury trial in relation to.
The inconsistent verdicts across four cases founded on (broadly) the same facts could be said to show both the best and worst of the jury system.
On the one side, one can imagine a justifiable sense of injustice felt by those defendants who – apparently due the administrative misfortune of having been placed into one trial group rather than another – now have been convicted of burglary and, in some cases, are subject to suspended sentences ranging up to 18 months. One can imagine it would be difficult to convince a person in such a position that it is fair that they were convicted by one jury whilst someone else who participated in the same joint mission with the same intentions was acquitted by another.
On the other side, who better than 12 ordinary people selected at random to be the weather vane in a society with ever changing standards of decency and honesty. This case illustrates precisely why until now even the lowest level alleged shoplifter has the right to elect that a jury decides whether they acted dishonestly or not. Only a trial by jury ensures that it is the people tell the state what is decent and honest, and not the other way around. Only a jury have the independence of mind and the diversity of thought to the state when institutions, enforcement agencies and regulations are lagging behind ordinary people’s sense of right and wrong, good and bad, honesty and dishonesty.
Perhaps the fairness of the jury system lies not in any guarantee or consistency, but in a fair opportunity to persuade a fairly selected group of one’s peers.
Samuel March is a barrister at 9 King’s Bench Walk, he tweets at @Sam_Oscar_March.
