He became known around the world in December 1998 when he engaged in a 68-day hunger strike in an effort to persuade the government to hold a public inquiry into animal testing, something the Labour Party had said it would do before it came to power in 1997.
[5] The hunger strike left Horne with kidney damage and failing eyesight, but it was neither the first nor the last he embarked upon, and when he died of liver failure three years later, he had not eaten for 15 days.
[9] He became active with Northampton Animal Concern in the spring of 1987, which organised a raid of a Unilever laboratory, and picketed Beatties, a department store that sold fur coats.
[10] Horne first came to public attention in 1988 when he tried to rescue Rocky, a bottlenose dolphin captured in 1971 off the Florida Panhandle then kept for 20 years, most of the time alone, in a small concrete pool at Marineland in Morecambe, Lancashire.
Horne and four other activists planned to move Rocky, who weighed 650 lb (290 kg), 200 yards from the pool to the sea, using a ladder, a net, a home-made stretcher, and a hired Austin-Rover Mini Metro.
[14] In 1991, Rocky was transferred to an 80-acre (320,000 m2) lagoon reserve in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then released, and within days was seen swimming with a pod of wild dolphins.
[15] Peter Hughes of the University of Sunderland cites Horne's campaign as an example of how promoting an animal rights perspective created a cultural shift in the UK toward seeing dolphins as "individual actors" who should be viewed in the wild if tourists want to interact with them.
They also removed documents listing Interfauna's customers, which included Boots, Glaxo, Beechams, and Huntingdon Research Centre, as well as a number of universities.
Keith Mann noted that the nature of police interest in animal rights activists was such that working alone was safer, and Horne was anyway a reserved man, happy to go out alone and "do stuff," as he put it.
[19] A number of night-time firebomb attacks, using home-made incendiary devices, took place over the next two years in Oxford, Cambridge, York, Harrogate, London, Bristol, as well as Newport and Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
[21] Police raided Horne's home in Swindon, Wiltshire, after the bombing campaign on the Isle of Wight, and reportedly found material advocating such attacks, but he was not charged.
[5] Because of the similarity between the Bristol devices and others used on the Isle of Wight, Horne was also accused of having caused damage estimated at £3 million in 1994 by destroying a branch of Boots in Newport, because the company tests its products on animals.
At his trial, he admitted the Bristol charges, but denied involvement in the Isle of Wight attacks,[22] which had been claimed by the Animal Rights Militia.
[24] On 6 January 1997, six months after being jailed on remand for the firebombings, as a Category A prisoner, Horne announced that he would refuse all food unless John Major's Conservative government pledged to withdraw its support for animal testing within five years.
Activists set up a camp opposite Huntingdon Life Sciences on the A1 in Cambridgeshire, digging tunnels to make eviction harder.
This was the first time a member of the government had agreed formally to talk to the animal liberation movement, and it was seen by Horne and his supporters as an important step forward.
[32] The Labour government publicly refused to give in to what it called blackmail, and said it would not negotiate with Horne or his supporters, but privately, it held talks with them.
Mann writes that Horne decided to take some orange juice and sweet tea for three days, in order to stave off the coma so that he could understand the negotiations.
Shortly after this, two activists parked a car at the end of Downing Street, slashed its tyres, and used D-Locks to attach themselves by the neck to the steering wheel, while protesters demonstrated nearby.
[39] The named targets were Colin Blakemore, a British scientist who studies vision;[40] Clive Page of King's College, London, a professor of pulmonary pharmacology and chair of the animal science group of the British Biosciences Federation;[41] Mark Matfield of the Research Defence Society;[40] and Christopher Brown, owner of Hill Grove Farm in Oxfordshire, who was breeding cats for laboratories.
[citation needed] Those on the ARM's list were given immediate police protection, which in some cases lasted years, and Special Branch increased its surveillance of activists, in particular of Robin Webb.
The police wired his home up directly to Special Branch, he was advised to take different routes each day to work, and he had to speak to his children's schools about the possibility of abduction.
[42] A meeting was arranged for day 66 at noon with his supporters to show him the documents that were being faxed through by the Home Office regarding offers the government might be willing to make.
Early on the morning of 10 December 1998, the 66th day of his hunger strike, Horne was moved out of hospital and back to Full Sutton Prison.
Newspapers focused on the period Horne had been drinking orange juice and sweet tea, writing that the hunger strike had been a fraud throughout.
He had signed a directive refusing medical treatment, and was regarded by psychiatrists as of sound mind, which caused the prison authorities not to intervene.
But in death Barry Horne will rise up as the first true martyr of the most successful terrorist group Britain has ever known, the animal rights movement.
Seven hundred people attended the pagan funeral service and accompanied the coffin through the town, carrying a banner that read: "Labour lied, Barry died".