For a little over three months, ‘MBR Suppliers’ has focused on plucking away any and all businesses that work with or supply MBR Acres in Cambridgeshire, UK, supporting the broader ‘Free the MBR Beagles campaign’ fighting against the puppy mill that breeds beagles for vivisection in the UK.
Since its inception they have managed to sign up 10 MBR Suppliers to a business boycott where they promise not to work with MBR again. A notable example would be JRS bedding supplier, which was also supplying with bedding to huge companies like Pets at Home. When folks contacted Pets at Home to tell them the supplier also sold bedding to MBR Acres, PaH threatened to pull and JRS decided not to sell bedding to MBR any longer. Other companies joining the boycott have been Acourt Group (they collected MBR Acres dog waste)and Bender, who did their human waste.
IMPEX (the company who transports the dogs from the farm to the labs) was targeted after people found their new van depot, so the farm that rented them a shed to store the vans evicted them and forced them to park in the owner’s house instead. They also lost the company who sold, serviced and modified their vans.
The campaign has seen multiple creative protest, but the vast majority of the action has been even simpler; emails and phone calls have achieved a lot of the wins so far. This means that the campaign is accessible to most, even internationally, but organisers insist that there is a place for all who want to take part, from leafletting and wheat pasting to emailing, protest, phone calls and researching, there are so many ways people can help that you will find a way to join them too!
They are mostly operation on a Facebook group, which can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mbrsuppliers
You don’t need to join that Facebook group though, you could potentially just look at the list of businesses identified as MBR suppliers and do your own thing. Check it out here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mbrsuppliers/posts/1183464019743710
They also have an automated emailer, which with a few clicks lets you send emails to all the companies involved. You can find it here:
Campaigning takes a million and one forms, and once you have identified your target, sometimes it is smarter to zoom out slightly to see the connections they have to the outside world. Plucking MBR suppliers away from the dog farm means they slowly asphyxiate trying to find someone else who will work with them, allowing other companies to demand more money for the same service to then pull out of the deal when they feel the pressure.
Join them, and destroy MBR!
{photo at a demo in front of Stericycle in Bournemouth}
