Nicolas Atwood is an American

animal rights Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all Animal consciousness, sentient animals have Moral patienthood, moral worth independent of their Utilitarianism, utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as ...

activist based in

West Palm Beach, Florida West Palm Beach is a city in and the county seat of Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. It is located immediately to the west of the adjacent Palm Beach, Florida, Palm Beach, which is situated on a barrier island across the Lake Worth Lag ...

. He maintains the Malaysia-registered '' Bite Back'' direct-action website, which is associated with the

Animal Liberation Front The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is a Far-left politics, far-left international, Leaderless resistance, leaderless, decentralized movement that emerged in Britain in the 1970s, evolving from the Bands of Mercy. It operates without a formal lead ...

.Walsh, Gareth, and Calvert, Jonathan
"Unmasked: animal extremist waging war on Oxford"
''The Sunday Times'', February 19, 2006. __TOC__

Background

Originally from

Chaska, Minnesota Chaska ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Carver County, Minnesota, Carver County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 27,810 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. An outer ring suburb of the Twin Cities located southwe ...

, Atwood is a former arts promoter with a postgraduate degree in business management from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

. He has a number of animal rights-related convictions, including criminal damage.

SHAC and SPEAK

Atwood is said by ''

The Sunday Times ''The Sunday Times'' is a British Sunday newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of N ...

'' to have traveled to Britain to meet

Greg Avery Greg Avery is a British animal rights activist and former criminal. He has been involved with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), an international campaign to force the closure of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), an animal testing company b ...

of the

Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) was an international animal rights campaign to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory. HLS tested medical and non-medical substances on around 75,00 ...

(SHAC) campaign, which aims to close

Huntingdon Life Sciences Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) was a contract research organisation (CRO) organized in Maryland and headquartered in East Millstone, New Jersey. It was founded in 1951 in Cambridgeshire, England. It had two laboratories in the United Kingdom a ...

, a British and U.S.-based contract

animal testing Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research, and ''in vivo'' testing, is the use of animals, as model organisms, in experiments that seek answers to scientific and medical questions. This approach can be contrasted ...

company. Atwood is also allegedly involved in the SPEAK campaign to stop the construction by

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

of a new animal-testing laboratory, believed by animal-rights activists to include plans for a new

primate Primates is an order (biology), order of mammals, which is further divided into the Strepsirrhini, strepsirrhines, which include lemurs, galagos, and Lorisidae, lorisids; and the Haplorhini, haplorhines, which include Tarsiiformes, tarsiers a ...

facility. According to ''The Sunday Times'', he has sent out e-mails naming Oxford academics who are targets of the animal rights movement, including

Colin Blakemore Sir Colin Blakemore (1 June 1944 – 27 June 2022) was a British neurobiologist, specialising in vision and the development of the brain. He was Yeung Kin Man Professor of Neuroscience and senior fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced S ...

, former head of the British Medical Research Council.

Notes

External links

Bite Back website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Atwood, Nicolas Animal Liberation Front American male criminals New York University Stern School of Business alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American animal rights activists People from Chaska, Minnesota