Inside the mind of a badger cull saboteur: Exclusive interview with Jay Tiernan

Happy

“When you are clear about what you are fundraising for, people are happy with it,” said Mr Tiernan.

“We do fundraisers for the cost of the website, mobile phone and broadband costs, road tax, insurance, the car, all of those things.

“Middle England lawful groups have much greater access to funding.”

Mr Tiernan also admits money he made from defrauding the Department for Education in the early 2000s was funnelled into animal rights activism.

“I was prosecuted for £3,000 worth of fraud, but I earned something like £30,000 in the space of six months,” he said.

“All of my co-defendants were very well-known animal rights activists and yes, a lot of that money was funnelled back into the animal rights movement, but it was also spent on rent and living.”

Prison

Mr Tiernan’s fraud conviction is not the only brush he has had with the law, having been given a six-month suspended prison sentence in 2015 for breaching an NFU injunction to protect farmers taking part in the culls.

He breached the injunction in nine different ways, including by filming cull participants.

In sentencing Mr Tiernan, the judge took into account the fact he had said sorry to those concerned, but he told Farmers Guardian he did not regret his actions ‘at all’.

Asked why he had apologised if that was the case, he said: “To avoid prison. I would do anything in court to try to get away from being sent to prison.”

The convicted activist was also clear he had no qualms about publishing farmers’ details online, even if it put their families at risk.

Stress

“If you get involved with something which is controversial, you cannot be surprised when it adds stress to your life,” he said.

“Everyone signing up for the badger cull knows animal rights activists exist, so when they complain we are making their life a nightmare, they knew it was coming.”

Mr Tiernan also admitted revealing home addresses could make it possible for farmers’ children to become victims of harassment.

“If a farmer’s whole family are living in the house, they are all benefitting from his work,” he said, adding he would not feel responsible if a child or spouse of a farmer were to be targeted because of information he had published online.

“People have got to take responsibility for their own actions,” he said.

Fire

“If I am responsible for putting out a farmer’s details, we would never encourage people to go round and throw bricks through their windows or set fire to their cars as we have seen in other animal rights campaigns.”

So what next for Mr Tiernan? Would stopping the badger cull be enough?

“First and foremost, we want to stop the badger culls, but we are always going to have an agenda of promoting animal rights and direct action, making people feel OK about criminal damage,” he said.

Through winter, when the culls are not happening, Stop The Cull social media accounts will cover fox hunt sabotage instead, because ‘the people involved are campaigning against the badger cull’.

Undercover

For Mr Tiernan specifically, undercover filming, particularly on dairy farms, is becoming more common.

He is also focusing his attention on shooting, collaborating with journalists to get footage for newspaper stories.

“A national paper has made it clear to me they are really keen on highlighting how many pheasants are being shot and thrown away,” he said.

“When you are told that by a journalist, you think ‘OK, this is my work’.”

Whatever the future holds for badger culling, it is clear farmers will not see the back of Mr Tiernan any time soon.