Biography
Darren Thurston is a Canadian animal rights and environmental activist with a long history of ALF organizing in Edmonton, Alberta dating back to the early 1990s. He was implicated through Operation Backfire in the August 1997 horse rescue at the Cavel West horse slaughterhouse in Redmond, Oregon, in which more than 100 horses were freed before the facility was burned. He pleaded guilty in 2006 to two charges and cooperated with federal prosecutors. On May 24, 2007, Judge Ann Aiken sentenced him to 37 months (3 years and 1 month) in federal prison.
Operation Backfire was the multi-agency federal investigation that, between 2005 and 2008, prosecuted approximately a dozen members of the small Eugene-area ELF/ALF cell known to investigators as 'The Family,' which had carried out roughly twenty arsons and acts of sabotage in five western states between 1996 and 2001. After the December 2005 arrests, the defendants split into two groups: those who cooperated with the federal government — testifying against their co-defendants in exchange for substantially reduced sentences — and those who did not (Daniel McGowan, Marius Mason, Joyanna Zacher, Nathan Block, Jonathan Paul, Briana Waters, Joseph Dibee, Justin Solondz, Rebecca Rubin, and the late William 'Avalon' Rodgers). This entry is for one of the cooperating defendants. The Earth Liberation Prisoners support network has consistently distinguished between cooperating and non-cooperating defendants, and many in the radical-ecology movement do not consider cooperators political prisoners. They are included here because they served meaningful federal prison time.
