Expert: Animal Rights Radicals Adopting Disturbing Tactics

Radical animal rights activists are more marginalized than ever before in the United States and western Europe. But it’s this growing marginalization that worries one national security expert who monitors their activities worldwide.

He believes a rash of vandalism, intimidation and arson across continental Europe, coupled with a recent home invasion of a California biomedical researcher, reveals a disturbing trend that ultimately may be expressed in even more violent acts.

“I think what it is showing is that the level of violence is increasing rather than decreasing,” says Dr. Robert Norton, an Auburn University agroterrorism expert and poultry science professor who works through the Alabama Cooperative Extension System educating Alabamians about biosecurity-related risks.

Norton stresses the strong distinctions between mainstream animal rights advocates and the radical activists who have gained an especially strong foothold in Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom.

“These are not animal rightists like the people who believe that you should take care of dogs and that there should be more animal shelters,” he says. “These are the kind of people who confront hunters and who not only protest at research facilities but who also try to shut down research or, at the very least, threaten or intimidate researchers.”

What most concerns Norton about the spread of this type of radicalism is “the ratcheting up of shrillness” that has accompanied it — a sign of a growing desperation among activists that ultimately may be expressed in more violence.

“What we have is a society that has largely dismissed the claims of the animal rightists, and so the radicals have chosen to ratchet up violence in an attempt to intimidate people,” he says.

Norton says this growing shrillness and desperation are typical behaviors among groups that undergo increasing marginalization within mainstream society.

“This is a studied process,” he says. “All sorts of radical social movements pass through these stages, and what we’re seeing with this group is a natural progression of this process.”

And largely for this reason, he fears the worst is yet to come.

“I think — and I first predicted this about three or four years ago — that we will see people killed, which has not been the case in the past,” Norton says.

The most recent incident in the United States involved the home invasion of a biomedical researcher and University of California Santa Cruz faculty in Westside Santa Cruz by six masked animal rights activists.

The researcher said in addition to terrifying her young children, ages 2 and 8, the intruders struck her husband on the hand with an unknown object when confronted on the front porch of their home.

The attack, which occurred Sunday, Feb. 23, is only the latest in several acts of vandalism and threats targeting UCSC researchers who are engaged in medical research and who employ mice, rats, fruit flies, worms and microorganisms in the course of their research.

Until now, most of the animal rights activity has been nonviolent.

“We’ve seen primarily break-ins, lots of graffiti, vandalism, the freeing of animals and some intimidation, including identity theft,” he says.

Norton describes England as the birthplace of radical animal rights activism, though it eventually fanned out into Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom before crossing the Atlantic.

If there’s any good news, at least for Alabamians, it’s that acts of intimidation and violence in the United States have been limited largely to the West Coast.

“The ratcheting up of the violence is not terribly widespread in the United States,” he says.

Even so, the steady increase in intimidation and violence that has characterized animal rights activism in recent months has closely patterned other radical groups that eventually began employing violent acts routinely, Norton says.

For this reason, he believes the United States ultimately will be forced to adopt legal measures now common in Great Britain where animal rights radicalism is more widespread.

“We’re either going to have to adopt some of the terrorist laws already prevalent in the United Kingdom or some other viable alternative, but we need to understand that this is not going away,” he says.

“Until we say ‘enough is enough,’ we’re going to have this problem for a long time to come.”

Posted by Jim Langcuster at February 29, 2008 02:52 PM