Animal Rights...Terrorists?

The war on terror has about as many fronts as the government can invent for it. It’s so hard to keep up with all of them that many issues fly under the radar until they appear in some new piece of legislation or executive order. We have written about ‘animal rights terrorists’ once or twice before, but, until recently, we did not realize just how much this ‘terrorist threat’ has been preoccupying our leaders on the Hill. Largely un-noticed outside of the websites of animal rights activists in the US and UK, the Senate this week unanimously passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA).

This bill amended the already draconian Animal Enterprise Protection Act (APEA). The APEA, law since 1992, created a penalty of $10,000 or 10 years to life imprisonment for any physical disruption that leads to $10,000 in damages to an animal enterprise.

The new AETA amends existing law in a number of ways. Firstly, the definition of an animal enterprise has been broadened to include (1) an enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products for profit for educational purposes; and (2) an animal shelter, pet store, breeder, or furrier. So virtually any enterprise that deals with animals is now included.

Interestingly, AETA goes further by expanding the type of prohibited criminal behaviour. It changes the term used to describe activity in AEPA from "for the purpose of causing physical disruption" to "for the purpose of damaging or disrupting" an animal enterprise. This widening of the kind of prohibited activity means that everything from death threats or serious bodily harm against individuals (including their family members, spouse, or intimate partners) who are involved with animal enterprises, to even benign and peaceful protests that might urge say a consumer boycott of a company are now included. This definition might also apply to a whistleblower seeking to make public what they deem to be harmful or illegal activities by an animal enterprise. The act also allows for Title III federal criminal wiretapping surveillance of animal rights organizations. AETA effectively criminalizes First Amendment activities such as demonstrations, leafleting, undercover investigations, and boycotts.

Passage of the act follows hard on the arrests and convictions of a large number of environmental and animal rights activists. On 7 December 2005, the FBI began 'Operation Backfire', a multi-state sweep of activists. Fifteen people have since been indicted by a Grand Jury on 65 charges in connection with actions between 1996 and 2001. Last month saw the sentencing of three animal rights activists of four to six years in prison and payment of more than $1 million in restitution for 'inciting violence and terror'. The activity involved mainly the administration of a website against Huntington Life Sciences, a contract research organization in the U.S. and U.K. that has long been the target of animal rights activists. Three others were convicted and have been given 30 days to hand themselves into the authorities.

Animal rights activists have been getting it here and abroad. While in the US Federal Authorities are determined to brand animal rights activists as terrorists, UK authorities are reluctant to include animal rights activists in their lexicon of terrorism, still calling them extremists. This is partly a result of a turf war between the police and MI5. Calling these activists terrorists would put them on the radar of MI5 and effectively close down a number of specialist police units.

In fact, the British Police seem to have all the powers they need. Earlier this year four animal rights activists were sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment for conspiracy to blackmail the owners of the Darly Oaks farm in Staffordshire, which bred guinea pigs for medical research. Their campaign against the farm culminated in the theft of the body of the grandmother of one of the owners of the farm from her grave in October 2004. Some of the sentences handed down to those convicted were harsher than those given for manslaughter in UK courts. So proficient have the UK authorities been in dealing with animal rights activists that the police report over half of them are now in jail.

In reality, in both the US and the UK we are talking about small groups of marginalized individuals who are little more than a public nuisance even to those who work on animal research. One may wonder about the moral code of people prepared to attack, harangue or stalk those involved in animal research. However, it’s incumbent on those of us who don't want to live in our bizarre security state to speak up for even this group of misanthropes’ right to protest. This is especially the case because the new law demonstrates how the war on terror has created a permissive environment in which all kinds of authoritarian law and order measures are considered acceptable and even necessary. One suspects the Senate didn’t even need to call these activists terrorists – just asserting the underlying principle of security would likely have been enough to pass this law restricting basic rights.

It's also clear that a battery of new laws and police powers aimed to halt the activities of this motley crew really avoids the issue. The government is not defending science by turning animal rights activists into terrorists. The real issue at hand is society's reluctance to endorse many of the activities of scientists, and rigorously to defend the idea of animal research. Animal rights activists simply leech off that existing suspicion. To deal with that problem, we need a wider cultural shift through a public debate on science and progress, not new laws and a clamping down on the right to protest.