Cracking Down on Animal Rights Terrorism

On both sides of the Atlantic, a new wave of terrorist acts from the animal rights and environmental movement are resulting in new legal initiatives to crack down on such crime.

In Great Britain, Home Secretary Jack Straw recently announced the formation of a special police squad that will concentrate solely on animal rights extremists who have been so successful in that country at carrying out acts of property destruction and intimidation.

Straw announced that and other new initiatives on a visit to the beleaguered Huntingdon Life Sciences. Straw said,

We will not tolerate a small number of criminals trying to threaten research organisations and companies, their shareholders, suppliers, customers, employees and their families. The work here is critical to humankind and we need to applaud the people who work here rather than abuse them. I assure we will be taking all the necessary steps we can to support companies like this and to better explain how important this sort of work is.

Meanwhile in the United States, the Oregon state Senate unanimously passed a couple bills which had already unanimously passed the state House to give prosecutors and law enforcement more tools in combating animal rights terrorism. The bills would make it a felony to interfere with agricultural research (extremist environmentalists have been destroying such research), as well as adding interference with animal research to the list of crimes that can be prosecuted as a Class A felony under Oregon’s anti-racketeering statutes.

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber is expected to sign the bill into law.

Source:

Clampdown on animal activists. The BBC, April 26, 2001.