Keeping protests within the law
December's editorial in Nature Neuroscience (10, 1501; 2007)
describes how law-enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom are acting
before trouble develops to protect researchers from threats and
harassment by animal rights extremists. Other countries should consider
adopting similar policies and tactics.
There has been "a sudden and very marked decline in targeting
individual researchers around the country in a personal way," the
director of the UK Research Defence Society (RDS, an organization that monitors such campaigns and receives police briefings) told The Guardian. The RDS website points to an article on Comment is Free, the Guardian blog, about the benefits of animal experiments for medicine.
According to the Nature Neuroscience
editorial: "In contrast, Dario Ringach and Michael Podell received
little support from law enforcement or their universities in the United
States in dealing with sustained campaigns of threats and intimidation,
which ultimately led each of them to stop studying animals. The passage
of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act raised hopes that the United
States might adopt a tougher approach, but one scientist in Los Angeles
said that the situation has not improved. In October, the Animal
Liberation Front took responsibility for flooding the house of a local
researcher, causing $20,000–40,000 in damage. Because the new federal
law applies only to crimes committed across state lines, it has not
been effective against extremists who act within a state. To crack down
on intimidation of researchers, legislatures will need to pass stronger
state laws and the police will need to respond proactively to threats."