March 6, 2008

Berkeley to Seek Restraining Order Against Animal-Rights Protesters

Officials at the University of California at Berkeley are planning to seek a restraining order against animal-rights protesters who have been staging loud demonstrations outside the homes of several researchers for the past two months, according to reports in California newspapers.

Robert Sanders, a spokesman for Berkeley, told The San Jose Mercury News that the protesters were “domestic terrorists, and the FBI has started treating them just as they would Al Qaeda.” He said the demonstrators had yelled into bullhorns late at night outside the homes of researchers, had smashed flowerpots, and had thrown rocks through windows.

The animal-rights activists have argued that the demonstrations are legal. In an article in The Daily Californian, Ryan Davis, a student at Berkeley who participated in the protests, said “the civil-rights movement used this tactic” of demonstrating at homes.

Berkeley officials said they feared that the demonstrations would escalate in violence. Last month activists in Southern California left an incendiary device outside the home of a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, and a group of protesters struck the husband of a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The police in Berkeley and Santa Cruz have been collaborating to see if there are any links between the protests at the two Bay Area campuses. Last Friday, Santa Cruz police officers released a sketch of one of the men involved in the attack on the home of the Santa Cruz researcher. The suspect, unlike the other assailants, apparently was not wearing a mask. —Richard Monastersky

Comments

1. The claim that demonstrations aimed at intimidating people who engage in legal and university approved scientific research involving animals has something to do with the civil rights movement is a fantastic and unsupportable notion. I am aware that some extreme animal rights activists claim that the scientific study of nonhuman animals is the moral equivalent of slavery and Nazi concentration camps, but such assertions are utterly rediculous and incredible. All who care about animals should support their humane care and treatment, and careful and considerate scientific study. Fine. Do that. But don’t support or sympathize with those who seek any excuse to be violent or disruptive.

   — Joe Erwin    Mar 6, 01:50 PM    #

2. I don’t recall civil right activists’ throwing rocks through windows, destroying property, or otherwise resorting to violence. Come to think of it, the concepts of nonviolence and passive disobedience seem to have been more the approach. These so-called protests and demonstrations cease to be protected under free speech when the speech escalates to violence. Such grotesque actions as these, along with those of ELF and other extremist groups, have less to do with free speech and liberation of the oppressed than with providing a pretext for unleashing hate and frustration. To claim kinship with the civil rights workers who suffered the violence inflicted upon them, without retaliating against their oppressors, in all too many cases to the point of death, is a shameful and revolting distortion of history.

   — Dan Kirklin    Mar 6, 03:54 PM    #

3. Dan – just a clarification – the Civil Rights movement practiced active, not passive, civil disobedience. Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed numerous times, including in Birmingham in 1963, for actively and nonviolently, disobeying the law.

   The same was true for the Lunch Counter Sit-in Movement and the Freedom Rides among other Civil Rights movement actions.

   Everything else you say is right on point and I fully agree.

   — Rick    Mar 7, 09:17 AM    #

4. Joe,

   I couldn’t agree more: don’t support or sympathize with those who seek any excuse to be violent or disruptive, especially if those excuses come in the name of science and “progress.”

   “Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and fetishization of the victims.”

   ~Derrick Jensen

   — yackademic    Mar 7, 09:57 PM    #

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