California:

It was late into the night when 25 people in ski masks descended on professor Dario Ringach’s family home. Pounding on the door, frightening his small children, they screamed into megaphones, “Animal killer! We know where you live! We will never give up!”

And they apparently meant it. That year, 2006, according to court documents, animal rights activists launched a summer-long campaign of harassment against Ringach, an assistant professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of California at Los Angeles and other scientists who conduct research with laboratory animals.

They hurled firecrackers at his house in the middle of the night and planted Molotov-cocktail-like explosives at other faculty houses, threatening to burn them to the ground.

UCLA hired private security, but Ringach feared for his family. “Effectively immediately, I am no longer doing animal research,” he finally wrote in an e-mail to his persecutors, pleading to be left alone. “Please don’t bother my family anymore.”

That probably just quadrupled the number of folks willing to engage in this behavior and quadrupled the lengths they’ll go to.

How are the researchers responding to the threat?

The University of California regents have responded by suing UCLA Primate Freedom, the Animal Liberation Brigade, the Animal Liberation Front and five people allegedly affiliated with them.

No doubt that immediately shut down the whole movement.

Indeed, a temporary restraining order — prohibiting harassment and posting of faculty members’ personal information on the Internet — was granted Feb. 21 by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. But three days later, six masked protesters reportedly disrupted a child’s birthday party at the home of a University of California at Santa Cruz researcher and confronted her husband at the door, hitting him on the hand.

That’s incredible. Didn’t they know about the restraining order?

Jerry Vlasak, spokesman for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office makes no bones about it:

“If killing them is the only way to stop them,” he said in a telephone interview, “then I said killing them would certainly be justified.”

I guess I take that to mean that you can’t tell which of these lunatics is willing to kill you, so you pretty much are forced to assume they all might be. And that means one warning shot (if time and circumstances permit) then light ‘em up.

Via RNS.

Tags: CA

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Crime and Violence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.