Animal Rights Extremism and the Terrorism Question

There has been a highly organized campaign of vandalism and intimidation directed against individuals associated with animal research by militant sections of the animal rights movement in the UK and United States since the late 1970s. While most of the many hundreds of recorded incidents have involved minor property damage and threats of violence there has been a small number of major arson cases involving plastic explosives, and recently there has been a campaign of placing incendiary devices under the cars or at the homes of animal researchers. In response to this long-running campaign, and after lobbying pressure from animal-user industries, lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic have recently introduced special legislation that effectively casts animal rights extremism (ARE) as terrorism. Speaking in support of the passage of the Animal Enterprises Terrorism Bill, the Deputy Director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division John E. Lewis said, “The FBI has made the prevention and investigation of animal rights extremist matters a domestic terrorism investigative priority.” After widening its statute definition of terrorism to incorporate ARE the UK government boasted, “Animal rights extremists should not be surprised to find themselves treated as terrorists.” But are lawmakers getting the conceptual analysis right? Should the recent violence in the name of animal rights be classed as terrorism? Given that there are serious philosophical question marks over the moral status of animals and the justifiability of using them in biomedical research, these are reasonable questions to ask. After all, if the ethics of using animals in biomedical research is an open question, there must also be scope for debating the ethics of using violence to stop animals being used for research purposes. Perhaps animal rights extremists do not warrant the pejorative label “terrorists” but instead deserve to be known as freedom fighters consistently applying philosophically respectable views—views now regularly debated in journals such as this one? Even if the terrorism question could be answered without having to decide whether ARE is in the service of a just cause, there is another reason for critical reflection on recent applications of the terrorism tag to animal rights violence. To date, ARE has not resulted in the single death of a human being. While it is true that extremists have been responsible for arson, making threats, damaging property, causing financial loss and, on one occasion, physical assault; and while it is