The British have always had a soft spot for animals, and have led the movement to treat them as humanely as possible. For that reason, the British have long shown tolerance for terrorist tactics of animal-rights activists, including bombings, blackmail, and character assassination. According to Der Spiegel, that appears to be changing. A new countering movement has rapidly gained favor among the British, who may have had their fill of terrorists altogether:
The British are waging a new war on terror, but this one is at home and is one in which they appear to be gaining the upper hand. When it comes to animal experiments, militant groups like the Animal Liberation Front, founded in 1976, have long enjoyed extensive support and a monopoly on opinion rarely questioned in public. Even when they resorted to extreme measures like setting fires or sending letter bombs, they could consistently bank on a silent majority’s vague sense of guilt over the suffering of laboratory animals.
But this support is rapidly disappearing, thanks in part to Pycroft and Pro-Test, but also because as a result of their extreme actions the laboratory rats avengers have been marginalized, and some have even been imprisoned. ….
Pycroft has two cats, Gloria and Charlie, and he says that he is very fond of his pets. But he also loves his grandfather, who lived to get to know his grandson because he was the recipient of heart valves that had been transplanted into his body from pigs. “People come first,” says Pycroft.
He began his crusade by founding an organization called Pro-Test, to campaign on behalf of the kinds of animal experiments that are unavoidable. Students and professors quickly joined his group, and together they began staging public debates and counter-demonstrations. As the movement grew, Pro-Test’s ranks swelled to the point where its protestors, sometimes numbering more than 1,000, would actually outnumber the animal rights protestors. Since then the house of Pycroft’s parents, where he lives, has been under police protection.
It’s about time. Speaking as the spouse of a diabetic and transplant patient, the ongoing engagement with these violent Luddites has been inexplicable. The advancement of medicine and science gained through animal research is undeniable, and these self-appointed Talibanists want to bring it to a screeching halt by intimidation and extortion, and worse. The emergence of al-Qaeda and radical Islamist terror has finally woken people to the danger of nihilists, even almost literally in sheep’s clothing.
The same dynamic could be seen in the US, although not so much with the animal rights movement. Before 9/11, terrorists of the radical Left had been given a romantic light in Hollywood. Insipid movies like Running on Empty and Flashback portrayed underground radicals as benign heroes, while the reality of the underground radical movement remained much more malevolent. When Kathleen Soliah of the Symbionese Liberation Army got unmasked here in Minnesota, she discovered that her post-9/11 capture prompted little sympathy for her plight — and eventually led her to plead guilty and accept a lengthy prison sentence for several crimes committed more than twenty years earlier.
Terrorism cuts to the heart of a democratic republic. It seeks to supplant the consensual governance of the community with the diktat of armed minorities. That remains true whether the armed minority comprise radical Islamists, hard-Left self-styled revolutionaries, or animal-rights lunatics. Rational societies should have no sympathy for those who would destroy democracy, regardless of their cause.