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Cracking down
from Nature
During the past decade, both the United States and the United Kingdom have enacted tough laws in response to violent tactics from activists. In 2005, the United Kingdom created the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act, allowing stiff sentences to be imposed on those who intimidate companies and individuals that contract with animal-testing labs. Activists have since been found guilty of blackmail for terrorizing individuals and companies with financial ties to Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract animal-testing company in Cambridgeshire, UK . In the United States, the 2008 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was brought in to combat property damage and threats that produce a 'reasonable fear' of death or injury for researchers or their relatives, although its enforcement has been challenged in the courts.
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These laws do not seem to have driven down the rate of violence. The Foundation for Biomedical Research in Washington DC, which is in favour of animal research, and the anti-animal-research magazine Bite Back, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, collect accounts of activism incidents from media reports and activist websites, respectively. Although not comprehensive, their data suggest that the worldwide incident rate has been stable for five years or more, with some regional variation. Activity in Britain seems to have dropped since the anti-Huntingdon campaign cooled. Protests have also been scaled back at the Biomedical Sciences Building at the University of Oxford, which opened in 2008 and houses research animals including primates.
Although Nature 's survey was not designed to measure the incidence of activism, it suggests a similar picture: 45% of respondents said they had not perceived an increase in activist activity in the past five years, with some regional differences. US scientists were more likely to say that activism had increased, whereas many UK scientists reported a perceived decrease. Sally Rockey, deputy director for extramural research at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says that the responses probably reflect the publicity drawn by high-profile incidents, not real increases. "There have been some life-threatening situations, arson and bomb threats for example. One of the things we've seen is some investigators have been targeted at their homes," says Rockey.
Animal researchers who said that they or someone they knew had been affected by activism wrote about incidents ranging from anonymous threats and protests outside laboratories to vandalism, 'liberation' of animals, physical attacks by masked activists and bombs both real and simulated. "Home damaged, young children terrorized, death threat, etc," reports one genomics researcher matter-of-factly.
A small number, about 15% (26 respondents), who had been negatively affected by activism said that they had changed the direction or practice of their research as a result. After encountering violent protests, one US academic was "much less willing to conduct any studies on non-human primates, despite their absolute critical relevance for neuro-protection research". |
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