Brendan O’Neill has written an incisive and mostly thoughtful article about animal rights extremism in spiked-online. He points out, rightly, that the bunch of thugs and morons who carry out direct action in the name of animal rights are far from genuine terrorists.

There is much in this article that we would agree with. The fear of animal rights extremism has induced a paralysis in the scientific community that goes well beyond the reality of the threat. There is simply no way that a handful of extremists can target all the hundreds of institutions and thousands of people involved in animal research in the UK at once. If we all spoke out together, we could drown out the tacit support the extremists get from the antivivisectionists, through their distorted and misleading accounts of animal research. This would accelerate the marginalisation of both antivivisectionist activists and extremists.

But though Brendan O’Neill asks why everyone is so obsessed with animal rights extremism, he fails to address this in his article. That’s a shame, because it is a critical question. What is it about modern society that so many people fear this sort of extremism. Why do they simply keep their heads down, demonstrating that they cannot contemplate the prospect of being targeted by the extremists. Why do so many companies capitulate so early when they become a target - even companies like Securicor, which one would hardly imagine is a soft touch. And how is it that this rag-tag bunch of extremists can force a major stock market listed company like Montpellier to pull out of construction of the Oxford animal lab.

The simple fact is that extremists managed to develop tactics that did work. And this demands more critical analysis. They closed down a number of smaller institutions. They were partly responsible for Cambridge University abandoning plans for a new neuroscience centre, and have delayed work enormously at the Oxford lab. O’Neill doesn’t seem to be able to explain any of this. He doesn’t even try.

Presumably O’Neill has not himself been a victim of animal rights extremism. But from our discussions with those who have been, it is a genuinely distressing experience. It may well be that extremists have done not so much serious physical harm directly to people. They have trashed plenty of cars and damaged other property instead. Their tactics have been more about harassement, which can have profound psychological impact. The extremists became adept at finding individuals who were vulnerable to their tactics. We can hardly blame someone like a cleaning lady from a company which supplies stationery to Huntingdon Life Sciences for being less resilient than their managing director Brian Cass. Those who were strong enough to hold out for longer, like the Hall family at the Newchurch guinea-pig farm, found their entire communities subject to ever greater levels of harassment, and sinister sorts of intimidation - not least grave desecration. O’Neill’s suggestion that the best way to stop animal rights activism is to defend, loudly and proudly, the work of animal researchers - is just waffle. The extremists don’t give a damn about the arguments surrounding animal research. And their victims want police action - and quickly.

We like the way O’Neill has applied plain-speaking to this ‘ragbag collection of former schoolteachers and vicar’s sons’. But there are other types of plain-speaking. Recently in the US, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran an editorial in strong support of legislation to crack down on extremists. It reads in part:

‘fanatics argue that extending the law would abridge their free-speech right. Rubbish. The First Amendment is no license for harassment against tertiary agencies or individuals when the intention obviously is to remove their support - and cripple a lab’s operation. Worse, still, is the chilling effect these campaigns could have on future medical research if lunatics are allowed to eviscerate scientific protocols.’

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 31 July 2006

Now that’s the kind of language we like.