WASHINGTON, May 4 (UPI) -- As U.K. and European authorities raided the homes of animal-rights extremists this week, activists in the United States were planning disruptions at next week's biotech-industry meeting in Boston.
Law-enforcement officials in England, the Netherlands and Belgium arrested 32 alleged extremists Tuesday in a two-year investigation that is one of the biggest ever conducted against animal-rights activists.
The FBI, which has said it considers animal-rights extremists the biggest domestic terrorist threat, issued a statement in support of the raids, suggesting the crackdown is also being intensified in the United States.
However, despite the FBI's efforts and a new law passed at the end of last year that allows for stiffer penalties, illegal animal-rights activity seems to be carrying on largely unabated.
In addition to the planned protests at the Biotechnology Industry Organization's meeting in Boston, animal-rights activists have been carrying out other legal protests as well as vandalism of labs, facilities and even the homes of executives of pharmaceutical firms.
The activists largely focus on Huntingdon Life Sciences -- which conducts animal tests that the advocates consider brutal and unnecessary -- and companies that do business with it.
Recent targets include the home of GlaxoSmithKline's president in Philadelphia and Torrey Pines Therapeutics in San Diego.
The FBI and groups associated with the pharmaceutical and biotech industries maintain they are only interested in stopping criminal and illegal activity, but the animal-rights groups claim law-enforcement officials are targeting legal protests and are infringing upon free-speech rights.
"The whole thing is meant to chill free speech," Camille Hankins, spokeswoman for Win Animal Rights, told United Press International.
Hankins said a New York Police Department officer threatened to arrest her and stopped a legal protest her group was conducting this past weekend at the home of the New York Stock Exchange chief executive officer. Hankins said she had the entire exchange on videotape.
Although Huntingdon has obtained a restraining order against Hankins' group that limits how they can conduct protests against those who do business with the company, including financial institutions, she said they were in compliance with the terms of the order and the officer had no legal basis to prohibit their protest.
The officer ordered Hankins' group to move on to their next location, which was the home of James Robinson III, chairman of the board of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Her group chanted protests at his house and the police did not interfere, she said.
Hankins said actions seeking to limit public protests will only serve to drive some activists underground to commit illegal activity.
Although she said she had no knowledge of any activists carrying out or planning to commit illegal actions, she said it's likely to happen because authorities are focused only on the above-ground activists and are making criminal activity the only option.
"It's a lot easier to do something at night, to do something anonymously," she said. "Those people are not being caught. It's the above-ground activists that are being targeted."
Jacquie Calnan, president of Americans for Medical Progress, a group in Alexandria, Va., that is supported by the pharmaceutical industry, told UPI she hasn't done a quantitative analysis but hasn't seen a decrease in the activities of animal-rights activists or an increase an arrests or prosecutions.
"I haven't notice any higher or lower level," Calnan said. "It's pretty much a continuum from where we were last year."
Calnan said she is confident the updated Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act President Bush signed into law late last year "will be used widely by law enforcement to remove criminally minded animal rights activists from circulation," but she stressed that her group is not seeking to suppress legal protests.
Frankie Trull, president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research, a group supported by industry, also said she hasn't detected an increase in underground, illegal activity, but there may have been some drop-off in the targeting and harassment of individuals who work for pharmaceutical firms or other companies that are involved in animal research.
However, that may not persist and the illegal activities could even increase.
"When the original act was passed in the early 1990s, stuff dropped like a rock," Trull told UPI. "Then the animal rights activists found loopholes and things got even worse. So there may be a lull in certain respects but I don't expect that to last."
So far, though, nobody has been arrested under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, Trull said. "I also believe law enforcement will be extremely careful how they use it so they do not appear to be even inadvertently to be abusing it," she added.
Jerry Vlasak, a spokesman for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which distributes anonymous communiques it receives about illegal actions committed by animal-rights extremists, shares Hankins' belief law enforcement are targeting activists who are seeking to remain on the right side of the law.
Vlasak may be an example of this himself. His house was raided by the FBI and the Santa Monica Police Department last year, and, six months later, the authorities haven't pressed any charges and have refused to return computer equipment, pamphlets, books and other materials they confiscated.
"They're not rounding up people doing underground actions because they don't know who they are," Vlasak told UPI.
And the illegal, underground actions appear to be continuing at the same numbers as before the passage of the AETA.
"You certainly don't see a drop-off," Vlasak said. "The number of actions is at least as frequent as before, if not more so."
