Animal rights extremists face backlash

LONDON -- Animal rights extremists, known for their attention-grabbing stunts and sometimes using violence to make their point, are facing considerable backlash in Britain. From a group that advocates the use of animals in scientific research, to an online petition in favor of animal testing that was signed by the prime minister, organizations are defying the radicals and raising questions about the lengths the activists are willing to go for their cause.

Britain has always been at the forefront of the animal rights movement; its Parliament enacted the world's first laws against animal cruelty in the 19th century -- decades before it passed any laws about cruelty toward children .

It has also been a hotbed for animal rights extremism. The Animal Liberation Front, which in 2005 was declared a terrorist threat by the US Department of Homeland Security, is an offshoot of Britain's Band of Mercy, which disrupted British fox hunting in the 19th century and moved on to protest pharmaceutical laboratories in the 20th century in the United States and Britain.

In 2001, the managing director of Huntingdon Life Sciences, Europe's largest animal-testing facility, was attacked outside his home near Cambridge by men wielding pick ax handles. Last year, activists firebombed the home of a GlaxoSmithKline executive in Buckinghamshire and set fire to an Oxford University boathouse, in effort s to stop both organizations from using animals in scientific research.

It's hard to say what tipped the balance against activists. Some analysts said it was when, in 2004, a relative of a farmer who bred research guinea pigs was disinterred ; or when, in early May, activists contacted hundreds of GlaxoSmithKline shareholders and threatened to publish their names and addresses unless they sold their shares in the company .

Yet many think the anti-extremism movement was jump-started by Laurie Pycroft, a 16-year-old high school dropout and self-proclaimed geek.

Last winter, Pycroft, who lives near Oxford, was walking by an animal rights protest when he and a friend decided to march near the protesters with makeshift signs reading, ``Support Progress. Build the Oxford Lab."

A handful of Oxford students heard about Pycroft's actions and joined with him to form Pro-Test, a group that supports testing on animals.

Buoyed by Pro-Test's favorable reception, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced last month that he was signing the People's Petition, an anonymous online petition started in May that supports animal testing and has more than 20,000 signatures.

Groups that advocate testing still face a formidable foe in the nonviolent majority of the animal rights movement, but the actions of extremists have put those organizations on the defensive.

``The animal rights movement is, at the moment, suffering from an image problem," said Alistair Currie, the campaign director for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, a nonviolent group that wants to end animal testing. .

Currie thinks that the Pro-Test movement won't get far in Britain. He maintains that 75 percent of Britons are still, in principle, against experiments that cause animals pain, according to a 2003 poll by his organization . But a recent poll by the Daily Telegraph newspaper suggested that support for animal testing is at 70 percent .

This doesn't dissuade Mel Broughton, the spokesman for Stop the Primate Lab at Oxford, which some British officials have labeled an extremist group.

``We have seriously pricked the conscience of society, and when you do that you face a backlash." he said. ``As far as we're concerned, we're not going to let it go.