The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act: Protecting researchers or chilling free speech?

By DOUG ERICKSON
Wisconsin State Journal
Dec. 01, 2006

From his office at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Dr. Joseph Kemnitz has watched people dig through the center's trash cans, apparently searching for documents they think could be incriminating.

He has consoled fellow researchers whose mail contained razor blades, and he has shielded his wife and children from the animal rights activists who have protested at his home five times.

"I think they enjoy coming right up to the line without crossing it," said Kemnitz, the center's director.

He said he and his fellow researchers at UW-Madison feel safer now that Congress has passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. But opponents say the legislation, which makes it a crime to threaten or intimidate animal researchers or their family members, goes too far.

"The frightening thing for me is that it heavily criminalizes civil disobedience, and just for animal rights activists," said Lori Nitzel, a Madison attorney and executive director of Alliance for Animals, a statewide group that pledges nonviolence.

Wisconsin ties

Madison, with its large federal primate lab, an active animal rights scene and a university researcher who testified before Congress on the bill, figured prominently in the law's evolution.

The legislation, which President Bush is expected to sign soon, amends the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act. The statute outlawed the "physical disruption" of an animal enterprise - such as a research lab or animal farm - but didn't address harassment against employees.

Supporters say the bill was needed because extremists are targeting researchers in hopes of pushing them out of the field.

In November 2005, the most recent time Kemnitz's home was targeted, activists parked a truck with a giant video screen in his neighborhood and broadcast scenes of monkeys being used in experiments at research labs in other parts of the country. They called him Josef Mengele, after the ruthless Nazi concentration camp doctor.

"They like to instill a fear factor when they can," Kemnitz said.

But critics say the legislation threatens legal forms of civil protest with a broad, over-the-top approach - an approach evident, they say, in the act's title, which was changed in 2002 to include the word "terrorism."

"It's depressing to know that, just because of our beliefs involving animals, we are going to be branded terrorists if we protest," Nitzel said.

Nitzel wonders if even the kind of leafleting the group did Friday near a Madison fur store could be construed as illegal. The bill can impose punishment if an animal enterprise suffers "economic damage."

"We are, in fact, hoping to cause economic damage to the store," Nitzel said.

'That's just silly'

Backers of the bill say opponents are trying to alarm people with wacky what-ifs.

The legislation, which had strong bipartisan support, protects lawful boycotts and peaceful demonstrations, said Frankie Trull, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research. The law would kick in only when there is an orchestrated effort across state lines to intimidate or harass someone to the extent that they fear for their safety, she said.

"This is not intended to say that all animal rights activists are terrorists," Trull said. "That's just silly."

Less clear is how the law would affect demonstrations outside researchers' homes - called "home visits" by activists - like those in Madison last fall.

While relations between local animal rights activists and researchers who use monkeys have always been strained - neither side trusts the other - the home visits ratcheted up the emotion.

During the protests, which were carried out at seven homes over four nights, about a dozen activists broadcast test- lab footage from the video truck and yelled epithets through bullhorns. They distributed fliers to neighbors with the researchers' photographs, addresses and alleged misdeeds, and they left sidewalk chalk markings such as "monkey murderer."

The researchers were targeted because of their work with the UW-Madison primate center, one of eight federally supported primate research labs. About 250 affiliated researchers conduct experiments on a population of 1,500 nonhuman primates, in areas such as aging, obesity, virology and embryonic stem cells.

A needed back-up

Eric Sandgren, an associate professor in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, said the activists trespassed on private property during the home visits and used rhetoric that could easily instill fear.

"In my view, it did constitute harassment and intimidation," he said. "If they had modified it just a little, it wouldn't have."

Still, Sandgren, who heads a campus committee that reviews proposed animal research and oversees animal care, doubts the legislation would have been triggered if it had been in place last fall. But he sees real value in the bill for its ability to dampen the potential for an escalation in activism.

"This is kind of like a back-up," he said. "There needn't be indecision for events that do cross the line."

Dr. Michele Basso, a UW-Madison assistant professor of physiology, testified before Congress that the home visits triggered fear in her. Supporters of the new law say her testimony went a long way in securing the bill's passage.

Basso said that, after the home visits, she had her name removed from a tax assessor's Web site and had her house deed switched to another name to conceal her new address. Still, within a few months, she was receiving more than 50 unsolicited subscriptions to random magazines, and books with titles such as "Oh, What a Slaughter" and "Fatal Burn."

An anonymous phone message said, "Hello, Michele, we know you're a monkey killer, and you can't get away from us."

Defending home visits

Local animal rights activists say they don't know who's behind the magazine subscriptions, and they condemn the 1999 incident in which four UW-Madison researchers - and many other researchers across the country - received razor blades in the mail.

But they defend last fall's home visits, saying sometimes activists have to make people uncomfortable to get results.

Activists had tried for seven years to get UW officials to agree to a public debate on animal testing, said Rick Bogle of Madison, founder of the Primate Freedom Project and a participant in the visits. A public debate occurred five months after the visits.

"Maybe it's coincidental, but the fact remains that nothing had happened up to that point," Bogle said.

Anyone who proposes a new law will claim that it doesn't infringe on civil rights, said Bogle, who calls the legislation draconian and vaguely worded. The reality is that no one really knows the scope of a new law until it is tested in court, he said. That's why he suspects that the real goal of the legislation is to scare people into submission.

"The intent, of course, is to quiet, to quell, public dissent," he said.

He isn't sure how the new law will alter local activism.

"It definitely has caught everybody's attention."