Share thisGlobalising animal rights issues and the targeting of secondary and tertiary targets means that all animal laboratory organisations must make security a top priority during the design/build process.
Over recent years, the UK has enjoyed significant success at countering and controlling the animal rights extremist threat to research facilities, with numerous successful prosecutions, long prison sentences and effective use of the UK Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Previously, we had seen the growth in tactics aimed at targeting not just the research organisations but also their staff and secondary and tertiary targets too. Worryingly, we have also seen the growth in the use of extremist tactics across the globe and in particular in mainland Europe and the United States. The rapid sharing of tactics via the Internet has seen mainland Europe, the Netherlands in particular, experiencing sharp rises in incidents, while the UK has seen a decline in incidents during the last few years. The U.S. has experienced fire-bombing, home visits and intimidation of researchers and their families, particularly on the West Coast — a worrying throwback to the previous times in the UK.
The open involvement of media machines such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has globalised the issue. PETA sponsors “undercover heroes for animals”, trains infiltrators, and gets endorsements from “celebrities”. In the UK, we must not be complacent because while the main protagonists are in prison, others will take their places. The sharing of tactics with other domestic extremist groups, may lead to the development of new tactics.
Globalising animal rights issues and targeting of secondary and tertiary targets will lead to organisations that are unfamiliar with the tactics becoming innocent victims of the threats. This also means that multinational research organisations may face similar issues, but, have different responses to the issues across many different countries in which they are based. We have seen moves in some countries such as the Netherlands and the U.S. to clamp down on the illegal activities of the activists. However, in other parts of Europe, the issue is not so clear and the statistics on animal rights crime are collected and collated in different ways, making animal rights counter-intelligence and monitoring difficult.
Now, more than ever, it is vital that organisations educate their supply chain across national boundaries, perform due diligence on suppliers, and ensure that those working within their facilities and those involved in building, design, and research projects have their best interests at heart. It is very important that any organisation embarking on a building project needs to be entirely sure of its plans and objectives for progressing the proposed programme at a very early stage of planning and development.