The battle for animal rights is getting uglier. The ALF, which fancies itself a kind of IRA for the animal kingdom, is now on the FBI’s list of domestic terrorist groups. So far this year, its members have claimed responsibility for violent acts at a rate of almost one a day. Its crimes range from small-time vandalism (smashing windows at a butcher’s shop in suburban Connecticut and spray-painting ““McMurder’’ inside a Michigan McDonald’s) to large-scale ““rescue’’ operations (releasing 10,000 minks from a farm in Oregon). State and federal investigators thought they had shut the group down after a spree of bombings and break-ins ended with the arrest of an ALF leader in 1994. But now the violence is escalating again. Supporters brag that no one’s ever been hurt in an ALF action, but investigators who’ve tracked the group say that’s just sheer luck. ““It’s just a matter of time,’’ Schuening says, ““until someone gets killed.''
Investigators admit their knowledge of the ALF is shadowy. Most members are thought to be college-age activists with ties to more legitimate animal-rights and environmental groups. What stymies law enforcement is that the ALF has no traditional structure. Its members work in tiny, secretive cells and get guidance from the Internet and underground pamphlets, investigators say. The group’s Web site proclaims that anyone who takes up the cause is welcome to call himself part of the ALF. ““It’s not like the Mafia,’’ a frustrated federal investigator says. ““I can’t find an individual and say, “Here’s the don of the ALF’.''
If the ALF does have a godfather of sorts, it’s Rod Coronado. The 31-year-old Native American is the only animal-rights terrorist the Feds have ever nailed; he’s serving five years in prison for his role in the destruction of a research lab at Michigan State University in 1992. Borrowing the ALF name from a British group in the late 1980s, Coronado began by posing as a fur trader to gain access to potential targets. He used that knowledge, he says, to launch Operation Bite Back: a series of raids and bombings. Coronado insists that ALF members plot their acts carefully so that no one will get caught or hurt. ““The government may call us terrorists, but the one thing that separates us from that is that we don’t have anybody’s blood on our hands,’’ he says.
His victims disagree. ““Every time a medical-research facility is destroyed, the people who suffer from diseases are harmed,’’ says Brandon Millett of Americans for Medical Progress. Animal-rights extremists have been blamed for at least 85 attacks on research labs since 1987. Millett’s group contends that ALF raids have delayed valuable lab testing on AIDS transmission, sleep deprivation and lethal bacteria.
Nor is it clear that the ALF’s brand of liberation does much good for animals. The ALF likes to release horrific images of animal abuse; one undercover video shows a cheerful farmer breaking the necks of squealing minks. But thousands of frenzied minks have died gnashing at each other after they were released from cages. Coyotes freed from research facilities have been hit by cars or have returned to the lab for food. Ironically, the raid at Michigan State accidentally ruined an adjoining lab where scientists were studying ways to curtail the need for animal testing.
Coronado shrugs all that off, saying the ALF’s main goal is to inflict financial wounds on abusers. But there, too, the results are uncertain. The manager of the Belgian-owned horse-meat plant in Oregon points out that the American plant accounted for a small fraction of his company’s global business and was insured anyway. (The plant exports horse meat to Europe for human consumption.) ““If they think they can destroy us, they’d better think twice,’’ Pascal Derde says. Standing amid the factory’s ruins, he inspects another horse–which he will shoot through the head once the plant is rebuilt.
If the ALF likens itself to the IRA, then People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is its Sinn Fein. The nation’s largest animal-rights group, PETA dutifully defends the ALF, even paying Coronado’s $42,000 in legal fees. A chic Hollywood cause boasting supporters such as Drew Barrymore and Alec Baldwin, PETA’s activities include protesting the traveling Oscar Meyer Weiner-mobile. But now it’s facing questions about whom it supports with its $12 million budget. ““You’ve got kids breaking open their piggy banks and sending in money, thinking it’s going to the little cats and dogs in their ads, and it’s really going to support animal-rights terrorism,’’ Millett charges. PETA’s cofounder, Ingrid Newkirk, makes no apologies. ““I wish every person would get up and break into a lab,’’ she says.
But how far are extremists really willing to go? The ALF is not the most violent animal-rights group. A Canadian outfit calling itself the Justice Department claims responsibility for sending envelopes rigged with poison-covered razor blades to hunting groups. Chased from their own country, some well-armed Canadian activists are thought to have fled to the United States. If that’s true, the militant ALF may soon seem as harmless as a couple of caged minks.
