Vegan or animal rights activist? Firebombings or arson? Domestic terrorism or protest?

When people start throwing around this kind of loaded language, you no longer have a debate over semantics. As soon as police and university officials declared the early August attacks on the property of two University of California Santa Cruz professors to be acts of domestic terrorism, the door for nuanced discussion closed. Incendiary rhetoric was lobbed back, most notably by Jerry Vlasak, MD, of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, who wrote in response to the attacks, “UC-Santa Cruz may consider themselves an institution of higher education, but they are also an institution of animal torture and killing. This is historically what happens whenever revolutionaries begin to take the oppression and suffering of their fellow beings seriously, whether human or nonhuman. It’s regrettable that certain scientists are willing to put their families at risk by choosing to do wasteful animal experiments in this day and age.”

It’s difficult to tease out nuanced positions amid such hard-line declarations. Press coverage has played fast and loose with terminology and facts. In a 24-hour news cycle fueled by innuendo, loaded terms such as “terrorism,” “firebombing” and “veganism” become easily intertwined. Among pundits and columnists, bloggers and readers, A plus B does not need to necessarily equal C to suggest intent or association. If A, B and C reside in the same few column inches together, that’s good enough.

Despite the media coverage and poorly sourced editorials, for many vegans or animal rights activists the attacks are alarming on a number of levels. As animal rights activists consider last week’s attacks, they fear the effect the fallout will have upon the nonextremist elements of the animal rights community.

Not My Battle
One of the strongest local critics of the actions last week is Erik Marcus, author of Meat Market: Animals, Ethics and Money and the publisher of Vegan.com. Marcus