Animal rights to the max

[Animal 0]

Hamilton Spectator

By Joe Mozingo
The Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES (Sep 12, 2006)

His views are so "dangerous" that he is banned from visiting Britain. He has
been arrested on a Canadian ice floe and at a travelling circus. He once fended
off a furious PTA mom while disrupting an elementary school fundraiser featuring
circus animals.

Dr. Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon who lives in the Woodland Hills district of
Los Angeles, takes his belief that animal life is as valuable as human to the
extreme -- openly arguing that killing scientists to stop animal research would
be "morally justifiable."

He has become the public face for underground groups such as the Animal
Liberation Front, which the FBI deems a significant domestic terrorism threat.

Last month, those groups scored a victory when a professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who was conducting research on macaque monkeys, sent
Vlasak and others an e-mail with the subject line "You win."

After several years of harassment and threats to his family, neurobiology
Professor Dario Ringach announced he would stop his primate research.

"I think Dario Ringach is a poster boy for the concept that the use of force or
the threat of force is an effective means to stop people who abuse animals,"
Vlasak said last week.

Vlasak, 48, sits on a precarious perch within the animal-rights movement.
Through his Animal Liberation Press Office, he is the spokesman for shadowy
groups that sabotage labs, vandalize homes, firebomb properties and make death
threats via late-night phone calls. But he works in the wide open, operating a
website, issuing press releases, talking to journalists.

When he's not doing that, he's performing surgery at Riverside Community
Hospital.

He does not know anyone in the underground personally, he says. He receives
anonymous "communiques" via e-mail or regular mail, posts them on his website
and writes press releases to get the message out.

The ALF is so deep underground that even its own members probably don't know who
their fellow conspirators are. And because there are no known leadership or
membership rosters, anyone can strike under the group's name. The communiques
are often signed just "ALF."

A typical one, posted on Vlasak's website July 27: "A bomb hoax was called into
Phenomenal headquarters in Torrance, California, on July 13. The call was a
hoax, but unless they cut their ties to ... Huntington Life Sciences, the next
time the result could be different. ALF."

Huntington Life Sciences is an animal research lab.

Vlasak and his wife, former child actress Pamelyn Ferdin, formed the Animal
Defence League of Los Angeles to bring a more confrontational, in-your-face
element to the animal-rights scene.

In December 2005, the Los Angeles city attorney filed 14 criminal counts against
the Animal Defence League and members, including Vlasak and Ferdin, for 62
specific acts of harassment and intimidation allegedly committed since January
2004.

In May, Vlasak was convicted of "targeted protesting" and sentenced to 30 days'
electronic monitoring. Ferdin was convicted of trespassing and sentenced to 90
days in jail. She said she was released because of overcrowding after a day in
the reception area.

Vlasak said the city is violating the group's free-speech rights. He said
authorities lash out against demonstrators because "they don't know who else to
look for."

"There is a real firewall between the above-ground people and the underground. I
am so high-profile, I have to stay squeaky clean."

The FBI would not comment on Vlasak specifically. But a spokesman said agents
were not going after people solely for their ties to the ALF or other domestic
extremist groups.

"We're not going to go out and arrest everyone with ties to this group," said
Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman in Washington. "It's different with international
terror groups like al-Qaeda, where just providing material support is breaking
the law."

Nationwide, the FBI says animal-rights and related environmental extremist
groups such as the Earth Liberation Front have escalated the number and severity
of criminal incidents in recent years.

"From January 1990 to June 2004, animal- and environmental-rights extremists
have claimed credit for more than 1,200 criminal incidents, resulting in
millions of dollars in damage and property loss," John Lewis, deputy assistant
director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, told a Senate committee last
year.

Michael Budkie, executive director of Stop Animal Exploitation Now!, provides
much of the research activists use to decide on targets. Based near Cincinnati,
Budkie ferrets out public records from universities around the nation, pores
through articles at the National Institutes of Health website, reads medical
journals, locates animal necropsy reports and unearths research proposals.

Budkie said he found articles by Ringach in scientific journals that described
placing electrodes into the brains of macaque monkeys and measuring the neural
response when the eye is stimulated with light.

Budkie said, based on documents, 30 monkeys are killed each year during the
research.

Ringach has refused to talk about the subject, after his family was repeatedly
threatened. But William McBride, chairman of UCLA's animal-research committee,
said in a statement that "recent descriptions of some of the work being
conducted here are ridiculously misleading."

Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate groups, suspect
Vlasak is connected to the underground that targeted Ringach.

"Spokespeople don't come out of nowhere," said Oren Segal, an ecoterrorism
specialist for the ADL. "They have to prove their bona fides somehow. One of the
reasons the Animal Liberation Press Office is so respected in the movement is
that he is connected."

He said Vlasak brings a sense of social legitimacy to the movement.

"Normally you think of these groups as tree-huggers, anarchists, people with
piercings," Segal said. "Vlasak brings this notion: 'We're serious people. We
have real jobs, we're affluent and we believe this.'"

As a medical resident before he became an activist, Vlasak said he worked doing
research on dogs' arteries in a lab at UCLA/Harbor Medical Center. The
experiments ultimately killed the dogs. He said he was not affected by it at the
time.

Ferdin, who among many roles in the 1960s and '70s was the voice of Lucy on
several Peanuts cartoon TV specials, decided some years ago that killing animals
was wrong; and, after much reading, Vlasak came around to her view.

Since then, they have led or joined all sorts of causes -- against whaling, seal
hunting, animal research, wolf hunting.

He and Ferdin chuckle at some of their follies in the field.

"Pam was once chased down and beaten up by a popcorn lady at a circus," he said.

Yet his rhetoric is serious to the extreme.

"I don't think you'd have to kill too many," he told the British newspaper, The
Observer in 2004, speaking of researchers who experiment on animals. "I think
for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, two million,
10 million non-human lives."

He depicts his struggle as a war of liberation, no less significant than
abolitionism in the 1800s or women's suffrage at the turn of the 20th century.

"No strictly peaceful movement has succeeded in liberation," Vlasak said. "John
Brown dragged slave owners out of their beds and shot them in the street. I
think the animal-rights movement has been restrained in its use of force mostly
because people in the struggle are often people of privilege who aren't willing
to risk losing that privilege."

Asked where he would draw the line on animals worth protecting with force --
jellyfish, sponges, flies? -- he parried that he has more pressing concerns.

"You don't have to believe in the rights of an oyster to see what they're doing
at UCLA is wrong," he said.