As Richard Dawkins continues his speaking engagements as a major leader in the Anti-Religion Movement, the animal rights activists are expanding their efforts to eliminate more scientific research:

Animal rights activists are using freedom of information laws to draw up a 'hit list' of universities which conduct research on monkeys Letters sent to six universities requesting details of experiments involving primates have sparked panic among researchers. The revelation raises the spectre of extremists widening their focus beyond Oxford University where militants are waging a terror campaign to derail a planned £20million animal research facility.
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They are concerned activists are attempting to discover the names of the 10 universities engaged in forms of primate research.
Until now, universities have attempted to keep their primate testing facilities secret amid fears of attack.
The Home Office has a list of institutions doing this work but it is strictly classified and not shared even with the Department of Trade and Industry, which is responsible for science.
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Simon Festing, executive director, said: "The fear is that this will be a hit list. If they identify the roughly ten institutions which do primate research and put it online, all it needs is some nutcase locally to follow a researcher home and carry out an attack.
"At the moment, animal rights extremists in the UK are sending hoax letter bombs. Actual injuries have been minimal but it is the fear that is the issue. These universities are scared for their researchers."

In this case, the fear among the community of researchers is justified.

I can also report that universities do not hide their evolutionary research for fear that creationists or IDists will target the researchers or universities. So how does Dawkins, with all his "Religion as the root of all evil" rhetoric, explain the fact that scientists are not hiding from religious people and are hiding from someone who says, "We have a long campaign to ban primate research completely. Primates are our next of kin."

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Animal Rights Extremism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.