[12] In 2005, the ALF was listed in a United States Department of Homeland Security planning document as a domestic terrorist threat, prompting the allocation of resources to monitor the group.
[5] That same year, FBI deputy assistant director John Lewis described "ecoterrorism" and the "animal rights movement" as the number one domestic terrorism threats.
Between June and August 1974, the Band carried out eight raids targeting animal-testing laboratories, as well as other actions against chicken breeders and gun shops, causing damage to buildings and vehicles.
[20] In the view of the ALF, failing to recognize this is an example of speciesism—the ascription of different values to beings on the basis of their species membership alone, which they argue is as ethically flawed as racism or sexism.
[21] "Labs raided, locks glued, products spiked, depots ransacked, windows smashed, construction halted, mink set free, fences torn down, cabs burnt out, offices in flames, car tyres es slashed, cages emptied, phone lines severed, slogans daubed, muck spread, damage done, electrics cut, site flooded, hunt dogs stolen, fur coats slashed, buildings destroyed, foxes freed, kennels attacked, businesses burgled, uproar, anger, outrage, balaclava clad thugs.
— Keith Mann[22]Although the ALF members reject violence against people, many activists support property crime, comparing the destruction of animal laboratories and other facilities to resistance fighters blowing up gas chambers in Nazi Germany.
An ALF activist involved in an arson attack on the University of Arizona told No Compromise in 1996: "[I]t is much the same thing as the abolitionists who fought against slavery going in and burning down the quarters or tearing down the auction block ...
"[25] In 1993, ALF was listed as an organization that has "claimed to have perpetrated acts of extremism in the United States" in the Report to Congress on the Extent and Effects of Domestic and International Terrorism on Animal Enterprises.
"[28] In hearings held on 18 May 2005, before a Senate panel, officials of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) stated that "violent animal rights extremists and eco-terrorists now pose one of the most serious terrorism threats to the nation.
"[29][30] The use of the terrorist label has been criticized, however; the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks U.S. domestic extremism, writes that "for all the property damage they have wreaked, eco-radicals have killed no one.
"[31] Best and trauma surgeon Jerry Vlasak, both of whom have volunteered for the North American press office, were banned from entering the UK in 2004 and 2005 after making statements that appeared to support violence against people.
Best argues that the principle of extensional self-defense mirrors the penal code statues known as the necessity defense, which can be invoked when a defendant believes the illegal act was necessary to avoid imminent and great harm.
[33][34] Best argues that "extensional self defense" is not just a theory, but put into practice in some African countries, where hired armed soldiers occasionally use lethal force against poachers who would kill rhinos, elephants and other endangered animals for their body parts to be sold in international markets.
Marineland eventually agreed to sell him for £120,000, money that was raised with the help of the Born Free Foundation and the Mail on Sunday, and in 1991 Rocky was transferred to an 80-acre (320,000 m2) lagoon reserve in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then released.
[41] Rachel Monaghan of the University of Ulster writes that, in their first year of operation alone, ALF actions accounted for £250,000 worth of damage, targeting butcher shops, furriers, circuses, slaughterhouses, breeders, and fast-food restaurants.
[42] Kim Stallwood, a national organiser for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in the 1980s, writes that the public's response to early ALF raids that removed animals was very positive, in large measure because of the non-violence policy.
In 1982, a group of ALF activists, including Roger Yates, now a sociologist at University College, Dublin, and Dave McColl, a director of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, became members of the BUAV's executive committee, and used their position to radicalize the organization.
Whereas the earliest activists had been committed to rescuing animals and destroyed property only where it contributed to the former, by the mid-1980s, Stallwood believed the ALF had lost its ethical foundation, and had become an opportunity "for misfits and misanthropes to seek personal revenge for some perceived social injustice".
[48] Freeman Wicklund and Kim Stallwood say that the first ALF action in the U.S. was on 29 May 1977, when researchers Ken LeVasseur and Steve Sipman released two dolphins, Puka and Kea, into the ocean from the University of Hawaii's Marine Mammal Laboratory.
[49] The North American Animal Liberation Press Office attributes the dolphin release to a group called Undersea Railroad, and says the first ALF action in the U.S. was, in fact, a raid on the New York University Medical Center on 14 March 1979, when activists removed one cat, two dogs, and two guinea pigs.
Newkirk writes that Valerie returned to Maryland and set up an ALF cell, with the first raid taking place on 24 December 1982 against Howard University, where 24 cats were removed, some of whose back legs had been crippled.
[56][57][58] These included Britches, a five-week-old macaque, who had been separated from his mother at birth and left alone with his eyes sewn shut and a sonar device on his head as part of a study into blindness.
[64][61] This is an early example of the shifting of responsibility from one banner to another depending on the nature of the act, with the ARM and another nom de guerre, the Justice Department—the latter first used in 1993—emerging as names for direct action that violated the ALF's "no harm to living beings" principle.
Terrorism expert Paul Wilkinson has written that the ALF, the Justice Department, and the ARM are essentially the same thing,[66] and Robert Garner of the University of Leicester writes that it would be pointless to argue otherwise, given the nature of the movement as a leaderless resistance.
[70] In June 1990, two days apart, bombs exploded in the cars of Margaret Baskerville, a veterinary surgeon working at Porton Down, a chemical research defence establishment, and Patrick Max Headley, a physiologist at Bristol University.
During the attack on Headley—which New Scientist writes involved the use of plastic explosives—a 13-month-old baby in a push-chair suffered flash burns, shrapnel wounds, and a partially severed finger.
Forensic evidence led police to arrest the owner of the vehicle, who admitted he had bombed his own car to discredit the animal rights movement and asked for two similar offences to be taken into consideration.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors U.S. domestic extremism, has described SHAC's modus operandi as "frankly terroristic tactics similar to those of anti-abortion extremists".
[76] ALF activist Donald Currie was jailed for 12 years and placed on probation for life in December 2006 after being found guilty of planting homemade bombs on the doorsteps of businessmen with links to HLS.
The incidents included arson attacks against meat-processing plants, lumber companies, a high-tension power line, and a ski centre, in Oregon, Wyoming, Washington, California and Colorado between 1996 and 2001.