Justice Department

The emergence of the Justice Department, a small, extremely violent animal rights group active in England and North America, demonstrated a significant philosophical change within the extreme wing of the animal rights movement. The group went beyond the financial sabotage carried out by groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) to actually threatening and harming individuals—a tactic similar to that employed by the Unabomber.

[Page 320]Since its inception in October 1993, the England-based Justice Department has specialized in directly targeting individuals involved in industries that use and may abuse animals. Its first act was to mail devices—such as razor-tipped mousetraps—to “blood-sports” supporters (i.e., hunters).

The Justice Department seemed to have declared war in 1994. That year the traditional Boxing Day (December 26) hunts in Sussex saw over 30 bomb attacks against them, including two bomb hoaxes; responsibility for the attacks and hoaxes was claimed by the Justice Department. The group targeted Prince Charles with a razor-tipped mousetrap after he took his two sons on their first hunts in October. Finally, the Justice Department shut down several ferries involved in the meat industry's live export sector.

In 1996 the Justice Department became active in Canada. In January, group members mailed 65 envelopes containing razor blades tainted with rat poison to big-game hunting guides throughout British Columbia and Alberta. Borrowing a tactic from another extremist animals rights group, Britain's Animal Rights Militia, in November 1997 the Justice Department began a contamination hoax in the eastern United States, claiming to have injected toxic substances into Thanksgiving turkeys at large chain supermarkets.

The Justice Department's most significant acts occurred in the fall of 1999, with two large-scale razor-blade campaigns in North America. The first wave, in August, against the fur industry, involved over 100 envelopes with rat-poisoned razorblades. The second, in October, targeted more than 80 scientists and researchers at major U.S. universities that conducted AIDS and cancer-related research on primates. The Justice Department indicated that the razorblades had been contaminated with AIDS-infected blood. The envelopes also contained four typewritten lines: “You have been targeted and you have until autumn 2000 to release all your primate captives and get out of the vivisection industry. If you do not heed our warning, your violence will be turned back upon you.” (A similar message had been included in the anti-fur campaign.) Although no one was hurt by the razorblades, the FBI and Americans for Medical Progress (AMP) officially recognized the mailings as an act of domestic terrorism.

With passage of Terrorism Act 2000 in Great Britain, the Justice Department became the first-ever animal rights group to join the company of the Irish Republic Army as a domestic terrorist group. Since then, the number of attacks explicitly committed by the Justice Department have significantly declined. But because the organization, like the ALF, operates in a loose, anonymous, and decentralized cell structure, it has been difficult for authorities to infiltrate. In addition, the loose structure of extremist animal rights groups means that membership among them is fluid, so that the same individuals may be committing acts under the name of more than one group.

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