CHAPTER SEVEN
April 28, 2006 Lauren Gazzola should not be laughing right now but, as she has said so many times throughout this ordeal, she can’t help it. I’m walking out the front door on my way to Connecticut to visit her when she calls. “Have you seen it?” she says. I tell her I have. She laughs and tells me that this morning she was eating breakfast and reading the newspaper when she turned the page. There, in the front section, across from the national report, was an anonymous, full-page ad that said “I Control Wall Street” with the photo of a man in a black ski mask and black leather jacket. Her sentencing is about a month away, and the New York Times has published a full-page ad labeling her a terrorist.
“Can you believe this?” she says, still laughing. “I mean, what kind of animal rights terrorist would wear a leather jacket?”
The campaign against Huntingdon sank the company’s share prices so low it had to be removed from the New York Stock Exchange in 2000. Huntingdon pleaded with stock exchange officials and attributed its financial plight to “economic terrorism,” but the company was dropped from the Big Board. On September 7, 2005, Brian Cass and the board of directors gathered at the exchange and prepared to celebrate Huntingdon’s relisting with champagne. Minutes before the scheduled announcement, they were told it had been delayed.
The stock exchange blamed Huntingdon’s finances; this full-page ad blames animal rights terrorists. “In March, six of the campaign’s leaders were convicted on federal terrorism charges,” the ad says. “But the NYSE is still running scared.”
Ads appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, three of the most expensive media markets for print advertising in the country. When groups spend that amount of cash for an ad, they typically want credit, but those responsible for these ads, whoever they are, have kept their identities hidden. There is no mention of sponsors, and the website listed, NYSEHostage.com, was registered anonymously. The website only says it is “a project of individuals and businesses who were disturbed by the New York Stock Exchange’s decision to abandon Life Sciences Research International,” which is the new name for Huntingdon.
Industry leaders deny responsibility. NYSEHostage.com links to Americans for Medical Progress, a group that has also labeled activists as terrorists. Jacquie Calnan, president of the group, will tell the Washington Times, “I can only say every instinct, after ten years of being in this field, is that it’s not any pharmaceutical company behind this.” Richard Michaelson of LSRI will speculate that the ad is an activist ploy: “The first we learned of the ad was when we opened the newspaper. . . . Animal rights activists are the only ones I can fathom that might be behind this.”
Animal experimentation groups have purchased ads like these many times before to coincide with key events. In advance of national protests by SHAC in Little Rock, the Foundation for Biomedical Research published newspaper ads with three men in black masks wielding axes that said, “Some people think that the best way to protect animal life is to make scientists fear for theirs.” A judge will soon decide how long Gazzola and the others will spend in prison, and animal industries are trying to push the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act through Congress. Fear of the defendants, and animal rights activists more broadly, will aid those efforts.
Gazzola asks me to download the website, since by court order she is not allowed to access the Internet. Bring the files to Connecticut, she says, and hurry. On Monday, May 1st, she turns twenty-seven, and I can’t miss her last birthday party before prison.
Before the trial, there was no Lauren Gazzola independent of SHAC’s Lauren Gazzola. The campaign was her life. She did not spend time pursuing personal interests, because that would mean time away from SHAC. She didn’t spend money on clothes and entertainment, because it would be better spent on the campaign. Anything not directly tied to closing Huntingdon was an indulgence, and that often included food. I remember talking to her on the phone as she rummaged through cupboards at the SHAC house. Once, when she found a lone jar of pasta sauce hidden away someplace, she shrieked so loudly she dropped the phone. When she remembered they had no pasta to go with it, she laughed.
Now Gazzola carefully monitors pots and pans on all four burners of the stove in her father’s kitchen, stirring and seasoning while she preps vegetables for the grill. She offers warm pita with hummus along with tomato salsa heavy on the cilantro, and motions for me to sit. The hummus and salsa both have such a sharp, clear taste I ask where she bought them. She smiles at me and rolls her eyes. “Oh, Will Potter,” she says, “I don’t buy pre-made.” House arrest has forced her to slow down and reclaim some parts of her life independent of the campaign. She now allows herself the luxury of food.
Gazzola prepares meals like she prepares court documents: methodically, precisely, but not without flair. She has had a hand in all of SHAC’s legal battles, either closely working with attorneys or, in their absence, preparing cases herself. She would often find motions from other cases, identify the necessary ingredients, and then create her own. In early 2004, when she lived at the Pinole house, Gazzola asked me to mail her some of my writing. “The sharing of one’s art deserves the same in return,” she wrote in reply, and included a motion to dismiss she filed in a Huntingdon lawsuit. In one section of the document, she rebuts claims that SHAC is “affiliated” with underground groups because of shared beliefs. “Unfortunately, there are places in the world where such a theory might prevail,” she wrote. “However . . . this country is not one of them.”
The dining room table in her father’s home is piled with boxes of legal materials. On house arrest, she has been rereading court transcripts, studying First Amendment case law, and aiding the early stages of the appeal. She has been intimately involved in every step of the trial, and I have relied on her, more than any attorney, to guide me through SHAC’s legal history. No matter how much she wants to continue this level of involvement from prison, she knows that she must soon step back from the stove.
I feel uncomfortable because I’m not sure what role I play in the kitchen. I offer to help chop or cook, and Gazzola steers me out the back door to the grill. She says I need to figure out why it won’t light. It has grown increasingly difficult to characterize my involvement in the SHAC trial and the lives of the defendants. When protesters gather outside at court dates, I feel like I should put down my notebook and carry a sign. This weekend, I’m staying at Gazzola’s home. I’m here as a friend, not a journalist. Sitting in the backyard, attaching a new propane tank to the grill, I wonder whether my work has stopped me from being a better friend to her and the others during such difficult times. The grill ignites and begins to warm.
After the picnic everyone lounges in the backyard, birthday cake comatose. Gray dusk has settled on the lawn. We had planned on being on the road to visit Jake Conroy by now, but no one shows interest in moving. His mother’s home is about an hour away. Gazzola funnels her friends out the front door. “Get going,” she says, “Jake needs to see you too.”
She follows us down the front walkway toward the car and abruptly stops. I look back and she points down to a black box the size of a pack of cigarettes strapped to her left ankle. The electronic device notifies police if she leaves her home. For court dates, she sometimes conceals it with a floral scarf.
“This is how far I can go,” she says, as she points ahead at a spot in the yard. That’s how the SHAC campaign operated. Gazzola and the others knew the law, they knew their rights, and they marched up to that legal line—with bullhorns and tough talk and puffed chests—and then stopped. They say they never crossed it. As we climb into the car, I notice that Gazzola has sat down and is waving goodbye a few paces short of her imaginary line.
When we arrive, Jake Conroy’s mom greets us with hugs and offers to make us up plates of dinner. As we pass through the dining room of their country-style home, his aunt and uncle stop me to chat about working for newspapers, and what I think of life in Washington, D.C. Upstairs, Conroy and a handful of friends listen to punk records, talk about video games and brainstorm movie and book recommendations for someone who, after months of house arrest, seems to have seen and read everything twice. Until this moment at the end of the evening, we could have been carless high schoolers on a suburban Saturday night.
His time on house arrest has been a war against boredom. His girlfriend, Andrea Lindsay, has traveled from California, and they’ve spent afternoons competing at Scrabble and trying not to think about prison. One evening they used children’s modeling clay to make miniature ALF figurines. Lindsay uploaded photos to Conroy’s support website, one with the caption, “House arrest makes you creative. Support the CLAY.L.F.” In one of their creations, a figure in a white lab coat and black mask carries a sledgehammer, and another figure in camouflage pants carries a small monkey with a device on its head and bandages on its eyes.
It was a miniature version of one of the most famous ALF raids in history. On April 20, 1985, the ALF deactivated the security system of a research laboratory at the University of California, Riverside. “Diane,” a member of the cell, said an inside contact had alerted them of animals being abused in sight-deprivation experiments. Underground activists in white lab coats and black masks entered the laboratory predawn, prying open doors as they went. Video footage released after the raid shows that they worked swiftly and walked confidently, crowbars in hand and the white tails of their lab coats flapping behind them.
They removed about 260 animals, many with their eyes sewn shut or damaged, including one infant primate named Britches. Experimenters had taken Britches from his mother on the night of his birth and sewn his eyes shut with thick black sutures. They attached a sonar device to his head that let off a screeching sound and placed him in a steel cage, alone; the isolation and sensory deprivation caused neurological disorders. Britches would lurch and shake, shrieking. After spray-painting “FREE! ALF,” activists wheeled racks of animals and carried cages up from the basement and into the darkness, with Britches, small enough to sit in the palm of a hand, clinging to one activist’s fingers.
Footage of Britches’s recovery, released by PETA, showed his eyes healing, his hair growing back, his neurotic episodes diminishing. One scene showed people in black masks holding Britches in a soft, white blanket and nursing him with a bottle. In the lab, Britches clung to and nursed from a faux mother, a contraption of metal and wire wrapped in cloth. After the raid, video showed Britches clinging to an adoptive primate mother who wrapped both arms around the infant and pulled his head to her chest.
The break-in cost about $683,500 in theft and damage, and animal experimenters hit back. State and national groups called for new legislation. The rescue of Britches was a critical step in the long march toward convincing the government, twenty years later, to apply the terrorist label to the SHAC 7.
Conroy looks tired. Lindsay says something about how it has been a long day and that we have a drive ahead of us. Time is running out before sentencing, and she rations these days and nights. Privately, she mentions to me that, in addition to spending time with those he loves, Conroy needs time to read. He has been studying books and pamphlets about how to survive in prison.
After sentencing, Conroy and the others will probably await their prison designation on house arrest and then self-surrender. If not, they will be remanded into the custody of U.S. Marshals straight from the courtroom. The latter option is dreaded. It means that they would await their Bureau of Prisons designation while in holding facilities—city and county jails—which are more crowded and more violent. Inmates who have arrived at the prison where they will spend years of their lives want to accrue time served with good behavior. With the transitional nature of city and county jails, inmates lack that motivation.
When he arrives, Conroy will be placed in a holding cell, booked, strip-searched, issued linens and khakis, and told to place any pieces of his previous self away in a box. Then he will be thrown in the deep end and expected to swim. Former prisoners often say they only served two days in prison: the day they went in and the day they came home. If you survive the first day, they say, you can make it to the last. Knowing that prison officials will not provide any guidance, nor will they care if he drowns, Conroy has turned to books to learn about head counts, call-outs, cell blocks, phone calls, shot callers, commissary, shoes, gangs, black markets, the hole, prison health care, prison tattoos and prison etiquette.
Rule number one: Don’t snitch. Ever. Snitches are the lowest of the low in the prison hierarchy, somewhere at the bottom with the pedophiles. For some of the Operation Backfire defendants who have chosen to cooperate with the government and turn in their friends, this means they will have a difficult and dangerous time. Other rules of inmate etiquette sound like those of elementary school, but they are potentially dangerous, even lethal, if broken. Don’t cut in line. Don’t reach across someone’s food. Don’t touch personal property. Don’t hog the phone. Don’t whine. Don’t owe debts.
Older inmates may help in this re-education. Prisoners who are from the same hometown, have mutual acquaintances or just remember what it was like being thrown in on the first day will step up and offer guidance. They will teach Conroy and the others where to sit in the cafeteria, how to buy stamps, and how to negotiate what is one of the most dangerous areas in any prison—the TV room.
Ultimately, though, there will be situations where no amount of book learning or inmate advice will help, and the activists will have to rely on gut instincts. There are two rules every prisoner must internalize, writes David Novak in Downtime. The first: Do your own time. When a fight breaks out, walk away. If someone is stabbed or beaten with a rock from the prison yard, turn your head. Your only responsibility is to yourself. The second rule: when in doubt, blend. If you aren’t sure how to stand or what to do, look around. “The one thing you want to do in prison,” writes Novak, “is not stand out.”
Downtime is one of the most popular books about preparing for prison. The copy I obtained is a computer scan of a photocopy of the original. It looks like it has been passed through many nervous hands. David Novak wrote it after spending about ten months incarcerated at Eglin Federal Prison Camp, the facility that inspired the term “Club Fed.” Public outrage over prison amenities led to its closure. Novak was a white-collar criminal doing ten of the easiest months possible. Incarcerated life for these activists will certainly be much different, but there are no books to prepare for what it’s like to serve time in prison as a terrorist.
September 12, 2006 Hijackers flew planes into buildings five years and one day ago, and the morning talk radio hosts are still discussing it. Lauren Ornelas’s fingers fidget with buttons on the car stereo only to return to NPR’s fifth anniversary coverage of September 11th. She turns down the volume so post-9/11 white noise hums in the background and then squeezes the wheel with both hands. Nobody in the car says a word about September 11th as we drive north on Interstate 295. We are heading to Trenton, N.J., to watch a judge sentence the SHAC 7, and no one wants to hear that word.
When my bus pulled up to the Takoma Park metro station near Washington, D.C., at 5:02 a.m., I had immediately pulled my Washington Post out of my bag and prepared to wait. Activist time is usually about thirty minutes behind what the clock says. Instead a small car, idling in the parking lot with foggy windows and no headlights, awoke and pulled in front of me. Ornelas and Patrick Sullivan, considered veteran animal rights activists even though they are only in their thirties, had agreed to let me tag along for the sentencing if I chipped in for gas. And tolls. New Jersey loves tolls.
Now, three and a half hours later, we’re late and lost. Taking a wrong exit had spat us into crawling traffic and more tolls. We can’t tell if this concrete horizon is New Jersey Gray or Delaware Gray or some other monochromatic state entirely. Finally, we see “TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES.” “I don’t know what Trenton makes,” Sullivan says, “but they better make me some goddamn coffee.”
The six defendants in their thrift-store court clothes work the room like hosts at a dinner party. Activists have traveled from Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland and Chicago for the court date. Around the room, old friends hug and laugh and then, as if remembering where they are, straighten their shirts and lower their voices. I approach Conroy as he leans against the dark wood wainscoting and watches supporters sift through the metal detector into the courtroom. Court pews begin to fill, and the guards turn people away. Kevin Kjonaas brings water to his mother. He places his left palm on her back and then opens her hands so they can receive his paper cup. They sit together on a pew and she shakes.
At a previous court date Conroy had pleaded that, on my next reporting trip, I bring him vegan cinnamon buns from Sticky Fingers Bakery in D.C. Vegans have a way of circling every conversation back to food, much like born-again Christians have a way of returning every conversation to the scripture. I start asking him questions about today’s sentencing and realize I forgot, once again, to make the holy sticky bun run.
“I covertly tried to sneak in a cinnamon roll with a file baked inside,” I say, “but the cops confiscated it at the metal detector.”
“You’re really sick, that’s not funny,” an eavesdropper says.
“Yes it is,” Conroy’s mother says, tears in her eyes. “You have to laugh. This is insanity.”
The cops break up the crowd and say everyone has to find a seat, and those who cannot find a seat must leave. Some New Jersey activists in the back row recognize me from previous court dates and squeeze together so I can sit with them.
I spot Michael Drewniak, spokesperson for the United States Attorney’s Office, with his trademark bald head, tanning-salon orange. He stands near Huntingdon executives, men who look like they sleep in suits. Drewniak takes mental snapshots of the activists in the courtroom. He stares at one for three seconds, shifts to the next for three seconds, one by one, row by row.
While we sit in silence waiting for the judge to make her appearance, a local reporter quietly opens his notebook and asks activists near him, “So, what did you think about the trial?” as if he is chatting up someone at the grocery checkout line. They turn him down one by one, verbally or through their body language. On his fourth or fifth attempt he turns to an activist with uneven facial hair and canvas sneakers.
“Are you a reporter?” the activist asks, leering at his notebook. “I can’t answer any of your questions. Why? Why do you think? These guys are on trial for guilt by association. Nobody in their right mind is going to talk to a corporate reporter.”
The reporter harrumphs and puts down his pen. Occasionally, laughter or bits of non-terrorism small talk break the silence, reminders that this is a courtroom of young people awkwardly struggling with the gravity of the scene unfolding before them. Across the room, I see Harper catch Gazzola with her nose to the armpit of her black sweater. She wrinkles her nose, and Harper covers his face. He tries not to smile. Gazzola tosses her head back and laughs.
Here is how a sentencing hearing for a federal case usually works. The judge makes a statement about the federal sentencing guidelines, whether they apply, and their parameters. The prosecutors then generally ask for sentences somewhere in the middle or on the high end of those guidelines. Defense attorneys respond with a series of nitpicky points about the sentencing recommendations, using legal jargon the defendants and family members do not understand, and argue that their client should receive a reduced sentence. Sometimes they submit letters from friends or family members saying that Johnny is a “fine young man” or that Jane is an “upstanding person who made a poor decision.” Sometimes defendants say they have seen the light, and realized the error of their ways. Sometimes they cry.
Here is how a sentencing hearing for animal rights “terrorists” works. The judge makes a statement outlining the sentencing guidelines. Some defendants face up to thirteen years in prison—in comparison, the average sentence is about twenty-one years for murder, eight and a half years for sex offenses and six and a half years for arson. Attorneys boil years of the defendants’ lives down to point systems outlined in a pre-sentence investigation report, or PSI. Prosecutors ask the judge to throw the book at these “extremists,” defense attorneys fight for scraps of time, and then the judge sides in favor of the government or knocks off a few months.
Charles McKenna, the assistant U.S. attorney for New Jersey, rises from his seat to make the government’s sentencing recommendation for each defendant. Behind him sit corporate representatives from Huntingdon and Stephens.
Kevin Kjonaas was “drunk with power,” McKenna says. “He could go in and push around multinational corporations.” He was the leader, a “cunning manipulator” who used the website to encourage illegal actions because he was “too cowardly to go out and do them himself.” The corporate executives targeted by protests or underground actions “can never feel safe again.”
Lauren Gazzola “had the bullhorn and was clearly the person in charge,” McKenna says. The government wiretapped a phone conversation she had with activists in Texas. She told them where to protest, he says, which shows her leadership role. On a job application, she listed herself as SHAC’s “campaign coordinator.”
McKenna argues with defense attorneys about details in Conroy’s paperwork, including the address on his driver’s license, before moving on to sentencing recommendations. Conroy’s attorney says that if these activists committed a crime, it is a “crime of compassion.” McKenna bursts from his seat to rebut: “I don’t think he’s a man of compassion.”
Pressed up against activists in the back row, I can feel and see their muscles tense. Across the aisle, I spot Greg Bennick, a close friend of Conroy’s and the lead singer of Trial, a vegan straight-edge hardcore band. In this crowd, he is something of a celebrity, a punk rock luminary. He sits at the end of the row, near more of Conroy’s friends, with a freshly shorn head and pinstriped suit. He bites his clenched fist and flexes the muscles in his left hand. He leans over in the pew, with one foot in the aisle, as if he is poised to jump and disrupt the scene.
Watching Bennick makes me think of one of SHAC’s campaign videos. Conroy and Harper produced the film, This Means War. They used a Trial song to narrate footage of activists storming offices and screaming through bullhorns. There’s an explosive release of drums and then Bennick screams, “The wreckage of humanity has been strewn across the land and now the hour of desperation is at hand.”
Bennick doesn’t leap from his seat now, nor does he relax. He remains on the edge, fists clenched. McKenna continues. “The Internet was key to these crimes, and Jacob Conroy was key to the Internet.” He turns to the judge and says, “Your Honor has often been called upon to sentence people, perhaps people from the inner city that grew up in lives of deprivation.” But Conroy and the others had “good homes, good schools,” and they “chose to throw it all away.”
“What the fuck,” a woman next to me says to herself. “They’re not drug dealers. They’re activists.”
The defense attorneys had not just submitted letters of support for the defendants, they submitted tomes. The judge raises a bound book from Conroy’s attorney, with letters from professors, friends and activists as far away as Cambodia who say they have been inspired by his compassion. The judge says she has rarely seen anything like this in any case.
Conroy declines to make a statement in his defense; he is sentenced to four years in prison. Gazzola’s sentence, after she tells the court she still will pursue law school, is four years and four months. Kjonaas, depicted by prosecutors as the leader, receives six. Darius Fullmer and Andy Stepanian, who each were charged only with conspiracy, will later be sentenced to a year and a day and three years, respectively. At the next court date, Harper will tell the court that he will fight for animal rights and defend direct action until the day he dies. He will be sentenced to three years in prison. The defendants are collectively ordered to pay $1 million in restitution to the lab they devoted their lives to closing.
The only other sentences that have been meted out under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act were for Justin Samuel and Peter Young, who released mink from fur farms. Samuel and Young each served about two years in prison. The SHAC defendants—who only wrote and spoke in defense of those who used illegal tactics—are sentenced to double and triple the amount of time given to those who have carried them out.
Activists who had been turned away from the overflowing chambers rush in to ask what happened. None of the defendants seems to know what to say. They put their game faces back on, standing tall with shoulders back, and when friends with tears in their eyes say they are sorry, they reply, “It could have been worse.”
The local press swarms the defendants with skinny notebooks in hand. I stand on the periphery and hold my questions. What do you say to someone who has just been sentenced to years in prison? It reminds me of my time at the Chicago Tribune, writing about murders and dead bodies found in storage lockers and having to ask people how it made them feel.
Outside the courthouse, a woman weaves through the camera crews and up the courthouse steps with her teenage son, for their own court date. He does not look much younger than the SHAC defendants, and wears a dress shirt, belt and pleated trousers all made for a much larger man. His oxford drapes off his shoulders like a rain poncho. The woman asks a reporter along the way, “What’s all this? They some superstars?”
Conroy and Gazzola invite Ornelas, Sullivan and me to a grocery store fifteen minutes away with the best vegan options New Jersey has to offer. For their post-sentencing farewell feast, they eat tempeh salad, hummus and nondairy ice cream with chocolate swirls in little plastic cups, the type elementary school students receive on special occasions in the cafeteria.
Gazzola moves from table to table, cracking jokes and trying to lighten the mood. She flexes her upper arm muscles and tells us, “On the upside, I’m going to come out of prison like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. I’m going to be totally ripped.”
An activist from New York takes photos with her cell phone, and the defendants pose with their supporters while an attorney from California takes a more formal group photograph in the middle of the bakery. Nearby, a customer squeezes and sniffs loaves of French bread while her toddler begs for a chocolate chip cookie. “Is this some kind of going-away party?”
Silence. “Yes,” the attorney says, “I guess it is.” She smiles politely at the woman, turns and walks away without explanation.
Later, in a motel room, seven California activists sit on a bedspread covered in cigarette burns, flipping through television channels. They’re looking for any mention of their friends. “Tonight’s game will be” CLICK “a new train service” CLICK “with sunny weather on the way” CLICK “a dog was rescued from a dumpster” CLICK “this was a brutal act, a savage act.”
“Oh, this must be us,” someone jokes and grabs the remote control to turn up the volume. After about twenty-five minutes, they find a mention of the trial on the local evening news. It lasts about ten seconds, accompanied by a graphic that says “ANIMAL RIGHTS” in white block letters imposed over images of puppies and kittens.
Andrea Lindsay, who heads up the SHAC support committee in addition to working full time and attending law school, doesn’t pay much attention to the news coverage. She sits with her legs crossed and back against the headboard, typing on her laptop. While others watch the news looking for some recognition of what has happened, she is looking forward, typing notes from the sentencing, editing a previously drafted press release, uploading photos to the website, and emailing animal welfare and civil liberties groups to help her partner and her friends prepare for their appeal.
One warm, foggy night in early September, as the SHAC 7 awaited sentencing, underground activists drove through the rolling hills of rural Massachusetts. They pulled up to a strip of land that looked as though it had been shaved out of the surrounding forest of white pine, sugar maple and eastern hemlock. The activists hopped the fence and headed straight to the rabbit sheds. They did not dodge security guards, pick locks or break windows. They walked right in through the mist and began opening cages.
New Zealand white rabbits are one of the most popular house rabbits. People love them for pets because they’re chubby and cuddly. They’re also affectionate to a fault, making them one of the most popular rabbits for experimentation, because they’re easy to stick, prod and cut. Selective breeding for albinism has given them bright white coats, a clean canvas to experiment with dyes and cosmetics. As a consequence of being bred for a genetic defect, a lack of melanin, their eyes burn red.
Capralogics is a company that uses these rabbits to create antibodies that are sold to animal experimenters and other testing labs. The process: inject proteins into the rabbits, allow them to build antibodies in their blood, drain the blood, extract the antibodies, then sell 100 microliters, about half a cup, for between $250 and $295. Capralogics prides itself on taking the time for multiple test bleeds. “Be patient,” the company advises prospective clients on its website. “This is where antibody production has much in common with wine making.”
The anonymous activists moved row by row, shed by shed, until every cage door had been opened. In their black hoods and black masks, with both arms wrapped around fat, white bunny bellies, they stepped back into the mist. The few rabbits they could not steal were let loose in the nearby field.
Some had warned that this could happen. The private intelligence firm STRATFOR advised that the SHAC 7 conviction “could serve to inspire more illegal activity, rather than less, and the trend could spread to involve larger numbers of groups and industries.” Andrea Lindsay made a similar comment to the press after sentencing. The government scoffed. “That’s the kind of twisted logic we’ve been dealing with from these militant animal rights followers who can rationalize their behavior, inspire others to do likewise, and refuse to take responsibility for their actions,” said Michael Drewniak, the government spokesman. “It’s just unbelievable that they can view harsh prison sentences this way.”
One week after the SHAC 7 sentencing, an anonymous communiqué is released. It includes photographs, which activists say were taken by Capralogics employees, of a rabbit with its head in a restraining device, a rabbit with chunks of fur shaved off and raw skin exposed, and lab technicians bleeding a rabbit’s ears. Twenty-three rabbits were removed from Capralogics and placed in new homes that night, the communiqué says. Six have been named Jake, Lauren, Kevin, Andy, Josh and Darius, after the defendants.
“The government and the industries it represents hate us so much because no matter who they surveil, raid, defame or imprison, they cannot kill the idea and so they cannot stop us,” the communiqué says. “And while the SHAC 7 will soon go to jail for simply speaking out on behalf of animals, those of us who have done all the nasty stuff talked about in the courts and in the media will still be free.
“So to those who still work with HLS and to all who abuse animals: we’re coming for you, motherfuckers.”