J. David Jentsch Stands Up to Animal Rights Extremists

I'm a little surprised to see this story at the Los Angeles Times, but check it out for some decent old-fashioned journalism: "UCLA professor stands up to violent animal rights activists":

As soon as he heard his car alarm blare and saw the orange glow through his bedroom window, UCLA neuroscientist J. David Jentsch knew that his fears had come true.

His 2006 Volvo, parked next to his Westside house, had been set ablaze and destroyed in an early morning attack March 7. Jentsch had become the latest victim in a series of violent incidents targeting University of California scientists who use animals in biomedical research.

"Obviously, someone who does the work I do in this environment expects that it's possible, indeed likely, that it would have happened," said Jentsch, who uses vervet monkeys in his research on treatments for schizophrenia and drug addiction. Before the attack, he had received no threats and had taken only limited precautions, including keeping his photo off the Internet.

"I've been as careful as you can be without being paranoid," he said.

After similar incidents, other UCLA scientists have become almost reclusive as security and public curiosity around them grew. Three years ago, another UCLA neuroscientist, weary of harassment and threats to his family, abandoned animal research altogether, sending an e-mail to an animal rights website that read: "You win."

But Jentsch has decided to push back.

Jentsch, an associate professor of psychology and psychiatry, has founded an organization at UCLA to voice support for research that uses animals in what he calls a humane, carefully regulated way. He is organizing a pro-research campus rally April 22, a date chosen because animal rights activists, who contend that his research involves the torture and needless killing of primates, already had scheduled their own UCLA protest that day.

"People always say: 'Don't respond. If you respond, that will give [the attackers] credibility,' " Jentsch, 37, said in a recent interview in his UCLA office. "But being silent wasn't making us feel safer. And it's a moot point if they are coming to burn your car anyway, whether you give them credibility or not."

The incidents have traumatized many professors and students on the Westwood campus, well beyond the circle of those directly affected, said Jentsch, who was not injured in the car fire.

This part's a little mind-boggling:

Two days after Jentsch's car was burned, a profanity-laced Internet message from the murky Animal Liberation Brigade took credit for the fire, as it had for past UCLA assaults.

"The things you and others like you do to feeling, sentient monkeys is so cruel and disgusting we can't believe anyone would be able to live with themselves," the message read. "David, here's a message just for you, we will come for you when you least expect it and do a lot more damage than to your property."

Jerry Vlasak, a Los Angeles-area physician and frequent spokesman for the animal rights movement, said he and fellow activists do not participate in the attacks and do not know who is behind them, although he sympathizes with the actions.

Jentsch, according to Vlasak, "is hurting and killing non-human primates every day. And if it took harming him to make him stop torturing, it is certainly morally justifiable."

Vlasak said that Jentsch's new group is a publicity stunt aimed at preserving researchers' federal funding and turning public attention from the nature of the researcher's own work, which involves addicting monkeys to methamphetamine. Vlasak and others said they want to meet Jentsch in a public debate, but the UCLA professor said he was willing to do so only with people who don't condone violence.

Jentsch (pronounced "Yench") has organized a counter organization affilliated with Britain's scientific progress group, "Pro-Test." On April 22, Jentsch will speak at a UCLA rally, "Stand up for Science, Research and the Medicines of Tomorrow." The event is scheduled for 11:30am at the UCLA campus. Click here for more information.

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Addendum: I just checked the archives for a previous entry on animal rights, "The Postmodern Culture of Animal Rights Activism."

It turns out that Professor John Sanbonmatsu of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, Massachusetts, left a comment at the post. Professor Sanbonmatsu attacks my essay as "factually wrong on all counts," and he suggests that my writing is "a blogger's animus toward animal rights, based neither in logic nor reason, but simple prejudice."

Well, I beg to differ with this point of neither "logic nor reason"; and frankly, the good professor looks to be short of logic when he suggests that animal rights "is not a 'relativistic' moral position; nor are animal rights activists 'postmodernists'."

Any philosophy that elevates animals to a morally equivalent plane to that of humankind qualifies as a "postmodernist" ideological program in the general usage of postmodernism in political science (interesting related link is here). I'm not particularly interested in Sanbonmatsu's revisionist nomenclature, in any case. He can quibble with academic labels if he wishes (but don't miss the philosphically anti-modernist "about page" at the "Institute for Critical Animal Studies," which is apparently an animal rights academic thinktank.

But check Roger Scruton's identification of the animal rights program as a key element of the contemporary left's radical worldview:

Properly understood, the concept of a right—and the attendant ideas of duty, responsibility, law, and obedience—enshrines what is distinctive in the human condition. To spread the concept beyond our species is to jeopardize our dignity as moral beings, who live in judgment of one another and of themselves.

Interestingly - and highly relevant to this discussion - it turns out that Professor Sanbonmatsu did his doctoral training at UC Santa Cruz; and according to his biography, the professor's specialities are in "Political philosophy; critical theory (Marxism, feminism, ecological theory); ethics and animal rights; existentialism (especially phenomenology)."

Well, that explains a lot.

Recall that David Horowitz and Jacob Laskin, in One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy, identified UC Santa Cruz as "the worst school in America." The introduction to One Party Classroom is available here.

I'd be interested to know the membership of Professor Sanbonmatsu's dissertation committee, as well as some of faculty members who taught the graduate seminars he attended.

Perhaps I'll find out: Dr. Sanbonmatsu's e-mail is available at his Worcester faculty page, and I'll forward him this post just as a matter of professional courtesy.