Dario Ringach
I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a "vivisector" and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with:
Vivisection, or what in polite society is merely called animal experimentation, is a barbaric practice that…
Remember Dario Ringach?
He's the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but who could blame Dr. Ringach? He was afraid for his family. That's because it was more than just threatening e-mails and phone calls, but rather the campaign of intimidation included masked thugs banging on the windows of his house at night,…