On Saturday, Americans saw the dark side of the animal rights movement when unknown activists firebombed two University of California Santa Cruz biomedical researchers. The local community has since rallied around the University and its scientists, denouncing the attacks and rooting for the perpetrators’ arrests. Unfortunately, the radical animal rights agenda that provided the motivation for these attacks (an agenda shared by the movement’s anti-meat faction) is not likely to go away anytime soon. And last night on San Francisco's most-watched local news station, we explained why.

The violence in Santa Cruz is a predictable result of the aggressive push to give human rights to farm animals and lab rats. As we told KGO-TV7, the recent attacks are more than just a disturbing repeat of what we’ve seen in the United Kingdom:

"They're resorting to more and more violent and dangerous tactics. It's really just a matter of time before someone on this side of the Atlantic gets killed."

It’s a frighteningly possible scenario, considering the fact that even the movement’s mainstream leaders have openly advocated assassination as a way to achieve their goal. And as we explained, their fiery rhetoric tends to find a willing audience among disaffected activists:

"The above ground guys are careful to keep their noses clean because they have to raise money so they're not making the bombs, but they are making the bombers."

Debra Saunders, a widely respected San Francisco Chronicle columnist, offered a fitting assessment of this latest chapter in animal rights zealotry yesterday:

True believers have distributed personal information on scientists and their families. They've placed firebombs in medical researchers' homes and cars. They've donned hoods on their heads and marched to the homes of professors, then banged on their doors. They've told children that their parents are evil murderers and chalked anonymous charges on sidewalks for the neighbors to see…

This is not a movement interested in the welfare and humane treatment of laboratory animals. It is an anarchistic, misanthropic cult.

Astonishingly, one segment of the movement has somehow managed to turn the recent violence into a public relations victory (much to the dismay of its less polished allies). With its contribution of a mere $2,500 to the law-enforcement reward fund (now up to $50,000), the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) demonstrated the sort of positive PR a little pocket change—compared to its $200 million bank account—can buy.

Nobody should be fooled by HSUS’s paltry gesture. While pretending to be part of the solution, the group continues to be a significant part of the problem—an over-zealous social movement bent on extending legal rights to animals, whether or not thinking people like the consequences. The entire community of Santa Cruz is learning this week what can happen when human beings resist the sort of evolution the animal rights community has planned for them. And it’s not pretty.