Equating animal-rights activism with terrorism increases the penalties for offenders and will please many of their victims. But it is not in the interests of science. So states this week’s lead Editorial in Nature (447, 353; 2007)

Last November, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was signed into law in the United States. It creates tough penalties for damaging property, making threats and conspiring against zoos, animal labs and the like. Leaving aside the merits of this act, its very name enshrines into law the idea that destructive activists are terrorists.

As one of the communities targeted by these activists, scientists may be tempted to embrace this rhetoric. Indeed, many people have personally felt terrified by the actions of the most extreme. But ‘terrorist’ is a word so debased and loaded by political use that, if it has any meaning at all, it is counterproductive. There is no such objective thing as a terrorist. A criminal is a person who has been convicted of a crime. We can examine a person’s records and make an unemotional determination of whether or not they are a criminal. But a terrorist is, in practice, a person who fights for a cause we do not believe in using methods that we do not approve of. Calling someone a terrorist is a value judgement.

The full text of the Editorial is available here (site licence or subscription required).