UCLA neuroscientist David Jentsch got an unwelcome surprise at his home this month. Animal rights activists had mailed him razor blades and a “threatening note," according to a news release from the university.

A group reportedly founded in the United Kingdom and calling themselves the “Justice Department” claimed responsibility for the package by sending a communiqué to the North American Animal Liberation Press Office on 23 November. The group claimed that the razor blades were covered with AIDS-infected blood. Jentsch (pictured addressing a pro-research demonstration, last year) was not the only target. Two other communiqués claimed that a similar package had been sent to a UCLA graduate student, and called for a resumption of attacks in response to the sentencing of several activists who targeted UK animal testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences in the 1990s.

The latter note suggested that the Justice Department is composed of veteran activists, saying “We are the past generation of animal liberationists, but we will now be the future.” According to archived communiqués, the group has sent out razor blades before, to UCLA and Wake Forest University researchers, and razor blades have been sent to people doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences in 2006. The North American Animal Liberation Press Office reports that the Justice Department is “willing to use violence,” unlike the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which limited itself to property destruction and aggressive protests.

But historian Geraldine Forbes of State University of New York Oswego says that ALF never really fit the profile of a typical nonviolent group. “A nonviolent movement really can’t be secretive,” she says. “It really aims at getting lots of people on board.” Forbes calls the ALF and Justice Department model “franchise terrorism.” “The ideology and the goals are already out there,” she says. “Any little group can pick it up, figure out what they want to do and then communicate back what they have done.”

So it is impossible to say whether the people who mailed Jentsch the package are the same people who targeted him in the past. In 2009, his car was torched. Since then, he has spoken out about the importance of animal research and his own work with vervet monkeys, which he uses in his studies of addiction and schizophrenia. In an interview with Nature in July, Jentsch spoke about the frequent harassing protests at his home and his support for new legal mechanisms to protect researchers, including the US Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (See Nature’s story on the AETA). He guessed at the number of active extremists as between one and three dozen, but, he added, “behind them are vast numbers of individuals who support their aggressive, intimidating campaign.”

Jentsch posted an “Open Letter to the Justice Department” on the website of the pro-animal-research group Speaking of Research. Jentsch writes that the threatening letters he has received “lack the gravitas required to react to them with fear” and that the activists themselves are “amateurish” and “childish bullies.”

“I will not give up my hard work in the laboratory on behalf of those who need my help,” he writes. “I will not feel fear in response to your increasingly desperate and puerile attempts to frighten. In the end, you will fail.”

Read Nature’s story on UCLA and Jentsch’s open dialogue with the above-ground animal rights group, Bruins for Animals.

Image courtesy UCLA/Reed Hutchinson.