Abstract
Animal rights extremists have carried out a number of campaigns in the past in order to protect animals. The actions they carry out as part of these campaigns are often described as acts of intimidation, however little has been done to explore how these groups use intimidation on the whole. Past research has focused mainly on specific animal rights campaign types (Donovan & Coupe, 2013; Munro, 2005) or action types (Monaghan, 1999). The current research aimed to explore the types of intimidating behaviours carried out by animal rights extremists in the UK across all campaign types. Literature reviews were carried out in order to understand more about the current knowledge of animal rights extremism and intimidation. Study 1 aimed to catalogue incidents carried out by animal rights extremists in the UK, and to identify any regular patterns of behaviour across and between distinct campaign groups. The results of this study demonstrated that animal rights extremists show patterns in their choice of actions and targets both across the campaigns, and more specific patterns emerged for the main five campaigns. Having identified that threats are closely associated with intimidation, both from the literature reviews and the findings of Study 1, the second study aimed to explore the type of language used by animal rights extremists when making threats. The findings of Study 2 indicate that animal rights extremists are extremely confident when making their threats, although they might not be truthful when doing so. Overall, the findings of this research have important practical implications for potential targets of animal rights extremists.