Animal Rights extremists are a threat to native wildlife. In
particular I am thinking of the bluebird article that ran in the Wall
Street Journal a year or two ago. Various bluebirders took the WSJ
reporter on their bluebird trails in good faith, but unfortunately most
of the subsequent article was devoted to the killing of house sparrows
by bluebirders. After the artical ran, one bluebirder got a threat
from such an extremist (not a physical threat however).



Below is another example of Animals rights extremists:

from rec.gardens
leonard.adolph at totembbs.com (Leonard Adolph) writes:
...
(following is excerpted from the Newark (NJ) Star Ledger, Aug 5, 1994,
p.3, byline Stacy Y. China, "Lawmakers rush to the defense of man
charged with killing rat" -- this story had recieved full Silly Season
press coverage in NJ)

"(Frank) Balun, 69, became a celebrity for attempting to keep
his tomato bushes free of rodents. [...] He borrowed a squirrel
trap from a neighbor and caught a rat two days later.
Because he was too squeamish to remove the rat himself, Balun called
the Humane Society to come and get it. While he was waiting, the rat pushed
its head through a one-inch hole and 'looked like it was going to escape,'
he said.
Balun hit the rat with a broom handle to subdue it and the rodent
was dead when the Humane Society representative arrived.
Two days later, Balun went to the Humane Society's Newark office
to retrieve his neighbor's trap, but Executive Director Lee Bernstein
impounded it and gave Balun a civil and criminal summons [ charge is
'needlessly abusing a rodent by hitting it while in a trap and killing the
animal' -- possibly $1250 in fines and 6 months in jail!]
[...] If [the rat] had been alive, Bernstein said,
the rat would have been released in a nature environment or killed by
lethal injection. "

Yes, the "nature environment" is a direct quote.