I would say that animal rights protesters and their supporters seem to come dangerously close to treating animals as if they are equal to humans, but as they honestly seem to believe that I will take a different tack.

It has been said that these professors who practice vivisection ( a process I find cruel and unnecessary) deserve direct intimidation because of what they have done. So, taking the assumption that humans and animals are equal, suppose you were to have a chicken which developed the cruel and unusual habit of laying its eggs on the heads of whatever animal walked underneath it. (this is of course a free range chicken, so its doing so from on top of your hay bales) What do you do to it?
booby trap the bale so that it explodes when it next tries its trick? Drop eggs on its head repeatedly until it gets the message?
follow it around and point a gun at it?
or just tell it off every time you catch it?

Were you to also keep a cat, which one day approached the hens and killed a brood of chicks. What do you do then?

bringing this back to the point, these arrests are quite possibly justified, but the declaration of these people as “terrorists” is misleading. However, protests hold no force unless the people who are being protested against feel they have something that is being threatened by these people, be it sales revenue or votes. But individuals who work at locations shouldn’t be threatened; its not effective. It just reduces the value of the argument in they eyes of those being threatened.

Oh, wait… Trying to claim right-wing groups as terrorists (such as the leaked DHS memo earlier this year) gets the whole country up in arms. Can’t have any of that. I guess they’ll just stick with the groups that are guilty of nothing more than property damage and let the real murderers go about their business.