As with just about every right-thinking person (and that includes many left thinking people too), I am spitting mad at the bunny-huggers of SHAC and Stop the Newchurch Guinea Pigs who have seem determined to halt medical progress. The Telegraph rightly calls them terrorists and it is a disgrace that they have won. I am glad to say that even decent people on the same side agree because the tactics that have caused the Halls to stop breeding guinea pigs are utterly despicable.
Yet, as terrorists go, it has to be said that they have managed to run a very smart and targeted terror campaign, unlike (for example) Osama and his Sheetheads, with clearly defined and achievable objectives. This probably explains why there has been limited outrage and, I regret to say, limited attempts by the police etc to stop them. Targetted terror and harassment is not something that impinges on the general public so they tend to complain about the expense of providing adequate protection rather than thinking about the message that is sent to the scum by their passivity. I am not sure what can be done about the passiveness, nor precisely what can be done to defeat the terror scum, but I have some ideas. They would all have the additional side-effect that they would get the Human Rights lobby worked up in a tizzy.
A big part of the problem is that, especially in the UK, law abiding people are not expected to lynch such scum so the risk/reward ratio for those considering terrorist acts is pretty much skewed in their favour. One way to move the ratio back would be to bar any animal rights activist caught performing criminal harassment to be barred from any UK hospital or doctor. This seems only logical, since they protest the way that medical research is carried out they should not benefit from it. I propose that such people be branded, tattooed or otherwise indelibly marked (e.g. fitted with a subcutaneous RFID chip - said fitting to be undertaken without anaesthetic of course) that identifies their status and that a law be passed stating that people so identified are not eligable for NHS benefits and that no pharmacy or private medical clinic is required to serve them either.
Once before I mentioned the idea of resurrecting the stocks (and for that matter public corporal punishment) for certain crimes and I would think that it would make an excellent punishment for people found guilty of harassment of others.
Another thing - and this might apply to other terrorist scum - could be the fitting of a GPS tag that then communicates its location to a publicly available place on the internet so that people can track them (and when they see them insult them). There are some practical problems such as what happens when the battery runs out or if the criminal covers the tag in some sort of Faraday cage (this would be trivially simple, you would just need some tin foil). Certainly I could imagine a requirement to register their status every night could be implemented, so long as a significant punishment for failure were also required, that could cause trouble.
Finally one other possibility would be to declare such folk to be "outlaws" and therefore not eligable for all sorts of legal protection or (this being a welfare state) any government benefits.