BUERK: ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS 'TERRORISTS' EXCLUSIVE Broadcaster's astonishing attack.

Byline: By CAMERON ROBERTSON

BROADCASTER Michael Buerk has blasted animal rights protesters as "terrorists" in an extraordinary attack.

The former Ten O'Clock News front-man said they should shut up and realise how animal testing helps humans.

Buerk, 60, complained: "It's all a terrible mix of sloppy sentimentality and lazy disinterest. There's hopeless confusion over our relations with animals.

"These protesters think animals have the same rights as us - that's wrong.

"If experimenting is necessary to cure terrible human conditions, it should be done - simple as that."

In a TV documentary later this month, Buerk says extreme action by the hardliners was just a "euphemism for vandalism, even terrorism". And he investigates how campaigners are damaging public support through their direct action.

He claims scientists are being targeted because the public has a "mixed-up and illogical attitude towards the animals we rely on for food".

Buerk argues: "On one hand we're more sentimental about some animals, but on the other we want cheap food, but we don't want to know how it's done. The result - factory farming."

He highlights the positive outcomes of animal testing for medical purposes, showing how someone with Parkinson's is helped by a tremour device developed through testing on monkeys.

He also talks to Pro-Test, a group supporting the rights of scientific researchers, and chair of the Countryside Alliance Kate Hoey - who criticised the public's "misty-eyed" view of animals.

He quotes a survey in May in which more than 70 per cent of the public accepted testing was sometimes essential.

And he confronts Mel Broughton, an animal rights activist jailed for four years in 1997 for smuggling incendiary bombs into an animal testing facility.

In the TV show, he also mocks their noisy protests when he hears two monkeys suffered during tests in Oxford.

Buerk says: "It sounds horrendous, until you learn that the 'Oxford Two' weren't political prisoners being tortured and murdered.

"It's not as if there wasn't clear, even startling evidence of the real benefits provided by experiments.

"The truth is the animal rights movement has lost the argument."

Buerk adds: "I hate the idea of unnecessary cruelty, but it's time we woke up to what we stand to lose if animals aren't used for research."

Last year he provoked outrage by moaning men had become "sperm donors" in a women's world.

Don't Get Me Started: Michael Buerk - Animal Rights, Human Wrongs is shown on Five on August 22.

BRAVE OR ABUERK?

ARE animal rights protesters who use violence to make their point terrorists? Calls 25p from standard BT line

YES: 0901 3834422 NO: 0901 3834421

[e-mail]

CAPTION(S):

BLASTED: The Oxford Two animal rights protest' OUTSPOKEN: Veteran journalist Michael Buerk