Violence is no joke to the children of animal research scientists at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Over the past two years, eco-terrorists have physically attacked and intimidated the biomedical experts and their spouses. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2008, one “researcher and her children cowered in the back of their house” while environmentalists assaulted her husband. “(A)ctivists had scrawled the words ‘murderer’ and ‘torturer’ in chalk on the sidewalk in front of her house and leading up to her front porch. They wrote graffiti at the home of one of the postdoctoral research fellows in her laboratory, and they appeared at the homes of two other university employees, smearing garbage and yelling at them.”

In a separate incident two summers ago, another Santa Cruz-area researcher’s home was firebombed by animal rights terrorists. The scientist and his two young children escaped on a fire ladder from a second-story window. Earlier this year, yet another researcher’s car brakes were sabotaged and emergency brake cables were cut.

When these planetary crusaders aren’t harassing children with their terror campaigns, they’re openly deriding youngsters as loathsome burdens or selfish indulgences whose numbers must be curtailed. The eugenics-inspired officials of Planned Parenthood have blanketed the Third World with population control signs and stickers that preach, “The fewer, the merrier.” London academic John Guillebaud of the Optimum Population Trust in London assailed children as energy thieves a few years ago: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet. … The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.”

Guillebaud accused large families of committing “eco-crimes.” Al Gore’s four children were unavailable for comment. The elite commanders of the green war on children get to live by their own special creed: Do as we say, not as we breed.

Michelle Malkin is the author of “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies” (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.