Free Distemper by Beth Saulnier Page A

cows from the experimental dairy herd. So far, nobody had been arrested, and the talk was
     that the group had some friends on the inside who helpedthem get into the buildings and avoid security. It wasn’t much and it certainly wasn’t violent, but it was enough to have
     anybody even remotely involved in animal experiments feeling itchy. An entomologist I knew even put triple locks on her office
     because she was terrified the “loonies” (her word) would try to free her tarantula collection. And, she lamented, only half
     of them were poisonous.
    But unlike most campus causes, this one seemed to have a fair number of opponents among the student body itself. Benson has
     world-class animal science departments, and their grants pay a lot of people’s salaries. Plus, there are plenty of grad students
     (and undergrads too) up there for the sole purpose of doing the very things that the so-called Benson Animal Anarchists object
     to, whether it’s dissecting frogs or twiddling with equine DNA. It didn’t help that of the five hundred animals they’d freed
     from the shackles of the mink farm, almost all of them died (either run over by cars or eaten by their closest friends) and
     one of the liberated cows wandered into the road and caused a near-fatal accident.
    Maybe because their profile wasn’t what they might have wanted—or because graduation was coming up and most of the group was
     off to law school—they decided it was time for something more dramatic. So there I was, hauled out of bed at seven on a Wednesday
     morning a week and a half before Memorial Day, watching the campus police try to unlock the front doors of the biology building.
     Gabriel is an eight-to-four town, and there was already a crowd of office workers, professors, and early-bird students waiting
     to get inside. Through the glass doors, I could see four beleaguered-looking people in labcoats who’d apparently been trapped there overnight, and it didn’t look like they were going anywhere soon. The handles of
     the back doors had been chained together with titanium bike locks, and in front the door locks had been glued shut with the
     industrial-strength stuff abortion protesters use to close down clinics. From what I could tell, there was no opening them
     without a battering ram. It was going to be a long day.
    Melissa was wandering through the crowd snapping pictures, wearing the photo-safari vest that makes her look like Meryl Streep
     in
Out of Africa
. The campus cops were not happy. At least nobody was chanting.
    “Hey there, Miss Alex,” she said. “What do you make of this spectacle?”
    “Drag. Nobody’s chained to anything.”
    “Not yet.”
    “Get any good shots?”
    “Fat cop with a hacksaw.”
    “Pulitzer time.”
    “I wonder what they’re after.”
    “All of bio’s in this building, so take your pick. I’m betting fetal pigs.”
    “Heads up. Here comes the flack brigade.”
    I turned around and saw the new vice president for university relations and two of his assistants coming our way. Phil Herzog
     got hired after his predecessor was shipped off to minimum-security work camp for drunk driving. The new guy was considerably
     less of a jerk but every bit as unhelpful. That part is inevitable, though: our job is to report the news, and his is to filter
     out all the bad stuff and leave us with the vanilla-pudding dregs thatmake parents and donors sleep at night. It’s not what you’d call a mutually satisfying relationship.
    Melissa slipped off, leaving me to deal with Herzog and his crew on my own. But when they were twenty feet away and closing,
     they and everyone else in the crowd stopped to stare at the line of marchers coming down the middle of the main campus street.
     There were only about two dozen of them, but they’d already jammed up what passes for rush-hour traffic around here. They
     were making some horrible noise, and it took me a minute to realize it was coming from four boom boxes playing