Between 1991 and 1992, the ALF's Operation Bite Back struck the fur industry's research infrastructure — mink-research facilities at Oregon State and Washington State, feed cooperatives, and in February 1992 the Michigan State University fur-animal research offices, burned with years of records. The campaign's public voice was Rod Coronado, the Pascua Yaqui saboteur already famous for scuttling half of Iceland's whaling fleet in 1986.
Coronado was hunted for two years — sheltered for a time on Native land — and in 1995 pleaded guilty to the MSU arson, serving 57 months as the era's best-known animal-liberation prisoner. Congress had already responded to Bite Back by passing the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act, the first statute written specifically to redefine the movement's property crimes as federal "animal enterprise terrorism."