It appears Morrissey is doing his best to live up to the Ringleader of the Tormentors moniker he coined for his latest album.
The Mancunian student icon of the 80s wears his vegetarianism as flamboyantly as his gladioli, and he's known to be a passionate advocate of animal rights.
Now he's got Oxford's new animal research lab in his sights. At a concert in the city last week, he condemned the lab and warned its workers: "We'll get you".
Animal testers - long the bogeymen of the idealistic left - have enjoyed something of a resurgence recently with the formation of the Pro-Test campaign group in favour of animal testing.
The group even counts a number of students among its members - something that would have been unheard of in Morrissey's heyday, when it was impossible to walk through any student town without signing up (again) to a gorily-illustrated anti-vivisection petition.
Morrissey's got previous on this one. In an interview with the True to You fanzine earlier this year, he said he understood "why fur-farmers and so-called laboratory scientists are repaid with violence - it is because they deal in violence themselves and it's the only language they understand".
I'm not quite sure how easily that sits with the view Morrissey expressed elsewhere in the True to You interview that "the proof of your political thinking is usually in your conduct. I find myself opposing barbarism, that's all".
Viva hate, as the great man put it.
