Officials at the University of California at Berkeley are planning to seek a restraining order against animal-rights protesters who have been staging loud demonstrations outside the homes of several researchers for the past two months, according to reports in California newspapers.

Robert Sanders, a spokesman for Berkeley, told The San Jose Mercury News that the protesters were “domestic terrorists, and the FBI has started treating them just as they would Al Qaeda.” He said the demonstrators had yelled into bullhorns late at night outside the homes of researchers, had smashed flowerpots, and had thrown rocks through windows.

The animal-rights activists have argued that the demonstrations are legal. In an article in The Daily Californian, Ryan Davis, a student at Berkeley who participated in the protests, said “the civil-rights movement used this tactic” of demonstrating at homes.

Berkeley officials said they feared that the demonstrations would escalate in violence. Last month activists in Southern California left an incendiary device outside the home of a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, and a group of protesters struck the husband of a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The police in Berkeley and Santa Cruz have been collaborating to see if there are any links between the protests at the two Bay Area campuses. Last Friday, Santa Cruz police officers released a sketch of one of the men involved in the attack on the home of the Santa Cruz researcher. The suspect, unlike the other assailants, apparently was not wearing a mask. —Richard Monastersky