ARTL: Review by ARK

Review by Animal Research Kills (U.K.) of ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES - Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer.

"In November 1990 the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries (MAF) commenced bulk mailing from Parliament of the booklet Animal Research Saves Lives - Humans and Animals Both Benefit (ARSL); the aim of the booklet clearly being to destroy the growing anti-vivisection movement in that country.

What the vivisection community there had clearly not foreseen was the determination of the founder of the New Zealand AV Society, Bette Overell, whose Society subsequently spent the next two years putting together the necessary rebuttal; resulting in the magnificent book ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES - Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer.

A 368 page hard-back book, containing 23 chapters, it effectively destroys the outrageous claims in the MAF booklet, and indeed just about any hair-brained justification of animal research a vivisector could come up with, it exposes amongst other things:

That the production of ARSL was part of a world-wide conspiracy to demolish the growing anti-vivisection movement.
That the NZ law on animal experimentation consists of a crooked peer-review system which decides, monitors and reviews the necessity for, and the carrying out, of their own experiments.
That many vivisectors are now opposing the vivisection method and principle.
That the NZ Government sanctioned the testing of cancer-forming drugs on thousands of NZ women without their consent or knowledge.
That Thalidomide was secretly tested on children, and that the drug's manufacturers continued to sell it for eight years after receiving warnings of malformations.

It also contains information such as: the farming/vivisection connection, animal vaccines, endangered species, the business of vivisection, and, of course, the human victims of vivisection. This is probably the most relevant book in the current struggle to abolish vivisection to have come out since Hans Ruesch's last work, and being a very 'readable' book with an extensive index, the anti-vivisectionist will often return to it for reference.

Finally the book is interspersed with photos from various NZAVS campaigns, and contains lists of recommended societies and further reading.

The massive task which was necessary to compile such a work has financially exhausted the NZAVS, which is now putting all efforts into the advertising and distribution of the book, with its initial launch on World Day for Laboratory Animals 1993. Unfortunately, with little money at present to promote the book, the Society is relying on the dedicated support of abolitionists worldwide.

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ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES - Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer

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