ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer
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If vivisection is criticised by those employed in the industry itself, who, as we have learned, openly admit that they have no faith or reliance in its principle apart from its guaranteed financial and academic advantages, and if it is actively opposed by thousands of doctors who are campaigning widely for abolition on the grounds that it is a grievously flawed method, the following questions must be asked:
Whereas the astute reader will be champing at the bit with answers, the slow-learner is directed to Chapter 1 Introduction to Animal Research Takes Lives, which draws attention to the recent petition launched to the Congress of the United States of America, which opposes abolition on the grounds that it would mean losses of jobs for millions of people. And Chapter 18 Spinal Cord Injury, which reveals the invisible and insidious connection between the U.S. biomedical community, which, through the U.S. National Institute of Health, channels funds to many countries, and the stranglehold of subservience accompanying such funds.
The U.S. Petition to maintain continued vivisection, registers the apprehension of its signatories that abolition means the loss of jobs, however it is important to emphasise that the adverse effects of abolition will only be felt by those whose careers centre on, or are linked with, the vivisection industry. When the animal laboratories are closed the massive finance being squandered by manufacturing sickness, misery, dis-ease and death in animals will be directed to creating employment for a greater number of people in the advancement of human health. An excellent example of this was publicised in New Zealand in 1989 with the closure of Middlemore Hospital vivisection laboratory which reported that "a saving of $87,000 per year made by the closure would go towards treating patients".
(Dominion, October 21 1989.)
And so exposing a chink in the rotten and crumbling edifice of vivisection, the Middlemore Hospital laboratory and others that are closing, admit that though it provides jobs for vivisectors no amount of inflicting dis-ease into healthy animals will make sick people well. All the evidence reveals that when funds are diverted from creating sickness, to acceptance and promotion of the many valid, harmonious, non-invasive and compatible therapies, vast multitudes of people will benefit. All over the world in the past few years, recognising the error of conventional vivisection-based drugs, an increasing number of people are turning to acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractice, osteopathy, hypnotherapy, aromatherapy, hydrology, psychosomatic medicine, reflex therapy, and other drugless remedies, all of which, whilst being valid ways of combating and preventing dis-ease, make employment. In addition, without the suction pump of vivisection draining away money, the funds will be applied to employing skilled and caring staff to care for the handicapped and elderly, providing physical and mental stimulation in their homes, as distinct from keeping them drugged and more dead than alive in institutions. When vivisection goes, sick people will have the benefit of diet and exercise programmes, massage, education into self-esteem and responsibility, colour, water, music treatments, and many others. All of which spell improved health, happier and healthier populations and funding for community responsibility to assist troubled and dis-eased people instead of funding the vivisectors.
The abolition of vivisection means the release of a large percentage of the five hundred million dollars per year currently spent on New Zealand's pharmaceutical bill, not to mention the thirty million dollars annually wasted on "bio-medical research" (the trade-name for vivisection) which will be used to prevent State-induced disease and illness which kept hospitals full to overflowing. For example, the Wellington Contact, April 16 1992, reports in bold headlines "Metal Concentrations Alarm Expert". This major article voices the concern of Dr Michael Sturm, visiting environmental sedimentologist from Austria, who is currently visiting the DSIR Oceanographic Institute at Greta Point. Dr Sturm says he is horrified at the levels of zinc, lead, copper, cadmium and mercury concentrations at sewage outfalls around Wellington which are "10 to 15 times worse than in lakes in the most densely populated parts of Switzerland where it is strictly forbidden to put such waste down drains".
Yet another example of the idiocy and perversion of the vivisectors' lies that cures for human ailments are to be found through vivisecting animals, is in the report in N.Z. Listener, October 10 1992, that "a very high mass of dioxin is contaminating Lake Rotorua (New Zealand's tourist mecca) to a degree that environmentalists rate worse than in highly industrialised areas like the Lower Rhine and Lake Ontario". That large quantities of deregistered pesticides from the Waikato in the north to the scenic Southland and from most of New Zealand's landfill sites are quietly leaching toxins into nearby waterways. That the developed world's increasingly chemophobic consumers could have second thoughts about our clean, green food products.
It cannot be over-emphasised that dis-ease, preventable and avoidable, is being manufactured and self-inflicted, through our food, air, water and erroneous chemical medicaments. That funds wasted on vivisection should be used in eradicating and preventing such dis-ease.
AND SO TO THE LAW
Prof. Croce wrote in the Foreword to Vivisection or Science - a choice to make:
"The Nation that first abolishes vivisection will be to the world what renaissance Italy was."
Although only in one province, this has already come about, the honour again falling to Italy as the law dated July 8 1986, No. 16, of the Province of Bolzano reads:
"REGULATIONS FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANIMALS...
The Provincial Council has approved, and the President of the Provincial Council has promulgated the following law...
Article 1
The autonomous Province of Bolzano has decreed that within its own sphere of competence animals of all kinds should be protected...
Article 7
The same penalty applies to anyone who carries out experiments on living animals even just for scientific or teaching purposes."
The triumph won by Italy could, and should, have been New Zealand's, which government for the past decade was the target of intense NZAVS legitimate, substantiated and well-evidenced calls for abolition, which had overwhelming public support. Instead however of giving consideration to NZAVS' two petitions, the New Zealand pro-vivisection alliance manoeuvred a system whereby vivisection is established, conducted and sanctified within the law. This was followed by the publication and distribution of Animal Research Saves Lives, with the motive of reassuring New Zealand's uneasy populace and chivvying waverers back into the fold of established thought. We now look at how this law evolved:
The New Zealand Animal Protection Act 1960 had no protection for animals in the country's laboratories. They were exempt from the Act until a law change in 1983 which resulted from NZAVS petition to abolish the Lethal Dose 50 Test. This petition was unique for New Zealand, not because it reflected the feeling of extensive apprehension being voiced by the New Zealand public, but because it was based on scientific, as distinct from moral grounds. The petition was presented to the Government with evidence, much of which came from the vivisectors themselves, that toxicological tests on animals are scientifically and medically worthless... except for their legal and technical advantages and benefits, whilst making jobs for the vivisectors and others in the industry.
In order to safeguard its combined interests from further challenge on the dangerous ground that vivisection is scientific fraud, rather than on ethical considerations (which the vivisectors are prepared to debate interminably, knowing it represents no threat), in 1983 the New Zealand pro-vivisection community, headed by the Minister of Agriculture set up the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee (NAEAC). With the enthusiastic collaboration of the RNZSPCA, NAEAC formulated a code of ethical conduct to which vivisection carried out in New Zealand laboratories must adhere. The code took four years to write and put into effect, that is to contrive to be sufficiently ambiguous to ensure protection of vivisectors and their activities. To this end each laboratory must form its own ethics committee at which those experimenting on animals decide, in the peer review system, which experiments are ethical and which are unethical. Proposed experiments are then submitted to the NAEAC for scrutiny and agreement prior to being passed to the Minister of Agriculture for final approval.
Undoubtedly the ethics committee system can truly be called a relic of a bygone age. Written by, for, and to protect the vivisectors, it has the necessary convenient loopholes, the same ambivalence and the same safeguards for the animal experimenters as did the absence of law prior to 1987 which merely suggested they adhere "to the spirit of the animals protection act". With vivisection protected by a law which is as flawed as vivisection itself it is worse for the animals, and for abolitionists, than if no law existed, for a token law is merely a legal bulwark against dissension. "Everything is being carried out to the letter of the law."
Unlike the honest law of the Province of Bolzano in Italy which consists of an uncomplicated, straightforward, twenty honest words which need no decoration or embellishment, the New Zealand law in its high-gloss, artistically presented 35 page fancy package is distinguishable at a glance as a phoney designed to protect not the animals but the vivisectors. Titled Guidelines for Institutional Animal Ethics Committees, initial suspicion is confirmed when the reader examines the Foreword... prior to tackling the work's top-heavy, superfluous and contradictory content. The following extracts from the document (hereafter referred to as The New Zealand Law), will be brief but the author, who adds her comments, trusts sufficiently enlightening to set readers forming their own judgement:
| FOREWORD TO The New Zealand Law |
"Animal Ethics Committees provide an important means of working with the scientific community to bring about improvements in the way laboratory animals are used..."
Author's Comment
ETHICS: "The science to which right action must conform."
(The Concise Oxford Dictionary.)
Established to "Bring about improvements in the way laboratory animals are used", The New Zealand Law is a contradiction in terms. At the onset the work is technically invalid. That vivisection is unethical is an escapable and immovable fact which millions of people find self-evident. The "laboratory animal" does not exist any more than does the laboratory human being. It is a technical error to use the word "ethics" to legitimise exertion of power over the weak, whether the victim on the receiving end is horizontal with four legs or vertical with two.
Would ethics committees have legitimised slavery in the cotton-fields, children labouring down the mines and up the chimneys, or the use of experimental human beings in Dachau and Belsen? Perhaps technically but never morally. The use of ethics committees to legitimise the vivisection of animals under The New Zealand Law reveals the New Zealand Government's willingness to shelter behind a questionable technicality on the first count as it is impossible on the second.
The author of the Foreword to The New Zealand Law is the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee Chairman, Mr Ian L. Baumgart, who, perhaps from modesty, but more likely from shame, omits to add his credentials. Mr Baumgart is:
Past senior scientist at the N.Z. Department of Industrial Research Laboratories and past Chairman of the Toxic Substances Board, which exposes, as elaborated in Chapter 1, The Vivisection Industry, that, unlike most trades and professions, a career in vivisection lasts long after retirement. It is a guaranteed enclosed, water-tight and solid-gold brotherhood.
| PAGE 1. The New Zealand Law |
INTRODUCTION: CONCERNS FOR THE LABORATORY ANIMAL
"Though the public demands research, testing and teaching be continued and improved to enhance the quality of human and animal life, there is growing concern about the ethical and philosophical implications of using animals in the ways they have been traditionally used."
Author's Comment
The public demands research, testing and teaching be carried out without the use of animals. To this end forty thousand people marched through the City of London on April 24 1992, similar marches took place in most American cities, and for the past 12 years NZAVS has marched through New Zealand's capital city annually on World Day for Laboratory Animals. Two Petitions to the New Zealand Parliament demanded abolition on grounds of scientific fraud. Ethical and philosophical implications aside an exploding international movement seeks abolition because of vivisection's grievously illogical methodology.
"It is clear the public is concerned about animal research and that ultimately the decision as to what is and what is not moral in animal research must include public as well as scientific, animal welfare, and philosophical input."
Author's Comment
Animal research is morally bankrupt. Since the founding of the first anti-vivisection society in London, 117 years ago, the vivisectors have been philosophising about morals and ethics with which they are obsessed, in the knowledge that to do so will not save one mouse from their clutches. Three things are made crystal clear in the above statement:
| PAGE 2. The New Zealand Law |
LEGAL REQUIREMENTS: THE MANIPULATION OF LIVE ANIMALS IN RESEARCH, TESTING AND TEACHING AND IN THE PRODUCTION OF BIOLOGICAL AGENTS.
"The New Zealand Law requires that any research, teaching, experimental, diagnostic, toxicity, or potency testing work or work for the purposes of producing antisera or other biological agents involving the manipulation of live animals must be carried out in accordance with a code of ethical conduct to be submitted to NAEAC by the director or chief executive of the institution and approved by the Minister of Agriculture."
Author's Comment
The use of animals as described above is unethical, see previous comment, therefore The New Zealand Law is technically invalid.
| PAGE 3. The New Zealand Law |
DEFINITIONS
"'Manipulation' in relation to any live animal, means interfering with the normal physiological, behavioural or anatomical integrity of the animal by deliberately:
(a) Exposing it to any parasite, micro-organism, drug, chemical, biological product, radiation, electrical stimulation, or environmental condition;
(b) Subjecting it to enforced activity, unusual restraint, abnormal nutrition, or surgical intervention;
(c) Depriving it of usual care...
but does not include any therapy or prophylaxis necessary or desirable for the welfare of the animal."
Author's Comment
Any member of society carrying out any one of the above manipulations on an animal without the extortionate exemption from The New Zealand Law bestowed on the vivisectors would be liable for fines or prison sentences.
| PAGE 4. The New Zealand Law |
STATEMENT OF POLICY AND GUIDELINES BY NAEAC
"The use of animals in research has an ethical cost that must be outweighed against the potential benefit to be obtained."
Author's Comment
The sole potential benefit of vivisection lies in the legal, technical, financial, academic and industrial areas where it is used as an alibi to prove whatever point the donor of the funds for the research wishes to establish. This is achieved by choosing the appropriate animal species.
| PAGE 5. The New Zealand Law |
OBJECTIVES
"The Commitees' objectives are:
To ensure the humane treatment of animals used in manipulations..."
Author's Comment
There is no humane way of treating animals manipulated in vivisection laboratories. The inhumanity begins before the manipulations commence... in the breeding, capturing, procuring, caging, preparing etc.
"To outline principles regarding the choice, supply and maintenance of animals."
Author's Comment
If the procedures in the manipulations are as humane as The New Zealand Law insists, the vivisectors should obviously form a pool of volunteers from their own ranks. This would ease public concern, cost less, there is an abundant supply, they are dispensable and more importantly it would solve their ethical concern for the animals.
PRINCIPLES
"Experiments involving the manipulation of animals are carried out to achieve educational objectives."
Author's Comment
The use of animals in education is inefficient, time-consuming, expensive and blunts the sensitivities and manual dexterity of the pupil, and similar to The New Zealand Law is light years behind the times. Refer Chapter 18, Surgical Techniques. (Also refer NZAVS submission to Parliament titled The LD50 Alibi and the New Zealand Parliamentarian, dated February 5 1985.)
The manipulation of a computer requires talent and brains, neither of which are necessary for cutting up animals, and for the diehard vivisector, daunted by the thought of change, it is tantamount to expecting a kindergarten infant to undertake an honours degree. However many overseas teaching institutions have come out of the dark ages, closed their animal laboratories and installed computers which doctors say younger students prefer for their practical superiority and ethical compatibility.
Dr Julius Melbin and his associates at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine write:
"We devised a computer simulation that replaced conventional physiology laboratory work, instead of students dissecting animals and watching various factors, blood-pressure, glucose tolerance and so on, they operate on a computer terminal by typing in information about what they intend to do. The digital computer quickly calculates how the animal will be affected and displays the results on oscilloscopes, chart recorders and print-outs. The screen mimics heart-rate, nerve impulses, body temperature, brain-waves and other vital signs of the living animals. The sound of the beating heart and the beep of a recorded nerve impulse adds drama and reality to the proceedings. As with other computers of this kind the 'operation' can be stopped anytime, backtracked to any given point, or even fast-forwarded. All impossible when using live animals when, should the student hold up proceedings to ask questions, the animal dies."
Dr Michael of the Department of Physiology, Rush Medical College, Chicago wrote:
"Computer simulations of student animal experiments do not require animals."
Over a decade ago, in correspondence with the author, Dr Michael was coordinating a clearing house to foster the exchange of programs produced throughout the world for the American Physiology Society. At this time the author attempted unsuccessfully to induce the New Zealand Government to contribute a computer grant towards this revolutionary work which benefits animals and humans and from which New Zealand research institutions would have reaped great advantage.
Dr Kurt Enslein of Health Designs Inc., New York, ten years ago, created programs which "could isolate dangerous chemicals at the earliest stages of testing". When the computer told him that piperine, an ingredient in black pepper, was a carcinogen, he searched through his literature and found a report that linked piperine to cancer. A further interesting point is that incorrect information fed into the computer which resulted from experiments on animals was rejected by the computer.
Dr Charles De Lisi, Biophysicist at the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland wrote that:
"Every year laboratories introduce thousands of new chemical compounds to the marketplace and using rats to test each individual substance can run into thousands of dollars... Dr Enslein's computer can test each chemical for $150."
(Dr De Lisi omitted to add that the rat tests are dangerous and invalid whereas the computer rejects false conclusions.)
Dr James R. Walker at this time had pioneered the installation of computers in the Integrated Functional Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical School, which replicated physiological functions which had hitherto been observed in living animals. Dr Walker wrote to the author that:
"The computers paid for themselves in two years, reducing the high cost of buying, housing and feeding animals. They also save pupils from a moral dilemma. They do things faster, better and differently. Of the few things animals and computers have in common, one similarity allows the students to study living systems without the necessity of using animals."
Dr Walker closed his animal laboratories saying:
"The computers are so successful that to provide such an experimental animal for use in the student laboratory would be impossible. The cost of computer maintenance after initial purchase is low, the computer can simulate not only the animal systems under study but waits for the students rather than the student waiting for developments to take place in the animal."
NOTE
Dr Walker generously donated (to the author on behalf of NZAVS) two software programs of standard experiments commonly carried out by students. On World Day for Laboratory Animals, April 24 1985, these were presented to Labour M.P. for Western Hutt, Mr John Terris, for onforwarding to the Minister of Health, Dr M. Bassett, who wrote to the Society that "the programmes had uses in training of medical students" adding that he would see that they were distributed. To this end Dr Bassett passed the programs to New Zealand's greatest protector and advocate of vivisection Dr B. Boyd, (then) Deputy Director of Health who held them for over six months until they were retrieved by Mr Terris and returned to the Society. By using funds donated by its members NZAVS copied and distributed the diskettes to medical schools, universities and agricultural and veterinary laboratories, which use animals in their training, conducting a survey which extended almost two years. The result of this expensive and time-consuming exercise, which is registered in detail in Mobilise!, No. 16, October 1986, concluded as follows:
The Society summarised its survey thus:
Though superior replacement techniques exist - the vivisectors' will to adopt them does not.
That the New Zealand teaching establishments have still not, eight years later, replaced teaching methods from the animal to the computer reflects the continued derelict attitudes and perhaps also the commercial behind-the-scenes advantages of adhering to the animal-system with its inherent profits. (Refer Chapter 1, The Vivisection Industry.)
Author's Comment
The professed "respect and care" for the animals stated in The New Zealand Law should be demonstrated by closing vivisection laboratories and the installation of valid, medically approved and ethical teaching methods. Animals are proven to be inconclusive, expensive and inefficient in experimental work and teaching.Author's Comment
The importance of this statement is what it omits, namely that animals in all the following categories can be experimented on in The New Zealand Law. Each one of which, like the specifically-bred laboratory-animals industry, represents a lucrative business:
The obsolescence and archaism of The New Zealand Law was exposed by the nationwide announcement on September 4 1992 that the Ministry of Agriculture had managed to overcome its ethical concern for the victims of vivisection sufficiently to plan trials of the dreaded myxomatosis on the country's increasingly rare and dwindling national emblem, the kiwi. Neither does its concern about ethics prevent The New Zealand Law from allowing pound seizure, which is banned in many countries, or from being part of the lucrative animal-breeding industry, by sanctioning and advocating the use of specifically-bred laboratory animals. Refer Chapter 1, The Vivisection Industry.
| PAGE 6. The New Zealand Law |
RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PERSON UNDERTAKING THE MANIPULATION
"Both the person carrying out the manipulation and the organisation or institution concerned must accept responsibility for the work undertaken. Such responsibility will include the selection of an appropriate animal species, the choice of the number of subjects, the nature of the procedures and all matters related to the continuing welfare of the animals and their ultimate disposal."
Author's Comment
As pointed out in a previous section the selection of the animal species can be manipulated to suit the desired objective of the experiment - which will in turn be determined by the funding source.
| PAGE 7. The New Zealand Law |
CHOICE OF AN APPROPRIATE ANIMAL SPECIES
"Endangered or threatened species should not be used unless the findings are expected to assist the survival of that species."
Author's Comment
Thus rare, endangered or threatened species can be poisoned to death with myxoma virus - or otherwise done to death in any way the vivisectors desire providing funds are forthcoming for the experiments.
| PAGE 8. The New Zealand Law |
MINIMISATION OF DISTRESS
"The following points must be taken into consideration:
Author's Comment
Thus if it is impossible to achieve the vivisector's "desired result" without imposing great or maximum stress or pain BOTH FACTORS OF WHICH ARE DETERMINED BY THE VIVISECTOR, such stress and pain is permissible in The New Zealand Law.
The vivisector's "adequacy" to carry out the technique, hinging on the vivisector's own judgement, means that, notorious for their self-determined confidence, any vivisector who fancies a quick workout on animals will claim he is "adequate" to carry out the technique to do so, knowing that the animal's protestation to the contrary is unlikely to be considered.
The use of anaesthesia, the minimisation of distress, the necessity of subjecting animals to further procedures and the necessity of terminating experiments, again all hinge on the vivisector. The reader is urged to turn to the Foreword at Chapter 1 which exposes that the British Law which is supposedly the most stringent in the world fails to protect animals from routine torture AS THE NECESSITY FOR ALL THE ABOVE DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON THE VIVISECTOR CARRYING OUT THE EXPERIMENT. (Three hundred million animals are done to death annually in the world's laboratories, in excess of eighty percent without anaesthesia or pain relief.)
The foregone extracts were highlighted from the first eight of 35 pages which comprise The New Zealand Law, the remaining 27 pages which consist of the same contrived phrases are meaningful only for their purpose of camouflaging and padding the important operative words to enable them to slide through their smokescreen unnoticed. For example:
Author's Comment
This is an established fact, therefore consider the following:
Author's Comment
Contentious to whom? As society is unaware of the proceedings it is unlikely to contend them; and the proceedings are unlikely to be contended by those involved in animal experiments!
Author's Comment
Thus a protocol does not always and must not necessarily comply with the code. "Should" merely states an unbinding 'intention'. This does not constitute a law.Author's Comment
From what do vivisectors require "protection" if experiments are ruled ethical and legal?
Author's Comment
This is precisely their function.
Author's Comment
Consequently they must be chosen carefully for the function they perform for the Committee - not for the function they perform for the animals:
Author's Comment
An anti-vivisectionist, no matter how well-rounded, respected, trusted or independent, would be most unsuitable as such a person's concern would be for the animals rather than for the credibility of the Committee. Only the brainwashed or ambitious is "suitable" to act as a public pacifier between vivisection and the public conscience. A "suitable" candidate is one who, conditioned in primary school, then through higher education, and finally by the media, retains at all times his safe position in the majority. No person who has conceived through study that vivisection is unethical and invalid, as he has conceived that the world is round and encircles the sun would be considered "suitable": Because the ethical and scientific invalidity of vivisection has not yet (because of propaganda like ARSL) been accepted by the majority.
Author's Comment
Appropriate to what? This means the sanctioning committee could be far removed from the experiment.
Author's Comment
This was the purpose of establishing the ethics committee system. Whilst The New Zealand Law, written by and for the vivisectors and funded by the public, ensures that vivisectors' activities are widely reported to their advantage by a friendly media which benefits financially from vivisectionist advertising, anti-vivisectionists' attempts to bring the scientific fraud of vivisection to the public remains diligently and systematically censored.
Author's Comment
Who and what must the lay member suit? The vivisectors of course! At onset this rules out the candidate who is opposed to vivisection.
Author's Comment
Why the confidentiality? If vivisection is ethical and scientifically valid, procedures should be heralded from the rooftops.
The guidelines to The New Zealand Law came from the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies. An outline of "ethical principles and guidelines for scientific experiments on animals" from the Swiss Academy of Sciences. Other information came from the UK RSPCA and the Swedish Board of Agriculture, and a smattering of assistance from U.S. affiliates... All of whom profess "ethical concern" for laboratory animals, none of whom promote abolition of vivisection.
This the writer mentions for the sole purpose of emphasising the international syndicate which, linking the vivisectionists transcends all geographical, religious and other boundaries more soundly and efficiently than do any connections based on brotherly love. A baffling and unwieldy amount of space is devoted to the vivisectors' obsession with the definitions and classification and categories of pain levels, categories of biomedical experiments based on increasing ethical concerns for non-human species, sections on monitoring experiments, and others on statistics.
The conclusions reached on studying The New Zealand Law, which having ruled that animal experiments are valid will accept no legal contradiction, is that: the most slip-shod and inadequate pursuers of academic titles in New Zealand, only requiring peer approval, have full licence to carry out any and all procedures on animals according to their own ambitions. The necessities, requirements, actions, monitorings and limitations for so-doing being self-imposed! That the vivisectors enjoy total freedom and complete peace of mind knowing that they are functioning legally within the guarantees, protection and shelter of The New Zealand Law. When a law is so clearly unethical (A belief being increasingly accepted by those the world over whose legal attempts to effect change will not be considered or debated by the lawmakers.) |
"Those who decide on the 'undeniable necessity' of vivisection and in what way it is to be carried out, are the vivisectors themselves, which means that the potential transgressors of the law can decide on both its application and its interpretation. Which is as absurd as allowing a thief to decide when or whether a theft is necessary and how it is to be committed."
(Kim Buti, in Prof. Croce's Vivisection or Science - a choice to make, page 115.)
"To regulate/control vivisection by law means giving the vivisectionists and the vivisection method a legal and moral dignity, granting it the same status as morally and scientifically legal activities, and conferring on the vivisectors a security protected by the law. In other words, a limited law is worse than no law at all."
(Prof. Croce, Vivisection or Science - a choice to make.)
"We demand not regulation and control, but abolition of vivisection being practised in the name of science."
(Dr Albert Poret, Paris. In Hans Ruesch, One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection.)
SOME IMPORTANT INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
Though the writing is on the wall for the end of animal-based medicine, propaganda like Animal Research Saves Lives threatens the reader with the dire consequences should vivisection be stopped...
THIS IS MERELY A SHAM USED TO ENSURE CONTINUED FUNDING.
SOME UNPALATABLE FACTS
| ALTERNATIVES TO USING ANIMALS IN RESEARCH The British law says all "alternatives to animals used in vivisection laboratories must be tested on animals before they can be called alternatives." (Letter from the British Secretary of State, on NZAVS file, September 12 1979.); (See Chapter 1 Foreword.) (Ack. H. Turtle.) |
| ABOLITION OF THE LD50 TEST Report on the LD50 Test presented to the British Secretary of State by the Advisory Committee on the administration of the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, Home Office, London 1979, ISBN 0 903727 75 7, page 18: "GENERAL CONCLUSIONS The suggestion was made to us by CREAE that the LD50 Test should be abolished or phased out. Having regard to the worldwide use of LD50s this is hardly a realistic proposal. BUT EVEN IF IT WERE WE COULD NOT SUPPORT IT." (Hans Ruesch, CIVIS Bullet-In, Nr. 2, page 24.) |
| DEMOCRACY AND STATE FUNDED AND PROTECTED VIVISECTION In the U.S.A. House Resolution 2407, a bill designed to guard federally-funded vivisection prohibits anyone from giving details of research to unauthorised persons. The bill establishes criminal penalties against the press for publishing said information. If, for example, a whistle-blower leaked information to a newspaper, the newspaper and reporter could be prosecuted for publishing the story. (Dr Dobb's Journal, May 1992.) |