ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer
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RESULTS OF TECHNIQUES DEVELOPED IN ANIMALS
The publishers of Animal Research Saves Lives criticise the videos being secretly filmed to expose today's "medical research" which is the premeditated, calculated mass slaughter of animals of magnitude difficult to comprehend by sane human beings. Claiming that the films are meant to shock and outrage, perhaps they are fearful that the public, to whom vivisection (until the advent of undercover videos) has been a carefully hidden secret, will become sufficiently shocked and outraged to tear down today's vivisection laboratories as in a former era they tore down the horror camps of Nazi Germany.
The anger generated by viewing, by way of undercover video tapes, the chilling and gruesome revelations of the vivisection laboratories and the depths to which human beings working in them sink on a daily basis, will shock and outrage, not only because of the atrocities exposed, but because the publishers of propaganda like ARSL attempt to make the public believe it is for the good of their health.
It is to the video entitled No Unnecessary Fuss, filmed undercover at the University of Pennsylvania on June 3 1983 that we go to witness vivisection as it is applied for research into head injuries.
The University of Pennsylvania received one million dollars of the taxpayers' money every year for thirteen consecutive years to research human head injuries arising from vehicle and sports accidents. To this end, instead of studying the many readily available human hospital patients, they took baboons (who do not drive vehicles, play sport, or have the same physiological mechanisms as humans) and simulated accidents thus:
In the presence of other baboons and to the accompaniment of loud rock music, joking and smoking, the vivisectors strap together the hindlegs and tail, then the forelegs are similarly bound. Next a helmet harness is cemented to the shaved skull. In this position, tearing at the bindings, eyes wide open, attempting to lift their heads from the platform, the animals wait until they are placed in a device which slashes the head over a 60 degree angle with forces up to what the vivisectors describe as "one thousand Gs". (A fifteen force "G" they say can kill a human being.) After the blow the vivisectors strike the helmet repeatedly with a hammer, using their full force in attempts to dislodge it from the injured head. Thus the once healthy animals, helpless, salivaring, bewildered, reduced to brain-damaged wrecks are deemed prepared for a series of unscientific, brutal, unhygienic and crude experiments.
When this video was released to the public Dr Gennarelli head of the programme insisted that the experiments were legitimate, that there should be "no unnecessary fuss". Nevertheless shock, outrage and the knowledge that these atrocities could not be relevant to human injury won the day, the experiments were stopped and the laboratory closed.
The sequel to No Unnecessary Fuss came on release of Hans Ruesch's book One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, for on page 55 of this indictment against vivisection there is a statement from Dr Paul Carrao, former head injury researcher in the Gennarelli lab, one of the vivisectors inflicting the head injuries witnessed on the video. To wit:
| "I just know what the literature shows, and I know what our results were, and I challenge anybody to show that any of that has advanced the cause of the treatment of human head injury one iota. The knowledge that now exists and upon which the treatment of human head injuries is predicated is that which has been derived from head injuries in the past, whether in the civilian sector or in the military. In many ways the results which were obtained with animals have been misleading, because in the case of quadrupeds the physiological mechanisms are different, so the kinds of data obtained from the different systems - circulatory, the blood pressure and so forth, respiratory, the cardiac - are different from those obtained from human head injuries." |
The Gennarelli experiments are not a rarity, rather they are the rule. In Animals, Men and Morals, Prof. Richard Ryder describes in sickening detail similar head injury experiments, the difference being that the monkeys were struck not one blow but multiple blows. Many died. Of the few that survived researchers concluded that their behaviour was "distinctly abnormal"! As Hans Ruesch points out in Slaughter of the Innocent page 301:
"It gets wearisome to read vivisectors' conclusions over the past 150 years, all stating the same thing: That results obtained on animals cannot be extrapolated to man. But it certainly isn't half as wearisome on the readers as on the animals involved."
| "The spiritual malady that rages in the soul of the vivisector is in itself sufficient to render him incapable of acquiring the highest and best knowledge. He finds it easier to propagate and multiply disease than to discover the secret of health. Seeking for the germs of life, he invents only new methods of death." (Dr Anna Kingsford, Britain's first woman doctor.) |
On page 15 of ARSL its publishers condone, even promote, the merits of blow-torching fully-conscious pigs until the flesh falls off their bones; claim the authenticity of restraining animals in clamps, the better for them to be blinded with shampoos, and praise the efficiency of the stereotaxic device which holds animals rigid making it easy for the vivisectors to cut, probe, burn and destroy their victims. ARSL attempts to smooth things over by lulling its readers into believing that
ARSL is wrong on both counts, and the reader is reminded of the words of George Bernard Shaw who wrote:
"Those who wouldn't hesitate to vivisect certainly would not hesitate to lie about it."
The illegitimacy of vivisection has been substantially outlined throughout this work and in this paper the reader has learned that a contrite Dr Paul Carrao, who personally inflicted head injuries on baboons in car-crash experiments subsequently admitted that what he did was worthless (except to his pay-packet). However in the vivisection industry the rewards far exceed the discouragements and the mere fact that their animal torture is invalid is no deterrent to the enthusiasm of those who carry it out. Though the Gennarelli Laboratory was closed on the grounds that the injuries they inflicted on baboons were "different from those obtained from human head injuries" similar experiments are still being carried out today...
It has recently been revealed that at its plant at Warren, Michigan, U.S.A. General Motors is smashing the skulls and necks of pigs with pneumatic impactors like the ones used on baboons in the Gennarelli Laboratory. PeTA News, Fall 1991, runs an article in which they report:
"In a typical current General Motors impact test on pigs, these intelligent, sensitive animals are restrained and hung in a cloth sling to await a crushing blow to the stomach or chest from a pneumatically-driven metal device."
"In the last decade General Motors has inflicted head, chest and abdominal injuries on hundreds of monkeys, dogs, rabbits, pigs and ferrets. In 1988 General Motors fed 23 dogs with ethyl alcohol, the animals then had their chests and pericardiums cut open, and were hit directly on the exposed heart with an air-pressurised impactor."
These are the actions that ARSL spent the taxpayers' money endorsing as justifiable and beneficial.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
(The above information from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's "Highest Death Rates" list, IIHS Status Report, Vol. 26, No. 4, April 13 1991.)
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY ABOUT GENERAL MOTORS ANIMAL-BASHING EXPERIMENTS
William R. Wittert, M.D., Pediatrics:Richard Sax, M.D., Neurology
Roy Selby, M.D., Neurology
Joan Poster, D.V.M.
Thomas Gennarelli of the baboon-bashing laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, in a paper "Controlled Cortical Impact: A New Experimental Brain Injury Model."
"This type of damage is not the same as that seen in man."
On January 12 1992 hundreds of anti-vivisectionists at the General Motors plant in Michigan, U.S.A. hit world news by chaining themselves to the cars on the assembly line in protest at car-crash experiments being carried out by this company.
[NZAVS Note, Year 2000: General Motors in 1993, following pressure from anti-vivisectionists, made the announcement that they "no longer have an animal trauma research activity".]
(As stated the author has received reports of a five-year programme being carried out at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Head Injury Lab. The infamous Penn II head injury apparatus will be used to inflict massive head injuries on "micro-pigs". The Scottish society Advocates for Animals has lodged a Petition to the University against these senseless experiments.)
At time of writing this article the results of AN UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION of toxicity testing carried out on beagle puppies by major drug company SmithKline Beecham is exposed. Posing as an animal technician the investigator wrote:
"One beautiful, young male dog was rendered unconscious by injection of phenol barbiturate until he was only just alive with a very slow heartbeat. A rod was screwed into his sternum to obtain a bone marrow sample and then he was taken to the post mortem room. Still alive he was placed over the sink. A man then sliced into his neck and severed both the main arteries so that blood gushed away, draining the dog of his life. Unbelievably, the atmosphere in the room was light-hearted and jovial as the team went about their work, cracking jokes as they hacked the dog apart. Only a few minutes earlier this dog had been alive, looking around, and sniffing the air... now he was simply a lump of flesh. All his vital organs were removed for analysis, including his eyes. Each foot was sawn off with a hacksaw, as the anti-viral compound being tested was suspected of causing damage to the dog's pads."
"We have asked SmithKline Beecham to set the remaining 24 beagle puppies free. We can find them good homes. We have had no reply from SmithKline Beecham... but we do know that after their time in the laboratories at Stock they were due to be moved to another SKB laboratory for further experiments."
The same investigator then moved to the laboratory of a different company where she is currently involved in filming and photographing rats, mice, guinea-pigs and rabbits being used in similar experiments. When leaving SKB for the last time she wrote:
"I am devastated as I write these notes this evening, for today was my last goodbye to the dogs. I shouldn't think I'll ever see them again... I feel so full of guilt and remorse... I can walk away from that hell-hole whilst they are still there, hurting and defenceless, and no-one to see them as more than just another piece of equipment..."
(A more comprehensive reference to Louise Wallis' under-cover investigation of SmithKline vivisection laboratories is made in Chapter 15 Arthritis and Hip Replacements.)
Undercover video tapes of vivisectors at work have obviously hit a nerve. As the truth of the medical fraud of vivisection and the hideous atrocities taking place behind the scenes are being exposed, the vivisectors' advertising and publicity is reaching hitherto unknown proportions.