CIVIS Bulletin Nr 1, 1983  (page seven)

In June 1983, as gaping crowds stand spellbound and police cars rush to the scene, Gerd Woictchach climbs 100 feet up the facade of the new tower of Berlin's famed Gedachtniskirche (Memorial Church) to affix a sheet inscribed STOP THE CONVENTION FOR ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION. The press had been reporting the scandalous proceedings at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, engineered by Britain's pharmaceutical industry in collusion with British Parliamentarians and the German, Swedish, Austrian, French and Dutch politicians.

 

THE BRITISH PRESS

 

In what way the hypocritical proceedings of the British vivisection organisation are being presented to the British people as a brilliant victory of its phony animal welfare organisations is best illustrated by the comments on those December '82 Hearings in the British press, which blindly accepted the schmaltz handed out by the RSPCA and published one of the crudest forgeries ever put over as authentic to millions of traditionally credulous Britons:

 

"The RSPCA has been able to influence the preparation of a blueprint for the European legislation which will offer protection to Europe's 25 million laboratory animals."(!)

 

Thus the naive, thoroughly misled Britons are being incited to pour more donations into the till of their largest and most prestigious "animal welfare" organisation, which basks in the patronage of her Gracious Majesty, the Queen, and the total support of the Establishment press.

 

Now let us see how this same press explained the failure of the draft Convention to be accepted at Strasbourg. Under the incredible title "How Germany vetoed new laws on animal pain," the Dec. 16, 1982 issue of the vivisection-happy New Scientist reported:

 

"The scientists and industrialists of Europe are being given a green light to carry on 'severe and enduring pain' to animals during scientific experiments - to satisfy the dictates of the West German constitution."

 

APRIL 1983

 

In April 1983 there was a new session in Strasbourg, but once again the Convention, which had meanwhile been slightly modified, did not pass. Interestingly, both the Italian delegation and the British delegation rejected it, but for opposite reasons. The Italians - who had meanwhile convinced their government to reject it - because the modified Convention was still far too permissive for the vivisectors; the British, because it was not permissive enough!

 

It is to be noted that during both the December '82 and the April '83 Hearings, the entire Italian delegation - parliamentarians, doctors, veterinarians, journalists, lawyers, welfare organisations - were solidly against vivisection and pleaded for abolition, banking heavily on the arguments listed in Slaughter; the British were all for the status quo or for an expansion of vivisection parliamentarians, veterinarians, doctors, as well as the spokespersons of the two phony Animal Welfare organisations. Once more, the British AV leagues were conspicuously absent.

 

As following the leadership of Lord Adrian, who delivered impassioned speeches in praise of vivisection, we should remember Britain's Garrett, Hawkins, Miller, Dudley Smith, along with Switzerland's Butty und Steiger, Luxembourg's Prussen, France's Bassinet, and Austria's Blenk. The list is far from exhaustive.

 

Britain's Garrett (Labour) spoke like a salesman of the drug industry. He said some people seem to ignore that we live in the century of the chemical industry, which plays an increasingly important role. He advocated a rejection of all humane amendments proposed by Italy's Fiandrotti. Also Mr Maurice Miller said that one should not criticize the pharmaceutical industry, which he called a fine industry, led by fine, upstanding citizens.  Another notable at he Hearings was A Granitza, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries Associations, meaning a traveling salesman of the drug industry on a world-wide level, who delivered the following bromide:

 

"It is unethical according to the Declaration of Tokyo to conduct clinical tests without prior animal tests. Protection of man is considered a higher-ranking object of legal protection than that of animals."

 

This concern expressed for the protection of man sounds ironic coming from the spokesman of an organisation that poisons - for profit motive - people and animals alike all over the world. But it is an argument that will be used ever again and for all times so long as the AV organisations contribute to the artfully constructed misconception that we must first find alternatives and only then can vivisection be abolished. It's the other way around. First vivisection must be legally forbidden because of its deadly effect on man and animals, and then the so-called medical researchers will have no choice but to follow the correct road.

 

But unaware of it all seems to this day to be AA's 'Outrage', which in its Sept-Oct issue, 1983, said: "Angela Walder is on the council of the RSPCA and is urging as many people as possible to join this society which currently tends to sit on the fence over some animal issues. New membership may stir them to more active work."

 

"The fence" hardly seems the proper designation to us for what the RSPCA is sitting on, when it is involved up to its eyeballs with the Association for Biomedical Research (the lobby arm of Charles River Breeding Laboratories, formerly named the Research Animal Alliance), and other organisations that promote the procurement, breeding, husbandry and use of laboratory animals and accessories.

 

SEPTEMBER 1983

 

On September 26, 1983, the European Council met once more to vote on the Convention, but once more it was rejected, thanks to the Italian coalition, which this time had found strong support from Germany and some other countries.

 

German Parliamentarian Klaus Rosch had cited from one of the CIVIS publications several medical authorities who ruled out animal experimentation on scientific grounds, and the Italians, who had long been banking on Slaughter and the various Technical Reports from CIVIS, had announced that they had persuaded their government to reject the Convention, and not to ratify it if it were accepted by the Council.

 

In Germany, the above-mentioned Scientific Work-Circle for Animal Protection had done terrific preparatory work by contacting and informing German and Austrian delegates. Acknowledgment is due to Prof I. Bingener, Dipl. Phys. I. Hahn, Magda Bubetz, and Austrian actress Barbara Rutting, among a few others.

 

They did everything that the British AVs, lulled into inactivity by their AV societies, had conspicuously failed to do.

 

There was no need to alert the Italian delegates, led by Fiandrotti, who tried desperately to introduce one amendment after the other in favor of the animals. All his proposals were systematically rejected by the British, until he stormed out of the Council in protest.

 

Two thirds of the votes were required to get the Convention accepted. By the time the final voting took place, 14 delegates had gone home or to the bathroom, and there were 83 left. The hucksters for the British drug industry and laboratory animal breeders in Parliamentarian garb, led by Mr Osborn and Lord Northfield, had done their worst to railroad the Convention. But, surprisingly, as many as 12 German delegates voted against. Added to the solid Italian front and a few delegates from Austria, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the dissenters managed to total 30 votes, meaning more than the third required for Rejection.

 

Having unexpectedly won a bitterly fought, though temporary, victory for humanity against the British-led drug and breeders combine, they fell into each others' arms. Some wept.

 

RESUME AND CONCLUSION

 

Even Peter Singer, brilliant author of Animal Liberation, seems to have awakened to the fact that moral considerations alone - he never questioned the medical aspects - won't lead us anywhere fast. In an interview to 'Agenda' (Animal Rights Network), July-August '82, he said:

 

"…Henry Salt made all the points that I've made and he made them 90 years ago. The depressing thing about that is if those points had already been made and we still haven't achieved the change of attitude that we need to achieve, are we going to? When are we going to? So in a sense I am less optimistic about total change than Henry Salt."

 

Maybe a total change of attitude on our side is needed, Peter! In fact, moral mumblings of the type "A respect for all life" stand no better chance against the rhetorical shout "It's either your baby or a dog" than a mouse in a lab.

 

The arguments for stopping animal experimentation today without in the least jeopardizing human health but much rather advancing medical science are all there, for all to see and use. The mass of evidence demonstrating the total failure of all animal experimentation for human medicine and the massive damage it has caused is so crushing that AV leaders who determinedly ignore all of its aspects must be either total incompetents or traitors to the cause.

 

Since the law of averages mathematically rules out the possibility that the AV movement attracts only morons, the conclusion is inescapable that a good number of AV leaders, it not all, are infiltrators or traitors to the cause.

 

Traitors and infiltrators are the stuff defeats are made of. But the moment they are exposed they cease to represent a serious threat. The exposure of traitors, infiltrators and incompetents is one of the tasks Hans Ruesch's CIVIS has set itself. The blatant forgeries committed by the major British leagues to discredit proofs that denounce the uselessness and damage of animal experimentation, as demonstrated in this Bulletin, can lead to but one conclusion.

 

It was the influence and documentation of Slaughter that enabled the Italian delegation at the Council of Europe to thwart a quick acceptance of the fraudulent Convention in December 1982, and then again - this time with the help of some German delegates - to thwart acceptance of the Convention in April and in September 1983. German Parliamentarian Klaus Rosch quoted four medical doctors from a CIVIS leaflet and demanded the abolition of all animal experimentation.

 

In other words, it was medical and not ethical argumentation that has thwarted so far the acceptance of the Convention that would lead to an increased use of animals and further protection of vivisectors under the hypocritical mantle of "animal welfare" designed by the British pharmaceutical mafia under the direction of the RDS and total absence of Britain's AV leagues.

 

They had surrendered all powers to the RSPCA-financed Eurogroup, made up largely of former vivisectors and RSPCA members - this RSPCA having ties with the Humane Society of the US and the international animal breeders associations, as a Special Report published in 1982 by the New York based United Action for Animals (Eleanor Seiling) has convincingly revealed.

 

In Slaughter, all the pertinent information is assembled, at everybody's free disposal. The principal evidence therein is derived from the medical researchers' own official records and publications, and is therefore irrefutable.

 

In what way the chemo-medical kombinat has managed to take over control of all official information on medical and "health" news through the major news services, suppressing all the damaging news and planting nothing but favorable items, is related in Naked Empress.

 

The foundation of some new AV league in Great Britain, from which of course all the leaders past and present of the existing leagues should be excluded unless they make amend by acknowledging their errors and embracing an entirely new stand, is a prerequisite for a rebirth of the AV movement - not only in Great Britain, but in most European countries, where the true abolitionist movement has been destroyed by carefully organized infiltration almost from the day of its inception.

 

If animal experimentation were really as useful and indispensable as its advocates claim it to be, they would not have to resort to systematic suppression of information and falsification of facts. All they would have to do is to present their case and allow it to be debated in a free public hearing by competent adversaries rather than by members of their own ilk disguised as animal welfarists (read Eurogroup).

 

They would have nothing to fear, because it stands to logic that if they could really prove the benefits of animal experimentation, human nature and human selfishness being what they are, the majority of the people would want to see it continued, for their own and for "our childrens'" sake.

 

But they know that all their claims can be refuted, and that's why they organize fake debates, as we have witnessed in several countries in Europe, plant stories in the press, and infiltrate the societies.

 

And we know that if it were possible to bring into every home an honest and exhaustive TV debate on vivisection, showing not only the horrors of the laboratories but also the consequences for human beings of this pseudo-research done in the interest of the Drug Trust and the animal breeders, then vivisection would be abolished overnight, through a public uprising if need be.

 

As it stands, the majority of people is still indifferent to the problem. Worse, owing to the carefully planned and ruthlessly enacted conspiracy of the powers that be, the majority is convinced that not damage but continous and great benefits derive from the current method. And not even their AV leagues tell them different.

 

And that explains why every year, as soon as they discover the most horrific aspects of vivisection, some people join the AV societies with immense enthusiasm, only to drop out again in discouragement, to be replaced by others. The turnover of membership in the AV societies is enormous. Sooner or later they all realize that ethical mumblings are slated for defeat by the 'It's-your-child-or-a-dog' argument. And so they turn to some other animal or human welfare cause.

 

Hans Ruesch's CIVIS is an information center that tries to start an international, grass-roots movement for the abolition of vivisection on medical grounds. Being a one-man organisation, it cannot be infiltrated. It publishes or distributes books like Slaughter of the Innocent, Technical Reports like Naked Empress, Bulletins like this one, and various leaflets in English, French, German and Italian that any AV organisation is permitted to reprint and circulate free of charge, provided the source is mentioned to satisfy the copyright laws. In fact ClVIS collaborates, as it always has, with any organisation or individual participating actively in the abolitionist cause.

 

 

LETTERS

 

Dear Mr Ruesch, you have brought the hideous senselessness of modern vivisection to the attention of thousands. Please permit me to congratulate you! Slaughter of the Innocent opened my eyes to the extent of the horror - and the futility - of it all. I had previously assumed it to be only a problem of degree (that too many experiments were taking place) and that underlying the gore was an unpleasant but necessary service to medical science. Thank you for opening my eyes to the fact that vivisection is not only irrelevant to the advancement of medical science but positively confusing and obstructing. I would like to assist the movement to stop vivisection. As a school teacher, I have a ready-made avenue for presenting the anti-vivisectionist case (which is too rarely presented in this country). - Barry York, Victoria, Australia

 

Dear Mr Ruesch, I have just read your book and was very much moved by it. You have put into words many of the things that I feel, but was never able to express. I have always been an anti-vivisectionist of the G.B. Shaw school - against it on principle, regardless of the benefits it might entail for mankind. However, the argument of 'a baby's life against a dog's life' seemed invincible in the face of my feelings. Now at last I realise that what I always instinctively knew is true - these horrible experiments are absolutely futile, and even harmful. In fact, your book has really brought home to me all the hideous ramifications of the practice of vivisection. - Rosalind Fell, Belgium

 

Dear Hans Ruesch, congratulations on your latest book on animal experimentation, Naked Empress. Although I have read your previous book on this subject, as well as a few other books (e.g. Animal Liberation, Medical Nemesis, The Medicine Men, Pills Profits and Politics), it was this book of yours, Naked Empress, which changed me from being a “controlist,” to being an abolitionist.

 

Before coming to Israel, while I was a veterinary student in South Africa, I managed to challenge Prof Chris Barnard on television, but I didn’t stand much chance against him and the other four professors who all spoke in favor of vivisection, while I was the only scientist speaking against.

 

In Israel, I am employed full time by the SPCA. Recently a small group of people decided to start an AV movement in Israel, called Animal Liberation. Ours is still a fairly small group, and we have very little in the way of funds. On behalf of Animal Liberation, I would like to ask you as to what our next major step should be. I am not keen to push for laws to control animal experimentation, judging by the results from those countries where legislation does exist to control experiments. - Dr Andre Menache, Israel

 

Reply: Let us hope that the distribution of this Bulletin will help persuade many like minded people in Israel to get in touch with your new organisation, to which I wish all the luck they’ll certainly need! -  H.R.

Links for this Bulletin Nr 1

 

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