CIVIS Bulletin Nr 2, New Year 1988 (Part One)

 

 

The Infiltration in Animal Welfare

 

 

CIVIS PRINCIPLES

 

1) All animal experimentation must be rejected both on ethical and medical grounds.

 

2) Animal experiments destroy respect for life and harden the experimenter against the suffering of human patients.

 

3) Experiments on animals are not a proper way to diagnose, research or heal human ailments. The organic, anatomical, biological, metabolic, genetic, and psychic differences between man and animals are so substantial that knowledge obtained from animals is not only worthless but misleading.

 

4) Animal experiments are carried out only to the advantage of the experimenters themselves, of their commercial backers, and of the laboratory animal breeding industry. They perform an alibi function. There has never been scientific statistical proof that their results are applicable to human beings.

 

5) Most of today's diseases are not organic in origin but have psychological, social, dietary, environmental and malpractice causes. Official medical science therefore has no causal treatment to offer. It can't even cure a common cold, rheumatism, arthritis, cancer,' nor any other of the millenarian ills, which much rather it has multiplied, adding always new diseases (SMON, Herpes, AIDS). By trying only to get rid of the symptoms, it prevents recognition and elimination of the causes.

 

6) With its highest consumption of laboratory animals in the world America should be the healthiest nation, but it is one of the sickest and ranks only 17th in life expectancy, behind several underdeveloped countries where such experimentation is unknown.

 

7) Health care requires first of all prevention, furthermore the application of one or several disciplines that have been ignored by official medicine because of its obsession with animal experimentation, for exam pie dietetics, psychosomatics, psychotherapy, clinical observation, environmentalism, epidemiology, vegetarianism, rehabilitation, homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, naprapathy, macrobiotics, diathermy, oligotherapy, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, heliotherapy, aromatherapy, faith healing, herbalism, acupuncture, fasting, and more, which have proven effective, and economical to boot.

 

8) Medicine must concern itself with the entire person, adopt methods that relate to the causes and the patients, instead of a veterinary medicine applied to humans, which at best replaces acute symptoms with chronic illness, but often creates new ills.

 

9) The veterinary schools must follow the same humane principles: no artificial, violent interventions on healthy animals to inflict maladies and mutilations and to desensitize the students, but careful study and sympathetic treatment of spontaneous diseases and natural accidents.

 

10) For all these reasons, to demand the total abolition (prohibition by law) of all animal experimentation is not only possible, but necessary.

 

CIVIS

 

CIVIS, meaning "citizen" in Latin, is the acronym for Centro Informazione Vivisezionista Internazionale Scientifica (Center for Scientific Information on Vivisection), founded by Swiss author Hans Ruesch in Rome in 1974. It is also the name of a publishing house dedicated exclusively to the fight against vivisection.

 

The USA subsidiary of CIVIS is CIVITAS Publications, Box 26, Swain, New York 14884. It was founded in 1983 expressly to reprint Slaughter of the Innocent after the book had been suddenly withdrawn from the market both in the USA and in Britain, and to publish other information on the counter-productiveness of vivisection for medical research.

 

This information comes mainly from international medical doctors whom the official, exclusively profit-oriented medical powers have been unable to squelch.

 

Abbreviations used in this publication

 

AA: Animal Aid, Tonbridge, Kent

ATRA: Association Tessinoise Romande Anti-vivisectionniste

AV:  Anti-vivisection, Anti-vivisectionist

BUAV: British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection

CS: Civis-Schweiz, Zurich

EC: European Community

IAAPEA: International Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals

NAVS: National Anti-vivisection Society

RDS: Research Defence Society, London, the British vivisection lobby

RSPCA: Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

SPA: Society for the Protection of Animals

SSPV: Scottish Society for the Prevention of Vivisection, Edinburgh

STS: Schweizer Tierschutz, official Swiss animal welfare organisation

WSPA: World Society for the Protection of Animals, London

 

 

FIRST POLITICAL BREAKTHROUGH ANYWHERE

 

A breakthrough of historic significance took place on November 16, 1984 in Italy, where Swiss author Hans Ruesch had started his Information Center on Vivisection, CIVIS, ten years earlier, with the publication of his first Technical Report, culminating with the original Italian version of Slaughter of the Innocent, (lmperatrice Nuda), which appeared in the publishing empire of Rizzoli in January 1976.

 

After raising the vivisection issue several times in the European Parliament in Strasbourg and in the Italian Parliament, Congressman Filippo Fiandrotti, repeatedly referring for his information to Imperatrice Nuda, introduced on November 16, 1984 a surprise motion in the Italian Parliament soliciting the government to call for a moratorium on all animal experiments for a duration of three years. The motion was accepted with a clear majority after a heated debate, not in an "empty chamber" but with almost 600 MPs present that day. The event made the front page in Italy's leading daily, Corriere della Sera, on November 17. The news item had the following wording:

 

 

PARLIAMENT VOTES AGAINST VIVISECTION

 

By a two-stage vote (first by a show of hands and then by electronic counting) the Chamber of Deputies voted in favor of a motion against vivisection. With a majority of 60 votes the Chamber accepted a motion tabled by Socialist Filippo Fiandrotti requesting the government to prohibit all animal experimentation during the triennial 1985-1987 and to assign the funds allocated for this purpose to other research projects.

 

Even if this assent is merely a political one (there is in fact no obligation on the part of the Government to fulfill it), the decision is nevertheless of great importance because it was reached by open vote. This means that many MPs of the majority party voted for abolition as a matter of conscience, although the government had opposed the motion.

 

NB: The vote-count had to be repeated because after the first count bedlam had broken out from industry-beholden MPs, who disputed the correctness of the count. They had also imposed the "non-secret" ballot in the hope that the members of the majority party would not dare defy the government's request to reject the motion. The electronic counting then confirmed the first result.

 

Fisticuffs on the floor were only narrowly averted by the intervention of the ushers before the second count. Before the vote, Congressman Gianni Tamino, cited in the center-fold of our Vivisection is Scientific Fraud booklet, told his colleagues that he was not speaking as a Congressman but as a scientist and medical researcher when recommending the total abolition of vivisection.

 

 

PRELUDE TO THE ITALIAN VOTE: An article in Rome's leading daily, II Messaggero, October 25, 1984:

 

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION: NOW EVERYBODY AGREES

Mere accusations are useless: we need a law, by Ugo Cubeddu

 

The small Chamber of the "Parliamentarian groups" is full. Parliamentarians, a Minister of State, representatives of humane and ecological associations, and spectators are on hand. After the lights have been dimmed, the show begins on the score of tv sets disposed all around. Those images have been provided by Hans Ruesch, author of Slaughter of the Innocent, one of the most devastating books ever to be published on the problem of vivisection. And in fact the subject matter is vivisection. Brutal pictures, merciless close-ups of incredible tortures inflicted upon animals of various species. One often says, "sacrificed on the altar of science", in order to conceal the truth, but what we see here has nothing to do with science, nor would a science be acceptable that justifies such-like experiments, which freeze the heart and are useless to boot.

 

Many, a great many spectators can't watch them. The Minister for Ecology, Biondi, covers his face with both hands. Aniasi, the Chamber's vice president, talks to his neighbor and glances from time to time at the screen. Others watch in stunned disbelief, or determinedly look away. And some walk out. Filippo Fiandrotti, Socialist, who has organized this meeting and is up to now the only congressman who has introduced bills for animal welfare, uses those images as weapons, as dreadful weapons, which consist of exposed brains, electrodes, mutilations, and a research that wants to explore the limits of sufferance.

 

"For many, for too many people - Fiandrotti says - vivisection is an abstract term, and always presented as a necessity, for the benefit of mankind. But that's completely wrong: true science does not need those stupid tortures, because human beings are completely different. Every year we spend 400 billion lire for animal experiments, and our country is being flooded with medicines we don't need, with drugs that cause cancer and terrible malformations. In every laboratory, identical animal experiments are being repeated, and then it is still not possible to establish relevant correlations with human physiology. And yet it goes on endlessly, because the enormous profits of the pharmaceutical multinationals or the senseless tests for new weaponry must somehow be justified."

 

These charges are not new, but it was the first time that they were voiced in a public forum, namely in parliament, where such problems can no longer be discussed on the emotional level but only on the objective basis of legality. Fiandrotti's call to involve the government's responsibility met with widespread consensus, Biondi, Aniasi, Casalinuova, Piro, even the consensus of Craxi and the President of the Republic, and that means that the problem will now be earnestly dealt with, it won't be shrugged off as "a problem or rich nations", as another Parliamentarian once remarked.

 

Two medical doctors, Professor Fedi and Professor Croce, confirmed that it is dishonest to speak of scientific research. Available data show how one could - and should - resort to different methods; which are safer and will eventually reduce costs and social contributions,

 

Now there is hope that the various draft conventions will come out of the drawers and will at least be discussed. It's the only way to make people understand that by saving the animals, it is first of all mankind that will be saved; also morally.

 

CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES, Rome, January 14th, 1985: "Dear Mr Ruesch, I wish to express my gratitude, also in the name of my antivivisectionist colleagues, for putting at our disposal the tremendously effective video that you have assembled and commented. Shown in the Chamber on October 24, 1984 it was doubtlessly just as decisive for our first big parliamentarian victory of November 16th of last year as the scientific arguments previously provided by your works, which demonstrate not only the uselessness, but moreover and especially the dangerous fallaciousness of animal experimentation applied to human medicine, responsible for so many pharmaceutical disasters." Cordially, (signed) Filippo Fiandrotti (Translated from the Italian)

 

 

ABOLITION OR REGULATIONS?

 

In Europe, all the anti-vivisection societies and the animal welfare societies, even the most thoroughly infiltrated ones, have no choice but to advocate the total abolition of vivisection if they want to retain their members, even if by some societies the word abolition is tempered by a preceding "eventual".

 

Their American counterparts are still discussing the opportunity of proposing "regulations and controls" rather than abolition, which most of their leaders call "unrealistic", implying it would be impossible to obtain. This testifies to the huge gap existing between European and American antivivisectionism. On this subject America is well over a century - about five generations behind Europe.

 

It seems strange that the chieftains of the various American organizations that advocate those "regulations" simply ignore the European lesson, which taught that regulations have never been able even just to reduce vivisection, neither in scope nor in cruelty; they have only succeeded in legalizing it, establishing the vivisectors' right to vivisect and providing their public image with the halo of legality, and even of scientific usefulness.

 

As the sustainers of vivisection know that they will never be able to silence their critics, they have discovered that the best tactics is to shunt off their efforts into discussing various problems except one: the uselessness and counter-productivity of vivisection. And while discussions keep the A Vs busy, vivisection continues to expand, worldwide. Even apart from the immense realm of ethics and philosophy, there is plenty to discuss:

 

1) The definition of pain. and how to establish its degree.

2) The capability of animals to feel pain in the first place.

3) Which experiments should be allowed, and which ones should be prohibited.

4) Which alternatives are valid?

5) Who is entitled to decide what. And so on and so forth.

 

Let us optimistically assume that after another century or so of passionate discussions and public debates, the American A Vs win, and legislation will be introduced in their country, promising to avoid the infliction of pain, on the blueprint of England's notorious Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, which was hailed as the answer to every A V's prayer. Where would that leave America? Exactly where Great Britain was well over a century ago. And then it might take another 100 years for the American A Vs to discover what it took the British A Vs just as long to discover, namely that regulations cannot stop vivisection, not even diminish it.

 

When those "strict controls and regulations" went into effect in Britain 110 years ago, the number of vivisections taking place in the UK were estimated at somewhat over 300 a year. A 100 years later, under the "strict control" of the Home Office (British Government), the experiments in the UK - not counting all the unlicensed ones and the many unregistered ones performed by the Armed Forces at Porton Down - had risen to a ghoulish 5.5 million, 85% of which without any anesthesia. And the claim that many of these "without anesthesia" experiments entail nothing worse than "a pinprick" is misleading. Most "pinpricks" inflict some mortal malady.

 

 

"ETHICS" IN THE SERVICE OF VIVISECTION

 

Shunting the vivisection issue off to ethical and other abstract, philosophical grounds exclusively has become the favorite ploy of the vivisection theoreticians, who use it to pre-empt any discussion about the only ground they logically fear and abhor - the scientific ground, which inevitably demonstrates the inanity of their claims and unmasks their self-serving motives.

 

Let us recall the instructions the vivisectionists have imposed on the heads of the animal welfare societies whose real goal it is to preserve the vivisection practice in spite of all its demonstrable aberrations: "You may, and should, excoriate animal experimenters in every way, to convince your members of your sincerity and dedication. Attack them on moral, ethical, intellectual grounds. But never, never on medical grounds. This is the only absolute taboo".

 

Ethical debates can never be lost - nor won. Scientific debates can, with demonstrable facts.

 

The infiltrators' tactics of using solely ethical arguments against vivisection (leaving the mass of damning scientific proofs against it unmentioned) are very clever because all ethical arguments are perfectly valid (albeit not very original), and are shared not only by all anti-vivisectionists but by all other decent people as well, and furthermore confer an aura of righteousness to its upholders. Even many vivisectors claim to be in accord with the ethical objections. The catch is in the bottom line: "Do you think it's ethical to let a child die just so as to spare a dog? It's either a dog or a baby!"

 

Links for this Bulletin Nr 2

 

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