CIVIS Foundation Report 3, Autumn 1988 (Part One)

 

 

For reasons explained in our first Report (always available), Italy is at present the only country of the Western world where articles by medical doctors who demand the abolition of vivisection on scientific grounds find acceptance in the general press. Below, two articles in the Venice daily, Gazzettino, of Oct. 8, 1987.

 

 

A WRONG METHODOLOGY WITH. ERRONEOUS RESULTS

 

The Error Is The Analogy Of Man And Animal, by Prof. Dr. Pietro Croce

 

At the outset of every scientific research there is an idea: at the end there is the result. The mediator between idea and result is the method. The scientist is the one who conceives the idea and, to verify its validity, chooses an existing method, or else he invents a new one. The method is the most important element in every scientific research. If the method is erroneous, the result will be erroneous. Animal experimentation, or vivisection; is an erroneous method. It is erroneous starting from its premises, and in all its applications. It is a methodological error.

 

In what does the error consist, and in what way does it influence the results?

 

To answer the first question, the error is the prejudice that the animal is similar to man, that it has the same qualities and the same reactions, - human qualities and human reactions, so that it can be used as an experimental model for man.

 

The answer to the second question is that a science which has adopted a wrong methodology is bound to achieve wrong results. At this point someone might object, pointing out that in some cases animal experiments have provided results that can be duplicated in human beings. This is true, but all such cases are due to pure coincidences, which at any rate can be verified only a posteriori, after the fact. The roulette player knows only after the ball settled that he has bet on the right number. We have concrete proofs that also the vivisectors themselves are becoming aware of these truths.

 

Vivisection holds two great dangers for human health and medical science, and for humanity in the widest sense of the word; first, an indirect danger, because of the inhuman, mechanistic, pitiless aspect modern medicine has taken on, so that it is no longer able to recognize, cure and respect the person; a medicine that knows the organs, but not the organism; and secondly a direct danger, because the vivisector has been encouraged to violate the ultimate bond - to trespass from animal vivisection to human vivisection, from the embryon to the fetus, and from there to the full-grown individual

 

 

INDUSTRIAL ALIBIS AND USELESS TESTS

 

Other Methods Are More Reliable, by Dr. Gianni Tamino, Depar.tment of Biology, Padua University

 

The media and a certain scientistic culture try to impose the notion that vivisection, though not very pleasant, contributes to saving human lives. But the truth is different, in fact quite the opposite.

 

Take, for example, the toxicity tests for chemical substances like the phytological drugs (pesticides) so widely used in agriculture. As the law requires, these very dangerous products are classified today according to acute toxicity established with the so-called LD-50 test, meaning the dosage of a substance that kills 50% of the test animals. This represents not only a useless sacrifice of animals, but simply an alibi that enables the drug manufacturers to swamp the market with products which, thanks to this method, are classified as harmless or almost, although they are in reality extremely dangerous in the long run, because their toxic effect acts by accumulation, even if used in very small doses. So many of those phyto-drugs, classified as pertaining to the fourth category, permitted to be sold freely and used without any warnings, have turned out to be cancerogenic or mutagenic, meaning they can produce cancers or mutations, or have a teratogenic effect, impeding the development of the fetus.

 

Such toxicity tests are made mostly on mice and rats, which, of course, do not react like man. But there is another problem.

 

Tests on animals are not only ambiguous but also very costly and slow - at least a year and up to 100,000 animals are necessary to obtain any results for a single product. So it is practically impossible to use these tests for the approximate 20,000 new chemical substances that are concocted every year, in addition to the 20 million chemical substances already known, but of which the cancerogenic potential is for the most part unknown. Also in this case the animal tests are not only useless or ambiguous, but they constitute an alibi for the manufacturers: it enables them to sell products whose cancerogenicity will only be discovered after human consumption.

 

And yet other methods do exist, which are cheaper, quicker (a few days are enough to obtain answers) and are equally or more reliable than the tests on mice and rats. They are the in-vitro tests on cell cultures or bacteria. Their validity has been proven many years ago.

 

However, it is not permitted to interfere with the interests of the industrial complexes, which for profit reasons want to impose on the world always new dangerous substances.

Gianni Tamino

 

The author Tamino thus confirms again what we have been saying all along: animal tests are not made to protect the consumers but, on the contrary, to protect the manufacturers and mislead the consumers. Dr. James Gallagher, Director of Medical Research of the Lederle Laboratories, said already in 1964 in JAMA: "Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. "

 

 

 

THE SCANDAL OF BRITAIN'S "ANIMAL WELFARE" ORGANISATIONS WIDENS

 

How moneys from the eternally gullible British "animal lovers" are regularly recycled to the vivisection industry through various "Alternative" enterprises, all linked to the vivisection and chemical industries.

 

One is FRAME (Fund For The Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments) in which ex-vivisector Michael Balls is particularly active, while most other principals strive for anonymity. Another is the Dr. Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, run by ex-vivisector Gill Langley, whose husband, ex-vivisector Christopher Langley, is a CIBA-GEIGY employee, and is being sued in court by irate veganists ever since he escalated to the Presidency of the British Vegan Society in order to carry the Gospel of Chemical Miracles and Vivisection even among the Veganites.

 

To extort money from the "animal lovers" for "alternative" research, it is first of all necessary to convince them that vivisection saves human lives and therefore can't be renounced until "alternatives" are found.

 

That the very opposite is true, and that vivisection costs human lives, has been shown a hundred times, by a large, growing number of medical doctors. A luminary of medical science, Prof. Dr. Pietro Croce, the author of VIVISECTION OR SCIENCE - A CHOICE, lists more than 400 scientific methods of medical research, none of which involve animals, and he says that there doesn't exist one single animal experiment that is scientifically justified, whereas incalculable damage has been wrought to humanity by the false method of vivisection; and Prof. Croce is just one of the more than 1000 doctors' opinions we have gathered against animal experimentation.

 

Things being so, how come has the overwhelming majority of the British public - presumably 99.9999% of it, including its numerous "animal lovers" - never been told that? At first gulp, the answer might sound incredible, but the facts speak clearly. There is a good chance that you, readers of these lines, have never heard of it, unless you've read our CIVIS literature before. For not only are the British (as well as the Swiss and other) media entirely dominated by the petrochemical interests (as demonstrated in Naked Empress and Hidden Crimes, the video) but so are the big, rich "animal welfare" and "antivivisection" (AV) societies, whose massive infiltration began right after the Second World War, when the chemical industries had just discovered the huge financial profits obtainable through a fraudulent, government-supported medical organisation as it exists in most industrialised countries today and is being constantly expanded worldwide through the international welfare organisations, as described in Naked Empress.

 

INFILTRATION IN GREAT BRITAIN

 

By 1960, not only the Scottish societies but also NAVS and BUAV were totally infiltrated. BUAV was not only Britain's oldest and largest society; it was the internationally most respected and influential AV organisation, thanks to the great Dr. WaIter Hadwen of Gloucester, who had died in 1932. He was the first medical authority who alerted the public to the uselessness and dangerousness of vaccination and had cured his hometown in the shortest time of a nation-wide epidemic with hygienic and preventive measures that strictly excluded vaccination.

 

Of course, this jeopardized severely the profits of the medical syndicate and drug industry, and he was exposed to the same vicious attacks as today's enlightened and progressive doctors.

 

When in 1960 Beatrice Kidd, Dr. Hadwen's long-time associate, passed away, aged about 90, the last of BUAV's old guard died with her, leaving the field clear for the likes of Betty Earp and Sydney Hicks and John Pitt and other phoney "animal welfarists" subservient to the chemical industry, who lost no time breaking up BUAV's shining image.

 

Their first moves were to replace all medical argumentation with philosophical high-wire acts, and to abolish BUAV's journal, The Abolitionist, the world's most authoritative, therefore most "dangerous" AV publication, scientifically and financially supported by what honest and courageous MDs were left in GB about a quarter century after Dr. Hadwen's death. And by the time the adventurers and business barons in charge of the new BUAV decided to cash in on the diversionary and profitable "alternative fraud" trend and to found an "alternative" enterprise of their own, they added insult to injury by usurping Dr. Hadwen's prestigious name and calling it The Dr. Hadwen Trust for Humane Research. It was founded on April 27, 1970, as a Registered Charity No. 261096.

 

To show the extent of the deception: Dr. Hadwen was a fierce opponent not only of vivisection but of vaccination as well, and he obtained his sensational successes in times of epidemics by adopting strict hygienic measures instead. In praxis Gill Langley hides and contradicts all of Hadwen's theories and activities, but exploits his prestigious name hoping to lure funds into her unsavory begging enterprise.

 

THE NEW REGIME

 

Among the Hadwen Trust's five Original Trustees listed in the official deed, one name stands out: John Pitt, Journalist.

 

He is the man who as the editor of BUAV's Animal Welfare (which had replaced Lord Hadwen's The Abolitionist) launched repeated all-out attacks on Slaughter of the Innocent, when the book first appeared in Great Britain in the Spring of 1979; attacks whose vicious, phoney allegations (described in the Preface to Slaughter) so infuriated the BUAV members, who had recognized the book as the best weapon so far in the fight for abolition, that in the course of the following months and several stormy assemblies the greatest upheaval took place at BUAV that any old, established AV society had ever experienced:

 

1) Pen-pusher John Pitt was dragged away, kicking and screaming, from his editorial desk;

 

2) President Betty Earp, who considered herself unmovable, was toppled from her prestigious post (she died shortly afterwards, heartbroken);

 

3) Gill Langley, the bungling Technical Advisor whose incompetence had provided Pitt with the wet ammunition that had caused his editorial debacle, was asked to collect her pencils and lollipops, and even the Hadwen Trust she was directing, and to start looking for some other office, which she eventually found at Animal Aid in 1981;

 

4) Animal Welfare, the BUAV journal, its prestige destroyed, begged for oblivion by changing its format and title, and is now called The Liberator;

 

5) D. A. Paterson, BUAV's General Secretary, also was forced to resign as a late consequence of the Slaughter scandal, sometime along 1981.

 

Only people who still believe in Santa Claus expect that after the above-mentioned big Spring cleaning, provoked by a massive members' uprising as a consequence of Pitt's invidious attack on Slaughter, the society was set for a total rebirth along the old Hadwen principles - medical competence, logically boiling down to a demand for immediate abolition on scientific grounds, over and above all the obvious ethical considerations.

 

Unfortunately, most honest AVs lack the time and money to dedicate themselves sufficiently to a society's bureaucratic matters. But not so the covert emissaries of the Chemical Syndicates; they are paid for that.

 

By the end of 1981, the forces of evil were in command again at BUAV, and the majority of honest, sincere AV Council members - by definition meek and remissive - had been squeezed out by intimidation or had resigned in discouragement or disgust over the constant, carefully organized inside bickerings.

 

In the musical chairs ballet of British societies, whose puppets are directed by invisible but unbreakable nylon strings, AA Founder Jean Pink has long ago forfeited her seat, AA's first chairman Bill Bingham has moved on to NAVS, his successor John Bryant is currently still chairman at AA - but hardly for long, after his recent bunglings - and the same can be predicted for Gill Langley, as ever more background information about her questionable, covert operations as General Secretary of the Hadwen Trust come to light.

 

In fact, from the records available to CIVIS, Judith Hampson, Britain's official animal welfarist responsible for co-drafting and advocating the infamous Vivisector's Charter of 1986 on behest of the Chemical industry, has received from the Hadwen Trust (Gill Langley), during the period of its preparation, various bonuses in cash. Details shall be published by CIVIS.

 

 

FLASH!  SCOOP!  SENSATION!

 

Dr. Robert Sharpe, another member of the cohort of former vivisectors who run the British anti-vivisectionist establishment - (he practised vivisection at Postgraduate Medical School, London, from 1976 until 1979) has just discovered the Mediterranean! Or at least this is as Mark Gold of Animal Aid makes it sound in reviewing in Outrage a book which this latest "Scientific Advisor" to the tottering old BUAV had just published under the title The Cruel Deception.

 

Now guess what is the "cruel deception" our starry-eyed Bobbie Sharpe has discovered? Hold on to your fans and canes, ladies and gentlemen! Dr. Sharpe has just discovered "the uselessness of animal experimentation!" No less!

 

Due to the persistent concealment efforts of Animal Aid's Dr. Gill Langley and all the other "Technical Advisors" to the animal welfare societies, this revelation must have come as a shattering surprise to most British AV's, who until that day had been instructed that animal experimentation is too useful to be renounced - but meanwhile please contribute generously to Gill Langley's Hadwen Trust, and other begging enterprises, to encourage this and other vivisectors to "find Alternatives" (to experiments that are unnecessary and counterproductive in the first place.)

 

Not content with his first revelation, BUAV's scientist took another bold step into virgin territory by proclaiming in his Cruel Deception: "Prevention is better than cure!"

 

Of course, old BUAV also got into the act of advertising Dr. Sharpe's "discovery", launching a national campaign for "Health With Humanity", that challenged for the first time animal experimentation in medical research. The BUAV press release, dated June 8th, states without blushing:

 

"For the first time (sic) Britain's largest anti-vivisection society uncovers, not only the cruelty inflicted on animals, but also the failure of animal testing to improve human health:"

 

A Spoilsport

Oxford's Greenline promptly cold-showered the triumphant announcement with the following comment:

 

This failure (of animal testing to improve human health) was uncovered, and the issue argued, over a decade ago by Hans Ruesch in his Slaughter of the Innocent - a book which, ironically enough, was attacked at the time by BUAV itself, and with some ferocity. Ruesch had always been critical of the ineptitude and lethargy of the established antivivisection societies. "This campaign," adds BUAV, "will certainly send shock waves through the medical research establishment. "  Greenline adds: "This is surely claiming too much for this particular campaign, though the shock waves that Ruesch sent out over ten years ago have indeed not lost their force."

 

And in fact it was during the years when the most recent vivisectionist deception was being organised in Parliament by Britain's Chemical Syndicate (which we had seen in action in Strasbourg in 1982) in collusion with its hirelings in the Home Office that the British AV societies should have acted to prevent it. They should have approached sympathetic MPs, opened their eyes, and taken advertisements in the press and on TV, (which those societies can well afford!) to show to one and all the deleterious results of a medical science based on animal experiments, as demonstrated in Slaughter and Empress, which CIVIS was putting freely at their disposal. But what they are loudly beginning to do only now, in 1988, when it is too late, and therefore useless - and they know it! - they determinedly avoided doing at the proper time.

 

In December of 1982, Dr. Robert Sharpe had been appointed by Judith Hampson, (who had just announced to the European Council in Strasbourg that we can never do without painful experiments,) to explain to the European Parliamentarians that some alternative methods of research are supposed to exist. Dr. Sharpe's deliberately effete address on the subject is remembered in our CIVIS Bulletin Nr. 1.

 

 

 

To Part Two