CIVIS Foundation Report 6, Summer 1989

 

 

SELF STYLED ANIMAL RIGHTISTS THE MAIN OBSTACLE TO ABOLITION? BUT IF THEY DON'T WANT ABOLITION WHAT DO THEY WANT?

 

George Cave, Cleveland Amory, Andrew Linzey, Martin Stevens

 

GEORGE CAVE

 

In our ClVIS Foundation Report Nr 2, we published a long list of self-styled animal rights advocates who express exclusively MORAL disapproval of vivisection, but indirectly, i.e. surreptitiously, always present vivisection as beneficial for mankind, at the same time giving lip service to "eventual" abolition. Classic example: "We are against vivisection on moral grounds, but not on scientific grounds." (George Cave of Trans-Species.) The speaker thus presents himself as a noble soul and real animal lover, so that well-meaning but ignorant followers will believe him when he affirms that "vivisection can't be abolished just yet."

 

CLEVELAND AMORY

 

Founder and president of the Fund for Animals, Cleveland Amory is perhaps the most widely known animal rightist in America. An unsigned article in Parade of last October confirms the CIVIS perception that soon, apart from the senior editors of lAMA, there will only be the heads of the animal rights organizations who still cling to the notion that vivisection can't be abolished, and for that reason steadfastly ignore the voices of the great many international doctors who say that animal experimentation can, and even MUST, be abolished.

 

Parade, a widely read, popular magazine, quotes Amory as saying, "We are opposed to medical research on animals, but we have to be pragmatic. There are some absolutely essential areas of medicine, like cancer and transplants, that so far apparently have had to use animals." Small wonder that his Fund for Animals has never advertised the contrary opinions of 1000 doctors, who surely know more about medicine and research than Amory does.

 

Have the many duped members of Fund for Animals never heard of Vested Interests? Have they never read Dr Robert Mendelsohn? Professor Pietro Croce? NAKED EMPRESS?

 

MARTIN STEPHENS OF HSUS

 

In the same unsigned article of Parade, the monthly of which Cleveland Amory is a "fellow editor", several other more or less shameless plugs for vivisection appear. The last one runs:

 

"Martin Stephens of The Humane Society of the United States, acknowledges: 'We have to be honest and recognize that there have been some benefits from animal research. But our ultimate goal is the complete replacement of animals'." CIVIS remarks: the first sentence of this fearless humanitarian is designed to keep the faith in animal research alive. (Of course he doesn't name a single example, well knowing we would ridicule him). The second sentence is calculated to keep the legions of HSUS members duped and happy, encouraging them to continue contributing to the society's financial fortunes, as described in our last Report Nr 5.

 

THE REVEREND ANDREW LINZEY

 

The surest way to guarantee the survival of vivisection for all is notoriously to confine the argument to the philosophical plane, since philosophical arguments can never achieve a practical success, nor suffer failure. But any scientific criticism of vivisection, if knowledgeably conducted, demonstrates irrefutably the inanity of the vivisectionist method. So it's not surprising that many religious leaders have been persuaded by the vested powers-that-be to beg their parishioners, and other nice people, to PLEASE confine their AV activities to prayer; they even organize international "prayer-meetings," which get loudly ballyhooed in such "animal rights" journals as Agenda.

 

One of those promoters is the Anglican Rev Dr Andrew Linzey. His religious fervor has recently led him to request, without laughing, a grant from one of the British Alternative Research Funds, hoping to get money "regarding a Research Project on Theology and the Use of Animals." That was too much even for the Brits, and the good Reverend got the boot: no AV money available for prayers as yet! (Alternative money must go strictly to the vivisectors...) Linzey was one of the two British AV personalities who disapproved of SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT when it came out in GB in 1979. (The other one was, of course, John Pitt, the editor of the BUAV journal, who ridiculed the book's abolitionist stance and its description of the Horsley-Clarke torture instrument as a torture instrument. Details available in our Report Nr 4.) Rev Linzey's objection in Resurgence was purely religious: he deplored the author's "lack of charity" - towards the vivisectors! Not a word from this man of God about the vivisectors' lack of charity. On the contrary, he seemed to regard the chastising of vivisectors as an "unchristian" act.

 

His jeremiad against SLAUGHTER so angered Margaret A. Heard, of the Women's Ecology Group, London, that she protested to Resurgence, with a letter which deserves resurrection now that thanks to Bartlett's Agenda the good Reverend's fame as a meritorious animalist is crossing the Atlantic.

 

ANOTHER VIEW OF REV LINZEY

 

Wrote Heard to Resurgence:

"Dear Editor - How boring to see that even Resurgence has fallen into the trap of intellectual compromise in publishing Andrew Linzey's review of SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT. This book, which exposes the evils of the animal vivisection business, has been deliberately suppressed in countries such as the U.SA. and Italy by powerful vested interests. And even in Britain, where it has gained some excellent reviews in national media, it has been attacked by the detracting tactics of some within Animal Welfare who appear to be more anxious to display their own supposedly "rational, balanced" mentalities than they are to support one of the greatest efforts to end this horrific cancer in society. Sorry, Rev. Linzey - I forgot - you probably don't approve of words like "horrific".

 

"The urging of reviewers like Linzey for "more tempered" and "modest" language in opposing scientific torture says a great deal about their own questionable role in Animal Welfare. The intellectuals are proving to be almost more of a nuisance in mounting action to bring true reform in our despicable treatment of animals than the perpetrators of the crimes, whose aims we can at least recognise. Incidentally, the Rev Linzey's snide comment that "If only 5% of the examples quoted here (in SLAUGHTER) are true", I would think verges on the libellous.

 

"If the young Rev Linzey had even a fraction of Hans Ruesch's "gut reaction" perhaps he would have had the stamina to continue working for the Animal Cause rather than quitting the scene after a few years, once his book was published and his name had become comparatively well known...The great Dr Schumacher recognised the danger of the purely intellectual approach when he wrote of the need for a return to the Heart centre. We need more heart and gut reactions of the Hans Ruesch's, not less. Indeed, this well-known author is a writer of considerable scope in his own sphere, and is not likely to be harmed in the long run by the priggish snappings of the Reverend Linzeys and all whose motives within the Animal Movement are suspect. We are going towards total abolition of animal experimentation in spite of the church and its double standards. So low has Andrew Linzey's westernized, intellectualised Anglican church fallen that one of its spokesmen for the teachings of Jesus Christ (!) was quoted recently as saying: "There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a Christian experimenting on animals... the church believes that man is far away from animals... We must not apply to animal life the same criteria as to human life". This, from the Vicar of Babraham, Cambridge, who told his parishioners to carry on with their "work" of transplanting sheeps' sex organs and goats' udders to their necks, sides and backs, and where udders have been made to produce milk, minus the goat, in glass cases. NO COMMENT..."

 

 

WHOSE AGENDA IS ANIMALS' AGENDA? RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY USED AS SMOKESCREENS

 

ANIMALS' AGENDA

 

As a purported "anarchist" magazine, The Match (Box 3488, Tucson, Arizona) is one of the few publications in the USA which will publish news that the New York Times would not consider fit to print. They don't have to fear any loss in advertising because they don't get any advertising.

 

Characteristically, The Match doesn't appear regularly, but whenever editor Woodworth feels like it. One of the recent issues gave an amusing and appropriate appraisal of Animals' Agenda. In an in-depth analysis of current animal rights literature, co-editor Don Holbrook wrote inter alias: "Logic hardly ever prevails. In the Anarchist movement the doctrine that animals have rights has only ever progressed to a tiny minority position, while among the anti-vivisectionists, ethical vegetarians, dog-pound crusaders and the like, it is a given that more and 'better' laws are the very thing needed to restore justice to some monstrous interactions. Several recent animal-rights periodicals prove the truth of the just-described limitation. Hans Ruesch's CIVIS, subtitled 'For the Abolition of Vivisection', is perhaps the most militant, and therefore the least depressingly liberal.  Animals' Agenda, 'The Animals Rights News Magazine', may be the most generally circulated and best produced, but it is infected with the worst virus of belief in religion and authority, which causes it to bow and scrape ignominiously toward church and legislature. "In recent issues, Animals' Agenda has suggested collaboration with Christian churches in an effort to mobilize larger numbers of people. The contradiction of depending for support upon the one philosophy - goddism - that props up the notion of the special distinction between man and animal, escapes the liberals. A recent letter by MATCH editor F. Woodworth to Animals , Agenda, suggesting that religion was an enemy of progress, not a friend, drew only fire from readers in subsequent letter columns, and to appearances the magazine is drifting ever farther toward a pro-religious stance that mimics as closely as possible the priest-ridden theory of the Sanctuary Movement: 'The churches are appropriate places to gather supporters for our cause'. They'd both have us forget that the churches are the prime movers in the train of abuse that finally brings this aspect of the 'cause' into view: religion puts authoritarianism on a pedestal and the alleged 'god' on the highest section of it, but then when authoritarianism gives birth to nationalism of human claims of superiority over other animals, we are asked to trust religion to fight it. Of course it CAN'T fight what is innate in itself, any more than a rattlesnake can fight its own venom.

 

"For a good look at tough-minded opposition to cruelty and victimization, we recommend CIVIS. For an annoying perusal of a magazine that at key points begins talking about 'god', there is ANIMALS' AGENDA".

 

Don Holbrook should know that not all Agenda readers are Bible-thumbing dreamers, and if a letter from MATCH "only drew fire" from Agenda readers this depends on the fact that its editor Kim Bartlett only prints in her letters column those replies that "toe the line" of religion and philosophy. She systematically suppresses all the medical facts that would definitely disqualify vivisection if ever they were allowed to become universally known.

 

For just as the judeo-christian churches, whom she reveres, are not the churches of the poor and the oppressed, but of the rich and powerful, so has Agenda long ago ceased to be the voice of anti-vivisection, and now supports - and is supported by - only those organisations that keep all the most damning scientific facts against vivisection well under wraps. And with its continual, fulsome praise of philosopher Peter Singer, the enthusiastic endorser and partner of Judith Hampson and vice-president of ANZFAS, Agenda and its editor have definitely disqualified themselves as a voice of antivivisection, and contributed to casting a cloud of suspicion upon America's entire "animal rights" movement.

 

Less than a year after SLAUGHTER had first appeared in the US, one Patricia Curtis published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a long article that very subtly presented the "usefulness" of vivisection, as well as the humaneness and sympathy of the vivisectors, as a given fact. The vivisection interests then managed to get that article reprinted by Reader's Digest, which thus misinformed once again its 20 million global readership in favor of vivisection.

 

When we thereupon denounced Curtis as the hidden lobbyist of vivisection that she appeared to us to be on the strength of her article, Agenda reacted by presenting her, in a three page interview, as the purest of animal defenders.

 

Similarly, when we advanced the opinion that a planned prayer meeting of church leaders was hardly the most effective way to combat vivisection, Animals Agenda promptly dedicated a cover story to an international prayer meeting, saying that was the best way to fight vivisection. The Vivisection Syndicate must have rejoiced. That was a few years ago. Now the magazine is at it again. Bigger and better than ever.

 

AGENDA CONTRIBUTOR REV LINZEY

 

In her Agenda's April issue of this year, Kim Bartlett dedicated no less than 18 pages to an interview with the Reverend Or Andrew Linzey, Anglican Chaplain to the University of Essex. This was the very same holy man who had chastised Ruesch's book for its "lack of charity" (towards the vivisectors!) but forgot to chastise the vivisectors for THEIR lack of charity...

 

Not even a picture of smiling Pope John Paul II was missing from Bartlett's lavishly illustrated article, which might have served a better purpose if it had illustrated the catastrophic consequences of a medical research based on a wrong methodology, as denounced by Italy's Prof. Pietro Croce, America's late Dr. Mendelsohn, and a thousand other honest and intelligent doctors and scientists.

 

Missing was a reminder that the good Pope had officially approved vivisection "because of all the good it had done for mankind", although he was no more able to identify this "good" than so many "animal rightists" who presume to pontificate on the subject of late - from George Cave all the way down to Stephen Kaufman and veteran vivisector John McArdle.