CIVIS Foundation Report 7, Autumn 1989 (Part 1)

 

 

WHY DOES HANS RUESCH'S CIVIS ADVOCATE THE TOTAL ABOLITION OF VIVISECTION

 

instead of merely "restrictions" or "controls' as many "animal rights" groups gingerly suggest? The book "Slaughter of the Innocent" answered this question some fifteen years ago. More and final answers will be found in the recent articles and public speeches by Italy's eminent scientist and one-time animal experimenter, Prof. Pietro Croce. CIVIS has now summarized Prof. Croce's argumentations as a public service and presents them herewith to the growing number of its Anglophone followers in English translation.

 

 

THAT'S WHY I AM AGAINST VIVISECTION

 

By Prof Pietro Croce, M.D., author of Vivisection or Science - a Choice

 

Is science working for mankind, or against mankind? This question, which wouldn't even have come to my mind ten years ago, has now become necessary and urgent. Science has degraded into Scientism, a religion with its own dogmas, prejudices, and privileges. The equation "science equals progress" has been imposed on us, based on the presupposition that progress follows only one direction - the one that benefits mankind. Thus the scientists can be foisted off as benefactors of mankind even when they present us with the atomic bomb, the systematic subversion of Nature, and a medicine that produces more maladies than it cures, because it is rooted in a methodological error.

 

VIVISECTION: A METHODOLOGICAL ERROR

 

Today's medical-biological experimentation rests on the prejudice that "the animal is an experimental model for man."  But the term "animal" is an abstraction. There isn't such a thing as "the animal."  There are numerous, widely differentiated species of animals. So which one of the 300,000 animal species on our planet should serve as an experimental model for man? This question has never received a logical answer. Every scientific research is born from an idea and, to obtain a result, it must use a method. A wrong method renders impossible a correct evaluation of the result. Animal experimentation represents an error in the choice of the method. Therefore it can only give unreliable results. The vivisectionists retort: "But Science has always proceeded by trial and error." True enough, but only provided that the error be not systematic, and fostered by a Medicine that has become an industry whose main purpose it is to promote itself along consumistic principles, creating new maladies in order to cure them, then curing the new maladies produced by the new cures used to cure the new maladies, and so on ad infinitum.

 

THE COMPASS CARD

 

The vivisectionists say: "We don't expect final answers from animal experiments, but just hints, indications, which encourage us to continue in a particular direction." But what's an indication? An approximate information, merely orientative. And as the compass card shows, an orientation can point in the right direction, of which there is only one, or to one of the many wrong directions, And an animal experiment only very rarely points to the right direction, and when it does, it is due to coincidence, and at any rate verifiable only after the fact.  Experimenting on animals to do medical research is like playing roulette.

 

TOXIC FOR WHOM?

 

Not so long ago, when a new drug proved toxic for one or two animal species, it was at once ruled out for human consumption. How many useful drugs have thus been discarded? Penicillin, for one, has been salvaged due to a lucky coincidence: only because no guinea-pigs were available at the moment was penicillin tested on mice, for which it is not toxic. But it is highly toxic for guinea-pigs. Botulin, mortal for humans, is harmless for cats. One mushroom amanita phalloides can wipe out a whole human family, but is health food for the rabbit. And we could go on forever. No substance is toxic in itself, but only according to the species.

 

How do certain species get promoted to "laboratory animals"? The experimenters first chose animals that were cheap, needed little room, and were proliferous. But they were systematically disappointed by the results. And so, in their foolish chase of the chimera that doesn't exist, namely of an animal that can substitute for man, after an escalation of failures they tried it with monkeys "because they look so much like us". What's the result of this conclusion, so incredibly clumsy, biologically speaking? That the "consumption" of those very expensive animals is such that it threatens the survival of whole species.  And the laboratories who can't afford the luxury of using monkeys? They continue using mice, because they are small, dogs, because they are cheap (especially when they come from pounds), and rabbits, because they don't bite.

 

A MEDICINE OF INCOHERENCE

 

What's the consequence of all this? A medical science that doesn't know what she is doing. A medical science that for many decades told the diabetics to avoid spaghetti and then suddenly warns from the danger of depriving diabetics of carbohydrates. A medicine that for years decries the use of butter, as an insidious assassin of our arteries, and one day discovers that there is no link at all between butterfat and arteriosclerosis. We could again continue in this vein forever: authoritative claims followed by authoritative denials, official promises never kept, drugs ballyhooed as miraculous one year and spurned as calamitous the next, solemn announcements of impending "breakthroughs", which eventually will only break out in new maladies, of which AIDS is but the list of a long series, and all of them calling for more "funding" to solve new unsolvable problems. In short, a medical science that rewards the bunglers and creates disease.

 

PHILOSOPHER'S WORD

 

Some of our students ask us: "But why do they continue vivisection, if it's a wrong way?" John Stuart Mill answered this question two centuries ago: "It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible." But this is not the only explanation for the survival of such an aberrant practice. The other mighty reason is the money that can be made from human suffering and animal torture.

 

PTOLEMAIC CULTURE: A METHODOLOGICAL ERROR

 

On June 22, 1633, the Congregation of the Holy Office condemned Galileo Galilei to nine years' silence and itself to undying ridicule. The Ptolemaic culture had built a system that for 2000 years seemed perfect - a sphere inside which all the inlays of a mosaic combined to form a coherent image. However, the entire sphere was wrong, because it rested on a methodological error, namely the assumption that the earth stands still and the sun and stars revolve around it. And yet the Ptolemaic system was intrinsically coherent, and even useful: its cosmography showed the seafarers how to find their way, in spite of its fundamental error.

 

Vivisectionism also thrives on a fundamental error, which does not disrupt its intrinsic coherence. And exactly this is the reason why it has to be discarded in its entirety, as happened to its illustrious predecessor. Vivisection cannot be adjusted, reformed, corrected: it has to be canceled from the face of the earth. Clean slate. Like all things of humanity, Medical Science also is subject to the universal laws of time and aging; gradually, it weakens, deteriorates, then begins to rot. At this point, eager to continue living, Medical Science shuts itself up, grows intolerant, ever more dogmatic, derides ethics and turns mean. This portends unequivably that the moment has come for passing from partial confutation to total confutation. The time is ripe for a "great passage" in medicine. Said Prof. Maurice Delort in his inaugural speech of the Academy of Bourges in France, as long ago as December 16, 1962, as cited in Slaughter of the Innocent: "Today's medicine is at the end of its road. It can no longer be transformed, modified, readjusted. That's been tried too often. Today's medicine must die in order to be reborn. We must prepare its complete renovation."

 

THE TOP

 

The animal rightists oppose vivisection because they don't want to see the animals suffer or because they refuse the idea of man's priority and his reckless exploitation of Nature. But we, whose formation is scientific and medical, disregard naturalistic ethics and go straight to the human problem. We think that vivisection represents a double threat to humanity:

 

Indirectly, because it gives us a medical science that is mostly erroneous;

 

Directly, because from cruel experiments on lower animals there has been a gradual escalation towards more evolved species, leading to cruel experiments on humans. Thus vivisectionism has disqualified itself, implicitly admitting that the only experimental model for man is man himself. In the USA, experiments are being conducted on a vast scale on inmates of penal institutions. In Italy, on so-called volunteers, who actually are just irresponsible mercenaries, duped by skilful, professional persuaders.

 

Furthermore, atrocious experiments are regularly performed on children (especially physically and psychically handicapped ones) and on mature fetuses. Fetuses extracted from the maternal womb when they are six months old are sold alive to research laboratories. Or else, being considered "abortions", and therefore without any legal status, they are being raised to full maturity, to be used as experimental objects in the laboratories. This is the logical result of vivisectionism. It has thus reached the top. But it has gone too far. It is now our task to accelerate its inevitable downfall.

 

THE DEGENERATION OF SCIENCE

 

If I had had any doubts or reservations left about my belated resolve to dedicate all my efforts to the abolition of vivisection, those last doubts would have been swept away by a recent news item: Guatemalan children, healthy but poor, have been smuggled to the United States as organ banks for sick but rich patients in want of transplants. This wouldn't be feasible without the connivance of important medical centers, prominent scientists and top level surgeons. Which poisoned soil has produced such fetid stalks? The soil has a name, and it's called Scientism - which is the corruption of Science, the degenerate offspring of an exasperated illuminism that has presumed to substitute the humanitarian Christian ideals with the blind adoration of Science; no longer a Science based on reason and knowledge, but on mindless faith. In fact Scientism was spawned by that cultural movement, called illuminism, that spread through Europe in the 18th Century and was characterized in the beginning by the faith in Progress guided by the lights of reason. While we owe to illuminism an extraordinary impulse of the naturalistic disciplines, when it reaches summits of ideological fanaticism to the point of worshiping reason as an absolute value, as an end in itself obscuring other, essential components of the human spirit then illuminism no longer justifies but denies itself. In its logical development, Scientism has reached and overstepped the summit, which means that from now on it has no other way to go but down. Like every other blind faith, Scientism also assumes some childish aspects: "They spread chemicals which poison my food, so they'll also give me chemicals which will restore my liver." And when Scientism produces catastrophes that threaten not only human existence but the entire planet, then they say: "They have been able to cause the damage, they will surely also be able to repair it."

 

WHAT TO DO AND NOT TO DO

 

First of all, we must be the first not to underestimate our anti-vivisectionist movement. We must not reduce it to the simple technical question: 'To experiment or not to experiment?' We must realize that anti-vivisectionism is the most audacious vanguard of a new culture, because it opposes a pseudo-culture, which easily gains public favor by foisting itself upon the world as a fighting force for human health. We must unmask this fraud, showing that vivisection, far from safeguarding anything, jeopardizes human health. We must learn to consider skeptically the boasts of official Science. We have all been conditioned from early age on to revere Science like a deity and scientists like demigods. We must free ourselves of this servitude. This does not mean we should despise, but we should examine our adversaries and their official claims with a critical mind. When confronted with a Nobel Laureate, let's recall to mind Johannes Fibiger, the German "scientist" who received the Nobel Prize in 1926 on his assertion that he had discovered the spiroptera carcinomatis, i.e. the bacillus of cancer!

 

We must not be afraid to measure ourselves with the vivisectionists. We will discover that they are not only very ordinary, but usually mediocre, unsure and ignorant people. At best, they are completely one-sided individuals, who may know everything about a leaf but haven't noticed that it hangs from a tree. We must propagate our ideas by digging deeply into the people's consciences, showing especially to the young people that vivisectionism is part of that negative culture which promotes the poisoning of the water and the atmosphere, the destruction of the forests, the contamination of the oceans. We must clearly show them the equation: fight against nature equals fight against humankind. What we mustn't do is to accept the dialogue with the vivisectionists. They are discovering that our movement is no longer what it used to be - a tiresome lamentation of pathetic bleeding hearts - and so, after deriding and humiliating us for years they now try to come to terms with us, to meet us halfway, saying "let's talk about it". But this is a trap. They want to compromise because they fear that otherwise they risk to lose all. And this is exactly what we must demand: that they lose everything. And we can obtain it, because all the signs are in our favor.

 

BEWARE THE INFILTRATORS

 

Careful: there are infiltrators in our movement, some who head big leagues, and there are leagues that have been founded by our adversaries, in order to undermine our movement from inside. What we must absolutely avoid is to confront them, to conduct philosophical, ideological discussions with them, because this is exactly their strategy: to keep us occupied with talks and arguments, to deviate us from our very clear, straight path. If we ignore them, their existence becomes useless. We must especially avoid all discussions about "alternatives to vivisection." There isn't such a thing. An apple can be an alternative to a pear, but not to a bicycle. It is our duty to liberate the world of a wrong, cruel, counterproductive method of pseudo-research. It is not our task to teach industry or medicine how to find new avenues of gain. This remains their task. We must never concede that "at least in the past" vivisection has brought some useful results. It hasn't. Vivisection is not an obsolete method, but has only been, at all times, a "methodological error", which has sidetracked science and caused fearsome damages, both material and spiritual ones. We must not be surprised if among the millions of animal experiments done, the one or the other has "subsequently" been confirmed by an experiment on man. Some experiments are bound to have the same results on man and animal. But which ones? This we can never tell beforehand.

 

CONTINUOUS CONFUTATION

 

According to Karl Popper, the Austrian philosopher, "It is not scientific what appears certain, but, on the contrary, what appears debatable." This means that continuous confutation is the condition which makes of Science a dynamic cultural matter, preventing it from degrading into Scientism. Science should be accompanied by continuous confutation. However, such assiduous and capillary criticism doesn't suffice at all times of the scientific development. Eventually a moment is bound to come when the entire system has to be reappraised and confuted as a whole, like the Ptolemaic sphere. This happens when the system, having given all it had to give, begins to age and decay. There are, in the history of science, as of all human activities, moments of Great Transitions. Galilei is the emblem of one such transition. In fact it would be a mistake to consider the Galileian culture a mere adjustment of the preceding era, limited to the dynamic relation between sun and earth. By the same token it would be a mistake to consider antivivisectionism, which is just one facet of a new culture in the making, as a simple attempt at "repairing" or "reforming" the current methodology in biomedical research. We can call the vivisectionists the "New Ptolemaians", because, like their unenlightened predecessors, they defend an anthropocentric view of life, as obsolete as the geocentric conception that dominated over the world before that 18th of February 1564, which saw the birth in Pisa of the son of the musician Vincenzo Galilei.

 

 

To Part 2