New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society Inc.
PO Box 9387, Addington, Christchurch 8243, New Zealand

Let us examine these three suggestions:

1) First Suggestion: Reduction of Animal Experiments

All those who support this proposal accept, perhaps without being aware of it, the standpoint of the animal welfarists, who reason as follows: let us try to limit the number of animals that have to suffer and die. Thereby they not only accept the path that promotes suffering and death for the animals, but also the claim that we cannot do without vivisection. If these people are convinced that animal experiments are useful to medical science, their suggestion is certainly in keeping with their ideas. But this suggestion is in no way directed against animal experiments, even less so in a scientific sense. It only amounts to a form of animal protection. But a kind of protectionism that is subordinate to supposedly compelling human needs; a protectionism that accepts the principle of Man being the master of all other living beings and having the right to use them as he thinks fit.

2) Second Suggestion: Controlling Through Laws

This too is a proposal of the animal welfarists or protectors. But precisely this suggestion is also advocated by our opponents, the vivisectionists, who see in it the triumphant Trojan horse: disguised as opponents of vivisection, they act as if they were supporting our movement, while their intention is to undermine it from within. To control animal experiments through laws means conferring a legal and moral status on this false method, awarding it a place among the truly scientific, ethically legal forms of procedures. It means giving the vivisectors the absolute right to carry on forever, undisturbed, sheltered and protected by the law. Many of those who advocate the legal control of vivisection stoop to pragmatic consequences such as proposing to ban experiments only for unnecessary products like cosmetics, but retaining them for serious purposes like medicine, surgery and pharmacology. Thus according to them, vivisection is a serious matter, which must be reserved for serious purposes. This is the greatest eulogy ever received by animal experimentation, a deification of vivisection.

3) Third Suggestion: Total Abolition

This is the only logical choice, and the only correct choice on a scientific basis: total abolition of animal experiments, this unscientific method that is responsible for old as well as new damages to human health, and for some real iatrogenic (doctor-induced) disasters. A method which impedes the advance of medicine and prevents using rational and truly scientific methods. At this point many will raise the objection that this is a maximum, ultimate objective, which cannot yet be attained at this moment in our history. They are wrong. In my book Vivisection or Science, which came out in Italy in 1981, I wrote on the first page:

"The country which first abolishes animal experiments will be for the world what Italy was for the Renaissance; and why should it not be Italy once again?’. Well, I can tell you today that this prophecy has - in part at least - already come true; the Province of South Tirol has forbidden animal experimentation throughout its territory. The Provincial law on animal welfare, no. 16 of July 8 1986, states, in paragraph B of Article 7: '… anyone who experiments on living animals, even only for scientific or instructional purposes, is subject to the same punishment'. So you see that the abolition of animal experiments is no Utopia. It has already been carried out in an Italian Province. Is this the beginning of the new Renaissance we are all waiting for?"