by Hans Ruesch

A dog is crucified in order to study the duration of the agony of Christ. A pregnant bitch is disemboweled to observe the maternal instinct in the throes of pain. Experimenters in an American university cause convulsions in dogs and cats to study their brain waves during the seizures, which gradually become more frequent and more severe until the animals are in a state of continual seizure that leads to death in three to five hours. The experimenters then supply several charts of the brain waves in question, but with no idea how they could be put to practical use.

Another team of "scientists" puts 15,000 animals through fatal scaldings, then administers to half of them a liver extract that is already known not to be useful in case of shock: As expected, the treated animals agonize longer than the others.

Beagles, well-known for their mild and affectionate natures, are tortured until they start attacking each other. The "scientists" responsible for this announce that they were "conducting a study of juvenile delinquency."

Exceptions? I wish they were.

Every day of the year, at the hands of white-robed individuals bent on getting recognition or a degree, or at least a lucrative job, millions of animals are slowly blinded by acids, poisoned, disemboweled, submitted to repeated shocks, frozen to be revived and refrozen, starved or left to die of thirst, in many cases after various glands have been entirely or partially extirpated or the spinal cord has been cut.

The victims' reactions are then meticulously recorded, except during the long weekends, when the animals are left unattended to meditate about their sufferings, which may last weeks, months, years, before death puts an end to their ordeal - death being the only effective anesthesia most of the victims get to know.

But often they are not left in peace even then: Brought back to life - miracle of modern science - they are subjected to ever-new series of tortures. Pain-crazed dogs have been seen devouring their own paws; convulsions have thrown cats against the walls of their cages until the creatures collapsed; monkeys have clawed and gnawed at their own bodies.

But don't stop reading just yet - because the purpose of this is to show you how you can, and why you should, put a stop to all that.

Though the majority of practicing physicians defend vivisection, most of them don't know what they are defending, having never set foot in a vivisection laboratory. Conversely, the great majority of vivisectors have never spent five minutes at a person's bedside, for the good reason that most of them decide to dedicate themselves to laboratory animals when they fail that most important medical examination, the one that would allow them to practice medicine on people. And many more take up "research" because that requires no formal studying. Any dunce can cut up live animals and report what he sees.

The cancer bogey has become the vivisectionists' most powerful weapon. Dr Howard M. Temin, a well-known scientists, said that many scientists are interested in money, power, publicity and prestige, and that "some promise quick cures for human diseases, provided they are given more power and more money." He added that there is a tremendous advantage in the assertion that "if I am given 500 million dollars for the next five years, I can cure cancer," pointing out that if a rainmaker puts the time far enough in the future, no one can prove him wrong.

But so far as cancer is concerned, it is obvious to anybody that an experimental cancer, one caused by grafting cancerous cells onto an animal, is entirely different from cancer that develops on its own in a human being. A spontaneous cancer has an intimate relationship to the organism that developed it, and probably to the mind of that organism as well, whereas cancerous cells implanted into another organism have no "natural' relationship whatsoever to that organism.

Of course, very large financial means will continue to be poured forth to keep the lid tightly on. And those people will continue to wail that their opponents would rather see a baby die than a frog.

But even the Pharoahs knew that to find out whether their food was poisoned, they had to try it on the cook, not on the cat. Since animals react differently from humans, every new product or method tried out on animals must be tried out again on humans, through careful clinical tests, before it can be considered safe. This rule knows no exceptions. Therefore tests on animals are not only dangerous because they may lead to wrong conclusions, but they also retard clinical investigation, which is the only valid kind.

A little mongrel dog, whose hind-quarters were paralyzed as a result of an operation, had been removed from the operating table and left on the floor. He started dragging himself painfully toward a retriever that had been blinded a few days earlier for another experiment and was being kept under observation. Its eyes had begun to putrefy. The blind dog managed to pick itself up, and wag its tail. Only one person in that laboratory seemed to notice the scene, which prompted that person to write: "That pathetic gesture of mutual sympathy put the human race to shame."

"Animal experiments should be forbidden everywhere."

- Dr Julius Hackethal, one of the best-known German surgeons and author of medical books, in an interview with Die Zeit, October 13, 1978.

It is nonsense to say that animals do not suffer because they have a lower order of intelligence. Pain is conveyed by the nerves to the brain, but there are other nerves than those of intelligence, such as sight, smell, touch and hearing. In some animals these nerves are much more highly developed than in ours.

In fact, there is reason to believe that animals are able to suffer more than we, and not only physically. Thanks to our power of speech and communication, we have many compensations - apart from our attendants' efforts to make us comfortable - that the animals don't have. A laboratory animal can't understand why, while shaken by fever or in the throes of hepatic or biliar colics, it is locked up in that wire cage or bound so tightly to an operating table that the ligatures cut into its flesh. Or why those big surrounding monsters in white squeeze its belly and force-feed it again and again, pushing into its already seared gullet even more of those powders and liquids that are destroying its liver and twisting its guts, that cause it again and again to vomit and defecate, whereafter it is submitted to the cold showers that get the cage clean. Or why its scrotum is submitted to still another electric shock, which causes its guts to twist, or its brain, causing one more convulsion.

Most people who every year "demonstrate their support" by contributing to what is deceptively presented to them as "medical research" have no idea that their money goes either into animal tortures or directly into the vivisectors' pockets, and that they are financing deadly quackery to the detriment of true science.

Vivisectors have revealed a side of the human soul that few lovers of animals believe to exist. So we must cry out what the mutilated animals cannot voice for themselves. In this way, it is to be hoped that the day will come when the world will look upon today's vivisection in the name of science the way we look today upon witch-hunts in the name of religion.

(Continued next page)