Bette Overell
Photograph: Simon Cottle

"The abolition of vivisection is not about animal rights - but about human rights:

1. The right to a health service based on prevention and clinical research, which is hailed by top scientists and health specialists around the world as the only solution to public heath. The right not to be at the mercy of a phoney and fraudulent health service based on damaging and inflicting sickness onto animals for the sake of an alibi.



2. The right against our financial ruin through payment of taxes supporting a fraudulent health service (the NZ Government spends 578 million dollars of the taxpayers' money every year to subsidise pharmaceuticals alone.)



3. The right to freedom from animal, vivisection-based farming and its resultant health and environmental damage. Forty thousand children starve to death every day in the third world as the food they grow is exported to feed the animals in the affluent nations. Sixty million people will starve to death this year because of the health and environmental damage of vivisection-based farming.



4. The right to have our Petition, of over one hundred thousand signatures to go to the vote of the people.



5. The right for human beings to be freed from psychological torture of grieving for the three hundred million animals that are dissected, mutilated, poisoned, frozen, burned, scalded, drowned, electric-shocked, irradiated, enslaved and otherwise tortured to death every year in vivisection laboratories, in the most shameful and disgraceful fraud of all time.

In the past five years the NZ Anti-Vivisection Society has placed two Petitions before Parliament. Both were well-researched and soundly supported by evidence from prestigious doctors and scientists from many fields of medicine. When the politicians will not look at the evidence, will not listen to the evidence, will not debate the evidence and will not act on the evidence - then other steps must obviously be taken..."

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