"Mr Chairman. It is now fashionable for vivisectors to abandon the sinking ship. Many of them are denouncing their past errors and joining the new abolitionist movement. Some in advisory capacity to anti-vivisection societies. One example is Dr Paul Carrao, former head injury researcher with the US Navy, analysing the head injury experiments on baboons conducted in the laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s. (These experiments were brought to the notice of the public by means of a secret video tape made by the Animal Liberation Front. It shocked, not only people in the United States of America, but people everywhere.) The US Health boss was relieved of her position and sent on posting to Ireland. The laboratory was closed.

This reformed vivisector now says:

'I challenge anybody to show that any of the injuries we inflicted on those animals advanced the cause of the treatment of human head injury one iota. The bulk of the knowledge that now exists and upon which the treatment of human head injuries is predicated is that which has been derived from human head injuries in the past, whether in the civilian sector or the military. In many ways the results which were obtained with animals were misleading, because in the case of quadrupeds the physiological mechanisms are different, so that the kinds of data obtained from different systems - circulatory, the blood-pressure and so forth, respiratory, the cardiac - are different from those obtained from human head injuries.'

Mr Chairman I could read many such reports from our dossier of former vivisectors.

In a few years on, today's vivisectors will be considered at the same level as those who used to burn witches at the stake. But the prime place in the rogue's gallery is reserved for those who profit from vivisection without getting blood on their hands. Those who will not look at the evidence, those who will not listen to the evidence, those will not act on the evidence. And one day, those who resort to activism against vivisection (like the suffragettes of the last century) will take their rightful place in history among the world's leading reformers.

Mr Chairman,

That vivisection is a fraud is an immovable fact. That vivisection will go is an inescapable and immovable fact. Public and political opinions are movable. It is time for New Zealand to move, and quickly, to abolish vivisection, lest another country, more enlightened, takes the great honour of being the first country on Earth to outlaw vivisection, totally, unconditionally, immediately.

Mr Chairman I have a copy of another letter, this time written by the previous Minister of Health, to Mrs Dight in Australia, dated 7 February 1990.

In this letter the Minister says: 'I am not aware of reports indicating that increasing numbers of medical doctors are opposed to experiments on animals.'

In case the grave inadequacies voiced in this quite astounding confession are shared by members of this Committee, with your permission I will outline and demonstrate the combined policy of at least seven leagues of distinguished abolitionist doctors and veterinarians, leaders in their respective fields of speciality.

These doctors are not members of animals rights groups, they do not campaign for animal welfare, neither do they seek the reduction of the suffering of helpless animals.

Totalling thousands of doctors from 28 countries, these forerunners of the great new movement of doctors for the abolition of vivisection call themselves scientific anti-vivisectionists.

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