Many members will have viewed the Foreign Correspondent programme 12/12/91, which presented a Public Eye documentary so grossly warped and lopsided it could be described as fraudulent. This programme elevated and glorified the cat-blinder Colin Blakemore (as did the NZ Herald 26/9/91 which featured almost an entire page on this "brilliant scientist" and carefully ignored our rebuttals). Palmed off as a serious assessment of the anti-vivisection issue this documentary was manipulated to the extent the vivisectors could - and probably did - make it themselves!

And if the media are good contrivers they are also good censors, for none of NZAVS letters to the Listener, or to the Christchurch and Wellington papers, have at the time of writing this article, seen the light of day.

Extracts from two of those letters are as seen below.

From Mrs V. Sands, Christchurch

This documentary was a transparent, elaborate propaganda exercise wherein the vivisectors, glamourised, glib and authoritative, live in mortal fear of their opposition, dishevelled, rabid and murderous. Most viewers would be aware that animal experimenters are not so much afraid of the ALF as of the abolition of vivisection, which would bring their lucrative careers to an end. They would recognise too, the popular tactic of confounding ALF functions with IRA terrorism in the public's mind, and of portraying the abolitionist as anti-social and dangerous. In reality, abolitionists comprise a high percentage of informed, concerned, citizens, including medical and scientific professionals.

The multinational vivisection industry's out-worn strategy also alleges that activists' dismantling of vivisectionist premises and equipment, and rescue of laboratory animals, destroy chances of discovering cures for human disease. Medical authorities have proved that cures cannot be produced by the unscientific animal research method which is found to have caused a mounting stockpile of disorders from Thalidomide to SMON, new cancers like DES, birth defects and immune deficiency diseases.

An honest, objective documentary featuring life-saving cures achieved without vivisection, interviews with internationally renowned abolitionist doctors and scientists and with a few of the countless human victims of animal-based medicines and vaccines has yet to be funded by the broadcasting fee.

From NZAVS Office

As spokesperson for the defence of vivisection Mike Embley interviewed Sir Roy Calne and Colin Blakemore, both of whom are big-wigs in the ongoing system of inducing artificial diseases into animals in order to study it and apply their findings to the human circumstance. Neglecting to interview any of their professional counterparts in the medical arena who oppose this principle he went to three lay-persons who all opposed vivisection from the ethical angle.

There are active leagues of doctors in several countries, including Great Britain who disagree vociferously with the policy espoused by Calne and Blakemore. Unified under the policy they call scientific anti-vivisectionism they call for a new approach to medical science claiming that the only valid medicine is that which studies spontaneous disease in human beings, which is both ethical and scientific because the disease is not artificially induced.

Professor Calne claimed that mice are essential to his cancer 'research'. In dialogue at correct level his abolitionist counterpart would have informed him that after 25 years of injecting four hundred thousand chemicals into leukemic mice in search of a cancer cure, on 17/9/90 the US National Cancer Institute Advisory Board released the following statement:

"We've been using the wrong system as the screening device. In future we will test potential cancer-fighting drugs on real human cancer cells, grown in laboratories and not on mice."

Interviewer Embley had no hesitancy in pitting the vivisectors against the young people in the march for "animal rights" . Neither had Calne or Blakemore the slightest trouble explaining how these poor innocents, though well-meaning, are wrong in their assumption that the world could continue to survive without the service of vivisection. But both these vivisectors are aware that animal rights is not on the agenda of doctors against vivisection. That abolition is about the right of human beings to a health service based on prevention, which instantly does away with all the legalised animal torture. The right not to be at the mercy of health based on inflicting damage and death on animals. The right against financial ruin through payment of taxes supporting their evil method. And the right to be freed of psychological torture of grieving for the ongoing callous slaughter of the innocents.

There are now many abolitionist doctors in Britain, we should all be asking why the producers of this programme invited none to debate the issue with the vivisectors.