As in ancient times the harbinger of bad news was nailed by an ear to a gatepost given a rusty knife and an hour to leave town, so the modern bearer of unpleasant tidings is hated, feared and demeaned. But popularity is not his motive. This truth is. We speak of our Patron, leader of the present-day abolitionist movement Hans Ruesch.

It was accidentally disclosed in an Italian newspaper by a naive reporter that Peter Singer's lecture tour of Italy was being sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation (the owner of 200-odd pharmaceutical enterprises, and one of the long arms of the international Drug Trust, as revealed in Naked Empress and Hans Ruesch's CIVIS Foundation Report Nr. 13). Hans Ruesch wrote to the editor of the newspaper pointing out the irony of this acclaimed animal lover's pilgrimage being financed by the pharmaceutical outfits. The editor turned it into a full-blown article titled "Peter Singer is a Big Phoney". Singer takes Ruesch to court.

The trial, set for 9 July 1992 had to be remanded until 9 November because Singer, though in Italy at the time, failed to show up. Meanwhile your editor forecast in the early stages of the drama that in suing our Patron, Prof. Singer would merely be putting himself under the spotlight, something he could ill-afford to do. She is proved correct as Hans Ruesch's Foundation Report Nr. 13 reveals such overwhelming international support for Ruesch that if Singer is to sue everyone who claims his actions have been illogical, he is to be a busy man.

NZ Anti-Vivisection Society Patron Hans Ruesch

As master's degrees are not dished out at kindergarten, knowledge of the intrigues and intricacies being played out in the international conspiracy of vivisection is not acquired by the beginner without honest and diligent effort. Study of the facts is essential. These have been published in back issues of Mobilise! and in Hans Ruesch's publications. Members who are not prepared to read the evidence thus put at their fingertips are in no position to question the Society, no matter how gently, for the seriousness of its message. Throughout the years we have steadfastly refused to trivialise the issue to suit those too lackadaisical to read and heed the truth. Though we need members, with respect, we fear that those who must be spoonfed with constant reassurings about what could be "misunderstandings", those who write with boring regularity saying we should all work in harmony, loving each other even the vivisectors, and those who request more "laid back" articles in Mobilise!, like poems, prayers and kiddies' pages, have joined the wrong Society.

In Mobilise! 34, we inform newcomers for the first time and reassure others for the umpteenth, about events which for the past 14 years have been droned over repeatedly in a relentless and sometimes tiresome struggle to bring the truth to those with wits enough to join the Society in the first place. The word tiresome describes our reactions to some members' reluctance to accept the facts, which unpalatable as they are, could place those voicing them in the category of perverse trouble-makers or oddities. Nonetheless NZAVS members of long-standing should be aware that this Country, though small, vitally strategic, has been in the past decade the location of a behind-the-scenes struggle and manoeuvre between pro and anti vivisection factions, the one notoriously and cleverly indistinguishable from the other. Neither will they need to be reminded, since they are in the enviable position of receiving, through Mobilise!, facts that never appear in the journals of a single animal rights/ animal welfare society, that despite their claims of being "radical" not one of said societies supported NZAVS Petition to abolish vivisection 1989, by circulating information about the Petition, sending Petition forms to members with their mail-outs, or by sending supporting Submissions to Parliament, which could have been carried out with minimum effort, and should have been as a routine courtesy. And they will also know that the RSPCA, speaking on behalf of "53 local societies which are either Branches of the RSPCA or Member Societies" actually sent a Submission to Parliament opposing the petition.

In this Mobilise! we briefly examine how, in this advanced day and age, with our plethora of technology, if not of intelligence, the grotesque and unbelievably inefficient and hit-and-miss institution of vivisection continues, spreads and flourishes, unabated.

On 16 July 1992, a World in Action documentary initiated by the BUAV titled "The Monkey Trade" , brought into viewers' living rooms those pathetic victims of the monkey trade unfortunate enough to survive the ordeal of capture, imprisonment, stress, starvation, thirst, separation from their families, over-crowding and suffocation in the holds of aircraft, to be delivered up to painful and lingering death by torture in the laboratories of the pharmaceutical companies, the potions of which we are constantly being urged by smooth and silky-voiced operators are as gentle to our stomachs as they are to our pockets. The cameras went behind the scenes with the trappers in Mauritius where thousands of monkeys are caught by enticing them into nets. They did not visit the east where the wide-spread practice is to shoot the mothers and tear their babies, many unweaned, from their dead and dying bodies. The viewer is then witness to gruelling scenes of the monkeys going insane in the cages of Shamrock Farms' animal clearing house discreetly tucked away in the countryside of Southern England. And there we must leave those doomed victims of the most vicious and profitable industry on Earth, and turn to the most respected and influential and wealthy representatives of the "animal welfare" brigade who have the sacred trust and grave responsibility, both to the animals and their financial donors, of shrieking to the world with all their might that... Vivisection is scientific fraud.

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