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/ Mobilise! / Issue 34 (November 1992) / Page 6 Email page link | Print this page

(From previous page)

Other Submissions to AFAS, none of which reject vivisection but conversely support it, are in similar vein... as the following extracts show:

"Of this vast number of experiments only a few contribute to important medical research."
- Peter Singer, Vice-President of ANZFAS
"There are a lot of alternatives to the uses of animals today. I am not naive enough to think that there are alternatives to every procedure being done in the laboratory. However I do not think there should be."
- Mr D.J. Barnes, Director of the Washington D.C. National Anti-Vivisection Society U.S. Invited Adviser (by AFAS) to the Senate Select Committee of Enquiry.
"Very often the validity of much of the research can be questioned."
- Richard Ryder, Chairman of the RSPCA's Animal Experimentation Advisory Committee. Chairman of the British Liberal Party's Animal Welfare Group. Invited by AFAS to give evidence to the Australian Committee of Inquiry into Animal Welfare.
"Some experimentation, however may be justified."
- Mr Ralph Blunden... on behalf of the Australian Federation of Animal Societies (later to become ANZFAS) in a paper entitled "Philosophical Aspects of the Animal Cause".

"The submissions from the Federation (AFAS) that I have seen are impressive and could set the standards for animal movements around the world."

"I want to abolish the use of animals as much as anybody else, but I say, let's do today what we can do today and then do more tomorrow down the line."

"The concept of the three Rs - reduction, replacement, refinement - is also applicable."
- Henry Spira, Coordinator of the Animal Rights International Coalitions , addressing the Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare, speaking to politicians, advisory committees, bureaucrats and the media.
"Suggests the following tests for all his categories... that the benefit to humans (or to humans and animals) clearly outweighs the pain and suffering experienced by the experimental animals."
- Bernard E. Rollin, Prof. of Philosophy and Bio-physics in the College of Veterinary Medicine of Colorado State University. In his book Animal Rights and Human Morality (1981) submitted as evidence by AFAS to the Senate Select Committee of Inquiry into Animal Welfare in Australia 1984.
ANZFAS Representatives Selection Board

"Your CV says you've served your time in vivisection laboratories, belong to the club, are ambitious, and capable of great deviousness - You're just the sort of person we're looking for!"

Still jostling for an NZAVS affiliation with AFAS the Federation wrote to the Society in June 1985 thus:

"An enlightened report by the Committee would not only result in widespread legislative reform in Australia but also act as a pressure-point for animal welfare reform overseas, particularly in New Zealand, North America and Europe. Due to the endeavours of AFAS there is much interest by animal societies overseas in the Inquiry (the Senate Select Committee's Inquiry into Animal Experimentation). In particular United States' animal societies have made their own considered written submissions to the Committee having sighted AFAS submission."

NZAVS comments that if those submissions were along the lines of that of AFAS there would be no need for the vivisectors to oppose them the animal societies so efficiently stated the case on the vivisectors' behalf!

In response to an article titled "Regulation or Abolition" in Mobilise! No. 12 of September 1985 in which we described the Great Australian Breakthrough as the Great Australian Sell-out, Peter Singer wrote to NZAVS stating that the AFAS Recommendations were "interim measures pending eventual abolition". Remarkably unperturbed that AFAS policy was not merely sealing forever the continuance of vivisection in Australia, but also attempting to consolidate by regulation, vivisection worldwide, the New Zealand societies rushed with enthusiasm into the alliance of 55 animal groups and over 50,000 subscription-paying members, and ANZFAS (the Australian and New Zealand Federation of Animal Societies) was born. Its policies were gladly, immediately and with relish espoused by the New Zealand Government, which, quick to capitalise from this solid-gold endorsement of vivisection, approved by dozens of animal welfare societies under the guidance of a prestigious affiliation of which Peter Singer was Vice President, in double-quick time was using AFAS policy in defence of vivisection against NZAVS Petition to abolish vivisection 1989!

In retrospect, reflecting on the catastrophe of ANZFAS and the irreparable damage the alliance did for the case for abolition, it is fair to say that the leaders of the organisations which led their unsuspecting members and supporters into the ANZFAS club should have been on the payroll of the Australian and New Zealand Governments such a good job did they do on the governments' behalf. Those organisations were: Save Animals From Experiments, Beauty With Compassion, the Humane Society, the SPCA (Auckland), the Anti-Cruelty Society (since defunct).

The writer emphasises that NZAVS is concerned solely with the AFAS policy on animal experiments. The Federation's policy on other issues having no relevance in this record.

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