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Media response to Daffodil Day continued
There were many other news and talk-back programmes of the same vein which unfortunately not recorded. It is interesting playing back these tapes and recognising familiar voices. Phil joins your editor in thanking everyone who supported him in his stand against bigotry, ignorance and brainwashing. As concluded on this Daffodil Day 1993 it is doubtful indeed whether society as a whole deserves the bitter struggle being carried out on its behalf by the abolitionist movement.
Sausage sizzle stirs anti-vivisectionists
Members of the NZ Anti-Vivisection Society protested when Cancer Society supporters sizzled sausages in Courtenay Place (above) and Cuba Mall during the annual Daffodil Day appeal on Friday 27 August.
NZAVS executive member Phil Clayton says experiments with rats and mice don't help to cure cancer in humans, because artificially induced conditions in animals are not the same as spontaneously occurring diseases in people. Instead he says the best way to reduce cancer is to prevent it through better lifestyle and diet - specifically, a vegetarian diet with less than 15% fat. He says:
"It's illogical for the Cancer Society to be raising funds through sausage sizzles,"
Clayton, a 21-year-old student in his fourth year of an honours degree in statistics and operations research at Victoria University, says he joined the movement when a friend handed him a pamphlet:
"I found that what they said was true. I started noting things in the paper, and gradually got more and more involved,"
But the Cancer Society says animal experiments are "essential" both to identify the causes of cancer and to treat it. The society says less than 20% of the money it spends on research goes on experiments with rats and mice, and all research makes up only 30% of its budget. The other 70% goes on looking after cancer patients and education programmes.
Spokesperson Jeff Brown says cancer research does not involve vivisection in the literal sense of cutting up animals. Rats and mice are used "in a limited way" under the control of ethics committees in each region.
Brown says the anti-vivisectionists appear to have had little or no effect on the money raised in Friday's appeal.
(Wellington City Voice, page 3, 2 September 1993.)
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