The Educational Challenges

Eight speakers.

• Animal rights in schools;
• Ethical principles in education;
• Experiments with live animals an essential component of the developmental experiences of future teachers and scientists;
• The training of animal welfare professionals - animal-based scientists and veterinarians;
• Courses available for animal technicians, nurses and support staff;
• The need to enforce the 3Rs.

Then follows two hours advocating the vivisectors' principles of the 3Rs (replacement, refinement and reduction) and presenting reports on the World Congress on Alternatives and Animal use in the Life Sciences, held at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Health, Baltimore, USA (attended by ANZCCART representatives including Neil Wells, former RNZSPCA, former President of Auckland SPCA).

The penultimate speech is titled 'Protecting the NZ Environment - Vertebrate Pest Control. It is, however, the concluding address: 'Public Education: Use of the Media' which has our observer falling off his chair in disbelief as Jim Tully, Head of Journalism, University of Canterbury announces:

"Scientists often don't know how to give journalists the information they need, but animal rightists and anti-vivisectionists know how to manipulate the media."

Obviously Mr Tully is ignorant of the fact that anti-vivisectionists are manipulated, censored, misquoted, abused, distorted, twisted and deceived by a media, which beholden to the vivisection brigade for their advertising revenue can be relied upon (with only the rare exception) to be openly antagonistic and hostile.

Added Extras

One member of ANZCCART describes Bette Overell to a reporter as a "rabid enthusiast" warning that the book Animal Research Takes Lives - Humans and Animals Both Suffer presented a few scientific facts and then extrapolated from there. The same person then says the idea of ANZCCART looming over and wanting to destroy NZAVS (as pictured on the cover of Mobilise! 38) is a "wild absurdity"...

Comments which were successful only in confirming that though no scientific challenge to vivisection was allowed to creep into or sully this meeting... those present were more than mindful of the existence of NZAVS.

Our British counterparts in the new organisation British Anti-Vivisection Association in Bristol will be interested to learn the names of the following who, in order to strengthen the international ties of the vivisectors, found the time and money to travel to the opposite ends of the Earth to attend the ANZCCART meeting.

• Dr Neville Gregory - University of Bristol
• Dr M. Appleby - University of Edinburgh
• Mr Harry Thompson - UFAW UK

Literature promoted at the Conference was from UFAW, the international Academy of Animal Welfare scientists, and a NZ MAF-sponsored leaflet titled Animal Welfare Information Centre - a division of the National Agriculture Library, US which distributes information from 12 international bodies which promote vivisection.

We take this opportunity of thanking our 'unofficial observer' (featured in photograph), to this first conference of ANZCCART, the organisation which could be fittingly described as:
The Australia and NZ Council for the CONTINUANCE of Animals in Research and Teaching.

For thirty minutes over the Christchurch radio on the day following the ANZCCART Conference, aided by an enthusiastic and willing interviewer, rat vivisector Robin Fraser espoused the cause of ANZCCART and his own dubious experiments. The evidence our members brought to their challenge in the following talk-back session, and the note of professionalism with which they presented it, soon shattered Fraser's complacency. This confidence they say, was brought about from the use of data at hand in NZAVS Animal Research Takes Lives - Humans and Animals Both Suffer.