As has been related, NZAVS Petition to Abolish the LD50 Test resulted in it being returned from the Select Committee to the Government with the extremely high Recommendation for Favourable Consideration. About this time the RSPCA and SAFE commenced pushing for the setting up of ethics committees to determine which experiments are ethical and which are otherwise. Immediately the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee was up and running the Government advised NZAVS it had:

"Placed the decisions on the LD50 test under the auspices of the NAEAC"!

SAFE accepted the invitation (from the RNZSPCA on behalf of the NAEAC) to place its representative on various ethics committees. NZAVS refused and attacked the ethics committee principle as being, of course, antipodal to the abolitionist Constitution.

If there are readers who even now, in the face of all the evidence, cannot comprehend the enormity of the subterfuges which took place in this era to protect and uphold the interests of the vivisectors by maligning the actions of NZAVS, it is necessary they turn to page 248 of Animal Research Takes Lives - Humans and Animals Both Suffer, which exposes the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee as a brotherhood of vivisectors and reveals the anomaly which facilitates its legitimacy without which it would be inoperable.

The anomaly, the RNZSPCA, plays the most crucial role in the ethics committee system. The NAEAC answerable only to the Minister of Agriculture administers a peer review system wherein the vivisectors make their own decisions and police their own affairs. This extremely desirable arrangement is made possible by the cooperation of the RNZSPCA and representatives of other animal welfare A/V groups, which, when accepting positions on the various ethics committees simultaneously and inescapably accept the vivisection principle as bona fide. One of the members of the original NAEAC is Dr C.H. B. Smith, Representative of the NZ Veterinary Association, and on this lady we now focus.

To do so the scene moves forward nine years to 31 August 1995 and a major article with bold headlines in Wellington's Dominion which shows a picture of Mr Keith Robinson, Chairman of the NAEAC pointing in fury to a t.v. screen which is showing Hidden Crimes. Mr Robinson is "urging schools to watch more 'appropriate videos'" and goes on to recommend a couple more "appropriate" to the vivisectors. (The writer should explain that Hidden Crimes is being screened in schools wherever teachers are less bigoted than of old.) The article says that the NAEAC was alerted to the screening of Hidden Crimes in schools by the Animals in Schools Education Trust Board, an organisation which operates under the aegis of the Veterinary Association... the President of which is NAEAC member, Dr Smith!

Smith's objection to the screening of Hidden Crimes in colleges reads thus:

"Hidden Crimes shows horrific scenes... It is gruesome, outdated, unethical and inaccurate... Produced by a U.S. animal rights group it will play on the minds of vulnerable teenagers... It's as good as inciting the kids to violence... It is very emotive and upsetting... It portrays much that is no longer done to animals...".

If this sounds familiar it is of course because we have heard it all before, from that grand passionara of animal rights Adrienne Hall, Who so vociferously shouted it - just nine years ago - on behalf of SAFE!

The NAEAC, which in its Annual Report 1994 states its "official" objection to Hidden Crimes , is itself a contrivance only made possible through complicity between ostensibly irreconcilable factions. To demonstrate the writer's point Smith states in the Dominion article: "Today any animal research or testing has to abide by a code of conduct and be approved by ethics committees and the RSPCA."