The scene now returns to New Zealand, where, once the SAFE Petition for anaesthetics and alternatives was submitted and the dirty-work accomplished, Carhart, who had emphasised how hard we must all work, without a ripple departs the spotlight and disappears from our story as though she had never been.

Like a rogue tornado, her successor, boiling with enthusiasm from her social intercourse in Copenhagen at the Congress of the International Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals, Adrienne Carlsson now takes centre stage. Appointed to SAFE Committee in 1983, with an intensity so ferocious and unnatural it could only spring from ignorance and naivety, or careful calculation, in double-quick time she was earning her pips for such devoted service to the vivisectors to the extent this modest mention in despatches is entirely inadequate.

Nineteen eightyfour was a momentous year for NZAVS. With a watertight case and meticulously-planned brief, it petitioned Parliament for Abolition of the LD50 Test. With the passion of an angel, Carlsson, pickaxe on the upswing poised for the first blow rushed to Wellington, where she advised NZAVS members and the public at large that:

"The Petition does not apply as the LD50 does not take place in New Zealand."

Though she did not sign the Petition, and had no connection with it, such trivialities were no deterrent to Carlsson, who with characteristic disregard of the basic courtesies pushed unannounced and without so much as acknowledging the writer who was "principal petitioner", into the Select Committee Hearing Chamber as a self-appointed observer and critic, whilst many legitimate and hard-working NZAVS members, including a sympathetic member of the press were turned away for lack of space.

Beginning by chipping at the cornices Carlsson was soon swinging her pickaxe in earnest at the very foundation stones of NZAVS in a demolition exercise that was to last for half a dozen years. In a scathing attack on the LD50 Petition in Safeguard editorial of Spring 1986 she wrote:

"It would be nice to be able to insist on the abolition of vivisection and not bother to make contingency plans. It would be very easy to criticise the status quo and not have a replacement the majority of the population can accept."

Carlsson omitted to say that NZAVS had been supported by evidence in the form of submissions from doctors and scientists all over the world, and that the Petition had been referred back to the Government with the extremely high Recommendation for Favourable Consideration.

The following extract is from a bold full-page article in Wellington's Evening Post 11 July 1990 which focused on NZAVS Petition to Abolish Vivisection in New Zealand 1989. SAFE had once again grasped the opportunity of publicly denouncing the Petition and publicising its policy of "compromise". Significantly when NZAVS Petition disappeared from the public eye... so did SAFE publicity... and so did Adrienne Hall (formerly Carlsson)!

"Hall accepts vivisection will not stop overnight despite the Anti-Vivisection Society's demand for its immediate abolition. SAFE's opposition to the practice is no less fierce than NZAVS', but Hall acknowledges a 'phase-out' is likely to be longer-term and follow a campaign to educate the public. This stance allows SAFE members to nominate members to the ethics committees which oversee the use of animals in science in this country... Hall says 'We (SAFE) want vivisection outlawed immediately too, but we don't want to cut off our noses to spite our faces... There has to be compromise if we are to get anywhere. If we did not have input into ethics committees we would not know what they have been doing in the last couple of years. We feel we have been able to offer constructive criticism and achieve tighter controls.'"

The reader is asked to compare SAFE's aim of "achieving tighter controls" with that of Prof. Croce, who said in his address to the International Congress of Doctors Against Vivisection at the Italian Parliament on 8 November 1989:

"To regulate/control vivisection by law means giving the vivisection method a legal and moral dignity, granting it the same status as morally and scientifically legal activities, and conferring on the vivisectors a security protected by the law. In other words, a limited law is worse than no law at all!"