(From previous page)

Their remarkable capacity for surviving tortures inflicted by man make them "suitable" for many repetitive demonstrations and investigations which could never be performed on warm-blooded animals due to the danger from shock, loss of blood and infection. Vivisectors call them "the domestic animal of the physiologist".

German physiologist Johannes Mueller wrote in 1833

"Some experiments cause such severe shock in higher vertebrates that most of the animals die before decisive results can be obtained. The happy thought at length occurred to me of performing the experiments on frogs. These animals are very tenacious of life...

"These unfortunate batrachians" (says Alexander Ecker in Anatomie des Frosches) "have fallen into the hands of a more terrible master than the stork of the fable and their prophetic cry in Aristophanes' choir of frogs 'We will have yet more terrible things to endure'... has been richly fulfilled."

Swammerton
The introduction to one of his works:

"I would on the first setting out, inform the reader that there is a much greater number of miracles and natural secrets in the frog than anyone hath ever before thought of or discovered."

Many species of amphibians and reptiles are being decimated in the wild. They are either sold for pets or killed for their parts. Their remains are either sold wholesale to large developed countries to be worked into salable articles or worked in the country of origin and sold to tourists or exported.

Endangered amphibians often sold as pets include the meter-long Japanese giant salamander, the axoloth salamander from Lake Xochilmilco, Mexico, and the resplendent golden frog from Panama. Reptiles endangered by trade include turtles, crocodiles, lizards and snakes. Turtles are highly prized, not only as pets, but for nearly every part of their bodies. The shell is made into jewelry; the meat and cartilage, bone and fat are consumed; and the skin is made into men's shoes and ladies' slippers and other leather articles. One should be particularly careful of buying turtle products in any of the tropical seas and their ports.

Members of the order Crocodylia: crocodiles, caimans and alligators, are highly sought after for their leather, which is made into shoes, purses, wallets or merely used as wall hangings. Declining populations of the crocodilians are causing a shifting of pressure to other reptile species such as lizards and snakes.

The beautiful illustration of the frog on a leaf by Narca Moore-Craig was reproduced on front cover of Mobilise! by the kind courtesy of the Animal Protection Institute Mainstream magazine. NZAVS also acknowledges the assistance of Sharyn Hayes, Wellington.