Position Statement: University Of Canterbury - First Year Psychology

The January 1988 issue of the American AV journal published the following opinions of mental health professionals and scientists learning that the University of California Berkeley was planning a new Northwest Animal Facility Center for cruel psychological experiments, which would cost the taxpayers another $14 million:

"Unfortunately these experiments will continue in a self-proliferating manner until they are curtailed by brave and innovative decisions on the part of people in positions of authority who have the courage to declare openly that the emperor has no clothes and that it is time to stop wasting money and animal lives on the pretense that manipulating several variables in rats, dogs, cats or monkeys has anything to do with human psychology."
- Murray Cohen, M.D.

"I cannot recall a single instance where my clinical judgement was even remotely influenced by the results of a psychological study using animals as subjects or "models". In view of what I perceive to be the complete irrelevance of the often cruel experiments inflicted upon innocent animals, I wish to go on record in calling for the termination of the use of non-human animals in psychological experimentation."
- Michael Klaper, M.D.

"An increasing number of clinicians realize that psychological animal experimentation is both unscientific and ethically bankrupt. I am among them. What do we really learn by separating infant macaques from their mothers? Does blinding a kitten teach us anything about human behaviour? There is no human payoff from ablating the brains of cats, monkeys, squirrels or mice."
- Wayne Johnson, Ph. D.

The above information has been taken from Hans Ruesch’s 1000 Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, page 35, published by CIVIS in 1989.

NZAVS has adopted the CIVIS Principles. The CIVIS Principles (http://www.nzavs.org.nz/ourPolicy.html) form part of our Position Statement.

The following links may be useful:

A Critical Look At Animal Experimentation, -3. 'Psychology and Substance Abuse' Section (http://www.mrmcmed.org/crit2.html#psychiatry)
'Why Animals are Extremely Poor Models of Human Psychiatric Illness' (http://web.archive.org/web/20030810112331/http://home.mira.net/~antiviv/article4.htm)
Animal Research Takes Lives - Humans and Animals Both Suffer (http://www.health.org.nz/cover.html)
LearningWithoutKilling.info (http://www.learningwithoutkilling.info)