NZAVS recommendations

Scientific anti-vivisectionism is a separate philosophy from animal rights. Vivisection must be abolished on the grounds of scientific and medical fraud. It is dangerous to both humans and animals. The 3Rs and ethics committee systems must be discarded, with The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act being broadened to explicitly state that the penalties apply to anyone who carries out experiments on animals, including those for 'scientific' or 'educational' purposes.

Issues paper

1.2) The Review Group concluded that the Review is predicated on the basis that animals will be used for research. That is, the Issues Paper does not encompass the question of whether or not animals should be used for research.

This is hardly surprising when the list of members of the Review Group is considered (Section 2 of the Issues Paper), there are no anti-vivisection representatives on the Review Group. All groups represented, without exception, have pro-vivisection policies.

Our Society maintains that the abolition of vivisection is in the public interest, with the benefits of abolition far outweighing any costs.

Our Society views the Review as being fundamentally flawed by not addressing the issue of abolition of vivisection.

NZAVS recommends: That the Review addresses on scientific as well as ethical grounds the question of whether or not animals should be used for research.

3.1) The 3Rs

"The policy of the '3Rs' were devised by the British chemical interests and palmed off to the Parliamentarians of the Common Market in Strasbourg and Brussels as a progressive step in animal welfare, instead of a step backward. Its purpose is anaesthetic - designed to fool the Parliamentarians and provide them with an alibi, and to allude the AVs [anti-vivisectionists] that 'something is being done'. Its unavowed purpose is of course to perpetuate vivisection, meanwhile extorting more money from the AVs; money that is regularly funnelled into the vivisectors' kitties, through the various 'funds for alternative research' - as has in fact been the case time and time again, in Italy as well as Germany, in Britain as well as America."
- Hans Ruesch, CIVIS Bullet-in Nr. 2, January 1988, page 29.

NZAVS recommends: That the principles of replacement, reduction and refinement be discarded in favour of the abolition of vivisection.

3.2.1) NZAVS cannot understand why scientific anti-vivisectionism is described under the heading of "Animal rights". The failure of the Issues Paper to separate these two concepts gives further reason for our Society to lack confidence in the Review.

"The new anti-vivisectionists are not animal lovers or at least are not necessarily so. They are for the most part experts who have had the mental clarity to ask fundamental questions: 'For whom are these experiments carried out? What results do they produce?'." [original emphasis]
- Prof. Pietro Croce M.D., Vivisection or Science - A Choice to Make, CIVIS, 1991, page 95.

"If I still believed in the usefulness of animal experiments, I would say: Let's do them. However, I've come to realize that they are not only useless, but moreover highly damaging for medical science, owing to their unreliable results. So if I advocate the abolition of vivisection it is not because I am concerned about animal suffering, but out of my concern for human health."
- Prof. Croce quoted in Bette Overell, Animal Research Takes Lives - Humans and Animals Both Suffer, NZAVS, 1993, page 8.

NZAVS recommends: that scientific anti-vivisectionism be considered a separate philosophy from animal rights.

Why vivisection must be abolished

(Details can be found in NZAVS Submission to NZ Parliament in Support of NZAVS Petition to Abolish Vivisection (1989), a copy of which is attached to and forms a part of this Submission)

Every species of animal is a different biomechanical and biochemical entity. Non-human animals are different not only from humans but also from each other, anatomically, physiologically, immunologically and histologically (down to the basic cellular structure).

Animals react differently to different drugs, vaccines, and chemical substances. Aspirin kills cats and penicillin kills guinea pigs. Yet guinea-pigs can safely eat strychnine - one of the deadliest poisons for humans, but not for monkeys. Consequently many pharmaceutical drugs - drugs that had been found "safe" based on animal tests and approved for human consumption - are withdrawn from the market because of the serious health problems they cause in human beings. Thus animal testing provides inaccurate information leading to market participants not being fully informed and causing market failure due to imperfect information.

Human diseases cannot be recreated in animals - or in human beings - because, once a disease is "recreated", it is artificial and is no longer the original, natural disease that the body itself produced. For example, if someone doesn't have epilepsy, no one can give it to them, and neither can it be given to a non-human animal. The exception to this is infectious disease. However animals do not get human infectious diseases.

The environment - air, land, water and food supplies - is being systematically destroyed by thousands of toxicants that are routinely and conveniently found "safe" - and thus allowed to be marketed based on inherently invalid and misleading animal tests.

Also, if animal tests coincidentally "show" the product to be harmful the producers and marketers defend it on the grounds that results of animal tests are notoriously useless. For instance when tests on rabbits coincidentally showed that 2,4,5-T was harmful to rabbits, Dow defended its continued production thus:

"There is no known means of extrapolating between rabbits and humans."
- Mr J. Plunkett, Agricultural Products Manager for Dow Chemicals (Australia), Dominion, Wellington, 4 September 1987.

"Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons."
- Dr J.D. Gallagher, Director of Medical Research, Lederle Laboratories, Journal of the American Medical Association, 14 March 1964.)

Ethics committees

The ethics committee system has been a failure both in New Zealand and Australia. Its role is to act as a public pacifier. Tame animal welfare groups such as RSPCAs give the system an air of legitimacy. However this legitimacy is false, for example the RNZSPCA shares the same pro-vivisection policy as the British RSPCA. It has been revealed several times that the U.K. RSPCA has had substantial investments in companies in companies which undertake vivisection programmes using hundreds of thousands of animals. The National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee in New Zealand is so closely connected to the vivisection industry that it even held a joint conference with ANZCCART, the vivisectors' cartel.

The presence of animal welfare representatives on Ethics Committee is also a sham designed to act as a public pacifier. Only "suitable" representatives are allowed. Presumably those considered "suitable" by the vivisectors. The experience of Lynette Shanley who was sacked from the Microsearch Ethics Committee as an animal welfare representative because she dared to question some experiments, shows just how much of a farce the Ethics Committee system is.

"I was told that to remain on these committees I have to just pass experiments, not ask too many questions and not ask for too many improvements for the animals."
- Lynette Shanley, in an e-mail message dated 15 February 1998, published in Mobilise!, No. 46, March 1998, page 7.

Self-regulation has been a complete disaster and failure.

Italian law

In Italy, the province of Bolzano has taken steps to abolish vivisection:

"Provincial Law of 8th July 1986 No. 16, Province of Bolzano (approved by the Council - vom Landtag genehmigt - on 21st July 1986)
Heading: Regulations for the protection of animals
The Provincial Council has approved
The President of the Provincial Council has promulgated the following law
Article 1
Decree
The autonomous province of Bolzano has decreed within its own sphere of competence animals of all kinds should be protected…
Article 7

a) …
b) the same penalty applies to anyone who carries out experiments on living animals, even just for scientific or teaching purposes."
- Croce, 1991, page 58

NZAVS recommends: that the ethics committee system be dismantled and vivisection abolished in order to fulfil the NSW Government's commitment to community protection. Vivisection is damaging to human and animal health and the environment. It is in the interest of consumers' health and safety that vivisection be abolished. Animal testing leads to imperfect information, as the problems of extrapolating between species results in inaccurate information therefore market participants are not fully informed. Existing animal welfare legislation should be broadened to specifically apply penalties to those who carry out experiments on animals including for 'scientific' or 'educational' purposes.

Background

The New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society was formed in 1978 by Bette Overell and has members and supporters throughout New Zealand, and also members from outside New Zealand including Australia.

The Society campaigns for the abolition of vivisection (experiments on animals) on the grounds that it is dangerous to human health. It is impossible to predict results in one species by observing another. ie drugs deadly to some species can test harmless on others and vice versa. Similar problems are encountered when studying an introduced disease because it is not the same as one that arises spontaneously. The way forward is through prevention and clinical experimentation.

Our Society has had two Petitions before the New Zealand Parliament both opposing vivisection on scientific grounds. The second petition in 1989 gained 120 000 signatures (then the third most number of signatures for a New Zealand petition. Our Submissions to Parliament on these Petitions went largely unheeded.

Our Society has distributed computer software for use in toxicity testing, brought New Zealand the Hidden Crimes video and the Ruesch books and made the word "vivisection" a household word. Our spectacular marches through the streets of Wellington would have made great TV news footage, but although filmed the TV companies censored them from their bulletins.

Our latest campaign is the distribution of Bette Overell's book Animal Research Takes Lives - Humans and Animals Both Suffer, the first book written in Australasia on the topic. It is written specifically for the New Zealand situation, responding to a pamphlet put out by the multinational vivisection companies, research charities, government and others involved in the fraud of vivisection. It deals with all the issues surrounding vivisection using the work of doctors and scientists throughout the world to rebut the vivisectors' phoney claims.

NZAVS Policy

As our policy on vivisection NZAVS has adopted the following principles written by our Patron, medical historian and author, Hans Ruesch of CIVIS (International Centre for Scientific Information on Vivisection).

CIVIS principles

1) All animal experimentation must be rejected both on ethical and medical grounds.

2) Animal experiments destroy respect for life and harden the experimenter against the suffering of human patients.

3) Experiments on animals are not a proper way to diagnose, research or heal human ailments. The organic, anatomical, biological, metabolic, genetic and psychic differences between humans and animals are so substantial that knowledge obtained from animals is not only worthless but misleading.

4) Animal experiments are carried out only to the advantage of the experimenters themselves, of their commercial backers, and of the laboratory animal breeding industry. They perform an alibi function. There has never been a scientific statistical proof that their results are applicable to human beings.

5) Most of today's diseases are not organic in origin but have psychological, social, dietary, environmental, and malpractice causes. Official medical science therefore has no causal treatment to offer. It can't even cure a common cold, rheumatism, arthritis, cancer, nor any other of the millenarian ills, which much rather it has multiplied, adding always new diseases (SMON, Herpes, AIDS). By trying only to get rid of the symptoms, it prevents recognition and elimination of the causes.

6) With its highest consumption of laboratory animals in the world America 'should' be the healthiest nation, but it is one of the sickest and ranks only 17th in life expectancy, behind several 'underdeveloped' countries where such experimentation is unknown.

7) Health care requires first of all prevention, furthermore the application of one or several disciplines that have been ignored by official medicine because of its obsession with animal experimentation, for example dietetics, psychosomatics, psychotherapy, clinical observation, environmentalism, epidemiology, vegetarianism, rehabilitation, homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, naprapathy, macrobiotics, diathermy, oligotherapy, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, heliotherapy, aromatherapy, faith healing, herbalism, acupuncture, fasting and more, which have proven effective, and economical to boot.

8) Medicine must concern itself with the entire person, adopt methods that relate to the causes and the patients, instead of a veterinary medicine applied to humans, which at best replaces acute symptoms with chronic illness, but often creates new ills.

9) The veterinary schools must follow the same humane principles: no artificial, violent interventions on healthy animals to inflict maladies and mutilations and to desensitise the students, but careful study and sympathetic treatment of spontaneous diseases and natural accidents.

10) For all these reasons, to demand the total abolition of all animal experimentation is not only possible but necessary.