OCR Document

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.” - HENRY BESTON - The Outermost House

It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age, so palpable an absurdity that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible. - John Stuart Mill

PREFACE

By Hans Ruesch

About the compulsion of scientists to perpetuate errors.

How can one explain that for well over a century and a half a great many respected citizens, including reputable scientists and physicians, physiologists and medical researchers have irrefutably demonstrated the uselessness of animal experimentation as a means of acquiring medical knowledge, and the damage ensuing to human health from this misconception, and yet the majority of "people who count" in politics, public health, education, media, even in animal welfare, and consequently also public opinion, which is influenced by all these institutions, continue to cling to the belief that animal experiments can't be renounced? There is a variety of reasons for this phenomenon, which shall be examined from various viewpoints.

The Historical Aspect

History knows many cases where there was a difference between veritable or normal science, (systematic knowledge, logically interconnected facts, establishment of verifiable general laws), and spurious science believed to be true simply because it was endorsed by the powers-that-be, including the Church and the scientists of the time, and that we shall define as "official" science. Official science usually precedes normal science, sometimes by centuries. For example:

In the Second Century A.D., the Greco-Egyptian astronomer, geographer and mathematician, Claudius Ptolemaeus, had developed a theory about the universe that according to the knowledge of his epoch was considered masterly and irrefutable, conditioning the way of thinking of all mankind up to the Middle Ages, although it was wrong. It was wrong because it was built on Aristotle's misconception that the Earth is immobile, and the center of the universe.

Starting out from this false premise, Ptolemaeus had managed to present a brilliant explanation for the astral movements in the sky that even enabled the sailors to navigate.

His theory had the blessing of the Church because thanks to it she could present herself as the spiritual head and religious center of the universe, and not just of an infinitesimal fraction of it, such as the Earth; so when in the 16th Century another astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei, came to upset the accepted theory, true science collided with official science in a resounding clash, which Galilei could only lose, at first. He was arrested, his life was threatened, some have it that he was even tortured, at any rate he was forced to recant.

People who believe that today such a thing could happen only in Soviet Russia are grievously mistaken; it happens in our so-called free democracies all the time, in various fields, even if the punishment for dissidence is not the death penalty, but economic or other sanctions, which may equally threaten a dissident's existence.

Galilei's theory was not only opposed by the Church, but also by his peers, the "natural philosophers", as the scientists were called at the time. Like many of today's scientists, being revered and admired as sort of demigods by the low as well as the mighty, they would rather have died than admit they had been wrong all along and propagated a mistake. Exactly this happens with many of them today in the realm of animal experimentation. Human nature doesn't change. That is why new notions are only accepted with extreme slowness and reluctance, as one must usually wait not only for all the teachers to die, but also for their pupils to die.

Another case in point was Andreas Vesalius, a Belgian who taught anatomy in Padua, Italy. It was around the same time as Galilei that Vesalius, by dissecting cadavers of the hanged (a practice that had been strictly forbidden until then, ever since antiquity), revealed that many of Galen's descriptions of the human anatomy were wrong, because Galen had based them on the dissections of animals. Again science clashed with official science when Vesalius revealed the truth - he was accused of "heresy and folly," and had to flee, fearing for his life. For example, Galen had described the human hipbone as being flared, like that of the ox, and when Vesalius corrected him, his peers, the university teachers, unwilling to admit that they had perpetuated a millenarian error, explained that since Galen's day the human hipbone must have changed shape because of the habit of wearing pants instead of the toga! Although the truth was evident for all to see, the Galenic errors survived for another 200 years in the seats of learning, proving once more that no ignorance is so stubborn as the ignorance of the learned.

This is just one reason why it is so difficult to get the men in charge of education and the health system to admit that using animals as a parameter for learning something about human biology may well be another of the great blunders of official science. (It is in regards to the most intriguing knowledge of all, the origin of life and the universe, that humans are dominated by one or the other of two misconceptions, which dwarf, in size and substance, any Ptolomean error of the past.

Both schools of thought rest plainly on fiction, but the adherents of each belief cling with unshakable faith to one or the other as if it were Gospel truth or "solid gold". One is the Big Bang explanation of our planet earth, with its corollary of the theory of evolution. It is the result of a scientistic mentality that in its ignorance and shortsightedness refuses to admit that there are domains far too vast for the human intellect to encompass and comprehend; so in their arrogance they invent hair-brained theories that they present as irrefutable facts, although they have been disproven by their own standards.

The other explanation for our existence is, of course, the religious one - divine creation. Although just as fictitious as any of the newfangled scientistic theories, it probably comes closer to the truth, reminding us of Joubert saying that the poets, in their search for beauty, have discovered more truths than the scientists in their quest for knowledge. The theory of creation is fiction, but highly inspired fiction, filled with human and moral values totally lacking in scientistic theories, with the added advantage over its rival theory that it has never been scientifically disproven.)

The Medical Aspect

Few words need be wasted on this. An anthology of names and opinions of physicians and researchers who, explicitly or indirectly, have denied any scientific or medical validity to vivisection make up the largest part of this book; so the question can be defined, at least, controversial. But if one considers that all those who assign validity to the animal model system are people who derive a morbid satisfaction or a monetary gain from it, the question appears no longer controversial but understandable. Just a handful of examples:

Lawson Tait, the giant of modern surgery (see biography) said:

"The position of vivisection as a method of scientific research stands alone amongst the infinite variety of roads for the discovery of Nature's secrets as being open to strong prima facie objection. No one can urge the slightest ground of objection against the astronomer, the chemist, the electrician, or the geologist in their ways of working; and the great commendation of all other workers is the comparative certainty of their results. But, for the physiologist, working upon a living animal, there are two strong objections: that he is violating a strong and widespread public sentiment, and that he tabulates results of the most uncertain and often quite contradictory kind."

And in 1988, Prof. Robert S. Mendelsohn of Chicago University, in his last, syndicated Medical Newsletter, The People's Doctor, No. 4, Vol. 12:

"Despite the tendency of doctors to call modern medicine an 'inexact science', it is more accurate to say there is practically no science in modern medicine at all. Almost everything doctors do is based on a conjecture, a guess, a clinical impression, a whim, a hope, a wish, an opinion or a belief. In short, everything they do is based on anything but solid scientific evidence. Thus, medicine is not a science at all, but a belief system. Beliefs are held by every religion, including the Religion of Modern Medicine."

And the noxious effects of modern medicine, which Prof. Mendelsohn kept denouncing to mass audiences in books, articles, newsletters, conferences and on TV, were mostly attributable to what Prof. Croce defines "the false methodology" of animal research.

The Intimidatory Aspect

The uninformed critic might well ask how the deception of the usefulness of vivisection could be kept alive within the medical community itself, considering that there has always been a number of prominent dissenters among them.

Walter Hadwen, one of the most eminent British MDs in the first half of the century (see biography), explains this phenomenon in the preface of a book he wrote about one of those dissenting MDs, titled "The Difficulties of Dr. Deguerre". We quote parts of it, pointing out that the conditions Dr Hadwen describes are no less true today.

"No medical man during his student days is taught to think. He is expected to assimilate the thoughts of others and to bow to authority. Throughout the whole of his medical career he must accept the current medical fashions of the day or suffer the loss of prestige and place. No public appointments, no coveted preferments are open to the medical man who declines to parrot the popular shibboleths of his profession. His qualifications may be beyond reproach, he may in himself possess qualities that command respect, but unless prepared to think and act within the narrow circle of accepted dogmas, he must be prepared for a more or less isolated path.

"The public press of today is largely governed by the orthodox rulers in the medical profession. The ubiquitous 'Medical Correspondent', who draws his inspiration from the pages of current fashionable medical literature, is expected to supply only such copy as will gratify the tastes of the mysterious power that stands supreme behind the editorial chair. The views of the unorthodox are with rare exceptions refused. So rigid is the control which medical orthodoxy seeks to exercise over the public mind, that not a word upon health matters, however important and interesting, is ever allowed to be broadcast by wireless unless it is approved and sanctioned by the bureaucrats of the Health Ministry.

"Every now and then some new medical 'discovery' is proclaimed with clamorous voice. The public eye is arrested by commanding headlines in the leading organs of the public press. The simultaneousness of their appearance and the similarity of the announcements leave no doubt as to how the whole scheme has been engineered. It may be a new cancer germ discovery; a new serum, vaccine, or chemical inoculation; a new theory concerning some old-fashioned disease dressed up in a new garb; a new outcry against flies, fleas, lice, cockroaches, dogs, cats, parrots, rats or goats; but, upon reflection, it will always be found that these 'discoveries' are entirely devoid of originality.

"It is safe to say that among all these flaming pronouncements no real discovery has been made, no original medical idea has been promulgated, no permanent contribution to medical science has been furnished, no advancement in medicine achieved. The public press has been utilized for the propagation of little else than medical sensationalism, proved to be such in time, by clinical and statistical experience.

"Practically all the modern claims of medicine are based upon the theories of Jenner and Pasteur, who have been exalted almost to the position of deities, whose dicta it is held to be impious to question. Those theories, in spite of a strenuous and increasing struggle to fix them upon a scientific basis, remain without foundation."

Modern medicine's scientific basis may be missing, but its financial profits are healthy, and anybody who dares jeopardize them is in for trouble, or worse. Who is "the mysterious power that stands supreme behind the editorial desk" which Dr Hadwen hints at? The answers stand recorded in at least two books, Morris Bealle's THE DRUG STORY, first published in the '40s and reprinted thirty-six times and maybe more since then, although no American bookstore ever dared handled it, and the writer's NAKED EMPRESS, published and republished in the '80s.

The Sociological Aspect

From the sociological point of view, man is a herd-animal, highly imitative to boot, as his fads and fashions show. His gregarious and conventional nature influences accordingly his psychic attitude or character.

Contrary to their general conviction, human beings, with rare exceptions are not mentally free, they shy away from venturing into independent thought, from treading unexplored territory; most of all, they are afraid of spurning the dogmas that have molded them, and of distancing themselves, also intellectually, from the herd. They feel safer following a leader, some kind of father image, even without knowing his intimate nature, and not seriously worrying about where this leader might lead them. The moment individuals join a marching herd, every thought process ceases. In fact, they feel freer in following some unknown leader than in having no leader to follow and being obliged to do their own thinking.

The written laws that rule our society in a constitutional state are an integral part of the system that the people want They are quite happy with those laws, and they are right. But not always. As happens in the field of science, also in jurisdiction some laws become obsolete, retrograde, they lag by decades, sometimes centuries, behind reality, behind the wishes of the majority or the social and scientific changes and needs. In fact laws are changed constantly, old ones are superseded by new ones, but this often only happens under great pressure, which can take on the form of violence and lead even to bloodshed. Think of all the social unrest of our and past times, some leading to revolutions and civil wars.

Obviously, reforms are started by fierce individualists, by heretics, deserters from the herd, by fearless and therefore always small minorities. The advocates of an abolition of vivisection on medical grounds, of which a goodly number are listed in this work, today still represent a minority. But what does it signify? Wisdom is not found by counting noses. Most of what the whole world now admits to be true or takes for granted, and most great social reforms which have proved immensely beneficial were originally advocated by a small, derided minority - sometimes a minority of one.

The laws that exist in most so-called civilized countries still permit, at best by omission, any and every kind of cruelty to animals, if done under the pretext of medical research, or "science", But since medicine is, by its own admission, not an exact science, and a science that is not exact is no science at all, but an oxymoron (a combination of contradictions), the cruelty carried out on animals is not only unscientific but illegal. And yet, in many countries, regulations established by the so-called health authorities actually impose those unscientific, Illegal tests. How is it possible? It is rendered possible by a fact that the public blissfully ignores, namely that the same health authorities who imposes those regulations are in the employ of the drug industry* which prescribes those notoriously unreliable tests on animals for the very reason that they are unreliable: they provide the necessary alibi every time a new pharmacological disaster occurs. Very few people are aware of that. They reason: if there are regulations, they must be good, in the public interest, like the laws against theft and armed robbery.

* How Rockefeller’s Drug Trust financed the Board of Education in the beginning of this century in order to promote the consumption of products from its huge drug empire, is related in NAKED EMPRESS.

As at this point in our history vivisection is still being regarded as an integral part of the order of things by the great majority of the population, it is once more the dominating herd instinct of the human species that stands in the way, along with many other important obstacles, to any speedy reform.

The Religious Aspect

The conviction that man is a supremely rational being is one more delusion in which the majority please to bask, even though it is a human idiosyncracy to be more susceptible to demagoguery than logic, more fascinated by fiction than facts, trusting more the occult than the visible.

The soap operas on TV command more devoted mass audiences than the goings-on on the Senate floor, even though the lawmakers' antics will affect the citizens' lives more substantially than the capers of the screen characters ever will. More people carry lifelong memories of the fairytales heard in childhood than of the works of Marx and Einstein, which most of them haven't even read, no matter how deeply they have transformed the world's social and political structure. And in 1988 the press announced, pretending surprise, that the world's most powerful individual had been looking to the stars for guidance, to the point that the intrusions of the astronomer "began to interfere with the normal conduct of the presidency", as one of Ronald Reagan's former aides (Don Regan) revealed. However, there was nothing surprising in this. Rulers and conquerors through the ages have been afflicted by the very same magical dependency from Adolf Hitler all the way back to the Babylonians and Assyrians.

Some great men have used this human peculiarity for noble purposes, as have the prophets and founders of the great religions - Buddha, Moses, Jesus Mohammed. Many have exploited it to their own personal advantage.

Banking on magic rather than logic, Modern Medicine, organized by industry-beholden health authorities along strictly commercial lines, in collusion with the tax -squeezing governments, has managed to take over the role that formerly belonged to the Church. The licensed doctors are this new religion's ordained priests, in whose hands the diffident patients are requested to place their full purse and blind trust, asking no questions. This has been obtained by blending facts with fiction so skillfully that not only the lay public but also many of the participants themselves are often unable to discern between the two.

Most people today deliberately ignore, or tolerate with an intimate feeling of reassurance, the incredible tortures to which animals are subjected in the laboratories of official science. But in the past, the great majority also regarded witch burning as a humanitarian activity that only the ignorant would oppose, because it was not only assured to protect mankind from the devil, but also to benefit the victim, whose soul was purged and thus saved by the fire.

In the same vein, the most cruel experiments on animals are foisted today on the credulous public as a blessing not only for humanity but for the animals themselves. And this because the belief in the benefit of vivisection as a corollary to the excellence of modern medicine has been inculcated into the dense population like a religious dogma, and with the same methods religions use to proselytize: continuous, systematic repetition of dogmatic claims unburdened by proofs, beginning in infancy, to the accompaniment of dark threats to any unbeliever, until the belief becomes a deeply radicated conviction - a blind faith, unfettered by thought. Freedom from thought is indeed the inderogable requisite of any faith. Once a faith has been implanted without the aid of reason, it is very difficult to eradicate it by reasoning: it has become a superstition.

The Britannica gives the following definition of Superstition:- "A belief founded on irrational feelings, especially of fear, and marked by credulity; also, any rite or practice inspired by that belief. Specifically, a belief in a religious system regarded (by others than the believer) as without reasonable support. Credulity regarding, or reverence for, the occult or supernatural."

It will be noted that this definition of Superstition applies equally to Religion, as well as to the belief in the excellence of Modern Medicine.

Thus, when we speak of the religion of Modern Medicine, we also mean to say the superstition of Modern Medicine, and the various rites this medicine performs are closely connected to the financial gain - and power - of its white robed priests, and more so of the heads of the syndicates, who make up the real power and take the lion's share of the gains. (See Naked Empress p. 35/36)

The vaccination myth is the most widespread superstition modern medicine has managed to impose, but, being by the same token the most profitable, it will prove to be also one of the most enduring, though there was never the slightest shred of scientific evidence upholding it.

Suffice it to say now that the various epidemics have experienced in all countries the same natural evolution of growth, decline, and eventual disappearance, whether vaccination or other therapies had been introduced or not. The only demonstrable effects were the widespread damages caused by the various vaccinations, none excluded.

Most pediatricians we know in Italy and France do not vaccinate their own children, although they cannot refuse to vaccinate their clients' children, if they want to retain their union license to practice. In West Germany, Medizinaldirektor Dr. med. Gerhard Buchwald had first to be shocked into awareness by seeing his own son turn into a vegetable as a consequence of smallpox vaccination, before embarking into a worldwide study that eventually led to the abolition of compulsory vaccination in his country, after he had demonstrated that there hadn't been a death from smallpox for years, but hundreds of people had died from the inoculation.

In the USA, several lawyers have published guidelines for parents on "How To Legally Avoid Vaccination", and several others have been seeking out vaccination-damaged patients, and suing the manufacturers of the killer medicament, with such success that many manufacturers nowadays refuse to produce vaccines unless the government who imposes them, also insures them against any damage suits; which many governments refuse to do.

These examples, added to many similar experiences by other doctors, in other lands, are rational arguments, but they only very slowly succeed in changing minds that have blindly adopted irrational dogmas, unburdened by scientific proofs, as is the case with all religious dogmas.

So it can safely be predicted that the advertised belief in the alleged blessings of vaccination will be among the last deadly rites of Modern Medicine to go, because it is far too profitable to the medical combine to be allowed to go without a bitter struggle, of which the beginnings can increasingly be seen today, but which will certainly drag on into the coming century. It is indeed so profitable - to Industry and State - that it is incentivated by being offered, or imposed, in many cases free of charge.

But in truth, who gets the bill? The taxpayer, of course.

That Modern Medicine can more rightly be defined as a religion than a science is demonstrated by the following:

An enlightened young patient at Zurich Cantonal Hospital had his torn Achilles tendon sewn together again and was then ordered to take some pills for several days. "Why take pills for a sewn- up tendon? Won't they affect my whole body?" - " Oh, no!" was the white-coated priest's cheerful reply. "Those pills have a selective effect - only on your tendon!"

That a doctor in a leading Swiss hospital can make such a statement without fearing to be laughed at demonstrates to what extent Modern Medicine has succeeded in passing itself off as a religion, in which the faithful are expected to have blind faith, rather than a science, which solicits discussions, debates, and evidence.

The Psychopathic Aspect

Sadism is a very ugly word, which serves to define a very ugly psychopathy - a mental disease. Vivisectors have been known to accept with equanimity the allegation of being money grubbers - of doing cruel experiments only to gain money or a professorship*. But we have never known a vivisector who bore with equanimity the allegation of being a sadist. They always reacted to all such allegations with frothing, like other psychopaths when they are confronted with the nature of their disorder.

If it is a mistake to believe that all vivisectors are sadists, it would be another mistake to believe that sadism is not rampant in the animal laboratories. It is. In fact, for men and women (more men, as a rule) who are affected by this grave psychopathy (mental malady), and on top of it are animal haters, what kind of remunerated occupation could be more gratifying than a job in a vivisection laboratory?

*Prof. Julius Hackethal, for example, West Germany's most celebrated surgeon, confessed in one of his books: "Today I abhor animal experiments. But there was a time when I performed them, simply because I wanted to become a professor."

Prof. Ferdinando de Leo, who has been teaching surgery at the University of Naples, Italy, for more than half a century, told us that often, at the end of the first lesson, some student will tug at his sleeve, asking eagerly: "When do we start working on animals?" However, most of the young students nowadays don't like, or refuse outright, to work on animals.

The psychological problem of sadism has been examined in Slaughter of the Innocent, and here we want to give some examples of experiments that were done at the beginning of the century and are still being repeated today, with a persistence unburdened by reason, which can only be explained as a serious mental defect. Today, the experiments mentioned by Dr. Hadwen more than half a century ago are still being performed, again and again, in greatly increased number and with ever-new "refinements" added, like the previous removal of particular portions of the brain, or the severing of the spine or extirpation of various organs; only their senselessness has remained unchanged. In the 1920's Dr. Hadwen estimated their number at 100,000 - 180,000 per year. But sixty years later, while a supposedly very restrictive Act was in force, they had soared to some 5.5 million in Great Britain alone, according to Home Office figures.

To this, all the unauthorized experiments should be added which physiologists conduct privately, and the experiments at the physiology teaching institutes for which no license is required and therefore go unreported, and then the mass of military experiments (in Britain at Porton Down, in the USA in many locations from coast to coast), for which no license is required either, of which no figures are given, and whose necessity politicians like Margaret Thatcher passionately invoke.

Below, two brief reports picked at random from the millions of published yearly experiments, the majority never even getting published:

"In the University of Colorado primate laboratory, baby monkeys are stimulated with 'grief' by removing them from mothers, familiar surroundings, etc., and their subsequent poor health is monitored by brain implants, etc. This brutality is funded by $100,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

"F.L. Eldridge, D.E. Millborn and T.G. Waldrop of the Departments of Medicine and Physiology, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC 27514) subjected an unspecified number of cats to surgery, removing part of their brains, then fastening them in treadmills forcing them to walk with electrodes implanted in what remained of their brains. The animals received no anaesthesia, but some were dosed with a paralyzing agent like curare. Result: intact animals respond differently to treadmills."

One of the propaganda lines of the vivisection community is that experiments on animals obviate the necessity of experimenting on people. Just the opposite is true, and that was predicted as far back as 1912, when the German physician Dr. Wolfgang Bohn wrote in the medical journal, Aerztliche Mitteilungen, (Nr. 7/8): "The constant spread of the vivisectionist method has achieved but one thing: to increase the scientific torture and murder of human beings. We can expect this increase to continue, for it would just be the logical consequence of animal vivisection."

Those prophetic words were called back to many minds when in 1984 an unqualified surgeon, Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, with a record in animal experimentation of more than 300 transplant failures and not a single survival, substituted in the Loma Linda Medical Center (California) a newborn baby's allegedly defective heart with the heart of a baboon, excised without a shade of anesthetic, as surgeons nowadays increasingly do even with human newborns.

All the leading American press hailed this vivisectionist idiocy as a "historic breakthrough" and "brilliant feat". Details of this incredible, but far from isolated aberration, in which human folly vied with human cruelty, are comprehensively reported in Naked Empress (p. 167-172).

Raved Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., in the New York Times, November 6, 1984: "With every beat the thriving infant makes history...Here is one of the most exciting and potentially important medical stories in recent times." Another enthusiast of vivisectionist stolidity, and contributor to several important American papers, Charles Krauthammer, hyperbolized in Time magazine: "Baby Fae was a means, a conscripted means, to a noble end."

Folly? Obtuseness? The two are oftentimes hard to keep apart. At any rate, it all goes to show what kind of doctors and news people several generations of vivisectionist indulgence have produced. The day-to-day reports from Loma Lynda revealed, to anybody able to "read", that before being released by merciful death, poor little Baby Fae had to endure for three weeks the very same insane tortures to which millions of laboratory animals are being subjected for months and years on end by the laboratory psychopaths. It is understandable that the mother, who had allegedly given her consent to the sadistic operation, didn't want her name to be known.

Not only the intelligence of the experimenters, but also the sensibilities of the public are being blunted in the course of time through the good offices of such press agents as Krauthammer and Altman, who keep commending cruel follies, slated for inevitable failure, as humanitarian achievements and medical "breakthroughs".

So the Lancet, Britain's most authoritative medical journal, could report with its usual professional aloofness in its January 31, 1987 issue that at Oxford's John Radcliffe Teaching Hospital eight premature babies had been subjected to open-heart surgery without any anesthesia. The controversy that flared briefly in a few press organs concerned mainly the question as to whether the babies had or had not received painkillers during the operation. (Painkillers have no anesthetizing effect: Aspirin is a "painkiller").

The press reports also revealed that the controversy about no anesthetics to newborns was old hat - some surgeons denying anesthesia, under the pretext that the shock from anesthetics was worse than the shock from pain, other doctors disagreeing, as usual.

Reported Parade magazine, USA, April 12, 1987:

"Doctors have struggled with the problem for years. At a conference of anesthesiologists held in Palm Springs, California, in 1970, a doctor stated that premature infants did not need anesthesia, just some adhesive tape to hold them down." Was that the upshot of 150 years of vivisectionist education and influence?

And now we come to a recent case in which religion, ignorance, sadism, and psychopathy intermingle to produce a script which would discredit any fiction writer as having suddenly turned mad and addle-brained.

On May 9, 1988, Turin's Stampa Sera scooped the entire Italian press with a front-page story titled: "They are experimenting on dogs the passion of Christ Doctors and experts want to demonstrate that the Holy Shroud was stained during Resurrection."

(The opening sentence on the first page of Slaughter of the Innocent, first published in Italy in January 1976, ran: "A dog is crucified in order to study the duration of the agony of Christ.”)

An abstract of the aforementioned Stampa Sera article of 1988 reads: "The President of the National Animal Protection Society (ENPA), Prof. Antonio Iacoe, has requested the District Attorney of Rome, Dr. Rosario Di Mauro, to stop an experiment on five dogs in whom the researchers want 'to reproduce the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.' According to Prof. Iacoe, the experiment has already begun, and today it should enter its most significant phase, in 'a location that is being kept secret, but which should be either in Rome's Gemelli Polyclinic or the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart The scientific aspect of this experiment is in the hands of two clinicians of the Catholic University: Prof. Paolo Pola, titular of the Chair of Angiology [blood vessels], and Dr. Augusto Borzone, of the Institute of Clinical Surgery.

The Mercenary Aspect

Maybe this single aspect is so strong that it might well sweep away the necessity of examining all the previous ones.

Human nature is contradictory, so that we are not only endowed with irrational feelings or instincts that might land us in some metaphysical impasse, as happens to the deeply religious, but we can also be rational to the extreme, especially when it comes to satisfying another characteristic of our nature: the miser's rapacious inclination, a thirst for riches, which can become addictive and, once born, seldom stops growing.

Of this, almost everybody is well aware. But very few realize to what extent their own minds are constantly being manipulated by the gigantic, venal interests that mold public opinion and influence the decisions of science at top levels.

As related in Naked Empress. some 90 percent of commercial advertising, the wherewithal of the mass media, derive from the petrochemical combine and its business partners. And the media manipulate public opinion according to the interests of their main clients. Not so much through the seductive display ads, which only serve to sell products, but much more determinately through editorials, articles, reports, even letters-to-the-editor, which serve to sell ideas and to justify government policies.

Most of the big petrochemical combines use animals as testing material. Are those animal tests necessary? Indeed they are, but not for the reasons generally stated. They don't serve to reveal the dangerousness of the tested products but, on the contrary, to conceal it.

What if there were no animals? Then the industry would have to test its products in some other way, with some scientific method, using human cell cultures, for example, or any of the other scientific methods available, which would quickly reveal the products' noxiousness. If such methods had been used, all-encroaching world pollution would not be what it is today.

The trend of using animals on a massive scale in medical research was started in America, by John D. Rockefeller, who had learned from his pappy, a traveling salesman of snake oil as a sure-fire cancer remedy, the limitless gullibility of the general public, and how to exploit it. JDR's genius gave him the idea to involve the government in the profits from the sale of lucrative but deadly "miracle" drugs, which had constantly to be replaced by new ones, after the advertised "miracles" had not only failed to materialize but had furthermore opened big scars, mental and physical ones, in the nation's health. Exactly how the Rockefeller principle was organised and sold to all other industrialized countries has been exhaustively described by Morris Bealle in his Drug Story (1949) and by the writer in Naked Empress (1982).

To what extent commercial interests determine the consumption of test animals is shown by the following: a small country like Switzerland, with only 6.5 million inhabitants but with a huge pharmaceutical industry, uses more laboratory animals than all of Soviet Russia with its 270 million inhabitants, but where nobody can get rich from the sale of drugs.

As a corollary to this situation, Switzerland has not only the highest consumption of laboratory animals in the world compared to the population, but is also, along with the USA, one of the sickest nations. So it was to nobody's surprise when a 1987 survey showed that Switzerland was world champion also in AIDS cases, proving once more what only the health authorities profess to ignore: that modern medicine, thanks to its therapies and medications, has become the main cause of disease.

Of course, it would be the animal welfare organisations' task to draw the public's attention not only to the cruelty of animal testing, but principally to the damages deriving from a fallacious system of research. But this, most of the organizations fail to do, being no less infiltrated by commercial interests than the media and the governments.

There is indeed nothing easier than to infiltrate an animal protection society. The wolf always arrives in sheep's clothing, the devil always knocks at the door flashing smiles and a golden halo of sainthood: so that the overworked, sometimes underpaid and more often unpaid animal workers in the big societies will sooner or later be glad to relinquish their post to the genial newcomer, who seems to have even more enthusiasm and energy and no pecuniary problems.

This explains such a phenomenon as that of the largest, richest animal welfare society in the world, the RSPCA, whose patron is Her Gracious Majesty the Queen; RSPCA propagandizes the necessity of vivisection, never advertises the damage deriving to the people from this fallacious method of research, and has invested most of its huge assets in bonds and stocks of industries that practice vivisection.

Dr. Irwin D. Bross (see biography), with long experience in America's cancer research programs, sheds light on the monetary interests that keep vivisection going, in the foreword to Brendon Reines' Cancer Research On Animals (1986). Dr. Bross' considerations apply primarily to the USA, where most vivisection funding comes from Government sources (taxpayer); in Europe it comes mainly from industry, which also finances the universities, to insure the support and loyalty of the faculties. Writes Dr. Bross:

”It has been historically true in general that 'he who pays the piper calls the tune'. So what is deemed 'officially true' is what is in line with the sponsor's policies, not necessarily what is in line with the facts. Moreover, 'authoritative opinion' nearly always supports the policies of its sponsors. Hence, the decisions in official science are Political decisions that only masquerade as scientific ones. Those in official science have the illusion that they are not politically controlled, and at times the public may share this illusion. Whatever may be said, when the time comes to act, the actions are in line with the official policies.

"Consider, for instance, the fact that the National Cancer Institute has spent billions of dollars on animal experimentation. The myth that such research produced the main chemotherapeutic drugs supports continuation of this funding. The medical schools and research facilities of the biomedical establishment that share in this bonanza are certainly not going to let mere facts interfere with this lucrative business. So even though the historical facts here show that animal experiments were worse than useless in selecting clinically effective cancer chemotherapies - they were consistently misleading - the 'consensus of authorities' will continue to say just the opposite. They may claim to love the truth, but when it is a matter of truth versus dollars, they love the dollars more.

"The way to stop useless and unnecessary animal experimentation is simply to make it unprofitable: Eliminate the funding by the government agencies or eliminate the agencies. Reasonable approaches will not work with official -science. Guidelines or legal limitations by government agencies are made to be evaded. It is pointless to present factual evidence because it will only be ignored. Protests by animal welfare and other well-meaning groups are easily put off by official evasions. Even for official science, however, there is one persuasive voice: Money talks.

"If the flow of taxpayer dollars that supports the foolish or cruel or dangerous practices of official science is cut off, these practices will stop."

Many of the doctors cited in the following pages have never investigated the subject of vivisection, and not all demand the immediate abolition of all animal experimentation in the realm of medical enquiry; many of them do; but all contribute to the disqualification of the vivisectionist method, nowadays often called "the animal model system," as being cruel, misleading, unscientific, and counterproductive.

A CHRONOLOGY OF PROFESSIONAL VERDICTS

In April 1987 the first ever International Conference of Doctors Against Vivisection was held at the Kongresshaus of Zurich, organised by the Community of Swiss Anti-vivisectionists. MDs from various European nations convened to denounce vivisection not only as the moral but also as the scientific and medical aberration that it represents. Swiss doctors were conspicuous by their absence.

But the success of the meeting was such that the Swiss Community proposed forthwith the foundation of an International League of Doctors for the Abolition of Vivisection (ILDAV). The proposal was received with enthusiastic approval by all the participants at that first meeting, and within a short time the new league came into being. It was the very first such organisation to be founded since the birth of government-endorsed, pseudo-scientific vivisection and its natural consequence – anti-vivisectionism.

lLDAV is unique in that its members are composed only of doctors, surgeons, pharmacists, biologists, veterinarians, and other scientists in medical fields. And that such an international league should spring into being inside a very Citadel of commercially fostered vivisection such as Switzerland, was probably no coincidence.

In a ceremony organised by the Community of Swiss Anti-vivisectionists, lLDAV was officially inaugurated in Zurich on the 24th of November of the same year, with Dr. med. Werner Hartinger, German surgeon, acting as President Swiss medical historian Hans Ruesch, whose works had inspired this unique medical league, was named as its Honorary President Dr. Werner Hartinger is also President of the German League of Doctors for the Abolition of Vivisection (founded by the late Dr. med. Herbert Stiller). Specialist in General and Accident Surgery, practitioner for the Industrial Injuries Insurance Institutes, with 28 years experience at the hospitals and in private practice in Waldshut-Tiengen, West Germany, Dr. Hartinger had been debunking many times in conferences, interviews, articles and pamphlets the vivisectors' self-serving myth that practice on animals is a prerequisite for surgical ability and competence.

Actually, Dr. Hartinger explains, the very opposite holds true: practice on animals can only mislead the surgeon, a view shared by the majority of his colleagues, of whom some of the most noted are cited in this collection - from France's Desjardins to Italy's De Leo to Austria's Hyrtl to Mexico's Herrejon to Britain's Tait to America's Bigelow.

Dr. Werner Hartinger, M.D., surgeon in West Germany:

"The claim, frequently heard, that animal experimentation is vital for the training of surgeons and that practice on living animals is necessary to gain manual and operating skills cannot be left unchallenged. A surgeon acquires his basic knowledge by observing and then assisting his teacher. In time, according to his experience, ability and manual dexterity he participates in supervised operating duties, until the surgeon responsible for his training decides as to when he can start operating on his own. Specialised knowledge of microsurgery is gained in the same way, just as working at the surgical microscope does not call for operating on animals.

“The same goes for transplant surgery. The operation itself presents no technical difficulties. The outcome of the operation only becomes problematical through the more or less pronounced intolerance of the transplant, which often leads to rejection. The risk, however, can in no way be evaluated on a comparative basis via animals.

As to the effects and tolerability of foreign substances (drugs, toxins etc.) in the human organism, numerous researchers of all disciplines have repeatedly pointed out that in this field also no adequate information can be obtained from experimenting on animals. There are, in fact, only two categories of doctors and scientists who are not opposed to vivisection: those who don't know enough about it, and those who make money from it."

Dr Vernon Coleman, M.D., one of Britain's most popular medical journalists and TV personality (see biography):

"Ever since the days of Galen, who put back the study of anatomy several hundred years by basing his conclusions on his experience dissecting pigs, practising doctors have been aware that animals are so different from humans - anatomically and physiologically - that the results obtained from experiments on animals are pointless. Only really second-rate scientists still believe that such experiments are worthwhile. But, sadly, the scientists who use animals are just that - universally second rate. We suffer from different diseases and we respond in different ways to drugs. Using animals to 'try out' products intended for humans is at best useless and at worst - as with Thalidomide - dangerously misleading," (From the 24-page long speech that Dr Coleman submitted to ILDAV to be delivered at the International Scientific Conference held at the Mutualite in Paris on June 19, 1989

Prof. Andre Passebecq, M.D., N.D., D.Psy., of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, 13th District, at the ILDAV conference of June 19, 1989 in Paris, after he had been elected as the new President of ILDAV:

"Man has developed awesome weapons of destruction, capable of annihilating our entire planet at the push of a button. But there are also other kinds of destruction. Vivisection is one of them. It causes not only severe damages in the biological area, but also untold spiritual damages.

“Experiments on animals lead inevitably to experiments on people. They are senseless, one and all. As if an animal test could ever predict the same result on a person. And as if an experiment on one human being could enable us to foresee the reactions of another human being, whose biology and metabolism are different, whose blood pressure is different, whose lifestyle and age and nourishment and sensitivity and genes and everything else are different.

“If we adopt a correct medical concept, based on an understanding of the vital requirements of the cells; if we understand the sense and purpose of the organism's natural reactions, then we renounce all animal experimentation. Then we recognize that each single organism, whether human or animal, has its very own reactions; that it responds in its own particular, individual way to the stimuli and attacks from the environment, that it disposes of peculiar faculties of defense and regeneration and self-healing powers.

“I understand that some animal protectors advocate the adoption of computers, data banks, tests with cells and tissue cultures as substitute methods of research in order to reduce the number of experimental animals. But this is no solution. It would only reduce the amount of human and animal suffering unsubstantially, and would not put a legal halt to the experimenters' sadism, whose persistence no amount of official concealment and media complicity can eliminate.

“Today's orthodox medicine and suppressive surgery don't understand the purpose of disease and therefore don't know how to treat it. A real doctor's experience derives from his natural intuition coupled with his observation at the sickbed, but never from invasive, violent experiments on people, and much less on animals. But instead of vital hygiene, which aims at preservation or reconstruction of health by natural means and shuns all use of degrading, destructive chemicals, today's medical students are only taught to manipulate poisons and mutilate bodies. We demand that this be changed.”

The January-February 1989 Newsletter of the Washington, D.C., based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine cited several doctors who denounced the dangerous fallaciousness of vivisection, when a University of Cincinnati head trauma "study" involving cats became known. The objections included the following three:

"[Some of] the reported changes in cats have been known to occur in humans for about 20 years. The papers [describing the cat experiments] I reviewed seem to contain little, if any, new information." - Roy Selby, M.D.

"The cat is a poor experimental model for head injury because of its distinctness from the human." - Michael Sukoff, M.D., F.A.C.S.

"It is only from human studies, both pathological (using autopsy material) and carefully controlled, prospective, randomized, double-blind clinical trials, that we will ultimately progress in our ability to treat victims of head trauma." - Josh Novic, MD.

From a 1989 article by Neal Barnard, M.D., chairman of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, D.C.:

"Take the artificial heart. There are many researchers who now wish it had never been invented. After tremendous expenditures of tax dollars (and reasonable success in animal tests), the plastic heart led to infections, bleeding, and other serious complications when it was used in human patients. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) wisely chose to cut off funds for this seemingly dead-end research last summer, but politicians - Senators from financially-interested states - forced them to restore funds by threatening to hold up approval of all NIH appropriations.

“A key part of research in this area involves the clotting mechanism. The artificial heart acts as a foreign body that can set off the clotting process. And blood clots can be fatal; they can plug an artery and lead to sudden death. But when medicines are given to prevent clotting, there is always the risk of uncontrollable bleeding."

References: Scott, C.F. Appropriate animal models for research on blood in contact with artificial surfaces. Annals NY Academy of Science. 1987, 516:636-37; Scott, CF. To the editor, The Physiologist, 1988, 31(3): 53.

The number of American doctors who have decided at long last to endorse the CIVIS policy of denouncing vivisection not only, as hitherto, on ethical grounds exclusively, but also and pre-eminently on medical grounds has been gaining momentum. A Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), founded in 1984 in Washington, D.C., issued in 1988 a Declaration of Concern and Support, which demanded the replacement of two among the most widely used animal tests - the eye-irritancy Draize test and the LD50 test for toxicity - with scientifically sounder and more humane methods. The Declaration was subscribed not only by countless lay personalities but also by many prominent members of the medical profession, including the following:

Neal D. Barnard, M.D., Psychiatrist; Carlo Buonomo, M.D., Anesthesiologist; Michael Klaper, M.D., General Practitioner; Richard M. Carlton, M.D., Psychiatrist; Murry J. Cohen, M.D., Psychiatrist; Donald E. Doyle, M.D., Surgeon; Stephen R. Kaufman, M.D., Ophthalmologist; James F. Grillo, M.D., Surgeon; Dallas Pratt, M.D., Psychiatrist; Kenneth P. Stoller, M.D., Pediatrician; Ulrich Fritzsche, M.D., Obstetrician/gynecologist; Daniel H. Siver, M.D., Internal Medicine; Herbert N. Gundersheimer, M.D., Internal Medicine; J. Herbert Fill, M.D., General Practitioner; Larry F. Kron, M.D., Psychiatrist; Richard S. Blinstrub, M.D., Dermatologist; Russel J. Bunai, M.D., Pediatrician; Donald C. Doll, M.D., Oncologist; Waiter Nowak, M.D., Hematologist; Herbert M. Simonson, M.D., Orthopedic Surgeon; Steven Tiger, Physician's Assistant Certified; Nedim Buyukmihci, V.M.D.

The following declarations were singled out:

Stephen Kaufman, M.D., New York: "As an ophthalmologist in the New York University I am surprised that the Draize eye irritation test is done at all...I know of no case in which an ophthalmologist found Draize data useful."

Christopher D. Smith, Long Beach, California: "The results of these [animal] tests cannot be used to predict toxicity or to guide therapy in human exposure."

Sandra Davis, M.D., Columbia, Maryland: "The result of these tests are of no use to physicians."

Herbert Gundersheimer, M.D., Baltimore, Maryland: "Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans...In reality these tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather are used to protect corporations from legal liability. "

Ellen Michael, M.D., Beverly Shores, Indiana: "The data produced by these tests don't keep harmful products from being sold."

Paula Kislak, D.V.M., Sherman Oaks, California: "After intensive study of the issue, I am convinced that the Draize eye irritancy and the Lethal Dose 50 tests are inaccurate, unreliable, costly and cruel to the animals. Moreover, the tests deceive the very consumers whom they are supposed to protect, by certifying as safe household products and cosmetics that cause nearly 200,000 hospital-recorded poisonous exposures annually."

Joel D. Mack, M.D., F.A.C.S., Bakersfield, California: "It has been shown on many occasions that the LD 50 test is misleading."

Neill. S. Barber, M.D., Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts: "As a board-certified emergency medicine physician who has been practicing for ten years, I have never found data from acute toxicity or eye irritancy tests on animals to be useful in treating patients. I would not rely on these data to treat patients, and I know of no physician who does."

Waiter Nowak, M.D., Worcester, Massachusetts: "I have never used the results of these tests to diagnose or treat patients. I find no justification for the continued use of these cruel tests."

Beverly Greenwold, M.D., Newtonville, Massachusetts: "The Draize test and the LD 50 acute toxicity test are as useless to the protection and treatment of humans as they are barbaric."

Carlo Buonomo, M.D., Baltimore, Maryland: "There is to my knowledge no area of science outside of commercial toxicology in which so many important decisions are based on data derived from tests which are so crude and imprecise."

Donald C. Doll, M.D., Columbia, Missouri: "As a practicing physician who is board certified in internal medicine and oncology, I can find no evidence that the Draize test, LD 50 test, or any other tests using animals to support the 'safety' of chemicals and cosmetics have any relevance to the human species...I strongly support legislation that prohibits the use of such animal tests by industry..."

Marc Applestein, M.D., Baltimore, Maryland: "Review of the current scientific literature has shown that extrapolation of animal data in terms of human responses is not reliable. "

G. Karlin Michelson, M.D., Los Angeles, CA: "The continued use of these archaic tests is simply not justified. Exploitation and the infliction of suffering is morally objectionable, particularly when the actions serve no purpose, as in the case of current product testing methods. "

Mark Silidker, M.D., and Helen Silidker, R.N., W.Orange, New Jersey: "As members of the medical community, we are well aware of the advanced technology available in numerous in-vitro testing techniques. When alternatives are already well developed and widely available, how can we justify brutally cruel tests such as the Draize and the anachronistic LD 50?"

Leslie Iffy, M.D., Summit, New Jersey: "Legislation to modernize consumer product testing methods is long overdue. Current safety testing procedures on animals are not only out-of-date and extremely cruel, but they are also inadequate to protect consumers from unsafe products. "

Robert W. Bensel, M.D., M.P.H., St. Paul, Minnesota: "The use of non-animal models is long overdue."

The PCRM Chairman, Neal D. Barnard, M.D., added a personal note to his colleagues' quotations: "Please let me tell you about my own personal experiences as a physician. I have witnessed first-hand how medical research and training subject a wide variety of animals to cruel, even sadistic treatment. And I regret to say that what I have seen occurs in medical schools and research laboratories all across the country. "

Dr. Roy Kupsinel, M.D., graduated from Tufts University, Medford, Mass. in 1949, and University of Miami School of Medicine in 1959. After 14 years in medical practice, he went into writing and publishing an holistic magazine in Orlando, Florida, and his many articles and publications include Vivisection - Science or Sham (1988), in which he says:

"Why am I against vivisection? The most important reason is because it's bad science, producing a lot of misleading and confusing data which pose hazards to human health. It's also a waste of the taxpayer's dollars to take healthy animals and artificially and violently induce diseases in them that they normally wouldn't get, or which occur in different form, when we already have the sick people who can be studied while they're being treated."

One more opinion by a medical expert that AIDS was created in animal laboratories (Excerpts from an article in the Mid-Devon Advertiser incorporating Mid-Devon Times, Dec. 2, 1988):

" A preventative vaccine for AIDS is unlikely to be found, a leading world expert on the disease told this newspaper in an exclusive interview this week…In the paper, Crossing the Species Barrier, which he was presenting yesterday in London, Dr Seale stressed that most viruses that affected one species did not affect another species. Dogs did not have cat diseases, and vice versa. The fact that the AIDS virus has such a structure is indicative to Dr Seale that it is not a natural virus, but one induced artificially in the laboratory, perhaps accidentally, by biologists using new techniques in virology, in which monkeys are used...'It could not have happened naturally', Dr Seale said. 'It has been artificially altered'."

Dr Christian Cabrol, the leading heart transplant surgeon of France, author of My First 400 Transplants, declared in a popular TV program, "Le Duel", Channel 5, "La Cinq", on October 20, 1988: "I agree with you, Mr Ruesch, I am against vivisection."

On March 7, 1988 Italy's leading daily, Corriere della Sera, published an article about a conference held in the center of Milan, titled "Still another condemnation of Vivisection" and including the following: "Prof. Pietro Croce, pathologist, asserted that it is absolutely necessary not to be content with demanding merely a regulation of animal experiments but their total abolition, and Prof. Fedi said that he agrees with this view and that such an abolition would bring great benefits to human health." (See biography)

"Truth is usually simple. Yet the AIDS virus theory has entered a realm of scientific obfuscation. Our addiction to animal research provides us with faulty information about AIDS and drugs intended for humans, who differ physiologically from other species. (Emphasis supplied.)" - Laurence E. Badgley, M.D., July 1988, in his Foreword to AIDS, Inc., by John Rappoport, Human Energy Press. San Bruno, CA.

"As a chiropractor and a strong believer of the human body's innate healing ability, I want to see the abolition of vivisection in the interest of human health so that we may put emphasis on Prevention, where it belongs." - Dr Ernest P. Miron, in CIVITAS Newsletter, Summer 1988.

Swiss State News on TV on May 30, 1988: "The use of Accutane, a Hoffmann-La Roche product, has caused hundreds of defective births. The packages containing this drug will henceforth have to display the picture of a malformed newborn." CIVIS: Accutane had of course also been considered safe following extensive animal testing.

"It is difficult to understand what perpetuates attempts at carcinogen identification using species to species...Not only do variations in metabolism of a drug make it difficult to extrapolate results of animal experiments to man, but they create a serious obstacle to the development of new therapeutic agents..." From an article in the Journal of the American Association For Science and Public Policy of March, 1988, by Melinda Calleia, Chairman of the Board.

For more than 200 years orthodox medicine has been unable to free itself from its obsession with the animal models system in cancer research, with the result that cancer has been increasing steadily from year to year, that billions of animals have been tortured to death in vain, and that no other "cure" for cancer has been officially devised than the cut-burn-poison method currently in use, which usually kills the patient sooner than the cancer would.

Ernst T. Krebs, Jr., a prominent biochemist from San Francisco, co-discoverer of vitamin B-17 (commonly called 'Laetril'), and discoverer of vitamin B-15 (pangamic acid), speaking before a seminar in Newark, New Jersey, in 1988, said:

"Chemotherapy and radiotherapy will make the ancient method of drilling holes in a patient's head to permit the escape of demons, look relatively advanced....Toxic chemotherapy is a hoax. The doctors who use it are guilty of premeditated murder; and the use of cobalt and other methods of cancer treatment popular today effectively closes the door on cure."

In written testimony before the state Department of Health Services, which was reviewing U.S. Surgical's practices, Dr. Roger Thrall, director of pulmonary research at the University of Connecticut's Health Center, encouraged the "immediate cessation" of U.S. Surgical's sales training on dogs. Dr. Alfred Cohen, chief of colorectal services in the Dept. of Surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and associate professor at Cornell Medical School, claims the U.S. Surgical dog labs are "unnecessary, cruel, and ultimately not in the best interests of human health care." Dr. Cohen, who uses the company's products "in quantity", has never attended a dog lab, nor operated on a dog in his career. "Dogs are not the flight simulators of the surgical world and the argument that surgeons must first practice on dogs is fallacious," he says. "Surgeons learn by observing other surgeons and by being supervised doing the actual procedure on humans." U.S. Surgical Corporation, 1988.

Donald J. Barnes, a graduate of Ohio State University, after working for over 15 years on classified chemical and laser warfare research at the Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, quit his job in disgust in 1980. At this point, he decided that the only thing he could decently do to atone for the cruel nonsense he had been misled to participate in was to join the abolitionists' ranks. In USA Today of April 25, 1988 he wrote under the heading "Animal Research is Wrong":

"After reading your editorial, ‘Animal research is needed; don't ban it,' for the fourth time, I cannot force myself to believe it was written by one of your regular editors. You adamantly state that animal research is "necessary" for human health, justifying this position with reams of drivel churned out by those who profit from the perpetuation of such research.

To be perfectly fair, I admit to sharing many of your views only a few years ago when I was involved in laboratory research with non-human primates, a profession which I had dutifully followed for almost 16 years. I was wrong, as you are wrong. The real "facts" demonstrate clearly that the use of non-human animals in medical and biomedical research retards rather than advances the progress of medical science."

On April 15/16/17, 1988, organized by the Netherlands' Anti-Vivisectie Stichting, the third Symposium of the ILDAV (International League of Doctors Against Vivisection), presided over by its Honorary President, Medical Historian Hans Ruesch of Switzerland, took place at Woudschoten, Holland, near the University of Utrecht. We cite briefly from four of the many speeches:

Dr. med. Werner Hartinger, surgeon, West Germany, President of ILDAV: "Vivisection is barbaric, useless, and a hindrance to scientific progress. "

Prof. Dr. Pietro Croce, M.D., pathologist, Italy, Vice-President of ILDAV (see biography): "Atrocious medical experiments are being made on children, mostly physically and mentally handicapped ones, and on aborted fetuses, given or sold to the laboratories for experimental purposes. This is a logical development of the practice of vivisection. It is our urgent task to accelerate its inevitable downfall."

Dr. med. Gerhard Buchwald, West Germany, specialist of internal diseases and participant in about 150 trials of vaccination victims: "Vaccination is not necessary, not useful, does not protect There are twice as many casualties from vaccination as from AIDS."

John Seale, M.D., world renowned specialist in venereal diseases and AIDS in Great Britain, explained in a long conference (parts of which he had previously published in London's Sunday Express in 1986), how AIDS was inadvertently created in the vivisection laboratories. He thus confirmed what French Dr. Gustave Mathieu had already announced in the summer of 1985, and what West Germany's Dr. med. Holger Strohm had reconfirmed in books, articles and conferences up to 1988. AIDS is a product of the animal laboratories.

The January 1988 issue of the American A V journal published the following opinions of mental health professionals and scientists on 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." - Murry Cohen, M.D.

"I cannot recall a single instance where my clinical judgment 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 behavior? There is no human payoff from ablating the brains of cats, monkeys, squirrels or mice. " - Wayne Johnson, Ph. D.

"I am appalled and deeply embarrassed by the research performed by my colleagues, and by the substantiation they present for it. Neither the research that they do, nor the case they make for it reflects wisdom. Instead, they become typified as opportunists." - Jeri Ryan, Ph. D.

"Not only are the studies themselves often lacking even face value, but they also drain badly needed funds away from patient care needs." - Neal D. Barnard, M.D.

"No animal has yet contracted AIDS after being given HIV in a laboratory." - Prof. Peter Duesberg, Biologist, Ca., from Royal Society of Medicine Newsletter, Spring 1988.

Researcher Donald J. Barnes, after experimenting on rhesus monkeys for 16 years at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, revealed to the Globe, a tabloid from Rouses Point, N.Y., May 27, 1980, how he had to blind and mercilessly torture by laser death rays and shock generators the animals in his charge. What for? In a letter to Hans Ruesch of December 31, 1987, Barnes wrote:

"Most important, I agree with your position re the utter uselessness of vivisection. When I first left the laboratory, I remained skeptical, stating, "there are some good experiments to be sure, but the majority are worthless", or words to that effect. Now after years of looking for those "good" experiments, I have long since concluded that they do not exist. But I had to do the looking myself. I was simply too conditioned to the "Party Line" to accept anyone's word for this."

From the article "The Basic Anatomical Element: Bechamp's Microzyma" by Dr. Glen Dettman, AMM, BA, PhD and Archie Kalokerinos, MD, in Health Consciousness, Oviedo, Fl., Oct 1986: "It is pathetic and ludicrous to say we vanquished smallpox with vaccines when only 10% of the population were ever vaccinated."

Moneim A. Fadali M. D., Cardiac/Thoracic Surgeon, UCLA Faculty, Board of Directors, Royal College of Surgeons of Cardiology, Canada, UCLA Clinical Staff, as reported by Fur 'n’ feathers, October 1987: "Animal models differ from their human counterparts. Conclusions drawn from animal research, when applied to human disease, are likely to a delay progress, mislead and do harm to the patient.”

Prof. Gianni Tamino, biologist, Padua University, a Congressman in the Italian Parliament, in Gazzettino, Venice, Oct 8, 1987:

"The growing opposition to vivisection is understandable both on ethical and biological counts. However, a certain scientistic culture says they serve to save human lives. But reality is quite the opposite. Let's take the case of the pesticides. These dangerous products, used in agriculture, are classified according to their acute toxicity, graduated with the LD tests. This represents not only a useless sacrifice of animals, but it's an alibi that enables the chemical industry to sell products which are classified as harmless or almost, but are in reality very harmful in the long run, even if taken in very small doses. Many pesticides classified as belonging to the fourth category, (meaning they can be sold and used freely) have turned out to be carcinogenic or mutagenic or capable of harming the fetus. Also in this case, animal tests are not only ambiguous, but they serve to put on the market some products of which any carcinogenic effect will be ascertained only when used by human beings - the real guinea-pigs of the multinationals. And yet there are laboratory tests that can be used, and are cheaper and quicker, than animal tests, 'in vitro' tests on cell cultures or bacteria, which have been proving their worth for years already. But the interests of the chemical industries which foist on us new products in all fields may not be questioned."

USA progressive animal welfare society Newsletter, issue 7, Oct. 1987: "Primate alcohol studies: one physician's view.

(1) Dr. Ulrich Fritzsche, M.D., board certified, has been practicing Obstetrics and Gynecology in Seattle for nearly 20 years. In the course of his profession, Dr. Fritzsche is called upon to advise pregnant women on alcohol consumption.

"Since 1973, more than 3,000 scientific papers have been published on the topic of alcohol's effect on pregnancy. When formulating my advice to patients who drink alcohol, I rely upon those studies which have examined the best 'model' we have: humans.

“Alcohol is a psychosocial problem. If given a choice, non-human animals will not consume alcohol regardless of how much they have been forced to consume previously. Unfortunately, humans are quite different in this respect. This very basic discrepancy is just one of the factors that make me distrustful of animal alcohol studies. I personally think the sacrifice of pets to demonstrate the effect of drugs is barbaric, but then I would be accused of being emotional, which is not the case at all.

"Only anatomy is learned from working with healthy tissues; and for that reason, a lab can use dogs which have been put to sleep by the kennels. They do not need to anesthetize live dogs and dissect them. I do not see the necessity, nor advantage, to using dog labs."

(2) Robert Ruby, MD, Moses Lake:

(3) Gary B. Spector, MD, Seattle:

"As a medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School, I was instructed in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and tracheotomy insertion using live and, until we got hold of them, healthy dogs. At the time, I was empathetic to the animals, but I thought that this must be necessary for a medical education. I can still remember the dogs whimpering because, as students, we didn't know how much anesthetic was appropriate. Since that time I have, with experience, realized that there was no need whatsoever for this type of instruction. Today even more than when I went to school, it is not necessary or even advantageous.

“I recently completed an intense two day cardiac resuscitation course provided by Children's Hospital which used mannequins and sophisticated computer instruction. These were more realistic and more educational than the dog models. Surgical incision of the trachea can best be taught to the student by one skilled in the procedure at the time when it is either emergently or electively indicated. There are ample opportunities to learn this prior to leaving one's training."

(4) Tom Giduz, MD, Carrboro, North Carolina:

"When you talk to med students about dog labs, some of them will say 'This is disgusting'. And those are, really, the more enlightened students. But a lot of them will like the dog labs, and there's a reason for it.

“As a first or second year student, you're not qualified to do anything on people, so they let you do anything on 'animals'. And, "Gee Whiz, I get to cut open this dog's chest and watch its heart beat right there beneath my hand.

“But that's not the way you learn surgery. You learn surgery operating on people, and it's a pain in the ass way to do it. You have to stand there a whole lot; it's no fun. Surgery residencies are five or six years, because you have to do the same thing over and over again before you learn what you're doing." (From Paws News)

In its July/August 1987 issue, Animals' Agenda reported an extensive interview conducted by Allan Bullington with Dr. Michael Grant, former vivisector and Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Bridgeport. The interview had recently been aired on "Animal Rights Forum", airing weekly on cable in New York City and many other venues, including Detroit, Michigan and Seattle, Washington. Host Bullington asked: "What do you feel you achieved on your research endeavors?"

Dr. Grant answered: "As a result of eight to ten years of laboratory research I can honestly say that there was no proof of anything of more than trivial significance. I know that my colleagues will not be very happy to hear that"

The British Encyclopedia defines "trivial" as meaning:

1. Of little value or importance; trifling; insignificant.

2. Such as found everywhere or every day; ordinary; commonplace.

3. Occupied with trifles; of low ability or wit; unscholarly.

See synonyms under CHlLDISH, INSIGNIFICANT, LITTLE, RIDICULOUS, VAIN, VENIAL.

It is worth noting that were Aspirin to be invented now "it would most probably not be licensed for use in humans because it causes birth defects in rats, mice, monkeys, guinea-pigs, cats and dogs. But not in humans."

Mr Bingham reported that the Public Health Laboratory Service recently admitted that almost half the cases of polio in Britain are caused by the vaccine itself! He pointed out that 39 chemicals are known to cause cancer in humans, but only 13 trigger cancer in laboratory animals, thus proving that vivisection is a poor test for such experiments. (From an article by Tony Ortzen, "From Here to Beyond", in Psychic News, London, July 11, 1987.)

Dr. J. E. R. McDonagh, FRCS, bacteriologist, in Outrage. June/July 1987: "Immunization with an attenuated virus cannot prevent distemper. The author has treated many dogs which have developed distemper despite two or three injections of the preventative agent... He is of the opinion that fits, chorea, hysteria, etc., in dogs have become more frequent since the use of distemper vaccine. Successful prevention will never be achieved by inoculation."

"Vaccines are made from: mucus of infected children (whooping cough), excrement from typhoid victims (typhoid), fermented chick embryos, and until recently, vaccines for polio were got from the diseased kidneys of monkeys, and cause: leukemia, encephalitis, MS - Multiple Sclerosis - and: "Now I believe the smallpox vaccine theory is the explanation to the explosion of AIDS". World Health Organization, advisor, Times 11.5.87.

As with all other medical drugs, vaccines are falsely 'tested' on animals in the vivisection laboratories. It is impossible to predict what a drug will do to humans from animal experiments.

"There is no doubt in my mind that in the UK alone some hundreds, if not thousands, of well infants have suffered irreparable brain damage needlessly, and that their lives and those of their parents have been wrecked in consequence. " - Gordon Stewart, Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, 1980, commenting on the deadly effects of whooping cough vaccine.

Dr. med. Bernhard Rambeck, since 1975 director of the Biochemistry Department of the Society for Epilepsy Research in Bielefeld-Bethel, West Germany: From his speech at International Symposium of April 25, 1987, Zurich:

"Animal-based research has shown us how we can induce fits of an epileptic semblance in rats, cats and monkeys through the administration of poisons or electric shocks, but the epileptic patient has his convulsions spontaneously, and not as a result of poisons or electric shocks...Every new medicament is a risk, and this risk cannot be reduced by no matter how many animal tests...As a scientist, I am of the opinion that animal experiments bring no progress in the diagnosis and therapy of epilepsies. I have a well-founded suspicion that similar facts apply in other areas of medicine."

Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn, on Toronto, Canada's CFRB station, April 10, 1987: "When I was a medical student we went into the physiology and the pharmacology laboratories and did animal experiments which we knew were worthless and the teachers knew were worthless, but we had to go through that ritual."

The April, 1987 issue of Fur ‘n’ Feathers, a monthly based in Burbank, California, evoked a number of doctors, past and present, who were opposed to vivisection. Here below, we quote a few:

Dr. Pierre Jeandidier, Ex Chief of Dermatological Clinic of the Faculty, 127 Saint Didier Street, Nancy, France - April 1964: "There are no arguments or considerations that could justify all the pain inflicted on all those unfortunate defenseless animals, and it is not much to say that such practices are entirely inhuman, if reference to man has as yet weight on the moral plane. The state owes it to itself to condemn them unequivocally and without restrictions."

Dr. A. Maignien-Courard, Ophthalmologist, 16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Street, Nantes, France - Clinique de L' Esprance - Feb. 6, 1964: "I am totally opposed to vivisection and experiments on animals, and have always recognized their cruelty and uselessness."

Dr. Raymond Lefevre, Professor of the School of Medicine, Director of the Regional Anti-Cancer Center, 50 Boulevard Lundy, Reims, France - March 27,1964: "The utility of vivisection does not seem to me to be fully determined. Such products tried out on animals produce results ineffective in man."

Dr. Frederic Benoit, Surgeon of the Maternity Hospital, Wassy, France April 1, 1964: "It is nonsense to believe that vivisectional experiments are necessary or useful for scientific progress: circumstances of vivisection are too arbitrary to have real interest, and the animals cannot be identical.”

Dr. Albert Poret, 6 Dufrency Street, Trocadero, Paris 10, France: "We demand, not regulation, but abolition of these cruelties (vivisection) which are being practiced in the name of science."

Dr. B. Ossipovski, Formely Interne of the Hospital of Paris, Chief of Clinical Medicine of the Faculty, Chief of the Saint Louis Hospital, 74 Villiers Avenue, Mac-Mahon, France: "My accord, my assistance are yours concerning the terrible practice of maniacs and neo-scientists. Men believe they are able to acquire physiological results by torturing animals and formulating theoretical deductions which, in most cases, have revealed themselves absolutely erroneous."

Dr. Eugene Lob, Faculty of Paris, General Medicine & Diseases of the Eyes, Wasigny, France (Ardennes): "I have the honor to enclose herewith a certificate against vivisection...cruel and useless."

Dr. Marie-Louise Griboval, Paris, France: "I am against vivisection because it is immoral and completely useless for the progress of human medicine. Animals have a physiology and reactions quite different from ours. I am of the opinion that all experiments on live animals should be abolished because they only lead us into error."

"The data in a recent article by John Bailar in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that the total failure of the National Cancer Institute 'Conquest of Cancer' program resulted in more than 30,000 additional deaths from cancer last year!" (From an article by Dr. Irwin Bross in the Animals' Agenda, March 1987). CIVIS comment: Practically the entire cancer program was based on animal experimentation - by which only the experimenters, and not the patients, profited.

An article by reporter Barbara Bouyet in Fur ‘n’ Feathers cites in its March 1987 issue Dr. Robert Simpson of Rutgers University as saying: "Immunization programs against flu, measles, mumps, polio, etc., actually may be seeding humans with RNA to form pro-viruses...which under proper conditions become activated and cause a variety of diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus erythematosus, Parkinson's disease and cancer. Spare me this 'medical miracle'."

From The Alliance News, Journal of Alliance for Animals, January 1987, Vol. 4, Nr. 1: "According to Dr. A.R. Mead, an official in the Cancer Institute's Drug Development Division: 'The live mouse screen is just not producing action against the major tumors.'”

“The new system, devised to replace the live mouse screening technique, consists of the testing of compounds against more than a hundred different strains of human cancer cells growing in test tubes. Officials expect that this new non-animal testing system will determine more quickly and more accurately which chemicals might make useful anticancer drugs. The new screening system is speculated to be "more sensitive" and capable of pinpointing drugs that act against specific types of cancer...Drugs "that would have been dismissed as useless" by the traditional animal screening process.

“While it would seem obvious to the lay observer that a test performed directly on hundreds of different strains of human cancer cells is superior to testing on mice with one specific form of animal leukemia, the research community, along with the funding institutions who support them, are often so firmly entrenched in the traditional animal research system that such logic is not recognized, and researchers are often reluctant to pursue non-animal alternatives.”

‘The arthritis drug Opren was withdrawn in 1982 after 3,500 reports of side effects including 61 deaths, mainly through liver damage in the elderly. According to an investigation by Granada TV's 'World in Action' programme, Eli Lilly insisted that they had no reason to think Opren would cause any particular problem for the elderly before they launched the drug. Prolonged tests in rhesus monkeys (the species usually considered closest to us), in which the animals received up to seven times the maximum tolerated human dose for a year, revealed no evidence of toxicity. Nor apparently had animal tests given any warning of the photosensitive skin reactions that were to bedevil patients during the drug's brief 22-month history.’ (From 'World in Action', Granada Television (GB), 9 November 1987.)

A recent book out in Great Britain, Vaccination and Immunization: Dangers, Delusions and Alternatives (C.W. Daniel, 1987) by Leon Chaitow, one of the world's best informed practitioners of natural medicines, includes up-to-date evidence against vaccination from vaccine researchers themselves, like the fact that even Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the "killed" polio vaccine that bears his name, cannot agree with his rival Dr. Alfred Sabin on the merits of "live" and "killed" vaccine, and each one accuses the other of being responsible for uncounted deaths among the gullible patients.

How can there be such varying views? First, vaccination programs and antibiotics have mistakenly been given all the credit for naturally occurring declines in killer diseases such as smallpox, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, dysentery, etc., whereas most or all the credit belongs to better hygiene, sanitation, housing, and greater resistance to disease thanks to improved economic conditions, better nutrition being particularly important in the case of tuberculosis.

London's typhoid epidemics were being halted by changes in the water supply before the "bug" was discovered, let alone a vaccine was developed- according to a 1923 report in the British Medical Journal. But tendentious legend has it that the vaccine saved the lives of thousands of troops in the Boer War and the 1914-1918 war. The documented truth is that typhus hit vaccinated soldiers and citizens with about the same frequency as unvaccinated ones, with the only difference that an unspecified number of vaccinated people developed the well-known post-vaccinal effects - immediate insurgence of the disease against which they had been vaccinated, meningitis, and death.

The issue is also confused by health professionals' consistent inability or unwillingness to identify vaccine-related deaths. A University of California study has shown that at least 1,000 deaths a year, described as the mysterious SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), are in fact caused by vaccines.

In Australia, Dr. Archie Kalokerinos, M.D., and Dr. Glen Dettman, Ph.D., discovered that some 500 out of every 1,000 Aboriginal children were dying in the Northern territories. The cause was a type of toxic shock reaction, complicated by vitamin C deficiency, brought on by immunization. In a two year period without vaccination and with improved nutrition not one child died.

Even the Swiss researchers and the huge pharmaceutical industry, whose profits rest squarely on the alibis of animal experiments, concede the unreliability of the animal tests. To wit:

Hans Aebei, a Ciba-Geigy employee, told the daily Basler Zeitung (April 12, 1986): "That Tifanol causes cancer in laboratory animals doesn't mean that it will cause cancer in human beings as well."

The Roche-Magazine, the organ of Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceutics, always spends a considerable amount of its time invoking the unreliability of animal tests to justify the damages its drugs keep causing. In that magazine's May 27 1986 issue we read: "The fact that this preparation causes cancer in animal experimentation does not necessarily mean that it will also cause cancer in people."

In the same issue: "Whether a new preparation will cause cancer in people or not can never be predicted with certainty, in spite of all preliminary experiments and tests."

Still in the same issue: "Tests for carcinogenesis are no egg of Columbus, because they are made on animals and not on people. A human being is neither a large rat nor a large mouse, and can always react in a different way."

Once more, in the same issue: "Why was it so difficult in the case of the Seveso exposure to assay the risks to health? Because we had no parameters but animal tests, and whether Dioxin would have the same effects on people could not be read from the tests on animals. The findings on laboratory animals were contradictory. Hamsters died from a ten-thousand higher dosage than did guinea-pigs."

Prof. Bruno Fedi, M.D., Director of the City Hospital of Terni, Italy, anatomist, pathologist, specialist in urology, gynecology and cancerology:

"All our current knowledge of medicine and surgery derives from observations of man following especially the anatomical-clinical method introduced by Virchow: symptoms of the patient while alive and the alterations found in the dead body.

“These observations have led us to discover the connection between smoking and cancer, between diet and arteriosclerosis, between alcohol and cirrhosis, and so on.

“Even the RH factor has not been discovered on the macacus rhesus. The observations of Banting and Best on diabetes, attributed to experiments on dogs, were already well-known.

“Every discovery derives from observations on humans, which are subsequently duplicated in animals, and whenever the findings happen to concur, their discovery is attributed to animal experimentation...

“Everything we know today in medicine derives from observations made on human beings. The ancient Romans and Greeks gained most of their knowledge from epidemiological studies of people. The same goes for surgery. Surgery can't be learned on animals.

“Animals are anatomically completely different from man, their reactivity is completely different, their structure and resistance are completely different. In fact, exercises on animals are misleading. The surgeon who works a lot on animals loses the sensibility necessary for operating on humans. " (Abstract from various TV interviews and articles by Prof. Fedi in the course of 1986).

"Most adverse reactions which occur in man cannot be demonstrated, anticipated or avoided by the routine subacute and chronic toxicity experiment." (Prof. G. Zbinden, Institute of Toxicology, Zurich, 1986)

From the report of the CIOMS (Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences) established under the auspices of WHO and UNESCO, XVII Round Table Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, 8-9 December 1983, Session 11, about "Understanding the Physiological Basis of Toxicological Phenomena", by Professor M.H. Driggs:

"Many experimental toxicity studies have been conducted on contraceptive estrogens, alone or in combination with progestogens (Heywood and Wadsworth, 1981). At multiples of the human dose, no adverse effect on blood clotting was found in mice, rats, dogs, or non-human primates. Indeed, far from accelerating blood coagulation, high doses of estrogens in rats and dogs prolonged clotting times. There is therefore no appropriate animal model for the coagulation changes occurring in women using oral contraceptives. Interestingly, deaths due to intravascular coagulation were noted in dogs receiving high doses of a long-acting depot progestogen (medroxyprogesterone acetate without estrogen), but thrombosis is not thought to be a risk in women using this product." (French Conseil des Organisations Internationales des Sciences Medicales, fonde sous les auspices de l'OMS et de I'UNESCO)

Irwin D. Bross, Ph.D., writes as a scientist with 30 years experience in public health; Head of research design and analysis at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute (1954), the most famous cancer research institute in the world; Then head of department of biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer Research in Buffalo, New York; Then President of Biomedical Metatechnology; Author or co-author of over 300 published articles and reports and 3 books:

"Consider the fact that the National Cancer Institute has spent billions of dollars on animal experimentation. The myth that such research produced the main chemotherapeutic drugs supports continuation of the funding. The medical schools and research facilities of the biomedical establishment that share in this bonanza are certainly not going to let mere facts interfere with this lucrative business. So even though the historical facts here show that animal experiments were worse than useless in selecting clinically effective cancer chemotherapies - they were consistently misleading - the' consensus of authorities' will continue to say just the opposite. They may claim to love the truth, but when it is a matter of truth versus dollars, they love the dollars more.

“Showing the uselessness of animal model systems in cancer research can do more than prevent the pointless suffering of laboratory animals. It can demonstrate why the public cannot afford to put its trust in official science...The way to stop useless and unnecessary animal experimentation is simply to make it unprofitable. Eliminate the funding by the government agencies or eliminate the agencies. Reasonable approaches will not work with official science. Guidelines or legal limitations by government agencies are made to be evaded. It is pointless to present factual evidence because it will only be ignored. Even for official science, however, there is one persuasive voice: Money talks. If the flow of taxpayer dollars that supports the foolish or cruel or dangerous practices of official science is cut off, these practices will stop." (From his Foreword to Brandon Reines' Cancer Research on Animals: Impact and Alternatives, 1986)

From the ATRA publication, Physicians Have the Word, ATRA, Camorino, Switzerland, December 1986, Dr. med. Jurg Kym, General practitioner in Zurich: "As a physician, I am definitely opposed to animal experiments. They are totally useless, they don't contribute in any way to the progress of medicine...Animal experiments are just business, and are usually associated with animal torture. Because of animal experimentation, modern medicine moves always farther away from humankind. This is obvious to every enlightened individual."

Richard Moskowitz, M.D. wrote to CIVIS on New Year's Eve, 1986: "My first disillusionment with modern medicine came in the summer of my junior year at Harvard while I was working at a large medical research laboratory...It turned my stomach to think that the whole edifice of medical research rested upon a calculated slaughter of this magnitude."

In the March 1983 issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Homoeopathy (76:7) he wrote among other things: "The public is surely entitled to convincing proof, beyond any reasonable doubt, that artificial immunization is in fact a safe and effective procedure, in no way injurious to health, and that the threat of the corresponding natural diseases remain sufficiently clear and urgent to warrant mass inoculation of everyone, even against their will if necessary. Unfortunately, such proof has never been given."

On December 22, 1986, the Jerusalem Post published the following opinion of well-known Israeli veterinarian Dr. Andre Menache of Givatayim:

“Sir, - You often publish articles where animal experiments are credited for the latest in (human) medical advances. As many research workers recognize (and now increasingly the lay public as well), animal experiments can be used to "prove" or "disprove" almost anything. Given the large variety of laboratory animals available today, and the multiplicity of laboratory conditions under which these experiments are carried out, it should not come as a surprise.

“Animal experimentation continues to provide misleading and inconclusive results for man, of which we are occasionally reminded by drug disasters. Put bluntly, animal experimentation is not science: it has no place in the so-called civilized and technologically advanced era of today.”

In announcing a new weapon in cancer treatment - it combines natural cancer-killing cells with two drugs - Dr. Steven A. Rosenberger of the National Cancer Institute went out of his way to avoid raising any false hopes of a quick cancer cure for humans. "This has all been done with mice. There are things that work in mice that do not work in people." (The AV Magazine. December 1986)

One of Britain's leading cancer research institutes, the Marie Curie Foundation, announced at the end of 1986 that it would henceforth renounce all animal experimentation. A spokesman for the foundation, which had been active in cancer research for many years, explained the decision with the realization that experiments on animals provide no meaningful results for human beings.

"In my opinion there exists a conspiracy of the medical-pharmaceutical interests on an international basis to eradicate alternative health (not disease) care from the people of the world with a total disregard for the health and life of the people. I feel that the major motivation of this potentially destructive scheme is the desire to make money and I call the condition of this utter sickness of man, "The Greed Disease". Here in the United States I observe the conspiracy is interwoven with the American Medical Association, the federal government, especially the Federal Drug Administration, the federal Trade Commission, the Pharmaceutical Advertising Council, and the entire media including television networks, radio networks, newspapers, magazines and book publishers. The media domination prevents the majority of people from being conscious of these negative forces and focuses their minds on the propaganda that alternative health care is "quackery". However, the Office of Technological Assessment reported to the Congress in the late 1970's that only 10-20% of the methods utilized in allopathic (official, orthodox) medicine are proven safe and efficacious. Quackery is defined as using non-proven methods for a profit. So who are the real quacks, anyway?

"Much of the enlightenment of the extremely cruel vivisection portion of this cartel is revealed in the writings of Hans Ruesch in both Slaughter of the Innocent and Naked Empress, which have both suffered international suppression. Vivisection is a paramount symptom of the "Greed Disease" and of the inhumane, unscientific, ignorant individuals who perpetuate it throughout the world. Animals are not human beings and do not react in a similar fashion to a drug. What might be beneficial in an animal might be lethal to the human, and conversely. Where is the logic to transfer information from animal experimentation to human usage of toxic chemicals? It is in the pocketbooks of the members of the conspiracy - the Greed Disease!" (Ray Kupsinel, M.D., medical magazine editor in Oviedo. FL 32765, November 22, 1986)

Extract from a lecture by Dr. Arie Brecher, M.D., to the Medical and Juridical Society at the Hotel Dan-Panorama of Haifa in Israel on November 1, 1986:

"The genetic code is transmitted by the chromosomes. Each species has a certain number of chromosomes, which characterizes that particular species... The genes and the chromosomes are the basis from which all other differences derive: the cythological, the historical, the biochemical, the physiological, the immunological and the anatomical differences...Because of the differences in the genetic code and the biological arrangements between one living being and another, the reactions to drugs and other stimuli between one species and another will also be different. So all this is not science, but a lottery.

"The well-being of man takes first place in the ladder of human values. Today, in 1986, after years of practice as a physician, I am convinced that any result I might obtain from experimentations on a dog, a cat, or any other animal, will be misleading, damaging and even disastrous for human beings. There is no question of any advantage to be gained at all.

"Animal experiments confuse the issues and their results will never have scientific precision. There is absolutely no connection between vivisection and human health. The general belief in the value of animal experimentation is the result of brainwashing that the public has been submitted to for a long time. Behind it are the pharmaceutical industries, which spend fortunes on publicity and finance the research institutes and the universities.

"What must be done? The laws must be changed and vivisection must be prohibited. There are today 400 experimental methods that don't require the use of animals. But even more important are prevention and the safeguard of human health. Science doesn't need vivisection, but the law does. I call upon everybody to sustain our movement bent on changing the law and bring about a total abolition of vivisection, for a better medicine and a healthier humanity."

The October-November 1986 issue of Outrage, the journal of Britain' s Animal Aid Society, bore the following quotes:

A Few Views On Cancer Research

"Reports in the scientific literature make it clear that as much as 75% to 85% of cancer is preventable. Cancer is no longer simply a medical problem, it is a social-economic problem, as many of the cancer-causing agents are a direct result of our technological age. Cancer agents are in the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cigarettes we smoke. It is clear that the incidence of cancer will never decline until we look at prevention rather than cure."

"Economics and politics simply intertwine in shaping conventional medicines approach to cancer. Very simply put, treating disease is enormously profitable, preventing disease is not." (The British Cancer Control Society)

"Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them." (Linus Pauling, PHD, two time Nobel Prize Winner)

"Large scale nationwide advertising is bringing in the four main established cancer charities in Britain something like 46 million a year. Together they hold assets of more than 76 million, including widespread international investments and buildings such as their various prestigious Central London Headquarters." (Cancer Control Society)

"It could be argued that this (cancer research) is a field of research which has consumed an enormous number of animals without any tangible result." (Professor D.H. Smyth, Alternatives to Animal Experiments)

"The cancer research bodies cause pain and suffering to hundreds of thousands of animals every year by inducing in the animals, by chemicals or irradiation, large cancerous growths in their bodies and limbs...Giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat those persons suffering from it." (Dr. A. Sabin, developer of the polio vaccine)

"...the simple unadulterated truth is that they are neither winning the fight against cancer nor are they about to find a cure. They have been claiming that a cure is just around the corner for a good 50 years or more, but the sad fact remains that in spite of the countless millions being collected, cancer in its most serious forms - in the lung, breast and bowel - is no nearer to being beaten today than it was at the turn of the century.

"Indeed, in some cases - breast cancer for example - the exact opposite is true; the scientists are actually losing the fight." (Cancer Control Society)

From an article by WiIliam Campbell Douglass, M.D., in the Health Freedom News, the journal of the National Health Federation, U.S.A., October 1986, p.31: "Medical students are often used as experimental animals. They come cheap because they need the money and they are a lot like humans. The results with animals don’t correlate with humans physiologically or pharmacologically, and besides, monkeys are expensive."

Prof. Robert S. Mendelsohn, M. D., in the film Hidden Crimes: "There has never been a single vaccine in this country that has ever been submitted to a controlled scientific study. They never took a group of 100 people who were candidates for a vaccine, gave 50 of them a vaccine and left the other 50 alone, and measured the outcome. And since that has never been done, that means that if you want to be kind, you will call vaccines an unproven remedy. If you want to be accurate, you'll call the people who give vaccines quacks."

"I did many experiments on live animals during medical school", said Dr. Abram Her, a Phoenix, AZ physician who formerly practiced anaesthesiology and now has switched to holistic medicine. "I would say they had nothing to do with what I later had to know about or do to humans."

1000 DOCTORS (AND MANY MORE) AGAINST VIVISECTION

Acknowledgements