So many phony's in one room,at one time,must be good for us genuine anti vivisectionists-- that way we can expose you all!

VERO,have you been set up by Oxford Uni to keep to "ethics"? All vivisectionists fear the scientific and medical facts exposing their psuedo science they represent,and VERO keeps to "ethics" ,namely, "animal rights".

Gill Langley's fraudulent organisation wrote a paper,medically and scientifically,esteeming vivisection with a quote "parkinsons is well modeled on monkeys". What an absurdity,brain damaging through external interventionist means on individual monkeys is not "parkinsons" :in cause or efffect.Is that how parkinsons in humans is caused:in cause and effect?


"ALTERNATIVES" and "HUMANE RESEARCH" are cons and competent people like Professor Croce and Hans Ruesch have demonstrated so!



THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES TO VIVISECTION BECAUSE VIVISECTION IS NOT SCIENCE.

Fuck your meeting!

I am starting to seriosuly wonder whether this Vero group wasn't set up deliberately to act as stooges. Or can so many 'academics' collectively be so stupid?

For a long time I opposed vivisection on purely ethical grounds, before I looked at the science. And I still think it is the best argument. The problem with the scientific argument is it assumes vivisection is wrong because it is scientific fraud. The implication is that if it was not scientific fraud then it would be okay.

Not everyone understands the science and so they will believe whoever shouts the loudest, which is the vivisectors. But the ethical argument is easily understood by everyone.

Most campaigners see vivisection as the most difficult of animal abuse issues - if we are to consider it as purely that - to try to get abolished due to the powerful industries that thrive on its continuation.

The ironic thing is that in theory vivisection SHOULD be the easiest to get abolished, on the grounds that it is the one area of animal abuse that is easily proven to be entirely useless, whilst highly damaging to human health, the environment and economy to boot.

It need hardly be pointed out that these arguments are ENTIRELY MEDICAL AND SCIENTIFIC. Moral and ethical arguments are almost entirely useless - vivisection will NEVER end whilst the public naively believes that the practice will save children from dying of cancer. Argue a mother with an incurably ill child that rats are as important as her child and wait for the inevitable reply. If one wants to end vivisection one has no choice BUT to use the scientific arguments.

Furthermore, the scientific arguments, based on provable FACTS, can alone destroy vivisection without having to enter the dodgy minefield of ethics that are to a greater or lesser degree necessary in probably all other areas of animal abuse, except perhaps meat-eating.

Michael says that the ethical argument is understood by everyone. He means by all animal rights people. The vast majority of people don't give a flying f**k about animal rights, and certainly not when such 'rights' delay the promised cure for little Johnny's cancer.

That "not everyone understands the science" might well be true, and this is due to the typical mental laziness and ineptitude displayed by most AR people, who nearly always put their own feelings before the cause. Becoming martyrs by getting arrested trading insults with police at demos on deserted city backstreets is much more adrenalin-pumping than actually studying the subject in order to outwit and out-argue a vivisector and thus expose him as the grant-hungry charlatan that he truly is. When the public at large understand this, then vivisection might end.

And this is why the BBC is allowed to continue to get away as being the official mouthpiece of the vivivsection industry. Sure, many AR people will moan and cry about each and every plug for vivisection the BBC - at our expense - comes out with, but most carry on down the same useless, counter-productive road. Anything but address the central problems, because doing so isn't exciting enough as, say, standing and yelling outside a Vodaphone shop for instance. Big deal.

I truly wonder sometimes whether most AR people actually want to see vivisection consigned to the history books! Perhaps subconsciously they crave defeat over and over again?

And so it goes on. Twenty years after Hans Ruesch exposed the phoney 'alternative' enterprises, and those who run them, another public meeting asking that, 'Hey Tone!, how about reducing those animal tests a little? How about spending a few more quid on finding other methods' (As if vivisection needs finding any alternative to!) 'How about promising to phase out animal tests in 50 years time'. And most AR people fall for this crap, and support it and fund it! Truly the vivisectors must rub their hands together - they love these 'alternative' enterprises, just like they love it when they hear people say that ethics alone will end vivivsection.

The tragic thing is, that had AR and AV people taken the trouble by educating themselves about the subject in the 70s when Slaughter of the Innocent first came out, I truly feel that vivisection would most likely be history by now. Today the task is going to be much harder as the opposition has become so very entrenched. And yet the 'movement' has hardly moved on at all! Perhaps collectively we want vivisection to carry on for another 100 years - supposing the planet can survive another 100 years of vivisection-derived poison onslaught.

It is in fact fair to say that most people supposedly campaigning to end vivivsection for the past 20 years have done more to keep it going that to actually end it, and the reason is sheer laziness and putting their feelings before all else.

Though I hold out few hopes for the movement as a whole, there MIGHT just be a couple of free-thinkers out there who are capable of understanding the issue. To those I urge you read Ruesch's books, Slaughter of the Innocent and Naked Empress. The BAVA website has a LOT of info, including the 2 vital CIVIS Bulletins on infiltration - very important reading (and complete and free of charge); most of the CIVIS Foundation reports, that add to the above; and much more on the phoneys in the movement, how 'alternatives' keep vivisection alive, the BBC, why ethics are a dead loss in the fight to end vivisection, and much much more.

None of it has been put online in order to fill an otherwise empty afternoon. To say what has been said before; unless the AR and AV movement decides to change tactics we will be forced to look at the putrid face of vivisection until the end of time.

 http://www.bava.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Chris makes some valid points, and in the end it is a combination of the ethical AND scientific debate, AND direct action AND political action that will win. One problem with using the scientific argument in New Zealand, is that unlike the UK, most vivisection is for the purpose of agricultural research or vertebrate pest control, not medical research.

So while it is true that using an animal as a "model" for a human or another animal species is problematic, the same cannot be said for using a sheep as a model for a sheep or a possum as a model for a possum. But the ethical argument is the same. And it is the ethical arguments against using vivisection to find ways of extracting yet more meat, milk or eggs from overstressed farm animals in a world already sated with animal protein that is worrying the industry.

I really don't think even the vivisectors are saying that vivisecting a rat will directly save a baby. If they do, then that argument can quite easily be shot down in flames. The most they are saying is that the experiments they do now MAY save the life of a baby in the future who does not yet exist. There are both scientific and ethical arguments that can be made against this.

Maybe the public don't care much about animal rights but they can be educated, and the ethics are much easier to understand than the science. I have been involved with campaigns against factory farming, and once you show people hens rescued from cages they generally know on an instinctive ethical level that what we are doing is wrong. The science of animal welfare is something they do not usually even want to know, asserting that "you don't need science to know this is cruel".

I share with Chris a concern over the lack of science education in the west. The problem as I see it is that children are taught science as a series of indisputable facts, rather than as a way of thinking that encourages them to keep their eyes open, question everything and not necessarily believe what those in authority are telling them. But that is a debate for another thread...

Most of the people I know who are anti-vivisection /animal rights originally became AV/AR because they couldn't bear to see the cruelty continue. They didn't care whether the experiments were justified or not they just knew that it is wrong to torture/exploit another creature. When I first got into AR I actually believed that vivisection worked but I was still against it.. Then I started reading the science behind it and realised what a sham the whole thing was.

When I speak to people in he street most are concenred about the abuse rather than the science. Those that are interested in the science I'll have a quick chat with about the damage vivisection does to human health etc and then pass them a URLs where they can read more about the science. I tell them not to believe me but to find out for themselves about the bad science behind it.

I'd say that the vast majority of people I speak to are against it because of the ethics of abusing another animal. The bad science part of it just makes us even more determined!

I think Michael is right: it's a combination of science, ethics and direct action that will end vivisection.

Not "bad science" just not "science" to begin with!

Sharron, the big mistake you make, as do most AR people, is by forgetting the fact that the vast majority of people are not AR people, and most do not give a toss for animal rights, or even animals per se. (Witness the fact that only a small number are vegetarian for instance.) As should be obvious, tell a mother whose child has cancer that rats are as important as her child and wait the inevitable result. (And let's remember that cancer affects most people these days one way or another!) Ethics ALONE are doomed to failure, which is why all the staged 'debates' on the BBC etc only ever address the ethical arguments. Time has proven ethics to be a total loss, isn't it time we moved on to more fruitful pastures?

Tatchell is not a phoney, but maybe he does not quite realise the company he is keeping by agreeing to share a platform with those three. Don’t underestimate him, even if he doesn’t realise now he will eventually. Most AR people are not strategists, they come into things initially from an ethical point of view and want to do something but are not sure what is the best thing to do. A situation ‘pseudo anti vivisectionists’ are POSITIONED to exploit.

Some AR activists go down the route of cultish thinking refusing to acknowledge that most people could not give a crap about AR and never will. If those people are rescuing animals from breeding centres and labs then I would not feel inclined to criticise them. They are doing something I have total respect for even if I don’t understand their mentality.

A small number of AR people appear to thrive on confrontations with the police however pointless this is. Arguing the ethical side solely can definitely be self serving and fatally blinding. A character like Langley can say that they are a vegan and that this is proof of their credibility. An ethics based outlook prevents people questioning that absurdity.

And people are also lazy, they are happy to hand over money to something they think is a good cause without delving too deeply, they can’t be bothered. Just as the general public hand over vast sums to cancer charities on the never never to feel they are doing something worthwhile.
People opposed to vivisection may also be naive and just don’t believe in the idea of ‘infiltrators’. Some AR people don’t want the truth, acting on it would ask too much of them. I am sure you realise that at this stage Chris.

Myself:

Yes you are right, I don't believe Tatchell is a phoney, he is well-meaning but unfortunately naive as to the - as you say - company he keeps.

"Some AR people don’t want the truth, acting on it would ask too much of them." This is very true; as others have said before, and I agree, AR people are in the main the biggest hurdle we face to achieving real change in regards to vivisection. I made comment on this in a lengthy article 'Time to Face Facts' which can be read at  http://www.bava.org.uk/Facts.html

See also my comments I made here regarding the new AR group in Cambridge. Sometimes it looks like AR people actively encourage defeat from the start.

If Chris is right and nobody really cares about animal rights, and nobody ever will care, then we will never win and we may as well stop now. In the end, vivisection will only end when enough people believe it is wrong, and take steps to stop it. We need to win hearts and minds. Most people may be naive, stupid, selfish, intellectually dishonest and lazy, but in the end I believe all of us are ethical beings, and we will eventually persuade enough people for vivisection to stop.

Remember that 300 years ago, nobody saw anything wrong with attending public executions, but now anyone who wanted to do so would be considered sick. So people can change their attitudes.

The science argument is in a way an ethical argument too, it is stating that it is unethical to continue to cause pain to animals where there is no gain from this in terms of useful knowledge. The problem is it is not a strong enough ethical argument, because it still allows agricultural experiments and manufacture of monoclonal antibodies.

Michael, I never did say that no one cares about animal rights. Please provide a reference for this if this is indeed what I have said somewhere. I did say that only animal rights people care about animal rights! And that this section of society is likely to remain a very small minority for a long time yet. You might well like to use the ethical arguments primarily, or even alone. However, what you or anyone else wants is immaterial - you have no choice but to use the arsenal of scientific and mecial arguments against vivisection if you want it to end!

Question: what is the justification on the part of the vivisectors that enables the practice to continue? Answer: that vivisection supposedly saves human lives. This is the one argument that has allowed vivisection to grow into the mighty industry which exists today, and most people fall for it.

Therefore, if you want to fight it effectively you just have to use the scientific arguments; arguments it must be said that could end vivisection in a short period if widely and forcibly spread amongst the population at large (Why do we hold back? What are we afraid of? Winning the argument?), whereas remaining in the wishy-washy land of ethics will ensure defeat time and time again, simply because human nature being what it is most people will always put humans before animals, however much you dislike this basic fact.

His exact words in one post were

”The vast majority of people don't give a flying f**k about animal rights”

and in another

“the vast majority of people are not AR people, and most do not give a toss for animal rights, or even animals per se”

which is true. Very different from what you use as the starting point of your argument

We are all flawed for sure but not all people are ”ethical beings“, you need only look at history and current events to see that. People don’t really change but that does not mean that change cannot take place. In Britain in the 1960s when hanging was abolished and homosexual behaviour was decriminalised it was against majority public opinion of the time. But for the subsequent generations who have grown up since bringing back the death penalty and recriminalising gay sex would be unthinkable except to a few twisted individuals.

I think Chris is saying that you will never end vivisection with the moral argument alone and that it is time to realise that. The scientific argument must never be sidelined or ignored the way some AV societies inexplicably do to lessen their impact - self sabotage or what!