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One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.
A masterpiece of investigative journalism and alternative scholarship, elegantly written Dirty Medicine embodies investigative reporting at its best. Links for those without Flash
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Slaughter of The Innocent
Printing history; The Slingshot edition was the seventh printing in the English language of Slaughter. It was published previously by Bantam in North America (1978) and a year later by Futura in England (1979). The other issues of the book were printed by Civitas Publications (1983,1985,1986,1991). All previous printings of the book had used copies of the first Bantam edition but for the new Slingshot edition an electronic manuscript was created enabling us to print with a slightly larger type face and page size. There are some books, that if you could wave a magic want you would wish to produce in sufficient number for everyone on the planet to read. For me, Slaughter of the Innocent is one of those books. From early on in the history of Slingshot, I had it in mind to re-publish it. I contacted Hans Ruesch and got permission. The most serious difficulty was the fact that the design and lay out of the book had become severely prejudiced after years of being copied from the first Bantam edition. With character recognition technology we created a new electronic manuscript, available not just for this edition, but for anyone else who offered to reprint the book in the future. For the new book and in honour of Hans Ruesch, then in his nineties, I in collaberation with Marco Mamone Capria, also a long standing admirer of the author and the book, on a new Preface.
Preface Marco Mamone Capria, PhD, University of Perugia, Italy If not me, then who; if not now, then when? (1) In January 1976, the book Imperatrice nuda (2) was published, with the subtitle ‘An indictment of contemporary medical science’.(3) Its author, Hans Ruesch, had until that time led an unusually rich and successful life. A Swiss citizen, born in Naples of Swiss parents, he was, during the Thirties, a world class racing driver; in the same years he also started writing fiction. In 1937 the first of his novels appeared in Switzerland; in 1953 this novel was made into the movie The Racers, starring Kirk Douglas. In 1938 Ruesch moved to the United States in order to devote himself exclusively to a literary career. In 1950 his first best-seller, and still the most famous of his novels, Top of the World, was published. The book deals with the world of the Inuit, or Eskimos, and their conflicting relationships with white men; it is an imaginative and fascinating story, but one which rests, as does all Ruesch’s fiction, on a sound documentation of the country and its denizens. Top of the World was followed by four other novels, South of the Heart or The Great Thirst, The Stealers, The Game, Back to Top of the World, and several short stories published in some of the main US and European magazines. In 1960 Top of the World became a movie, starring Anthony Quinn. Apart from the very first novel, which in its English version was entitled The Racer, all Ruesch’s books were first written in English, and then translated into several other languages. In some cases these translations were in fact re-writes, since the author actually re-wrote the original books, taking advantage of his fluency in four languages. Ruesch’s novels are both captivating and subtle, and full of fact-ual information about their widely different settings. Their main con-cern seems to be to illustrate the clash of cultures in all of its forms, from simple misunderstanding to imperialism and the revolt against it. The author’s viewpoint is a broadly humanistic one, within which each culture must be understood on its own terms and in its own geo-graphic and historical context, before any attempt is made to introd-uce foreign cultural contents and values. Clearly, these themes are now more timely than ever. To re-read Ruesch’s fiction – in particular his South of the Heart, an impressive account of the Islamic world-view – could only have a beneficial effect on a contemporary public and their political leaders. One of the reasons Ruesch’s novels are not as well known as they were (apart from Top of the World, a modern classic which, at least in the Italian version, is still reprinted after fifty years) has to do with the change in their author’s life which eventually led to the publication of his essays on contemporary medical research and industry. At the beginning of the nineteen seventies, Ruesch was living in Rome. One day he was shown a black kitten by an acquaintance; the cat had scars all over its small body. He was told that the little animal, which was to die after a few days notwithstanding the care tended to it, had been rescued from a medical laboratory. Immediately it dawned on him that it was exceedingly unlikely that medical progress could ever be, or have been, achieved by doing such things to a small cat. Recently Ruesch has said (4) that another factor which influenced him to take up the cause of anti-vivisection was the death fifty years before, in Zurich, of his year old baby brother, Konrad. Konrad had been affected by common milk crusts which is sometimes caused in babies by the intake of excessive protein, during breast feeding. Fifty years later, Ruesch was to read about Salvarsan. Developed by Paul Ehrlich, for which ‘Magic Bullet’ he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Salvarsan was known during its development as 606, the six hund-redth and sixth arsenic and mercury preparation tested on animals, in this case, a dog named Hata. The drug was dropped by its German manufacturers after it was discovered that, used as a cure for syphilis, it often succeeded in killing the patient. It was by a preparation containing also arsenic and mercury that Konrad had been ‘treated’ in 1917.(5) Up to this time, in the nineteen seventies, Ruesch, who had always had a strong interest in medicine, and indeed had edited an Italian series of popular medical books called The Health’s Hand-books,(6) had been unaware that a large number of self-styled medical researchers had been trying for centuries to develop treatments for human illnesses by performing experiments, many of them very cruel and intellectually despicable, on animals of different species. This discovery affected him deeply, and when in 1973 Ruesch gave to his publisher his last novel he publicly stated that ‘he was never going to write fiction again so long as the fraud of vivisection was not generally exposed.’ From then on he devoted himself resolutely to this task, and in 1974 he founded the Center for Scientific Information on Vivisection (CIVIS).(7) The book he published two years later, Imperatrice nuda, was accordingly something quite new in Ruesch’s production, being an historical and scientific essay on vivisection, which provided a wide documentation on the many disasters provoked by the widespread reliance on, and legal recognition of, this variety of pseudoscience. The American version of the book, published in 1978 with the title Slaughter of the Innocent, was much longer and fuller than the original work. It is this version of the book that was to be translated in the following years into many languages, including Japanese and Hebrew, and is presented in this volume, in its seventh English language edition, which includes all the additions made by the author since the first one. The larger context Great books are never exceptional in isolation: they are created and produced within and into a social context. They arrive on the cusp of their changing times and help motivate individuals and coalesce movements. Often, although authors may think that they are working in isolation, in the case of a truly important book they are riding on the crest of an unseen wave which materialises only with the comple-tion of their work. Legions of unannounced followers are waiting for great books to give articulation to their own thoughtful explorations, and lend authority to their actions. Great books, although they often appear before their time, are always of their time. Hans Ruesch’s Slaughter of the Innocent proves to be a great book by all the above criteria. When it was first published, it was both of its time in its clamour for radical change, and before its time in its uncompromising commitment to absolute abolition. The book be-came a lodestar and a guide to those who had always suspected that vivisection was a cruel, unscientific and unhealthy practice but had lacked the detailed analysis and understanding of science with which to argue. The decades on either side of the late sixties provided the found-ations for a whole new political analysis. Rather than the relationship between industry, capital and worker, which were the basic tenets of Marxist thinking, this new analysis examined inequalities of power in all forms: between multinationals and indigenous workers, between psychiatric patients and State institutions, between male doctors and their female patients, between men and women both domestically and at work, between black and white, between apparently able and ‘dis-abled’ – and between humans and non-human animals. A revitalised interest in animals and their habitat grew out of an ecology movement which developed after the second world war. Slaughter of the Innocent slipped into a historical continuum which had been re-writing social history since the early sixties. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book Silent Spring, signalled the way that the new environmental and ecological criticism was to be written. Strongly stating the case against man’s industrial incursions into the world of nature, it also pointed to the health-damaging effects to humans of the new farming chemicals. Even before it was publish-ed it drew fire from the chemical companies which produced pest-icides. In 1964, Ruth Harrison’s brilliantly pre-emptive Animal Machines (8) was published in England. Harrison’s book, together with a long article about it in the Observer newspaper, stirred up such wrath amongst the British people that the Government was forced to set up an Inquiry into ‘factory farming’. Amongst the plethora of books which dealt with the welfare and treatment of animals, (9) Ruesch did find two books by one author which showed that he was not alone in believing in the importance of sustained anti-vivisection writing. John Vyvyan had spent the majority of his life as a Shakespearean scholar (10) but in retirement he wrote two seminal books which looked at vivisection and the anti-vivisection movement, In Pity and in Anger (11) and The Dark Face of Science. (12) Ruesch spoke to Vyvyan, who complained that his two books had met with a considerable and unfair opposition. Vyvyan died just before the first publication of Imperatrice nuda. Other works were published in the sixties and mid-seventies, which enjoyed a wide circulation and contributed in a decisive way to the emergence of a new climate of opinion concerning modern med-icine. Among them one must remember Maurice Pappworth’s Human Guinea Pigs, which shed a sinister light on the way experimental medicine was operating in western societies, apparently heedless of the Nuremberg code established to provide a legal grounding for the Nazi doctors’ trials; (13) Thomas McKeown’s historical studies, which detailed the true, non-medical causes of the main advances in human life expectancy during the last centuries; (14) and Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine, which developed with consummate scholarship and phil-osophical sensitivity the claim contained in its memorable first line: ‘The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.’ (15) With this new writing, for the first time since the turn of the cent-ury, ‘muckraking’ journalism in America, writers and campaigners held companies, governments and individuals responsible for what they were doing to workers, consumers and the environment. These books were also providing a radical criticism of one of the unquestioned myths of modernity – scientific medicine and the progress in the standards of living which it supposedly achieved. Slaughter of the Innocent is one of the best examples of this modern ‘muckraking’ and critical genre. It names names, analyses the motives of all participants in the dirty game of vivisection, and dares to say that the empress is naked. Notwithstanding the repeated attempts to suppress them and silence their author, Ruesch’s books against vivisection,(16) and part-icularly Slaughter of the Innocent, are landmarks in the journey to end both the oppression of animals and the control of health by the ind-ustrial science monopoly. One reason for the enduring importance of Slaughter of the Innocent is that, when researching it, Ruesch worked his way through the original scientific literature in German, English, Italian, and French. His purpose was to verify the authority of the endless series of benefits that vivisectors claimed for their methodology. His dis-covery, which was to form the historical core of the book, was that this was just a pretence: not a single one of the important medical discoveries credited to vivisection was in fact due to it. The opposite view – which unfortunately is still by and large the orthodox one in the bio-medical community – depended on accepting historical falsification and/or muddled thinking on the link between scientific conjectures and their confirming evidence. Publication in Italy In Italy, Ruesch’s arguments discrediting the scientific grounds of ani-mal experimentation had the dramatic and paradoxical effect of top-pling the only anti-vivisection society existing at the time, the UAI.(17) In its debris, several grass-roots new societies blossomed during the year following the publication of Imperatrice nuda. The popular up-roar and rational questioning of vivisection originating from Ruesch’s book prompted some town councils to outlaw vivisection inside the city area during the Seventies. These decrees contained supporting information from Imperatrice nuda. The greatest result, however, was probably the enactment of a law permitting the conscientious objection to animal experimentation in all laboratories or research institutes, both public and private. This law,(18) devised by a group of people who had a long-standing connec-tion with Ruesch,(19) should be considered as a model for most other countries. In particular, its approval by the European Parliament should be given a high priority by the European anti-vivisectionist movement. Unfortunately, in Italy the anti-vivisectionist societies have not strongly enough opposed the efforts by the vivisectionist lobby, inside the universities and elsewhere, to illegally hide the law from those to whom it applies – particularly students – or threaten them when they wish to avail themselves of it. Clearly, if both the very existence of such a law and the powerful arguments against vivisection presented in Ruesch’s books had been more widely known among Italian students and researchers, vivisection would have been ended in a matter of years. The response to the book in Britain Although there were positive results from the publication of Slaught-er of the Innocent in Britain, unlike in Italy, these positive results did not come from city authorities or the Government. The book produc-ed further progressive changes in the animal rights movement and provoked a radical confrontation between abolitionists and Britain’s established reformist anti-vivisection movement. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) came into being in Britain in 1976.(20) The organisation grew out of a small direct action group called The Band of Mercy, formed in 1972, and responsible amongst other actions for a successful burglary at the offices of the London-based Research Defence Society.(21) By the end of the nineteen seventies, hundreds of people were taking part in ALF operations. In 1977, Animal Aid was founded in England. This organisation was the first ‘life style anti-cruelty’ organisation in the world; its aims covered the protection of all animals whether they were tortured by vivisectors or exploited and ill-treated in circuses. The previously moribund ‘animal sympathetic’ organisations, such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the historical anti-vivisection organisations National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) (22) and the British Union for the Abolition Vivisection (BUAV), (23) were left behind in the wake of the first signs of a truly critical assault on industrial society’s oppression of animals. When, in the mid-seventies, these older moribund organisations were overtaken by a new wave of radical and less compromised org-anisations, industrial science and medicine found some difficulty, for a short time, in de-railing them. Apart from the more general books about the oppression of animals, one of anti-vivisection book which appeared around this period was Richard Ryder’s Victims of Science: the use of animals in research. (24) This book was first published in 1975 and then again in 1983 by the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Ryder’s book was a polite affair befitting a man who had been thoroughly versed in the abuse of laboratory animals at Cambridge and Columbia and then at Oxford Hospitals. In 1969, Ryder had ‘seen the light’ and become an activist who went on to be Chairman of the RSPCA. Richard Ryder was a reformist and, in the ‘summary of main find-ings’ at the end of his book, he states three conclusions which adequately clarify the position of gradualists at this time. Firstly, he suggested the prohibition of all painful non-medical experiments, secondly he suggested government support for the development of alternatives to animals in research, and finally he asked for greater public accountability. In Hans Ruesch’s view the first two reforms suggested by Ryder were inadequate, but more importantly, any support for such reforms could actually be seen as a barrier to abolishing vivisection. The first reform leaves untouched all vivisection for ‘apparently’ medical pur-poses, while the second seemed to promote ‘an alternative to animal research’, but in Ruesch’s view only promoted animal research as the scientific ‘gold standard’. Ryder and others, despite being anti-vivi-sectionists, still claimed vivisection was somehow useful to science. The antipathy of the reformists to Ruesch’s abolitionist views was evident when Ruesch travelled to England on the publication of his book. Hans Ruesch travelled to England twice in 1979 to lead marches in both Cambridge and Oxford and take part in debates in these university towns. In early May Ruesch travelled especially from Switzerland to lead more than 500 anti-vivisectionists in the then biggest demonstration against vivisection, organised in England to Cambridge University. The event was organised by the newly formed Animal Aid, and the demonstration was considered a considerable success by its organisers and participants. Five months later, Ruesch was in Oxford heading a demonstration which had more than double the participants, so many in fact that the large auditorium of the University could not hold all the demonstrators. While the Cambridge event had been an unqualified success, however, by October 1979, the opposition had had time to organise. When Hans Ruesch spoke, he referred to the suppression of his book in Italy and the United States and the attempts by prominent people in the British anti-vivisection movement to stop the book. Ruesch also spoke about how John Pitt, the editor of the BUAV journal Animal Welfare, had responded to his book in a review. Pitt had lambasted the book while defending vivisectionists and even their laboratory equipment.(25) (26) No sooner had Ruesch begun this critique of the established British anti-vivisection societies, than he was heckled from the floor. A voice lashing out viciously from the audience interrupted me in midsentence: ‘You are backbiting, Mister Ruesch! Mister Pitt isn’t here and can’t defend himself! Shame on you!’ – or words to that effect. They came from a sharp-looking young woman. I responded asking just as angrily why she wanted to silence me, and soon a verbal slugfest was under way, briskly interrupted by a mature man who angrily ordered the woman to shut up because he had come to hear the foreign guest and not some loutish heckler in the crowd. The stormy approval those words received from the audience discouraged the woman from opening her mouth again. At least for that night.(27) The two hecklers turned out to be Gill Langley (28) and Richard Ryder. The Oxford meeting was a foretaste of how Ruesch’s important books were to be treated over the next twenty years in Britain. The meeting was also a clear sign of the turbulence which was to settle upon the British anti-vivisection movement over the new two decades. Ruesch was to find the British anti-vivisection scene dominated by reformists and establishment-minded older organisations which had lain on their laurels for long periods. As well as having a natural antipathy to militancy, these organisations were riddled with ‘agents’ placed there by industrial and medical science. Their institutional organisation often depended upon a system of advisory boards which sought the opinion of vivisectors (those being the individuals who knew most about the value of vivisection!) when deciding policy. The contemporary situation in Britain In contemporary Britain, the division between those who argue that ‘vivisection is scientific fraud’ and those who argue that the camp-aigning emphasis should be placed upon ‘cruelty to animals’, fuels a constant battle. That these two strategic positions have developed separately is understandable. That the two strategies should become engaged in conflict is less easy to understand. One reason is that the anti-cruelty campaigns tend to be all inclusive in their strategies, demanding of participants a life style which eschews all-evidence of animal exploitation. This is despite the fact that people can consist-ently and effectively oppose vivisection without committing them-selves to this life style, including being vegetarians or vegans, for all the good reasons that exist in favour of this choice.(29) When animalist and, indeed, self-defined anti-vivisectionist groups insist on never mentioning the good scientific reasons against vivisection, they inev-itably make life more difficult for themselves. It is a moot point just why they should do so. Perhaps because the number of animals used in Britain for the purposes of classical vivisection has declined since the mid-seventies – though biotechnologies are probably leading just now to a new increase – even the focus for the anti-vivisection campaigns has shift-ed to include the use of animals for testing chemicals. In America, Japan and Europe, millions of animals are being used to newly test chemicals, the toxicity of which has been known for years. Of course such experiments are not only cruel, but unreliable, and so they open the door for future damage to the health of humans. Ruesch’s arg-uments apply to chemical testing just as they do to pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures and research into psychological responses.(30) Ronnie Lee, one of the founders of the ALF, has written that he is pleased to see that new tactics had emerged in the battle against all kinds of animal abuse. The original strategies of the ALF had been, he suggested, haphazard and diffuse.(31) In the event of the new strategies of direct action, arguments about how to persuade scientists and policy makers are being re-appraised. The strategies which have superseded those initially used by the ALF are highly focused and geared to hurting the enemy economic-ally. They have been refined over three major campaigns against Consort Kennels, Hill Grove cat farm and the campaign to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences Laboratory. Consort, near Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire, bred beagles for vivisection. After a nine-month campaign by the Consort Beagles Campaign, the premises were shut down and 200 dogs were re-homed. The campaign against Hill Grove cat farm, near Oxford, followed. The cat farm was shut down in August 1999. The campaign against the farm, where kittens were reared for vivisection, had been begun in an unfocused way by the ALF in 1981, re-invigorated and consolidat-ed in earnest by Cynthia O’Neill and a small group of campaigners in 1991, and finally conjoined with the organisers of the successful Consort campaign in 1997.(32) This group was to move on after the Hill-grove campaign to be involved in the campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences Laboratories, now in its fifth year of organisation. (33) The Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) (34) campaign, while keeping and depending upon the mass demonstration and the more established strategies used since the nineteenth century, has develop-ed a whole new armoury of guerrilla tactics. After research and anal-ysis, they ‘hit’ insurers, financiers, and linked transport and logistic companies. They have developed a very personal response to comp-any directors and executives whom they have named and shamed and then tried to drive from the company. Although the campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences Lab-oratory includes the word cruelty in its title, the organisation is clearly informed about the scientific arguments against vivisection. In 2002, SHAC began approaching healthcare professionals to record first hand testimonies ‘of people who have witnessed the untold human suffering caused by drugs ‘safety tested’ on animals.’ (35) In today’s highly integrated global economy, campaigning against animal testing no longer means going up against individual vivi-sectors, but now involves taking on corporate industrial science and, in contemporary Britain, its zealous Government backers. (36) Even with the present energetic and successful campaigns in England and the evident hostility of public opinion, there is still a long way to go before total victory against the vivisectionist lobby. Scientists are still trying to push through escalating programmes of vivisection. Cambridge University (37) planned a human brain research centre, on a green belt site, where researchers would carry out vivi-section work on marmoset monkeys. (38) Despite the fact that the Uni-versity’s original application for the centre was turned down by the South Cambridgeshire District Council in 2001, and a revised ap-plication was refused in February 2002, the University gained a public inquiry before a government-appointed Planning Inspector. This Inquiry finished in 2003, however, a final decision will be made unilaterally by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. (39) As far as the scientists are concerned I think that there has been wide and sustained recognition that the 1986 Act is the most comprehensive and the strictest legislation regulating the use of animals in research anywhere in the world. There is, as far as I know, universal respect for that. I do not know of anyone who would want to change that situation. After some exchanges Blakemore expands on this point and clarifies its real meaning: The Act, I think, is very good in this respect in that it rules out nothing in advance and requires everything to be judged on its merits ... One of the great strengths of the Act is that it is not prescriptive, in a sense it started with a clean piece of paper, anything might be possible if it could be justified in terms of potential benefits and in the mitigation of pain and suffering. (41)
One product of Ruesch’s prodigious research was to prove definit-ively that scientific doubts about vivisection had been voiced by liter-ally hundreds of scientists and doctors, a fact which had been carefully concealed from the wider public by the vivisectionist lobby and also, most regrettably, by the so-called ‘humane societies’. In Slaughter of the Innocent, a large selection of such statements is prov-ided, but it is the subsequent volume, One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection, that fully documents the extent and quality of this opposition by chronologically listing quotations of medical doctors who criticize vivisection as a useless and dangerous practice.(43) This book has been widely used and sometimes pillaged by subsequent authors, not always with an adequate acknowledgment of their source. Though this fact may well be deplored, it bears further evidence of the influence and of the authoritativeness of our author. Vivisection had not only failed to deliver the goods its practition-ers had been promising – and boasting – for two centuries. It had seriously misled the medical profession and undermined health care, causing in many instances severe damage to patients. So the oppos-ition to the practice of ‘testing’ on animals drugs, substances or ther-apies was not to be based just on compassion towards animals – it was as well, indissolubly, a plea for the human sufferer’s right to effective treatments. One important question remains. Why and how has vivisection survived so many failures, some of them gigantic, and weathered the scientific and humanitarian protests which have accompanied it throughout its history? Apart from academic dogmatism and op-portunism, the fundamental reason, which Ruesch expounds and exemplifies at special length in the second of his books, Naked Em-press, is that for as long as animal experimentation is officially recognized as a valid ground for inference to humans, the pharma-ceutical industry will be able to market a never-ending flow of highly profitable but only marginally useful, useless, or even dangerous drugs. There is hardly another method that could be used as effectively to this end: the very ambiguity of the answers given by vivisection, while an unmistakable mark of its pseudoscientific character, is ad-vantageous to the industry when the time comes for it to excuse the ‘collateral damages’ its products have caused to people. At this point, a common misunderstanding about Ruesch’s po-sition must be dispelled. Contrary to widespread misinformation, Ruesch has from the very beginning of his activism as an abolitionist stressed the importance of the moral argument against vivisection. This should be clear to anybody who reads the first few pages of Slaughter of the Innocent. It is also spelled out forcibly further on in the book: The first objection is a moral one. If vivisection were useful instead of damaging, that would be an aggravating rather that an extenuating circumstance, for it would sanction the principle that the end justifies the means – that well-worn picklock which has always opened all doors to wickedness, including those to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. If man accepts this principle, he can no longer consider himself a morally superior being. [p. 146] But what Ruesch has always refused to do is to reduce the case against vivisection to ethics. Those whom Ruesch accuses of using only ethical arguments against vivisection in a detrimental manner, are those who he cons-iders are trying to obfuscate the situation, those who appear tolerant of reform but intolerant of total abolition. In 1983, Ruesch wrote: So far the common denominator of the British AV societies has been their exclusive use of lofty – and perfectly valid – ethical arguments, to the system-atic exclusion of all the powerful scientific arguments and evidence with which Abolition should be demanded and could be obtained, and whose list keeps growing day by day. They deliberately overlook all the massive evidence of widespread damage caused to human health by the erroneous method of animal based research. By his insistence on scientific arguments, Ruesch has proved more long-sighted than his critics. In fact, from a historical perspective, there is little questioning that appeal to ethics or humanity has never succeeded in doing more than enact superficial improvements, if any, in the rearing and keeping of the laboratory animals. This is not surprising: so long as experiments on animals are recognized as an es-sential step towards the enhancing of the human condition, the sufferings of laboratory animals will always be considered as the les-ser evil by most of the people – and those who just want to put an end to it will be accordingly labelled as sentimental misanthropists. To insist on defending the rights of animals while conceding that animal experimentation does in fact help medicine to progress, is politically self-defeating. To quote again one of Ruesch’s pithy statements: In fact, moral mumblings of the type ‘A respect for all life’ stand no better chance against the rhetorical shout ‘It’s either your baby or a dog’, than a mouse in a lab.(44) Worse yet, any ‘reform’ to cages, for example, may perhaps help the laboratory animals to lead a less uncomfortable life, but it will not succeed in protecting the health of the real, irreplaceable and un-protected guinea-pigs at the end of the process – ourselves. And to insist that the point is to find ‘alternative methods’ is tantamount to covertly endorsing that vivisection is scientifically acceptable: It is our opinion that all organisations that promise to ‘develop alternatives’ suffer from the ‘in-built fraud-clause’ which is the assumption that animal experimentation cannot be profitably abolished today without causing great harm to medical progress and human health, whereas just the opposite is true. (45) In sum, to separate the well-being of humans from the respect for the (other) animals as far as medical research is concerned means en-dangering both.(46) The scientific arguments against vivisection are in fact the only ones which are likely to make a lasting impression on present or future biomedical researchers, legislators and public.(47) For this reason to make Ruesch’s books available again is an important contribution in the struggle against both pseudoscientific misinformation and cruelty to sentient, human and non-human, beings.
Slaughter of the Innocent presented much more than a bill of indict-ment against the modern world’s mad vivisectors; it accused the bourgeoning scientific medical industry, its system of education, its multinational agencies, the pharmaceutical companies, medical science and its researchers of basing the development of drugs and medical practices on the ultimately harmful, completely useless and cruel premise of vivisection. It would of course be ridiculous to expect too much from scientists and their conscience. Together with the enactment and the enforcement of laws allowing for the conscientious objection to vivisection, it is high time a new popular movement rose up to dem-and abolition of all the practices associated with vivisection, and for a real concern for human health to be shown by both researchers and the public authorities. What is at stake is not some aspect of the ethical and emotional sensitivity of a minority group: at stake is the future of the whole biosphere. All three of Hans Ruesch’s books about medicine and vivisection are political; they are not just about the politics of vivisection, they are about the relations of power. All such discourses are difficult to understand, their subtleties often incomprehensible to the outsider who naively sees a clear and uncluttered objective somewhere in the mid distance. However, principally because of Hans Ruesch’s work, his constant determination to face up to every challenge to his ideas and his research, his refusal to lie comfortable in some middle ground while the battle rages about him, it is easier today to understand the opposing power and the political dynamics around science and vivisection in particular and the oppression of animals in general. Since the first appearance of Imperatrice nuda, Ruesch’s books and articles against vivisection have repeatedly been suppressed by the media and many attempts have been made to silence their author and his CIVIS Foundation by media censorship and judicial means.(48) In fact, as hinted above, also his past literary output became soon un-available, because the very name of such a dangerous enemy of the ‘Chemical-Medical-Vivisectionist Kombinat’ had to be removed completely from the public discourse. In fact, one of the reasons Ruesch’s voice has not been heard as frequently as would have been desirable in recent years, apart for censorship, is that in the last decade he had to fight against a long and enervating series of suits for ‘defamation’. Their origin lies in his consistent refusal to follow the general tactics adopted by most well-known critics of the establishment, namely to expose the sin without also exposing the sinner. Though Ruesch’s claims have never been proven false in a trial, and though provably false allegations have been made against him in lawsuits, he has been repeatedly condemned to costly fines, in Italy and especially in Switzerland. This is a disquieting fact which deser-ves to be more widely known, since it throws a very long shadow on the workings of our judicial system, and on the reality of freedom of speech in our democracies. Marco Mamone Capria, PhD, University of Perugia, Italy 1 Possibly originating with the Rabbi Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?’ 2 Not to be confused with Ruesch’s second published book in English, Naked Empress or the Great Medical Fraud, which was first published in 1982 by CIVIS. 3 La scienza medica attuale sotto accusa. 4 Interview with Martin J. Walker. 5 Baby Cured to Death with Arsenic and Mercury. International Foundation Report 16, CIVIS For the Abolition of Vivisection, 1994. 7 Centro Informazione Vivisezionista Internazionale Scientifica. 9 One of the most advertised books of this kind, Singer’s book Animal Liberation: A new ethics for our treatment of animals, came out in 1975, when Imperatrice nuda was already in press. Although the book boosted the animal liberation movement, it was not an anti-vivisection text. In this book and later, Singer expressed the view that vivisectors should be the ones to have control over their experiments. In 1991, Singer sued Ruesch when Ruesch described him disparagingly in an article for the journal of the Lega Anti-Vivisezione (LAV), Italy’s main anti-vivisection society. On July 5th 1993, a Court in Perugia fined both CIVIS and LAV for writing and publishing the article. Four months before the sentence, it was revealed in Rome’s La Repubblica that Singer’s animal rights lecture tour of Italy, in 1989 at the time of the publication of Slaughter of the Innocent, had been sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s biggest sponsors of self-styled ‘scientific medicine’, i. e. medicine based on animal experimentation. Despite the fact that Ruesch and his lawyers considered that this article had a bearing on the case, the court refused to allow the information to be submitted in evidence. 10 John Vyvyan, 1908-1975. 11 John Vyvyan, In Pity and in Anger, Michael Joseph, London 1969. 14 T. McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population, New York, Academic Press, 1976. 16 These are Slaughter of the Innocent, Naked Empress or The Great medical Fraud and 1000 Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection. 17 Unione Antivivisezionista Italiana. This society had been founded in 1929 by the medical doctor Gennaro Ciaburri, but after Ciaburri’s death in 1970, it had fallen under the control of a group of lawyers, who used it mainly as a strategic resource for self-promotion. 18 DL n. 413, of October 12, 1993. 19 For the story of this law, see: http://www.antivivisezione.it/story%20of%20a%20law.html.24 20 In the 1983 CIVIS version of Slaughter of the Innocent, Ruesch praises the activists of the ALF with the words: ‘While others talked and wept, ALF acted in an unprecedented direct action campaign, with nothing to be gained for its members, much to be lost.’ In fact ALF activists, when caught, were often sentenced to disproportionate penalties, which shows that they were perceived as a real threat to the establishment. Barry Horne, the ALF activist who died at 49 on November 5, 2001, after two weeks of hunger strike, had been sentenced to 18 years for a couple of arson attacks on companies financing tests on animals. 21 Set up in 1908, the aim of the Research Defence Society was to counter the arguments of anti-vivisectionists and particularly at the time, the writing and campaigning of L. Lind-Af-Hageby. 22 NAVS was founded in 1875 by Francis Power Cobbe, as the Victorian Street Society. In 1898, Cobbe left the National Anti-Vivisection Society, finally disgusted at the approach adopted by reformists and founded the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. (Rebecca Hall, Voiceless Victims, Wildwood House, Middlesex, 1984). 23 BUAV was founded in June 1898 as an absolutist anti-vivisection organisation. Its aims were to ‘oppose vivisection absolutely and entirely, and to demand its complete prohibition by law, without attempts at compromise of any kind’. (Rebecca Hall. Ibid.). 24 Published by Davis-Poynter (England) 25 In an article that followed the ‘review’ Pitt quoted a pro vivisection review in the New Scientist which had said: "It would be good to see no more volumes like Slaughter of the Innocent, a highly emotive attack on vivisection by someone who would like to see it abolished, not merely restricted" (cit. in Hans Ruesch’s Bullet-In No.1). 26 This review, together with other factors, was to have disastrous consequences for BUAV, when the next Annual assembly of the organisation ousted the long standing president Betty Earp and swept into her place Jean Pink, the founder of Animal Aid. Within a couple of years, however, Pink herself lost the presidency and the post remained unfilled for some years. Pink soon retired completely from activism, and in 1985 she announced she had become a follower of a ‘Spiritual Master’ called Da Free John, ‘a Divine Being, a second Christ.’ 27 Hans Ruesch’s version of the events in Oxford cited in CIVIS Report No. 14. 28 Prior to 1981, Dr Gill Langley was the General Secretary of the Lord Hadwen Trust Fund for Humane Research (LHTF) a reformist organisation linked to BUAV. In 1981, Animal Aid took over the LHTF and Dr Gill Langley became a Technical Adviser to AA. From this position, she criticised and objected to the distribution of Slaughter of the Innocent and Ruesch’s later book Naked Empress. In 1982, Langley wrote about Naked Empress in AA’s Outrage magazine: ‘There are important inaccuracies scattered throughout the book’. In 1983, Ruesch wrote that she did not ‘name any [of the inaccuracies] – surely an ingenious ploy for discouraging prospective readers.’ 29 Conversely, one should not fall in the trap of considering that anyone professing to be a vegetarian or a vegan is necessarily a genuine animal lover or anti-vivisectionist. People (and particularly scientists!) can opt for this nutritional regime because it is more healthy than the ‘omnivorous’ one – and because it may be helpful in improving one’s public image. 30 Ruesch deals with toxicity testing and the notorious LD-50 test on pp. 115-7 of Slaughter of the Innocent. An in-depth treatment of this topic is provided by Alix Fano in Lethal Laws: Animal Testing, Human Health and Environmental Policy, London and New York, Zed Books, 1997. 32 A Cat In Hell’s Chance: The story of the campaign against Hill Grove cat farm. Written by the campaigners, edited by Anny Malle. Slingshot Publications. London, 2002. 33 In 1997, Channel 4 showed It’s a Dog’s Life, which exposed through covert filming the treatment of beagles at Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) laboratories. In the following furore, £85 million was wiped off the firm’s share prices and two former employees were convicted of cruelty to dogs. 34 SHAC, 6, Boat Lane, Evesham, Worcs. WR11 4BP, England. 35 SHAC leaflet, Autumn 2002. 36 When SHAC managed to persuade capitalising funders to withdraw loans from Huntingdon, the New Labour Government stepped in, setting up a special account for them to draw upon, at the Bank of England. 37 Animal Aid director Andrew Tyler explained objections to the laboratory on the X-Cape web site: 38 This work is already done within the University but on a smaller scale. 39 Tony Blair has already gone public with his support for the Cambridge Primate Centre. In a speech to the Royal Society – and in press interviews before and after – the PM characterised opponents of such projects as driven by ignorance and emotion. 40 These Minutes, which provide a precious and often dismaying source of information for the British contemporary debate on vivisection, are available at the House of Lords web address. 41 Minutes of Evidence, Tuesday 22 January 2002. Italics added. 42 Slaughter of the Innocent, pp. 119-120. 43 Today there exist societies of medical doctors explicitly based on scientific antivivisectionist principles, like Doctors and Lawyers for Responsible Medicine (DLRM), which “is an international organisation with 500 professional members calling for the abolition on medical and scientific grounds of all animal experiments in human medical research” (http: //www.dlrm.org). Its honorary president is professor Pietro Croce, who was inspired by Ruesch’s Imperatrice nuda to write his fundamental essay Vivisection or Science?, London and New York, Zed 1999 (first Italian edition: 1981). 44 CIVIS Bullet-in 1 (The anti-Hans Ruesch front. The British Bulwark at Strasbourg), p. 47. Unfortunately Ruesch’s lesson has yet to be learnt by many anti-vivisectionists. This is clearly shown in some pages of the Minutes of Evidence quoted above. For instance, in the Tuesday 6 November 2001 session, the Scientific Adviser to the Dr. Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, Gill Langley, who was the General Secretary of the Trust at the time of Ruesch’s visits in England, declares when introducing herself to the Committee: ‘We are based on anti-vivisection principles, so we are opposed on an ethical basis to all animal experiments . . . The Trust is only interested in the development of alternative methods.’ (Italics added). 46 The idea that the most rational argument against vivisection has to do with human health also applies to many other forms of animal oppression. Although arguments against factory farming were initially based upon ethical and philosophical arguments, over the last twenty years it has increasingly been argued that the industrial production of food (because of the use of antibiotics, growth enhancers, pesticides and other chemicals) ultimately has an adverse effect upon human health. 47 Again it is useful to quote from the Minutes of Evidence, where Michelle Thew, Chief Executive of BUAV (Tuesday 17 July 2001), is reported stating: ‘When we are talking about animal experiments the issue at stake is whether we as humans have a right to inflict pain and suffering on an animal not for its benefit,’ and she is soon deluged under a series of questions like: ‘What do you mean by a sentient being? How much of the animal kingdom do you cover? Does it extends to mosquitos? ... What is the moral authority for your views? Is it St Augustine? Is it Brahma? Is it Confucius, or is it just your own opinion?’, etc. Surprisingly, for a Society like BUAV which was once presided over by Dr. Hadwen of Gloucester (see 1000 doctors (and many more) against vivisection, p. 276), and for a Trust which is explicitly named after him, neither Thew nor Langley ever refer to the medical disasters caused by vivisection; the harshest statement by Langley in this direction is: ‘Animal tests are very far from being scientifically perfect.’ 48 A welcome reversal of this was the publication in 2003, of an education history anthology, Past to Present Ideas that Changed our World, by Stuart Hirschberg and Terry Hirschberg, published on a world wide basis by Pearson Education Inc. This wide ranging anthology which looks at influential ideas in the modern world gives fourteen pages to faithful excerpts from Slaughter of the Innocent which is introduced in the contents pages with the words: ‘An internationally respected critic of vivisection argues against it on ethical, moral, and practical grounds.’
Born of a rare blend of high intelligence, sound but unstuffy scholarship, a strong capacity for pity and empathy, allied to a striking literary skill. Slaughter of the Innocent constitutes the 20th century’s single most powerful indictment of ‘vivisection’ – the experimentation with and upon living animals. Dr Tony Page. From the Forword to Civis Answers Questions on Vivisection. |
