BRINGING THE MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC
Advertising in Switzerland for Abolition of Animal Experiments in Opposition to the Pharmaceutical and 'Animal Protection' Syndicates.
Christopher Anderegg, MD, PhD.
I would first like to tell you something about my background. I had a simultaneous medical and biology education in the US, an MD-Ph.D program which is available at 25 universities in America. When you're finished the program, you obtain an MD and a PhD in biology, biochemistry or whatever, and then enter the academic community to do intensive, medically-oriented research, hopefully related to clinical medicine. I had considered practising medicine, but I chose the MD-PhD course because research had fascinated me during my college days.
Just a little bit about my background as an animal experimenter. For my Ph.D research in biology I killed about 2,000 mice. Killing these animals was never pleasant, but I merely pushed the whole thing out of my conscience, killed the mice and knew that by doing so I would be able to complete my dissertation and get published in, I hoped, a prestigious journal - and then I could put myself on a pedestal when looking for a job. I am now ashamed of what drove me to slaughtering those 2,000 mice - so that I could get my PhD - and I never pretended (and neither did my professor) that this research was in any way applicable, in the long term or the short, to human patients. So, I felt somewhat guilty when I came to Switzerland and was doing precisely this same kind of research with mice and rats - my thinking being that, perhaps in a decade, I would be at the clinical level and working (a euphemism!) or experimenting on human beings.
At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where I obtained my post-doctoral position, I was fortunate enough to meet my future wife, and she was very, very critical of what I was doing, questioning me persistently, bringing me anti-vivisection books, 'picking' at my conscience - and I could not answer her. (Before this I don't think I had even heard the word 'anti-vivisection'.)
Suddenly, a whole new world of what was being done to animals in the name of science opened up before me. The revelation was horrifying - I am really not exaggerating. At this time I was going to the laboratory every day, to perform my experiments on rats and mice; but by just reading the literature I could no longer justify what I was doing in the laboratory. So from the very beginning of this period I was reading the scientific arguments against it, but I was considering the whole thing from an ethical standpoint. I really liked animals and never liked killing them; and moving 'up' to rats was even more difficult, because they have a bad image, but laboratory-bred rats are in fact extremely nice, tame and intelligent animals - and here I was putting them in a plastic bag and turning a nozzle to suffocate them with carbon dioxide. There they were, reeling about as they suffocated; and it was so unpleasant for me, too, that my defense mechanisms began to break down. And, once I had started reading books attacking the system, it came to the point where I could no longer carry on. One day I sat in front of the mouse cage and said, "This mouse I am going to spare." That was in November 1989 and it was the last experiment I ever did - or rather, didn't do! And that is basically my story.
The thrust of my talk is "Bringing the Message to the Public". We have in Switzerland about one hundred organizations calling themselves animal protection or anti-vivisection or animal welfare societies. None of them does any work which they choose to bring to the attention of the public. They have their mailing lists, they write their quarterly newsletters, but they never, with a few exceptions, put anything before the general public. This is a very bad and dangerous practice, because people are giving money to them in good faith, but they are content to sit back, take no risks, produce their newsletters, preach only to the converted and raise funds for themselves.
To counter this (and to use our opponents' own tactics of presenting a positive image), my wife and I set up "The Zurich Campaign for Humans and Animals", an organization established to put our work before the public - to get the message out at the political, legislative and constitutional levels: "Get the law changed - animal experiments must be forbidden - it is the only way!"
At least two or three times a week in Zurich there is a newspaper story about some 'major breakthrough' based on animal experimentation. So, if we opposing doctors are to have any chance at reversing the law, we also have to 'go public'; and going to the press, and holding conferences which we advertise, are very effective methods.
We must use our opponents' expert methods when publicising ourselves.
For instance, they have a series of pictures in the press. The first is captioned: "Give This Child A Chance!" The layout is so professional - no specific facts, no details, just the claim: "We need animal experiments to cure this child." Then there is the slogan at the end: "Say YES - Animal Experiments are Necessary!" Then a little asterisk (nice touch!): * "Animal experiments which are legally required." They omit to mention that the legislators were advised by the animal experimenters to write the laws.
So how do the public respond to this advertisement? Very positively. They look at this cute little kid - the smile, like a little doll, and the nice colours, that nice, deep pink - "Give Her A Chance!" - something positive. And then, of course, away down at the bottom, in small print, a Post Office Box number and Zurich post-code. And the public ask, "Who is this from? It must be a group of doctors."
This is all done on a very professional level. The process was investigated by the one and only journalist in Zurich who has actively tried to expose this organization - and has no qualms about doing so. He discovered that the whole thing was nothing but the invention of Switzerland's largest public relations agency and that the photos had not been taken by doctors at all but by PR people - who, of course, know the best way to manipulate public opinion in the support of an issue and who, naturally, are paid to do so.
This is a very subtle and brilliant manipulation of popular opinion. It is the image that counts - different photos, different colours, placed in every single regional and national newspaper and magazine. It adds up to a massive propaganda flood of printed images - we are talking here of a million franks' worth.
The second ad in the above series is: "Give This Girl A Chance!" Same kind of image, different colour - girl on a motorcycle - implication? "Might have an accident - if she is injured, we shall have to do animal experiments to save her."
Another in the series: "Give This Father A Chance!" He looks as if he may get heart disease because of his bad diet and lousy habits. So let's have animal experiments and we may be able to save this man - say YES - Animal Experiments Are Necessary!"
Then we have the grandmother (this one really gets me!): "Give This Grandmother A Chance!" How professional this photograph is - one half of the face is fading into darkness, as if she is will fade away without animal experiments!
For me, and for my wife, it is so frustrating that this propaganda is just bombarding the press. 'Our side' has so many organizations in Switzerland - yet there is no response, no reverberation - just silence. Nothing.
So, as I said at the beginning, we -my wife and I - decided to establish an organization to combat this head on. All funds go into counter-blast advertisements - not newsletters for the converted or cushy salaries for ourselves.
We first contacted a PR person. She provided a photograph, but my wife and I wrote the text. (This presented a major problem. It is not as easy as it might seem. My wife and I do not have the expertise for writing public-relations texts; we are not journalists, and we do not know how to write so smoothly, so sophistically, that we couldn't, even if we had wanted to (and we certainly wouldn't!), manipulate and persuade the public through clever style and misleading books and texts.)
Next, we placed an ad in one of Zurich's largest daily newspapers: "Say YES to Abolition - Abolition of Animal Experiments Will Save Lives!" No more of the ethical stance that animal experiments are cruel but necessary - just "Say YES to Abolition!"
Going back a little: the first 'opposition' example I gave said: "Say YES, Animal Experiments Are Necessary!" This appeared again after our first ad, but the professionals had taken out the: "Say YES ... " sentence because there was a vote in the offing, and the public might have got confused and voted "YES" for abolition. So the other side responded to our ad and changed their own text - which I feel is something of an achievement!
We also have a press syndicate - the so-called independent press. But in Switzerland at least this is an endangered species. Here is just one typical example: free propaganda. I am talking about an industry that has unlimited funds: but they are so shamelessly for vivisection that they go out of their way to republish vivisectionist advertisements, and they called three letters-to-the-editor "independent letters by independent readers of our newspapers." In fact, these were from nothing more nor less than PR representatives of the two organizations which we are fighting tooth and nail: Professor Lindemann, for example, sat on the committee of one of these PR organizations; and there is another example of someone who hides behind all this - Professor Dr. Paul Walter.
People believe that Professor Walter is a practising doctor - I decided to investigate. What does this man do? He is an animal researcher: he has probably never seen a human patient in his life; he does not have an MD; he has a PhD in biochemistry and since 1979 has decapitated thousands of rats for basic research, which he pretends will possibly some day be useful to humans. So an animal researcher, not a doctor, is sitting behind these organizations; but do not make the mistake of thinking that he wrote the text of the letter - that was written by the PR people who put his name to it.
My wife and I started our organization two-and-a-half years ago. Since then, I have investigated the largest, wealthiest animal protection-and-welfare organizations supporting 'alternatives' to animal research, and I know that the situation is the same in Germany and Britain as in Switzerland. I have looked at their published financial records and have found that - really, no exaggeration - they are sitting on millions!
I did some further investigations and found that in Zurich there is what I call a syndicate: a pharmaceutical syndicate, a press syndicate, an 'animal protection' syndicate. We have seven organizations which pretend to their members that they are independent, but we also have a group of 8 people, all of whom sit on their committees - the controlling committees - so that the whole syndicate is controlled by these people. And they do not support abolition; their cry is: "REDUCE, REFINE, REPLACE! - Animal experiments are cruel, but they are a necessary evil, so we cannot abolish them; but we can, if we work together with the nice man in his white coat, achieve a reduction, a refinement, a replacement ..."
What does this syndicate do? The Swiss ecologist and journalist Franz Weber launched an initiative in 1980 for a referendum on vivisection. (Any Swiss citizen can launch an initiative to have the constitution changed, as long as enough signatures are collected in a given time.) Enough signatures and more were collected in good time, but the biggest Swiss so-called animal-protection society added its support to a number of political parties and said "NO" to the vote to abolish vivisection! And even as Franz Weber was gathering in 150,000 signatures, this organization was instructing people to ignore the initiative, to distance themselves from it!
This was six months before the vote in December 1985. This organization, the Swiss Animal Protection League, then decided to launch its own initiative, thereby sabotaging the coming vote; and the chemical industry and the universities welcomed this initiative because it was so "reasonable" and did not ask for abolition but for reduction. Paragraph 1 says: "All animal experiments which cause an animal pain, suffering or damage are forbidden in Switzerland." The second paragraph says: "The law of parliament decides the exceptions to this abolition." And here comes the big punch-line (which I could never accept, even though I indirectly supported this initiative). I could never clear my conscience with this statement: "All animal experiments which are necessary for the maintenance or curing or palliation of the suffering of humans and animals will be allowed." So here we have this organization, sitting on millions, with hundreds of thousands of members, launching an initiative sabotaging the thing we had all fought so hard for. This is just absolutely incomprehensible.
The fact is that these large and wealthy animal-protection organizations and humane societies concentrate on the ethical arguments; they completely ignore the scientific arguments, and this is very dangerous, because, with the ethical arguments, all animal experimentation is generally considered as a necessary evil which is cruel. And because it is cruel, BUT NECESSARY, it should be practised to a very limited extent and should therefor be REDUCED, REFINED, REPLACED. I have absolutely no tolerance for this "3Rs" philosophy, which is widely espoused by many organizations, including many in Britain. You are familiar with FRAME (Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments). This "3Rs" idea is also very disturbing because what underlies it is the alleged necessity of animal experiments: "Cruel but necessary. Because they are cruel they should be reduced BUT NOT ABOLISHED."
This is in complete contradiction to the aims of our movement, since, for the scientific approach to human medicine, ALL ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS ARE INVALID.
I would like just to add one point here which to me is very interesting. Veterinary medicine is based on working with animals, observing animals, treating animals; and veterinary medicine is in no way based on human beings, which, for me, is very sound medical practice. Why, then, is human medicine based so much on animals? That for me is an irrational contradiction and demonstrates a basic defect.
As I have said, we stress ABOLITION, for the animals as well as for humans. Just imagine how difficult it is for us to get our message across to the public, when we have the biggest animal "protection" organization in Switzerland coming out with advertisements for this bogus new initiative, which was voted on in February 1992. (Franz Weber's animal-protection initiative to abolish vivisection finally, in fact, received only 29% of the YES vote.) The Swiss Animal-Protection League initiative will allow "necessary" animal experiments but will prevent "useless" ones!
I should like you to consider how dangerous another animal-protection syndicate ad is: "Animal Experiments for Medicine - Cancer, AIDS and Other Diseases - YES!" And then: "A small number of animals experiments for cosmetics - NO!" ...
There is yet another organization, which was founded two years ago, as the pharmaceutical syndicate no longer thought that the "Working Circle for Health and Research" was sufficient, so now they needed two PR outlets: "Forschung fur Leben" means "Research for Life"; its brochure was sent to every single doctor's practice in Switzerland, and to every single pharmacy, so that the patients and customers are told: "Animal experiments are necessary - Green for Life - RESEARCH FOR LIFE!" Very professional.
Now I want to give a few examples of our ideas. I have already mentioned the advertisement which said: "Say YES to Abolition!" We also supported the Protection League initiative, but only indirectly - we did not stray from our line of abolition.
In the beginning we were dependent upon ads which said: "Please help with our educational campaign - your donation allows us to continue." Unfortunately, all the ads had to have horrifying pictures accompanying them, which got the money flowing in. But we have changed our tactics since: now we use only such images for fund-raising mail-outs. With the money raised, we publish very neutral ads, and this system is far more effective. We are learning all the time - but we still need to work hard at it.
Recently, we changed our tactics away from long texts and now use short texts and striking cartoons. We write about the polio vaccine, for instance: "Animal experiments are dangerous - abolition will save lives!" And we present "visuals" - skulls and crossbones, other symbols of death, etc.
AN
EXAMPLE
(graphics
omitted)
A CATALOGUE OF SUFFERING AND DEATH
Did you know that there are more than 250,000 pharmaceutical products on the world market today, from which the World Health Organisation already in 1977 described only 250 - i.e. 0.1% - as essential to life? Did you also know that during the last few decades thousands of medicines and vaccines have been withdrawn from the market because of their lethal side-effects? As irrefutable proof for this the United Nations published in 1987 the second edition of of its 650-page catalogue with the title "Consolidated List of Products Whose Consumption and/or Sale Have Been Banned, Withdrawn, Severely Restricted or Not Approved by Governments".
Some of these products have, according to the medical literature, each claimed more than 10,000 victims (e.g. Clioquinol, which blinded more than 10,000 Japanese). The list is nevertheless growing at a frightening rate: already today the recently-withdrawn anti-rheumatic drugs Rengasil and Peroxinorm can be added to it.
How are such tragedies possible? The answer lies in animal experimentation: Practically all of these products were tested, by law, on thousands of animals and found to be "safe" and/or "effective". On humans, however, they have led to the worst of suffering and death. No wonder: Because of anatomical, physiological, biochemical and behavioural differences, the results of animal experiments cannot be extrapolated to humans. Animal experiments are no safety-barrier - on the contrary: They facilitate the release of dangerous drugs and vaccines onto the market, while providing at the same time a 'scientific' and 'legal' alibi to the manufacturer. Such products would not be released onto the market if they were tested exclusively on human cell, tissue and organ cultures.
ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS ARE DANGEROUS.
ABOLITION WILL SAVE LIVES.
(end of example)
Incidentally, with regard to vaccination, an assumption has been made - and I find it a dangerous one - that it is simply a question of "to vaccinate or not to vaccinate". The assumption is being made on the supporting side that vaccines are useful and that they are so because they are based on trials on animals. This underlying belief is also applied to the testing of medicines: those on the market which are clinically useful are claimed to be so because of animal experiments - but these experiments are in fact invalid and misleading.
The fact is that, of all the pre-clinical tests on animals, 95% (that is, 19 out of 20) are invalidated when it comes to clinical trials on humans; and those few drugs - 5% of vaccines - which make it through these clinical trials have an effectiveness based not on the original pre-clinical trials on animals but on those clinical "human trials" which are prescribed by law.
The question: "Are we then advocating the use of 'human guinnea-pigs'?" is a standard one, which is used to put doctors such as myself in a bad light - here we are, against animal experiments, and we are promoting human experiments! But what is utterly concealed from the public is the fact that human experimentation is carried out every day and is prescribed by law. And this is a very subtle acknowledgement by the legislators (who are advised by the animal experimenters!), that animal experimentation is completely unreliable and that we have to rely on clinical trials on human beings to determine the efficacy and the side-effects of any given drug or vaccine.
A catalogue published by the World Health Organisation lists all the vaccines, cosmetics, medicines, anything you care to name - including agricultural chemicals - that have been withdrawn from the market because of their lethal side-effects on human beings and in spite of the 'necessary' animal experiments used in their research. And the list is as long as a telephone book! This in itself is irrefutable evidence of the dangers of animal experimentation and proves THE ABSOLUTE VALIDITY OF THE SCIENTIFIC, ANTI-VIVISECTION APPROACH TO MEDICINE.