The scapegoat concept –the idea of getting rid of one's sins, vices, diseases, misfortunes and other troubles by transferring them to some guiltless man or animal-- has always been widespread in human society. The Babylonians used to behead a ram for this purpose. The ancient Greeks scourged two human scapegoats out of the city every year—a criminal, or deformed, man and woman.

Today the scapegoat transference is usually psychological rather than physical, and consists in blaming other persons or groups for one's own shortcomings and frustrations.

The scapegoat concept looms importantly in the whole vivisectionist practice. Although usually the choice of a scapegoat is arrived at through an irrational process, the vivisectors have 'rational' reasons for their practice: monetary gain or personal satisfaction. But the scapegoat concept has certainly contributed to the tacit acceptance of the vivisectionist practice by large segments of the public.

To obtain 'scientific confirmation' of the well-known fact that overcrowding leads to nervousness, hostility and violence, experimenters like to confine great numbers of rats in such cramped quarters that they will eventually attack and kill one another. To get 'scientific proof' that motherly warmth and love are important for the child, newborn primates are snatched from their mothers and kept for years in solitary confinement, some of them, furthermore, in total darkness—a punishment generally considered too cruel even for hardened criminals.

To the same category of experiments belong those designed to turn animals into drug addicts. When they get cramps or convulsions after the sudden withdrawal of the drug, soothing medicines can be tried out on them. But then, of course, the researchers still don't know whether those medicines will have the same effect on man, or whether they are going to poison men—in view of the fact that strychnine, for instance, is a deadly poison for man but not for monkeys.

Although worldwide statistics have conclusively proved that heavy smoking can lead to lung cancer, the researchers—especially those in the employ of the tobacco companies—obstinately claim that 'there is no scientific proof' that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer, since it has not yet been possible to produce lung cancer in animals. Actually, if researchers succeed in causing lung cancer in an animal through heavy smoking, it would only prove that smoking can give cancer to that particular species, not to man. We already know that smoking may give lung cancer to man: through statitistcs and clinical observations.

Yet millions of animals, mainly dogs and rabbits immobilized in restraining devices, are subjected to smoking treatments lasting a lifetime for the sake of theories that the experimenters keep calling 'scientific' but which, in actual fact, are an insult to real science and to every thinking man and woman.

The American press recently reported experiments on sleep that one Dr. William Dement of Stanford University was making, depriving cats of sleep until they went out of their minds—in order, so he claimed, to understand better the mechanism of human sleep...

The nervous system of animals, especially of cats, has very little in common with ours. A cat normally snoozes 22 hours out of 24, practically anywhere and even standing up. So perhaps does Dr. Dement, but most people don't. To deprive cats of sleep, without having to keep awake himself, Dr. Dement has hit on a bright idea: He places his experimental cat, electrodes in its head, on a brick surrounded by water. When the cat goes limp with sleepiness its nose slips into the water. Dr. Dement has thus kept hundreds of cats awake for up to 70 days—not hours, but days. Whereafter he reported that the brain waves revealed 'definite personality changes', which in 'scientific' jargon means 'madness'...

In her book, Intelligence and Personality (Pelican, 1970) Dr. Alice Heim, an eminent British psychologist working as a member of the Medical Research Council, denounced other experiments in sleep deprivation, which speak very poorly for the mental balance of the experimenters in her own country as well. Rats were deprived of sleep for 27 consecutive days, by means of placing them in a continuously rotating wheel, two-thirds submerged in water. The rats, when exhausted, fell from the wheel into the water and were unable to remount the wheel. Some found ways of resting by hanging on food trays and, in one case, climbing on top of the cubicle and sleeping while hanging with front teeth hooked in the cloth top. Modifications were introduced to prevent this.

Thus in every field of science innocent animals are made to serve as scapegoats for man's vices and faults. We smoke, animals don't: So we force animals to smoke, although for them it's torture, for us pleasure. We drink alcohol, animals don't: So we cause liver cirrhoses in animals by funneling alcohol into them. We drug ourselves, animals don't: So we turn animals into drug addicts. We suffer from insomnia owing to our daily excesses, animals don't: So we force animals to stay awake until they go crazy. We suffer from stress owing to our unnatural way of living, animals don't: So we traumatize them in rotating drums to put them in a state of stress. We cause car accidents through incompetence or carelessness, animals don't: So we fasten animals to vehicles and send them crashing against walls. We contract cancer by consuming the wrong foods and toxic drugs, and through pollution caused exclusively by ourselves: So we inflict cancer upon millions of animals and continue torturing them while we watch them slowly waste away through the cruelest malady mass-produced by man.

Now we have had a first glimpse of what passes today for Medical Science. Speculating upon the ignorance and suffering of countless people, their constant fear of pain and disease, and with the help of the mass media, this pseudo-science has created the illusion—like the shamans of the primitive tribes who promise rain—that she wields mysterious and unlimited powers on which mankind's salvation depends. So the peoples of the western hemisphere have prostrated themselves in awe and servility at her feet, imagining her as an almighty goddess of peerless beauty, shining with gold and brocades, to which common mortals may not even raise their eyes, lest they be blinded. But if they dared to do so, they would discover that their empress hasn't got a stitch on and is gruesome to behold.

Greed, cruelty, anbition, incompetence, vanity, callousness, stupidity, sadism, insanity are the charges that this treatise levels at the entire practice of vivisection. The evidence is in the coming parts. They exaggerate nothing, for the simple reason that in matters of vivisection any exaggeration is not only superfluous, but impossible... »

« The idea, as I understand it, is that fundamental truths are revealed in laboratory experimentation on lower animals and are then applied to the problems of the sick patient. Having been myself trained as a physiologist, I feel in a way competent to assess such a claim. It is plain nonsense. »

It is not only scandalous but also tragic that the Drug Trust is permitted to flood the market with its products on the grounds that they have been thoroughly tested for effectiveness and safety on animals, and that the Health Authorities, meaning the Government, abet this deception, which is nothing but confirmed fraud. For both sides are well aware that animal tests are fallacious and merely serve as an alibi—an insurance against the day when it is no longer possible to conceal the disastrous side effects of a drug. Then they can say that « all the required tests have been made »--that they have obeyed the Law.

But they don't say that they themselves have imposed those laws, because the Lawmaker has no choice in all medical questions but to submit to the dictates of the 'medical experts'. And who are they? Agents of the Chemo-Medical Syndicate, whose links to the Health Authorities are so close that they usually overlap. So they, and no one else, impart binding orders to that mysterious and omnipotent individual, identified anonymously as 'The Lawmaker'.

It is this outrageous state of affairs that once caused Dr. James D. Gallagher, Director of Medical Research of Lederle Laboratories, to declare:

Another basic problem which we share as a result of the regulations and the things that prompted them is an unscientific preoccupation with animal studies. Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such studies for man is meaningless—
which means our research may be meaningless.
(Journal of the American Medical Association, March 14, 1964.)

In fact, the so-called 'medical experts' that have imposed animal tests as the touchstone of medical research are among the principal participants in the greatest fraud that has ever been perpetrated, mainly for profit motives, to the detriment of mankind in all history. To bring exhaustive proof of this assertion, with which a growing number of medical people are in full agreement, is the purpose of this exposé... *9

«The case of Hans Ruesch may break all records (or come close to breaking all records) in terms of the number of legal actions taken against a scholar and the scholar's organization... He reported that between 1989 and 1996, more than 70 legal actions were taken against him by persons connected with the medical and pharmaceutical establishment. In one of his recent publications, International Foundation Report, Ruesch (1993) related that, as a result of these legal actions, some publication plans of the Centre d'Information Vivisectionniste International Scientifique (CIVIS) have been held up (and, thus, silenced, at least for a period of time): 'CIVIS had planned an important publication program which lay within our possibilities three years ago. Uninterrupted legal actions conducted against Hans Ruesch through the Swiss courts... prevented the realization of our program.'(p.16)

« Although he has not been completely silenced, much of Ruesch's time, energy, and financial resources have been taken up by the legal actions against him. The sheer number of such actions seems to imply that they function as harassment. As a scholar, Ruesch is being silenced to the extent that time, energy, and financial burdens required to fight the legal actions prevent him from writing, publishing, and giving lectures on his scholarly material... »*17

« ...Jobs are more important to governments than the people's health. That is why as early as infancy the population is made dependent on medicines. The parents help along with this too. Of course, they were themselves brought up in this way. A congress of specialist German doctors for internal medicine in Wiesbaden, Germany confirmed in 1977 that 6% of all illnesses resulting in death and 25% of all organic diseases are caused by medicines. Moreover, 61% of all deformities at birth and 88% of all still-births are caused by drugs...

« Although millions of animals are sacrificed each year in research on cancer and circulation ailments, these illnesses are constantly increasing. Their causes are well known and could be avoided by preventative measures, which are in fact the only approach and do not cause dangerous side-effects. But of course there is no money to be made out of prevention...

« Diabetes is one of those illnesses which are best avoided by preventative measures, namely a suitable diet. The long-term use of animal-derived insulin (a catastrophically harmful approach) leads to blindness, circulatory and other problems and early death, as well as encouraging the insulin-user to neglect the appropriate diet. What is more, long-term insulin use leads to the total atrophy of the already malfunctioning pancreas gland. No wonder that since the introduction of insulin, diabetes has not decreased but increased enormously...

« Penicillin was discovered by pure chance and would probably not have been employed as a medicine, according to statements by its co-discoverers, had it been first tested as intended on guiney-pigs – since penicillin is fatal to guinea-pigs. But at the time there were no guinea-pigs available in their laboratory, so mice were used instead and they weren't killed by it... ...some animals can tolerate 100 times more or less of a given substance than human beings... to this day there is still no universally 'correct' dosage of penicillin. Some people are extremely allergic to penicillin and can be severely harmed by it, while it remains ineffective in others. Moreover, more and more doctors are agreed these days that penicillin has caused more harm than good.

« The thoughtless, massive over-prescription of penicillin, using it even as a preventative medicine, has over time led to the development of particularly resistant strains of bacteria which are immune to all penicillin treatments. The same applies to other antibiotics... It is one of the achievements of modern medicine that it has succeeded in creating ever weaker human beings, and ever stronger strains of bacteria. « Antibiotic », by the way, means « hostile to life ». And it is no secret that all these wonder drugs have only worked wonders for the bank balances of their manufacturers...

« ...The use of progressive research methods needs to be learned; it requires hard study and at least average intelligence – whereas any idiot can cut up or poison animals and report what he sees. Whether such experiments have any validity for human medical research is of no interest to these gentlemen. Clearly, there is no obstinacy greater than that of academics mired in their set ways. But in addition, over the last few decades a gigantic industry has developed around animal research: manufacturers of restraining devices, cages and torture instruments, as well as animal breeders, all of whom together constitute a most powerful lobby who influence the media and the politicians...

« All the great plagues and epidemics evinced a certain cycle. Inoculations were only introduced when the cycle was already approaching its end. The devastating bubonic plague of the Middle Ages disappeared on its own without medical intervention and long before there was any talk of vaccinations. Puerperal (childbirth) fever which in earlier times snatched away the lives of so many newborn babies and their mothers and for a long time diminished general life expectancy was defeated solely by the hygienic measures introduced by Semmelweis many decades before Pasteur...

« ...Massive polio vaccinaton programmes were only introduced when this extremely rare infectious disease was already dying out. Polio declined in all countries that did not vaccinate against it, just as in those which did. These latter, however, witnessed a renewed flaring up of the illness every time after vaccination. Brazil was hit particularly badly, since there had previously been almost no polio at all in that country, until mass vaccination was undertaken...

« ...In 1983, for instance – some 30 years after the allegedly so successful action against polio – there were major polio vaccination scandals in the USA, Great Britain and New Zealand. Of particular interest is the fact that the tissue cultures derived from monkey kidneys (upon which Salk and Sabin based their vaccines) proved to be very dangerous, and were so precisely because they were of animal origin. Recognition of this fact led to the production of a new vaccine, which derived not from animals but from human cell cultures... »

« Allow me a counter question: Would you let yourself be operated on by a vet? Why not? We shall answer you with the words of Lawson Tait, the famous British surgeon, who at the end of the 19th century developed fundamental operative techniques which are still in use today After years of experimenting on animals, Tait gave up this method and started to speak out forcibly in a veritable campaign against vivisection. He wrote, for instance: 'As a method of research, experimentation on living animals has led all those who have practised it to quite wrong conclusions, and their reports abound with cases where not only animals are uselessly sacrificed but where, because of the errors, humans have been added to the list of sacrifices too.' A whole host of authoritative surgeons of today and yester-year have expressed similar views...

« Abel Desjardins, the best known French surgeon of his time and professor of surgery at the University of Paris, answered this question unequivocally and logically. In a lecture in Geneva he stated, amongst other things: 'First one must be an assistant to an experienced surgeon for a long time. Then one takes up simple cases under the supervision of one's teacher, who can warn about every wrong move or give advice. Gradually one moves on to more difficult cases. This is the true method of training up a surgeon, and I state categorically that there is no other. Any training based upon operations upon dogs cannot but lead to lamentable errors. The surgeon who knows his art cannot learn a thing from such exercises, and the trainee does not learn correct surgical technique from them but becomes a dangerous surgeon.' ...

« ...The chemical and arms industries are not subject to the politicians, but rank above them in real power. They also influence the attitudes of the opinion-forming Press, which depends for its survival on advertisements – approximately 80-90% of all ads stem directly or indirectly from big business, which exerts an effective form of censorship, so that our ads (the ads of CIVIS) are simply refused by the great press barons... even though we are trying to point out the deplorable state of affairs that exists in matters of public health...

« Through generous endowments to universities, the chemical industry buys the indebtedness and dependency of relevant university departments, not to mention the doctors, who have become assiduous propagandists for the disasterous but lucrative products of the chemical industry. Intelligent, brave and honest doctors who prescribe cheap, tried-and-tested, safe natural medications are denounced as 'quacks' by the chemical pushers who dominate orthodox medicine, and nature-cure physicians are often thrown out of the medical fraternity altogether. By means of generous donations, the financial powers of the chemcial industry have won over the leaders of all the big animal-protection societies and have even bribed the leaders of some anti-vivisection societies, so that they now see their main rôle as hushing up the truth about vivisection's uselesness and ever-attendant dangers. In other words, their task is to hold anti-vivisectionism in check... [b]y asserting that at least a certain percentage of animal experiments 'are still essential' and that one cannot therefore press for total abolition. But through this means, any experiment can be justified, since it is the pseudo-scientists of the chemical and medical industries who claim the right to decide what is and is not 'essential'. Experience has shown that for them everything is ultimately deemed 'essential'. That is why we insist on total abolition of all animal experiments, instead of regulation, which already exists and has proven itself utterly inadequate. The vivisectors are only too keen to 'regulate' themselves... »

« What would YOU say about an industry that does not hesitate to dump drugs onto the peoples of the Third World – drugs which have long been withdrawn from the manufacturers' own markets because of their devastating side-effects?... »

« ...From all that has been said so far, you will be able to see that we are also concerned for the good of humanity, and actually a lot more than the chemical industry, the media, the doctors and the governments all put together. With such organisations, the 'good of humanity' and 'our children' are welcome pretexts for boosting their own power and wealth. This question is usually put to us by people who have never done anything for either animals or people. There are adequate statutes in our legislation for the protection of people. But the same legislation has seen to it that not the laboratory animals but solely their torturers and ruthless exploiters are protected. And animal experimenters exploit humanity too... »

• back to a rediscovery of the wisdom of Hippocrates, whose advice (strict hygene, a simple, frugal diet and a pure environment) is still the best means of maintaining the health of our species,
• back to an appreciation of our fellow earth creatures, animals and even insects, as forms of Life that act, each individual, with its own individual intelligence --like us!-- and not blindly from instinct as we have been falsely taught.
• back to an appreciation of the Moral Law at work in society, which means that Mankind must pay for its follies (we can vivisect, we can pollute, we can defraud, but there will be a reckoning...)
• back to a Humanism in which the dignity of our species is affirmed through respect for the other creatures of the Earth, respect for their roles in the balance of Nature (over which Man's attempt to rule has proved so disasterous), and respect for the only home we have, our planet Earth.

« Consistent with the view of a university as a place where polemic is set aside in favour of rational discourse, the seminar on 9 October by Professor Peter Singer (Professor of Philosophy at Monash University who was visiting UNSW to give a few lectures on ethical topics for the School of Community Medicine) allowed a useful interaction between a significant number of UNSW staff who use animals in their work and the 'guru' of the animal liberation movement – especially during question time.

« The scientists were obviously gratified to hear Professor Singer say that the use of pound dogs in research could, with appropriate controls, be 'an example of the most defensible kind of experimentation because the animal presumably feels nothing, additional to what it would feel' when put down with a high dose of anaesthetic, something which happens to thousands of abandoned cats and dogs every week in Australia... »

Professor Peter Singer, for years touted by animal liberationists as their 'guru', is suing prominent figure in the antivivisection movement, Hans Ruesch, after accusation of being a 'big phony'.

Mr Ruesch made the accusation after a journalist accidentially disclosed in an Italian newspaper that Peter Singer's animal rights lecture tour of Italy at the time (1989) was being sponsored by THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION. The Rockefeller industrial complex owns over 200 pharmaceutical enterprises – a major user of animal experimentation. Hans Ruesch wrote to Rome's antivivisection society, Lega Anti-Vivisezione (LAV), pointing out the irony of this acclaimed animal lover's pilgrimage being financed by the pharmaceutical outfits. The editor turned it into a full page article titled 'PETER SINGER IS A BIG PHONY'. Consequently, Singer is suing Mr. Ruesch and LAV.

Spokesperson for the Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research, John Leso, explains : 'In suing Ruesch, who is the world-leader of the abolitionist anti-vivisection movement, Professor Peter Singer has put himself under the spotlight, something he could ill-afford to do.' Mr Leso further states that ''... If Professor Singer is to sue everyone who claims he is a 'phony', then he would be a very busy man.' »

Hans Ruesch, the well-known Swiss author who has been living mainly in Italy, has consulted me in regard to the harassment by the Swiss courts to which he is bieng subjected ever since he constituted in Lugano, Switzerland, a FOUNDATION FOR A MEDICINE WITHOUT VIVISECTION. The relentlessness and outcome of those court actions arouse in many informed individuals the suspicion that they are politically inspired.

Mr. Ruesch has been for many years a highly esteemed client of mine, because I am a lawyer specialized in international copyright law and in that capacity I have negotiated for him various contracts for the sale of the movie rights to some of his books. Most of my professional activity is in English, a language I know well also thanks to long sojourns in the USA, as do my sons, who are lawyers too and work with me; and none of us has been able to find in Mr. Ruesch's CIVIS FOUNDATION REPORT Nr. 13 the phrase that, according to the verdicts of the Swiss courts, has allegedly appeared in it.

It is incomprehensible and disconcerting for me as a man of the law of very long standing (and particularly proud of his profession because I am the son of Italy's most celebrated jurist, the late Luigi Ferrara), to learn that both the Court of Appeals of Lugano and the Federal Court of Lausanne have passed punitive verdicts against Hans Ruesch for something that has not been proved to exist; verdicts that have then been spread worldwide by his habitual pursuer with the clear purpose of defaming a universally respected name.

Signed : Prof. Massimo Ferrara-Santamaria