The Nature Of Wellness

THE ABOLITION OF ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION:
PIPE DREAM OR REACHABLE GOAL?

AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE FOUNDER

Dear Friend:

I want to take this opportunity to talk to you about several critical issues, suggestions and concerns that are often raised by our supporters, and my ideas and thoughts about the future of our movement and this great cause - that both you and I are a part of. And, as always, I want to be totally candid and to the point with you.

• Is the abolition of animal experimentation a pipe dream or can it become a reality?
• Does the solution to stopping vivisection lie in passing legislation? In organizing demonstrations? In breaking into labs to rescue the animals? Or in some other strategy?
• Why hasn’t there been any significant progress made towards the abolition of animal experimentation in spite of the fact that this is by far the most horrifying and shameful atrocity ever committed against animals, and that the opposition to it has existed for well over 100 years?
• What can we do to stop vivisection for good?

Let me begin by saying this. On a weekly basis, our organization receives hundreds of letters, telephone calls, faxes, and emails from concerned individuals all over the country. Many of these letters come from people who have been in the animal protection movement all their lives - 30 years, 40 years, even 50 years! Many of them have been actively fighting vivisection and/or financially supporting all sorts of organizations their whole lives. Often these individuals are totally discouraged and even angry. Angry at the wasted effort, the wasted monies. They are fed up with the endless numbers of requests for donations coming from an ever-increasing number of organizations. They are frustrated because they realize that no real progress has been made in the fight against vivisection.

Another group of people who contact us are the newcomers. These are people who up until yesterday didn’t know that vivisection even existed (we catch them mainly through the airings of our documentary Lethal Medicine on television). These caring individuals are totally outraged at what they have just seen and want vivisection stopped NOW. They want a shortcut. They don’t want to wait 40, 50 years.

The bottom line question all these people keep asking us is “What is The Nature of Wellness doing to stop vivisection?” It is this very important concern that I want to address. I know full well the kind of answer our caring supporters would like us to give them. In general, they either would like us to tell them that we are working on introducing sweeping legislation in Congress which will ban vivisection forever, or else, they would like us to tell them that we are going to break into labs in order to rescue the animals.

Of course there are many reasons why it is totally impossible to break into the labs. First of all, it is illegal. But the sad truth is that even if we had a huge army at our disposal, we still wouldn’t have enough man/woman power to get every animal out of the labs (more than 100 million animals are used each year by thousands of universities, hospitals, private research institutions, and government labs all over the country). Besides, even if we could, it wouldn’t matter because the rescued animals would be replaced with a fresh supply of lab animals the very next morning!

As for legislation, this is the most popular 'solution' our supporters would like us to concentrate our efforts on. They would like us to assure them that sweeping legislation banning most or even all vivisection will soon be passed by Congress and that the whole nightmare of vivisection will disappear forever.

Please allow me to be brutally honest with you. No meaningful legislation of any kind against vivisection will ever be passed until one basic thing happens first. And this is what our organization has been trying to get across for the last 17 years: Nobody will ever stop vivisection for as long as the overwhelming majority of the American public (and I mean the overwhelming majority) is utterly convinced that “at least some animal experimentation is medically and scientifically sound and that it saves human lives.” The failure to understand that vivisection can only be stopped by destroying the lie on which it is based is precisely what has kept the opposition to vivisection frozen in place for the last 100 years. The alleged medical and scientific usefulness of animal experimentation must be debunked before its abolition or even curtailment can be contemplated. In other words, what not even an army could accomplish by force, can be accomplished by an idea.

I also know that many of our own supporters believe that at least some animal research is useful. They figure that from all the countless millions of animal experiments that have been conducted all over the world just in the last 50 years, something useful must surely have come out. And they feel that in the future, it may be possible to find a cure for cancer, diabetes, spinal cord injury or AIDS through animal research. This is what I call the 'Las Vegas Syndrome'. They figure that if enough coins are put into the slot machine of biomedical research with animals, the vivisectors will eventually hit the jackpot!

I know how very difficult it is for many people, including those who deeply care about animals, to believe that vivisection has never worked and never will. They have a very hard time believing that such a monstrous fraud involving so many individuals and institutions could be going on. They have come to believe blindly in vivisection because all they have heard all their lives is the biomedical empire’s main slogan “animal research saves human lives.” This message is relentlessly delivered not only by doctors and scientists, but also by the media, the school systems, the politicians, corporate America, religious authorities, and, tragically, even by many 'animal organizations.'

This, of course, concerns me a great deal because what allows vivisection to go on is precisely this type of religious belief in vivisection, so deeply entrenched not only in the minds of the general public, but tragically, also in the minds of most 'animal people.' It is true that many animal people are opposed to all vivisection morally. I know that many of them say “I don’t care whether animal research works or not. I want it stopped because I don’t want defenseless, innocent animals to be tortured. Period.” But remember, the general public supports vivisection because they feel it is “the lesser of two evils.” They feel that their child’s life is much more important than a rat’s or even a dog’s. In other words, the public has swallowed the biomedical community’s outrageous lie that there is a choice to be made between rats and babies, and that those who oppose vivisection are automatically anti-human because they support the “liberation” of animals at the expense of human health.

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