Léa, dead in a laboratory, for nothing

Léa, dead in a laboratory, for nothing

"One crucifies a dog to study the Christ's life span."

So begins the book of Hans Ruesch," Animal Experimentation ", real indictment against the abuses of the experimental medicine.

The previous centuries knew the despotism of the clergy, today we undergo the supremacy of a peremptory, dogmatic science, that refuses to admit its limits and its mistakes.

A group of scientists declared in 1988 :

"The desire to know the world is overwhelmed today by the need to exploit it."

Since centuries, and nowadays more again, " the crimes of the extreme civilization being more atrocious than those of the extreme barbarism ", science and morals face themselves, while science and mysticism always completed themselves and harmonized.

Of these paradoxical assertions, Einstein gives us the key in these terms :

"If one had to pull out of the temple of the science those that don't make the true science, this temple would be well empty."

In this mystical context, it won't be question to weigh pros and cons of the vivisection, but rather to demonstrate that the sacrifice of animals never served and will never serve the medical science, and this in the name of the unchangeable and inescapable karmic law, law of cause to effect, that will never permit that health constructs itself on the torture.

To the evidence, it is not in a laboratory of vivisection that we will meet the physician of whom Paracelse spoke to us thus :

"Who could be a physician without be first a philosopher, astronomer, alchemist ? No one. "

"It is necessary to be versed in these three things because they contain the truth of medicine."

Every day, in the world, 400 000 animals are sacrificed for the purpose of the science.

This number increases 5% per year.

France is, of all countries of Europe, the one that sacrifices the most.

Whereas some numerous and alternative methods exist and proved their efficiency, excluding the animal of research, one continues to immolate, in the most total barbarism, mouses, rats, frogs, Guinea pigs, rabbits, turtles, birds, goats, pigs, horses, dolphins, cats, dogs and monkeys.

The one who beats a horse with a stick risks a heavy punishment, but the one that learnedly studied how many strokes are necessary to kill it receives diplomas and admiration of his collegues.

The vivisection, of the Latin vivus - sectio, "section on the living", designate all physiological experimentation operated on a living animal.

"Fundamental research" and "research on model" are its euphemisms.

On the contrary, the "in vitro research" intends to study without the animal :

modelling by computer, bio-molecular analysis, culture on cells and on tissues, etc.

The reliable and low cost of the substitutive methods, recognized by eminent scientifics, don't interest the official medical community, and not more the state, that brings them no subsidy.

At all times, were repressed those who distanced themselves from the classic thought.

In the XVIe century, Paracelse lost his chair in the university of Basel to have burnt the works of Galien in public, and his students themselves asked for his resignation for such an audacity and such a disrespect of the centennial beliefs.

Today, as an example, one meets a researcher in the C.N.R.S., main promoter of the methods In vitro, who has been "transferred" by his hierarchical superior, himself director of research in vivo.

If the vivisectionists are the churchgoers of this method, the vivisectionnistes are their partisans.

One counts among them most physicians of today, who recognize however that, having never put the feet in a laboratory of vivisection, they ignore what they defend.

Medicine and research are two domains distinct and separated .

Among the vivisectionists, between the four walls of their laboratory, one finds former medical students often having failed to their exams.

Contrary to the received idea, it is not necessary to be brilliant nor scholarly to make research in the vivo domain.

On the other hand, one of the essential goals of this research is to bring the petty individual to get for himself some honorary title and to collect money.

The vivisectionists are never in contact with the patients, and it is so much the better for these patients if one believes the medical editor of the "New York Daily Mirror" who wrote in 1928 :

" Doesn't it seem that those who are cruel towards the animals are madmen? "

" They should be locked away in asylums for madness ? "

It is true that in psychiatry, the cruelties on animals are classified in the serious madness demonstration.

On the contrary, the anti-vivisectionnists reject the experimentations on animals, judging them cruel and deceptive.

It is often occasional and repentant vivisectionists, notably eminent surgeons of whom we will discuss again, but also scientific or literary personalities who , at all times, fiercely elevated themselves against such methods.

So Leonardo of Vinci, Goethe and the doctor Schweitzer defended the idea that a species wanting to be saved by such means would not be worthy.

Leonardo of Vinci, universal genius, used to be one of the first experts in anatomy, Goethe, other genius and passionate of physiology, brought a big light on the structure of the human skull, and the doctor Schweitzer, musician, humanist and philanthropist, Nobel prize of the Peace, was in Lambaréné an exceptional physician.I

On the same way Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Schiller, Wagner, Tolstoy, the Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, professor Theodore Monod and a lot of other sages, philosophers and humanist, always respected our brothers the animals, confirming the assertion of Lamartine thus :

"One doesn't have a heart for the humans and another for the animals. "

"One has a heart or one doesn't have any ! "

Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist well appreciated by the sophrologues, refused to pursue his studies of medicine by horror of the vivisection.

This didn't prevent him from developing the psychoanalysis and to leave his indelible signature there with the analytic psychology.

A whole universe separates the humanist intelligence and perfectly structured of Jung and the mediocrity of the laboratory researchers that don't hesitate, in order to study the maternal deficiency, to separate of their mother and to mistreat some babies monkeys and then to conclude that bad treatments and separation are the cause of psychological messes.

What a discovery !

In the small following history, Philippe Mailhebiau, while caricaturing the absurdity of the fundamental research, is not distant of the reality :

"A researcher pushes a frog of the finger while saying: "Jump, jump ! " The animal makes some springings, to the big joy of the scientist.

Then this one sections its two forefeet and pursues his experience :

"Jump, jump ! " The frog succeeds again in moving itself.

Finally the researcher sections the two rear paws of the frog and reiterate: "Jump, jump ! " "

"The poor beast, laid down immobile , the young man writes his note of service and concludes: "

" "When one cuts the four paws of a frog, it becomes deaf! " "

In the name of the science, all is permitted, even the most extravagant cruelty.

Doctor Walker Meek, professor of physiology in an American university, said :

" To inflict the most terrifying suffering to an infinite number of animals is justified, in the mind of the last member of any medicine faculty, if there is the smallest hope to add something to the total sum of the human knowledge and this without asking the question to know if this knowledge has a convenient value or no."

87% of the animals are not anesthetized.

These screams that would disturb are suppressed of the most efficient way that is : the devocalization, first torture inflicted in the sinister underground rooms of laboratory, if one excludes the psychological torment of the anguish that the animal feels since the instant where he puts the paws in this awful universe.

Let's note in passing that the medical and pharmaceutical industries are far from being the only ones to use the vivisection.

Whereas there is no obligation to make it, all industrial products are tested on the animals.

One conducts the Test of Draize for example (1) for the cosmetics, and to the Dose Lethal 50 (2) for the chemicals (paintings, varnish, paint strippers, washing powders, herbicides, etc.)

The army also tests its inventions : shell, napalm, flame-thrower, defoliants, lasers, nuclear radiations.

Every second, the death delivers twenty-five animals, silent victims of the science that one doesn't hesitate to stuff with food, to blind, to transfix, to crush, to section, to mutilate, to eviscerate, to transplant, to submit to all fires, to immerse, to drown, to freeze, to condemn to smoke, to die of hunger, of thirst, of cold weather, of hot, to dissect and living autopsier.

Since centuries and in the general indifference, the animal of laboratory suffers immeasurably, so much in intensity that in length.

Some researchers are very pleased about their compassion for some of their more resistant guinea pigs than of others.

So Ivan Pavlov, Nobel prize in 1904 for his research on the digestive glands, sacrificed with the help of his seventy helpers, thousands of animals in order to "discover" on the salivation what the Greeks already knew twenty centuries ago.

He is proud to have had a particular tenderness for a dog that, during two years, supported hundred and twenty-eight operations before dying (3).

One of the Pavlov's disciples bragged about maintaining a dog in life during nine years with the stomach opened.

This scientist, proud of his exploit and of his humor, spoke" of a true dog's life ! "

Other researchers don't lack of imagination: J.-L. Brachet, professor of general pathology, made the admiration of his colleagues for his "moral" experiences that one would call today "psychological."

In his report, he notes :

"I opened the stomach of a bitch attached to the operating table in order to extract a litter of puppies whose birth was imminent and I presented them to the bitch to know if it would recognize them : this one licked them while moaning..."

One understands why Rita Lewis Montalerni, Nobel prize of medicine in 1995, wrote :

"Research is a dangerous environment."

Dangerous to all considerations. And before, the General de Gaulle had said with humor :

"Researchers who look for, we find many of them but researchers who find, we are looking for "

Research on the cancer, that began in the XVIII ème century, would surely have evolved more quickly without the recourse to the vivisection.

For the research on serious illnesses, one asks for money, and one justifies the expenses later.

The more are animals sacrificed and the more they become credible. Where five hundred tests would be statistically sufficient, one makes fifteen thousand of them.

The vivisection permits to squeeze big money out, this by receiving enormous subsidies from the governments and from the private organisms.

According to Jacqueline Bousquet, researcher in the C.N.R.S. and scientific coordinator to Pro Anima (4),

"...we have scientists, we don't have any thinkers; a technology, not a science; some ethical, but no morality. [...] The animal doesn't complain, don't accuse, doesn't make lawsuits. [...] We attend an upsurge of the iatrogene illnesses, that is to say generated by the drugs themselves, for the biggest happiness of the medicine and of the research centers, this allowing them to ask again for more money in order to solve these new problems that they created themselves..."

Whereas the Pharaohs knew that in order to discover if their food was poisoned, it was necessary to try it on the cook and not on the cat, today it is mandatory to test on the animal, and later on the man, every new medicine so that its harmlessness is recognized and its A.M. (Authorization of Marketing) efficient, which is a stupid thing when one knows that the results of experiences are not transposable from a specie to another.

So, the penicillin kills the guinea pigs; the strychnine,a violent poison, is without danger for the monkeys; the digitalis, first medicine available for the cardiacs, has been rejected a long time because, tested on the dogs, is raising their blood pressure dangerously; the tamoxifène, efficient contraceptive among the rats, increase the fertility of the women.

The thalidomide, sadly famous to have caused the birth of ten thousand phocomeles children, that is to say deprived of their members, had been tested successfully on pregnant bitches, etc.

Today, according to several studies, 61% of the abnormal births would be due to medicines.

One of the biggest world laboratories, Ciba-Geigy, recognizes that after clinical tests on the humans, he must suppress 95% of the medicines that were previously tested with success on the animals.

The innumerable medicines suppressed of the sale because of dangerous toxicity could fill an encyclopedia.

Twenty-five years ago, professor Arrigo Colariri, director of the pediatric clinic of the university of Rome, declared :

"The physical improvement that we notice is in part spontaneous and in part due to better social, economic and hygienic conditions. "

"The medicines are not the main reason. "Without chemical medicines, the Ancients reached an advanced age.

Hippocrate has lived until 83 years. In 1904, the doctor Salivas and most famous physicians of his time told of him :

"The immortal Hippocrate never practiced the vivisection, and however he raised the medical art to a level of which we are very far today, in spite of the allegedly big discoveries."

The one who has been the biggest physician of the antique was the initiator of the clinical observation.

His teaching is founded entirely on the respect of hygiene and food.

His confidence in the strength of the nature was total: "Vis suprema guartix", "The nature is the supreme healer."

Hippocrate taught us everything on the epidemics and on the fever, while twenty-four centuries later, thousands of dogs have been tortured to tempt to prove that the fever was the reason, and not the effect of an illness !

Thanks to hygiene and to the wise precepts of Hippocrate, the antique developed the surgery to a high degree.

The operations of big surgery were current : tonsillectomy, elimination of the cataracts, ablation of the goiters, trephination, excision of tumors, elimination of kidney stones and the gall bladder, plastic surgery.

Whereas the Greeks, at the time of an amputation, knew how to tie the vessels, to the Middle Ages, the stumps were cauterized with white-hot irons or boiling oil.

This decadence is essentially assigned to Claude Galien, that lived from the year 131 to the year 201.

Greek physician of the gladiators and of five successive emperors, he had the particularity to be the first physician official vivisectionist.

Galien learned by direct contact with his patients that the organic reactions are influenced by the mind, observation of big importance, and reinforced completely by the present holistic medicine.

On the other hand, his very numerous dissections on living animals has thrown him down into a great confusion : he affirmed indeed that the pus is beneficial and essential to the recovery, the fruits are harmful because the cats and the dogs don't eat any, the woman has two uteruses : one for the boys, one for the girls, urine is secreted by the vena cava, etc. (5)

The faith of Galien in a Supreme Divinity carried the Catholic church later to enact his perfect and indisputable doctrine.

Whoever that emitted some doubts on his teaching was tortured.

During fifteen centuries, the humanity had to undergo the involution, until obscurantism, of the galienic medicine. Hygiene, so important in the antique, was turned in derision by Galien.

The surgical acts were so dangerous that they became rare.

To the Middle Ages and in the centuries that followed, under the hand of the surgeons, the patients had to endure such tortures that some preferred to commit suicide.

The others fought and shouted until losing their reason.

The anesthesia not existing anymore, the surgeons the more appreciated were the fastest.

Thus, Guillaume Dupuytren, that operated until 1835, was the French surgeon paid best because the fastest. He said that the pain kills as much as the hemorrhage.

The discovery of the anesthetics didn't have anything to do with the animal experimentation.

In 1803, the German pharmacist Friedrich Serturner discovered the anesthetic value of morphine, that used to be rejected since a long time because, being tried on dogs, the morphine caused a maniac excitation on them.

In the same way, chloroform was used with success in England, thanks to James Simpson that, in 1847, had tried it on himself, while in France, one continued to experiment it on dogs and to conclude to its toxicity.

We owe the important discovery of the lumbar anesthesia to August Bier, who is considered as one of the best physician of our time and that, in 1920, injected himself in his backbone a solution of cocaine to 1%.

He wrote: "The real medical art is decadent, put in the shade by the research of laboratory."

The eminent surgeons, from all over the world, have always declared that the vivisection doesn't have any value for the humanity.

In 1898, Frédéric Trèves, surgeon of the royal family to London and world authority in abdominal surgery, wrote :

"After being trained to operate on dogs, I have had to unlearn everything, because my experiences on animals had made me incapable to intervene on the human organs."

Sir Charles Bell, very famous surgeon of the XIXème century for his studies on the brain and the nervous system, wrote:

"The dissection of living animals contributed to perpetuate the mistake more that to confirm the correct notions coming from the survey of the anatomy."

Doctor Charles Clay, father of the ovariectomie and the use of the drainage in the abdominal surgery, declare :

"I don't owe an ounce of my knowledge nor my ability to the vivisection. "

"I challenge any member of my profession to prove that the vivisection was the least utility to the" progress of the medical science."

The doctor Lowson Tait, in the years following 1870, was considered as one of the giants of the progress in surgery.

He wrote a pitiless indictment against the vivisection.

"I regret, he said, the use of the experiences on living animals. They are absolutely useless and the legislation should put an end there without the least reserve."

Abel Desjardin, president of the French society of surgery, declared, at the time of a convention in 1932 :

"The vivisection will make of you a dangerous surgeon, because it learns to have no respect to the thing that a surgeon worthy of this name must respect : the life. "

The doctor Lowson Tait, in the years following 1870, was considered like one of the progress giants in surgery.

He wrote a pitiless indictment against the vivisection.

"I regret, he said, the use of the experiences on living animals. They are absolutely useless and the legislation should be able to year end them without the reserved least."

Abel Desjardin, president of the French society of surgery, declared, at the time of has convention in 1932 :

"The vivisection will make of you has dangerous surgeon, because it learns to not to respect the thing that has surgeon worthy of this name must respect: life. "

In 1895, Eslosson, chemistry professor and vivisectionist, wrote :

"A human life is nothing in relation to a new fact. The purpose of the science is the progress of the human knowledge at the cost of any sacrifice of human life. "

Nowadays, the number of the silent victims increases and diversify : prisoners, disabled, old men, abandoned and poor children from all over the world.

To discredit the animal, it is to despise the man.

The vivisection is the way of the human torture, as some endowed of wisdom scientists foresaw it.

"If we abolish the vivisection solely because it is useless, said Wagner, the humanity won't have won anything. "

"It will be banished because, deprived of respect, it is the absence of moral."

"I like the animals, told us the Dalai Lama, because they are beautiful, good and sincere. "

"They have a big sense of the responsibilities. "

The sense of the responsibilities isn't it exactly what God expects from the man, while bestowing him this superiority on the other reigns of the Creation?

To forget those that are silent signs an absence of conscience... the "man's conscience" of which Victor Hugo tells us that" she is God's thought ".

"God who sees all and never hits falsely" doesn't he judge the indifference like the most abject of the qualm ?

According to the rosicrusian philosophy, there is no possible spirituality without this love of the nature that allows us to understand until the joy of the birds and animals.

"The flowers that smell good are so our sisters, the deers, the horses, the big eagles are our brothers.

"What is the man without the beasts ? If all beasts had disappeared, the man would die completely lone, because what arrives to the beasts, will arrive soon to the man..."

Words of an Indian chief

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Genevieve Coupeau,

Member of the section "Ecology" of the university Rose-Croix Internationale

Notes

(1) test of Draize : The products are tested in the eyes of the rabbits immobilized in collars.

The attack goes from the simple redness to the total blindness by ulceration. The rabbits are chosen for their big eyes and their absence of tears.

(2) dose Lethal 50 : The products are tested by stuffing, inhalation or injection, and the doses increased until 50% of the animals die.

(3) and (5) Hans Ruesch : "Experimentation animal shame and failure of medicine.", New international Presses, Civis 1991.

(4) Pro Anima 16, Rue Vézelay, 75008 Paris is a scientific, apolitical and independent committee gathering voluntary personalities of the scientific and medical world.

Placed under the presidency of professor Theodore Monod's honor (deceased beginning 2001), his vocation is double : scientific and ethical.

Bibliography

Sylvie Simon: "The dictatorship médicoscientifique ", Filipacchi 1997.

Samir Mejri" silent Victims ", Terradru 1991.

Luc Ferry, Claudine Germé" Of the animals and men ", Paperback 1994.

Descartes" The speech of the Method ", Maxi-pocket 1998.

Philippe Mailhebiau reviewed" The tie ", June 1991 and March 1992.

Pierre Dombres Editorial of the magazine" The impatient ".

and various documents of OneVoice, for the animals of the Planet: 8 Rue des Morillons, 75015 Paris.

Brigitte foundation Bardot 45, Rue Vineuse, 75116 Paris.

Animal Equalis: 2 Rue du Fief, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt.