Lara Goldstein from Masada College interviews Claudette Vaughan

Interviewed by Lara Goldstein (22nd February 2006)

Lara Goldstein: I want to ask you a hypothetical question. If you or someone close to you was sick, but a cure that was developed with the use of laboratory animals was available, would you use it, or refuse out of principle, even if that decision proved to be fatal?

Claudette Vaughan: I am unalterably opposed to vivisection under all circumstances.

I don’t believe that our choice in life is about nonhuman animals or about humans. Is not the issue of animal liberation, human liberation also?

So in answer to your question: The sun is not setting on the animal rights movement, the sun is only just rising. There’s a long way to go. There’s much work to be done. The way is strewn with difficulties. Will we see a day when people refuse animal tested pharmaceutical drugs as a form of non-violent protest even it they know it’ll be fatal for them to do so? The short answer is ‘Yes’.

Non-violent opposition has nothing to do with passivity and nothing whatsoever to do with the demeaning experience of injustice. It’s strength is shown most clearly by consciously and specifically not doing anything which could be construed as participating in injustice. This could mean not obeying unjust orders, or not holding back in situations where injustice is being meted out to others.

Non violent direct action has not brought governments down, it does not spell the end of parliament or the courts; but it forces these institutions to seek change from their business-as-usual ethos.

There are even some in the animal rights movement who have scoffed at the efforts of non-violent direct action equating violence somehow with change and non-violence with weakness. This is not correct and in my opinion, an overly simplified way to view life, politics and the animal rights/liberation struggle.

Lara Goldstein: Have you been able to challenge/change the opinions of people who hold different opinions on the subject of animal rights (e.g. they are indifferent, against).

Claudette Vaughan: Sure. Sometimes I think that’s all we do. We challenge them constantly – at work, at home, at play. The animal rights movement doesn’t suit the faint hearted especially in today’s political atmosphere.

Yet it’s not all hard work either. Take veganism for example. Believe it or not, some people are challenged even just by the very mention of the word ‘vegan’.

Veganism is a significant contribution against food and land wastage, against the senseless and unnatural raising and slaughtering of farmed animals and against the dehumanisation of those who work to treat our younger brothers and sisters as milking and food ‘machines’

When we challenge the duck hunt or the farmer or the live export industry it’s for the animals. As somebody once said, and I’m para phasing here – “We must never forget it’s for the animals and take every opportunity, claw our way inch by inch if need be, for every success”. I think that’s a pretty accurate statement.

If it’s tough on animal activists to change public opinion, it is one hundredfold – one thousandfold – worse for the non-human animal kingdom and the filthy, stressful and over-crowded conditions they are forced to endure to be slaughtered at the end of it.

Have we been able to change opinions? Yes, most definitely.

The Animal Rights movement, just by its very existence, challenges the lies of the day. What will be a tremendous boost to us in the future will be several concurrent movements questioning human health and this frenetic drive for maximum food production at rock-bottom costs.

Today, the corporate takeover of the global food chain is now the world’s biggest public health hazard. There is now just four companies responsible for 13% of total food sales in the world – and these are taking a huge toll in developing countries. The Food Conglomerate has gone the way of pharmaceuticals where a few companies dictate to the majority.

We have to engage the citizen towards healthy, vegan, organic consumer choices. This form of direct action is really nothing new but it’s an idea that’s constantly being reworked.

Basically it’s the old Marxist notion that exploitation distorts the life of the capitalist and the cruel illusion – which animal liberationists are apt at exposing – from which both exploiter and exploited suffer under capitalism. It seems as if the west’s ability to amass to it technological power has burnt away its deeper awareness of the opportunity and responsibly that are uniquely ours.

Where did the west acquire its werewolf greed? The Animal Rights movement arose not out of misery but out of plenty. Its role is to insist upon and explore a new range of issues concerning the nonhuman animal kingdom and I think that the very weakness of western conventional ideological politics lent
the animal rights/liberation movement, but not the welfare movement, towards its unique insight.

So, the animal rights movement is committed to leading the animal kingdom towards its liberation but this cannot occur without raising questions about the quality and purpose of life, about experience and consciousness, about the rationality and permanence of industrial growth and about our long term relations with others, human and non human and the natural environment.

Lara Goldstein: Many visual campaigns for animal rights organisations are confronting and graphic. Is this an organisations way of trying to get through to those indifferent people.

Claudette Vaughan: Farmers have accused animal activists of manipulating the media by showing only the worse case scenarios but my experience has been that these graphic photos are more the norm than the extreme.

Does shocking people into realisation work? It can. Can it turn people off? Well, they are already ‘turned off’ by their non-participation. The ‘soft’ marketing of animals lives and conditions to suit a meek and mild audience is over. It’s not the job of the animal rights movement to further lull people into a false sense of complacency or complicity.

Factory farming saw to that. Mad Cow’s disease saw to that. The Avian flu scare saw to that. Foot and Mouth saw to that too.

Money talks in western society and there is no interest more virulent than “the money power”.

No age before ours has possessed such a wealth of materials with which to draw the self-portrait of the human race. One only needs to scratch the surface of civilisation to find out the truth of the matter. When the savage mind is called into account it doesn’t like it. The savage mind identifies 4 main conditions of life and usually doesn’t move beyond them. They are: Eating, Sleeping, Defecating and Reproducing. The neanderthal mind rebels against being challenged on its authority and attitudes.

Hence, the animal rights movement, as a critical force, demands a reappraisal of the economics of growth, the high-consumption lifestyle and anthropocentric science. The deconstruction of our most cherished beliefs surrounding speciesism will, in the future, further be seen as targeting a corporate system which holds the ultimate locus of power in an industrial society.

The reason we have an animal rights/liberation movement is because the culture that preceded it is being opposed. That culture, one of reductionist science, ecoicidal industrialism and corporate regimentation isn’t capable of taking the non-human animal kingdom, along with the rest of us, to higher ground.

Lara Goldstein: What made you become an animal rights activist and why?

Claudette Vaughan: Like many people I read the book Animal Liberation and it profoundly effected me. After arriving back from overseas I happened by chance to see a program called A Current Affair where a mother sow went insane by not being able to move or turn around in her sow stall. It was a powerful image. So I rang Animal Liberation NSW and from there went on direct actions, managed their shop OINK! The Animal Liberation Shop for a couple of years, starting doing the activist interviews, was a presenter on an animal show called “Animals Matter”, went on duck rescues, stood outside the Shark Bar for a year protesting, took undercover footage, got involved, held vegan fundraisers regularly, did my research, went to court with Tony Pope for locking ourselves down to a live export boat and I’m currently just out of a 1 year good behaviour bond. For the past year and a half I have produced my own online e-zine called Abolitionist-Online.com

Such is the nature of grassroots activism.

Lara Goldstein: Do you think the government should ensure that the use of animals in scientific research centres be banned and funding should be available for those centres that can’t afford to use alternative measures?

Claudette Vaughan: There’s still a way to go towards proposing something as rational and as important as to what you have suggested.

Even if vivisection was abolished tomorrow, which is highly unlikely, the dominant view of western civilisation since the Renaissance holds that human beings are the most important creatures in the universe. Everything else – plants, rocks, rivers, non-human animals – exists to serve the needs of humanity. Followed to its logical conclusion, this view deems the harvesting of rainforests, the damming of wild rivers to generate electricity, and the decimation of animal species for their flesh, horns, skin and body parts as an unassailable human right.

The government will not ensure that the use of animals in scientific research centres be abolished any time soon.

The public are kept entirely in the dark over animal experimentation. The 3R’s are a scam – replacing, reducing, refining animal experiments is not based on science nor a real concern for medical ethics but serves as a means of making animal experimentation seem more reasonable and acceptable.

Animal experimentation must be abolished entirely. We know that all animal experiments are scientifically invalid because of what is known as “species differences” i.e. – the anatomy, physiology, neurology, metabolism, genetic make-up of a human differs from that in non-human animals.

Over 95% of all diseases which affect humans do not occur in non-human animals. The effectiveness of treatments and measuring of safety in humans does not correlate with results in toxicological, carcinogenity, mutagenicity, teratogencity tests in non-human animals – then no matter how few or how many animals are used, there can be no ‘model’ to compare with that in the human species.

Another point is, the validation process – comparing data derived from alternatives with that from animal experiments can take years. The authorities for validation and assessment of alternative methods will only accept an alternative if it produces the same results as those seen in the animal experiment to which it is compared.

That means, given this procedure, “Alternative” are then as scientifically flawed as animal experimentation – i.e. we accept that animal experimentation is scientifically invalid, inaccurate and irrelevant, then any methodology which is based on the same results is equally doomed for failure.

So when it’s stated that “alternatives” are sought to counter animal experimentation we need to be aware that this can lead us up a dark alley which has no medical consequences and keeps the animal experimentation process in continued operation and full swing.

Only last Friday (17/02/06) Dr Andrew Knight a conscientious objector now a vet and outspoken animal activist, spoke on alternatives to vivisection. Although not exhaustive due to time restraints, he puts the alternatives into 3 categories. The Good. The Bad and The Ugly.

Basically the Good include computer simulations, DASIE surgical simulators, and alternative surgical training and non-invasive techniques. He told us that a real grey area for veterinary students is using the waste products from an abattoir so that major blood vessels can be infused with fake blood.

The Bad is, for example, euthanasing sheep (a large portion of animals used in his training were sheep) to cut major blood vessels and to find out how their physiology works. Andrew Knight, being a conscientious objector, had many stories to tell of how thrilled some of his colleagues were to feel the beating of a sheep’s heart still pounding within her body just before they were about to kill her.

Killing non-human animals, from a university perspective, is how they condition their students into thinking they are developing a real sense of responsibility towards animals. No doubt some people would call it “humane” slaughter!

Dr Knight sited The Ugly situations as greyhounds who are dissected over a period of 6 weeks. Dr Knight said that by refusing to dissect in his second year he encountered much hostility. He personally used the threat of legal action and threatened to go to the media if he was in any way disadvantaged in grade marks for his refusal to kill animals under any and all circumstances.

Non-human animals cannot be considered as appropriate models of human diseases and conditions. To even consider using non-human animals, even the animals that are the furthest away from humans on the phylogenetic scale, has obviously no basis in science.

So legitimate alternatives are available but we have a problem with transparency in Australia and this is where our efforts must lie if we are to make inroads for so-called “laboratory” animals.

We won’t see governments hurrying to ban animal experimentation because economic considerations stand in contrast to the ethical views, the huge financial interests at stake overwhelm both ethical and scientific considerations, thanks to the sensationalism of the media and the ruling government of the day.

Lara Goldstein: When I visited the LP News Archive I found an article which debated the issue of animal rights. Overwhelmingly readers who wrote in were against them (67.5%) with one reader stating “I would rather they use animals for testing products than humans. Would any abolitionist animal rights activist volunteer to be used in tests so that animals could be spared”? Do you agree with human testing in laboratories, in place of animals?

Claudette Vaughan: The question you ask is very similar to: Which is it to be? My Child or My Dog?

It’s never something I’ve entertained seriously because even at an instinctive level I think the question is a stacked deck – a loaded question. Fait accompli. It’s something that the biomedical community trots out occasionally to strike fear into an unsuspecting public because it works and they know it. It’s rhetoric and such philosophical renditions do not address the science of the issue.

If there was a book I would recommend it would be “What Will We Do If We Don’t Experiment On Animals?” by Jean Swingle Greek and C Ray Greek. They came up with that title because that’s the most frequently asked question from biomedical people through to animal rights advocates. The Dr Greek(s) have spent their careers on producing evidence on how animal – modeled research harms humans.

As animal rights activists are protesting to get animals out of laboratories, so the cost of the human health issue is also taken into account. For example: It’s been said that arterial suturing was delayed because of the dependence on the results of the procedure performed on animals. Decades later, during an attempt to bore through the blocked arteries of a human patient the surgeon found that the build-up was so great that any attempt would be futile. Instead he suggested that the obstruction could be “by-passed” by means of attaching an artery above and below the blockage. This was done. Initially it was considered only as a temporary measure, but with the patient surviving and continuing to show a marked improvement, the bypass was left in place. The patient went on to live a normal life for several years.

Take heart valve replacement as another example. The first work on heart valves was demonstrated in human cadavers. Others began working on dogs. Due to the anatomical and physiological differences between the canine species and humans, the procedure which was effective in dogs was ineffective in humans. Thus, the development for clinical use was delayed.

It has been well over 20 years since the first case of AIDS was identified, over 40 million people worldwide have died, and it is estimated that every day 10,000 more are becoming infected with HIV. It’s a wonder that AIDS activists aren’t more vocal in opposing animal experimentation because some know that primates cannot get fully blown AIDS.

In a brave article called “AIDS and Animals” human and animal activist, Peter Tatchell movingly attacked the use of animals in Aids research and called upon the gay community "to give a lead to society by declaring our abhorrence of AIDS research which is based upon captivity and cruelty to other animal species". He said and I quote:

“Am I alone in my sense of moral revulsion at the way chimpanzees are being abused in the name of scientific research to combat AIDS? Is there anyone else who shares my feelings of shame at the way the lesbian and gay community and AIDS organisations have remained silent about the cruelty of these experiments?”
“We all want to see a cure and vaccine against HIV as soon as possible. But can it be right to remedy the suffering of people with AIDS through deliberate infliction of suffering on other sentient species? Given our own experience of oppression, don't we have a responsibility to speak out against the exploitation of animals in scientific laboratories?

I have seen first hand the pain and anguish AIDS causes. Indeed, it is precisely because of this first-hand knowledge that I feel such a sense of outrage that chimpanzees are being wilfully injected with HIV and subjected to other experiments in the name of conquering AIDS.

In addition to the cruelty involved in many of these vivisection experiments, the animals are usually kept in the most appalling conditions. Chimpanzees, which have evolved to live a roaming treetop existence in large family groups, are, instead, isolated in tiny metal cages where they have barely room to turn. This results in stress and anxiety for the animals and leads to psychological disorders and physical ill health.

Even prior to their imprisonment in scientific laboratories, much suffering is inflicted on chimpanzees. Many are taken from the wild as infants; usually by shooting their mothers. For every chimpanzee that reaches a laboratory alive, between five and ten die during capture or later during transportation due to physical abuse, starvation or despair.

In West Africa, partly as a result of this "slave trade" in animals, chimpanzees are now an endangered species with their population today being only two percent of what it was a hundred years ago.

Faced with such barbarism, it seems incumbent on the lesbian and gay community, and on people with HIV, to speak out against this AIDS-related animal research which is increasingly being justified in our name and for our alleged benefit. If we still hold true to the emancipatory ideals which inspired the modern lesbian and gay movement, then we cannot possibly collude with the oppression of other species in order to deliver ourselves from the oppression of AIDS. To demand rights for ourselves as homosexuals, and as people with HIV, and then to deny the rights of other sentient creatures, would be a grotesque betrayal of the liberatory vision which has been at the heart of the struggle for lesbian and gay freedom.”

“The moral case for opposing AIDS-connected animal experiments, and all other forms of vivisection, closely mirrors the case for universal human rights and the rejection of other forms of oppression such as racism and homophobia.” - Peter Tatchell.

For further research into human-based models I recommend the book ‘Specious Science’ especially the chapter titled Beyond the Animal Model: Human autopsy studies, Clinical Research, Epidemiology, In Vitro Research, The Human Genome and Proteome Projects, The Vital Role of Technology, the Power of Prevention and Changing the System.

In ‘What Do We Do If We Don’t Experiment On Animals?” there’s a whole chapter called “The Past, Present and Future of Human-based Research”.

I’d also recommend Gary Francione’s “Intro to Animal Rights: Your Child or Your Dog?”

Thanks Lara for your time and interest.