Media Inquiries
The Anti-Vivisection Movement
Publisher Roberta Kalechofsky has
pinpointed the birthplace of the anti-vivisection movement
to be Florence, Italy, circa 1863. At that time, the aristocracy
and the intellectual community both wholeheartedly endorsed
a petition to end the experiments of Professor Schiff, then
a prominent vivisector. Frances Power Cobbe was at the helm
of the early anti-vivisection movement, and she was succeeded
by another forceful woman, Anna Kingsford, a physician trained
in Paris at the turn of the 1880s, according to John Vyvyan,
author of In Pity and In Anger.
In the United States, Joseph Greene
recruited a group of Boston’s most prominent citizens for
the first meeting of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society
(NEAVS) on March 30, 1895. Six months later, the society was
incorporated and opened its first office at 179A Tremont Street.
Philip Peabody, a physician by training and lawyer by profession,
became its first president.
Dr. Henry J. Bigelow wrote, "There
will come a time when the world will look back to modern vivisection
in the name of science as they now do the burning at the stake
in the name of religion."
In addition to ethical arguments,
the modern anti-vivisection movement has been buoyed by strong
scientific evidence that non-animal research methods make
for better human medicine.
Anti-vivisectionists use a variety
of means to end the oppression of animals, including outreach
and educational activities. Other ways include encouraging
people to purchase cruelty-free products and putting pressure
on a specific lab/company to reform or end its animal experiments.
Funding research to develop non-animal tests to replace vivisection
is also crucial.
Although vivisectionists and the research
industry work hard to characterize all those opposed to animal
experimentation and testing as being indifferent to human
needs, that is far from the truth. In reality, the
anti-vivisection movement is based in science and ethics,
and is deeply concerned with social justice for all beings.
The anti-vivisection movement brings together people who are
also concerned with human rights, the environment and racial
equality. The anti-vivisection mission is to expose,
oppose and end all harmful experiments on living beings, whether
human or nonhuman.
|
