HANS RUESCH

CIVIS – STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES  (1975-2000)

 

 

1. All animal experiments (aka vivisection) must be rejected both on ethical and medical grounds.

 

2. Animal experimentation destroys respect for life and hardens the experimenter against the suffering of human patients. Callousness towards animals turns imperceptibly but inevitably into callousness towards human beings.

 

3. Experiments on animals are not a proper way to diagnose, research or heal human ailments. The organic, anatomical, biological, metabolic, genetic, histological and psychic differences between humans and animals are so substantial that knowledge obtained from animals is not only worthless but misleading, and can be fatal when applied to humans, especially the sick (pharmacological disasters, therapeutical errors, etc.).

 

4. Animal experiments are not carried out in the interest of mankind, but only of the experimenters themselves and their financial backers, as there has never been a singles statistical proof that their results are applicable to human beings, whereas proofs of the opposite are countless.

 

5. Animal experiments lull the public, especially doctors and patients, into a false sense of security that prevents them from warding off illnesses.

 

6. Most of today’s diseases are not organic in origin but have psychological, social, alimentary, environmental and iatrogenic (due to doctors and therapies) causes. All these factors cannot be reproduced in their complexity in animals. That is why orthodox medicine has no causal treatments to offer. It can’t even cure a common cold, insomnia, rheumatism, arthritis, cancer, nor any of the other traditional diseases, which it has only managed to increase, meanwhile producing new ills, such as SMON, various herpeses and allergies, leukemias, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, Ebola etc. By concentrating on the symptoms, it obscures the recognition of the causes.

 

7. Sick care is one of the main victims of vivisection. The many billions of dollars squandered yearly on useless animal torture should rather go to the assistance of the ailing. With the biggest budget for animal experimentation in the world, the United States should also be the healthiest of all nations, but it is one of the sickest, mentally and physically, only seventeenth in the statistics of life expectancy, behind many underdeveloped countries where animal research is unknown.

 

8. While health depends primarily on prevention and individual lifestyle, the healing of ills can in no way be obtained by animal experiments, but only by application of some of the many “soft” disciplines that are spurned by official medicine because of its fixation on animal experimentation and profits rather than health, for example dietetics, psychosomatics, psychotherapy, exercise, fasting, yoga, environmentalism, epidemiology, vegetarianism, veganism, homeopathy, chiropractic, osteopathy, naprapathy, diathermy, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, heliotherapy, faith healing, herbalism, acupuncture, urinotherapy (Amaroli), macrobiotics, and more, which have proven effective, and economical to boot.

 

9. Medical research must be holistic, concern itself with the entire person, adopt methods of research that relate to the causes and the patients, instead of veterinarian results applied to humans, which at best replace acute symptoms with chronic illness.

 

10. The veterinary education should equally follow humane principles: no more deliberate infliction of maladies and mutilations on healthy animals, but considerate treatment of spontaneous diseases and natural accidents. For all these reasons, to demand the total abolition (prohibition by law) of animal experimentation is not only possible but necessary.