Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #370472 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-23
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Thorough and rigid - enlightening and readable
Page is an intelligent and stuctured writer. His research is methodical and he presents it in an academically acceptable way.

He had managed to keep it interesting despite this, and adopts a very easy style of communication. His obviouis passion to unearth the truth comes out, but he avoids the rant.

The book looks at seperate areas such as specific diseases, periods in history and consequences. In each he delves in to medical journals and news stories to unearth striking information. He also manages to include a cultural interlude: Shakespeare and Wagner are included.

I would suggest this book to people beginning to find out about it. It's accessable and can be read without delving into technical details.

It's also idea for people who want to explain why we don't need animal experiments, as it includes helpful servings of evidence in understandable form. As a medical magazine said of this book, it deserves a wider audience.

Relentless in its condemnation of animal experimentation...
With the insight and precision of a scientifically trained mind, Dr. Page outlines why vivisection (defined as experimenting on a being for the benefit of something or someone other than itself) cannot, has not, and will not, work. The reason is simple and available to anybody capable of rational, common-sense thinking: that is, rats, dogs and chimpanzees are not humans. Page begins his work by favourably quoting Kant: you have intelligence, use it! In other words, do not believe assertions your heart militates against.

Whenever the boundary between two or more species is crosses, differences in anatomy, neurochemistry, physiology, immunology, metabolism.....arise. In the best possible case a drug administered to numerous animals will produce inconsistent, discordant and unreliable results: so that a dog withstands a chemical which would kill a monkey, and a rat, subject to the same experiment, dies whilst its rodent cousin the mouse lives. Dr. Page lists lots of these differing responses to particular experiments amongst the animal kingdom and, despite what may be intuitively felt, there are no obvious grouped reactions: humans sometimes react like gorillas, other times like gerbils.

This natural variation in how a species responds to a particular experimental procedure is compounded by what could be called the external effects. Laboratories, subjecting the same animals to the same experiment, often find it difficult to reproduce the same result elsewhere and/or at a later date. In one telling example, Dr. Page outlines how something as innocuous as bedding can drastically alter the findings found in research which uses mice. Add to this the variations in age, sex and diet and you end up with a chaotic, meaningless collection of often conflicting findings. So, what do you go for, A, B or C? Are you willing to stake your child's life on this decision?

Vivisection, of course, is built upon faulty logic from the outset. Each being is vulnerable to species specific diseases, and of the 30,000 we humans are known to be at risk of, only a total of 300 are shared by other animals. So these diseases, which in most cases we know not the cause nor the cure of, are artificially created and then given to animals. These man-made diseases represent, not parallel, human ones.

As other reviewers have noted, the strongest part of this book is the opinions of vivisectors themselves. Dr. Page takes us into a world where even the top UK vivisector admits that it is not a necessary practice (quite a concession). The chapter on cancer includes quotations from professors at the top of their fields referring to present cancer research using animals as fraudulent and flawed, and it is quite chilling reading for anyone with an ounce of compassion in their bones. Others ponder why trying to extrapolate data derived from experiments on rats seem to have no practical worth for humans. Indeed he shows us that despite the heroic image vivisectors like to effect for the media - which usually leaves the lay viewer with a vision of the lone experimenter working to end the scourge of cancer day in day out - the vast majority of experiments are the products of misplaced boyish curiosity, in the best possible case, and simple cruelty, in the worst. At my own university, for instance, professors were paid to study divorce patterns in humans using separated gerbils. Absurd? Yes. But sadly such experiments are the rule not the exception: people who are truly seeking a cure for the notorious diseases, those who deserve our admiration, would stay away from the irrelevancies of vivisection. Precious resources - in the form of gifted minds, economic subsidies and moral support - are wasted funding experiments the findings of which have long since sat in books "vivisectors are too ignorant to poke their noses into" (to quote Schopenhauer). As Page indicates early on in this book, the vast majority of animal experiments are but repeats of what has been done countless times before, and this simple fact proves the inconclusive nature at the heart of vivisection.

And that leads me onto what I consider the weakness in this book, others may consider it its strength. Although at times Dr. Page seems to tinker on the edge of lambasting the cruelty and arrogance of modern science and exploring the immorality of vivisection, this book is solely about the scientific dimension of animal experimentation. A more complete message, I think, may have been delivered by complementing this approach with basic ethics. Rather than to show the historical inaccuracies in certain pro-vivisectionists claims, for instance, Dr. Page could have shown the redundancy of such retrospective thinking. Just because something has given something of value (not that vivisection has) does not mean that it has an immutable right to persist in the face of something which gives us greater benefits. The telegram, for example, bestowed upon us humans unknown wonders, but we do not use that system of communication any longer because the telephone has bettered it. Likewise, modern technology has made the value of vivisection redundant, it is only slavery to tradition which keeps this absurd cruelty alive.

One objection which the pro-vivisectionist may offer to this book is as follows: all of these statistics, the scientific facts and figures Dr. Page has at the tips of his fingertips were, after all, discovered by animal experiments. To which we can respond thus: "all of those statistics, little medical-man, have piled up a mountain of dead animals upon which the flag of ignorance waves!" Dr. Page shows, in a way this brief review cannot, that vivisection has only revealed its own uselessness. Experimenting on animals is a relic of the initials stages of our scientific age, it is a cruel, scientifically illogical waste of human resources and animal lives. It is a barbarism, which must end if human progress is ever going to equate more than going round in circles.

It's not "your baby versus your dog", it's vivisection versus science. This scholarly and wise book shows us why.

A complete and thorough investigation
The amount of research Dr Page must have put into this book must be enough to put most writers to shame. Despite the fact that most animal researchers jealously hide any clue that their job might not be as vital as they claim in public, the evidence uncovered comes largely from the vivisectors themsleves.

Somehow Dr Page manages to give us all the facts, and hard scientific evidence without threatening to lose us in a cloud of scientific jargon, he makes his work accessable to schoolchildren and to those already versed in science and medicine.

The conclusion reached by Dr Page is that no animal experiment is justifiable - on MEDICAL grounds, he doesn't resort to emotional tales of 'totured bunnies'. This conclusion is undeniable on discovery of the information Dr Page unveils through the book.

It's rare for a textbook to hold the interest of the reader, but this lively, well written book speaks volumes and lays down challenges to the medical world by arguing on a rational, intelligent level on simple, well supported truths.

I suspect that most purchasers of this book will be thse aiming to educate themselves as to why vivisection doesn't work, to enable them to help end it. Although these people could find no better text with which to do this, I hope other readers will include the sceptical, the fence sitters, the open minded, the undecided, and those who have accepted the existence of experiments on animals as a neccesary cost of human medicine.

The discoveries the reader makes range from progressive, unshakeable arguments to jaw-dropping bombshells (see some of the stuff on cancer !) but there are no heads raised above the parapets - all references are solid and anything not indisputably proven has obviously been left out.

I defy anyone to read this book and come away without having seen anything new. It is rare for a book to provoke this much thought and be so unforgettable.