As Public Support for Vivisection Wains, Alliance for Progressive Science Counters Animal Abusers’ Attempt at Resurgence

In January 2006, 16-year-old Laurie Pycroft formed the “Pro-Test” movement in the UK to rally public support for vivisection in the face of vocal animal rights opposition. The group’s young spokesperson, Tom Holder, came to the US in 2008, funded by a vivisection industry front group, to start Speaking of Research, a “media” network that promotes animal “research.” In March 2009, Dr. David Jentsch founded a Pro-Test chapter at UCLA and, with Holder’s support, a new movement of aggressive vivisector- activists was born.

Deploring the research community’s inadequate response to aggressive anti-vivisection campaigns, Pro-Test activists advocate fearless defense of their agenda and have initiated a new offensive in the ongoing science wars. In alliance with the Americans for Medical Progress, a vivisection industry front group, and with the aid of a million dollar bankroll, Pro-Test forces have rallied their base, organized spirited protests, spread their message through newspapers ad and billboards, and promoted disinformation generally.

While the Pro-Test movement is still small, it must not be underestimated. In the 1980s the animal rights movement thought it had shut down the fur industry, only to witness its vigorous resurgence a decade later; anti-vivisectionists must not make the same mistake and need to attack every new tactic and campaign, every novel threat. In October 2009, amidst a glaring neglect of critical attention two leading total liberation blogs, Thomas Paine’s Corner (TPC) and Negotiation Is Over (NIO), joined forces with Dr. Steven Best and the North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO) to create the Alliance for Progressive Science (APS).

APS was formed to attack Pro-Test on both scientific and ethical grounds. APS exposes the powerful economic interests driving the vivisection complex and 17th century research paradigms, during a 21 st century era of advanced nutritional science and hundreds of sophisticated technological alternatives to nonhuman animal research and testing. Through the concept of “progress,” APS emphasizes both the moral bankruptcy of vivisection and its antiquated and unscientific nature, combating the stereotype of animal rights as “anti-scientific” and “anti-progress.”

APS champions a new research paradigm that is “progressive” in its embrace of animal rights and development of new technologies that promise qualitative leaps in science and medicine. APS emphasizes that the vivisection industry, not the animal rights community, is the true terrorist menace and the real obstacle to moral and technological progress, in that it clings tortures and kills up to 100 million nonhuman animals a year, it operates with fallacious research models, it prostitutes science and the public interest to profit and the capitalist interests of pharmaceutical corporations.

To maintain critical focus on the new propaganda tactics of the vivisection industry, NIO is establishing a network of bloggers committed to publishing regular articles on the Pro-Test propaganda front to advance a new model of science, medicine, and progress. We urge fellow activists to join us; to become regular readers of NIO and TPC; to follow our reporting on Pro-Test tactics and campaigns; to research, write, and publish on our pages your own essays; and to advance a new concept and practice of science and medicine that relegates vivisection to its rightful place – in the dustbin of history.

APS does not compete with, but rather compliments, existing anti-vivisection activism. APS seeks to put down the new tactical fronts and propaganda efforts designed to erase two centuries of anti-vivisection activism and to expand the vivisection industry and Big Pharma to unprecedented levels of killing, influence, and profit. Please review our upcoming website and more detailed statement of purpose in our critical manifesto for a progressive science. We look forward to your thoughts and hope we can work together to stop Pro-Test, abolish vivisection, and take the giant strides in science and medicine that the vivisection industry, universities, pharmaceutical corporations, and government so effectively blocks.

Coming soon: www.allianceforprogressivescience.org