Tell me more about the other books Slingshot has published or is going to publish?

 

When I published Dirty Medicine in 1993 I set up Slingshot Publications and it was my intention to publish my own books. Dirty Medicine went out of print in 1998 after selling 7, 000 copies mainly by mail order.

 

In 1998 I published a small booklet about Loic Le Ribault, an important French forensic scientist, mercilessly denigrated by the French State and by medical interests because he discovered the use of organic silica as a medicine for arthritis. I wrote a short booklet about him and he has since published his own series of books about his struggles and two terms of imprisonment.

 

Around 1999 or so, I thought that I would actually like to publish other people's work as well. In December 2002 Slingshot published A Cat in Hell's Chance, a campaigners view of the battle to close Hill Grove Farm in Oxfordshire, which bred cats for vivisection. There are no good aspects of vivisection or chemical testing and they have to absolutely abolished, they cannot be reformed. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), the campaign against Huntington Life Sciences is the way forward, attacking companies and the industry on every front while trying to cut off their financial backing and productive infrastructure.

 

One of the things that has always been of interest to me is the generational continuity of ideas, especially political ideas. So I thought it would be a good idea to publish some of the original texts which had a great impact on people. I offered to reprint an English language edition of Hans Ruesch´s ground-breaking and seminal anti-vivisectionbook Slaughter of the Innocent, which we did in 2003.

 

Although it was first published over 20 years ago in 1979, this book still gives you a sense of direction today. It was very difficult to re-publish, we had to create an electronic manuscript for it which meant copying every page with data recognition technology. Then it all had to be typeset again in the original form, so that there was continuity of the references.

 

Despite the fact that testing on a mouse or rat cannot have any real bearing on how a drug will affect a human and can lead to adverse reactions when given to humans, there are more animals being experimented on today than ever before.

 

The New Labour government has reneged on its anti-vivisectionist vote-catching rhetoric because they are so heavily indebted to and entrenched with the pharmaceutical multinationals. They can't back down from the position the chemical and pharmaceutical companies demand and that is why millions of animals continue to be slaughtered every year.

Testing of chemicals on animals is growing in Britain and America. When it comes to the questioning of a particular chemical, which has been known to be carcinogenic for a long time, the solution that has occurred to the chemical companies is to get full scale massive animal testing trials for that chemical. This means that they can put off making decisions for at least 5 or 6 years, which gives them another 5 or 6 years' profit and another 5 or 6 years' unaccountable deaths, while we wait for these massive animal slaughtering exercises to be carried out. Then of course there is another 5 or 6 years in implementing any reforming regulations.

 

Buying time?

 

If the tests prove to be unequivocally against the chemical, no doubt the chemical companies will come up with bizarre arguments such as: 'Oh well, you can't rely on animal testing, can you? It's not the same as human physiology'. Which is what they have said in the past. Then you get another 5 years of: 'How can we test chemicals on humans?' or 'How can we collate anecdotal stories of the effect of chemicals on humans?' and 'Let's have a think about this and find some way of doing it'. Then there's another 5 years and it just goes on indefinitely.