The ANZCCART protests
Vivisectors from around the country came to Wellington in June for the annual conference of the Australia and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching (ANZCCART). The ANZCCART conference was a disaster for the vivisectors and a victory for animal rights activists. The original conference venue was to have been the National Library in Wellington. NAVC started a letter writing and email campaign urging the library not to host the vivisectors, and library staff joined in by starting a petition against the vivisection conference. Penny Carnaby, chief executive of the National Library, got a lot of letters and emails from around the country and was starting to feel the pressure. With just two weeks to go until the conference was due to open, the Library suddenly announced that ANZCCART had canceled the conference booking. No reason was given but we are presuming that the National Library had pressured them behind the scenes or that opposition from some library staff made it impossible for the conference to go ahead.
From then on, ANZCCART refused to make any comment to the media about the conference. Several media outlets interviewed NAVC but none of them could get any comment out of ANZCCART.
In the meantime we were advertising the protests against the conference but we didn’t know where the conference was going to be. We called a rally at Parliament on Sunday 26th of June, the day the conference was due to start.
On the day, around 100 people gathered at parliament to hear Sue Kedgley from the Green party and Mark Eden from NAVC speaking about vivisection and ANZCCART. After the rally a group of protesters went to the nearby Royal Society Buildings, where ANZCCART has its office, and held a noisy protest where fake blood was thrown over the office buildings. We didn’t know it at the time but ANZCCART had not found a conference venue at all and were forced to cram themselves into the Royal Society buildings and were actually inside when this protest took place.
The next day, several activists staked out hotels where vivisectors where known to be staying and followed them to the venue. It was only then that we discovered that they were using the Royal Society buildings, which contain a few small meeting rooms. Previous ANZCCART conference have been in expensive corporate conference venues so it must have been a real blow to the vivisectors to have their conference in a cramped low budget meeting room.
Later on Monday, protesters visited two vivisection labs in Upper Hutt. The Wallaceville Animal Research centre is owned by AgResearch and is the oldest vivisection laboratory in the country. Several protesters jumped the fence and ran into the lab buildings. Activists discovered sheep undergoing experiments and photographed them. Police arrived and arrested two activists but released them without charge after twenty minutes. Protesters then visited Schering Plough Animal Health Ltd, which makes vaccines for farm animals and test them on guinea pigs and other animals. Schering Plough are responsible for the cruelest experiments in the country, causing "very severe suffering" to 865 guinea pigs in 2003 alone. Security and police locked the gate while the protest was held outside and neighbours where informed about what goes on inside this factory. That evening, ANZCCART delegates met at the Wellesley Club in Wellington for a conference dinner. Unfortunately for them, they were followed and we discovered the supposedly secret dinner venue. Two hours of drumming and chanting outside the Wellesley Club meant that everyone in the area was aware of just who was eating there that night.
Tuesday was the last day of the conference and it started very early when a small group of protesters visited a hotel where many vivisectors were staying and woke them up with drums and whistles at 5.30am. Protests continued outside the Royal Society buildings all morning until the end of the ANZCCART conference at 1pm. During the morning a small group visited the nearby Ministry of Agriculture and held a short but noisy protest inside the head office. Police arrested six activists after this action. The arrested activists ranged in age from 17 to 85 years old. They were charged with disorderly behaviour but all charges were withdrawn by police on August 9th.
THANK YOU:
To all the protesters who kept the pressure on the vivisectors for three days of protests. Thanks to all the background people who helped keep the frontline protesters on the streets 24 hours a day, and thank you to all the anonymous supporters who supplied us with info on the movements of the vivisectors as they tried (and failed) to keep their conference secret over the last few days.