The following report and photos were received by Italian activists
The European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) was taking place this year in Arezzo, Italy, from august 27th to 29th. Among the Scientific board organizing this conference was Alessandra Angelucci, worldwide known for her cruel experiments on primates. A group of Italian activists felt the need to do something to highlight the suffering of these animals and name and shame Alessandra Angelucci the vivisector among her colleagues.
While organizing some demos for the conference, alerts on e-mail lists were sent out, asking to politely inform the ECVP organizing committee that vivisectors like Alessandra are not welcome and should not take part in serious events like ECVP2007.
On monday 26th ECVP attendees were having a public opening banquet in the most famous square of Arezzo, when about 10 activists appeared among them with hundreds of leaflets informing them about Alesandra Angelucci’s work on primates, called for what it is: torture! The leaflet had Alessandra’s photo on it, so that they could recognize her among the partecipants and show their disgust. A lot of police was hiding around the square (not so well actually, since they had been spotted previously but didn’t deter activists from this leafletting) and immediately arrived asking for Id’s and a copy of the leaflet. This gave a lot more attention on the activists, wich carried on leafletting and answering questions from curious researchers.
One of the ECVP organizers approached the activists, telling them he personnaly knows Alessandra from their University days in Rome. He said she was not personally coming to the conference, but remained in Utah.
Meanwhile other activists put about 50 posters with Alessandra’s face on the walls over the city center.
On tuesday 27th we had a great demo at the entrance of the "Congress Center" for the first day of this important international conference. At 8.00 am about 20 activists were greeeting attendees with a lot of posters, pictures of mutilated animals in labs, megaphones, airhorns and whistles. Two big banners were put on the fence near the gate, one generally against vivisection, the other one simply reading: 'Allessandra Angelucci = torturer'. A lot of the posters had Alessandra’ face on them, so that every person passing by could see her, and was approached asking 'do you know this woman? She kills and mutilates primates at Utah University, she could be inside there, beware!'. The megaphone was used to inform hundreds of researchers going to ECVP about the horrors of primate experiments and how it is our duty to give names to what happens in labs, one of them being Alessandra Angelucci's.
The best thing of all was not only to shame her in front of so many colleagues, but also receiving a good amount of positive reactions. We met a vegan eye researcher, who talked to us on how he opposes animal experiments on ethical and scientific grounds and how he would use all is knowledge to talk about this during debates spurring inside the congress center because of our demo. He said that a lot of the scientific community in this field is opposed to animal experiments.
It was good to talk to young students, both working as staff at ECVP to gain free entry. They confirmed our friend Alessandra was not there, they had asked about it after reading our leaflets at the opening banquet. They both oppose animal experiments and said that even if some other vivisectors were present at this event, they area tiny minority and are generally seen badly from all the others. Good news to hear!
Well, we actually had also some negative response; one of them was a woman that started saying something like 'better on primates than on humans' and then admitted she does experiments on cats eyes herself! The other one being a good friend of Alessandra, so angry hearing her name shamed on the megaphone and arrogantly confronting the activist using it. He could only start a phrase saying he was a friend of Alessandra when he had so many activists surrounding him and shouting “shame on you!” on his face that we could not hear one more word from him. This angry man had to be escorted inside by riot police!
Even if Alessandra was not personally there we think this demo and our pressure on ECVP did have a good effect and were really worth the effort. We hope some day animal killers will not be admitted inside ECVP and similar events.
