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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: September 2007

Auto racer, author, and anti-vivisectionist Hans Ruesch dies at age 94

 

Hans Ruesch, 94, died in Massagno, Switzerland, on August 27, 2007, after a prolonged illness that brought several premature reports of his death.

Born in Naples of a Swiss mother and German father, Ruesch briefly studied law at the University of Zurich, but quit at age 19 to race his M.G. sports car. Soon switching to a much faster Maserati, Ruesch won the first 12 of his eventual 27 victories in international auto racing competion during the next three years, proving especially successful in hill climbs and races on ice.

Moving rapidly to the top level of European auto racing, Ruesch drove an Alfa Romeo to third place in his 1932 Grand Prix debut. Competing chiefly on the Grand Prix circuit after 1934, Ruesch was an independent car owner in a sport dominated by German and Italian factory teams who raced with Nazi and Fascist subsidies.

Taking the lead in the 1936 British Grand Prix on the third lap, and holding it, Ruesch on the 60th lap, as an apparent gesture of sportsmanship, turned his car over to Dick Seaman, the most renowned British driver of the era, and shared his first Grand Prix victory with Seaman.

Ruesch took his Alfa Romeo to South Africa for the winter of 1936-1937, where he raced chiefly against the Nazi-subsidized Auto Union team.

After four Grand Prix wins among a career-best six victories in 1937, Ruesch appeared to be on the verge of Grand Prix stardom. According to some sources--but not others, including his authorized online biography--Ruesch in 1938 joined the Alfa Romeo factory team; traveled to the U.S. with the Italian racing great Tazio Nuvolari in mid-year, after the Alfa Romeo cars proved uncompetitive and dangerous; and in July 1938 jumped to the Auto Union team with Nuvolari. The official Ruesch biography mentions no events of 1938 after April.

"In 1939 with the political situation in Europe deteriorating," the official bio recounts, Ruesch "moved to Paris, where he began writingS¹He had made a scouting trip to America in 1938, and with the Germans one day away from Paris and the borders closed, he headed for SpainS¹He was arrested in Madrid but, with the help of a female friend, managed to get released and continued on to Lisbon where he stayed for six weeksS¹He settled in New York, studying creative writing. He took up writing full time and had short stories published by Redbook, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post and Esquire."

Post-World War II, Ruesch authored two novels, Top of the World (1950) and The Racer (1953), which were made into films starring Anthony Quinn and Peter O'Toole, and Kirk Douglas, respectively.

An attempted racing comeback in 1953 ended after Ruesch crashed his Ferrari in his first event, killing a Italian policeman and seriously injuring three other people.

Ruesch produced several more novels during the next 23 years, but founded the Center for Scientific Information on Vivisection (CIVIS) in 1974, and abandoned fiction writing to produce the influential exposés The Slaughter of The Innocent (1978) and The Naked Empress (1982). Both were instrumental in boosting support for the early animal rights movement.

CIVIS chapters founded around the world in support of Ruesch were among the most active incubators of animal rights activism, but lost much of their momentum and leadership to other organizations, as Ruesch became embroiled in often one-sided disputes with perceived rivals. Ruesch eventually lost a protracted libel suit brought by the Italian League Against Vivisection. Animal Liberation author Peter Singer, another frequent target, mostly ignored him.

Eventually Ruesch outlived the central premise of his argument. Ruesch held that animal experiments are invalid predictors of the effects of drugs and medical procedures on humans because animals are inherently too different from humans to permit accurate cross-species extrapolation.

Introduced by antivivisectionists more than two generations before Charles Darwin authored The Origin of Species, this approach was eroded by advances in genetic research which have increasingly established how closely humans are related to other species--even mollusks. Thus, while whole organisms may respond very differently to particular conditions or substances, specific tissues or systems sometimes respond identically.

As the science of the "scientific" argument that Ruesch favored changed, the emphasis of anti-vivisection campaigning tilted heavily toward making the case that animals should not be experimented on because they are enough like humans to deserve equivalent moral consideration.

Ruesch argued in his last published essay--as he often had before--that the turn away from his approach came because universities both employ moral philosophers and host animal experiments. --Merritt Clifton