Vivisection Is A Social Evil

“VIVISECTION IS A SOCIAL EVIL”

“…because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character”.

George Bernard Shaw Linden Brough

UNIVERSAL OCTOPUS

Published by Universal Octopus 2017 www.universaloctopus.com First Edition 2010. Second Edition 2017 A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-9956346-4-0

Dedicated to end Suffering of Animals in Laboratories

SEEING and KNOWING Suffering with direct, incisive understanding.

Contents PART 1 PREFACE TO A PREFACE

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POSTSCRIPT: FEEDBACK

45

PART 11

EPILOGUE PART 111

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George Bernard Shaw: Writings on Vivisection WRITINGS ON VIVISECTION

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DOCTORS AND VIVISECTION

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THE HIGHER MOTIVE. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

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THE PRIMITIVE SAVAGE MOTIVE THE FLAW IN THE ARGUMENT

LIMITATIONS OF THE RIGHT TO KNOWLEDGE A FALSE ALTERNATIVE

CRUELTY FOR ITS OWN SAKE OUR OWN CRUELTIES

THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF CRUELTY

57 60 61 62 64

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SUGGESTED LABORATORY TESTS OF THE VIVISECTOR'S EMOTIONS 68 ROUTINE

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VIVISECTING THE HUMAN SUBJECT

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THE OLD LINE BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST "THE LIE IS A EUROPEAN POWER"

AN ARGUMENT WHICH WOULD DEFEND ANY CRIME THOU ART THE MAN

Bibliography/Helpful Resources

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PART 1

PREFACE - TO A PREFACE1

H

ow did posting an article about WORLD WEEK FOR ANIMALS IN LABORATORIES bring George Bernard Shaw face to face with a present day Vivisectionist? It began with a leaflet from WDAIL (World Day for Animals in Laboratories) that had come in the post enclosed in the latest Animal Aid magazine. I had been made aware of the intense suffering of animals in laboratories and the horrors of vivisection through such Newsletters and magazines from animal activist groups like PETA, Animal Aid and The Vegan Society.

At first I thought to send a donation to WDAIL but wasn’t sure about contributing to organizing the proposed Walk and Rally in London. The leaflet remained on my desk silently reminding me of the suffering of all the helpless animal victims in laboratories.

The facts pertaining to one ‘helpless animal victim’ had recently been revealed by PETA; it was about a golden-haired macaque monkey called Felix. Oxford University were granted a licence allowing experiments to cause Felix suffering classified as of

1

George Bernard Shaw’s comments on Vivisection from the PREFACE to “THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA: A TRAGEDY” (1906).

As fresh and relevant today as the understanding is based on Morality.

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substantial severity. First, over long months, Felix was conditioned through deprivation to perform repetitive movements. Next the surgeons cut through his skull to implant electrodes into his brain. Then, by injecting him with a toxin to destroy parts of his brain, experimenters deliberately induced the uncontrollable shaking and muscle rigidity that characterises Parkinson’s disease. Disabled, frightened and confused, Felix was put through more tests on his brain before he was killed, cut up and discarded.

Vivisectors killed Felix.

The procedures carried out on Felix were supposed to offer insight into Parkinson’s disease – but the key new treatment for Parkinson’s was made possible by research involving humans.

As prominent neurosurgeon Marius Maxwell argues: “One can

only conclude that primate vivisection has amounted to an expensive, savagely cruel and scientifically invalid sideshow”.

Through my work as a writer and honorary agent to poet Brian Taylor, I had become a ‘Newbie’ member of a very active and highly respected International writers’ forum. I had noticed there was a Current Affairs board and decided to post a thread there to bring attention to WORLD WEEK FOR ANIMALS IN LABORATORIES and invite members to report on what was happening in their part of the world.

Because it was a writer’s site I included a quote from George Bernard Shaw found on the U.K. WDAIL (World Day for Animals in Laboratories) site, used the ‘bite sized’ information and added a poem referring to Oxford University’s vivisection laboratory.

This was my first posting of a topic, having only posted poems and technical questions, so I didn’t know what to expect but hoped it might be noticed like a poster on a wall.

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I thought there might be a few replies about what was happening in America and certainly hadn’t expected the first reply to be from a Vivisectionist! A description and justification of cruel deeds, and a direct challenge to the Poster as being a hypocrite.

Here is what I posted:

ANYTHING TO REPORT FROM YOUR PART OF THE WORLD? WORLD DAY FOR ANIMALS IN LABORATORIES National March and Rally in LONDON Each year, millions of animals are dissected, infected, injected, gassed, burned & blinded in hidden laboratories across the nation under the guise of improving human health. But ignorance is anything but bliss for animals used in labs. Help save dogs, cats, primates, rabbits and other animals who are unwilling victims of painful and useless research.

Join World Week for Animals in Laboratories http://www.wdail.org AREOPAGITICA In the Vivisection Laboratory, the faintest of grey lights slants through the bars of cages where animals wait to be scientifically tortured for the benefit of mankind, to justify the ways of Man to God. (Oxford Blues by Brian Taylor)

"He who does not hesitate to vivisect would not hesitate to lie about it." ─George Bernard Shaw



Vivisectionist:

“So, I take it that you have not gotten any vaccinations, nor

have been to the doctor or dentist for any ailment.

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I assume this because 95% of all modern day medical treatment has 'some' origin from animal research.

I used to perform animal research.

I did research which is responsible for clearing the way for Lasik and other eye surgeries. There is a whole series of protocols that you must do and demonstrate before you can legally begin animal research.

Animal rights proponents think that if a company or government has an idea, we run out, grab 100,000 dogs or rabbits, and just experiment away.

That is not the case.

First, you have to put in 100s - 1000s of hours of research into past experiments and theories and justify that you aren't reinventing the wheel or pursuing something that isn't going to work.

Then, you have to put together a proposal detailing the risks and benefits along with the science of how it may or may not work.

The proposal is peer reviewed and if it passes it is then forwarded to a board for approval.

Once you get approval, then starts the tedious task of starting from 'theory' and going to 'experiment'.

1) You do as many mathematical and computer models as you can.

2) You then do proof of concept experiments on 'similar' material (inorganics and organics--sample tissue from cadavers and such).

3) Then after going back and forth from 1) to 2) you put together ANOTHER proposal using your results and asking permission to continue on to live animals.

Contrary to popular belief, computers cannot even get close to replacing animals. Computers are only as smart as the user.

Or put another way, computers only know what we know. So, if you are doing research into the unknown, computers can't magically tell you what will and will not work...

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So, the board then reviews your data and results and hypothesis/proposal to move forward and then if it is satisfactory you are green-lighted to continue to animals.

The actual animal research is done as humanely as possible.

We are nice to the animals, feed them, care for them, and then the experimentation is done as painlessly as possible.

If anaesthetic doesn't interfere with the results (majority of the time), then we use local anaesthetics.

If it does interfere with the results, then we proceed as quickly as possible. Once the experiment is completed, if necessary, we euthanize the animal with a painless and quick procedure. If the experiment doesn't require euthanasia and the animal isn't suffering any severe physical/emotional trauma, then we work with various orgs to place the animal with an owner.

Unfortunately though, the majority of the time, the animal does end up getting euthanized. On the whole, we aren't slaughtering animals by the hundreds for shi*s and giggles.

Nor are we needlessly abusive to the animals. We follow a whole series of protocols to ensure that the 'minimum' number of animals are used.

I find most animal rights movements to be offensive when those same people have no qualms about going to the hospital for their ailments, or going to the pharmacy to buy drugs for their discomforts.

Talk about hypocrisy.”

“In vain do the sentimental champions of vivisection declare themselves the most humane of men, inflicting suffering only to relieve it, scrupulous in the use of anaesthetics, and void of all passion except the passion of pity for a disease-ridden world.” ─ George Bernard Shaw 1906 13

This was followed by emotional replies about lives being saved because of animal testing, defending vivisection and admitting being biased:  Zoombie: “...without animal testing, I’d be dead. My mother would be dead... yeah, I’m biased… mostly because I’m closely acquainted with what we would have lost.”  Maryn: “...counting the lives of family members saved due to products involving animal testing, and running out of fingers.”

“It is not in his capacity of healer and man of science that the doctor vivisects or defends vivisection, but in his entirely vulgar lay capacity. He is made of the same clay as the ignorant, shallow, credulous, half-miseducated, pecuniarily anxious people who call him in when they have tried in vain every bottle and every pill the advertising druggist can persuade them to buy.” ─ George Bernard Shaw

As the Poster, I was accused of being a hypocrite, lying, scamming, trolling, talking nonsense; even the quote from George Bernard Shaw stirred up disbelief and was dismissed:  Waylander: “...I don’t think that Shaw really said that.”  Icerose: “I couldn’t find anywhere on the net that attributed the quote to Shaw other than this specific agenda group, and couldn’t find the quote period despite the various sites 14

with extensive quotes from Shaw. I’d say it was pretty safe to figure he didn’t say it.”  Mscelina: Shaw was a vegetarian and a well-known opponent of animal cruelty – including vivisection and animal testing.

He spoke out on a number of issues – as was his right – but that doesn’t make him the fount of all knowledge on any particular subject.

There are pro and cons to animal testing – and most interestingly, I’ve found this self-same post on several forums across the web today.

While it is pertinent spam considering the day and source of the quotation, it is inevitably, still spam.”  Billiebee: “I don’t think Shaw really said that. I could be wrong.

However, if Shaw didn’t and you know it...”

Effort had obviously been put in to find the quote without success so replies reflected an assumption that as the quote was invalid hence so was the rest of the posting. It seemed to be a case of nit-picking and avoidance of effort to understand what Shaw meant. I didn’t doubt that the quote was genuine but having posted it, I now felt responsible for validating it. It certainly wasn’t easy to find as it wasn’t among the popular listed quotes. Eventually I sourced it through the International Vegetarian Union by downloading and reading the E-book ‘Preface’ to ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma; a Tragedy’ by George Bernard Shaw. It was worth every moment of the time spent looking for it!

Here was a bright humanitarian mind that had looked deeply and thoroughly into the subject of Vivisection seeing it as 15

‘barbaric’ treatment of fellow beings. What was so refreshing was the timeless quality of the writing. He clearly saw suffering and its cause, illuminating the sanity of morality and the insanity of vivisection. His words rang out Truth that is as relevant today as it was one hundred years ago.

I was becoming aware that something extraordinary was happening. Where else in the world was such a parody taking place? A Vivisectionist publicly defending his unethical views, backed by beguiled supporters, challenging a Poster who was a Buddhist and a Vegan, and the whole predicament shown up in its true light by the spirit of George Bernard Shaw?

I decided to record what may represent the mainstream views of ‘educated’ Westerners to vivisection and use it, with quotes from George Bernard Shaw, to preface his Preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma. Also, to address the lost understanding of morality.

Added to the outbursts was exception to the wording in the information about vivisection being done ‘under the guise of improving human health’. This was in the ‘bite’ that had been offered for use from the WDAIL site and I had not noticed it as contentious. Here are the replies:  Waylander: “Live experiments in the UK are rigorously controlled by the Home Office; experimenters are subject to frequent inspection and extensive approval procedures. …the Poster has no idea what they are talking about...”  Billiebee: “It isn’t a ‘guise’, not just an appearance.

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Animal testing has saved human lives and improved human health. Was it worth it? If it gave us... sure... I guess...”

“When a man says to Society, "May I torture my mother in pursuit of knowledge?" Society replies, "No." If he pleads, "What! Not even if I have a chance of finding out how to cure cancer by doing it?" Society still says, "Not even then." If the scientist, making the best of his disappointment, goes on to ask may he torture a dog, the stupid and callous people who do not realize that a dog is a fellow-creature and sometimes a good friend, may say Yes, though Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson and their like may say No.” ─ G.B.S.

 Veinglory: “under the guise of improving human health = for the actual purpose of protecting and improving the health of humans and other animals.

I am very interested in reducing animal use, finding alternatives and improving the welfare of animals in the laboratory. But suggesting that animal-based research does not actually benefit us is plain wrong.

If only it were that simple.”

“The paths to knowledge are countless. One of these paths is a path through darkness, secrecy, and cruelty. When a man deliberately turns from all other paths and goes down that one, it is scientific to infer that what attracts him is not knowledge, since there are other paths to that, but cruelty. ...so the wisest people say, “If you cannot attain to knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.” ─ G.B.S. 17

A firm foundation of Morality puts an end to unwholesome thoughts like intentionally causing suffering to other living beings so that I can be free from suffering. There would be no desire for results obtained unethically. All come from the one Source; what we do to another we do to ourselves.

“Public support of vivisection is founded almost wholly on the assurances of the vivisectors that great public benefits may be expected from the practice. Not for a moment do I suggest that such a defence would be valid even if proved.” ─ G.B.S.

Having found the full quote I posted it with comments along the lines that by clinging to viewpoints we miss the truth of Suffering.

Here is the full quote from “The Doctor’s Dilemma: Preface on Doctors” by George Bernard Shaw:

“It is hardly to be expected that a man who does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will hesitate to lie about it afterwards to protect it from what he deems the ignorant sentimentality of the laity.”

As a thing is viewed so it appears... Comments arise based on viewpoints... Looking at a dog, one might view a hairy animal with four legs, or a guard dog, or a family pet, or something to inject something into if one is a vivisectionist... They are all viewpoints which submerge the TRUTH - that a dog is a living being which suffers just like us...

All living beings want to be happy... Moral purity is the spontaneous result of this clear seeing and understanding...

May all beings be well and happy!

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This caused another upsurge of reaction:  Waylander:

“Let’s revisit this discussion when someone important to you is diagnosed with an untreatable condition, Alzheimers or MS say...”

 Roger:

“Each year BILLIONS of animals are slaughtered and eaten. I would think that would be a higher priority than laboratory animals just based on sheer numbers.

Of course, to be morally pure, those concerned people would also have to be strict vegans and use absolutely no animal products of any kind.

Anything else is hypocrisy.”

 Icerose “I believe animals should be treated as well as possible, but I don't equate them to human life. Never will.

It is sad that we still have to use laboratory animals to get our latest medical breakthroughs, but what's the alternative? Just throw up our hands and return to the dark age so those precious little fuzzies won't be tested on?

I’m also not a vegetarian. I believe animals were put on this earth for our use. Granted that means we have a heck of a lot of responsibility and it should not be taken lightly.

No animal should be killed for thrills, but rather for the intention of protecting other humans (in the case of man eaters or other overly aggressive animals) or in the case that they are needed for food and clothing.”

Everyday language objectifying animals with words like ‘fuzzies’ denies their capacity for intelligence and emotion. The result of labelling cruelty correctly is - the more you look the more you see.

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“On one occasion I was invited to speak at a large AntiVivisection meeting in the Queen's Hall in London. I found myself on the platform with fox hunters, tame stag hunters, men and women whose calendar was divided, not by pay days and quarter days, but by seasons for killing animals for sport: the fox, the hare, the otter, the partridge and the rest having each its appointed date for slaughter.

The ladies among us wore hats and cloaks and head-dresses obtained by wholesale massacres, ruthless trappings, callous extermination of our fellow creatures.

We insisted on our butchers supplying us with white veal, and were large and constant consumers of pate de foie gras; both comestibles being obtained by revolting methods... Yet we were all in hysterics of indignation at the cruelties of the vivisectors.

These, if any were present, must have smiled sardonically at such inhuman humanitarians, whose daily habits and fashionable amusements cause more suffering in England in a week than all the vivisectors of Europe do in a year.” ─ G.B.S.

 Vivisectionist: “You have got to be trolling here. Seriously.

So are you a vegetarian?

Do you own any leather products?

Do you or your significant other use make-up?

Have you been vaccinated?

Do you plan on letting your kids be vaccinated?

Have you ever been to the hospital/dentist and had a procedure done?

If you get sick/injured do you plan on going to the hospital?

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Look, I'm all for morals and values, but at the same time, we live in the real world.

One day, probably in the next couple of hundred years, our technology will be such where we will never have to kill another animal for food or for research.

But in the meantime, simple prudence demands that these unpleasant tasks must occur.

I rarely outright denigrate a poster, but you are being just plain silly.

And trolling.”

“...every vivisector is a deserter from the army of honourable investigators. But the vivisector does not see this. He not only calls his methods scientific: he contends that there are no other scientific methods. When you express your natural loathing for his cruelty and your natural contempt for his stupidity, he imagines that you are attacking science.” ─ G.B.S.

A Buddhist undertakes to keep the Five Buddhist Precepts to practice Morality in everyday life; no Killing, Stealing, Sexual Misconduct, False Speech, no Intoxicating Drinks and Drugs.

This moral framework guides right action to avoid causing suffering to others. It simplifies choice to ‘cruelty free’ in everyday life; thoughts, speech, actions, livelihood – Mind comes first.

Morality is the first step in heightened awareness; labels are read to avoid products tested on animals and which include 21

unnecessary toxic chemicals that contribute to poisoning the environment for all living beings.

Therefore, as a consumer, one can make a difference.

The practice of morality is not a Buddhist idea but a Universal Truth reflected in all true spiritual teachings.

“...but that does not prevent the vivisectors from freely using the “you’re another” retort, and using it with justice.

We must therefore give ourselves no airs of superiority when denouncing the cruelties of vivisection. We all do just as horrible things, with even less excuse...

We are, as a matter of fact, a cruel nation; and our habit of disguising our vices by giving polite names to the offences we are determined to commit does not, unfortunately for my own comfort, impose on me.

Vivisectors can hardly pretend to be better than the classes from which they are drawn, or those above them; and if these classes are capable of sacrificing animals in various cruel ways under cover of sport, fashion, education, discipline, and even, when the cruel sacrifices are human sacrifices, of political economy, it is idle for the vivisector to pretend that he is incapable of practising cruelty for pleasure or profit or both under the cloak of science.

We are all tarred with the same brush; and the vivisectors are not slow to remind us of it, and to protest vehemently against being branded as exceptionally cruel...” ─ G.B.S.

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 Roger: What is a "being"? A dog? A worm? A microbe?

What is "well and happy"?

What is happiness to a dog or a worm?

Are we required to make sure all animals are "well" at all times? If applied in its strictest sense, the statement is ludicrous.

The Poster applied it to laboratory animals, but I was just pointing out that it could be applied far more widely so that none of us could claim ‘moral purity’.

Idealists often ignore the effect their ideals (if implemented) would have.

For instance, suppose PETA got its wish and we stopped "exploiting" animals.

What would happen to the millions of cows, pigs, and chickens in the world?

Who would feed them and take care of them?

No one would.

Without the income made by exploiting them, no one could afford to. It would be genocide on a massive scale.

As individuals, domesticated animals are "exploited" by man, but as species, they are some of the most successful because of their association with man.

Would PETA be happy with their virtual extinction?

Happy with having a few in zoos or returned to the wild for which they are no longer adapted?

Somehow I doubt it.”

“All beings tremble before danger, all fear death. When a man considers this he does not kill or cause to kill.”

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“He who for the sake of happiness hurts others who also want happiness, shall not hereafter find happiness.”

(The Dhammapada – Teachings of the Buddha)

Any fool can burn down a city or cut an animal open; and an exceptionally foolish fool is quite likely to promise enormous benefits to the race as the result of such activities. But when the constructive, benevolent part of the business comes to be done, the same want of imagination, the same stupidity and cruelty, the same laziness and want of perseverance that prevented Nero or the vivisector from devising or pushing through humane methods, prevents him from bringing order out of the chaos and happiness out of the misery he has made.” ─ G.B.S.

 Hellokiddo: “Animal abuse is a fundamental part of our culture.

Reasonably, in order to avoid ALL situations that support animal abuse of ANY type in ANY form we would have to virtually shut ourselves off from modern society.

So what are we to do if we disapprove of animal abuse?

Move to a deserted island, live as hermits, grow our own food, reject all society? Or could we stay and try to change it?

Doing so means, even if only indirectly, we are supporting animal abuse in some forms.

But in the long run we may do more good than harm that way.”

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 Dommo: “Let me tip over your soap box kiddo.

The animal rights position is essentially hypocritical bulls***.

Yeah animals shouldn't be wantonly slaughtered without reason, but at the end of the day I place human/sentient life above all else.

If it meant killing a few thousand lab rats to discover a useful new drug for combating diabetes, I'd completely support it. The reason I'm calling you out, is because what defines abuse?

I just licked my hand, and now about 100 mites are probably on a trip down to my gullet and are going to die.

I just murdered innocent creatures.

Just because we've got a fascination with the cute and cuddly, shouldn't mean that those animals are put on a pedestal. Let me put it this way.

I used to work on my uncle’s farm, and I can assure you, I saw more animals die during the harvesting of crops, than were EVER slaughtered (and they had beef cattle/pigs as well). A modern combine basically chops up anything that's hiding in the fields, deer, rabbits, mice, etc. So the next time you bite into that corncob, or you eat your salad, remember that thousands of innocent critters met their demise in order for you to eat that vegetable. Ultimately, eating meat is actually more humane...

So what say you? Is the life of a mouse worth that of a cow? Or how about that house fly that's just cruising around outside in your back yard. Is that creature equivalent to a dog?

If you support animal rights as PETA would have it, all creatures should be treated equally, right?”

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 BenPanced:

“...Yeah, like the release of hundreds of animals back into the wild "where they belong" is much more humane...”

Karma means action, things done, doing. If you intentionally give a poor man a pound, both of you benefit. If you tread on a snail deliberately, you have created Karma. The snail suffers. Because of your intention, you will suffer too.

Somewhere. Sometime. If you step on a snail accidentally, the snail suffers. Because you had no intention to harm it, moral purity protects you.

“The Achilles heel of vivisection, however, is not to be found in the pain it causes, but in the line of argument by which it is justified. The medical code regarding it is simply criminal anarchism at its very worst.” ─ G.B.S.



Vivisectionist: “...Look, I like animals.

I've never put a kitten in my microwave for shi*s and giggles.

But for crying out loud, the way this universe works is that there is a limited amount of resources and an infinite need for them, and as such, the strong survive.

It's not about being 'right or wrong' but rather being just the way the world works.

What is so offensive about animal rights activists (taken to the extreme) is that they have a complete and total 26

disregard for the OBVIOUS benefit and need for animals in food production and animal research or consequence if animal use was prohibited.

If they had their way, millions/billions of people would die each year and that is just ri-fu**ing-diculous. It is so ridiculous that it makes my head hurt.”

“Many people do cruel and vile things without being in the least cruel or vile, because the routine to which they have been brought up is superstitiously cruel and vile.

In the same way we find men and women practicing vivisection as senselessly as a humane butcher, who adores his fox terrier, will cut a calf's throat and hang it up by its heels to bleed slowly to death because it is the custom to eat veal and insist on its being white; or as a German purveyor nails a goose to a board and stuffs it with food because fashionable people eat pate de foie gras; or as the crew of a whaler breaks in on a colony of seals and clubs them to death in wholesale massacre because ladies want sealskin jackets; or as fanciers blind singing birds with hot needles, and mutilate the ears and tails of dogs and horses.” ─ G.B.S.

I followed this up with a final posting that had the intention of acknowledging the states of mind observed and to clarify understanding of morality.

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This post began with the question, 'Anything to Report From Your Part of the World?' in relation to WORLD WEEK for raising awareness about Animals in Laboratories.

There has been a reporting on inner worlds of thoughts, feelings, confusion, opinions, resentments, ill will, justification, blame - and very little compassion, loving kindness, wisdom, the very mental states needed to open up new ways to learn that will create a future when vivisection will be viewed as the dark ages of research.

Why the dark ages? Because vivisection is unethical and immoral.

What is ethical and moral?

Look to God - 'Thou Shalt Not Kill'...

To Jesus - 'To do unto others as you would like done unto yourself'...

To Buddha - Five Buddhist Precepts; to abstain from KILLING, STEALING, SEXUAL MISCONDUCT, LYING and INTOXICATING DRINKS & DRUGS...

To Yogis - Yama; NON-KILLING, TRUTHFULNESS and NON-STEALING...

To your own Heart...

It is IGNORANCE (not-seeing Truth), driven by greed and ill will, that causes man to create laws and rules that negate MORALITY. Gurdjieff's words warn us:

"You are both a wolf and a lamb.

If you do not stay awake the wolf will devour the lamb."

 Roger: “Well, if you're only looking for people to agree with you, you've come to the wrong place. Wisdom often comes from listening to the thoughts of others.”

Wisdom is the faculty in man that helps him distinguish what is good and beautiful from what is evil and ugly, what is true from 28

what is false. In Buddhism it means seeing things as they really are in order to expose and uproot the defilements of greed, ill will and ignorance that obscure the truth of suffering.  Waylander: “…Because vivisection is unethical and immoral.”

No it is not.

It is all relative.

Like I said, come back when someone you care about is diagnosed with Alzheimers and you realise that there is no meaningful treatment.

Or Aids - go find someone HIV positive and ask them how they feel about the use of animal models of HIV. I am willing to bet that your attitude towards developing animal models for human degenerative diseases will change pretty drastically.”

“...the lists of diseases which vivisection claims to have cured is long; but the returns of the Registrar-General show that people still persist in dying of them as if vivisection had never been heard of.” ─ G.B.S.

Morality is the Eternal Law of the Universe. It is Truth. All life is One. All creation is an organic whole. No man is independent of that whole. We should not do to others what we do not want done to us. If we put ourselves in the position of animals in laboratories that are at the receiving end of our actions – imprisoned, tortured, betrayed, killed, we would never want to cause that suffering to others.

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It is on this basis that moral intentions are constructed. They act as a framework within which our activities take place. In this way we normalise our relationships with others and the world around us.

There had begun to emerge other humanitarian replies against animal testing and offering evidence of the success of nonanimal tests. ďƒ˜ Hellokiddo: “... we all support companies that engage in practices we feel are immoral. We can't reasonably help it. In college I stopped eating meat, boycotted all companies that did animal testing, and would only use vegan products. I wrote to companies that tested on animals and asked them to stop. I shopped for vegan shoes online.

I refused to shop in malls and other stores that exploited sweatshop labor or sold fur; when possible, I bought products from vegan-run companies. When my doctor wrote me a prescription I handed it back and asked if there was a humane alternative available, explaining my boycott of animal testing.

I refused to keep a lovely diamond pendant my aunt got me for Christmas because I would not support the "blood diamond" industry.

I eventually came to the conclusion that it was impossible to be an active member of society and never support any companies with immoral practices.

If animal rights activists are "hypocrites," so is everyone else.

We all, if we live reasonably normal American lives, give our money to companies that engage in practices we consider immoral. Does that mean we throw in the towel?

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Do we say, "I cannot fail to support animal abuse in some ways, so why ever say a word about any of it?"

Some people feel that way, but I'm not one of them. We can both live in a society and try to change it. We do not have to take an all-or-nothing "love it leave it" attitude.”

The Buddha taught the Noble Eightfold Path as the Middle Way to live in the world and Jesus spoke of ‘living in the world but not of the world’.

Living a life based on ‘loving one another’ or ‘not doing evil, doing good and purifying the mind’ may result in changes that are given names like Vegan, anti-vivisectionist... If the intention is genuine there will be no problem with these names. No anger or ill will towards those who disagree with you.

Morality is the foundation.  Rowan: “Your saying that anyone who uses products that have been tested on animals but does not support animal testing is a hypocrite is a point I disagree with. Those people sitting and dying because they won't support companies that do tests that they were (often) legally required to do is pointless.

The tests are done, the products already exist.

Boycotting them all now accomplishes nothing, but that doesn't mean we can't change the future.

I don't think the argument that we should continue animal abuse because if we stopped it tomorrow God only knows how many animals would be left with nowhere to go is a good one. If they must be killed (and likely they would), then so be it. They are going to be killed anyway.

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A quick and humane death is preferable to the alternative for many (if not most) of them, and the abuse would come to an end then.

Continuing to support blatantly inhumane behaviors because "it's a complex issue" is one that has never sat well with me.

There are pros and cons to most arguments. I know that and so do most people who support animal rights.

You're wrong if you think all people who support animal rights are ignorant people who have not considered all the facts before they made their decisions.”

What we will become is the product of what we are doing now.

Everything is done in the present. Although the products of the past are all around us, the past itself has gone. Nothing can be done in the past.

If we understand this, we see how supremely important it is that we do only those things which produce results in the future which are wholly satisfactory. The future is our future. It is we who will inherit the results of today. How shall we decide what to do? And what not to do? The best guide is ourselves.

We should not do to others what we do not want done to us.

Since we want to be happy, we should not impair the happiness of others.  Veinglory:

“Vivisection, at that (Shaw’s) time, meant cutting an animal open without using analgesia or anaesthesia.

Most people are against that--or at least would "hesitate" before choosing to do it for some pressing reason.

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I am very interested in reducing animal use, finding alternatives and improving the welfare of animals in the laboratory.”

 Rowan: “If we stop animal research, then we significantly stop the advances in medical science…”

I believe this to be false.

Look to stem cell research, etc.

There are alternatives and other viable options...

I do know that most animal physiology is vastly different from human. This is a hot button issue... just wanted to point out that I don't believe this statement to be true.

“And if we stopped consuming animals, billions of people die”.

Not true... there's a lot of evidence to refute this one.”

(By this time the Vivisectionist had posted two huge images of ugly trolls with accompanying accusations of being a troublemaker, denouncing the Poster as a troll.)  Zoombie:

“Actually, animal physiology has similarities with humans.

Pig hearts are similar to human hearts, for example. I know there are other similarities...

Everyone here agrees that we should stop it as soon as we are able to without...letting...millions of people die.

That's why we use animal testing.

If we didn't get anything valuable out of it, we would not do it! There would be no point!”

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 Rowan:

“Most animal physiology is vastly different from human…

Also, worth pointing out that there's a difference between anatomy v. physiology.

Devil's advocate here: why not test on actual humans?

Death row inmates perhaps?

You could also argue that would also save...millions of people.

And then we have stem cell research...”

“As a matter of fact the man who once concedes to the vivisector the right to put a dog outside the laws of honour and fellowship, concedes to him also the right to put himself outside them; for he is nothing to the vivisector but a more highly developed, and consequently more interesting-to-experimenton vertebrate than the dog.” ─ G.B.S.

 Zoombie:

I'm a full supporter of pretty much all research that can help humans live longer, healthier, better lives. And I'm a full supporter of stem cell research.

A LOT of that research requires, for the moment, animal testing.

For example, this guy did a ton of research using mice and earthworms that will save lives. Watch the video and see that some earthworms died, and now I might have a much higher chance to survive a heart attack. ...As for testing on death row inmates, that...is just... that's 34

not a good idea.

Reminds me too much of Dr. Mengele.”

 Waylander:

“There aren't enough death row inmates....and they have lawyers.”

“You do not settle whether an experiment is justified or not by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments, but between barbarous and civilised behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.” ─ G.B.S.

 Vivisector: “...the degree to which animal testing is linked to the various aspects of our modern day society makes it virtually impossible for anyone living in our modern day society to live in said society while simultaneously boycotting everything that has to do with animal testing and animal usage.

This actually is a very good argument for the implausibility of ending said testing if you really think about it.

If there were an 'easier' way, we'd have done it. There is a reason a soap bubble is round. There is a reason why we use animals. If there were a better/easier way we'd have done it.

Regardless of the alternatives, the new procedures, drugs, etc will still have to be tested prior to human usage.

No way around it.”

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 Waylander:

“...animal physiology has differences to human, but they are the best indicator we have.

Nothing that you can culture from stem cells is as complex as a living animal. We do test new compounds on cell cultures before moving on to live animals, maybe one compound in fifty makes that jump, so cell cultures are making a significant contribution. Eventually new drugs have to be tested on human volunteers.

How would you feel about being a test subject knowing that it had only ever been tested on cell cultures?”

 Vivisector: “...there are TREMENDOUS similarities between the human animal and rats, rabbits, dogs, monkeys, and chimpanzees (BTW, that is the hierarchy of animal testing to what is most similar to humans).

So... It is the early 90s, a new laser has come out, this laser has a visible wavelength in the Ultra violet.

A doctor/scientist team has proposed that it should be possible to use lasers for Eye surgery, specifically on the Cornea. The current method of using ultra thin metallic surgical instruments has many problems: accuracy/precision, scarring, variability in results, and unforeseen after effects in patient vision (spots, halos, pain, grit in the eye, etc).

The Dr. proposes that instead of using the surgical instruments to use a laser.

But a laser is dramatically different.

There would be control issues, also wavelength issues, how much power should one use?

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What pulse repetition rate should be used? Or should the laser be continuous wave? And what beam profile should be used, gaussian-TEM00 or TEM01, TEM02 (there are hundreds of different modes BTW).

What would be the after effects? How would the body respond? So... how in the hell do 'stem cells' answer the above question?

How do you model this with a computer when there exists NO DATA between laser and eye tissue interaction?

And this is just one little example.

There are other new surgical procedures developed all the time. And then there is the matter of incorporated 'new' technology with surgical practices, like the integration of nano-technology.

And this is just the realm of surgery, drugs are even more complex. In the case of eye surgery. Do you have any idea how many human beings we would have blinded if we weren't able to use animals--thousands.

Also, in science, unanticipated results occur all the time.

One of the principal wavelengths/pulse repetition rates that were going to be used actually activated cancer cells in the eye and caused eye cancer.

No one even dreamed of that side effect and it was easily corrected by changing frequencies and varying the rep rate of the laser...

Your beliefs don't change accepted medical and scientific practices that have been in use for thousands of years...

People who immediately jump to 'stem cell research' as the end all and be all to medical arguments are extremely ignorant of the medical/scientific aspect.�

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“Indeed no criminal has yet had the impudence to argue as every vivisector argues... Thieves and assassins understand quite well that there are paths of acquisition, even of the best things, that are barred to all men of honour.” ─ G.B.S.

 Rowan: “...there are viable alternatives to animal testing. ...I also never stated that stem cell research is the ‘be all and end all’. ...I suggested it as a viable option for medical testing (I didn't say ALL but perhaps I should've said "SOME"?).

If not for cost/ethical obstacles I predict we’d be a lot further along in SCR...”

“There is great enthusiasm in the scientific community for the potential of human stem cell research to lead to better treatments or perhaps even a cure for certain diseases.

At this time, human stem cell research offers the most immediate hope in the fight against Type 1 Diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injury, where cell repair can be narrowly directed to a defined target.”

There is a difference between seeing and knowing.

Knowledge is information stored in the mind. It may be correct or incorrect. It is often the subject of debate and argument with those who produce different data which appears to contradict it.

The vivisectionist uses what he thinks he knows (data collected from various sources) to back up his argument. An antivivisectionist counters his argument also with data, including 38

data from an ethical source. Like a game of tennis, this may go on for a long time, to and fro.

Seeing is immediate perception. In this case the immediate perception of suffering. If a normal person witnesses the actual suffering of an animal in present time and before his own eyes, it overrides all other data he may have accumulated. If, in the case of the vivisectionist, it doesn’t have this effect, it is because, although he is witnessing suffering, he is not feeling it himself. He should therefore perform the experiment upon his own body. If he doesn’t have the courage to do this, he should ask someone else to do it for him.

I assure him he will quite easily find someone to fulfil such a reasonable request, for purely scientific reasons. I also assure him that it will have a beneficial effect upon the vivisectionist.  Rowan: “….most animal physiology is vastly different from human”.

Back to physiology: there’s a reason why you can’t give dogs/cats (for example) certain medications (ibuprofen for one) that work for humans or food items we routinely consume (grapes, macadamia nuts, xylitol, etc.) because it’s toxic to them.

Why? Because dog/cat physiological makeup is different. This is also why you can test a certain drug on a dog/cat/horse/monkey and not replicate the results on a human being.

Again, differing physiological makeups and therefore a difference in how the drug impacts the system. And yeah, that’s way over-simplifying on my part...

My suggestion to use death row inmates as test subjects was tongue in cheek/sarcastic. Yeah, I know all about 39

lawyers. And I'm fully aware that nobody would advocate prisoner use for medical or for other testing/purposes... ...I guess that's why they call them volunteers and would disclose all previous testing so said volunteers know the risks.”

 Waylander: “The point being that the number of volunteers to test new drug substances that have had no previous toxicology testing in animals would be very small, possibly zero. That means no new drugs being released to the patient population and, fairly quickly, no drug research. Don't underestimate the role of the FDA and EMA in this; they require extensive animal tox data packages as part of the licensing application.”

 Icerose: “Stem cell is great for those kinds of RESEARCH. However, for it to ever be put into to practice, it has to be TESTED. Which still requires animals and their stem cells.

There's a reason we use animals for testing, it's because it can cut out a lot of the unforseeable consequences and dangers before they ever reach human testing.

If you're okay with all kinds of nasties hitting humans during testing that could have been prevented by proper animal research for the sake of saving a few rats, then I'm sorry, I'm so not on the same wavelength as you and others who feel as you do.”

“Simple disgust at cruelty is very rare.” ─ G.B.S.

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 Rowan:

“...actually I was (and have been) referring to: embryonic and adult stem cell research - as in human stem cells… I think you meant to say that the "findings from stem cell research must first be tested on animals" before human trials.

I'm also aware of that aspect, but my hope lies in the advances of stem cell research - and other viable alternatives to animal testing - and what that could eventually mean. That's why I support the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine...”

 Williebee:

“…schoolchildren can now do a whole ANATOMY OF A FROG experiment without a frog even being there.”

 Icerose:

“I'd be absolutely thrilled if we could bypass animal testing. I just don't think we're there yet scientifically. To eliminate animal testing now would mean eliminating all medical advances. ...So testing out stem cells on animals is definitely a vital step before they can start implanting stem cells into humans. So even with stem cell research you can't bypass the animals...”

 Veinglory:

“At the current time the majority of stem cell research is animal-based research.

The stem cells are generated in mice through procedures like radiation and parabiosis in most cases.

There are human lines but they are less flexible.”

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“No knowledge is finally impossible of human attainment; for even though it may be beyond our present capacity, the needed capacity is not unattainable. Consequently, no method of investigation is the only method; and no law forbidding any particular method can cut us off from the knowledge we hope to gain by it.

The only knowledge we lose by forbidding cruelty is knowledge at first hand of cruelty itself, which is precisely the knowledge humane people wish to be spared.” ─ G.B.S.

 Icerose:

“Good to know that early research and testing are animal.

I'm sure human stem cells are a bit more precious at this stage to use them for any level of early research before it's solidified due to restrictions.”

“The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods.

He says they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods...

Those who deliberately choose them are not only morally but intellectually imbecile...” ─ G.B.S.



Vivisectionist: “This is what makes many 'extreme' ideas implausible.

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Seems most idealists are just incapable of thinking beyond Step 2 when there are many other cause and effect actions beyond their lofty ideas.

If we stop animal research, then we significantly stop the advances in medical science.

So, no cure for cancer, no treatment for Alzheimers, Parkinsons, no cure for diabetes, blindness, paralysis, etc. etc.

And if we stopped consuming animals, billions of people die.

Now, one day mankind will be in a position for which it does not need animals.

We will be able to synthesize all our food from bacteria cultures mixed with seaweed, and we will have genetic treatments for every single ailment and also cloning to replace any defective/damaged parts.

But that day is 100 - 200 years into the future.

So, for now, we must make do with what we have, and all the wishing in the world isn't going to change that fact.

I'm done”

“As you sow So are you reaped.”

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PART 11 POSTSCRIPT: FEEDBACK Dear Linden, Many thanks for the two copies of Vivisection is a Social Evil. I liked the way you interposed GBS’s comments throughout, along with your own patient contributions in response to the typically harsh and self-satisfied postings by the pro-vivisectors. It always seems incredible to me the way such people (and they are common throughout our society) are utterly convinced as to the superiority of human beings over all other animals. Taking the proanimal research postings in your book: if you were to substitute ‘woman’ or ‘African’ for ‘animal’, ‘rat’ etc, they would read as the purest of fascist tracts (one useful definition of fascism being the assertion of will through violence and fear).

Animals used in labs are sentient and ‘tremble before danger and fear death’, and therefore the word-substitution I suggest above is apt.

As for the ‘cures’ your correspondents constantly allude to, the suggestion that remedies to profound human physical and mental ailments will be delivered by the medical therapy industry is a beguiling nonsense that costs all of us dear.

Kind regards, Andrew (Andrew Tyler, Director, Animal Aid, UK) Animal Aid campaigns against all animal abuse, and promotes a cruelty-free lifestyle.

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Dear Linden, I am reading "Vivisection is a Social Evil," a thread in which it must have been maddening to participate. Pygmalion and Three Other Plays sits on a shelf here, and in poor shape, but I was certain to re-read the scathing and lengthy "Preface on Doctors," with which I am sympathetic ("...the more appalling the mutilation, the more the mutilator is paid..."). Ah, and "The Vaccination Craze!" Prescient but unheeded -- Shaw wept. Your confrontation with Pharmaceutical Industry Apparatchiks must have been infuriating, unless your skin is thicker than is mine‌ "...what we do to another we do to ourselves." I believe this whole-heartedly.

Reading the comments/reactions, I find the lengths to which people go in an effort to rationalize a belief, EXTRAORDINARY -- and finally, disconcerting: our disregard for life. I consider the body a 'whole system,' whereas your critics would break it down into component parts, as though each component could be treated individually and by brute force, as though vivisection were an elegant approach to the development of novel treatments, as opposed to barbaric.

And funnier still: these so called medical 'breakthroughs' to which your critics repeatedly referred! What breakthroughs!? Our approach to modern medicine is barbaric in almost every respect. And most treatments are developed chiefly to prolong illness and to exacerbate symptoms, each of which must be treated -- a monstrous industry.

Your effort became the target of a concerted disinformation campaign! I applaud your willingness to carry the effort to term. Your opponents pride themselves on their ability to short-circuit debate; the skill with which they may disable the audience's ability to think critically (i.e., the ad hominem attacks, etc.).

Again, I commend you for getting down and dirty in the trenches, drawing fire, remaining resolute and confident in your noble aims.

Hope this finds you well, Tom (Tom Fahy, N.Y. Musician & Writer, USA)

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Dear Linden, Congratulations on publishing the discussion thread you prompted between advocates and opponents of animal experimentation. Of the hundreds of such threads I have seen, this was a very typical example. The more exposure of such exchanges that can be achieved, the better, so that people can see all the flaws in the reasoning that are repeated in such fora ad infinitum.

One of the most striking things about the contributions from advocates of animal experimentation is their adherence to dogma, rather than evidence.

In fact, there is overwhelming evidence of harm to human health as a result of animal experimentation. For example: •

Smoking cigarettes and eating lots of cholesterol were deemed beneficial to health based on animal experimentation. Probably no two mistakes have cost as many lives.

•

Millions of women prescribed HRT are at twice the risk of breast cancer and heart disease, thanks to tests in monkeys which predicted the opposite.

•

Tests in mice, rats, rabbits and dogs indicated that painkiller Vioxx protects the heart - yet it killed more than 100,000 people through heart attacks and strokes.

•

Hundreds of drugs for stroke have been developed and tested in primates and other animals, yet all of them have failed and even harmed patients in trials.

Some of the writers claim that without animal research there will be no cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. Yet all of the breakthroughs in research into these (and other) diseases are being made in research involving patients, their families and their tissues.

According to Dr John Xuereb MA MD FRCP FRCPath, former Director of the Cambridge Brain Bank & Wolfson Imaging Centre: 47

"Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases occur in humans and it is in human tissue that we will find the answers to these diseases".

In 1998, Dr Richard Klausner, then director of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), admitted, "The history of cancer research has been a history

of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn't work in humans". The NCI believes we have lost cures for cancer because they were ineffective in mice.

The common claim that "all medical breakthroughs relied on animals" is a myth. Anaesthetics, antibiotics, aspirin and many others owe nothing to animals. Heart-valve replacements, penicillin, the polio vaccine and many other therapies were delayed because of misleading test results in animals.

People died as a result of these delays.

More than 10,000 people die every year in Britain alone from side-effects of their animal-tested medicines: prescription drugs are now the fourth biggest killer in the western world. Of course, animal tests are not solely responsible but medicines would be much safer for patients if they were tested not in animals but in human tissues, human DNA chips, computer models of human organs and finally in risk-free microdose studies in human volunteers.

Advocates of animal testing are often not as knowledgeable about the subject as they like to believe. I understand absolutely how they feel: as a pharmaceutical research scientist, I used to believe that a future of medical progress without animal research was just wishful thinking. But now, having researched the matter for ten years, and having witnessed first-hand, both as a researcher and a patient, how misleading animal studies can be, I know that one of the surest ways to advance medicine would be to abandon animal research in favour of the many superior methods of research based on human biology that are now at our disposal.

Kind regards, Kathy (Kathie Archibald B.Sc., Director) Safer Medicines Campaign, P.O. Box 62720, LONDON SW2 9FQ 48

Dear Linden, I was a teacher for several years at schools and universities but in my whole career I never taught anything as important as the lesson imparted by your book.

Who can read about the shameful treatment of “Felix” at Oxford and not wholeheartedly agree with George Bernard Shaw’s conclusion that, if you cannot attain to knowledge without torturing a monkey, you must do without knowledge?

No further discussion is required, ETHICS is absolute. It doesn’t deal with “ifs” and “buts”.

How I wish that copies of your book were in every school library!

Alexander Brooks, M.A. The Hermitage, Cornwall, UK

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EPILOGUE This is an uncomfortable book, in that it deprives people of viewpoints about animal experimentation as an alibi for their own unresolved ethical behaviour. It does not use scientific animal data to prove that vivisection is unreliable, misleading and fails to produce the medical advances so claimed by advocates of animal experimentation, nor compare failed results of animal testing with successful non-animal testing, nor call for improving the welfare of animals in laboratories; it upstreams all this by bringing the ethical aspect to the fore.

From an ethical viewpoint, all animal experimentation is seen as wrong and such mistreatment of fellow creatures will not happen when ethics is the first step in scientific medical research. Simply put, we should “not do to any other living being what we would not like done to ourselves.”

It has been pointed out that “…the more exposure of such exchanges that can be achieved, the better, so that people can see all the flaws in the reasoning that are repeated in such forums ad infinitum.” A flaw that may not be so obvious is the ‘reasoning’ of well-intentioned anti-vivisection scientists who claim that scientific research which compares the failed results of animal testing with successful non-animal testing will lead to the abolition of animal testing because “...ethical arguments alone will never end animal experimentation”. This is an error.

No matter how many failures can be identified in past tests, this will never prove that future tests will be unsuccessful. Someone else might prove the great benefits of animal testing and thus swing opinion. There is too much money and self interest in animal testing.

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Take the example of the Vivisectionist who justifies experimentation on animals for testing new laser technology: “Do you know how many human beings would have been blinded if we weren’t able to use animals – thousands.” He uses animal research data to claim benefit for humans.

Yet when this example was presented to an anti-vivisection scientist the reply was that the Vivisectionist does not use data: he simply makes unsubstantiated assertions, which are incorrect. Also, that it was damaging when people broadcast such lies and nobody challenges them. The scientist had gone on to say that the way to test lasers is to use human eyes post mortem, or artificial corneas which are now available. That in fact when ophthalmologists started performing radial keratotomy on patients after practicing on rabbits, they blinded people and had to modify the procedure for the human eye.

The Vivisectionist uses what he thinks he knows, data collected from various sources, to back up his argument. An antivivisectionist scientist counters his argument also with data, including data from an ethical source. Like a game of tennis, this may go on for a long time, to and fro.

This game will never result in the abolition of animal experimentation. The scientists and advocates against animal testing who believe that the way forward is to separate ‘ethics’ and ‘science’, and that ethical objections though valid, are outside a ‘strictly scientific’ remit, are examples of trying to sit on two stools at the same time – which is one thing you can’t do with ethics. Either something is right or wrong. They are unintentionally encouraging the blindness of those who will not see. It’s not that they cannot see. They will not.

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“Ethics is the highest science because it is concerned with survival and not merely knowledge.” — Brian Taylor The only sound argument against animal testing is the ethical one. (Ethics are also essential in non-animal testing to protect humans). Scientists without ethics will always remain bad scientists and cannot come to ethics via science: “It is hardly to be expected that a man who does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will hesitate to lie about it afterwards…” — G.B.S. The primary aim of this book in exposing all the flawed viewpoints about animal experiments is for understanding to arise and act as a new way of seeing. To see suffering with direct, incisive understanding. This will enable recognition of false science and give confidence in a moral viewpoint that does not rely on data.

It is not about putting ‘animals’ or ‘humans’ first, but ‘ethics’ first. If MPs, scientists, journalists, students, etc. do not take seriously the truth that only an ethical foundation will put an end to animal experimentation then this reflects their own unresolved moral understanding.

This book may be described as ‘not scientific’. It has been written for people who are prepared to change their viewpoint and take the ethical path seeing that it causes least suffering to other beings, and not merely sit on the fence and waste time juggling with the pros and cons of animal testing with empty data.

In whatever we do we are in duty bound to be aware of being human. And of our spiritual goal which must not be allowed to 52

be tainted by a betrayal of human dignity but must be expressive of that dignity in ethical behaviour.

“Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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PART 111

WRITINGS ON VIVISECTION FROM THE PREFACE TO

“THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA: A TRAGEDY” (1906) GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

DOCTORS AND VIVISECTION

T

he importance to our doctors of a reputation for the tenderest humanity is so obvious, and the quantity of benevolent work actually done by them for nothing (a great deal of it from sheer good nature) so large, that at first sight it seems unaccountable that they should not only throw all their credit away, but deliberately choose to band themselves publicly with outlaws and scoundrels by claiming that in the pursuit of their professional knowledge they should be free from the restraints of law, of honour, of pity, of remorse, of everything that distinguishes an orderly citizen from a South Sea buccaneer, or a philosopher from an inquisitor.

For here we look in vain for either an economic or a sentimental motive. In every generation fools and blackguards have made this claim; and honest and reasonable men, led by the strongest contemporary minds, have repudiated it and exposed its crude rascality. From Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson to Ruskin and Mark Twain, the natural abhorrence of sane mankind for the vivisector's cruelty, and the contempt of able thinkers for his imbecile casuistry, have been expressed by the most popular spokesmen of humanity.

If the medical profession were to outdo the Anti-Vivisection Societies in a general professional protest against the practice and principles of the vivisectors, every doctor in the kingdom would gain substantially by the immense relief and reconciliation which would follow such a reassurance of the humanity of the doctor.

Not one doctor in a thousand is a vivisector, or has any interest in vivisection, either pecuniary or intellectual, or would treat his dog cruelly or allow anyone else to do it. It is true that the doctor complies with the professional fashion of defending vivisection, and assuring you that people like Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson and 56

Ruskin and Mark Twain are ignorant sentimentalists, just as he complies with any other silly fashion: the mystery is, how it became the fashion in spite of its being so injurious to those who follow it.

Making all possible allowance for the effect of the brazen lying of the few men who bring a rush of despairing patients to their doors by professing in letters to the newspapers to have learnt from vivisection how to cure certain diseases, and the assurances of the sayers of smooth things that the practice is quite painless under the law, it is still difficult to find any civilized motive for an attitude by which the medical profession has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

THE PRIMITIVE SAVAGE MOTIVE I say civilized motive advisedly; for primitive tribal motives are easy enough to find. Every savage chief who is not a Mahomet learns that if he wishes to strike the imagination of his tribe - and without doing that he cannot rule them - he must terrify or revolt them from time to time by acts of hideous cruelty or disgusting unnaturalness.

We are far from being as superior to such tribes as we imagine. It is very doubtful indeed whether Peter the Great could have effected the changes he made in Russia if he had not fascinated and intimidated his people by his monstrous cruelties and grotesque escapades. Had he been a nineteenth-century king of England, he would have had to wait for some huge accidental calamity: a cholera epidemic, a war, or an insurrection, before waking us up sufficiently to get anything done.

Vivisection helps the doctor to rule us as Peter ruled the Russians.

The notion that the man who does dreadful things is superhuman, and that therefore he can also do wonderful things either as ruler, avenger, healer, or what not, is by no means confined to barbarians.

Just as the manifold wickednesses and stupidities of our criminal 57

code are supported, not by any general comprehension of law or study of jurisprudence, not even by simple vindictiveness, but by the superstition that a calamity of any sort must be expiated by a human sacrifice; so the wickednesses and stupidities of our medicine men are rooted in superstitions that have no more to do with science than the traditional ceremony of christening an ironclad has to do with the effectiveness of its armament.

We have only to turn to Macaulay's description of the treatment of Charles II in his last illness to see how strongly his physicians felt that their only chance of cheating death was by outraging nature in tormenting and disgusting their unfortunate patient. True, this was more than two centuries ago; but I have heard my own nineteenthcentury grandfather describe the cupping and firing and nauseous medicines of his time with perfect credulity as to their beneficial effects; and some more modern treatments appear to me quite as barbarous.

It is in this way that vivisection pays the doctor. It appeals to the fear and credulity of the savage in us; and without fear and credulity half the private doctor's occupation and seven-eighths of his influence would be gone.

THE HIGHER MOTIVE. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE. But the greatest force of all on the side of vivisection is the mighty and indeed divine force of curiosity. Here we have no decaying tribal instinct which men strive to root out of themselves as they strive to root out the tiger's lust for blood. On the contrary, the curiosity of the ape, or of the child who pulls out the legs and wings of a fly to see what it will do without them, or who, on being told that a cat dropped out of the window will always fall on its legs, immediately tries the 58

experiment on the nearest cat from the highest window in the house (I protest I did it myself from the first floor only), is as nothing compared to the thirst for knowledge of the philosopher, the poet, the biologist, and the naturalist.

I have always despised Adam because he had to be tempted by the woman, as she was by the serpent, before he could he induced to pluck the apple from the tree of knowledge. I should have swallowed every apple on the tree the moment the owner's back was turned.

When Gray said "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," he forgot that it is godlike to be wise; and since nobody wants bliss particularly, or could stand more than a very brief taste of it if it were attainable, and since everybody, by the deepest law of the Life Force, desires to be godlike, it is stupid, and indeed blasphemous and despairing, to hope that the thirst for knowledge will either diminish or consent to be subordinated to any other end whatsoever.

We shall see later on that the claim that has arisen in this way for the unconditioned pursuit of knowledge is as idle as all dreams of unconditioned activity; but none the less the right to knowledge must be regarded as a fundamental human right. The fact that men of science have had to fight so hard to secure its recognition, and are still so vigorously persecuted when they discover anything that is not quite palatable to vulgar people, makes them sorely jealous for that right; and when they hear a popular outcry for the suppression of a method of research which has an air of being scientific, their first instinct is to rally to the defence of that method without further consideration, with the result that they sometimes, as in the case of vivisection, presently find themselves fighting on a false issue.

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THE FLAW IN THE ARGUMENT I may as well pause here to explain their error. The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing, though any fool can prove that ignorance is bliss, and that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" (a little being the most that any of us can attain), as easily as that the pains of life are more numerous and constant than its pleasures, and that therefore we should all be better dead.

The logic is unimpeachable; but its only effect is to make us say that if these are the conclusions logic leads to, so much the worse for logic, after which curt dismissal of Folly, we continue living and learning by instinct: that is, as of right.

We legislate on the assumption that no man may be killed on the strength of a demonstration that he would be happier in his grave, not even if he is dying slowly of cancer and begs the doctor to despatch him quickly and mercifully. To get killed lawfully he must violate somebody else's right to live by committing murder. But he is by no means free to live unconditionally. In society he can exercise his right to live only under very stiff conditions. In countries where there is compulsory military service he may even have to throw away his individual life to save the life of the community.

It is just so in the case of the right to knowledge. It is a right that is as yet very imperfectly recognized in practice. But in theory it is admitted that an adult person in pursuit of knowledge must not be refused it on the ground that he would be better or happier without it. Parents and priests may forbid knowledge to those who accept their authority; and social taboo may be made effective by acts of legal persecution under cover of repressing blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition; but no government now openly forbids its subjects to 60

pursue knowledge on the ground that knowledge is in itself a bad thing, or that it is possible for any of us to have too much of it.

LIMITATIONS OF THE RIGHT TO KNOWLEDGE But neither does any government exempt the pursuit of knowledge, any more than the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness (as the American Constitution puts it), from all social conditions. No man is allowed to put his mother into the stove because he desires to know how long an adult woman will survive at a temperature of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter how important or interesting that particular addition to the store of human knowledge may be. A man who did so would have short work made not only of his right to knowledge, but of his right to live and all his other rights at the same time. The right to knowledge is not the only right; and its exercise must be limited by respect for other rights, and for its own exercise by others.

When a man says to Society, "May I torture my mother in pursuit of knowledge?" Society replies, "No." If he pleads, "What! Not even if I have a chance of finding out how to cure cancer by doing it?" Society still says, "Not even then."

If the scientist, making the best of his disappointment, goes on to ask may he torture a dog, the stupid and callous people who do not realize that a dog is a fellow-creature and sometimes a good friend, may say Yes, though Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson and their like may say No. But even those who say "You may torture A dog" never say "You may torture MY dog." And nobody says, "Yes, because in the pursuit of knowledge you may do as you please." Just as even the stupidest people say, in effect, "If you cannot attain to knowledge without burning your mother you must do without knowledge," so the 61

wisest people say, "If you cannot attain to knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge."

A FALSE ALTERNATIVE But in practice you cannot persuade any wise man that this alternative can ever be forced on anyone but a fool, or that a fool can be trusted to learn anything from any experiment, cruel or humane.

The Chinaman who burnt down his house to roast his pig was no doubt honestly unable to conceive any less disastrous way of cooking his dinner; and the roast must have been spoiled after all (a perfect type of the average vivisectionist experiment); but this did not prove that the Chinaman was right: it only proved that the Chinaman was an incapable cook and, fundamentally, a fool.

Take another celebrated experiment: one in sanitary reform. In the days of Nero, Rome was in the same predicament as London to-day.

If some one would burn down London, and it were rebuilt, as it would now have to be, subject to the sanitary by-laws and Building Act provisions enforced by the London County Council, it would be enormously improved; and the average lifetime of Londoners would be considerably prolonged. Nero argued in the same way about Rome. He employed incendiaries to set it on fire; and he played the harp in scientific raptures whilst it was burning.

I am so far of Nero's way of thinking that I have often said, when consulted by despairing sanitary reformers, that what London needs to make her healthy is an earthquake. Why, then, it may be asked, do not I, as a public-spirited man, employ incendiaries to set it on fire, with a heroic disregard of the consequences to myself and others? Any vivisector would, if he had the courage of his opinions.

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The reasonable answer is that London can be made healthy without burning her down; and that as we have not enough civic virtue to make her healthy in a humane and economical way, we should not have enough to rebuild her in that way.

In the old Hebrew legend, God lost patience with the world as Nero did with Rome, and drowned everybody except a single family. But the result was that the progeny of that family reproduced all the vices of their predecessors so exactly that the misery caused by the flood might just as well have been spared: things went on just as they did before.

In the same way, the lists of diseases which vivisection claims to have cured is long; but the returns of the Registrar-General show that people still persist in dying of them as if vivisection had never been heard of.

Any fool can burn down a city or cut an animal open; and an exceptionally foolish fool is quite likely to promise enormous benefits to the race as the result of such activities. But when the constructive, benevolent part of the business comes to be done, the same want of imagination, the same stupidity and cruelty, the same laziness and want of perseverance that prevented Nero or the vivisector from devising or pushing through humane methods, prevents him from bringing order out of the chaos and happiness out of the misery he has made.

At one time it seemed reasonable enough to declare that it was impossible to find whether or not there was a stone inside a man's body except by exploring it with a knife, or to find out what the sun is made of without visiting it in a balloon.

Both these impossibilities have been achieved, but not by vivisectors.

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The Rontgen rays need not hurt the patient; and spectrum analysis involves no destruction. After such triumphs of humane experiment and reasoning, it is useless to assure us that there is no other key to knowledge except cruelty. When the vivisector offers us that assurance, we reply simply and contemptuously, "You mean that you are not clever or humane or energetic enough to find one."

CRUELTY FOR ITS OWN SAKE It will now, I hope, be clear why the attack on vivisection is not an attack on the right to knowledge: why, indeed, those who have the deepest conviction of the sacredness of that right are the leaders of the attack.

No knowledge is finally impossible of human attainment; for even though it may be beyond our present capacity, the needed capacity is not unattainable. Consequently no method of investigation is the only method; and no law forbidding any particular method can cut us off from the knowledge we hope to gain by it. The only knowledge we lose by forbidding cruelty is knowledge at first hand of cruelty itself, which is precisely the knowledge humane people wish to be spared.

But the question remains: Do we all really wish to be spared that knowledge? Are humane methods really to be preferred to cruel ones? Even if the experiments come to nothing, may not their cruelty be enjoyed for its own sake, as a sensational luxury?

Let us face these questions boldly, not shrinking from the fact that cruelty is one of the primitive pleasures of mankind, and that the detection of its Protean disguises as law, education, medicine, discipline, sport and so forth, is one of the most difficult of the unending tasks of the legislator.

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OUR OWN CRUELTIES At first blush it may seem not only unnecessary, but even indecent, to discuss such a proposition as the elevation of cruelty to the rank of a human right. Unnecessary, because no vivisector confesses to a love of cruelty for its own sake or claims any general fundamental right to be cruel.

Indecent, because there is an accepted convention to repudiate cruelty; and vivisection is only tolerated by the law on condition that, like judicial torture, it shall be done as mercifully as the nature of the practice allows. But the moment the controversy becomes embittered, the recriminations bandied between the opposed parties bring us face-to-face with some very ugly truths.

On one occasion I was invited to speak at a large Anti-Vivisection meeting in the Queen's Hall in London. I found myself on the platform with fox hunters, tame stag hunters, men and women whose calendar was divided, not by pay days and quarter days, but by seasons for killing animals for sport: the fox, the hare, the otter, the partridge and the rest having each its appointed date for slaughter.

The ladies among us wore hats and cloaks and head-dresses obtained by wholesale massacres, ruthless trappings, callous extermination of our fellow creatures.

We insisted on our butchers supplying us with white veal, and were large and constant consumers of pate de foie gras; both comestibles being obtained by revolting methods. We sent our sons to public schools where indecent flogging is a recognized method of taming the young human animal. Yet we were all in hysterics of indignation at the cruelties of the vivisectors.

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These, if any were present, must have smiled sardonically at such inhuman humanitarians, whose daily habits and fashionable amusements cause more suffering in England in a week than all the vivisectors of Europe do in a year.

I made a very effective speech, not exclusively against vivisection, but against cruelty; and I have never been asked to speak since by that Society, nor do I expect to be, as I should probably give such offence to its most affluent subscribers that its attempts to suppress vivisection would be seriously hindered. But that does not prevent the vivisectors from freely using the "you’re another" retort, and using it with justice.

We must therefore give ourselves no airs of superiority when denouncing the cruelties of vivisection. We all do just as horrible things, with even less excuse. But in making that admission we are also making short work of the virtuous airs with which we are sometimes referred to the humanity of the medical profession as a guarantee that vivisection is not abused - much as if our burglars should assure us that they are too honest to abuse the practice of burgling.

We are, as a matter of fact, a cruel nation; and our habit of disguising our vices by giving polite names to the offences we are determined to commit does not, unfortunately for my own comfort, impose on me.

Vivisectors can hardly pretend to be better than the classes from which they are drawn, or those above them; and if these classes are capable of sacrificing animals in various cruel ways under cover of sport, fashion, education, discipline, and even, when the cruel sacrifices are human sacrifices, of political economy, it is idle for the vivisector to pretend that he is incapable of practising cruelty for pleasure or profit or both under the cloak of science.

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We are all tarred with the same brush; and the vivisectors are not slow to remind us of it, and to protest vehemently against being branded as exceptionally cruel and as devisors of horrible instruments of torture by people whose main notion of enjoyment is cruel sport, and whose requirements in the way of villainously cruel traps occupy pages of the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores.

THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF CRUELTY There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

Simple disgust at cruelty is very rare.

The people who turn sick and faint and those who gloat are often alike in the pains they take to witness executions, floggings, operations or any other exhibitions of suffering, especially those involving bloodshed, blows, and laceration.

A craze for cruelty can be developed just as a craze for drink can; and nobody who attempts to ignore cruelty as a possible factor in the attraction of vivisection and even of antivivisection, or in the credulity with which we accept its excuses, can be regarded as a scientific investigator of it.

Those who accuse vivisectors of indulging the well-known passion of cruelty under the cloak of research are therefore putting forward a strictly scientific psychological hypothesis, which is also simple, human, obvious, and probable. It may be as wounding to the personal vanity of the vivisector as Darwin's Origin of Species was to the people who could not bear to think that they were cousins to the monkeys (remember Goldsmith's anger when he was told that he 67

could not move his upper jaw); but science has to consider only the truth of the hypothesis, and not whether conceited people will like it or not.

In vain do the sentimental champions of vivisection declare themselves the most humane of men, inflicting suffering only to relieve it, scrupulous in the use of anaesthetics, and void of all passion except the passion of pity for a disease-ridden world.

The really scientific investigator answers that the question cannot be settled by hysterical protestations, and that if the vivisectionist rejects deductive reasoning, he had better clear his character by his own favorite method of experiment.

SUGGESTED LABORATORY TESTS OF THE VIVISECTOR'S EMOTIONS Take the hackneyed case of the Italian who tortured mice, ostensibly to find out about the effects of pain (of which the nearest dentist could have told him) and who boasted of the ecstatic sensations (he actually used the word love) with which he carried out his experiments. Or the gentleman who starved sixty dogs to death to establish the fact that a dog deprived of food gets progressively lighter and weaker, becoming remarkably emaciated, and finally dying: an undoubted truth, but ascertainable without laboratory experiments by a simple enquiry addressed to the nearest policeman, or, failing him, to any sane person in Europe.

The Italian is diagnosed as a cruel voluptuary: the dog-starver is passed over as such a hopeless fool that it is impossible to take any interest in him.

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Why not test the diagnosis scientifically? Why not perform a careful series of experiments on persons under the influence of voluptuous ecstasy, so as to ascertain its physiological symptoms? Then perform a second series on persons engaged in mathematical work or machine designing, so as to ascertain the symptoms of cold scientific activity? Then note the symptoms of a vivisector performing a cruel experiment; and compare them with the voluptuary symptoms and the mathematical symptoms?

Such experiments would be quite as interesting and important as any yet undertaken by the vivisectors. They might open a line of investigation which would finally make, for instance, the ascertainment of the guilt or innocence of an accused person a much exacter process than the very fallible methods of our criminal courts.

But instead of proposing such an investigation, our vivisectors offer us all the pious protestations and all the huffy recriminations that any common unscientific mortal offers when he is accused of unworthy conduct.

ROUTINE Yet most vivisectors would probably come triumphant out of such a series of experiments, because vivisection is now a routine, like butchering or hanging or flogging; and many of the men who practise it do so only because it has been established as part of the profession they have adopted.

Far from enjoying it, they have simply overcome their natural repugnance and become indifferent to it, as men inevitably become indifferent to anything they do often enough.

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It is this dangerous power of custom that makes it so difficult to convince the common sense of mankind that any established commercial or professional practice has its root in passion. Let a routine once spring from passion, and you will presently find thousands of routineers following it passionlessly for a livelihood.

Thus it always seems strained to speak of the religious convictions of a clergyman, because nine out of ten clergymen have no religious convictions: they are ordinary officials carrying on a routine of baptizing, marrying, and churching; praying, reciting, and preaching; and, like solicitors or doctors, getting away from their duties with relief to hunt, to garden, to keep bees, to go into society, and the like.

In the same way many people do cruel and vile things without being in the least cruel or vile, because the routine to which they have been brought up is superstitiously cruel and vile. To say that every man who beats his children and every schoolmaster who flogs a pupil is a conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull, conscientious people beat their children conscientiously, because they were beaten themselves and think children ought to be beaten.

The ill-tempered vulgarity that instinctively strikes at and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all children are annoying), and the simple stupidity that requires from a child perfection beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common condition of leaving a child unwhipped), produce a good deal of flagellation among people who not only do not lust after it, but who hit the harder because they are angry at having to perform an uncomfortable duty.

These people will beat merely to assert their authority, or to carry out what they conceive to be a divine order on the strength of the precept of Solomon recorded in the Bible, which carefully adds that 70

Solomon completely spoilt his own son and turned away from the god of his fathers to the sensuous idolatry in which he ended his days.

In the same way we find men and women practising vivisection as senselessly as a humane butcher, who adores his fox terrier, will cut a calf's throat and hang it up by its heels to bleed slowly to death because it is the custom to eat veal and insist on its being white; or as a German purveyor nails a goose to a board and stuffs it with food because fashionable people eat pate de foie gras; or as the crew of a whaler breaks in on a colony of seals and clubs them to death in wholesale massacre because ladies want sealskin jackets; or as fanciers blind singing birds with hot needles, and mutilate the ears and tails of dogs and horses.

Let cruelty or kindness or anything else once become customary and it will be practised by people to whom it is not at all natural, but whose rule of life is simply to do only what everybody else does, and who would lose their employment and starve if they indulged in any peculiarity.

A respectable man will lie daily, in speech and in print, about the qualities of the article he lives by selling, because it is customary to do so. He will flog his boy for telling a lie, because it is customary to do so. He will also flog him for not telling a lie if the boy tells inconvenient or disrespectful truths, because it is customary to do so.

He will give the same boy a present on his birthday, and buy him a spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious, nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable of ethical judgment or independent action.

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Just so do we find a crowd of petty vivisectionists daily committing atrocities and stupidities, because it is the custom to do so.

Vivisection is customary as part of the routine of preparing lectures in medical schools. For instance, there are two ways of making the action of the heart visible to students. One, a barbarous, ignorant, and thoughtless way, is to stick little flags into a rabbit's heart and let the students see the flags jump. The other, an elegant, ingenious, well-informed, and instructive way, is to put a sphygmograph on the student's wrist and let him see a record of his heart's action traced by a needle on a slip of smoked paper. But it has become the custom for lecturers to teach from the rabbit; and the lecturers are not original enough to get out of their groove.

Then there are the demonstrations which are made by cutting up frogs with scissors. The most humane man, however repugnant the operation may be to him at first, cannot do it at lecture after lecture for months without finally--and that very soon--feeling no more for the frog than if he were cutting up pieces of paper.

Such clumsy and lazy ways of teaching are based on the cheapness of frogs and rabbits. If machines were as cheap as frogs, engineers would not only be taught the anatomy of machines and the functions of their parts: they would also have machines misused and wrecked before them so that they might learn as much as possible by using their eyes, and as little as possible by using their brains and imaginations.

Thus we have, as part of the routine of teaching, a routine of vivisection which soon produces complete indifference to it on the part even of those who are naturally humane. If they pass on from the routine of lecture preparation, not into general practice, but into research work, they carry this acquired indifference with them into 72

the laboratory, where any atrocity is possible, because all atrocities satisfy curiosity.

The routine man is in the majority in his profession always: consequently the moment his practice is tracked down to its source in human passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of the public, which sees that the average doctor is much too commonplace and decent a person to be capable of passionate wickedness of any kind.

Here then, we have in vivisection, as in all the other tolerated and instituted cruelties, this anti-climax: that only a negligible percentage of those who practise and consequently defend it get any satisfaction out of it. As in Mr. Galsworthy's play Justice the useless and detestable torture of solitary imprisonment is shown at its worst without the introduction of a single cruel person into the drama, so it would be possible to represent all the torments of vivisection dramatically without introducing a single vivisector who had not felt sick at his first experience in the laboratory. Not that this can exonerate any vivisector from suspicion of enjoying his work (or her work: a good deal of the vivisection in medical schools is done by women).

In every autobiography which records a real experience of school or prison life, we find that here and there among the routineers there is to be found the genuine amateur, the orgiastic flogging schoolmaster or the nagging warder, who has sought out a cruel profession for the sake of its cruelty. But it is the genuine routineer who is the bulwark of the practice, because, though you can excite public fury against a Sade, a Bluebeard, or a Nero, you cannot rouse any feeling against dull Mr. Smith doing his duty: that is, doing the usual thing.

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He is so obviously no better and no worse than anyone else that it is difficult to conceive that the things he does are abominable. If you would see public dislike surging up in a moment against an individual, you must watch one who does something unusual, no matter how sensible it may be. The name of Jonas Hanway lives as that of a brave man because he was the first who dared to appear in the streets of this rainy island with an umbrella.

THE OLD LINE BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST But there is still a distinction to be clung to by those who dare not tell themselves the truth about the medical profession because they are so helplessly dependent on it when death threatens the household.

That distinction is the line that separates the brute from the man in the old classification.

Granted, they will plead, that we are all cruel; yet the tame staghunter does not hunt men; and the sportsman who lets a leash of greyhounds loose on a hare would be horrified at the thought of letting them loose on a human child. The lady who gets her cloak by flaying a sable does not flay a negro; nor does it ever occur to her that her veal cutlet might be improved on by a slice of tender baby.

Now there was a time when some trust could be placed in this distinction. The Roman Catholic Church still maintains, with what it must permit me to call a stupid obstinacy, and in spite of St. Francis and St. Anthony, that animals have no souls and no rights; so that you cannot sin against an animal, or against God by anything you may choose to do to an animal.

Resisting the temptation to enter on an argument as to whether you may not sin against your own soul if you are unjust or cruel to the 74

least of those whom St. Francis called his little brothers, I have only to point out here that nothing could be more despicably superstitious in the opinion of a vivisector than the notion that science recognizes any such step in evolution as the step from a physical organism to an immortal soul.

That conceit has been taken out of all our men of science, and out of all our doctors, by the evolutionists; and when it is considered how completely obsessed biological science has become in our days, not by the full scope of evolution, but by that particular method of it which has neither sense nor purpose nor life nor anything human, much less godlike, in it: by the method, that is, of so-called Natural Selection (meaning no selection at all, but mere dead accident and luck), the folly of trusting to vivisectors to hold the human animal any more sacred than the other animals becomes so clear that it would be waste of time to insist further on it.

As a matter of fact the man who once concedes to the vivisector the right to put a dog outside the laws of honour and fellowship, concedes to him also the right to put himself outside them; for he is nothing to the vivisector but a more highly developed, and consequently more interesting-to-experiment-on vertebrate than the dog.

VIVISECTING THE HUMAN SUBJECT I have in my hand a printed and published account by a doctor of how he tested his remedy for pulmonary tuberculosis, which was to inject a powerful germicide directly into the circulation by stabbing a vein with a syringe. He was one of those doctors who are able to command public sympathy by saying, quite truly, that when they discovered that the proposed treatment was dangerous, they experimented thenceforth on themselves.

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In this case the doctor was devoted enough to carry his experiments to the point of running serious risks, and actually making himself very uncomfortable. But he did not begin with himself. His first experiment was on two hospital patients. On receiving a message from the hospital to the effect that these two martyrs to therapeutic science had all but expired in convulsions, he experimented on a rabbit, which instantly dropped dead. It was then, and not until then, that he began to experiment on himself, with the germicide modified in the direction indicated by the experiments made on the two patients and the rabbit.

As a good many people countenance vivisection because they fear that if the experiments are not made on rabbits they will be made on themselves, it is worth noting that in this case, where both rabbits and men were equally available, the men, being, of course, enormously more instructive, and costing nothing, were experimented on first.

Once grant the ethics of the vivisectionists and you not only sanction the experiment on the human subject, but make it the first duty of the vivisector.

If a guinea pig may be sacrificed for the sake of the very little that can be learnt from it, shall not a man be sacrificed for the sake of the great deal that can be learnt from him? At all events, he is sacrificed, as this typical case shows. I may add (not that it touches the argument) that the doctor, the patients, and the rabbit all suffered in vain, as far as the hoped-for rescue of the race from pulmonary consumption is concerned.

"THE LIE IS A EUROPEAN POWER" Now at the very time when the lectures describing these experiments 76

were being circulated in print and discussed eagerly by the medical profession, the customary denials that patients are experimented on were as loud, as indignant, as high-minded as ever, in spite of the few intelligent doctors who point out rightly that all treatments are experiments on the patient. And this brings us to an obvious but mostly overlooked weakness in the vivisector's position: that is, his inevitable forfeiture of all claim to have his word believed.

It is hardly to be expected that a man who does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will hesitate to lie about it afterwards to protect it from what he deems the ignorant sentimentality of the laity.

When the public conscience stirs uneasily and threatens suppression, there is never wanting some doctor of eminent position and high character who will sacrifice himself devotedly to the cause of science by coming forward to assure the public on his honour that all experiments on animals are completely painless; although he must know that the very experiments which first provoked the antivivisection movement by their atrocity were experiments to ascertain the physiological effects of the sensation of extreme pain (the much more interesting physiology of pleasure remains uninvestigated) and that all experiments in which sensation is a factor are voided by its suppression.

Besides, vivisection may be painless in cases where the experiments are very cruel. If a person scratches me with a poisoned dagger so gently that I do not feel the scratch, he has achieved a painless vivisection; but if I presently die in torment I am not likely to consider that his humility is amply vindicated by his gentleness. A cobra's bite hurts so little that the creature is almost, legally speaking, a vivisector who inflicts no pain. By giving his victims chloroform before biting them he could comply with the law completely.

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Here, then, is a pretty deadlock. Public support of vivisection is founded almost wholly on the assurances of the vivisectors that great public benefits may be expected from the practice. Not for a moment do I suggest that such a defence would be valid even if proved.

But when the witnesses begin by alleging that in the cause of science all the customary ethical obligations (which include the obligation to tell the truth) are suspended, what weight can any reasonable person give to their testimony? I would rather swear fifty lies than take an animal which had licked my hand in good fellowship and torture it. If I did torture the dog, I should certainly not have the face to turn round and ask how any person there could suspect an honourable man like myself of telling lies. Most sensible and humane people would, I hope, reply flatly that honourable men do not behave dishonourably, even to dogs.

The murderer who, when asked by the chaplain whether he had any other crimes to confess, replied indignantly, "What do you take me for?" reminds us very strongly of the vivisectors who are so deeply hurt when their evidence is set aside as worthless.

AN ARGUMENT WHICH WOULD DEFEND ANY CRIME The Achilles heel of vivisection, however, is not to be found in the pain it causes, but in the line of argument by which it is justified. The medical code regarding it is simply criminal anarchism at its very worst.

Indeed no criminal has yet had the impudence to argue as every vivisector argues. No burglar contends that as it is admittedly important to have money to spend, and as the object of burglary is to 78

provide the burglar with money to spend, and as in many instances it has achieved this object, therefore the burglar is a public benefactor and the police are ignorant sentimentalists. No highway robber has yet harrowed us with denunciations of the puling moralist who allows his child to suffer all the evils of poverty because certain faddists think it dishonest to garotte an alderman.

Thieves and assassins understand quite well that there are paths of acquisition, even of the best things, that are barred to all men of honour. Again, has the silliest burglar ever pretended that to put a stop to burglary is to put a stop to industry? All the vivisections that have been performed since the world began have produced nothing so important as the innocent and honourable discovery of radiography; and one of the reasons why radiography was not discovered sooner was that the men whose business it was to discover new clinical methods were coarsening and stupefying themselves with the sensual villanies and cut-throat's casuistries of vivisection.

The law of the conservation of energy holds good in physiology as in other things: every vivisector is a deserter from the army of honourable investigators.

But the vivisector does not see this.

He not only calls his methods scientific: he contends that there are no other scientific methods. When you express your natural loathing for his cruelty and your natural contempt for his stupidity, he imagines that you are attacking science. Yet he has no inkling of the method and temper of science. The point at issue being plainly whether he is a rascal or not, he not only insists that the real point is whether some hotheaded antivivisectionist is a liar (which he proves by ridiculously unscientific assumptions as to the degree of accuracy 79

attainable in human statement), but never dreams of offering any scientific evidence by his own methods.

There are many paths to knowledge already discovered; and no enlightened man doubts that there are many more waiting to be discovered.

Indeed, all paths lead to knowledge; because even the vilest and stupidest action teaches us something about vileness and stupidity, and may accidentally teach us a good deal more: for instance, a cutthroat learns (and perhaps teaches) the anatomy of the carotid artery and jugular vein; and there can be no question that the burning of St. Joan of Arc must have been a most instructive and interesting experiment to a good observer, and could have been made more so if it had been carried out by skilled physiologists under laboratory conditions. The earthquake in San Francisco proved invaluable as an experiment in the stability of giant steel buildings; and the ramming of the Victoria by the Camperdown settled doubtful points of the greatest importance in naval warfare.

According to vivisectionist logic our builders would be justified in producing artificial earthquakes with dynamite, and our admirals in contriving catastrophes at naval manoeuvres, in order to follow up the line of research thus accidentally discovered.

The truth is, if the acquisition of knowledge justifies every sort of conduct, it justifies any sort of conduct, from the illumination of Nero's feasts by burning human beings alive (another interesting experiment) to the simplest act of kindness. And in the light of that truth it is clear that the exemption of the pursuit of knowledge from the laws of honour is the most hideous conceivable enlargement of anarchy; worse, by far, than an exemption of the pursuit of money or political power, since these can hardly be attained without some 80

regard for at least the appearances of human welfare, whereas a curious devil might destroy the whole race in torment, acquiring knowledge all the time from his highly interesting experiment.

There is more danger in one respectable scientist countenancing such a monstrous claim than in fifty assassins or dynamitards. The man who makes it is ethically imbecile; and whoever imagines that it is a scientific claim has not the faintest conception of what science means.

The paths to knowledge are countless.

One of these paths is a path through darkness, secrecy, and cruelty.

When a man deliberately turns from all other paths and goes down that one, it is scientific to infer that what attracts him is not knowledge, since there are other paths to that, but cruelty.

With so strong and scientific a case against him, it is childish for him to stand on his honour and reputation and high character and the credit of a noble profession and so forth: he must clear himself either by reason or by experiment, unless he boldly contends that evolution has retained a passion of cruelty in man just because it is indispensable to the fullness of his knowledge.

THOU ART THE MAN I shall not be at all surprised if what I have written above has induced in sympathetic readers a transport of virtuous indignation at the expense of the medical profession.

I shall not damp so creditable and salutary a sentiment; but I must point out that the guilt is shared by all of us. It is not in his capacity of 81

healer and man of science that the doctor vivisects or defends vivisection, but in his entirely vulgar lay capacity. He is made of the same clay as the ignorant, shallow, credulous, half-miseducated, pecuniarily anxious people who call him in when they have tried in vain every bottle and every pill the advertising druggist can persuade them to buy.

The real remedy for vivisection is the remedy for all the mischief that the medical profession and all the other professions are doing: namely, more knowledge.

The juries which send the poor Peculiars to prison, and give vivisectionists heavy damages against humane persons who accuse them of cruelty; the editors and councillors and student-led mobs who are striving to make Vivisection one of the watchwords of our civilization, are not doctors: they are the British public, all so afraid to die that they will cling frantically to any idol which promises to cure all their diseases, and crucify anyone who tells them that they must not only die when their time comes, but die like gentlemen.

In their paroxysms of cowardice and selfishness they force the doctors to humour their folly and ignorance. How complete and inconsiderate their ignorance is can only be realized by those who have some knowledge of vital statistics, and of the illusions which beset Public Health legislation.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY The Doctor’s Dilemma: a Tragedy —George Bernard Shaw Available as Free E-Book from

www.ivu.org/history/shaw/ Basic Buddhism for a World in Trouble ─Brian Taylor www.universaloctopus.com

HELPFUL RESOURCES VERO (Voice for Ethical Research at Oxford) www.vero.org.uk ANIMAL AID www.animalaid.org.uk THE VEGAN SOCIETY www.vegansociety.com ANIMAL FREE RESEARCH UK www.animalfreeresearchuk.org PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) www.PETA.org CRUELTY FREE International www.crueltyfreeinternational.org IVU (International Vegetarian Union) www.ivu.org SMC (Safer Medicines Campaign) www.SaferMedicines.org AAAE (Association for the Abolition of Animal Experiments)

www.animalexperiments.ch

FLOE (For Life On Earth) www.forlifeonearth.org

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