Observation, Part 3

Usage examples of animals.

Shall we say to-day that the utility of torment, in the vivisection of animals, constitutes perfect justification and defence?

Instead of taking the position of the antivivisectionist that ALL scientific investigations involving the use of animals, should be legally prohibited, it maintains that distinctions may, and should, be drawn, and that only the abuses of vivisection should be condemned by law.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals intends to give effect to the memorial presented to it on Monday, and do its utmost to put down the monstrous abuses which have sprung up of late years in the practice of vivisection, it will probably find that the greatest obstacle to success lies IN THE SECRECY WITH WHICH SUCH EXPERIMENTS ARE CONDUCTED, AND IT IS TO THE DESTRUCTION OF THAT SECRECY that its best efforts should be directed.

At the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, therefore, Professor William Rutherford delivered an address, wherein for the second time an English physiologist openly advocated the vivisection of animals as a method of teaching wellknown facts.

We hope Sir William Thompson was not justified in stating that revolting cruelties are sometimes practised in this country, in the name of vivisection, although we may concur with him in reprehending the performance of experiments on animals in illustration of truths already ascertained.

Until then it is dreadful to think how many poor animals will be subjected to excruciating agony as one medical college after another becomes penetrated with the idea that vivisection is a part of modern teaching, and that, to hold way with other institutions, they, too, must have their vivisector, their mutilated dogs, their guineapigs, their rabbits, their chamber of torture and of horrors, to advertise as a laboratory.

A distinguished philosopher and vivisector of three hundred years ago, Rene Descartes, put forth the theory that animals, being without souls, cannot suffer pain, and that their cries under vivisection were simply as the whirring of wheels in an intricate piece of machinery.

It may be doubted whether any reliabce whatever can be placed upon the assertions or protesting denials of any profession vivisector now drawing a large income from the vivisection of animals, whose interests would possibly be affeted by failure to produce startling results, or by removal of the secrecy that now enshrouds the laboratory.

Of the vivisection of animals in England and America carried on in secret, the general public, even of the more intelligent class, has no more accurate inforumation than two centuries ago it had of the methods of the Spanish Inquisition in the dungeons of Madrid or Seville.

APPENDIX II In the acquirement of knowledge concerning vivisection, and for the prevention of abuses, it is essential that in every institution where experiments are performed a register of all animals received be carefully and accurately kept.

Whilst the schools of medicine in this country are as a rule not liable to the charge of vivisectional abuses as regards the higher animals, we cannot altogether acquit them from a rather reckless expenditure of the lives and feelings of cold-blooded creatures.

Is public opinion to-day inclined to be any more favourable to the legal abolition of all scientific experimentation upon animals than it was a third of a century ago?

America raised, not in condemnation of all experimentation upon animals, but solely in protest against its cruelty and secrecy, and in appeal for its reform, was that of the leading American surgeon of his time, Professor Henry J.

Legislature again has before it a Bill to bring animal experimentation, or the infliction of pain on animals, in the interest of the treatment of human beings, within law and under responsibility to law.

Wilson, a member of the Royal Commission, it cannot adequately protect animals liable to experimentation from hte possibility of abuse.