The Pros and Cons of Vivisection

by Charles Richet

Plants certainly do not suffer. Already, however, there are certain difficulties in the way of determining the exact boundary line between the animal and the plant. When we expose an infusion of hay to the air, for instance, various microbes develop therein. A learned and minute analysis allows us to distinguish both bacteria and infusoria among the innumerable micro-organisms which swarm in the infusion. Now we know that bacteria are plants and infusoria are animals. If, therefore, all animal life were eliminated from experimentation, we should have no right to boil an infusion of hay, because we know that it contains infusoria which are animals.

These infusoria are so closely related to bacteria that they may be confused with the latter, as indeed has been the case up to the last few years. A number of inferior beings were formerly called zoophytes, that is to say, animal plants; and it is sheer nonsense to suppose that they are conscious of pain. Sponges, corals, sea-anemones, star-fishes, sea-urchins, possess a nervous system which is so little developed, and reactions which are so indistinct, that we can scarcely suppose they possess an intelligent consciousness, and, consequently, sensibility to pain. Moreover, I do not see how their reactions would differ if they possessed the notion of pain. When we touch the tentacles of a star-fish, we notice, near the tentacles touched, a sort of agitation set up among the neighbouring tentacles, but this agitation does not extend to the tentacles of the others' arms; so that a general consciousness does not appear to exist, unless it be in a prodigiously rudimentary state, among inferior beings. In certain classes of the mollusca there is no head. Thus oysters and mussels, named on that account acephala, have in all probability no consciousness. I would have no scruple, therefore, either in eating living oysters, or in experimenting upon living oysters and mussels, since it seems to me evident that the notion of pain does not exist in them.

It is not the same thing with insects; it is here that the first signs of pain begin to appear. Nevertheless, we must be careful to avoid confusing pain with signs of pain. When we take a worm and cut it into three segments, each of these segments will struggle and writhe in a perfect frenzy. It would, therefore, be necessary to admit that pain existed in each of these three segments—in other words, that each fragment possesses a central seat of pain, which is absurd; it is much more rational to suppose that the perturbed movements of the animal are the result of a strong nervous excitation, and that the injury is accompanied by defensive reflex movements but provokes no painful perception.

Among the superior animals however, and especially among the vertebrata, pain exists. There can be no doubt about this, although it is impossible to know exactly in what consists the consciousness of pain in an animal; the most profound obscurity still reigns, and will perhaps always reign, over their consciousness and sensations. It would be ridiculous to deny that a dog suffers when his paw is crushed. Certainly, I fully believe that all pain is much less clearly perceived by the dog than by man. But, after all, it is a phenomenon of the same order and identical, save in intensity.

Now pain, taken in its profoundest sense, consists of two essential elements: a shock to the conscious self, the ego, in the first place; and, in the second place, the prolongation of the shock. If the self is not distinctly conscious, if it does not go so far as to assert itself by the separation of that self from the external world, we cannot say that pain is possible. The ego never asserts itself with so much force as under a very painful impression. So that among beings whose reactions are mechanical, automatic, governed by other forces than by the assertion of the self and a freely deliberate will, pain becomes so indistinct, so confused, that it probably does not exist in the strict psychological sense at all. The greatest philosopher of modern times, Descartes, imagined a system of machine-animals; this idea has been turned into ridicule by the ignorant, but nevertheless we are almost forced to return to it when we dive to the bottom of reflex movements. Now, if we are able to admit that there is a vague consciousness of the selfhood among superior animals, such as the mammalia and birds, this consciousness, as far as concerns the inferior vertebrata, is most certainly extremely hazy, if, indeed, it exists at all. I have difficulty in conceiving that a frog is able to ponder over its ego, assert its existence in presence of the external world, and say or think, I SUFFER. No being suffers unless he is able to think that he suffers, and meditate on his suffering. To suffer means to have consciousness; and as far as it is permissible for a man to picture to himself the sensations of a frog, I should say that the frog has no consciousness of suffering.

Even as regards the more highly developed vertebrata, such as birds, rabbits, and guinea-pigs, suffering is probably of a very obscure nature. It is not enough to say that an animal suffers because we see him animated by the contortions and reactions of defence. The new-born infant, which has neither intelligence nor memory nor consciousness, is probably incapable of real conscious suffering, nevertheless it screams and cries when it is hungry or when it is pricked. But these screams and tears do not suffice to allow us to affirm that the child is suffering real pain. It is a nervous excitation which is translated by the reactions of defence; it is not the conscious assertion of an ego which has been painfully perturbed.

Further, for pain to exist the impression must be durable and not fugitive. The assertion of the ego is not enough. It must be prolonged. A pain, however intense we may suppose it to be, which traverses the organism for a second and which leaves no painful echo behind it, is no real pain. I will allow any one to inflict the most excruciating tortures on me if he can assure me that, at the end of one second, I shall have lost all recollection of the suffering and that no trace of the torture will remain. The extraction of a tooth lasts perhaps only half a second, but you remember it all your life. In any case, for several minutes the pain continues to be atrocious. Therefore we may certainly consider that pain is a phenomenon of memory. Pain is an empty word for every being that has no memory.

From these facts we may evolve the general conclusion that, under penalty of falling into vulgar anthromorphism, we cannot apply to the pain of animals the data which have been gathered on human pain.[5] With man, the developed intelligence and vivacious memory enable pain to acquire an extreme intensity. But with animals, in proportion as the intelligence lessens and the memory becomes more rudimentary, so does pain diminish, and, without having the right to be very affirmative, as we are in profound darkness concerning the consciousness of animals, it appears to me that, as we descend the scale of the animal kingdom, pain rapidly becomes very hazy, scarcely perceived, and as indistinct as the consciousness of the ego.

We have, therefore, the right to perform vivisection on beings which, because they possess no selfhood, do not suffer. Now, this absence of memory, consciousness, and intelligence extends assuredly over the whole of the vegetable kingdom, almost certainly over all the groups of the invertebrata, and also probably over all the inferior vertebrata.

Finally, there remain only the mammalia and birds which are capable of real pain. Although this pain may be obscure and indistinct, it is certain; and we must take it into consideration or fall into barbarism; therefore we shall restrict the problem of vivisection to the vivisection of superior animals, who, alone, are capable of suffering.