The Pros and Cons of Vivisection

by Charles Richet

Let us suppose, nevertheless, that it is so; and let us even admit five victims a day, with 300 working days in the year, which is also an evident exaggeration: this will make about 200,000 victims a year. This number, which seems very considerable, is in reality very small, if we put it against the enormous number of living beings. Probably about two thousand millions of mammals die every year, so that the proportion of animals that suffer a little (and very little) through the act of man in his search for knowledge is one in 10,000, in other words, a negligible quantity.

In the immense earthly universe are thousands and thousands of pains, of fierce, incessant struggles between living animals. Every rock in the ocean, every tree in the forest, shelters ferocious combats, and is the constant scene of painful death-agonies. Darwin has admirably shown that life is a struggle for life, that the weak are crushed by the strong, and that the voice of living nature is a cry of distress rather than a hymn of joy. Therefore, in this universal concert of animal pain and of human pain, the slight pain of animals experimented upon is a little thing, and from an absolute point of view we have the right to disregard it.

Think well over it all for a moment. By giving an experimental disease to a rabbit, for example, I scarcely change its lot. If I had left it to itself, in one, two, or perhaps three years it would have been attacked by another disease, probably more cruel than the tuberculosis with which I infected it. The lot of dogs which die of old age is scarcely enviable. How many poor old dogs have I seen, impotent from rheumatism, completely blind, no longer able to crawl about, covered with disgusting ulcers, seeming to beg for the finishing stroke which would put an end to their misery! And old, worn-out horses! What a spectacle! This residuum of existence of old animals is truly pitiable, and, taking everything into consideration, it is not an enormous dose of happiness we have left them in not sacrificing them when they were young.

But I shall not dwell upon this argument, for it might also be applied to human beings. The Greeks said: "Happy are they who die young, for they are beloved of the gods." Perhaps some day human ethics will allow us to spare our dear ones the cruel and useless sufferings of old age! I know not. But what I do know is that it is not inhuman to sacrifice an old horse or an old dog in order to save it from going through all the tortures which old age and disease hold in reserve for him.

In any case, the sufferings produced by physiologists who inoculate diseases into animals weigh very little in comparison with natural suffering, not only because the suffering of animals is always more or less immersed in the nihilism of semi-consciousness, but also because these experimental sufferings are less than natural sufferings, and extend over a very small number of victims.

But the question does not lie there. The point is not whether the suffering of animals be a large or small quantity in nature from an absolute standpoint; the question is a higher one: we must ask ourselves if the fact of inflicting pain is compatible with human morality.

Tolstoi says somewhere that the sciences are nothing, that art is nothing, that the true science is that of good and evil, of justice and injustice. Everything sinks into insignificance in presence of this great duty, or rather life has no other object. We should be entirely engrossed in doing good; justice should be our sole preoccupation.

If, then, from an absolute point of view the suffering of frogs and rabbits does not count, it counts a lot from the point of view of human morality. If a bad child should martyrise a toad, it is not the toad which would interest me: poor creature of diffused consciousness, ignorant even of its own pain, such a tiny pain, too, in comparison with the immense pains which the beings of this great universe are suffering at this moment! No; the toad would scarcely exist for me. The child would interest me greatly; and all my pity would be turned upon that cruel child. My efforts would tend much less towards preventing the toad from suffering than towards preventing that human being from becoming a barbarian.

If the anti-vivisectionists were true moralists and not fanatics they would say: "To provoke suffering to produce disease, to inflict tortures, is an execrable moral lesson. Whilst the first duty of man is to be good, you instruct young men to be wicked. The doctor, who ought to be compassionate for human suffering, should not serve his apprenticeship in that noble profession by showing himself devoid of pity for the suffering of innocent victims. A civilisation which allows itself to inflict death and torture on living beings can be only a barbarous civilisation."

I recognise the force of that argument. And whilst not a single one of the preceding assertions of the anti-vivisectionists had succeeded in moving me, I confess that this objection of human morality is a most powerful one. I am nevertheless going to try to show that it is not admissible.