“That doesn’t affect the question.”
“I gather you reckon the beasts oughtn’t help advance science.”
“They don’t. Doctors are as ill as anybody.”
“True enough. You consider that invalidates medical science?”
“Of course they are over-worked and many of them splendid. But illness doesn’t decrease. If one disease goes down another goes up.”
“Great Cæsar, where did you come across that?”
“Even so; but suppose they all went up?”
“Besides, you talk about animals advancing science. Even if there wasn’t that great French physiologist or chemist or something who looked at the result of experiments on animals and said hélàs, nous avons les mains vides. He declared that there’s nothing to be learned about human bodies from animals and even if there were the thing is that the animals have no choice. We’ve no right to force them to suffer.”
“An animal’s constituted differently to a man. You can’t compare them in the matter of sensitiveness to pain.”
“I knew you’d say that. If people really want to advance science by experiments on bodies they should offer their own bodies.”