Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress

by Henry S. Salt

O there above the little grave,

We kissed again with tears.”

It seems to us as humanitarians, that, as far as Monsignor Vaughan and the Catholic vivisectionist school is concerned (it is otherwise with the scientists), it is pure waste of time to argue with them, there being a fundamental difference of opinion as to data and principles. The sole reason for discussion is to insure that the humanitarian view of the question be rightly placed before the public, and this can best be done by stating it clearly in contradistinction to the anthropocentric dogma. We do not admit the assumption that “beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.” We view the matter in a wholly different aspect. We find ourselves born into an age which has been evolved in a gradual progress from savagery to civilization, with old-world wrongs around us, the worst of which are being slowly redeemed, century after century, by a growing spirit of brotherhood. We have never pretended that these wrongs, woven as they are into the fabric of Society, can be immediately and simultaneously righted, nor do we admit, in the case of the lower animals any more than in the case of men, that the necessity of inflicting some pain confers the right to inflict any pain. We insist on the undeniable tendency from barbarism to humaneness, which has already at many points bridged the gulf between man and man, and will also bridge the gulf between man and his lower fellow-creatures. Science has exploded the idea that there is any difference in kind, and not in degree only, between the human and the non-human animal; and sympathy, guided by reason, is making it more and more impossible that we should for ever treat as mere automata fellow-beings to whom we are, in fact, very closely akin.

Humane Review, 1901.

VI

THE CONFESSIONS OF A PHYSICIAN[55]

“Confessions of a Physician,” by V. Veresaeff, is a Russian work, first published in 1901, the writer of which exposes with the utmost frankness the secrets of the medical profession—the doubts, difficulties, dangers, scruples, failures, and even homicides, that fall to the lot of the practitioner. It is not that Veresaeff is disloyal to his colleagues; but his judgment is drawn in two opposite directions by his sense of duty to Science on the one side, and to Morality on the other, and is exercised by the problem of how to reconcile the “necessities,” as he conceives them, of medical research with the “rights,” as he cannot but admit them to be, of its human and non-human victims. Hence, though Veresaeff is himself only in part a humanitarian, his book has considerable interest for humanitarian readers.

In a dissertation on the English anti-vivisection movement, from which the Russian movement originated, Veresaeff, while not stifling his misgivings, falls back on the assertion that vivisection is necessary, because it is impossible without it to know the living organism. He is very contemptuous of the “clergymen, society ladies, statesmen, persons entirely unassociated with science,” who seek to refute the scientists; but then, veering to the moral side of the question, he makes the following reference to this book on “Animals’ Rights”:

“However, we must give them their due; for not all the anti-vivisectionists base their opinions upon such crude and ignorant tenets. A number of them seek to base the whole question upon foundations of pure principle; thus, for instance, the author of ‘Animals’ Rights, Considered in relation to Social Progress,’ says: ‘Let us assume that the progress of surgical science is assisted by the experiments of the vivisector. What then? Before rushing to the conclusion that vivisection is justifiable on that account, a wise man will take into full consideration the other—the moral side of the question—the hideous injustice of torturing an innocent animal.’ This is the only possible and fitting position for the anti-vivisectionist to take up; whether science can dispense with vivisection or not, does not concern him; animals are made to suffer, and that settles everything. The question is plainly put, and there can be no room for any equivocation. I repeat, we ought not to ridicule the pretensions of the anti-vivisectionists—the sufferings of animals are truly horrible—and sympathy with them is not sentimentality; but we must bear in mind that there is no ‘way round,’ where the building up of scientific medicine—its goal—the healing of mankind—is at stake.”[56]