Yes, the position of the dog is unique. We have made him intelligent; and it is sinister ethics to choose him for vivisections or inoculations because of the very intelligence we have implanted. We have taught him faith and love, and I feel are ourselves bound by what we have taught him. Into other animals we have not instilled these qualities, we are therefore not bound to the same special faith with them that we owe to the dog.
My plea being simply that men cannot make friends of dogs and then treat them as if that relationship did not exist, I am not concerned to discuss the disputed question of whether or not special benefit does arise from experiments on dogs; but, in regard to suffering in such experiments, take the Home Office Returns for 1911: “Dogs and cats experimented upon without anæsthetics, 452. Dogs and cats allowed to recover after serious operations, 393”; and the words of the Report of the Royal Commission on Vivisection: “It is clear that even if the initial procedure may be regarded as trivial, the subsequent results of this procedure must in some cases, at any rate, be productive of great pain and much suffering.”
After all, we have not only bodies but spirits, and when our minds have once become alive to ethical doubt on a question such as this (there are 870,000 signatures to a petition for the total exemption of dogs from vivisection), when we are no longer sure that we have the right so to treat our dog comrades, there has fallen a shadow on the human conscience that will surely grow, until, by adjustment of our actions to our ethical sense, it has been remedied.
VI
Horses in Mines
(1)
(A Letter to The Times, 1910.)
The experience which has just befallen the 300 horses and ponies imprisoned underground during the strike riots at Clydach Vale spurs me to an appeal to all owners of collieries and mines to abandon, as far as possible the use of horses and ponies below ground.
The question of the treatment of pit ponies has of late attracted much attention, and is under examination by the Royal Commission on Mines. Into discussion of the truth of particular stories of cruelty I do not intend to enter. I have no first-hand knowledge, and, short of becoming a pit-pony driver, or mine inspector, no real chance of obtaining any. I wish simply to draw the attention of owners and managers of collieries and mines to certain considerations that need not in the least hurt a just belief in their own humanity or that of their employees.
Apart from the aberrations of human brutes, who flourish as well above ground as below, cruelty in these days is not deliberate, but requires for its existence three primary fostering conditions: the first, an overdriven or irritated state of nerves; the second, secrecy; the third, a helpless object.