Answer. Here is what the trouble is. Now and then one uses chloroform, but the great majority do not. They claim that it interferes with the value of the experiment, and, as I said before, they object to the expense. Why should they care for what the animals suffer? They inflict the most horrible and useless pain, and they try the silliest experiments—experiments of no possible use or advantage.
For instance: They flay a dog to see how long he can live without his skin. Is this trifling experiment of any importance? Suppose the dog can live a week or a month or a year, what then? What must the real character of the scientific wretch be who would try an experiment like this? Is such a man seeking the good of his fellow- men?
So, these scientists starve animals until they slowly die; watch them from day to day as life recedes from the extremities, and watch them until the final surrender, to see how long the heart will flutter without food; without water. They keep a diary of their sufferings, of their whinings and moanings, of their insanity. And this diary is published and read with joy and eagerness by other scientists in like experiments. Of what possible use is it to know how long a dog or horse can live without food?
So, they take animals, dogs and horses, cut through the flesh with the knife, remove some of the back bone with the chisel, then divide the spinal marrow, then touch it with red hot wires for the purpose of finding, as they say, the connection of nerves; and the animal, thus vivisected, is left to die.
A good man will not voluntarily inflict pain. He will see that his horse has food, if he can procure it, and if he cannot procure the food, he will end the sufferings of the animal in the best and easiest way. So, the good man would rather remain in ignorance as to how pain is transmitted than to cut open the body of a living animal, divide the marrow and torture the nerves with red hot iron. Of what use can it be to take a dog, tie him down and cut out one of his kidneys to see if he can live with the other?
These horrors are perpetrated only by the cruel and the heartless —so cruel and so heartless that they are utterly unfit to be trusted with a human life. They inoculate animals with a virus of disease; they put poison in their eyes until rottenness destroys the sight; until the poor brutes become insane. They given them a disease that resembles hydrophobia, that is accompanied by the most frightful convulsions and spasms. They put them in ovens to see what degree of heat it is that kills. They also try the effect of cold; they slowly drown them; they poison them with the venom of snakes; they force foreign substances into their blood, and, by inoculation, into their eyes; and then watch and record their agonies; their sufferings.
Question. Don't you think that some good has been accomplished, some valuable information obtained, by vivisection?
Answer. I don't think any valuable information has been obtained by the vivisection of animals without chloroform that could not have been obtained with chloroform. And to answer the question broadly as to whether any good has been accomplished by vivisection, I say no.
According to the best information that I can obtain, the vivisectors have hindered instead of helped. Lawson Tait, who stands at the head of his profession in England, the best surgeon in Great Britain, says that all this cutting and roasting and freezing and torturing of animals has done harm instead of good. He says publicly that the vivisectors have hindered the progress of surgery. He declares that they have not only done no good, but asserts that they have done only harm. The same views according to Doctor Tait, are entertained by Bell, Syme and Fergusson.
Many have spoken of Darwin as though he were a vivisector. This is not true. All that has been accomplished by these torturers of dumb and helpless animals amounts to nothing. We have obtained from these gentlemen Koch's cure for consumption, Pasteur's factory of hydrophobia and Brown-Sequard's elixir of life. These three failures, gigantic, absurd, ludicrous, are the great accomplishment of vivisection.