This Report gives a clear answer to certain false statements alleged against experiments on animals. It shows that more than 90 per cent. of these experiments are inoculations, with a few feeding experiments, administrations of substances by the mouth, or abstractions of a minute quantity of blood for examination. In no instance has a certificate dispensing with the use of anæsthetics been allowed for an experiment involving a serious operation. In no case has a cutting operation more severe than a superficial venesection been allowed to be performed without anæsthetics. It shows, also, that the results, in a very large number of these inoculations, are negative, painless, not even inconvenient.
The Report shows, also, that the vast majority of all experiments are inoculations made on the smaller animals; and that the larger animals (dog, cat, horse, mule, or ass) are seldom used for inoculation.
It shows, also, that a great proportion of these inoculations are made in the direct practical service of the public health and the public purse: to standardise drugs, to ensure the purity of food and of rivers, to protect flocks and herds, and to decide quarantine. Government Departments, County Councils, Municipal Corporations, and a Royal Commission made more than one-third of the total number of inoculations; and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund made more than one-third, mostly on mice; and a sixth was made over the testing and standardising of sera and of drugs.
The operations performed under the License + Certificate B, or B + EE, or B + F, were 3 per cent. of the whole number of experiments. The majority of the animals were neither cats nor dogs. They can hardly be compared to the same number of the larger animals mutilated by breeders and farmers: for these mutilations may be inflicted, and are inflicted, without an anæsthetic. They can hardly be compared to the same number of pheasants or rabbits wounded, but not killed, in sport; for the animals wounded in sport get no subsequent care, and, if they are in pain, nobody need put them out of it. They may fairly be compared to the same number of pet animals that have undergone surgical operations, under anæsthesia, at the hands of a skilled veterinary surgeon; only with this difference, that many of them lose health, or suffer disablement or disease, and so die or are killed; but, if the wound suppurates, the animal must be killed, and, after the wound has healed, the animals are not necessarily, or even generally, in pain. And there must be no further experiment without anæsthesia. No observations or stimulations of a character to cause pain are allowed to be made without the animals being anæsthetised. It is evident that good care is taken to ensure an irreducible minimum of pain.
PART IV
THE CASE AGAINST ANTI-VIVISECTION
THE CASE AGAINST ANTI-VIVISECTION