Experiments on Animals

by Stephen Paget

Here, at the risk of repetition, let me make quite clear what they are fighting against. Nine out of ten experiments are bacteriological. That is to say, 90 or 95 per cent. Of these inoculations, more than a third are made in the direct service of the national health, and as it were by the direct orders of Government. A vast number of them are wholly painless; nothing happens; the result is negative; the thing does not take. Some are followed by disease, and the animal is painlessly killed at the first manifestation of the disease, or recovers, or dies of the disease. The fate of that animal is the fate of all of us; it has got to die of something, and it dies of it. Anyhow, the talk about torture-troughs and cutting-up has no place here; and the word vivisection, by a gross and palpable abuse, is false nine times out of every ten. Of the remaining 10 per cent. of all experiments; in those that are made under the License alone, or under the License plus Certificate C, the question of pain does not arise. The animal is anæsthetised, and is killed under that anæsthetic. The remaining 3 per cent. of all experiments are those that are made under the License plus Certificate B (or B + EE, or B + F). The initial operation is done under the anæsthetic; the animal is allowed to recover; it may be, practically, none the worse for it. Or it may be the worse for it, and therefore die, or be killed. But Certificate B is not allowed for any infliction of pain on the animal through the operation wound, and never will be.

Here are two sets of experiments: those under Certificate A, and those under Certificate B. One is 90 per cent. of all experiments; the other is 3 per cent. Nine out of ten experiments are inoculations, and the operation of the tenth is done under an anæsthetic. That is the first fact, which we must fix in our minds, before we consider the arguments of the societies.

Next, the dates and the sources of their evidence. They wish to stop the experiments that are now made in this country. They are bound, therefore, to produce "up-to-date" evidence, and from home sources; not that which is thirty years old, or comes from sources far away. This present use of animals, here and now, under the restrictions of the Act, is what they are fighting; they are bound to draw their instances from here and now.

But this would not suit them at all: they could not bear to be thus limited to here and now. Their arguments and their instances extend over thirty or more years, and are drawn from all parts of the world, from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, from every country. Journals of Physiology, text-books, reports, medical journals, British and foreign, are ransacked to find evidence for the cause; there is a regular system, year in year out, a sort of secret service or detective force, a persistent hunting-up of all scraps and shreds of evidence. One society advertised, in a daily paper, that it wanted confidential communications, from medical students, as to the practices of the laboratory. Another, seeing the chance of a prosecution, says, "Special inquiries were made on the subject, and the society's solicitor went to Belfast to conduct these inquiries on the spot." All this espionage is sure now and again, in thirty years, to detect something which it can magnify into a scandal. And when a fault is found, even a little one, oh the joy in the ranks of the societies. And, at once, the fault, exaggerated, and highly coloured, is made a locus classicus, a commonplace of every drawing-room meeting. What is the date of it, what was the place of it? Was it long ago, was it far from here? Still, never let it drop; what one did then, they are all doing now, all of them of malice prepense; let us proclaim the blessed news from every platform; and please remember us in your Wills.

Among the arguments against all experiments on animals, is this very common argument, that the truth about them is too horrible to be told. "We dare not produce our brief," says the Rev. Nevison Loraine, at the annual meeting of the London Society in 1901; "it is only the courage of a lady that dares to produce tales so harrowing as those that have been briefly alluded to to-day; and it is part of the weakness of our cause with the public that we cannot tell the whole story." But, not long ago, the courage of two ladies, officers of a Swedish Anti-vivisection Society, honorary members of Mr. Coleridge's society, did produce a book full of harrowing tales; they told the whole story to the Lord Chief Justice and a jury. Was not that producing their brief? I have here in my pocket something I have not got the nerve to read to you, says Archdeacon Wilberforce, at the annual meeting of the National Society in 1901; and the next minute a lady in the audience is crying out, Do not go on, we cannot bear it; and he says, You have got to bear it. Good God, they have got to suffer it. Is not that producing his brief? Mr. Coleridge, in 1902, sends out 12,000 copies, just to begin with, of an illustrated German catalogue of laboratory instruments: The question of thus scattering abroad this fearful document has been the subject of very grave consideration.... We have launched upon the world this terrible proof of what vivisection really is, with a full sense of our responsibility. Is not that producing his brief? These things in the pocket, and fearful documents, and briefs that Mr. Loraine dares not produce, are apt to say little or nothing about anæsthetics, and to be silent over the fact that nine out of every ten experiments are bacteriological, and to over-emphasise experiments made many years ago or a thousand miles away. You bring the speaker down to now and here, to the text of the Act, to the reports to Government, to the Home Secretary's own words in Parliament; and you are told that they are all in a conspiracy, all liars more or less, and that the truth is in the societies, especially in one of them. Or you bring him down to the good that these experiments have done, the lives that they have saved; and at once he is off like the wind:—

"The society does not concern itself with the results of vivisection, whether good or bad, and thinks it is beside the mark to discuss them." (Report of the Canine Defence League, 1903.)

"When the angel of pity is driven from the heart; when the fountain of tears is dry, the soul becomes a serpent crawling in the dust of the desert." (Colonel Ingersoll.)

"I make no pretence to criticise vivisectional experiments on the ground of their technical failure or success. I dogmatically postulate humaneness as a condition of worthy personal character." (Mr. Bernard Shaw.)

"The vivisector, when he stands over his animal, whether with anæsthetics or without anæsthetics, is creating, even if the physical health of the nation is enhanced by it, a moral shroud not only for himself, but a moral shroud the edges of which are continually extending into the thought atmosphere, and so deadening the national conscience at large." (Mr. Herbert Burrows.)

"The developed taste for blood and cruelty must in the end find its full satisfaction in the vivisection of human beings when they have the misfortune to come under the power of our future doctors." (Bishop Bagshawe.)