PAIN AND DEATH
We have not yet touched at the root of the problem, for physiology is not
mere demonstration. The real point at issue is the search for new truths.
The demonstration of an acquired truth, however important this may be, must
not be confused with the research for an unknown truth. Now, physiologists
claim that they have not only the right--but that it is their duty--to
inflict some suffering on animals, if by so doing they diminish human
suffering. I am going to put this proposition to the test.
1. It is universally recognised, except perhaps by the Brahmans, that we
have the right to kill dangerous or offensive animals. I do not believe
there is a man foolish enough not to kill a mosquito which is stinging him.
No one would hesitate to crush a viper which is on the point of biting
him, or the caterpillar which is eating the leaves of his fruit trees. If
an invasion of locusts threatens our harvest, we have the right to stamp
out these legions of enemies. To refuse man the right to defend himself
against his animal foes is such a ridiculous proposition that it is useless
even to attempt to combat it.
Not only have we the right to wage war against offensive animals, such as
rats, mice, caterpillars, locusts, bugs, mosquitoes, serpents, wolves,
tigers, hyaenas, and all ferocious and mischievous animals, but we have
also the right to kill such animals as are necessary for our nourishment. I
am quite aware of the fact that certain religions proscribe the use of
meat. I am also aware that an exclusively vegetable alimentation might be
substituted for our customary mixed diet, which is both animal and
vegetable. But, though a vegetable alimentation is possible, our western
civilisation is bound up with the principle of a mixed diet in the ordinary
conditions of life. If, indeed, alimentation should be exclusively
vegetable, it would be useless to hunt, to fish, to rear poultry, to breed
cattle for the market; and it would be necessary to confine our nutriment
exclusively to wheat, corn, maize, rice, herbs, and fruits. Undoubtedly
man, thus nourished, could live, and indeed live very well; but
vegetarianism would be such a radical reform in our customs that in an
article bearing solely upon vivisection I cannot handle such a vast
problem.
I recognise that those anti-vivisectionists who are at the same time strict
vegetarians are consistent; they live entirely on fruit and vegetables,
make no use of animal flesh, for they contest the right of man to kill an
animal for his nourishment. It is difficult to reply to such vegetarian,[4]
for, after all, animal alimentation is not indispensable to human life. But
we must take things as they actually exist. The bulk of my readers and the
majority of anti-vivisectionists are not vegetarians; and it is only an
innocent pastime to build up new civilisations in the fantastic realms of
Utopia.
We are not, then, addressing ourselves to vegetarians, but to those
anti-vivisectionists who feel no compunction in drinking broth or milk or
eating the wing of a chicken, who do not shrink with horror from the sight
of a cutlet, and who are capable of eating meat twice a day throughout the
whole term of their existence. These people know full well that it was
necessary to kill the animal which serves them for food: the ox was beaten
to death; the sheep had its throat cut open; the pig was bled to death; the
cod and the sardine were suffocated. I pass over the tortures which special
preparations and elegant sports inflict on the animal for the mere savour
of our meals: geese stuffed by force for months whilst nailed down to
boards; pheasants, partridges, hares, slaughtered in the hunt; fish thrown
into boats, gasping and finally dying after long, agonising struggles. All
these and other tortures are inflicted by man on the animal in order to
satisfy his pleasure and his appetite.
Perhaps these anti-vivisectionists have never visited a slaughter-house
when the moment for killing the sheep has arrived. There, bound and
stretched out on an immense table, are to be seen five hundred unfortunate
sheep, with their throats thrust forth. The butcher passes in front and,
with a stroke of his knife, slashes open the neck and throat of the poor
wretches; the blood spouts out, convulsions rend the body, and only at the
end of one minute or one and a half minutes does death supervene. This is
death in all its savage horror inflicted by man on the animal. There are
anti-vivisectionists who accept this. Therefore, they recognise implicitly
man's right to kill animals, since they profit by such slaughter for their
alimentation; they add, however, that though man has a right to kill, he
has no right to cause suffering. Is there no suffering in the
slaughter-house? Are anaesthetics ever dreamt of there?
2. Now it is impossible to point out the boundary line which separates the
being that suffers from the being that does not suffer; and I defy any one
to establish any line of demarcation whatsoever between a being capable of
pain and a being incapable of pain.
Plants certainly do not suffer. Already, however, there are certain
difficulties in the way of determining the exact boundary line between the
animal and the plant. When we expose an infusion of hay to the air, for
instance, various microbes develop therein. A learned and minute analysis
allows us to distinguish both bacteria and infusoria among the innumerable
micro-organisms which swarm in the infusion. Now we know that bacteria are
plants and infusoria are animals. If, therefore, all animal life were
eliminated from experimentation, we should have no right to boil an
infusion of hay, because we know that it contains infusoria which are
animals.
These infusoria are so closely related to bacteria that they may be
confused with the latter, as indeed has been the case up to the last few
years. A number of inferior beings were formerly called zoophytes, that is
to say, animal plants; and it is sheer nonsense to suppose that they are
conscious of pain. Sponges, corals, sea-anemones, star-fishes, sea-urchins,
possess a nervous system which is so little developed, and reactions which
are so indistinct, that we can scarcely suppose they possess an intelligent
consciousness, and, consequently, sensibility to pain. Moreover, I do not
see how their reactions would differ if they possessed the notion of pain.
When we touch the tentacles of a star-fish, we notice, near the tentacles
touched, a sort of agitation set up among the neighbouring tentacles, but
this agitation does not extend to the tentacles of the others' arms; so
that a general consciousness does not appear to exist, unless it be in a
prodigiously rudimentary state, among inferior beings. In certain classes
of the mollusca there is no head. Thus oysters and mussels, named on that
account _acephala_, have in all probability no consciousness. I would have
no scruple, therefore, either in eating living oysters, or in experimenting
upon living oysters and mussels, since it seems to me evident that the
notion of pain does not exist in them.
It is not the same thing with insects; it is here that the first signs of
pain begin to appear. Nevertheless, we must be careful to avoid confusing
pain with signs of pain. When we take a worm and cut it into three
segments, each of these segments will struggle and writhe in a perfect
frenzy. It would, therefore, be necessary to admit that pain existed in
each of these three segments--in other words, that each fragment possesses
a central seat of pain, which is absurd; it is much more rational to
suppose that the perturbed movements of the animal are the result of a
strong nervous excitation, and that the injury is accompanied by defensive
reflex movements but provokes no painful perception.
Among the superior animals however, and especially among the vertebrata,
pain exists. There can be no doubt about this, although it is impossible to
know exactly in what consists the consciousness of pain in an animal; the
most profound obscurity still reigns, and will perhaps always reign, over
their consciousness and sensations. It would be ridiculous to deny that a
dog suffers when his paw is crushed. Certainly, I fully believe that all
pain is much less clearly perceived by the dog than by man. But, after all,
it is a phenomenon of the same order and identical, save in intensity.
Now pain, taken in its profoundest sense, consists of two essential
elements: a shock to the conscious self, the _ego_, in the first place;
and, in the second place, the prolongation of the shock. If the self is
not distinctly conscious, if it does not go so far as to assert itself by
the separation of that self from the external world, we cannot say that
pain is possible. The _ego_ never asserts itself with so much force as
under a very painful impression. So that among beings whose reactions are
mechanical, automatic, governed by other forces than by the assertion of
the self and a freely deliberate will, pain becomes so indistinct, so
confused, that it probably does not exist in the strict psychological sense
at all. The greatest philosopher of modern times, Descartes, imagined a
system of machine-animals; this idea has been turned into ridicule by the
ignorant, but nevertheless we are almost forced to return to it when we
dive to the bottom of reflex movements. Now, if we are able to admit that
there is a vague consciousness of the selfhood among superior animals, such
as the mammalia and birds, this consciousness, as far as concerns the
inferior vertebrata, is most certainly extremely hazy, if, indeed, it
exists at all. I have difficulty in conceiving that a frog is able to
ponder over its _ego_, assert its existence in presence of the external
world, and say or think, I SUFFER. No being suffers unless he is able to
think that he suffers, and meditate on his suffering. To suffer means to
have consciousness; and as far as it is permissible for a man to picture to
himself the sensations of a frog, I should say that the frog has no
consciousness of suffering.
Even as regards the more highly developed vertebrata, such as birds,
rabbits, and guinea-pigs, suffering is probably of a very obscure nature.
It is not enough to say that an animal suffers because we see him animated
by the contortions and reactions of defence. The new-born infant, which has
neither intelligence nor memory nor consciousness, is probably incapable of
real conscious suffering, nevertheless it screams and cries when it is
hungry or when it is pricked. But these screams and tears do not suffice to
allow us to affirm that the child is suffering real pain. It is a nervous
excitation which is translated by the reactions of defence; it is not the
conscious assertion of an _ego_ which has been painfully perturbed.
Further, for pain to exist the impression must be durable and not
fugitive. The assertion of the _ego_ is not enough. It must be prolonged. A
pain, however intense we may suppose it to be, which traverses the organism
for a second and which leaves no painful echo behind it, is no real pain. I
will allow any one to inflict the most excruciating tortures on me if he
can assure me that, at the end of one second, I shall have lost all
recollection of the suffering and that no trace of the torture will remain.
The extraction of a tooth lasts perhaps only half a second, but you
remember it all your life. In any case, for several minutes the pain
continues to be atrocious. Therefore we may certainly consider that pain is
a phenomenon of memory. Pain is an empty word for every being that has no
memory.
From these facts we may evolve the general conclusion that, under penalty
of falling into vulgar anthromorphism, we cannot apply to the pain of
animals the data which have been gathered on human pain.[5] With man, the
developed intelligence and vivacious memory enable pain to acquire an
extreme intensity. But with animals, in proportion as the intelligence
lessens and the memory becomes more rudimentary, so does pain diminish,
and, without having the right to be very affirmative, as we are in profound
darkness concerning the consciousness of animals, it appears to me that, as
we descend the scale of the animal kingdom, pain rapidly becomes very hazy,
scarcely perceived, and as indistinct as the consciousness of the _ego_.
We have, therefore, the right to perform vivisection on beings which,
because they possess no _selfhood_, do not suffer. Now, this absence of
memory, consciousness, and intelligence extends assuredly over the whole of
the vegetable kingdom, almost certainly over all the groups of the
invertebrata, and also probably over all the inferior vertebrata.
Finally, there remain only the mammalia and birds which are capable of real
pain. Although this pain may be obscure and indistinct, it is certain; and
we must take it into consideration or fall into barbarism; therefore we
shall restrict the problem of vivisection to the vivisection of superior
animals, who, alone, are capable of suffering.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The true vegetarian is an extremely rare person. The usual so-called
vegetarian ought more properly to be called a non-meat eater, for he does
not scruple to consume milk (intended by nature for the calf) and milk
products (cream, cheese, and butter) and eggs, nor to wear garments made of
wool and leather.--(W. D. H.)
[5] In the little leaflet already referred to, quotation is made of a
sentence from Professor Pritchard, which says that the various animals have
a skin of different thickness, but that sensibility is the same among all,
including man. It seems to me that Professor Pritchard has scarcely looked
into the questions of general psychology.