There are some questions that really serve to classify men’s minds.
Nowadays the popularly received classifications rarely mean anything
at all. Are you Republican or Democrat, are you Liberal, Labour, or
Conservative? The answer tells you only of accidents of upbringing and
circumstance. Are you a Socialist? “We are all Socialists nowadays.”
Are you a Christian? Yes and no, or a “Yes”--and a long explanation.
But these other questions are test questions. Fairly put and fairly
answered they reveal the quality--or rather, let me say, the key and
colour--of a mind quite definitively. They mean exact things. They show
you are this sort of man or that.
One of these test questions is birth control, because on your belief
whether that is possible and desirable or whether it is not, hang,
logically and necessarily, all your ideas of the competition of types,
peoples, and races, and of the possibility of socialism and world
peace. If you can believe it is possible then world peace is possible,
and if you think it is impossible all talk of world peace is just
sentimental foolishness or a humbugging preparation for propaganda
in the next war. Another test issue is the question whether the Mass
as performed by a properly qualified priest is or is not the central
fact of Christian religious life. If your answer is “Yes,” you are a
Catholic, and if “No” a Protestant. All the other points at issue among
the different sorts of Christians are subordinate to that, and you will
find that the decisions people make upon them are always more or less
clearly consequent upon that primary decision. Your attitude towards
education will be different, and towards literature and history.
You will face death differently and pain differently. Upon a great
multitude of the important problems of to-day you do not know where
you are, you are just maundering about, until you have thought out and
decided clearly on these two key matters and adjusted your ideas to
them.
A third cardinal issue, not perhaps quite so far-reaching in its
implications as these others, but very far-reaching, is the question
of vivisection. To get your attitude to that quite clear and settled
in your mind is--after these other two--as sound and profitable an
enterprise in self-examination as it is possible to imagine.
What is vivisection? It is a clumsy and misleading name for
experimentation on animals for the sake of the knowledge to be gained
thereby. It is clumsy and misleading because it means literally cutting
up alive and trails with it to most uninstructed minds a suggestion of
highly sensitive creatures, bound and helpless, being slowly anatomized
to death. This is an idea naturally repulsive to gentle and kindly
spirits, and it puts an imputation of extreme cruelty on vivisection
which warps the discussion from the outset. But the larger bulk of
experiments upon animals for scientific purposes involve no cutting
about and very little pain. Many cause discomfort rather than actual
pain. There may be the prick of an injection and a subsequent illness.
Where there is actual cutting it is nearly always performed under
anæsthetics, and in a considerable proportion of such cases there is no
need for the animal to recover consciousness and it does not recover
consciousness.
Still, a residue of cases remains in which real suffering is
inflicted. Far more pain, terror, and distress is inflicted on the
first day of pheasant shooting every year, for no purpose at all except
the satisfaction of the guns, upon the wounded and mutilated birds
which escape than is inflicted by all the scientific investigators in
the world vivisecting for a year. The lives of “fancy” dogs, again,
invalid and grotesque deformations of the canine type, must make an
aggregation of prolonged discomfort beyond all comparison greater
than that of the creatures inoculated by the physiologist. But such
considerations do not release us from the straight question whether it
is right and permissible to cut even a single animal about, or indeed
to hurt any living creature at all, for the sake of knowledge.
That is what the scientific experimentalist claims to be free to do
and which the anti-vivisectionists labour strenuously to prevent.
There is no denial on the part of the scientific experimentalist that
a certain number of experiments are painful and have to be painful,
and that they are of a sort that have to be performed upon animals of
an order of intelligence that leaves one in no doubt of the reality of
the sufferings inflicted. The large majority of experiments involve no
inconvenience to the creatures tested, but there is this residuum of
admittedly painful cases. It is an amount of suffering infinitesimal in
comparison with the gross aggregate of pain inflicted day by day upon
sentient creatures by mankind, but it occurs.
The anti-vivisectionist wants legislation to prevent all experiment
upon living things for the sake of knowledge. Failing that he wants to
prevent experiment upon dogs in particular, even when the experiment
involves no pain whatever to the subject. But you will find that
the typical anti-vivisectionist is incapable of believing that an
experiment can be painless; his imagination is too vivid for any
assurance to the contrary. The idea of living substance cut while it
quivers and feels is too powerful for him. When the arguments and
imaginative appeals to his agitation are scrutinized it will be found
that his objection is to real or imagined pain, inflicted in cold blood
to no matter what beneficial end.
That is what he wants to stop. His propaganda literature is filled
with assertions that no knowledge of any value has ever been gained by
biological experimentation, but these preposterous denials of widely
known facts are the natural and habitual exaggerations of controversial
literature. The sound anti-vivisectionist would not rest his case on
any such proposition, for, even if it were true, a single wonderful
discovery to-morrow would upset it again. Pushed into a corner he will
admit that he does not care whether the knowledge gained is worth while
or no. He will not have knowledge gained in this fashion.
It would be easy to convict the anti-vivisectionist movement of
many manifest inconsistencies, but my object here is rather to
disentangle a fundamental idea than to exhibit confusions of thought.
I want to disentangle what is at the root of the feelings of the
anti-vivisectionist, and not to score controversial points. But I
must call attention to the marked disregard shown by the active
spirits in this agitation for any sort of experimenting with animals,
however productive of pain, that does not produce scientific results.
The world of pet animals is a world of aimless experimenting with
life. The lives of the “pets” of careless women are for the most
part remarkable histories of wrong and excessive feeding and fitful
fussing and negligence, and these creatures are themselves, in many of
their varieties, products of a ruthlessly dysgenic breeding industry
which sacrifices vigour and vitality to minuteness, quaintness, and
delicious ugliness, but the anti-vivisectionist has never shown the
slightest disposition to couple this ugly trade in animal deformity
with the pursuit of scientific research. Nor does he show any animus
against the importation of little monkeys and suchlike small attractive
beasts, dragged from their natural environment to die en route or
perish miserably but “amusingly” in uncongenial and often terrifying
surroundings. Indeed, a large part of the social and financial support
of anti-vivisection seems to come from just the sort of people who
sustain the breeders and procurers of animals for “petting.”
But very probably the toy-dog lover does not realize the biological
abomination of these practices. In his disregard of possible pain and
discomfort in one case and in his exaggeration of pain and discomfort
in the other, we find the clue to the fundamental issue of this
controversy. The pet is to him a dear little thing and its incessant
struggles to breathe with its pug nose are considered to be funny;
its fitful appetite is interpreted as fastidiousness; its manifest
ill-health is “delicacy”; if it is constantly washed and combed it does
not smell and it is a sweet creature; its abject physical dependence on
its owner, its terror and hatred of the world beyond the proprietary
aura is very flattering and easily interpreted as love. There is the
same disinclination to see the realities in the case of the pet dog
as in the case of the dog in the hands of the experimentalist, but
the disinclination is set at a different angle. The former leads a
life of general discomfort, but it is necessary for the pet-owning and
pet-protecting type to think of it as exquisitely indulged; the latter
may not suffer in the slightest degree, and may show the friendliest
feelings to the man who has made it a contributor to science or may
jump on the table eagerly for the injection that is followed by a pat
and a tit-bit of food, but it has to be regarded as being thrillingly
and outrageously tormented. These, however, are honest delusions, the
outcome of a peculiar mental make-up, and the anti-vivisectionist is
not to be charged with wilful inconsistency. His or her--it is more
commonly her--intention is to prevent and forbid the infliction in cold
blood and for a scientific end of anything that looks like pain on any
animal that can be imagined to suffer.
The hatred is not against pain as such; it is against pain inflicted
for knowledge. The medical profession is massively in support of
vivisection, and its testimony is that the knowledge derived from
vivisection has made possible the successful treatment of many cases
of human suffering. So far as we can measure one pain against another,
or the pain of this creature against the pain of that, vivisection
has diminished the pain of the world very considerably. But the
anti-vivisectionists will hear nothing of that. They will hear nothing
of that because it is not material to their conception of the case.
The peculiar animus of the anti-vivisectionist is clearly against the
deliberation and the scientific aim and not against the pain in itself.
The general subjugation of animals to human ends is not questioned.
Many anti-vivisectionists are, like their pets, carnivorous. They will
leave the abattoir to go on when they have closed the laboratory; they
will recognize the right and duty of the owner of a big dog to beat his
fortunate possession into good behaviour and keep it short of food to
tame it. They would be indignant if they were refused the freedom of
giving their pets anything to eat that they fancied--provided always
that no scientific knowledge ensued from its subsequent reactions. It
is the quiet determination of the clean-handed man with the scalpel
that they cannot endure.
It is not that he is cruel, because manifestly he is not cruel--if
he had a lust for cruelty the richly emotional nature of the
anti-vivisectionists would probably understand him better--it is
because he is not driven by his feelings or cravings to do what
he does, but by a will for abstract lucidity, that he rouses the
antagonism, the violent sense of difference, in his “antis.”
Vivisection is only occasionally and incidentally the infliction of
pain, and anti-vivisection is not really a campaign against pain at
all. The real campaign is against the thrusting of a scientific probe
into mysteries and hidden things which it is felt should either be
approached in a state of awe, tenderness, excitement, or passion, or
else avoided. It is, we begin to realize, a campaign to protect a world
of fantasy against science, a cherished and necessary world of fantasy.
It is a counter-attack upon a treatment of animals that gives the lie
to a delightful and elaborated mythology in which these poor limited
creatures are humanized and have thrust upon them responses, loyalties,
and sympathetic understandings of which they are, in reality, scarcely
more capable than plants. The curious, materialistic, shameless, and
intelligent monkey lends itself far less easily than the dog to such
mythological interpretation, and so gets far less consideration from
the anti-vivisectionists. It pulls everything to pieces, including
pleasant fantasies about itself. But you can tell a dog that it
thinks and feels anything you like, however noble and complex, and it
watches you hopefully and wags its tail. And so it is about the dog
that the controversy centres and the passions of the dispute rage most
obstinately.
To the question we have posed, whether it is justifiable to inflict
pain upon animals if need be for the sake of knowledge, the supporter
of vivisection says “Yes.” He says “Yes” because he regards the whole
animal creation as existing not merely for its present sensations, but
as a contributing part of a continuing and developing reality which
increases in knowledge and power. His disposition is to see things
plainly and to accept the subservience of beasts to man in man’s
increasing effort to understand and control. He regards animals as
limited and simplified cognates of our own infinitely more complex
and important beings, illuminating inferiors, and he can conceive no
better or more profitable use for their lives than to serve the ends of
mental growth. What otherwise are their lives? A play of desires and
fears, that ends in being devoured by other creatures great and small.
To this mentality that of the natural anti-vivisectionist is in the
completest contrast. The world that the pro-vivisectionist is by his
nature impelled to strip bare, the anti-vivisectionist clothes in rich
swathings of feeling and self-projection. He imagines souls in birds
and beasts, long memories and intricate criticism. He can imagine dogs
and cats pressed by forebodings, a prey to anxiety, vexed and thwarted.
He does not clearly separate them from humanity. Often he will compare
these dream-enriched animals of his with mankind to the disadvantage of
the latter. He enriches reality but at the same time he distorts and
conceals it by these ornamentations. He is afraid of bare reality as a
child is afraid of a skeleton.
The biological experimenter experiments because he wants to know.
He is neither dismayed by pain nor does he desire that pain should
enter into his experiments. He avoids it when possible. I doubt if
his work is largely determined by practical ends, or whether it would
have much value if he undertook it directly for the sake of curing
disease, benefiting humanity, or anything of that sort. Sentimental
aims mean loose, sentimental, ineffective work. He wants knowledge
because he wants knowledge; it is his characteristic good. Practical
applications follow unsought. He is a type of humanity that may or
may not be increasing in the world. Most of us do not stand up to
knowledge like that. We want to keep our illusions. We do not want
knowledge for ourselves or others very much, we prefer to be happy in
our imaginations, and the rescue of animals from the “clutches” of the
vivisectionists appeals to our deep instinctive self-protection quite
as much as it does to the widely diffused desire to champion the weak
against the strong.
_24 July, 1927._