Supposing the vivisectors forced to abandon this position, they may then fall back on the next parallel—
6. That the pain inflicted on an individual animal in vivisection is not greater than in sport.
I am no sportsman, and so have no right to dogmatize, but I am tolerably sure that all sportsmen will agree with me that this is untrue of shooting, in which, whenever the creature is killed at once, it is probably as painless a form of death as could be devised ; while the sufferings of one that escapes wounded ought to be laid to the charge of unskilful sport, not of sport in the abstract. Probably much the same might be said of fishing : for other forms of sport, and especially for hunting, I have no defence to offer, believing that they involve very great cruelty.
Even if the last two fallacies were granted to the advocates of vivisection, their use in the argument must depend on the following proposition being true :—
7. That the evil charged against vivisection consists chiefly in the pain inflicted on the animal.
I maintain, on the contrary, that it consists chiefly in the effect produced on the operator. To use the words of Mr. Freeman, in the article already quoted, “the question is not as to the aggregate amount of suffering inflicted, but as to the moral character of the acts by which the suffering is inflicted.” We see this most clearly, when we shift our view from the act itself to its remoter consequences. The hapless animal suffers, dies, “and there an end :” but the man whose sympathies have been deadened, and whose selfishness has been fostered, by the contemplation of pain deliberately inflicted, may be the parent of others equally brutalised, and so, bequeathe a curse to future ages. And even if we limit our view to the present time, who can doubt that the degradation of a soul is a greater evil than the suffering of a bodily frame ? Even if driven to admit this, the advocates of the practice may still assert—
The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898), English author, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection” serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library.
