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8. That vivisection has no demoralising effect on the character of the operator.

“Look at our surgeons !” they may exclaim. “Are they a demoralised or a brutalised class ? Yet you must admit that, in the operations they have to perform, they are perpetually contemplating pain—aye, and pain deliberately inflicted by their own hands.” The analogy is not a fair one ; since the immediate motive—of saving the life, or diminishing the sufferings, of the person operated on—is a counteracting influence in surgery, to which vivisection, with its shadowy hope of some day relieving the sufferings of some human being yet unborn, has nothing parallel to offer. This, however, is a question to be decided by evidence, not by argument. History furnishes us with but too many examples of the degradation of character produced by the deliberate pitiless contemplation of suffering. The effect of the national bull-fights on the Spanish character is a case in point. But we need not go to Spain for evidence : the following extract from the Echo, quoted in the Spectator for March 20, will be enough to enable the reader to judge for himself what sort of effect this practice is likely to have on the minds of students:— “But if yet more be necessary to satisfy the public mind on this latter point” (the effect on the operators),” the testimony of an English physiologist, known to the writer, maybe useful in conclusion. He was, present some time past at a lecture, in the course of which demonstrations were made on living dogs. When the unfortunate creatures cried and moaned under the operations, many of the students actually mimicked their cries in derision ! The gentleman who related this occurrence adds that the spectacle of the writhing animals and the fiendish behaviour of the audience so sickened him, that he could not wait for the conclusion of the lecture, but took his departure in disgust.”

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.

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.

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.

I come now to another class of fallacies—those involved in the comparison, so often made, between vivisection and field-sports. If the theory, that the two are essentially similar, involved no worse consequence than that sport should be condemned by all who condemn vivisection, I should be by no means anxious to refute it. Unfortunately the other consequence is just as logical, and just as likely, that vivisection should be approved of by all who approve of sport.

The comparison rests on the assumption that the main evil laid to the charge of vivisection is the pain inflicted on the animal. This assumption I propose to deal with, further on, as a fallacy : at present I will admit it for the sake of argument, hoping to show that, even on this hypothesis, the vivisectors have a very poor case. In making this comparison their first claim is—

5. That it is fair to compare aggregates of pain.

“The aggregate amount of wrong”—I quote from an article in the Pall Mall Gazette for February 13— “which is perpetrated against animals by sportsmen in a single year probably exceeds that which some of them endure from vivisectors in half a century.” The best refutation of this fallacy would seem to be to trace it to its logical conclusion—that a very large number of trivial wrongs are equal to one great one. For instance, that a man, who by wiling adulterated bread inflicts a minute injury on the health of some thousands of persons, commits a crime equal to one murder. Once grasp this reductio ad absurdum, and you will be, ready to allow that the only fair comparison is between individual and individual.

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.