Why animals?
Sir: It is refreshing and nice to those of us who are wholeheartedly anti-vivisection to see reasonable people like John Rowan Wilson saying to us: 'To sneer at them or write them off as cranks, as some people do, is surely vapid and insensitive'. True. We are not cranks. We are merely chivalrous people—chivalrous to its extreme, logical, conclusion.
Is the captain of a sinking ship a crank when he shouts 'women and children first'? There might be some people on that ship who were women prostitutes; there might be some children who will grow up to become thieves or even murderers; and there may be some men who would be of immense value to their fellows, such as, say, an Edison or a Stephenson; or, during a war, a Churchill on whom the well-being of the nation depended. Never mind. No matter what happened it is 'women and children first', merely because in times of crisis we are all chivalrous and put the helpless first regardless of importance.
You may say, 'Oh but it is different with animals. You can't put them first.' But I should like to remind your readers that an idea is an idea, and must be taken to its logical conclusion or we are in danger. Once drop our ideals and there is no knowing where we shall land. The willingness to torture animals to help man leads on to the willingness to torture unimportant men to help more valuable men. Didn't it do so in Germany? Didn't the Germans set up a human vivisection laboratory (they called it Belsen) where they vivisected Jews to benefit Aryans because they considered the Jews worthless and the Aryans great?
I appreciate tremendously John Rowan Wilson's approval of FRAME, the organisation set up by a group of scientists to publicise and encourage the use of certain modern techniques designed to make laboratory animals obsolete; and I should like your readers to know that there is another organisation, called the Lawson Tait Medical and Scientific Research Trust, an organisa- tion existing to finance any medical research which does not involve animal ex- perimentation. Furthermore, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection is working towards the setting-up of the Dr Walter Hadwen Foundation, which would consist of premises where scientists could learn medical research methods which did not consist of vivisection.
But I think it needs to be remembered, too, that there is a place on the earth for those of us who maintain that vivisection is wholly wrong, regardless of whether it helps man or not. Otherwise we are led on inevitably to the 'human guinea pigs' which Dr Pappworth warns us about in his book. Stella Houghton President, Birmingham Branch, British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, 96 Acheson Road, Birmingham 28
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