VIVISECTION
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Stn,—Sir Humphry Rolleston has been permitted to speak to the countless wireless listeners in praise of vivisection. He said, " we should not be led by a genuine sympathy for a comparatively small number of dogs and other animali into delaying the discoveries and new remedies which might save the lives of your nearest and dearest when they are critically ill."
This one sentence contains the ancient defence of inflicting serious suffering on helpless animals by licensed scientific inquisitors. It violates the fundamental principle of Christian ethics that if we take an animal's life we are bound to take it with as little accompanying pain as possible.
Next it speaks of " a comparatively small number of dogs and other animals as being treated in a manner that violates the above fundamental principle of Christian ethics. With what is this comparison in numbers associated, and what does it matter in morals how often you violate funda- mental principles ? If it is wrong to steal, it matters nothing whether the thief steals from " comparatively " few innocent victims. If he steals from only 8,848 Londoners out of the seven millions, does that make his thefts innocent acts ? And if he can assert, though without specific proof, that he has most beneficently distributed the proceeds of his larcencies, does that entitle him to the admiration of any- body except his fellow thieves ?
Then we come to the well worn phrase about " our nearest and dearest." I am quite sure my nearest and dearest would repudiate with disgust any suggestion that they should sanction dreadful suffering being inflicted on helpless animals on the chance—for it is only a chance being admittedly an experiment—of their being saved some pain or even kept alive. Anyone who would say by all means inflict dreadful misery and suffering on a dog who has been lost and taken to a laboratory if thereby I can be benefited " would never be among my own " nearest and dearest." And as one who suffered shocking agony in a nursing home, I know no one about me would have insulted me by suggesting that I should sanction the torturing of a dog on the chance of thereby finding some relief for myself.
Lastly, of course I know nothing about medicine or surgery, though I have in my life not seldom benefited by the kindly ministrations of doctors and surgeons and to one great surgeon owe the life of my son desperately wounded in France, but I do know that the cancer given to all the hundreds of thousands of animals in all the organs of their bodies has produced nothing but vast interminable reports, which nobody reads, while the death rate from the disease has never ceased to increase every year. Cancer is the classic instance of a vast implacable welter of suffering being inflicted on animals for over twenty years with no benefit of any kind to mankind. This is a specific case. Sir Humphry Rolleston only declaims
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