One hundred years ago
In The Times of Monday Mr J.G. Romanes characterises the agitation against Vivisection as diverted against`a harmless will-o'-the-wisp', and declares that it has diverted human feeling from its true work, the work of insisting on more humane modes of trapping rabbits and other creatures which multiply too fast for the interest of man. Anything less like a harmless will-o'-the-wisp than the doctrine of the physiologists, that we may legitimately inflict any amount of physical anguish on scores of the highest and most trusting creatures, in order, for instance, to ascertain the effect of particular drugs on the secretion of bile, we find it impossible to conceive. And yet, this is what the vivisectors hold; and it is the principle on which, unfortunately, the law still enables them, even in Great Britain, frequently to act. No economy of needless animal pain will neutralise the mischief of a teaching which declares all pain to be needful, which is inflicted on animals for the sake of diminishing the suffering that we ourselves are otherwise required to bear.
Spectator, 30 April 1881
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