The Pros and Cons of Vivisection Part 4

I was able to demonstrate that, if the temperature of the air is very high, as in the hottest days of summer, dogs that are muzzled die rapidly of hyperpyrexia (_i.e._ high fever), for they are no longer able to cool themselves by panting. It is true that this experiment cost the lives of a few dogs, but has it not saved many others by pointing out that dogs should not be muzzled under certain conditions? It goes without saying I am not speaking of the theoretical consequences of this experiment.

Artificial respiration, which can restore to life the apparently drowned, is one, of the conquests of experimental physiology; for we have been able to determine the best method and the essential conditions (for artificial breathing) by experiments of a very precise nature. Is it nothing to know how to restore to life the apparently drowned?

3. _The Process of Digestion_ has also been learned solely by experiment.

In the history of science there are two or three cases of individuals in whom a wound or an operation has produced a gastric fistula, that is to say an abdominal opening through which the stomach can be reached and food introduced. Had we remained satisfied with these accidental observations, we should have obtained but mediocre results. Physiologists therefore have made experimental gastric fistulae. Dogs thus operated on, after an illness of a few days, recover thoroughly. Some physiologists have kept dogs for several years in this condition: gay, caressing, docile, they did not appear to complain of their lot. They were better nourished, more petted and loved than the many starving dogs which roam about the country. They were not a whit more unhappy than was Alexis St Martin (observed in 1831 by Dr Beaumont) and Marcellin (whom I observed in 1878, at the beginning of my career). Quite recently an eminent Russian physiologist, Pawloff, has, by making gastric fistulae in animals, been able to discover a number of important facts, absolutely necessary to be known for the treatment of diseases of the stomach, and even for the establishment of a normal alimentation.

The problem of alimentation is, indeed, one of the most essential, perhaps the most essential, in the history of humanity. I suppose that anti-vivisectionists are aware of the fact that, even in Europe, large populations exist who are insufficiently nourished. Under these conditions, is it not desirable to know exactly the quant.i.ties of carbon, nitrogen, salt, lime, and phosphorus which are necessary for animals, and consequently for man? Should not anti-vivisectionists, interested in vegetarianism, before venturing to inst.i.tute a vegetable diet for man, try it first of all upon carnivorous animals, so as to know how a mixed alimentation can be modified by a vegetable alimentation, and to what extent those modifications are compatible with health?

4. _The Nervous System_ is not so well known, so far as its functions are concerned, as the circulatory system or the digestive system. Nevertheless, positive discoveries are extremely numerous: the action of the nerves on the glands and on the muscles; the part played by the different portions of the brain; nervous degenerations; the laws governing reflex actions--all this const.i.tutes a formidable body of well-established facts. I do not pretend that everything is known. Alas! No! There are still innumerable truths to be discovered, and serious errors are doubtless most learnedly taught, with many contradictions, much uncertainty, much confusion--all of which simply proves that physiology is not a science whose last chapter has yet been written, that the last word of this science has not yet been p.r.o.nounced. Nevertheless, blind indeed would the man be who would venture to conclude that physiology was not a science; or to a.s.sert that physiology is a science of little importance; that the role of the physiologist, from the point of view of the alleviation of human miseries, is null; and that knowledge of physiological facts is useless. Will it be claimed that the doctor has no need of a knowledge of physiology? I will reply by a comparison I am accustomed to make before my medical students when I wish to make them understand the necessity of a sound physiological education.

Let us suppose that a watchmaker claimed to be able to cure disordered watches, but at the same time declared himself unable to tell by what springs and by what mysterious mechanism a healthy watch should mark the hour; that watchmaker would inspire me with a very small amount of confidence, and I would not go to him; for, until the contrary is proved to me, I believe that an indispensable condition for repairing a watch when out of order is to know how a watch should work when in good repair.

Physiology exists only because there have been physiologists. By that I do not mean to say that all the truths of physiology are due exclusively to vivisection. I only claim that physiology without vivisection would be strangely clumsy, limited to a few empirical facts, and that, if vivisection be proscribed, we must resolutely give up cla.s.sing physiology among the sciences. We may study the stars and the earth, electricity and heat, geography and history, and are we to be forbidden to study the functions of living matter? Such a proposal is obviously absurd, for of all the sciences accessible to man, physiology is that which is nearest to him.

It is only the ignorant who dare a.s.sert that experimentation on animals cannot be applied to man. There are of course differences which physiologists train themselves to perceive; for example, certain poisons are almost innocuous to some animals, and are very fatal to man. The alkaloid of belladonna, atropine, is a thousand times more toxic for a man than for a goat. It is difficult to kill a goat with morphia, whilst a drop of laudanum kills a new-born babe. Carbonic oxide is absolutely harmless for the invertebrata which have no blood. Crayfish and snails live with impunity in pure oxide of carbon. And I could cite a number of other facts which are described in detail in every treatise of physiology or pharmacology.

But what does it matter to us if we know it?--and we can nearly always know it. There are functional differences between men and animals; and physiologists know these perfectly well by their training; but there are, above all things, much more striking resemblances. It would be, for instance, ridiculous to suppose that oxygen did not dissolve in our blood in about the same way in which it dissolves in the blood of a cat or a rabbit; that the pneumogastric nerve, which stops the heart of the cat and the rabbit, will not stop the heart of man; that the arterial pressure, which is 16 c.m. of mercury in the horse, the dog, and the cat, is 1 c.m.

or 1.60 c.m. in man; that the transformation of alb.u.minous matters into urea takes place differently in the dog and in man. On the contrary, everything goes to prove the general laws are the same, and that the physiology of man, whilst not rigorously identical in every respect with the physiology of the animal, is nevertheless sufficiently a.n.a.logous to enable a _general physiology_ to comprise in its vast laws the functions of every living being, man, mammal, vertebrata, invertebrata, and even every living cell.

CHAPTER VI

MORALITY AND VIVISECTION

If we took the a.s.sertions of anti-vivisectionists literally, we should arrive at the strange conclusion, that the victims of vivisection are immensely numerous, and that vivisection is one of the calamities of the century. As a matter of fact, the number of victims due to physiology is very low. Let us try to count them up.

There are only about twenty laboratories in France where experiments on animals are made. Let us allow that there are twenty in England, twenty in Italy, forty in Germany, and fifty in other countries, making a total of 150 laboratories. If we suppose that a dog, a cat, and a rabbit are sacrificed every day in each of these laboratories, we should certainly exaggerate.

Let us suppose, nevertheless, that it is so; and let us even admit five victims a day, with 300 working days in the year, which is also an evident exaggeration: this will make about 200,000 victims a year. This number, which seems very considerable, is in reality very small, if we put it against the enormous number of living beings. Probably about two thousand millions of mammals die every year, so that the proportion of animals that suffer a little (and very little) through the act of man in his search for knowledge is one in 10,000, in other words, a negligible quant.i.ty.

In the immense earthly universe are thousands and thousands of pains, of fierce, incessant struggles between living animals. Every rock in the ocean, every tree in the forest, shelters ferocious combats, and is the constant scene of painful death-agonies. Darwin has admirably shown that life is a struggle for life, that the weak are crushed by the strong, and that the voice of living nature is a cry of distress rather than a hymn of joy. Therefore, in this universal concert of animal pain and of human pain, the slight pain of animals experimented upon is a little thing, and from an absolute point of view we have the right to disregard it.

Think well over it all for a moment. By giving an experimental disease to a rabbit, for example, I scarcely change its lot. If I had left it to itself, in one, two, or perhaps three years it would have been attacked by another disease, probably more cruel than the tuberculosis with which I infected it. The lot of dogs which die of old age is scarcely enviable. How many poor old dogs have I seen, impotent from rheumatism, completely blind, no longer able to crawl about, covered with disgusting ulcers, seeming to beg for the finis.h.i.+ng stroke which would put an end to their misery! And old, worn-out horses! What a spectacle! This residuum of existence of old animals is truly pitiable, and, taking everything into consideration, it is not an enormous dose of happiness we have left them in not sacrificing them when they were young.

But I shall not dwell upon this argument, for it might also be applied to human beings. The Greeks said: "Happy are they who die young, for they are beloved of the G.o.ds." Perhaps some day human ethics will allow us to spare our dear ones the cruel and useless sufferings of old age! I know not. But what I do know is that it is not inhuman to sacrifice an old horse or an old dog in order to save it from going through all the tortures which old age and disease hold in reserve for him.

In any case, the sufferings produced by physiologists who inoculate diseases into animals weigh very little in comparison with natural suffering, not only because the suffering of animals is always more or less immersed in the nihilism of semi-consciousness, but also because these experimental sufferings are less than natural sufferings, and extend over a very small number of victims.

_But the question does not lie there._ The point is not whether the suffering of animals be a large or small quant.i.ty in nature from an absolute standpoint; the question is a higher one: we must ask ourselves if the fact of inflicting pain is compatible with human morality.

Tolstoi says somewhere that the sciences are nothing, that art is nothing, that the true science is that of good and evil, of justice and injustice.

Everything sinks into insignificance in presence of this great duty, or rather life has no other object. We should be entirely engrossed in doing good; justice should be our sole preoccupation.

If, then, from an absolute point of view the suffering of frogs and rabbits does not count, it counts a lot from the point of view of human morality.

If a bad child should martyrise a toad, it is not the toad which would interest me: poor creature of diffused consciousness, ignorant even of its own pain, such a tiny pain, too, in comparison with the immense pains which the beings of this great universe are suffering at this moment! No; the toad would scarcely exist for me. The child would interest me greatly; and all my pity would be turned upon that cruel child. My efforts would tend much less towards preventing the toad from suffering than towards preventing that human being from becoming a barbarian.

If the anti-vivisectionists were true moralists and not fanatics they would say: "To provoke suffering to produce disease, to inflict tortures, is an execrable moral lesson. Whilst the first duty of man is to be good, you instruct young men to be wicked. The doctor, who ought to be compa.s.sionate for human suffering, should not serve his apprentices.h.i.+p in that n.o.ble profession by showing himself devoid of pity for the suffering of innocent victims. A civilisation which allows itself to inflict death and torture on living beings can be only a barbarous civilisation."

I recognise the force of that argument. And whilst not a single one of the preceding a.s.sertions of the anti-vivisectionists had succeeded in moving me, I confess that this objection of human morality is a most powerful one.

I am nevertheless going to try to show that it is not admissible.

And first of all, because there is in this world much suffering, human suffering, which it is more important to allay than that of the victims of vivisection. If our sole care were that of morality, what battles would we not have to fight! There are thousands of people in India who die of hunger; and throughout Asia whole populations perish of disease which a little hygiene could prevent. The hunger-evil is rife in Russia; most of the peasants in Sicily also never know what it is to satisfy their hunger.

The misery of children is lamentable everywhere: in our large cities, Paris, Berlin, London, it is not exceptional, alas! to come across people dying of hunger. The terribly high rate of mortality among children less than a year old is due to hunger and to hunger alone. In Europe two million children, under one year of age, die every year solely because their parents are plunged in misery, because the mother, instead of nursing her child, is forced to work, to earn her living at manual labour, which dries up her milk. _These two million children who die of hunger are the disgrace of our civilisation._ And yet we continue to live in luxury, we look on calmly and indifferently at the agony of our human brothers, an agony which we could easily alleviate. For my part, willingly shall I allow myself to be melted with pity at the sight of tuberculous rabbits when I see those persons who champion these same rabbits, develop within themselves some pity for human suffering, a pity grown so deep, so powerful, that they devote their entire fortune towards rescuing their brethren from death through hunger.

There is not only famine and want. There are many other social scourges; and these scourges are much more serious than vivisection can ever become.

There is alcoholism, prost.i.tution, war. And I have no need to say that alcoholism is an evil, that prost.i.tution is an evil, that war is an evil.

When human morality has been developed to such a pitch that man will no longer be able to look on these great social miseries without horror, it will be time enough perhaps to ask if it be permissible to seek for truth at the expense of a little animal suffering. But until then I have the right to stigmatise as hypocrisy all that immense pity which certain people profess for dogs, side by side with their immense heedlessness, which they do not fear to display, towards the fate of so many unfortunate human beings.

If anti-vivisectionists were animated by a great desire for morality, they would endeavour to reform our social condition, which is abominable and full of horrors; they would strive to impart into youth other notions than that of smug satisfaction with the present social conditions. As long as we have not faced the profound evils which gnaw at the root of our social system, as long as we take a delight in the egotistical satisfaction of our capitalist and martial society, it is not permissible, if we would not be accused of scandalous hypocrisy, to affect pretensions to morality.

Even from the very exclusive and rather paltry point of view of animals'

rights, are there not among anti-vivisectionists those of social position who make no scruple in amusing themselves by fis.h.i.+ng and hunting? In this case they kill, they martyrise, not to conquer new truths, but for their amus.e.m.e.nt and recreation.

The hunter who fires at a hare sends after the wounded animal a savage dog, trained to fierceness for this pursuit, and he looks on at the chase with delight. The angler who has hooked a fish feels a pleasurable emotion when he holds in the palm of his hand the struggling, writhing being. Elegant sportsmen aim at pigeons to give proofs of their dexterity. A large number of victims do not die on the spot, but, with wounded wing, or chest pierced with lead, creep away to die in agony in the neighbouring woods.

Quite a large gathering of fas.h.i.+onable young women and distinguished young men follow on horseback the tortures of a wretched stag pursued by a furious pack of hounds. And, finally, the entire population of a large city (Seville or Madrid, San Sebastian or Valencia), men and women, old and young, go crazy with delight at the hideous spectacle of a n.o.ble bull disembowelling horses, tormented by the picadors, and finally succ.u.mbing, exhausted, done to death by his cowardly enemies. There are sights for you!

there are amus.e.m.e.nts for you if you like, which reflect scant honour on human ethics; and well do I understand generous-hearted men and women forming societies to combat war, alcoholism, prost.i.tution, distributing their wealth among the starving populations, also turning their energies against hunting, angling, pigeon-shooting, and bullfights. It is a n.o.ble programme of life which they have drawn up for themselves, and such people merit our highest admiration.

Societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals are admirable and irreproachable when they defend animals against human savagery: for example, when they prevent carters from las.h.i.+ng into ribbons the skin of the miserable horses under their charge; or when they put down the practice of harnessing a horse to a cart too heavily loaded; or when they interdict c.o.c.k-fighting and bull-baiting. I will even point out to these same societies, so enamoured of animals' rights, a new kind of protection of quite a special nature.

There exist a number of species of animals which, hunted and hemmed in by man, are on the point of extinction. How many, alas! have for ever disappeared; and no human power will ever be able to bring back to life an animal species once extinct.

It is a great pity; for these charming forms, the joy of the eyes, provided with curious and delicate instincts, have been annihilated for ever. I will give some examples to show to what an extent it is necessary for man to protect the animal against man himself. Man has the taste for devastation; and when he is excited, either by the fury of the hunt or the bait of gain, he does not hesitate to make many victims without asking himself if these furious ravages will not find their consummation in the destruction of an entire race of animals.

Already in the Polar regions, some fine species of animals have disappeared. The great auk (extinct since 1844) exists no longer. One species of walrus has also disappeared.

The seal is on the road to extinction; fishermen have indulged in such orgies of destruction that international measures have had to be taken to prevent the total destruction of the species. And indeed be it not forgotten that if the Governments of England and of the United States have made regulations restricting the ma.s.sacre of seals, it is not by any means in order to stem the tide of destruction of an animal species interesting in itself, but solely because such destruction would put an end to a source of very considerable commercial profit.

A hundred years ago, whales were so abundant that 30,000 fishermen earned their living by whale-hunting. Now, our means of warfare against the cetacea have become so effective that whales can no longer defend themselves, and their number is decreasing every day to such an extent that we can almost foretell the moment when the whale will have ceased to exist.

In America, vast regions were overrun by immense herds of bisons. They have been ma.s.sacred with such mad and blind ardour that if the Government had not finally taken some tardy and insufficient measures of precaution, the bison would be extinct too.

Aurochs, elks, chamois, bears have almost disappeared, whereas a century ago they were widely diffused in Europe. In proportion as man takes possession of the earth to cultivate it, he kills off every wild species and replaces them by domestic species where race loses its value. If this goes on, a time will come, unfortunately, when all-powerful man, having given himself up to the thoughtless destruction of everything not of immediate use to him, will have wiped off the face of the earth all save domestic animals. There will be hens, ducks, geese, turkeys, and guinea-fowls, sheep, oxen, donkeys, horses, cows. Perhaps for the pleasure of hunting, a few deer and a few hares will be preserved; but all wild species which cannot be reproduced in captivity will have disappeared, will no longer be there to delight our gaze. In France, the small birds are destroyed in rank fury, and every measure taken to protect them is inefficacious, thanks to the rage for destruction among the inhabitants.

Asia and Africa once upon a time--when almost unknown and unexplored by Europeans--sheltered many a n.o.ble animal species to-day well-nigh extinct, and which, if strict measures of precaution be not speedily taken, will soon have disappeared for ever. The large monkeys, the ostrich, the giraffe, and especially the elephant, shun the haunts of man, for man is their ruthless enemy. It looks as though a hundred years hence, not one will be left.

It is not without sadness we think of that future civilisation, a brilliant one perhaps from several points of view, but monotonous and tame, as it will no longer possess this marvellous variety of different animal species which is as one of the smiles of nature. A pitiable uniformity will replace the varied forms which natural selection has taken thousands of years to bring forth; and then perhaps some tardy poet, in contemplation before the vast sheepfolds and poultry farms, where man will cultivate the species of use to him, will regret those far-off days when birds of all kinds sang in the forests, blending their gambols with those of the graceful animals which human civilisation will have annihilated.

There, I fancy, is a fertile subject for meditation, and interesting initiative for all those who have at heart the rights of animals, and, if I may express myself thus, the future of animality.

But the sight of a vivisection, the preparation of a laboratory experiment cannot be compared with the stupid and mischievous pleasures of angling and hunting. It is not a question of amusing oneself, of killing time, of diversion, of finding in the sight of blood or pain a recreation for boredom. It is quite another motive which animates the _savant_. He has ever before his mind the thought that his efforts are going to bring a little alleviation to the great sum of human suffering. If he inoculates a rabbit with tuberculosis, he cannot help thinking of all the wretched consumptives who are at that moment in the throes of death. He knows well that each time he discovers even only a particle of truth, that little bit of new truth is going to bring in its train some consequence which will bear fruit in the healing of suffering mankind.

It is with no light-heartedness that the physiologist causes the blood to flow, inoculates disease, injects poisons. I know the thought which animates my friends and my colleagues when they make their experiments: it is never without the most profound pity that we dare to take a healthy, gay, confiding animal, and give him chloroform, or inject a poison into him. This respect for pain, far from decreasing with age, on the contrary goes on increasing. Just as the doctor as he grows older becomes more and more sensitive to the sight of human suffering, so the physiologist who has performed many experiments understands more and more thoroughly the seriousness of pain. He feels all the weight of it: he has a greater responsibility. His morality has become higher and higher, his sensibility has increased. Often he repeats to himself this line of Virgil's:--

"_Non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco._"

(Knowing misfortune, I teach the succour of the wretched.)