Frances Power Cobbe

“ The influences of civilization, of religion, of culture—in short, of all kinds, mental and moral—have softened, like the rain of heaven, the crust of our dry, hard world, and there is every reason to hope that, unless arrested or perverted, they will trickle downwards and permeate the whole soil of human society, till the "desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." ”

“ To disregard all the beautiful and noble moral qualities which such animals exhibit, and coldly contemplate them as if their quivering frames were mere machines of bone and tissue which it might be interesting and profitable to explore with forceps and scalpel, is to display heinous indifference to Love and Fidelity themselves, and surely to renounce the claim to be the object of such sentiments to brute or man. Our human race has for thousands of years trained these creatures to serve and trust us, till their natures are all bent towards us in love and confidence. ”

“ Turn we, on the other hand, to those boasted motives of lofty and far-sighted philanthropy which are alleged to spur the Vivisector to his ugly work in his laboratory, where no fern-brakes or leathery bills, no fresh breezes or lancing streams, such as throw enchantment round the pursuits of the sportsman, are present to cast any glamour over the process of torture: and where no chance of escape on the part of the brute, or risk to his own person, may stir his pulse with the manly struggle for victory. ”

“ Will any one contend that it is not the vilest, the most odious treachery to betray and mock such faith of the dumb creature, and torture him to death for our purposes, while he—poor brute, whom we despise!—would die freely to save us from fire or the waves, or perchance expire of grief upon our graves? ”

“ As the main work of civilization has been the vindication of the rights of the weak, it is not too much, I think, to insist that the practice of Vivisection, in which this tyranny of strength culminates is a retrograde step in the progress of our race, a backwater in the onward flowing stream of justice and mercy, no less anomalous than it is deplorable and portentous. ”

“ To find a number of men of science—disciples, it is believed, almost without exception, of the doctrine of Evolution—themselves pursuing, and teaching their pupils to pursue, trains of physiological investigations involving unutterable suffering to these same "Poor Relations" of our human family, is an appalling phenomenon. That the disciples of Darwin should themselves be the teachers and leaders in a new development of most exquisite cruelty to the brutes whom they believe to share our blood, our intelligence, and our affections, is indeed a portent of strange and threatening augury. ”

“ What man teach the noble quality of mercy, of sensitiveness to every form of suffering, so powerfully as the knowledge of what suffering really is? Can the man who has once realized by minute study what the nerves are, what the brain is, and what waves of agony the one can convey to the other, go forth and wantonly inflict pain on any sentient being? A little while ago we should have confidently replied, 'He cannot do it.' In the light of modern revelations we must sorrowfully confess he can." Again, in a still more marked way the acts of the vivisectors are anomalous and out of character. ”

“ Our real problem is, whether the highest end to which it may conduce, and which they may possibly contemplate,—viz, either the direct benefit of mankind by special discovery, or the indirect benefit by the general advancement of science—morally justifies the means whereby it is to be obtained? Does the Good of Man justify the torture of brutes? ”

“ When we think of what earth might become were the tiger passions within our race to be bred out at last, and the divine faculty of love and sympathy to attain its obviously intended development, it would seem as if efforts for the improvement of our physical or sanitary conditions, or for the advance of arts, science or laws, were scarcely worth making, in comparison of any step which should bring us nearer to such an age of joy. ”

“ So deeply rooted, indeed, is this faith in man in the case of the dog, that those who have witnessed the scenes in the laboratories of physiologists testify that the brutes can scarcely be made to understand that it is intended to hurt and kill them, but still try, after hours of agony, to lick the hands of their tormentor, and plead with him for mercy with their beseeching eyes, when their limbs are all fastened down and immovable on the operating table. ”

“ And is it our proper Teachers, those who are fit to guide and train young minds, and direct the tendencies of future generations, who are striving to move us to condone and approve such deeds by cant about the "Glory of Science," and by appeals to our miserable, cowardly fears of disease, and our selfish willingness to save "the smallest pain of a man at the cost of the torture of a hecatomb of brutes?" ”

“ Not merely our purely corporeal frames, but Thought, Memory, Love, Hate, Hope, Fear, and even some shadowy analogues of Conscience and Religion have been traced by the great thinker and truly tender-hearted man at the head of this school, throughout the lower realms of life upon this planet; and, in the eyes of most cultivated and thoughtful persons in these days, the claims of a dog, an elephant, a seal or a chimpanzee, to consideration and compassion, are at least as high as were those of a Negro a century ago in the eyes of a Jamaica planter. ”

“ One offence does not exculpate another, even if both be morally on the same level. But (as we have just seen) all other cruelties have some excuse in the ignorance or stupidity of those who inflict them, while those of the physiologist alone bear the treble stigma of being dune in the full light of knowledge, by singularly able men, and with the calmest forethought and deliberation. ”

“ My reply is that the parallel between Vivisection and Field Sports is about as just and accurate as if a tyrant, accused of racking his prisoners in his secret dungeons, were to turn round and open a discussion on the Lawfulness of War. That creatures who chase, and are chased all their days in fields and waters, should have an arch-enemy and pursuer in man, may be differently estimated as ill or well. ”

“ A new passion which scarcely had existence twenty years ago, is sprouting above ground and showing its bud in Vivisection.
⁠Of course the motive of the sportsman, being usually merely spurt, contrasts much to his disadvantage with that which the vivisector requires us to believe in his actuating principle. The latter tells us that it is for the exalted purpose of alleviating the sufferings of mankind, which touch his tender heart to the quick, that he puts himself and his brute victims to the pain of his experiments ”

“ The whole notion of Vivisection, as a legitimate exercise and mode of satisfying human desire of knowledge, seems to rest on a radically false conception of the proper ends of human life, and a no less erroneous idea of our relationship to those bumbler tribes of creatures who are our fellow-lodgers in this planet house of the Almighty. ”

“ For a lower class we must, I fear, take the word of a man who worked for four months among them, in a laboratory where from one to three dogs were sacrificed daily: "The idea of the good of humanity was simply out of the question, and would have been laughed at; the great aim being to keep up with or go ahead of our contemporaries in science, even at the price of an incalculable amount of needless torture to animals. [7]
⁠But the motives which actually influence living vivisectors do not, of course, determine the ethical lawfulness of the practice of vivisection. ”

“ And while every other kind of cruelty is falling into disrepute, if not into disuse, this alone is rising almost into the rank of a profession, like a superior sort of butchery. As to the argument that it does not become people who eat animal flesh to demur to the torture of animals, it would have seemed as if no one with common sense could have employed it, had we not found it repeatedly brought forward by the pro-vivisectors as if it possessed withering force. The cattle we use for food exists on the condition that we shall take their lives when we need them ”

“ Much such a rapid development of peculiarly acrimonious moral disease appears to be taking place in that part of our social body which is just now the seat of highest vitality. Science is undoubtedly at this hour the ruling passion of the age. What the Chase, War, Art and Learning, have been in various past epochs, so is the pursuit of Physical Knowledge in our generation. ”

“ The common passion for science in general and for physiology in particular, and the prevalent materialistic belief that the secrets of Mind can best be explored in Matter, undoubtedly account in no small measure for the vehemence of the new pursuit of original physiological investigation. Then, for the instruction of students in agonizing experiments, other causes may readily be found. Young men at the age of ordinary medical students are, as I began by remarking, filled with curiosity and exceedingly empty of sympathy and pity. ”

“ If it be proper to torture a hundred affectionate dogs or intelligent chimpanzees to settle some curious problems about their brains, will they advocate doing the same to a score of Bosjesmen, to the idiots in our asylum, to criminals, to infants, to women? ”

“ In the first place, artists, sportamen, and bon-vivants, know comparatively little of the nature and extent of the suffering caused by lacerations of the living tissues, or the production of morbid conditions, while the physiologists understand the matter to a nicety, and have the most perfect acquaintance with every pain which they cause—nay, whose causation is often the immediate object of their ingenious exertions. ”

“ It verges truly on the gigantic and Promethean to talk of such devotion to the interests of humanity in the abstract; and when we behold a cultivated and gifted gentleman selecting freely for his life-work the daily mangling of dogs and cats, we are quite at a loss to qualify the grandeur of his voluntary martyrdom. ”

“ I am at a loss then to concieve on what principle, deserving the name of moral, we are to speak and act as if such evil counted absolutely for nothing, while the aches and pains of men are to be so highly esteemed, that the most wholesale sacrifices must not be spared, if a chance exist of alleviating them. When we remember who are the teachers who talk about the "hecatomb," and what is their view of the relationship of man to the lower animals, we discover (as above remarked) that the only intelligible principle on which they proceed is that very ancient one—le droit du plus fort. ”

“ What is done, thought, felt, by the mon of science is of almost incalculable weight in determining the proximate tendencies of thousands of lesser spirits—the direction to be taken by all those innumerable minds which have no motor force of their own, but follow the Zeit Geist whithersoever he goeth. ”

“ It is the boast of the school of science to which they belong that it has exploded the old theory that man was unique in creation, with a higher origin than the brutes, and a different destiny. They give us to understand that God has "made of one blood" at least all the Mammalia "upon earth." ”

“ Is it a question for a man who aspires to be a brave or worthy, not to speak of a chivalrous or noble person, whether he may, within the limits of actual offense, spend his days in putting harmless animals on the rack for the benefit of himself and his kind? ”

“ The same keenness of observation, or a memory of their own youthful insensibility, ought to teach all professors of physiology that they are indulging a maleficent tendency which already exists in their pupils’ disposition, when they invite mere lads of the Bob Sawyer type to watch their frightful experiments —the more frightful, so much, alas! ”

“ Whether this sort of thing be not strangely at variance with the tone of thought and practice which at present prevail in other departments of human activity; and whether such books, for example, as these Catechisms of the Art of Torture, do not even stand unique in the literature of the world? While our legislation tends to an almost excessive lenity towards criminals; while our Art and our Letters become yearly more refined and fastidious ”