Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/1213

Rh 5. That it is fair to compare aggregates of pain.

"The aggregate amount of wrong"—I quote from an article in the Pall Mall Gazette for February 13th—"which is perpetrated against animals by sportsmen in a single year probably exceeds that which some of them endure from vivisectors in half a century." The best refutation of this fallacy would seem to be to trace it to its logical conclusion—that a very large number of trivial wrongs are equal to one great one. For instance, that a man, who by selling adulterated bread inflicts a minute injury on the health of some thousands of persons, commits a crime equal to one murder. Once grasp this reductio ad absurdum, and you will be ready to allow that the only fair comparison is between individual and individual.

Supposing the vivisectors are forced to abandon this position, they may then fall back on the next parallel—

6. That the pain inflicted on an individual animal in vivisection is not greater than in sport.

I am no sportsman, and so have no right to dogmatise, but I am tolerably sure that all sportsmen will agree with me that this is untrue of shooting, in which, whenever the animal is killed at once, it is probably as painless a form of death as could be devised; while the sufferings of one that escapes wounded ought to be laid to the charge of unskilful sport, not of sport in the abstract. Probably much of the same might be said of fishing: for other forms of sport, and especially for hunting, I have no defence to offer, believing that they involve very great cruelty.

Even if the last two fallacies were granted to advocates of vivisection, their use in the argument must depend on the following proposition being true:—