Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/778

760 pest of the grape-vine, but all would consider it a pious duty to destroy that baleful insect; and it is right to use every effort to hunt out the tigers and serpents of India. All the world is of one mind on these points.

Besides these maleficent animals there are useful ones, which serve us food, or on which we call for daily help. It would be absurd to prevent horses from drawing carriages, or oxen from being yoked to plows. The suppression of animal food, which is almost necessary to our existence, is not a subject for serious consideration. But if man has the right to slay an animal to live upon its flesh, it does not follow that he has the right to make it suffer before killing it. Legitimate as it may seem to kill a sheep to make food of it, it would be cruel to take the animal and expose him to torture for the vain pleasure of watching his contortions and observing his pain. It is, however, this very pain and just such contortions that physicists who make vivisections study with curiosity; and this leads us to the consideration of the question. Has man the right to make living beings suffer for purposes of utility or information?

We remark, first, that if vivisection is to be proscribed, it will be impossible to draw the line at any animal. If morality prohibits us from experimenting on the dog, we must, by the same rule, respect the cat, the rabbit, the fowl, the turtle, and the frog. If we prohibit the use of the frog, how can we permit the use of the snail, the oyster, and the medusa? In a little while we come to those beings the animal nature of which is in dispute. If we are forbiden to send an electric current through the body of a medusa, I do not see what right we have to electrify bacteria. Finally, it might be made to appear a culpable act to put an axe into an oak, or to electrify a sensitive-plant, since in either case we disorganize a living being, and possibly produce suffering. Thus easily is the reasoning of the anti-vivisectionists reduced to absurdity.

The anti-vivisectionists, however, direct their opposition against the infliction of pain; and that, they say, is acute in proportion as the animal is intelligent. The animals nearest in order to man are the ones which it is most important to spare from suffering, and there are gradations in the wrong. It is very wrong to make a dog suffer, but the matter is less a crime when it comes to a rabbit. A frog and a crawfish are entitled to still less compassion, and, in the case of the medusæ, bacteria, and plants, whose sensibility is less developed, the act is only half reprehensible. This argument yields the point that we have a right to experiment upon animals which do not feel suffering, or only feel it a little. Let us leave out the question of the inferior animals, and go straight to the strongest argument that can be brought forward, that which turns upon the martyrdom of the dog. Let us take the question, as they say, by the horns, and see if the physiologists have the right to make a dog suffer.