(2)

I answer the rejoinders to my plea for the exemption of dogs from vivisection in no spirit of hostility to science, with all respect for investigators who are inspired by the desire to lessen the sum of suffering in the world, and not at all assuming that those who support the vivisection of dogs must needs be without fondness for their companionship.

I suggest that there is a distinction between being “vivisected” (and in that word I include inoculations) to save your own life or lessen your own suffering and being vivisected by your neighbours to save their lives or lessen their sufferings. The distinction indeed might almost be called profound. And if my contention that the dog has earned for himself a consideration from man, I do not say equal, but analogous, to that which man has for his own species, be admitted, it would follow that if we approve of cutting up and inoculating the dog, not for his individual benefit, but for our benefit and for that of his fellow-dogs, we must also approve of cutting up and inoculating our children and ourselves, not for our individual benefit, but for the benefit of the race, having regard to the immeasurably more direct results which science would secure from vivisections and inoculations on the human body. It is possible, indeed, that some vivisectors are prepared, in the interests of the scientific treatment of disease, to say: “I am so entirely, so definitely, convinced of the benefits to the human race of these experiments that I am ready to give not only my dog but my child, my wife, myself if necessary, for the good of mankind.” But I personally—and I venture to think there may be others of the same opinion—am not prepared to go so far. And I plead simply that if we are not ready to make martyrs of our children and heroes of ourselves, the time has come when we are no longer entitled to make martyrs of dogs. The issue raised, in fact, is whether or no the dog has reached a position where it becomes unethical to treat him as if he had not reached that position.

There are innumerable people in all ranks of our civilized world who would echo the words I heard last night: “If I were condemned to spend twenty-four hours alone with a single creature, I would choose to spend them with my dog.” Granting that most people would make two or three human exceptions, the saying expresses a true feeling. There is a quiet comfort in the companionship of a dog, with its ever-ready touching humility, which human companionship, save of the nearest, does not bring; and I assert that this boon, to mankind—of dog’s companionship—does raise the dog on to the peculiar plane of ethical consideration which we apply to ourselves. There is no need to adduce stories of how “Dash” or “Don” saved the gardener’s baby from setting herself on fire, or swam to the rescue of little Thomas who was drowning; we have only to watch dogs in house or street. I noted three yesterday afternoon, the only three in the street at the moment. The first, a fox-terrier, was trotting along quite by himself with an air of mastery of London that could not have been excelled by the best “man of the world” amongst us. No other sort of animal could have even begun to walk the streets of man with that quiet busy confidence. The second, a spaniel, was looking up at his mistress—it is not often that children and their mothers have the confidence in each other that those two certainly had. The third, a retriever, was towing an infirm old gentleman.

Yes, the position of the dog is unique. We have made him intelligent; and it is sinister ethics to choose him for vivisections or inoculations because of the very intelligence we have implanted. We have taught him faith and love, and I feel are ourselves bound by what we have taught him. Into other animals we have not instilled these qualities, we are therefore not bound to the same special faith with them that we owe to the dog.

My plea being simply that men cannot make friends of dogs and then treat them as if that relationship did not exist, I am not concerned to discuss the disputed question of whether or not special benefit does arise from experiments on dogs; but, in regard to suffering in such experiments, take the Home Office Returns for 1911: “Dogs and cats experimented upon without anæsthetics, 452. Dogs and cats allowed to recover after serious operations, 393”; and the words of the Report of the Royal Commission on Vivisection: “It is clear that even if the initial procedure may be regarded as trivial, the subsequent results of this procedure must in some cases, at any rate, be productive of great pain and much suffering.”

After all, we have not only bodies but spirits, and when our minds have once become alive to ethical doubt on a question such as this (there are 870,000 signatures to a petition for the total exemption of dogs from vivisection), when we are no longer sure that we have the right so to treat our dog comrades, there has fallen a shadow on the human conscience that will surely grow, until, by adjustment of our actions to our ethical sense, it has been remedied.