4. That man is infinitely more important than the lower animals, so that the infliction of animal suffering, however great, is justifiable if it prevent human suffering, however small.
This fallacy can be assumed only when unexpressed. To put it into words is almost to refute it. Few, even in an age where selfishness has almost become a religion, dare openly avow a selfishness so hideous as this ! While there are thousands, I believe, who would be ready to assure the vivisectors that, so far as their personal interests are concerned, they are ready to forego any prospect they may have of a diminution of pain, if it can only be secured by the infliction of so much pain on innocent creatures.
But I have a more serious charge than that of selfishness to bring against the scientific men who make this assumption. They use it dishonestly, recognising it when it tells in their favour, and ignoring it when it tells against them. For does it not presuppose the axiom that human and animal suffering differ in kind? A strange assertion this, from the lips of people who tell us that man is twin-brother to the monkey ! Let them be at least consistent, and when they have proved that the lessening of human suffering is an end so great and glorious as to justify any means that will secure it, them give to the anthropomorphoid ape the benefit of the argument. Further than that I will not ask them to go, but will resign them in confidence to the guidance of an inexorable logic.
Had they only the candour and the courage to do it, I believe that they would choose the other horn of the dilemma, and would reply, “Yes, man is in the same category as the brute ; and just as we care not (you see it, so, we cannot deny it) how much pain we inflict on the one, so we care not, unless when deterred by legal penalties, how much we inflict on the other. The lust for scientific knowledge is our real guiding principle. The lessening of human suffering is a mere dummy set up to amuse sentimental dreamers.”
I come now to another class of fallacies—those involved in the comparison, so often made, between vivisection and field-sports. If the theory, that the two are essentially similar, involved no worse consequence than that sport should be condemned by all who condemn vivisection, I should be by no means anxious to refute it. Unfortunately the other consequence is just as logical, and just as likely, that vivisection should be approved of by all who approve of sport.
The comparison rests on the assumption that the main evil laid to the charge of vivisection is the pain inflicted on the animal. This assumption I propose to deal with, further on, as a fallacy: at present I will admit it for the sake of argument, hoping to show that, even on this hypothesis, the vivisectors have a very poor case. In making this comparison their first claim is—
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 13— “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 wiling 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 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 dogmatize, but I am tolerably sure that all sportsmen will agree with me that this is untrue of shooting, in which, whenever the creature 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 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.
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