“But all this ignores the motive of the action,” cry the vivisectors. “What is it in sport? Mere pleasure. In this matter we hold an impregnable position.” Let us see.

10. That, while the motive in sport is essentially selfish, in vivisection it is essentially unselfish.

It is my conviction that the non-scientific world is far too ready to attribute to the advocates of science all the virtues they are so ready to claim ; and when they put forward their favourite ad captandum argument that their labours are undergone for one pure motive—the good of humanity—society is far too ready to exclaim, with Mrs. Varden, “Here is a meek, righteous, thorough-going Christian, who, having dropped a pinch of salt on the tails of all the cardinal virtues, and, caught them every one, makes light of their possession, and pants for more morality !” In other words, society is far too ready to accept the picture of the pale, worn devotee of science giving his days and nights to irksome and thankless toil, spurred on by no other motive than a boundless philanthropy. As one who has himself devoted much time and labour to scientific investigations, I desire to offer the strongest possible protest against this falsely coloured picture. I believe that any branch of science, when taken up by one who has a natural turn for it, will soon become as fascinating as sport to the most ardent sportsman, or as any form of pleasure to the most refined sensualist. The claim that hard work, or the endurance of privation, proves the existence of an unselfish motive, is simply monstrous. Grant to me that the miser is proved unselfish when he stints himself of food and sleep to add one more piece of gold to his secret hoard, that the place-hunter is proved unselfish when he toils through long years to reach the goal of his ambition, and I will grant to you that the laborious pursuit of science is proof positive of an unselfish motive. Of course I do not assert, of even a single scientific student, that his real motive is merely that craving for more knowledge, whether useful or useless, which is as natural an appetite as the craving for novelty or any other form of excitement. I only say that the lower motive would account for the observed conduct quite as well as the higher.

Yet, after all, the whole argument, deduced from a comparison of vivisection with sport, rests on the following proposition, which I claim to class as a fallacy:—

11. That the toleration of one form of an evil necessitates the toleration of all others.

Grant this, and you simply paralyze all conceivable efforts at reformation. How can we talk of putting down cruelty to animals when drunkenness is rampant in the land? You would propose, then, to legislate in the interests of sobriety? Shame on you ! Look at the unseaworthy ships in which our gallant sailors are risking their lives ! What ! Organize a crusade against dishonest shipowners, while our streets swarm with a population growing up in heathen ignorance ! We can but reply, non omnia possumus omnes. And surely the man who sees his way to diminish in any degree even a single one of the myriad evils around him, may well lay to heart the saying of a wise man of old, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

The last parallel to which the advocates of vivisection may be expected to retreat, supposing all these positions to be found untenable, is the assertion—

12. That legislation would only increase the evil.

The plea, if I understand it aright, amounts to this,—that legislation would probably encourage many to go beyond the limit with which at present they are content, as soon as they found that a legal limit had been fixed beyond their own. Granting this to be the tendency of human nature, what is the remedy usually adopted in other cases? A stricter limit, or the abandonment of all limits? Suppose a case—that in a certain town it were proposed to close all taverns at midnight, and that the opponents of the measure urged, “At present some close at eleven—a most desirable hour: if you pass this law, all will keep open till midnight.” What would the answer be? “Then let us do nothing,” or “Then let us fix eleven, instead of twelve, as our limit”? Surely this does not need many words: the principle of doing evil that good may come is not likely to find many defenders, even in this modern disguise of forbearing to do good lest evil should come. We may safely take our stand on, the principle of doing the duty which we see before us: secondary consequences are at once out of our control and beyond our calculation.

Let me now collect into one paragraph the contradictions of some of these fallacies (which I have here rather attempted to formulate and classify than to refute, or even fully discuss), and so exhibit in one view the case of the opponents of vivisection. It is briefly this—

That while we do not deny the absolute right of man to end the lives of the lower animals by a painless death, we require good and sufficient cause to be shown for all infliction of pain.

That the prevention of suffering to a human being does not justify the infliction of a greater amount of suffering on an animal.

That the chief evil of the practice of vivisection consists in its effect on the moral character of the operator ; and that this effect is distinctly demoralising and brutalising.

That hard work and the endurance of privations are no proof of an unselfish motive.

That the toleration of one form of an evil is no excuse for tolerating another.

Lastly, that the risk of legislation increasing the evil is not enough to make all legislation undesirable.

We have now, I think, seen good reason to suspect that the principle of selfishness lies at the root of this accursed practice. That the same principle is probably the cause of the indifference with which its growth among us is regarded, is not perhaps so obvious. Yet I believe this indifference to based on a tacit assumption, which I propose to notice as the last of this long catalogue of fallacies—

13. That the practice of vivisection will never be extended so as to include human subjects.

That is, in other words, that while science arrogates to herself the right of torturing a her pleasure the whole sentient creation up to man himself, some inscrutable boundary-line is there drawn, over which she will never venture to pass. “Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.”

Not improbably, when that stately Levite of old was pacing with dainty step the road that led from Jerusalem to Jericho, “bemused with thinking of tithe-concerns,” and doing his best to look unconscious of the prostrate form on the other side of the way, if it could have been whispered in his ear, “Your turn comes next to fall among the thieves !” some sudden thrill of pity might have been aroused in him: he might even, at the risk of soiling those rich robes, have joined the Samaritan in his humane task of tending the wounded man. And surely the easy-going Levites of our own time would take an altogether new interest in this matter, could they only realise the possible advent of a day when anatomy shall claim, as legitimate subjects for experiment, first, our condemned criminals—next, perhaps, the inmates of our refuges for incurables—then the hopeless lunatic, the pauper hospital-patient, and generally “him that hath no helper,”—a day when successive generations of students, trained from their earliest years to the repression of all human sympathies, shall have developed a new and more hideous Frankenstein—a soulless being to whom science shall be all in all. Homo sum: quidvis humanum a me alienum puto.

And when that day shall come, 0 my brother-man, you who claim for yourself and for me so proud an ancestry—tracing our pedigree through the anthropomorphoid ape up to the primeval zoophyte—what potent spell have you in store to win exemption from the common doom? Will you represent to that grim spectre, as he gloats over you, scalpel in hand, the inalienable rights of man? He will tell you that this is merely a question of relative expediency,—that, with so feeble a physique as yours, you have only to be thankful that natural selection has spared you so long. Will you reproach him with the needless torture he proposes to inflict upon you? He will smilingly assure you that thehyperæsthesia, which he hopes to induce, is in itself a most interesting phenomenon, deserving much patient study. Will you then, gathering up all your strength for one last desperate appeal, plead with him as with a fellow-man, and with an agonized cry for “Mercy !” seek to rouse some dormant spark of pity in that icy breast? Ask it rather of the nether mill-stone.

LEWIS CARROLL.

Fonte: Animal Rights History.org