It shows, also, that a great proportion of these inoculations are made
in the direct practical service of the public health and the public
purse: to standardise drugs, to ensure the purity of food and of
rivers, to protect flocks and herds, and to decide quarantine.
Government Departments, County Councils, Municipal Corporations, and a
Royal Commission made more than one-third of the total number of
inoculations; and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund made more than
one-third, mostly on mice; and a sixth was made over the testing and
standardising of sera and of drugs.
The operations performed under the License + Certificate B, or B + EE,
or B + F, were 3 per cent. of the whole number of experiments. The
majority of the animals were neither cats nor dogs. They can hardly
be compared to the same number of the larger animals mutilated by
breeders and farmers: for these mutilations may be inflicted, and are
inflicted, without an anæsthetic. They can hardly be compared to the
same number of pheasants or rabbits wounded, but not killed, in sport;
for the animals wounded in sport get no subsequent care, and, if they
are in pain, nobody need put them out of it. They may fairly be
compared to the same number of pet animals that have undergone
surgical operations, under anæsthesia, at the hands of a skilled
veterinary surgeon; only with this difference, that many of them lose
health, or suffer disablement or disease, and so die or are killed;
but, if the wound suppurates, the animal must be killed, and, after
the wound has healed, the animals are not necessarily, or even
generally, in pain. And there must be no _further_ experiment without
anæsthesia. _No observations or stimulations of a character to cause
pain are allowed to be made without the animals being anæsthetised._
It is evident that good care is taken to ensure an irreducible minimum
of pain.
PART IV
THE CASE AGAINST ANTI-VIVISECTION
THE CASE AGAINST ANTI-VIVISECTION
[The following pages are taken, with a few changes and
omissions, from a pamphlet which I published in 1904. I am glad
to say that the tone of the Anti-Vivisection Societies is not
quite so bad as it was a few years ago; but I think that what I
wrote in 1904 is still fairly accurate.]
1. ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETIES
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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