Читать книгу A Sheaf - John Galsworthy - Страница 12
Оглавление(1)
Whatever one’s beliefs concerning the whole question of experiments on the living body, the vivisection of dogs is a strange anomaly. Even if it be granted that the dog, by reason of its intelligence and nervous organisation, is more fitted than other animals for certain vivisectional experiments (though I believe this is disputed), there are yet basic considerations which make such treatment of the dog a scandalous betrayal. Man, no doubt, first bound or bred the dog to his service and companionship for purely utilitarian reasons; but we of to-day, by immemorial tradition and a sentiment that has become almost as inherent in us as the sentiment towards children, give him a place in our lives utterly different from that which we accord to any other animal (not even excepting cats); a place that he has won for himself throughout the ages, and that he ever increasingly deserves. He is by far the nearest thing to man on the face of the earth; the one link that we have spiritually with the animal creation; the one dumb creature into whose eyes we can look and tell pretty well for certain what emotion, even what thought is at work within; the one dumb creature which—not as a rare exception, but almost always—steadily feels the sentiments of love and trust. This special nature of the dog is our own handiwork, a thing instilled into him through thousands of years of intimacy, care, and mutual service, deliberately and ever more carefully fostered; extraordinarily precious even to those of us who profess to be without sentiment. It is one of the prime factors of our daily lives in all classes of society—this mute partnership with dogs; and—we are still vivisecting them!
I am told that pro-vivisectionists are fighting tooth and nail against the Bill (now in committee stage in the House of Commons) which has for object the exemption of dogs from all vivisectional and inoculative experiments. If it indeed be so, I ask them: “Would you, any one of you, give your own dog up to the vivisector’s knife, or respect a man who gave or sold you his dog for your experiments?” I take it they would reply: “We would not give our own dogs. We should think poorly of the man who sold or gave us his dog. The dogs we use are homeless, masterless, dogs.” And in turn I would answer: “There are no dogs born in this country without home or master. The dogs you use are those who have already fallen on cruelty or misfortune, whom as kindly men you pity or should pity; these are the dogs, the lost dogs that you take for your experiments, to make their ends more wretched than their lives have been!”
If this be sentiment, it is not mere cultured sentiment, but based on a very real and simple sense of what is decent. Miners, farmers, shepherds, little shopmen, gamekeepers, and humble men of all sorts, who own dogs, have precisely the same feeling—that the dog is essentially the friend of man, deserving loyal treatment. We all have this feeling; yet, when for our alleged benefit we want to violate it, we can still say: “Oh! it does not matter; this dog is already down!” In a word, what we would not do with our own dogs we have no right to do with dogs that have not had the luck to be ours. It is not so much a question of love of dogs as of good faith in men.
I do not wish to enter here into the general question of vivisection, but I do plead that, whether we believe in vivisection or not, we are bound, in common honour, to make a clean and whole-hearted exception of the one creature whom we have trained to really trust and love us. By not doing so we injure the human spirit.
(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.
