The Sociological Aspect
From the sociological point of view, man is a herd animal, highly imitative to boot, as his fads and fashions show. His gregarious and conventional nature influences accordingly his psychic attitude and character.
Contrary to their general conviction, human beings, with rare exceptions, are not mentally free, they shy away from venturing into independent thought, from treading unexplored territory; most of all, they are afraid of spurning the dogmas that have moulded them, and of distancing themselves, also intellectually, from the herd. They feel safer following a leader, some kind of father-figure, even without knowing his intimate nature, and not seriously worrying about where this leader might lead them. The moment individuals join a marching herd, every thought process ceases. In fact, they feel freer in following some unknown leader than in having no leader to follow and being obliged to do their own thinking.
The written laws that rule our society in a constitutional state are an integral part of the system that the people want. They are quite happy with those laws, and they are right. But not always. As happens in the field of science, also in jurisdiction some laws become obsolete, retrograde, they lag by decades, sometimes centuries, behind reality, behind the wishes of the majority or the social and scientific changes and needs.
In fact, laws are changed all the time, old ones are superseded by new ones; but often this happens only under great pressure, which can take on the form of violence and lead even to bloodshed. Think of all the social unrest of our time and past times, some leading to revolution and civil war.
Obviously, reforms are started by fierce individualists, by heretics, deserters from the herd, by fearless and therefor always small minorities. The advocates of an abolition of vivisection on medical grounds today still represent a minority. But what does it signify? Wisdom is not found by counting noses. Most of what the whole world now admits as true or takes for granted, and most great social reforms which have proved immensely beneficial, were originally advocated by a small, derided minority -sometimes a minority of one.
The laws that exist in most so-called civilized countries still permit, at best by ommision, any and every kind of cruelty to animals, if done under the pretext of medical research, or "science". But since medicine, by its own admission, is not an exact science, and a science that is not exact is not a science at all, but an oxymoron ( a combination of contradictions), the cruelty carried out on animals is not only unscientific but illegal. And yet, in many countries, regulations established by the so-called health authorities actually impose those unscientific, illegal tests. How is this possible? It is rendered possible by a fact that the public blissfully ignores, namely that those health authorities are in the employ of the drug industry*, which prescribes those notoriously unreliable tests on animals for the very reason that they are unreliable: they provide the necessary alibi every time a new pharmacological or therapeutic disaster occurs. Very few people are aware of that. They reason: if there are regulations, they must be good, in the public interest, like the laws against theft and armed robbery.
As at this point in our history vivisection is still being regarded as an integral part of the order of things by the great majority of the population, it is once more the dominating herd instinct of the human species that stands in the way, along with many other important obstacles, to any speedy reform.
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* How Rockefeller's Drug Trust financed the General Board of Education in the beginning of this century in order to promote the consumption of products from its huge drug empire, is related in NAKED EMPRESS or The Great Medical Fraud. CIVIS Publications, Switz., 1986.