The Credo

To make the idea acceptable and gain the support of government and media, the vivisectionists have spread the following credo:

Vivisection is indispensible to the development of biology and medicine. To vivisection we owe the greatest discoveries of the past, starting with the circulation of the blood, the discoveries of Spallanzani, Galvani, Volta, Claude Bernard, Pasteur, Koch, up to the latest drugs, vaccines, vitamins, the development of surgery, the investigation of cancer, etc. Thanks to vivisection, life expectancy has increased and is going to increase - practically the sky's the limit. With the help of vivisection we could have avoided the Thalidomide tragedy. Through vivisection we are going to abolish cancer, arthritic, rheumatic, circulatory, heart, mental and venereal diseases. Vivisection will give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, youth to the old. We vivisectors are all animal lovers, much more so than our critics. Our work is beneficial to not only humanity, but to the animals as well. Our opponents are just a small bunch of hysterical spinsters, sexual deviates and befuddled old fogies. The medical men who oppose us are ignoramuses. Besides the animals don't suffer - either because they aren't able to feel pain, or because we treat them with as much love and kindness as we treat our human patients.

We know we haven't added a single word of our own to this vivisectionist credo, and we hope we haven't forgotten any.

Our first objection is a moral one. If vivisection were useful and not damaging, that would be an aggravating and not an extenuating circumstance, for it would sanction the principle that the end justifies the means - that well-worn picklock that opens the doors to every sort of wickedness, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald. If man accepts this principle, he can no longer consider himself a morally superior being.

As to the small bunch of regressive people who have rejected vivisection on all counts , they happen to include Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Victor Hugo, Ibsen, Wagner, Tennyson, Ruskin, Tolstoy, Cardinals Manning and Newman, Mark Twain, G.B.Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi, C.G.Jung, Clare Booth Luce, Nobel Laureates Albert Schweitzer and Hermann Hesse - to name but a few of the deceased ones, and known in the English-speaking world. If human culture has a voice, it is theirs. If there is any justification for the human species on earth, it is to have brought forth a few individuals like these; and not the hominids of the laboratory subculture.

The antivivisectionists also included several outstanding men of action, like Garibaldi, Bismarck, Lord Dowding. And all had their feet planted firmly in the reality of their time, several of them also having contributed to the advancement of science.

Leonardo, the universal genius, was not only one of the greatest artists and technological innovators of all time, but also the world's foremost expert on anatomy. Schiller's graduation thesis, "The Philosophy of Physiology", is the first known study of psychosomatic medicine. Physiology was also among the many interests of that other universal genius, Goethe, whose observations shed new light on the structure of the human skull. Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian, philanthropist, philosopher and musician of world renown - the foremost interpreter of the music of Bach on the the organ - was also a practising physician who dedicated most of his life to caring for the blacks in his jungle hospital. Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, who took his antivivisection fight to the House of Lords, led the Royal Air Force in the Battle of London. These names, then, are part of "the small bunch of hysterical cranks, etc."

As for the medical men who denounced vivisection as senseless and misleading, their names could fill a whole book, and in fact they do: more than four decades ago Ludwig Fliegel, a Zurich dentist, cited a thousand of them in a volume titled 1000 Ärzte gegen die Vivisektion, which means just that, "1000 Doctors Against Vivisection."

Now let us briefly examine, in the light of history, the vivisectionists' claim that animal experimentation in the past, present and future has been or could ever be essential to medical science. Luckily, even the briefest perusal of the available evidence proves the falsity of these assertions and provides historical proof that clinical observation is the only real road to medical knowledge, and that some of the most influential mass media have been systematically spreading untrue information - whether with the deliberate intent of deceiving or in good faith is quite irrelevant at this point.