WCP6881

[1]

Frith Hill, Godalming.

April 11th, 1884

Dear Mr Girdlestone

Thanks for your paper on "Vivisection" which I have read carefully and will tell you any conclusions. In the first place your facts about the comparative insensibility of some animals to pain are interesting, and, I hope, are really what they seem to be. But I feel sure, that almost equally remarkable cases could be adduced of the insensibility of men to pain, — yet the inference that all men, or even most men, are insensible to pain would be a most incorrect one.

Coming however to the main subject of your paper it seems to me that your position is an illogical one — that is in confining your defence to vivisection, as now practised and limited in England. This seems to me very much as if one should argue that judicial torture, if limited to [2] whipping & thumb-screws, so as not to endanger life or even injure health (as practised in "Laputa") is justifiable and useful, — but as practised in Turkey and Egypt (or ^as by the Inquisition) is [illeg.] wholly bad and damnable!

It seems to me that we must, logically, take either one ground or the other. Either all torture of animals is prima facie bad and wrong ^{per se}, or animals have no rights as against the interests, or pleasures of man, & we need not regard their sufferings at all. Taking the first as correct, I can understand the limitations of ^{due to} mans superiority, and that the lives of animals are subordinate to his. Hence animals may be used for food[?] by man; may be used to labour for him; may be domesticated — (and for purposes of domestication may be castrated), — these are all directly [3] and immediately subservient to the use of animals by man, — but all these uses must be made with the least possible suffering to the animals concerned. This seems to me the only ground compatible with the existence of laws for the protection of animals, — and it is the ground I think that would be taken by the majority of humane men.

Then comes the next question. Is it right to experiment with living animals, involving always some, often extremely great torture, resulting in death, for the sake of acquiring knowledge, which may or may not be practically useful to man. I accept no limitations to this. Either yes or no. If yes, — then all vivisection, to acquire & extend knowledge, is right & should be allowed. If no — then no vivisection is permissible. And, as a fact, every one who has been much among scientific men, knows, that original [4] investigation becomes a passion. It is gloried in as the pursuit for the hidden secrets of nature for the sake of the knowledge, and for the sake of the use that may come out of that knowledge; — and what Dr. Hoygan[?] states as the clearly expressed opinion on the continent is the inwardly felt opinion of many of our physiologists, but in deference to public opinion (& now, to law) they do not publicly express it. In every other branch of science the pursuit of immediately practical results is held to be degrading — to be not science at all; & in physiology it is the same. The "real object" sought is knowledge, not practical results, — and if our physiologists may study the effects of various poisons & irritants on the secretions of living animals (as they do) why may not they bake alive then hundreds of dogs to study the effects of heat as the continental physiologists have done? My feelings revolt from unlimited vivisection; I cannot see any logical foundation for limiting it. It is either "right" or "wrong", — not right to a certain undefinable extent, & wrong beyond.

Yours very sincerely | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]