http://roberts375lblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/dissecting-vivisection.html
Robert R. Titus
English 375L
Dissecting Vivisection
In Victorian England, the moralistic extension of animal rights grew out of a greater scientific understanding of the world. Through public education, animal rights activists used Victorian scientific advances to change the public perception of animals. Animal maltreatment, once dismissed completely, became a social faux pas. Harriet Ritvo described the moralistic change of attitude towards animal treatment as the triumph of “redefined and humanitarian modern conceptions of justice” over “gross and brutal medieval conceptions.”[1] Ironically, the “gross and brutal medieval treatment” of animals continues, justified by science. The scientific establishment is both a benefit and a hindrance to animal prosperity. Scientific rationalism freed people from the elitist human conceptions that oppressed animals. It also gave birth to vivisection, a brutal scientific procedure that involves the live dissection of animals. Victorian scientist believed they were above the moral obligations of everyday people. Modern animal researchers, like their Victorian scientific counter parts, believe they are above moral obligations. We will examine the rise of animal rights in Victorian times, and the success of animal researchers in marginalizing political positions against their elitist conceptions.
The Rational Animal
Humans view
themselves as the elite species on the planet. Throughout history, humans
distinguished themselves from animals by claiming the ability to reason as a
specifically human characteristic. For a long time, philosophers “took
rationality to be the crucial feature dividing humans from other animals.”[2]
David Hume, a sixteenth century British philosopher, attacked widely accepted
notions with his book, Of the Reason of
Animals. Hume argued that animals, like humans, could understand complex
cause and effect relationships. Sixteenth Century
One Victorian to adapt Hume’s ideas was Charles
Darwin. After reading Hume,
The Burgeoning Animal Rights Movement
The RSPCA drafted legislative protections and organized public enforcement for animal cruelty. The enforcers cracked down on obvious infractions, arrested abusive horse drovers and omnibus drivers. They raided public arenas that housed animal combat and arrested the owners. Perpetrators of wonton acts of cruelty, such as live cat skinning and rat rhyming, received especially harsh punishments. The RSPCA, though their legislative successes and enforcement of animal cruelty laws, changed the Victorian perception towards animals. The RSPCA then turned its attention towards vivisection, a morally complex case of animal abuse.
Vivisection, as Ritvo describes it, is “commonly understood as dissecting a live animal or performing some other painful operation on it for scientific purposes.”[6] In an attempt to understand the human body, researchers delved into the bodies of living animals, inflicting an immense amount of pain in the process. The RSPCA pursued vivisection researchers; however, they encountered stiff opposition and a divided public.
Vivisection polarized Victorian England. Scientist fought to establish a “distinction between inflicting pain during ‘justifiable’ experiments and mere cruelty.”[7] In their eyes, scientists belonged to a different moral category than drovers and omnibus drivers. Moreover, the scientific establishment consisted exclusively of upper class citizens that possessed political power. Antivivisectionist refused to concede the researchers any moral distinctions. To the activists, killing an animal in such an inhumane manner was wrong regardless of experimental aims. These two groups publicly attacked one anther throughout the Victorian era. Ultimately, the scientist’s gradual successes and political power marginalized the antivivisectionist movement. “By the early years of the twentieth century antivivisection became a fringe movement, appealing to an assortment of feminists, labor activists, vegetarians, spiritualists, and others who did not fit easily into the established order of society.”[8] Vivisection, as you shall soon see, is not a Victorian procedure. It is practiced everyday at universities across the world.
My Vivisection Experience
(This
is the outside of the
The Animal “Research” Center at the
I spent my first two years at the university inside the belly of this building performing a multitude of tasks. With medical school aspirations, I felt that animal research was a good opportunity to gain some research and surgical experience. I met a graduate student in a biopsychology course and began assisting in the Japanese quail laboratory. Our experiment was time consuming as it took nearly a year and a half to complete. It was also intensely laborious as it involved over 1000 birds and multiple trails.
Japanese Quail Incubator youtube.com video
The experiment began with production of the colony. In the video above[10], you will see a person filming recently incubated eggs. As the eggs hatch, the person in the video films the process. Our experiment required a consistent colony of nearly 600 subjects. I constantly incubated eggs and monitored the hatching. Once hatched, I tagged the birds with a permanent metal band around their left foot that indicates their number. After tagging, the animal becomes an experimental number. After six weeks, I numerically separated the quails into sixteen-inch individual square cages.
(This
is a ten-minute sample of actual trial footage. We counted the amounted of
times a male bird copulated with the female. Notice the bird grabbing the neck.
We consider that a copulatory act. )
(The above is a picture of sexually
mature Japanese quail that are about four months of age.)
Our experiment investigated the copulatory (sexual) behavior of Japanese quail and its effects on learning and memory. A trail generally ran for 32 consecutive days. We introduced a male quail to the same female quail several times. Then, on the last day of the trial, we placed a new red-feathered female in the cage with the male. Japanese quail females do not naturally have red feathers, so I glued several around the neck of numerous females. The males became excited at the sight of these red-feather birds. After allowing the birds to mate for ten minutes, I then removed the female and waited ninety minutes to allow the neurophysiological process to take place.
(This is a research guillotine, used
to decapitate smaller experimental animals)
I removed male birds from their cages and took them to a room with specialized equipment. I placed their heads in the diamond shaped aperture of the guillotine. The subjects did not receive sedation or anesthetic as those chemicals would conflict with the aims of the experiment. Then, grabbing the handle of the guillotine, I forcefully slid the blade through the bird’s neck, decapitating it from the rest of the body. The headless bleeding body convulsed violently at the base of the guillotine as I shifted my focus to the head.
The head of the animal was critical to data collection. I grabbed the beak of the bird’s head and quickly stripped the skin of its face. Often the bird would release a final movement as this occurred. With a razor blade, I opened the bird’s skull to expose the brain. The brain extraction process requires great care not to damage the tissue of the exposed brain. Once removed, I froze the brain and then sliced it into to microscopically thin sections. I placed the sections on a glass slide, and then stained the slides with chemicals. Ultimately, I formulated the data collected into the paper shown below.
(I
presented the results of the experiment at the annual Society for Behavioral
Neuroendocrinology meeting. This is an abstract from our published results.)
The medical implications of the Japanese quail trials are worth outlining. The entire aim of the sexual conditioning experiment above was to build a better understanding of novelty. After a mammal performs a task a multitude of times, no matter how entertaining, the process becomes perfunctory and loses it initial excitement. However, when researchers introduce a novel aspect, in this case a red-feathered female, the physiological process produces an explosion of neurotransmitters and generates the initial excitement and interest. Ideally, if researchers understand the mechanisms that produce this transition it could revolutionize medicine and possibly lead improved medication for impotence and depression.
While I respect the aims of the experiment, I am revolted by the means. Certainly, improving the daily life of humans across the planet is a worthy endeavor; nevertheless, the draconian procedure of vivisection is too great a cost. Peter Singer, a modern ethicist and philosopher, addresses the vivisection problem by comparing it to other atrocities. “Surely one day our children’s children, reading about what was done in laboratories in the twentieth century will feel the same sense of horror and incredulity that we now feel when we read about the atrocities of the Roman Gladiatorial arenas of the eighteenth century slave trade.”[14]
The Victorian scientific community won a public relations campaign that marginalized the antivivisectionist movement. The animal rights movement feels the effect of that marginalization today. “Legislators and the public have been convinced that opposition comes from uniformed fanatics who consider the interests of animals more important than the interests of human beings.”[15] As a former researcher, I am not uniformed. Moreover, given my appreciation for both sides of the animal rights debate, I do not consider myself a fanatic.
While I appreciate the need for animal research, I completely disagree with vivisection. As Anna Sewell states in Black Beauty, “We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”[16] The suffering inflicted by vivisection is immense and animals cannot communicate their suffering to us in words. However, if you can imagine a surgery without anesthetic – the slow, excruciating insertion of a scalpel into exposed flesh – you will briefly suffer the unarticulated agony that vivisection victims endure. The aims of vivisection, no matter how grand, do not free researchers from moral obligations. As Jude the Obscure noted, “Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!”[17] As a researcher, I appreciate the medical advances gained through animal research, however, as living being, I feel that it is time to put an end to vivisection.
The Victorian
extension of rights to animals, initiated by Hume and advanced by
Word Count: 2021
WC minus Quotes: 1754
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