All Things Considered
“Suppose your wife were dying.” Vivisection is not done by a man whose
wife is dying. If it were it might be lifted to the level of the
moment, as would be lying or stealing bread, or any other ugly action.
But this ugly action is done in cold blood, at leisure, by men who are
not sure that it will be of any use to anybody—men of whom the most
that can be said is that they may conceivably make the beginnings of
some discovery which may perhaps save the life of some one else’s wife
in some remote future. That is too cold and distant to rob an act of
its immediate horror. That is like training the child to tell lies for
the sake of some great dilemma that may never come to him. You are
doing a cruel thing, but not with enough passion to make it a kindly
one.
So much for why I am an anti-vivisectionist; and I should like to say,
in conclusion, that all other anti-vivisectionists of my acquaintance
weaken their case infinitely by forming this attack on a scientific
speciality in which the human heart is commonly on their side, with
attacks upon universal human customs in which the human heart is not at
all on their side. I have heard humanitarians, for instance, speak of
vivisection and field sports as if they were the same kind of thing.
The difference seems to me simple and enormous. In sport a man goes
into a wood and mixes with the existing life of that wood; becomes a
destroyer only in the simple and healthy sense in which all the
creatures are destroyers; becomes for one moment to them what they are
to him—another animal. In vivisection a man takes a simpler creature
and subjects it to subtleties which no one but man could inflict on
him, and for which man is therefore gravely and terribly responsible.
Meanwhile, it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey this
Christmas; and it is not in the least true (as the vegetarians say)
that I shall do it because I do not realise what I am doing, or because
I do what I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or a
fundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what I
am doing; in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do.
Scrooge and the Cratchits and I are, as I have said, all in one boat;
the turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in the
night, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well; but it is
really practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. I
can avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificial
tormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun or sticking knives in
him for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly and
killing him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in
his own solemn eyes his own strange and separate destiny, whether I
have made him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the
gods love and who die young—that is far more removed from my
possibilities of knowledge than the most abstruse intricacies of
mysticism or theology. A turkey is more occult and awful than all the
angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an
angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has
never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live
turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the
enigma has rather increased than diminished.