The Morality of Vivisection

Stop Vivisection!

        Defined literally, vivisection signifies the dissection of living creatures.  Ordinarily, it means any scientific experiments on animals involving the use of scalpel.  Incorrectly, it is used for any experimental observations of animals under abnormal conditions.  According to Ancient Roman texts, vivisection started in Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy II (285-247 B.C.E) and Ptolemy III (247-221 B.C.E) as living criminals were dismembered either for entertainment, scientific, or philosophical purposes.  While animals, starting the 16^th century Tudor Dynasty that continued towards the Middle Stuart period, were starved and taunted to fight each other to death (for example, a pack of starving dogs to a tortured gorilla) in a bloody entertainment called a “Baiting”, this was also used by the scientist to ascertain the order of supremacy among wild animals.  Lately, vivisection has been the norm for the scientific community but ethicists and moralists frown upon the practice stating that it is both inhumane and immoral because we are treating living organisms as objects.  In this paper, I will argue that, while the use of animals for experimentation is scientifically justified, it is morally questionable to use them as scientific articles instead of the living things that they are.

      The history of scientific observation of and experimentation upon animals, both bloodless and bloody, began at the moment when it was perceived that the processes of nature could be discovered only by the exact observation of nature and not by philosophical methods.

       For physiological and pathological research, experimentation on animals is indispensable, while for medical science it is of much value.  It gives a view of the working processes of the body if the living organism, for example, observing the artificially implanted diseases and the organic changes it produced.

        William Harvey (1578-1657) admitted that his discovery of blood circulation was the result of numerous vivisections of all kinds of animals in order for him to understand the circulation process inherent to living animals.  The Jesuit Jasphar Schott (1606-1666), a professor of Mathematics and Physics at Wurzburg, put animals in an enclosure with insufficient air to simulate deaths caused by suffocation as basis for experiments.  The discoveries during the Scientific Revolution started on animal experimentation.  Surgeons learned to extract degenerated organs from mammals in order to safely operate on human beings.  As such, there is no branch of medical science that cannot be essentially benefited by experiments on animals.  In the last instance, the results of the experiments do good to humanity.

       With vivisection considered as morally incorrect, the advent of technology today now provides means to study living organisms without actually killing or torturing them in the process.  One of which is called the “Corrositex” which is an example of synthetic skin created from plant fibers which act like the epidermis of the human body; another is called the computer modelling which simulates how the human body works, the processes it undergoes and how it reacts to foreign objects.  Computer modelling is partnered with an improved statistical design that shows the probability of the human body to react in an expected way against diseases or new antigens or antibodies.  Lastly, there is also a process called the Murine Local Lymph Node Assay (MLLNA) which is used to predict the “turning on of the oncogenes and the growth of cancer cells or tumour located in the body by means of extracting a lymph node specimen from a variety of people and putting it together with known or supposed carcinogenic chemicals or substances.

        Throughout the world, everyday, millions of animals are in laboratories, undergoing painful and invasive experimentation.  A large portion of this is used in medical researches or cosmetics and household reagents which serve the commercial industry.  This is not science.  A specie of another cannot replace the original, for there would be a very confusing and inconclusive variation since the genetic, chemical, and physiological make-up is different for every specie.

       There are no animal models for genetic diseases like the Down Syndrome, Klinefelter’s Syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, cystic fibrosis , autism and the like, but still animals are used in such researches on a massive scale.
     Retrospectively, the overall results from laboratory animal experiments cannot be extrapolated to apply to more than 50% of the cases investigated, thus like tossing a coin which is not of any assurance at all.  Only in retrospect do we learn which were useful and which were not, but in the true human fashion, this realization often comes too late.

           According to Robert Green Ingersoll in his paper, Vivisection: “A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces—laying bare the nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out with forceps—would not hesitate to try experimenting with men and women for the gratification of his curiosity”.  This was true in the case of the Imperial Japanese Army in the times of the Second World War (1939-1945) where they have undertaken lethal human experimentation in which numerous Prisoners of War were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia and are infected with various diseases and undergo several surgeries.  In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that, “I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time it was much easier.  By the third time, I was willing to do it.”  He believes that around a thousand surgeons and doctors, both trained and untrained, are involved in the same form of vivisection throughout mainland China.

          This is an example of cruelty and a heinous crime.  Of course, it is widely accepted that we are animals, but we surely don’t have to act like one.  The main reason why we practice vivisection is because we the mentality that being able to think, we hold dominion over every other living thing, as such treating them as an inferior specie.  That should not be the case since we are tasked to make sure that the biosphere would continue to live on for countless generations from the start of time.  But this never happens because we always believe that our needs take precedence over others.

        I maintain that animals should not be used that way, we could think of alternatives; we just have to use what we have in front of us.  I agree that before it would be acceptable because they could see no other way but today is different, we have the resources and the brain to think of alternatives.  We have to adapt and we have to do what is right for everyone and not only what is right for us humans.  Ingersoll thought that, “a brain without a heart is far more dangerous than a heart without a brain.”  There could be science amidst morality and we need not make each other suffer by doing what we already know is wrong.  This is not the case of the Machiavellian thought that “the end justifies the means” because this end could all be the end of all of us.