Quotes Concerning Experimentation

(22 Quotations)

• Philip Abelson (editor, Science) – "the standard carcinogen tests that use rodents are an obsolescent relic of the ignorance of past decades."

• Christian Barnard (surgeon) – "I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."

• Henry J. Bigelow - "There will come a time when the world will look back to modern vivisection in the name of Science, as they do now to burning at the stake in the name of religion."

• Brigid Brophy (novelist, essayist; Animals, Men and Morals) – "Whenever people say, “We mustn’t be sentimental,” you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, “We must be realistic,” they mean they are going to make money out of it."

• Robert Browning (poet) - "I despise and abhor the pleas on behalf of that infamous practice, vivisection... I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured to death on the pretense of sparing me a twinge or two."

• Renato Dulbecco (Nobel laureate) – "If we wish to understand human cancer, the effort [cancer research] should be made in humans, because the genetic control seems to be different in different species…"

• Johanna Dwyer (Tufts University) – "The major problems of animal studies are the validity of cross species comparisons and relevance to the human disease."

• Mohandas K. Gandhi – "I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence.”

• Mohandas K. Gandhi - "Vivisection is the blackest of all the black crimes that a man is at present committing against God and his fair creation. It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures."

• Herbert Gundersheimer, M.D. (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine) – "Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans...In reality these tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather they are used to protect corporations from legal liability."

• Carl G. Jung (psychologist) - "During my medical education at the University of Basel I found vivisection horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary."

• Charles R. Magel, PhD. – "Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.”

• Charles Mayo (founder, Mayo Clinic) – "I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery, that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil.”

• John Cowper Powys - "What is the importance of human lives? Is it their continuing alive for so many years like animals in a menagerie? The value of a man cannot be judged by the number of diseases from which he escapes. The value of a man is in his human qualities: in his character, in his conscience, in the nobility and magnanimity, of his soul. Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience."

• Richard Ryder – "What are we doing when we brainwash children in schools to cut open their fellow animals? Are we dangerously desensitizing them? Some of the most warped and blunted people I know are those who have gone through training of this sort."

• Richard Ryder - "The cruel experimenter cannot be allowed to have it both ways. He cannot, in the same breath, defend the scientific validity of vivisection on the grounds of the physical similarities between man and the other animals, and then defend the morality of vivisection on the grounds that men and animals are physically different. The only logical alternatives for him are to admit he is either pre-Darwinian or immoral."

• George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925) - "Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research."

• George Bernard Shaw – "Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."

• Count Leo Tolstoy (author) - "What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."

• Mark Twain - "I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."

• Voltaire – In a statement directed towards the vivisector Voltaire stated, "You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, mechanist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal so that it may not feel?"

• Richard Wright (renown author, The Man Who Went to Chicago) – "Each Saturday morning I assisted a . . . doctor in slitting the vocal chords of a fresh batch of dogs from the city pound. The object was to devocalize the dogs so that their howls would not disturb the patients in other parts of the hospital. I held each dog as the doctor injected Nembutal into its veins to make it unconscious: then I held the dog’s jaws open as the doctor inserted the scalpel and severed the vocal chords. Later, when the dogs came to, they would lift their heads to the ceiling and gape in a soundless wail. The sight became lodged in my imagination as a symbol of silent suffering."