by Ouida
Moral blight is a more formidable danger to the world than physical ills. A crime is worse than a tumour. Coldheartedness produces more misery than the cholera. And here let me say that I use above the word cowardice advisedly, and would only beg anyone who doubts its just application to read the directions given by Claude Bernard to capture a dog for operation with an instrument common to the laboratories — a huge pair of iron pincers — with which he directs his successors and imitators to seize the dog round the throat from behind, lest it should bite them! The man who can so capture a poor defenceless beast, doomed to the torture, may be a great scientist and scholar, but he is a miserable coward too.
We all know that in the best of men and women there lies a frightful capability of evil. Goethe nobly acknowledged this in himself, and the history of mankind proves it There is in human nature a wild beast, a machairodus, a devil, a brute, call it what we will, which is always secreted in the human heart, and which springs into savage and cruel life under temptation or opportunity. Many of the most terrible tyrants the world has seen have been apparently gentle youths until the possession and intoxication of irresponsible power entered into them. The passion for destruction is still so natural to the human beast that he cannot taste of it without drunkenness, and thirst to return to its fierce delights. All history shows this, from the Asiatic or Roman annals of autocratic blood-lust to the lessons of the French Revolution in the last century or the Russian fury against the Jew’s in this immediate hour. The best and noblest of men (or women either), given boundless power and allowed the taste of blood, may become, almost in an instant, Nero or Robespierre, Catherine or Théroigne. There is not only in human nature a ferocity that may with ease be excited into dominance, but an appalling facility for dead apathetic indifference towards pain that is seen and not felt. There are few children who do not evince the tendency to either or both. Mercifulness is much harder to teach than the delight in tyranny or destruction which is inherent in many. Even where the young child will shed tears at first seeing the spaniel beaten or the hare shot, familiarity with these cruelties quickly blunts its sensitiveness and its pity. It learns with fatal rapidity to use the whip and level the gun. Now, can the prominence given to vivisection, and the popularising of its rudiments as methods of education, fail to excite this ferocity and harden this indifference? What can be the state of moral feeling in any educated man who can take a large famishing hound, and, with no compassion for its past sufferings, for its loneliness, for its forlorn and homeless condition, can keep it “from October to April” in misery and torment, the subject of unceasing and torturing experiments, which its natural strength and forces resist, until at length, after seven months, purulent meningitis, after repeated operations on the spine, ends its hapless life? I say that whatever benefits or discoveries ensued from this cruelty (and in this case neither did ensue), they would be far too dearly purchased by having begotten a human beast of such insatiable and revolting callousness as was the capturer and torturer of this poor ownerless starving hound. There are numbers of narratives similar in the printed annals of the laboratories, where they are set forth as creditable and noteworthy examples. It is idle, in the face of such, to pretend that the use of anaesthetics has served in any way to mitigate the agonies of these victims. Chloroform cannot be given for seven months, and in the most torturing of all experiments, those on the nerve and cerebral systems, chloroform cannot be used at all, as the object of these experiments is to study the sensitiveness of the animal, which is studied under the application of red-hot iron, galvanism, or scourging. Neither can chloroform be employed in crucifixion, which is often resorted to as an “important demonstration” for the instruction of pupils. If it be argued that these studies of animal pain will lead up to what is called the reverence for beautiful organisms and observance of natural laws, we may fairly oppose to this the probability that it will rather lead in the child (as, according even to one of its own professors, it does constantly lead in the scientist) to a callousness which deals with these living organisms “just as they deal with physical bodies that have no feeling or consciousness.” (Dr. Sharpey before the Royal Commission.)
In the law laid down by Dr. Willis, and followed by all vivisectors, we have precisely that treatment of the organism as if it had neither feeling nor consciousness, which Dr. Sharpey regretted, but which is certainly the inevitable outcome and natural result of the practices of the laboratories. Even the physiologist who, like Bernard or Schiff, watches the slow roasting of a dog to death, or keeps one blinded in a cage for the convenience of experiment, could scarcely do so unless he had attained this absolute deadness to any “consciousness or feeling” of his victim.
I fail to see how any physiologist could escape from this, the logical, issue of all physiological pleas for the use of animal torture as a means of observation and experiment; and I believe that not very many years separate us from a bolder demand on the part of physiology, which will claim human organisms in precisely the same language as it now employs to obtain the horse, the dog, and the cat. Science will claim to be more “merciful” than war.
Observe the pleading of Dr. Carpenter in reply to Lord Coleridge, wherein Dr. Carpenter seeks to conciliate the sympathies of the religious classes in Great Britain, by affirming that vivisection; obeys the “highest law of mercy.” This whole line of argument must be extended to human subjects if it be admitted as correct in the case of animals. It must equally become the “highest law of mercy” to torture a few hundred men on the chance of ultimately benefiting, by discovery from their sufferings, the human race.
And, moreover, had the now large body of vivisectors any true courage or any honest devotion in them to their cause, one at least, amongst their number would have been found ere now to offer himself as a subject for those experiments which Professor Schiff is never tired of asserting must be “incomplete” until made upon a human body.
How long will vivisection wait for the human body?
Not long, I believe, unless the world at large becomes alive to what the demands, the arguments, and the desires of vivisection do really and finally mean.
Jules Scholl (whose book is before me) considers that the hideous preference for sights of pain is something yet worse than callousness, that it has become a moral disease, the blood-drunkenness of which Professors Rolleston and Haughton warned the English Royal Commission; and there is much in the appalling confessions, or (to give them their truer name) the boasts, of such “artists in vivisection” as Paul Bert and Voght, Mantegazza and Goltz, and many another arch-priest of this ghastly cultus, which tends to confirm this view.
The German physiologists describe the freudige Aufregung with which they rapturously rush to the torture-trough, and the French and Italian physiologists out-rival each other in their relations of their wanton and exultant ingenuity in producing unnatural agony and watching its helpless struggles. That these men do not immediately give themselves the greater luxury of human victims is due only to their timidity before public opinion. I fail to see any logical refusal that can be made them when they shall demand it Science has declared that man is but a beast that perishes; the superiority once claimed by humanity as having been made in the likeness of Deity cannot be put forward by a world which has long been taught by science to see itself as a mere accidental congregation of atoms. Why shall not the physiologist claim the cripple, the mute, the idiot, the convict, the pauper, to enhance the “interest” of his experiments? It is not science which can give them any exemption as “heirs of God”; science has long since established that the doctrine of the soul is the mere dream of fools.
If “knowledge” be the one sacred thing of life, the one absorbing and solely gracious quest, and this knowledge be only obtainable by the prolonged and exquisite torture of the nerve-centres of sensitive organisms, how long will “knowledge” and its high-priests consent to be defrauded by mere “sentiment” from that extension and that certainty which can alone, as they alr
eady declare, be derived from the subjection to its experiments of human beings?
The most intricate social problems wait unsolved; political economy remains merely a name; all the revolutions and reasonings of mankind have failed to produce any even balance of property or any just division of pleasure; drink, vice, dirt, prostitution, hunger, and unnatural crimes work their wholesale ruin amidst the millions of miserable creatures that crowd together in all the cities of the world: yet the scientists think that the whole key of “study” and “knowledge” lies in a rabbit’s rectum or a dog’s pancreas, and turn their backs and close their sight to the frightful needs of the nations, which draw with every hour nearer to communism and chaos, whilst these “helpers of humanity” watch with freudige Aufregung (Cyon’s Methodik.) the piteous efforts of a puppy whose eyes they have put out by hot irons, or gaze con motto amore e pazienza on the guinea-pig they have larded with nails. (Mantegazza’s Dolore.)
Rome may burn: these Neros will not leave their fiddling. Soon they will crave for their music the deeper diapason of a human agony.
OUIDA.
Dogs
AN ENGLISH writer has declared that, in view of the moral advantages which man enjoys from constant intimacy with the dog, the former has not derived all the benefits he might have done from contact with the latter. This is one of those jests which is not without its substance and suggestion in fact. The dog does continually display qualities from which man may with advantage mould his own conduct, and in unselfishness the canine animal leaves the human animal far behind him.
There is a charming story by Louis Enault, called the “Chien du Capitaine,” which I should wish every one who cares for dogs to read, and which would, even in those who do not care for them, awaken sympathy with the loyal, rough-coated, fourfooted hero in his troublous Odyssey from Senegal to Normandy. A French critic once gravely objected to a story of this kind on the score that un chien ne pourrait pas penser. Now, that a dog can and does think, and think to much purpose, there can be no doubt whatever in those who have studied dogs in life with sympathy and attention. I am quite sure that a dog thinks in exactly the same manner as ourselves, although in a different measure. Sight and hearing being supplemented in him by that wonderful sensibility of the olfactory nerves conferring on him a sixth sense of which we can form but a very vague conception, the dog’s views, actions, antipathies, attachments, and judgment of all events, places, and persons are colored and guided by what this delicate and marvellous set of nerves tells him about them. The physiologist who destroyed the nerves of a dog’s nose destroyed in him all powers of discrimination, selection, and attachment, and, without the cruel operation, might have known that he would do so. It is impossible for us to measure the innumerable and sensitive impressions conveyed by the olfactory nerves to the canine brain; but that on receiving these impressions this brain thinks exactly as the human brain thinks there can be no doubt in any one who is accustomed to study dogs. I have seen a dog standing in a doorway looking up and down and pondering which way it would be most agreeable to take, precisely as a lounger will stand on the steps of his club and meditate whether he shall turn to the right or to the left.
Dogs have very strongly-marked volition, inclination, and powers of choice, and their wishes are too often neglected and set aside or brutally thwarted. The general idea of a well-brought-up dog is a dog that is cowed out of all will of his own; but it is only in leaving the animal much of his own will that the interesting characteristics of his idiosyncrasy can be studied and enjoyed. A dog who is afraid is a dog who has been robbed of the frank charm of his original temper; he becomes hesitating and sad, if he does not become sullen, and is so timid lest he should offend that all his delightful impulsiveness disappears; instead of a varied and most interesting individuality, you have a mere machine wound up and moved by the single spring of fear.
Men too often forget that all which they command is against the nature of the dog, opposed to his instincts, oppressive to his desires; and they should be infinitely more gentle and forbearing than they are in the imposition of their orders. The most entirely amusing, delightful, and affectionate dogs that I have ever known have been the most completely insubordinate. They were tiresome, no doubt, sometimes; but, in compensation, how droll, how interesting, how devoted, how beautiful in their lithe, free attitudes, how gay and how good-humored in their sportiveness!
With our dogs, as with our human friendships and affections, to enjoy much we must sacrifice something. We must like the animal for himself as well as for ourselves. There is as much difference in the characters of dogs as in those of men. I have known many, but I have never known two alike.
I see with utter disapprobation and regret all the tendency of modern times to make the dog into a chattel to gamble with in a minor degree as the horse is made in a greater sense. All the shows and prizes and competitions and heartburnings, all the advertisements of stud dogs and pedigrees and cups won by this dog and by that, are injurious to the dog himself, tend to make external points in him of a value wholly fictitious, and to induce his owners to view him with feelings varying in ratio with his success or failure at exhibitions. The physical sufferings endured by dogs at these shows, the long journeys, the privations, the separation from places and persons dear to them, the anxiety and sorrow entailed on them, — all these things are injurious to them and are ill compensated by the questionable good done to the race by the dubious value of conflicting verdicts on the excellence of breed and form.
The Maltese (called in French the Havanais) dog has been ruined in England by the absurd decree of the judges at dog-shows that the hair of this breed should have no curl or wave in it. On the contrary, a perfect Maltese or lion-dog should have undulating hair, fine and soft as floss silk, curling at the ends and when brushed out surrounding his body with a snowy cloud.
This most beautiful of all small dogs was a fashionable pet from the days of Louis XIII. to the Revolution, and in all pictures in which he is portrayed (he was termed chien du manchon) the hair is waving and curling at the ends. The decree also of dog-show judges that there should be no fawn in the ears is an error; for in the most perfect specimens of this breed, which are to be found in Italy, the fawn-colored tips are often seen. I wish that I could restore the exquisite lion-dog to its place in fashion, usurped so unfittingly by the squat, clumsy, deformed dachshund, who is as ugly as he is out of place on the cushion of a carriage or a boudoir. The lion-dog is admirable, beautiful, and his aristocratic appearance, his little face which has a look of Gainsborough’s and Reynolds’s children, his white silken coat, and his descent from the darlings of Versailles and Whitehall, all make him an ideal dog for women. He is of high courage and of great intelligence; take him all in all, there is no dog his equal, and this little tender patrician will fight till he drops.
The dog I have cared most for in my life was of this breed; his name, Ali, had been corrupted into Lili; he was lovely to the sight, passionately devoted in affection, and of incomparable courage. He lived with me for nine years, which were as happy years to him as it was possible for a dog to know, and he lies in his last sleep between two magnolia-trees under a marble sun-dial, on whose base a famous and noble poet has written his epitaph:
“Ecquid est quod jure doeemus amabile?
Nos amat, et nobis esse fidele potest,
Lili, pelle canis, data sunt tibi pelle sub ista,
Digna fides hominis pectore dignus Amor.”
Which for the unlearned may be roughly translated as meaning that there is nothing so precious to us as the heart which loves and responds to ours, and that such a heart was Lili’s, although clothed in a canine form.
The Maltese, the most patrician of all small dogs, was, as I have said, at the height of his fashion in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution, and the little dog with which the poor little dauphin used to play in the gardens of Tuileries was of this race. What became of this royal pet? How many poor little pet dogs m
ust have been left to starve and shiver homeless in those dread years, whilst their graceful and stately mistresses and masters were dragged in the tumbril to the scaffold! Dogs suffer from the contre-coup of all human misfortunes; and when death or adversity breaks up a home, the dog who was happy in it is one of the first and greatest losers by the calamity.
Not long ago in Paris a poor acrobat died, unknown and unregarded except by the three dogs who had belonged to and performed with him in the streets, a greyhound, a poodle, and a water-spaniel. These three poor mourners followed his coffin to its pauper’s rest, and when the earth was thrown in on him they waited about the spot mournfully until the guardian of the place chased them away; and then they quietly, with their heads and tails hung low, went back into the crowds of the great city which had no home in it all for them. What became of them? One shudders to think of the torture-trough of the physiologists which was probably their doom. I learned their story too late to be able to trace and find them. Very likely the dead man had been a brute to them; but they had loved him.
The black poodle has almost superseded the larger white poodle in the affections of society; yet the white one is incomparably the finer animal. The big white poodles of Florence are very handsome and marvellously clever; but, poor fellows! they are not “in demand,” and therefore they grow rarer every year. The Pomeranian is a most charming small dog, and his high spirit and extreme intelligence make him a very valuable guard. There is an electric quality in his hair which repels dust and dirt; and in intensity of attachment he cannot be surpassed. The Italian lupetto is often mistaken for a Pomeranian, but there is a marked difference between them. The lupetto does not possess the thick, short, woolly undercoat which is the characteristic of the Pomeranian, and his hair droops, while the Pomeranian’s stands out from his body. The lupetto is, there can be no doubt, the same breed of dog as was especially sacrificed in the Floralian games in classic Rome: at that time the Pomeranian was peaceably leading a wild and free life in the dread solitudes of those chilly lands in which Ovid fretted his heart out till it broke.