Friends of animals : an address delivered at North Berwick, East Lothian, on March 19th, 1910 / by J.L. Marjoribanks.

  • Marjoribanks, James Leslie, 1874-
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Friends of animals : an address delivered at North Berwick, East Lothian, on March 19th, 1910 / by J.L. Marjoribanks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The use of tuberculine, to detect and weed out tuberculous beasts from among a herd of cattle, not only protects the children who depend on them for their milk, but involves an eventual diminution of suffering, as the generations go on among the animals themselves. As a member of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals I am bound to admit that while prevention of animal-suffering is done, one may say, retail by the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, it is done wholesale by science, though in such a very unpicturesque way. There is a disease of dogs, called malignant jaundice, which renders it almost impossible to keep a dog in some parts of South Africa and other warm countries. Only last year a doctor and a veterinary surgeon, working at Cambridge, discovered by means of experiments that the disease which is caused by a minute parasite, called a piroplasma, in the blood, can be prevented or cured, as tbe case may be, by the administration of a drug known as trypanblau. You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. I grant you that, in order to study the disease, dogs had to be infected with it artificially. But they suffered no more than thousands of other dogs who were naturally ill of the disease in different countries at the same moment; indeed, they suffered less, for they could be put out of pain, and need suffer no lingering death ; moreover, they^suffered for a good purpose, and not uselessly, like the rest. Scientists are to-day working hard, by means of experiments, to discover the nature of distemper in cats and dogs, and the cure for it. I do not want to be intolerant towards those who differ from me, but I cannot help thinking that those scientists have a far better right to be called the friends of animals than the tender-hearted people who are trying to have legislation passed that would make all such investi- gations illegal in this country. To any anti-vivisectionist who tells me that he or she looks at an experiment from the animal’s point of view, I say “ So do I. But I put the apostrophe in a different place. I look at it from the animals’ point of view. I think that is the broader way to look at it.” Until the Research Defence Society was formed, the anti-vivi- sectionist societies formed the only side that was represented before the public. The Research Defence Society has already a membership of over three thousand, and, using the word in the best sense of the tei’m, the quality of its membership is good. The societies that oppose the scientific work I have spoken of have some of them hundreds, and one of them thousands a year of income; a lady left one of them £5,000 only the other day. Every five shillings the Research Defence Society receives has to counterbalance many pounds given to the other side, but five shillings is none the less worth giving all the same. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have done. I am ready to shake hands with any anti-vivisectionist on the strength of what we have in common, our desire to save animals as much suffering as possible : and I do not want to force my opinions down the throat of anyone. I leave it to you to make up your own minds which of the two positions is, from the point of view of men and of animals, the wiser, the more far-seeing, and, in the long run, the kinder.