The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War
Between Animal Research and Animal Protection by Deborah Rudacille, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
$25, 390 pages.
The News & Observer
January 21, 2001
Specimens, delicacies and best friends
In 1824, the French scientist Francois Magendie held a demonstration
of animal experimentation in London. Deborah Rudacille reconstructs
the scene in "The Scalpel and the Butterfly": "The
man tortured animals in public, slicing into living flesh as if
it were a piece of mutton, as the bound beasts screamed in agony.
Men became sick to their stomachs and women fainted." English
outrage over the experiments led that same year to the founding
of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
However, Rudacille also notes that animal experiments were usually
performed for a good cause. Scientists used animals to develop
vaccines for polio and typhus. Louis Pasteur's work with rabbits
might have involved killing lab specimens, but it led to a vaccine
for rabies that has saved the lives of countless other animals
and quite a few humans. Nevertheless, his lab, decorated with
the drying backbones of rabbits that happened to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time, was a gory mess.
Rudacille, a writer who has worked for the Johns Hopkins Center
for Alternatives to Animal Testing, recounts the history of animal-protection
groups and describes the sporadic but largely successful war between
them and animal researchers. Although her style is dry, her detailed
and balanced history raises central questions at the nexus between
science and philosophy: Does the end justify the means? Should
rabbits (or dogs or cats or chimpanzees) be sacrificed because
what might be learned from them could help humans? What do we
make of the antiviv (as antivivisectionists are called in the
research community) who told a Massachusetts politician that if
he was willing to sacrifice a dog to improve the chances of saving
his sick daughter's life, he was "a cruel man"?
The vivisection philosophy started with the 17th-century French
philosopher Rene Descartes, who believed that animals were a kind
of machine. They had the capacity for sensation but were unable
to think or feel real pain. His followers, Rudacille writes, "interpreted
the cries of animals during vivisection as the mere creaking of
the animal 'clockwork.' " The argument against Descartes'
views was articulated by an Englishman, Jeremy Bentham: "The
question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can
they suffer?" Bentham's phrase became the rallying cry for
the animal-protection movement.
Led by English women, the antivivisection movement gained ground
in the 19th century. But scientists in England fought back and
defeated a bill that would have banned all experiments on dogs,
cats and horses. The animal-protection movement then splintered,
with some groups pushing for the elimination of all animal experiments
and advocating vegetarianism. These goals were too radical for
the public, and the movement lost its support and its momentum.
It did not regain them until the middle of the 20th century.
The wind that blew the animal activists out of the doldrums came
in 1965 when "Life" magazine published photographs of
dogs that were to be used in medical research. The pictures of
emaciated animals crowded into filthy pens infuriated animal lovers.
A year later, despite the protests of the research community,
the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act was passed by Congress. The
law didn't offer the animals much protection -- it only governed
their handling before they reached the lab -- but it was a start.
About the same time, W.M.S. Russell and Rex Burch wrote a small
book that said good science and animal welfare were not incompatible.
It would prove to be far more important to the animal-protection
movement than the sensationalist spread in "Life." The
authors outlined three principles of humane treatment of laboratory
animals: Replace animals used in experiments with other procedures,
if possible; if animals must be used, reduce the number; and refine
experimental procedures to make them more humane. Replace, reduce,
refine became known as the three Rs of animal protection.
Although some members of the scientific community embraced these
principles, others resisted. This intransigence led to a resurgence
of animal-protection activists in the 1980s -- the moderate Humane
Society added 15,000 members in that decade. More strikingly,
it also spurred the rise of far more radical organizations, including
the Animal Liberation Front and People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals, which stressed not just animal protection, but animal
rights. For them, there was no such thing as humane animal research
-- they called for an end to all animal experiments and opposed
meat-eating and the use of fur and leather.
Fran Trutt was typical of the new breed of activists. Trutt developed
a hatred for Leon Hirsch, the chairman of U.S. Surgical Corporation,
a company that used dogs in its demonstrations of surgical staples
to doctors. Afterward, the dogs were killed. On Nov. 10, 1988,
she and a companion placed a bomb near Hirsch's parking place
at the company's headquarters in Norwalk, Conn.
Trutt, it turned out, had been set up. Her companion notified
the police, who nabbed her just after she planted the bomb. She
was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Ultimately, she
pleaded no contest and spent 32 months in jail.
The Trutt affair turned off the public, just as the overly righteous
antivivisectionists of the 19th century had. PETA did not help
the cause when it opposed researchers' use of animals to fight
AIDS, saying "people bring disease on themselves." Today,
public support for animal-protection groups has all but dried
up. But if the animal activists of the 20th century lost the public-relations
war, they won the legal battle. The Laboratory Animal Welfare
Act has been amended several times, broadening and strengthening
it. And although animal experimentation continues, most laboratories
now subscribe to the three Rs.
Does the end justify the means? Fran Trutt apparently thought
that saving animals justified taking a human life. Most scientists
believe that improving the health of humans justifies sacrificing
animals, if it is necessary. Rudacille offers no easy answers.
"Each of us must somehow seek our own answer," she says.
Thus, I feel free to give my own: Laboratory animals should be
treated humanely, but research that uses them sparingly and intelligently
should not be stopped -- which is exactly the concept that led
to the three Rs.
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