Vivisection Quotes

“I remember one bobcat they had in here - now bobcats are an endangered species in this neck of the woods - they'd caught it somewhere and they must have put that cat through a dozen rounds of burn experiments before they finally determined that it was utterly useless to them. Like an empty beer can. And then you know what they did to it? Claudius was late for a lunch date so rather thanput the destroyed but still breathing animal to sleep, he picked it up by its hind legs and simply smashed its head against a wall repeatedly until it was dead. How can I forget it: I was the one told to clean up the mess. The head dented in. The eyes slowly closing. The once proud claws hanging down, stunned and lifeless, the utter senselessness of it all, and the hate, a hatred that was consummated in me which is as dangerous a hormone, or chemical, or portion of the brain, as any neutron bomb. Except that I didnt know how to explode. I was like a computer without a keyboard, a bird without wings. Roaring inside. I wanted to kill that man. To do unto others what they had done unto me. I was that bobcat, you better believe it.”
― Michael Tobias, Rage and Reason

“it is a federal system of sadistic torture, vivisection, and animal genocide, which has been carried on for decades under the fraudulent guise of respectable medical research. And nobody on the outside knows, or wants to know, or is willing to find out. My parents, my friends, my teachers, wouldnt listen to me, or suggested that if it was bothering me that much I just had to quit the job. Just like that. As if that would have solved anything. As if I could ever live with such cowardice. You can't imagine, or maybe you can, how many people are convinced - without knowing the first thing about it - Animal research is essential. Americans have been hopelessly brainwashed on this issue. The animal rights people, by and large, acknowledge the essential futility of trying to change the system. So they address the smaller issues, fighting for legislation which would provide one extra visit per week to the labs by a custodian of the US dept of agriculture. Or demanding that a squirrel monkey be given an extra 12 square inches in his holding pen, before being led to the slaughter. That sort of thing. For whomever, and whatever it's worth, I hope my little write up is clear. I dont have the guts to do whats necessary. I pray there's someone out there who does. God help all of us.”
― Michael Tobias, Rage and Reason

“The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“But those who are incapable of
pitying animals are, as a matter of fact, incapable of pitying men.
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 experiments with men and women
for the gratification of his curiosity.”
― Robert Ingersoll

“One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans.

A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?”

Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach”
― GaryLFrancione

“He had the compassion of a vivisectionist.”
― Storm Constantine, The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit

“When we say that humans have a “right” not to be used for these purposes, this means simply that the interest of humans in not being used as non-consenting subjects in experiments will be protected even if the consequences of using them would be very beneficial for the rest of us. The question, then, is why do we think that it is morally acceptable to use nonhumans in experiments but not to use humans?

Vivisection, Part Two: The Moral Justification of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach”
― GaryLFrancione

“Animal testing, including vivisection, only tests the ability of the human being to be inhuman.”
-Shenita Etwaroo”
― Shenita Etwaroo

“Animal testing doesn’t actually teach us anything. It sure as heck doesn’t teach them anything, either.”
-Shenita Etwaroo”
― Shenita Etwaroo

“On the one hand, it is said that the animals are so unlike us that they are not worthy of our consideration. On the other hand, vivisectors claim that animals are so like us that they are essential to research. In these conflicting statements we see a researcher's own confusion as to the genuine nature of his "subjects," and their nature in relation to this own.”
― Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery

“I really don't think it's a case of not caring at all about animals. Instead, I think it's a case of caring so much about one's own self that everything else becomes immaterial.”
― Micheal Slusher

“In the racist, sexist, speciesist United States, non-white racialized minorities and women are subjected to more than their share of horrific violence, but no human being would wish to trade places with nonhuman animals in a factory farm or laboratory.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“In the racist, sexist United States, nonwhite racialized minorities—and women in particular—are subjected to more than their share of horrific violence, but no human being would wish to trade places with nonhuman animals in factory farms or laboratories. . . .
The legal status of women and nonwhite racialized
minorities has improved markedly in the past fifty years; matters have grown considerably worse for nonhuman animals.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“There is no such creature as a “farm animal,” except human beings, who have spent considerable time farming down through history. Other species, such as turkeys and pigs, are exploited on farms, by humans. As such, they are “farmed” animals. Similarly, there is no such thing as a “veal calf” or a “lab animal,” though there are millions of calves and mice who are systematically exploited by ranchers, experimenters, and consumers. There is also no such thing as seafood, only sea creatures who are exploited by others for food or profit.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“In the racist, sexist United States, nonwhite racialized minorities—and women in particular—are subjected to more than their share of horrific violence, but no human being would wish to trade places with nonhuman animals in factory farms or laboratories. . . . The legal status of women and nonwhite racialized
minorities has improved markedly in the past fifty years; matters have grown considerably worse for nonhuman animals.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“Similarly, vivisection is a selfish exploitation of other creatures—nonhumans are not here to live and die on behalf of our hopes.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions

“Those who stand within one of the world’s largest religious traditions, if they are sincere in their religious commitment, must not buy flesh, nursing milk products, or hen’s reproductive eggs in any form, or support any industry that profits at the expense of anymals, including zoos, circuses, aquariums, horse and dog racing, rodeos, and movies. Furthermore, those who stand within one of the world’s largest religious traditions must assist and defend anymals who are exploited in any of these industries, as well as anymals who are exploited to gather or disseminate information, whether for medicine, biology, pharmaceuticals, veterinary science, pathology, psychology, sociology, anymal behavior, or weaponry, to name just a few. These requirements are not particularly stringent when we realize that these products and activities not only harm anymals, but also have been proven to harm human health and prevent us from gathering more pertinent information.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions

“Many humans would experiment on nonhumans in the hope of saving a loved one, and they would just as readily experiment on humans to sustain that same hope.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“We are morally required to stop systematically exploiting others, whether chimpanzees or pygmy lemurs, chickens or chinchillas. Nonhuman animals are also persons who fare better or worse depending on the way we treat them, we must begin to give them the respect and dignity that persons deserve”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Scientists treat animals like petri dishes—recording emotional distress and physiological terror like weather fluctuations on a barometer.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Might does not make right; self-interest—even desperate self-interest—does not justify exploiting others.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“International trade in primates flourishes because we exploit primates for science.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“What megalomania led us to believe it would be morally acceptable to exploit individuals from other species for scientific experimentation?”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“...restaurants run by the wrong sort of people, such as an Eskimo Curry House... Or, wait a minute, how about a Slaughterhouse for Vegetables. Wait, I've got it, Protests at Vegetable Vivisection!!”
― Ian Watson

“I believe 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 pains which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

I have tried to understand why it should be considered a kind of credit and a handsome thing to belong to a human race that has vivisectors in it.”
― Mark Twain

“Here is another, also called a moral experiment, which I quote from a speech by Dr. Shaw, delivered quite recently before the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, " The operator began by treating the animal kindly and winning its love and confidence. When these were secured he cut off an ear of the dog, who looked astonished but manifested no resentment. Next day he cut off a paw, and a few days afterwards another. Thus he went on from one outrage to another, slashing and stabbing till the experiment was complete. It was astonishing how much the animal endured before his confidence was gone and his love turned to hate. After the second paw was removed he continued to gaze up into his master's face, and to lick the hand that maimed him. ~ CHARLES BELL TAYLOR (1892)”
― Frances Power Cobbe, The Antivivisection Question

“It is now nearly a quarter of a century since I was startled into a review of my own work on the surgery of the arteries, and led to the humiliating recognition of the fact that the conclusions obtained from a series of experiments on animals could not be applied to man, and that our efforts to adapt them were leading us into serious surgical blunders. An extended investigation into which I was further attracted by the rising discussion of this question forced upon me the opinion that Syme and Fergusson were right when they stoutly asserted that surgery had in no way been advanced by experiments on animals. I knew these two men intimately. . . . They were the two greatest surgeons I have ever known. . . . I decide altogether against vivisection, because it is inherently objectionable from my religious point of view, because it is clumsy and inexact, and because it has very frequently, if indeed it has not always, been found altogether misleading.— Prof. LAWSON TAIT (1896)”
― Frances Power Cobbe, The Antivivisection Question

“As the main work of civilization has been the vindication of the rights of the weak, it is not too much, I think, to insist that the practice of Vivisection, in which this tyranny of strength culminates is a retrograde step in the progress of our race, a backwater in the onward flowing stream of justice and mercy, no less anomalous than it is deplorable and portentous.”
― Frances Power Cobbe, The Moral Aspects of Vivisection