Autobiography of a Revolutionary: Essays on Animal and Human Rights

by Roberta Kalechofsky, micah@micahbooks.com, www.micahbooks.com

This is the full text of the book, in one file. The print version is available from Micah Publications, 255 Humphrey St., Marblehead, MA 01945, www.micahbooks.com  Roberta's other work includes: Orestes in Progress, Justice My Brother, A View of Toledo, Solomon's Wisdom, The Martyrdom of Stephen Werner, and Bodmin 1349.

All of the above books are now available on CD, in a "context" of 270 related classic books,  for just $29:
Works of Roberta Kalechofsky in Context contains five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays by Roberta, together with 270 related classic books that provide a context for better appreciating and enjoying her work. The "context" books deal with Jewish Religion, Christian Religion, Medieval Europe (including works of Dante, Boccacio, and Chaucer), Greek classics (including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles), Latin American History, Animals, Women's Rights, Anti-Slavery, along with works of novelists Conrad, Melville, and Hawthorne. Table of Contents

Micah Publications also publishes Jewish vegetarian and animal rightsbooks, such as: The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook, Vegetarian Judaism--A Guide for Everyone, and Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb. For a full list with descriptions, see www.micahbooks.com

Table of Contents

• Acknowlegements
• Introduction : My Good Works Resume
• Autobiography of  Revolutionary
• The Economics of Humanitarianism or The Revolt of the Taxpayer's Conscience
• The Social and Medical Antecedents to the Nazi Experiments in the Concentration Camps
• Humans and Animals as Victims
• Mod Science
• The Animal Estate, by Harriet Ritvo
• Animals: An Historical Perspective
• The Animal Rights Movement and Religion
• Dedicated to Descartes' Niece: The Women's Movement and Anti-vivisection in the 19th Century
• A Political History of Animal Research
• Metaphors of Nature: Vivisection and Pornography
• The Phenomenon of Life, by Hans Jonas
• The Seed of Peace: Vegetarianism in Prophetic Writing
• When We Walked on the Moon: An Epilogue

Several of her stories, and two novellas, La Hoya and Stephen's Passion, have been translated into Italian and published in Italy. La Hoya received excellent reviews in major publications, such as Corriere Della Sera., and was included in a college curriculum in Italy under the title, Veduta di Toledo.. Stephen's Passion has also been included in a college curriculum in courses in American Fiction in the University of Florence, under the title, La Passione Di Stephen. Her novel, Bodmin, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years, was included twice in a college curriculum in the United States.

She began Micah Publications in 1975 and has received publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, in addition to her literary fellowships. As a publisher, she created The Echad Series, which includes five anthologies of Jewish writing from around the world, and has published 40 different titles in poetry, fiction, scholarship, vegetarianism and animal rights. She is active in the animal rights and vegetarian movements and began the organization, Jews for Animal Rights, in 1985, and coordinates publishing projects with this organization.

She has also been a contributing editor to various magazines, such as Margins, and On The Issues, and taught at Brooklyn College for four years.

She was a participant in a round-table discussion, "Please Use Other Door: Literary Creativity and the Publishing Industry," with Cynthia Ozick, Hugh Nissenson, Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Sifton and Robert Boyers, which was published in RSA Journal, #3 (March, 1992).

She graduated from Brooklyn College and received a doctorate in English literature in 1970 from New York University.

A critical essay on her work can be found in the Dictionary of Literary Biographies, Volume 28: Jewish Fiction Writers. A list of her published work and/or extended resume is available upon request.

Text on back cover:

In fourteen essays that explore the Anti-vivisection and Animal Rights movements in their relationship to religion, experimentation on human beings in the Nazi concentration camps and elsewhere; the Women's Movement; pornography; and the reform movements in the 19th century, Roberta Kalechofsky broadens the concept of rights from a political context to a socio-biological context.

Roberta Kalechofsky is more than a scholar of the highest rank. She is a visionary and a poet. Her work consummately combines that marriage of passion and intellect, of the heart and the mind, that is the hallmark of all liberation movements. Her writing inspires no less than it instructs. All who are privileged to read the fine essays collected here stand in her debt.
-- Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights

I have seldom encountered a contemporary American author as responsive to broad, fundamental historical issues as Roberta Kalechofsky, and as interested in investigating the complex, and often undetected epistempoligcal factors that influence human actions.
Mario Materassi, Editor, Shifting Landscape: The Published Short Wirtings of Henry Roth 1925-1987

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Hans Jonas for his generosity in permitting me to quote so liberally from his book, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards A Philosophical Biology published by University of Chicago Press, 1966.  The excerpts of poetry in "When We Walked on The Moon" are from Inside Outer Space: New Poems Of The Space Age, edited by Robert Vas-Dias, DouEl-eda-y, 1970.

The following essays were first published elsewhere, or presented as talks:

"Autobiography of A Revolutionary," Between The Species.  Vol 5, no. 4,1 Fall, 1989.

"The Social and Medical Antecedents to the Nazi Experiments in the Concentration Camps," Holocaust Scholars' Conference, Anne Frank Institute, Philadelphia, 1988.

"The Animal Estate," by Harriet Ritvo, On The Issues, Vol.  IX, 1988.

"Dedicated To Descartes' Niece: The Women's Movement and Anti-vivisection in the 19th Century,," presented at the Culture and Animals Spoleto Festival For Animals, October, 1990.

"Metaphors of Nature: Vivisection and Pornography--The Manichean Machine," presented at the Society for Ethics and Animals, American Philosophical Association, December, 1988.  Published in Between The Species, Vol. 4, no. 3, Summer, 1988; On the Issues, Vol.  IX, 1988; Behavioral & Political Animal Studies, Vol. 1, no. 1, July, 1988, Hamilton, New Zealand; Etica & Animali, Vol 11, no. 1, Spring, 1989, Milan, Italy.

"The Seed of Peace: Vegetarianism in Prophetic Writing," presented at The International Vegetarian Congress, Israel, Spring, 1991.

My debt to Coral Lansbury is special.  Her book, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian Engla re-arranged the social map of late Victorian England.  It brought into focus the dramatic impact which the emergence of the practice of vivisection had on the Women's Movement and on the many other social iysues of the day. The vivisection controversy has been too long relegated to the dustbin of that kind of history which becomes a footnote.  Coral Lansbury returned it to where it belongs in the main text of Victorian history.  We shall miss het: This book is dedicated to her and to the old brown dog whose statue has been returned to Battersea Park, where it belongs.

Introduction: My Good Works Resume

A cousin asked me why I wasn't doing something for mothers on welfare, a friend asked why I wasn't involved in inner city problems.  It so happens that I have been and am involved in causes that may (probably not) propitiate my inquirers.
I was a volunteer teacher for a Head Start program in Lynn, Massachusetts for two years.  One of my pupils was a mother on welfare, who subsequently passed her high school equivalency examination, got a job, and got off welfare (not all due to me), and it also happens that I worked on welfare legislation during my years of involvement with the League of Women Voters, as well as helped initiate recycling in my town.  The number of non-animal causes I have been involved with include gun control laws (to keep human beings from shooting each other), Civil Rights, Interfaith dialogues, feminism, and emigration of Soviet and Ethiopian Jewry.  My membership in non-animal rights organizations includes the National Writers Union, Amnesty International and the Anti-Slavery Society.

This is a bare outline of my "good works" for the human race and, like Frances Power Cobbe, I would hope it would suffice to persuade the public that there is no antithesis between involvement in the Animal Rights movement and concern for human affairs.  Indeed, quite the opposite:

The rise of the Animal Rights movement is embedded in the 18th and 19th centuries' general concept of "rights.' People like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Paine understood that animal rights was a category of general rights.  In 1796, John Lawrence, a gentleman farmer in Great Britain, framed a concept of animal rights based on the revolutionary ideas emanating from France and the United States.

No human government, I believe, has ever recognized the jus animalum which surely ought to form a part of the principles of justice and humanity .... I therefore propose that the rights of Beasts be formally acknowledged by the State and that a law be framed upon that principle to guard and protect them from acts of f lagr ant and wanton cruelty, whether committed by their owners or others.

From the beginning ... the anti-slavery cause was supported by those for whom it was only one aspect, though very often a central one, of a whole panoply of desirable social reforms which encompassed such issues as education, peace, land reform, reduced taxation, f ree trade, reform in factories, feminism,, the alleviation of cruelty to animals and pacifism.

These papers were written over several years, often for occasions remote from the thought of publishing them collectively.  Every effort was made to harmonize the style of a paper meant to be heard with one meant to be read, and to eliminate repetitious points.  It was difficult to be consistent with the spelling of terms such as anti-vivisection

(Anti-vivisection, or antivivisection?) since they were spelled variously in quoted material.  The term, "science" in these essays should not suggest mathematics or physics, but medical research.  However, since, in the 19th century, medical research frequently included anthropology, sociology, chemisty and biology, the general term, 'science" was used.  Occasionally, more material was added to an essay as further information became available.  In one particular case, in retrospect, I should have expanded the issue of Jack the Ripper in "Metaphors of Nature--Pomography and Vivisection." It seems now more likely that Jack The Ripper was the famous Dr. William Gull, a notorious spokesman for vivisect ion.  The case of Jack The Ripper has attracted commentators for decades, for implicit in these murders was not only the issue of vivisection, but the omnipresent evil of poverty, with the consequent preying of the powerful upon the powerless.

The British novelist, Joyce Cary, once asked why so many of us make a fuss about "the mystery of evil." Good, he pointed out, is as much of a mystery as evil.  It should come as an exalted surprise that in these decades characterized by "me too" values, that so many people willingly undertake the work of reform on behalf of creatures who can never vote for them or repay them, motivated by revulsion to cruelty and sympathy with suffering.  These motivations inspire the genealogy of those reform movements which stand apart from other political movements and self-serving ideologies.

Autobiography of a Revolutionary

The 20th century is hard on writers. depleted our stock of language about evil. It has depleted our stock of language about evil. Hemingway turned his back on language after the first World War, George Steiner wrote his elegy on language after the Holocaust.  Time and again, I think how useful "anti-Christ" (as the antithesis to good) was to Christian medieval writers.  I need a word to describe 'Unnecessary Fuss" as the polarization of whatever I might mean by God.  Blasphemy, like evil, is in the dustbin.

When the cultural force of a word dies, even a dictionary definition is useless.  My Oxford Universal Dictionary defines "evil" as: "A. adj. the antithesis of Good.  Now little used, except in literary English." Is it then a term used only by archaic writers?  If so, what word shall 20th century writers use to denote the dismantling of the universe as known by atavistic believers in a creative force once called God, called Ya-wah, called Shaping Genius, Source of Breath, Soul-Stuff, called Life-Force, Providence, Covenantal, the Promise-Never-to-Destroy-Again, called Voice4n-TheWhirlwind, In-'Me-Thunder, From-The-Mountain, Fatherof-Mercies, Sheltering Wings, Pillar of Fire, I-WhoWill-Be-With-You-Always-Breathing-With-You4n-YourDoings.  Yes?

I grew up in a patchwork of traditions and beliefs, lucky to survive the crush of contradictions in my family and in my culture.  Animals had little to do with the first thirty-five years of my life, so that it is a marvel that they now have everything to do with the Jewish upbringing I had the first ten years of my life.  My parents were separated when I was a year old, my mother an aspiring modern Jew, my father the only son of Orthodox Jews who regarded modernity as one more phase to be tolerated and ignored in the history of the Jewish people.  Real history for them was the line of development from God to Adam and Eve to the generations of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to Moses, to me.  The rest were passing fancies.  I never heard of Darwin until I got to college.  In place of "knowledge" I was raised to believe that God knew everything I did, and everything I did mattered to God.  That impression of a direct line between me and God f aded as I matured, but enough remained so that when it was evident that my husband and I were going to marry (there was no formal declaration of this, just a sliding towards inevitability), I told him that if he was going to marry me, he should be prepared to know that I had a destiny to fulfill.  He asked me if I knew what it was.  When I told him I didn't, he shrugged his shoulders, and decided to take his chances anyway.  He did not know what I was talking about.  Neither did 1.

The years that were responsible for this peculiar slant were spent in a partly rural neighborhood of Brooklyn, populated by Christians and Jews from Eastern Europe, Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox Slavs with Mongolian faces.  Sum m er nights, in the democracy of heat, everyone sat outside on folding chairs and gossiped.  Sum m er nights, too, we were periodically invaded by a menace, our equivalent of Skinheads, who would set bonfires on nearby empty lots and perform rituals I was forbidden to watch.

Milk and fruit and vegetables were delivered by horse-drawn carts. (True mechanization did not begin until after the second World War.) Some people kept gdats or a few chickens in their backyards.  When the animals were killed, I did not see it.  I did not go to the slaughterhouses which were small, local places at the time.  When my grandmother brought home a dead chicken and placed it on her lap to pluck its feathers, I did not relate it to living ones.  The act of violent death was secret to me 9 the dead and the living separate creatures, until one night I bit into the forbidden apple and went where I was told not to go.  I stole out of the circle of night gossipers to watch these other human beings from another world at their bonfire ritual,% racing ddgs and daring one another to leap over the flames they had made.  The night crackled with a contagious violence.  The dogs on their leashes went wild with frenzy when a kitten was caught, bound by her paws to a spit, and placed over a bonfire to burn.

I have a memory of not feeling anything, except that I should report "this thing' at once--I was definitely not grown-up enough to deal with it. have a memory of myself running back, confidently, to the circle of grown-ups sitting in the shadow of the tree,% to deliver my r-eport, with a curious primness about how I went about the business of reporting evil.  Directly--as I had been told to do.  Opening my mouth.  Saying: "Dear Editor, I wish to report an evil in my neighborhood.  Surely, you will print my letter, and inform the world." There was a pause in the gossip, nothing more.  Only the breezes stirred.  The sounds that remained of the incident were the mewing of the kitten and the frenzied barking of a dog.  I did not know then that I was witnessing a common ritual in brutality, unpretentious in its mechanism, no supporting vested interests, no class conflicts, no ideology, no religious motivations, most likely rooted in the need to master death by becoming a technician of the process, practised by those to whom death is an obsession; and that the reaction of those to whom I delivered my report was equally commonplace, the hiatus in conscience through which history pulses.

A dozen years went by before I thought about that incident again.  I had become a writer, self-consciously, with the objective of being published, being read, becoming famous, writing prose that would do what I wanted it to do-- change the world.  I did not want my writing to reflect it, to "hold the mirror up to nature." I wanted to re-write history, smash the mirror and put it back together again in language that would compel change.  I could not recover from Eden.  I was hopelessly naive.

The first story of mine to be published dealt with this early incident.  It was called "To Light A Candle"--a mawkish title--in which the observer of the night's auto da fe holds her finger in a candle flame to experience the flame, to identify with the victim.  Motivation unknown.

The world changed.  The small, rural neighborhood disappeared in to concrete and high-risers.  Horse-drawn wagons, backyard goats and chickens disappeared.  I rarely saw animals again except when we "went to the country," a momentous excursion in the era before thruways and super highways. formed a love of nature, of clouds, of climate, of oceans and mountains, rainfall, wind, the rhythm of seasons and growing things, the response of adolescent body to sultry night.  It was a nature devoid of animals, except for an occasional muzzled bulldog terrier (favorite breed at the time).  Cows in a country field terrified me.  I couldn't tell them from the bull, and the bull had a bad reputation.  Animals belonged in cages or in books or on a leash.  I did not know they existed in any other way.  Tarzan and Cheetah were a myth.  Sundays were spent desultorily in parks and zoos with my father, whose visiting rights entitled him to that, and me to throwing peanuts at the elephants and watching the monkeys masturbate.

This prolonged ignorance about animal life began to disappear when my husband taught me how not to fear dogs.  Being a jogger and a biker, I was made miserable by dogs who ran after me. My husband taught me how to talk to them. Instructed that almost any dog I would meet on a city street would most likely be domesticated, I learned how to say sternly, "Go home," the only two words I knew in their language, but they worked.  To me, they worked like a miracle.  Dogs wagged their tails and trotted away. (This technique does not work with rapists.) Dogs, I learned, were sociable creatures.  They understood language in a context.  My next step was to pat the dogs I spoke to.  Friendliness became an open sesame to the animal world.  The dogs along my jogging route became part of my landscape of nature, the gardens and early morning sunlight I loved to see.

A friend once asked me where I got my love of nature from.  I told him from the Bible, but after I le ft my grandparents to live with my mother, around the age of ten, I no longer lived in "Bible time," but in a "fashionable" neighborhood, remote in sentiment and social habits from my grandparents'.

In my senior year at college, I took a course in the Bilble more out of curiosity than loyalty.  We read Genesis, the prophets, tsalms, the Book of Job, and parts of the New Testament.  Professor Rypins told us, in his introductory lecture, that we were the first class in the entire country to take a course in Bible literature at a secular college, and that he had struggled for twenty years to have such a course included in the curriculum.  He beamed with satisfaction and said, 'You are all revolutionaries.'

I do not know why the others were there, my motives were desultory, and I did not feel entitled to his praise.  Nor could I share his enviable love for the Book of Job which, he told us, had sustained him through many vicissitude& I looked forward to sharing this sustenance--I could use help--but received a shock when I realized I was on the wrong side of the argument: I identified with the counsellors and not at all with Job.  Educated in commonsense thinking, their arguments seemed reasonable to me compared with Job's accusations or with God!s response to Job:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth?

When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted for joy

That same year I also took a course in Modem European Fiction.  We read Gide, Kafka, Proust, and Malraux.  Something in that reading diet made me sick. was seized, internally, by incoherence and dropped out from the course though it was a dangerous thing to do in my senior year.  But I could not read about the aberrations of Baron Charlus, the muffled, oblique world of Kafka, the bloody world in Man's Fate where violence becomes a means of psychological reification and an estheticized technique, without a sense of terror that the human race had been remade according to laws I could not recognize.  I wrote a letter to my professor which said essentially, "I do not understand the 20th century and cannot read its literature."

The crisis about whether I would graduate passed.  My professor charitably gave me an "A" (momentary insanity is sometimes a compelling argument), but the crisis in my understanding of this century took decades.  Like most Jewish children, I knew my
history of antisemitism, blood libels and pogroms, but there was a piece of the puzzle missing for me in the documentation of the Holocaust.  Why the elaborate technology?  Why the elaborate, massive, baroque, bureaucratized technology?  Is it not simpler to kill people in their villages and ghettos, like the old-fashioned crusaders and Coss acks, than to transplant them hundreds of miles to killing centers?  In place of horsemen with cruel whips was a captur,ed photograph of a German soldier scrubbing the skin off a prisoner's back with a brush made of barbed wire.  The air is still.  'Me place is empty.  Flat ground extends beyond them.  The victim is almost dead, perhaps dead, for his tongue lolls loosely from his mouth.  The soldier does not notice.  He is very young and bored.  His gaze is distant.  Perhaps he is daydreaming about his girlfriend.

There is no bloodlust here.  Nazi honor forbade it. So, with cunning, Eichman and others could say that he "personally" was not an anti-Semite, he "personally" had Jewish friends, his "personhood" was nDt involved in the machinery of execution.  No parallel is intended here between the Holocaust and vivisection, between people and animals, but a common mentality embraces the vivisector who says he "personally" loves dogs, he "personally' has two or three pets at home, he "personally" hates pain and violence.  He does what he does constrained by an ethic different from the Skinheads of my youth.  Not until I learned the history of vivisection could I understand that emotionless gaze, the divorce between act and feeling, violence without personal involvement, which is a current in the modern sensibility.

It is a new ethos, which Hitler expressed when he demanded efficiency and rationality in matters of destruction.  A man of the 20th century, he distrusted emotionality and hated the archaic bloodlust, the sexual excitement that races through the groin in the act of killing: He sought to "purify" the S.S. of such primitive promptings.  Hannah Arendt remarked that "the concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested.' The technological imperative, mastered on other living creatures, had transformed our omnipresent impulse towards destruction and created a new balance between good and evil.  We shall miss the old brutalities

As with other Jewish children of my generation, the Holocaust was not a topic of conversation, except for hushed references about "disappeared!' relatives.  Before this fateful era had a name, I pieced it together by myself after my children were bom, no doubt because I became a mother.  Two unplanned journeys began for me the night I went into labor with my f irst son.  The act of giving birth astonished me.  Its physicality -was monumental.  The pain was not predicted.  The process ignored me.  No use to cry out, "I've changed my mind!" I woke the next morning, discovering dimensions to myself I (Rd not know existed.  I had read dozens of books about becoming a mother.  None of them had prepared me for the "irrational" f ever ish attachment I felt immediately for my son.  Where had it come from?  It seemed to rise from the nature of motherhood itself, a nature known to me, in this first stage, only through the literature of animals, mama bears and mama wolves who defended their cubs with their lives, birds who shrieked to frighten an enemy from their nest, who were the paradigm for a God with "sheltering wings," the pr-otectoress upon whose consuming care for her offspring is the secret of survival.

Thou art my God from my mother's belly

We live stubbornly--
like a small beast
who's gnawed off his paw
to get out of the trap on three--

But such connections between myself and animals were largely subliminal, until Sasha came into my life.  She was the dog we adopted to atone for Dylan, whose death was caused by our carelessness.  Dylan was ten years old when he died, suffocated in a parked car.  We had done the "reasonable" things, left the windows open enough for air, but not enough so that he could jump out, left a bowl of water which he turned over in panic, left the car parked under a shady tree--the temperature was about 83 deg ree s. In the three hours we were gone, it rose unpredictably 15 degrees.  Dylan died in my arms.  I know how a dog looks who has been subjected to a heat experiment.

Dylan had not been a loveable dog.  He was crotchety and jealous of babies, he loathed everyone in a uniform, postmen, policemen, firemen, and meter-maids.  We called him our "counter-culture" dog.  We had bought him from a kennel in the early 60's that bred wire-haired terriers (his mother had inadvertently mated with a beagle who had jumped the fence to get at her, and her offspring were a loss to the kennel), prodded by my son who insisted that if I were going to have a baby (I was pregnant with my second son), he was entitled to a puppy.  Not wishing to tangle with this logic, we brought him home a pet and named him for the poet, Dylan Thomas.

He was scrappy from the day he entered our house, always getting into trouble, always getting us into trouble.  Twice he bit our mailman.  Once he urinated into the open suitcase of a house guest. When he was five, to our horror, he jumped from the window of our car and tore the nerves in a front haunch.  The leg had to be amputated.  Dylan was unfazed, Three-legged, he sprang at horses and battled with great Danes.  Old people identified with his handicap and loved him.  One elderly lady who walked with a cane, conversed with him every morning, "I know just how you feel, missing a leg!" Another elderly gentleman, who had been born in Civil War Days, placed gifts of bones and leftovers for him in our backyard.  People called us and related sad stories of how they had put a pet "down" when he had lost a leg, believing an animal could not live on three legs.  Some of their stories were thirty years old.  Regret and guilt re-emerged in them at the sight of Dylan.  Professor White, who has done head-transplants on animals, has described affection for animals as "a special form of insanity." Our "madness" is apparently wide-spread.  His, so far, is confined to the research community.

Dylan could survive anything, except human stupidity.  He became a symbol for me, as he was for our elderly neighbors, of the life instinct, uncivil when his territory was threatened, self sufficient if left to itself.  He became the dog, Aleph, in my novel, Orestes in Progress whose nose for evil smells self destruction in his human masters.  Animals were now not only in my landscape of nature, but demanding a place in my landscape of thought.

That process became more active when Sasha gave birth to a single puppy the year after Dylan's death.  We had adopted her from an acquaintance who saved stray animals on a few acres of farmland.  She came looking for us. We were looking at other animals, more pedigreed ones.  Twice she escaped from her cage, ran after my younger son and sat down on his toes.  He pointed his ten-year old finger at her and said, 'I want this one." She had no records, no background.  She had been found on a street, deserted, thrown-away, abused.  She came to us out of the misalliance of humans and animals, and revealed to me the secret of God!s response to Job: the ingenuity of nature, the extraordinary oc)mpatibility of form and function, the near-perfect fit between mother and offspring, the incredible design repeated through millennia, with few accidents.  I would watch her sleep next to her puppy, her long white, fox-like body wrapped around her daughter, this new, know-nothing ball of fur who found her way to her teats through ancient pathways.  I watched how she went out for her walks, first surveying the scene where her puppy slept, so like any mother looking into a nursery before she leaves the house, how she returned and surveyed the scene again to make sure nothing had gone wrong while she was gone.  I read her thoughts.  They once had been my thoughts.

"With respect to the emotions of joy and sorrow, and the feeling of the mother for her young, there is no difference between the hum an and the animal.' Maimonides

Her pups came out and she licked them clean and pushed them about with her tongue until they had life and began to move and found their way to her tea ts.  She laid herself down with no more ado while 1, cast out from the animal world, wandered with fear and with hunger.  But I went now with peace for I saw there was law and governance in the world, and I cared no more for what others taught of the evil that be in nature and matter, and that the soul alone can lift this evil. cared no more for what they teach for I saw that the mutter had a law that governed her.  I saw that the sun and the moon and the birds and the beasts had a law though you have taught me that they have no soul, but man who has a soul has no law that governs him.

Modern man also studies the birth process.  The October issue of Science, 1984 describes such a study at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, where Dr. Raymond Stark, a pediatrician, and a team of researchers wish to explore the mystery of what triggers birth.  Dr. Stark makes an incision in a monkey with a five month old fetus.  He perforates the uterus and takes out the head of the fetus, and makes an incision into its head, exposing the trachea into which he slides a catheter that will allow him to measure the fetus' breathing.  He inserts catheters into the carotid artery and jugular vein, then stitches the neck closed.  He then twirls a tiny drill bit into the soft bone of the fetus' forehead and inserts another catheter into the cerebral-spinal fluid.  Three more holes are drilled into the top of the fetus' skull for three more catheters.  More catheters are still placed in the fetus' neck, to measure electrical activity of the heart.  The fetus is now returned to the mother's uterus.  All incisions are closed, except for the catheter tubes and wires from electrodes which protrude from the mother's right side.  The mother spends the next four weeks in a restraining device, so that she cannot pull out the wires.  Dr. Stark has made twelve attempts for monkeys to deliver in this way.  All have failed.  Dr. Stark explains: "The baboons like to give birth at night when no one is around.  Because of the chair , and the catheters and electrodes, they can't properly tend to the infants without help, and they die."

Claude Bernard, the "father" of the vivisection process, has described it as "the dismantling of the living organism." In the century since he has died the techniques for dismantling animals have become ingenious and incalculable.  Not merely organs from single animals are dismantled, but whole animals are dismantled and re-assembled according to the fancies of their experimenters.  The experiments are beyond ordinary imagination, and the public is ignorant, as I was, of the subterranean world that exists in basements, in "maximum security" entrenchments beneath the campuses of many large, respectable academic institutions.

Isaiah had cursed the land because its inhabitants practised the cruelty of tearing a limb from a living animal! (24:6) This bears thinking about in relation to vivisection.  No amount of casuistic evasion can obliterate the fact that in the Torah God!s covenant includes the animal world.  No doubt there will be a great deal of squirming by many people before that plain fact is accepted for what it is.

I discovered this other world of "experimentation" rather than of 'experienc6' by accident.  The words, "animal research" had conveyed nothing more sinister to me than rats in a maze or on a treadmill.  While doing research on a German-Italian novelist, Curzio Malaparte, I read his chapter entitled "The Black Wind" in his novel, Skin.  It is about a man who loses his dog, and finds him in a research laboratory.
 

He opened a door and we entered a large, clean bright room, the floor of which was covered with blue linoleum.
Along the walls, one beside the other, like beds in a children's clinic, were rows of strange cradles, shaped like cellos.  In each of the cradles was a dog, lying on its back, with its stomach exposed, or its skull split, or its chest gaping open....

Suddenly I uttered a cry of terror.  'Why this silence?' I shouted.  'What does this silence mean?'
It was a horrible silence--a vast, chilling, deathly silence, the silence of snow.

The doctor approached me with a syringe in his hand.  'Before we operate on them,' he said, ?we cut their vocal cords.'

No devil at the door.  No pacts sealed with wax And dabbled with blood.  Only the drone of minds

All but unbearable yet issuing these absolutes:
Perfections like traps, all the taut majesty

Of device.  We pray each night that we will have
A history.  We pray for all that is uninvented.
-- Baron Wormser, 'Intellectual Beauty"

The first step towards the modern world of technological destruction was taken when Cartesian philosophy permitted us to reduce animals to a mechanistic model:

The split between mind and body, between man's "higher' and 'lower" natures, is not only a consequence but the major goal...The spirit soars, preens, odnsoles itself in a freedom gained by repressing consciousness of the body and its needs.  A short-hand formula for the whole of this endeavor would be: ... where the body was, there shall spirit be.  Western civilization is the negation of biological reality, and unavoidably, since life and death are inextricable, the denial of death comes finally to be a denial of life. [The Survivor, p. 243]

The Mosaic law does envisage animal interests, does legislate animal rights, and, to that extent, does represent animals as moral objects ... In the Wisdom literature the underlying moral finds expression in the unfortunately neglected proverb: 'A righteous man has regard for the life of his beast.'

"We are entitled to believe ... that we can create anew all the substances and creatures that have emerged since the beginning of things...."  Marcellin Berthellot, chemist, 1885

Does the hawk soar by your wisdom
And stretch her wings towards the south
Does the eagle mount at your command?

Buber commented that in the Bible, the natural world is created with a blessing, but the historical world is created with a curse.  It is from the historical world of injustice that job cries out for vindication.  It is with arguments from the natural world that God  justifies Himself against Job's attacks, but it is against nature that we make our prolonged war.  Our work is cut out for a long time to come and our siege works are prepared, while the historical world still remains cursed.  The m os t radical texts for our time may be the Book of Job and that quirky, inchoate fable, The Tower-of Babel.

The Economics of Humanitarianism, or The Revolt of The Taxpayer's Conscience

The Research Community, in pursuit of TRUTH and KNOWLEDGE as hot as hounds after the fox, wishes to spare us undue expense which, considering the fact that the public pays for the research whose financial rewards from the end products of drugs or transistors most often finds its way into the hands of private corporations, is hardly a virtue.

Still virtuously, the Research Community comes up from time to time with schemes to save us money, and if some of these schemes makes one squeamish, indeed ill, we are reminded that the savings in taxes is enormous.  Take the example of "recycling" animals for biological research which has been suggested as a way of reducing the number of animals used in the laboratories and which has the 'Humanitarian Good Seal of Approval,' since it could reduce the huge numbers of animals used for experiments: A monkey that is put on a conveyor belt and spends weeks being electrically shocked to induce epileptic fits, may then have his eyes taken out to test the effects of blindness on his sex life or his eating habits, or he may then be starved to 80% of his body weight to measure 'famine stress"; or he may be given a dose of syphilis or LSD or cocaine or anything else that ails the human race.  If he is unlucky enough to survive this long, he may wind up in a radiation lab, doing good service to the human race in our preparation for nuclear war.  But not to worry.  If this sounds gruesome, "recycling" the animal (again, lab jargon) could spare the taxpayer the cost of fresh animals.  The savings are simply tremendous.

An offshoot--or a companion activity--of the use of animals in everything from sausages to the testing of pharmaceuticals, household detergents, cosmetics, spray poisons, alcoholism, drug addiction, drug withdrawal, diet fad,% chemical warfare, biological warfare, nuclear warf are, automobile collisions, inflammatory materials, and the inexhaustible gold mine of cancer research, is the lucrative business of animal smuggling--next to drugs, the most lucrative smuggling business there is, because like cocaine, the market just can't keep up with the demand.

Unlike drugs, however, dogs and burros, horses, apes and monkeys have to be fed, watered, given enough room to breathe in, and go to the bathroom sometimes.  Just like humans.  But not to worry here either, because they're carted around the world
more like drugs, for the market, the profit, the comfort and convenience of the human race.  The economics of their transport are worked out to the penny, exactly as it was for the slave ships.  Any animal that can't make the crossing from Burma to the United States, or from Venezuela to Belgium, wouldn't be any use in the laboratory anyway.  If three monkeys die out of every four, the other three didn't cost us anything and if the journey was a legal one, the dead monkeys are tax deductible.  So not to worry.  The monkey that survives the journey of asphyxiation, starvation, and living in its waste for days or weeks is the monkey we want, the monkey that will earn our money's worth in the radiation lab.

Luck is with the taxpayer!

In the fullness of historical time, there has evolved a way to save him more research money: The data from the experiments that the Nazis conducted is still available for use.  The people have died, true!  But the data is alive.  Though it might be morally offensive to some to see a footnote to Mengele in a research paper, and the use of the data might set a precedent (or certainly not discourage the repetition of such research), the pragmatics of the economic and humanitarian arguments about research strike some as compelling.  The Research Community, fond of the argument as to whether one would rather save one's dog or one's child, can now argue whether we would rather save one dog or our sensibilities A saving is a saving.

Lest anyone think this cost-benefit approach is repugnant to the Research community, it has its precedent in the exchange our government made of justice for "information" when they agreed to drop war crimes prosecution of the Japanese in exchange for data on experiments conducted on 3,000 pri soners--many of them Americans---"our boys." Some of "our boy,-," in the Japanese camps had their arms frozen solid in various procedures.  "Chinese women were infected with massive doses of plague, typhus, dysentery ... typhoid, cholera, anthrax, smallpox...... etc., or injected with horse blood in the interest of research.

It was an idea that interested someone, like taking out the olfactory bulbs from cats to see what happens to their sex lives (the "can you make it without a smell?" experiment), and if we sacrificed a scruple about justice and a few about mercy, the taxpayer was saved a bundle.  A government official explained '%..the information was cheap, costing a mere pittance compared with the actual cost to the Japanese of carrying on the work."[11 You just can't beat a good bargain.

During the PROPET Petition Drive in Massachusetts, I and others stood on street corners and in malls, signing up people for the petition to repeal the Pound Seizure law in Massachusetts, which bad allowed animals in the pounds to be recycled out to the Research labs.  We spent hours at places like the Topsfield Fair, in front of liquor stores, grocery stores, in poor neighborhoods and in upperclass neighborhoods, and we had the opportunity to listen to many comments from 'the people in the street." Three to one, the poor were in favor of repeal.  The handicapped, the "mentally retarded7 and those who care for them or who care about them, the aged, people in wheelchairs people on crutches--the dispossessed and those who care about them--the very people upon whom the tax burden falls hardest, and those who, one would think, have most to benefit f rom medical research --- these lined up with alacrity.  There were instances when we could not supply them with pens fast enough.  They lined up in rows of four abreast and went to fetch their husbands or wives or mothers to sign the petition.  They told me stories about pets they had lost, pets they had traced and found in research labs,, dogs that had been kidnapped from their yards, cats that had strayed and had been found "before it was too late.' One elderly woman said she would sign for 'all the old people and every animal that has lost its home."

There were unsavory experiences and sad experiences people wanted to talk about: dogs that had been rescued and pets that had been dead fifteen years that still brought tears to their eyes.  And there was one dark and angry comment that goes to the heart of modern science as much as any other oc)mment one can make.  One man came up to my table, snatched the pen from my hand and said, "ril sign, I'll sign, but I shouldn't.' Puzzled, I asked why, expecting the usual slithering statement about "how else are we going to learn?"---a question that always recalls for me Gandhi's response when once asked what vexed him most: "The hardheartedness of the educated." But the man looked at me as if I were a misguided fool and only snarled more, "Don't you know?  If we don't give them all the animals they want, they'll be snatching our kids off our back porches!"

This hostile statement will be disputed here and there, but the line between animal vivisection and human experimentation is thin and has been crossed on more than one occasion, as "leaks" that surface from the Research Community from time to time inforn) us: there was, for example, the matter of the syphilis experiments conducted on poor and tmeducated Blacks during the 1930s, and the LSD tests conducted by the Army on 800 civilians, after having sponsored experiments with LSD on monkeys and cats at Tulane University in the 1950s.  Further, as Hans Ruesch reports, "The Department of Health, Education and Welfare gave millions of dollars in grants to more than 30 university researchers for LSD experiments with hum an subjects, while themselves conducting LSD tests on some 2,500 prisoners, mental patients and 'paid volunteers'." (And now incarcerates addicts and spends billions to buy out foreign drug markets.)

The progression from animal experimentation to human experimentation is not an aberration , it is a natural progression, and there is evidence that the idea of the availability of hum ans for experimentation is not unthinkable in the Research Community, if at the moment it is restrained.  Recently the effort to abolish Pound Seizure in California lost by four votes.  The Research Community, according to Animals' Agenda magazine, "staged an emotional presentation at the hearing.  One of those who testified was a heart transplant surgeon who argued, "if research didn't have pound dogs, we will experiment on people.' The verb, "will' should be chilling.

Nor should this expression, nor the progression su rp ri se us.  This position has been enunciated for more than a century, in one way or another.  C.S. Lewis prophesied:

If we cut up beasts simply because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.  Indeed experiments on men have already begun.  We all hear that Nazi scientists have done them.  We all suspect that our own scientists may begin to do so, in secret, at any moment.

The most signif icant, the most profound, the most disturbing (and to many the most frightening) consequence of the development of Science lies not in the industrial and technical revolu tion, but in the agonizing reappraisal, which Science forces upon Man, of his deepest rooted concepts of himself and of his relationship to the universe .... Science, in its development, has gradually attacked and dissolved to the core the very foundations of the various value systems which, from prehistoric times, had served as ethical framework f or human societies .... To begin with, the adopt ion of the scientific m et hod, defining "true" knowledge as having no possible source other than the objective confrontation of logic and observation, eliminates ipso facto the animist assumption of t e existence of some kind of subjectivity in nature.  The absolute objectivity of Nature is the basic postulate of the scientific method....

Finally, "the absolute objectivity of Nature" may be a postulate of the scientific "method," but a method is not an ontological statement, it is but a method" and not a postulate of creaturely lif e. Those old perceptions of "prescientific" people that there are overlapping and over-arching values which embrace human and animal life, global orderliness and global existence--values which are not subject to facts and figures and information--return in the vacuum of value which science has bred in its rapacious and singleminded quest for value-free knowledge.

Edith Wharton, that most unsentimental woman, was once asked to list her ruling passions.  She began with 1) Justice and order,, 2) dogs, 3) books.  An excellent beginning!  In a diary entry, she spoke of her relationship towards animals: 'I am secretly afraid of animals--of all animals, except dogs, and even of some dogs.  I think it is because of the usness in their eye,% with the underlying not-us-ness which belies it and Is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery.  'Why?' their eyes seem to ask us."

I have seen comparable expressions in the photographs of monkeys held in brutal restraining chairs, plates strapped to their skulls and legs through which they are electrically shocked.  I have seen photographs of chimpanzees whose necks have been broken to induce brain damage.  I have seen the melted faces of apes burned with dioxin.  I do not see the question "why?' in their eyes.  They ar,e--it seems to me--in too much pain for such speculation.  I have seen photographs of a dockside lined with the bodies of chimpanzees who had suffocated in cars and boats during their voyage to the laboratories.  These have no expressions In their eyes, only in their lifeless limbs, their pathetic, lifeless limbs, and I am haunted by photographs.  In the eyes of those who are still living I see shock, the shock of terrible bodily pain confronting their human masters, the shock of pain nothing in nature has prepared them for, and nothing in our human literature has attempted to articulate, nor can they write the record of their agony.  Nevertheless, it is through my history as a human, in this century particularly, that I cross the divide to them and understand what it means to fall into the hands of human power.

Myy friends in the Research Community tell me I am anthropomorphizing and that that is a sin against the modem intelligence.  Yes? --- and why not ?  Which of us has not experienced the shock of human cruelty?  But if human awareness of human cupidity and human atrociousness is not enough for the modem intellect, let me put the question in a modem form: are we getting our money's worth in the pursuit of life and longevity, and how would we prove it? on what chart, by what set of statistics?  Or perhaps it would be better to paraphrase a famous electioneering question: 'Are you safer now than you were fifty years ago? ten years ago? five years ago?"

1. quoted in Hans Ruesch, Slaughter of The Innocent, Bantam Books, 1978.

*Information about human experimentation in Japan is from New York Times, Oct. 31, 1972, "P.O.W. Deaths Laid to-Zer-m--Wdr Tests by Japan.

The New York Times, Sunday, April 14, 1991 cites 8.2 billion dollars ai-th-e sum given by Federal grants for medical and biotechnology research.

The Social and Medical Antecedents to the Nazi Experiments in the Concentration Camps

"Art" for physiologists such as Claude Bernard was equivalent to everything that was indeterminate and dif fuse in lif e, and which involved intuition, collective memory and tradition in order to resolve questions.  'Science' was determinate, it expelled uncertainty.  Claude Bernard wrote: "...the realm of the indeterminate is the occult and the marvellous .. the real and effective cause of a disease must be constant and determined .... anything else would be a denial of science in medicine." In the case of a problematic profession such as medicine, necessarily occupying the realm of ambiguity, Bernard, accredited as the "Father of Modern Nledicine," a brilliant physiologist and an eloquent writer, threw down the gauntlet to the profession: one must choose liscience' or "art" in the practice of medicine.

No one was more influential in shaping the destiny of modern medicine than Claude Bernard (1813-1878).  His writings, his life as a physiologist, his views on medical science and vivisection were decisive.  His classic, An Introduction to, Experimental Medicine (1865), was required reading as part of the philosophy program for the baccalaureat in French schools up to 1957.  As Reino Virtanen wrote of him, " ... his physiology was...a fulfillment of Cartesian mechanism.  It contains the current leading from the Beast-Machine through La Mettrie's Man-Machine....Il Following the Cartesian path, Bernard excoriated vitalism in medicine.  It was for him "...a kind of medical superstition--a belief in the supernatural.... [which] encourages ignorance and gives birth to a sort of unintentional quackery .... In living bodies and in organic bodies, laws are immutable." [1]

Such views were not stated without opposition.  Gerdy, a famous surgeon and professor in the Facult6 de M6dicine at the Charit6, attacked Bernard at a meeting, saying: "Your conclusion would be correct for inert nature, but it cannot be true for living nature.' Elizabeth Blackwell, one of the first women doctors, expressed the problem thus: "The first law of good science and all morality is to know the distinction between the organic and the inorganic." But Bernard also knew that unless he submitted the organic to the model of the inorganic, medicine would not be accepted as a science, a status much coveted.

The healing profession suffered from a tradition of anxiety that was cen tu ries old, and f rom a strenuously contradictory relationship between doctor and patient, one founded on authority and presumed benevolence on the part of the doctor, and mistrust on the part of the patient that was often suppressed hostility. [2] The doctor was indispensable--like the gravedigger--but his presence always augured something nasty.  His status was at the mercy of a force--disease--over which he had little control.  Aptly, Peter Gay has called medicine, 'A Profession of Anxiety." [3] 'Gradually, the doctor, long the buff of hostile jokes, became a folk-hero of bourgeois culture." Men of science and medicine, like Pasteur, Koch and Bernard, became national heroes, their funerals attended by the pomp reserved for victorious generals and royalty.  The transformation was electrifying, and the medical profession grasped the brass ring with what Gay sardonically called "The Flight Into Knowledge."

Experimentation--which meant vivisection--became the accepted methodology: it became an orthodoxy.  Vivisection--both human and anim al--had been practised haphazardly and intermittently for centuries.  Galen used to collect the bodies of the dead--and perhaps not yet dead--gladiators.  Dr. Henry Beecher tells us that, "Celsus, practising in Alexandria in the third century ELC. cried out against the dissection of living men."[4] Descartes cut up living, unanesthetized animals and made the practice acceptable, at least to some: There were always considerable voices of dissent and, to an im port ant extent, the history of the rise of the medical profession since 1850, is the history of the silencing of these dissenting voices.

Human experimentation was incipient in the experimental m et hod.  Claude Bernard had reservations, but wrote: "The right to experiment on humans cannot be denied as a m atter of principle."[5] In 1892, Lord Lister acknowledged, "A serious thing to experiment on the lives of our fellow-men, but I believe the time has now come when it may be tried....'[6] By the turn of the century, the American chem ist, F- E. Slosson proclaimed, '%..a human life is nothing compared with a new f act .... the aim of science is the advancement of human knowledge atany sacrifice of human life."[7] By the beginning of the twentieth century, a considerable amount of human experimentation was being practised in England and in France, and soon in the United States, but not so much that it threatened public tranquility, though it had become a class issue which led to Anti-vivisection riots in

Great Britain.  For several decades in Edwardian England, the Anti-vivisection movement was composed of members from all the social classes, including the poor and the working-class who knew that it was their graves that were being robbed for bodies, their orphans and their people in the charity wards and asylums who were the victims of this new practice.[8] Their protests were so marked that Stephen Paget, founder of the Research Defense Society (1908), an English pro-vivisection lobby, accused the Anti-vivisection movement of being a Marxist conspiracy. [9]

The problem of the "material, " or population to be used f or human experimentation vexes modern ethicists.  Unfortunately, and invariably, those used for such purposes remain the same: the unpropertied, the unintellectual, the unwanted.[10] The problem of human experimentation is a civil rights issue of unacknowledged but im posing magni tude.  The opposition determined Bernard to advise vivisectors, in his last work published posthumously, to practise their discipline secretly, and soon after the turn of the century, vivisection or "biomedical research" as it is now called, went underground and a new era in experimental medicine was born.

But prior to the turn of the century, vivisection was practised openly, indeed often in theatres where men and women could watch unanesthetized dogs strapped down and dismembered.  The literature of the day attests to the forcible impressions made on many of those who watched a vivisection experiment.  Jung, in a diary notation, wrote that he was sickened by one such exhibition and vowed never to go again.  :..horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary. [11] Dr. William Sharpey, testifying at the First Royal Commission Into Vivisection in 1875 said:

When I was a young man studying in Paris, I went to a series of lectures which Magendie gave upon experim ent al physiology, and I was so utterly repelled by what I witnessed that I never went back again.  In the first place, they [ the experiments] were painf ul and sometimes they were very severe, and then they were without any sufficient cb ect....He [the experimenter] put the animals to death in a very painful way. [12]

Between 1860 and 1885, when vivisection gained a foothold in the academic world, its medical relevance was not at all established and often refuted.  In defiance of Koch's announcement that he had isolated the cholera bacilli and had proven that it made animals sick by injecting them into dogs, hens, mice and cats, Professor Pettenkofer of Munich heroically drank a glass of water swarming with cholera bacilli and triumphantly survived.  It was noted that epidemics of cholera and small pox came and went in cycles that defied the logic of medical determinism.  Anna Kingsford, an outspoken opponent of vivisection, asked Professor Leon Le Fort at the Faculte de Medecine of Paris, where she was taking her degree in medicine, why vivisection is insisted upon when its conclusions seem unsound.  His response echoed that of other vivisectors of the 19th century.

Speaking for myself and my brethren of the Facult'e, I do not mean to say that we claim for that method of investigation that it has been of any practical utility to medical science, or that we expect it to be so.  But it is necessary as a protest on behalf of the independence of science against interference by clerics and moralists.  When all the world has reached the high intellectual level of France, and no longer believes in God, the soul, moral responsibilty, or any nonsense of that kind, but makes practical utility the only rule of conduct, then, and not till then, can science afford to dispense with vivisection. [13]

Such sentiments as Professor Leon Le Fort and Dr. Putnam-Jacobi were echoed elsewhere throughout the latter.part of the nineteenth century, stated openly, with little censure.  Charles Richet, an eminent physician, wrote in his published writings:

I do not believe that a single experimenter says to himself when he gives curare to a rabbit, or cuts the spinal marrow of a dog, or poisons a frog, 'Here is an experiment that will relieve or cure the disease of some man.1 No, in truth, he does not think that.  He says to himself, 'I shall clear tp some obscure point, I will seek out a new fact.' And this scientific curiosity which alone animates him is explained by the high idea he has formed of science.  This is why we pass our days in foetid laboratories, surrounded by groaning creatures, in the midst of blood and suffering, bent over palpitating entrails.

We find no hypercritical pretence here whether of utility or anesthetics, or of the comparative non-serlsibility of the animals.  The operator addresses limself to the public as frankly and as confident of their sympathy as we might conceive a devil addressing his fellow-devils to be, taking it for granted that the sentiments of humanity are as extinct in them as in himself. [15]

Human history often develops specialized types of personalities, such as the shaman or types of priesthood,% often justified by an esoteric knowledge and practice, by a strenuous discipline, and by the lofty goal of saving the human race from corruption or disease.  The "physician-scientist," became such a specialized type of person, and quickly evolved into what Robert Lifton has eloquently formulated as "the healer-killer" in modern medicine. [16] To Li f ton's psychological analysis, however, must be added the history and sociology of the medical profession.  The personality of 'the healer-killer" did not arise in a social vacuum, but had its r-oots in nineteenth century vivisection practice, philosophy and discipline.  By 1916, in a critique of the vivisection p ractice, Dr. Albert Leffingwell commented: ... rarely, if ever, in the history of the world has a transformation of ideals been m ore completely attained.." [17] In the process, our civilization became became transformed as well.

Dr. Leffingwell, a crusader against outrages in human and animal vivisection--though not an Anti-vivisectionist--recorded the following experiment to measure the relationship between pain and blood pressure:

The means taken to depress the vital powers were as varied as the ingenuity of the vivisectors could devise.  Sometimes it was accom plished by skinning the animal alive, a part of the body at a time, and then roughly sponging' the denuded surface.  Sometimes it was secured by crushing the dog's paws, first one and then the other.  Now and then the dog's feet were bumt, or the intestines exposed and roughly manipulated, the tail crushed, the limbs amputated, the stomach cut out.  Then came the stimulation' of the exposed nerve, carried on and repeated sometimes until Nature refused longer to respond, and death came to the creature's relief.[18]

What astonished contemporaries who witnessed the rise of vivisection was the joining together of education and cruelty.  It was not only what was being done in the name of science, but who was doing it.  John Graham, principal of Dalton Hall in Victoria University, Ntanchester, in his testimony before the Second Royal Commission Into Vivisection Practices in 1906, expressed the disquiet of many when he said of vivisection: "This is a new incursion of -reaction into human life.  In the very highest part of human life, namely, the intellectual side, the moral side is outraged...."[19]

Leffingwell's efforts to arouse the public against the excesses of animal and human experimentation were joined by other eminent figures of his time as William James, but went unheeded.  In 1907, Leffingwell published a booklet, entitled Illustrations of Human Vivisection.  If the experiments on humans were not as grotesque as those upon animals, they e?ually embraced the new ethos.  Dr. Sydney Ringer, o the University Hospital of London, experimented with poison on children and openly wrote 'using healthy children for our experiments." The patients of ten su f fe red severe headaches, vom it ing, and spasmodic twitching of limbs.  In several of these case,% the children had been brought in already sick, some suffering from pneumonia, one from belladonna poisoning, and were subjected to experiments after they had been cured of their original illness, or in addition to their original illness.  "Dr.  Ringer's scientific enthusiasm was so great that he could not forbear making experiments upon hospital patients with a poison for which there appears to be no recognized medical use, and so rare that he was cbliged to have it specially manufactured for the occasion." His experiments were published openly in a text, Handbook on Therapeutics, in which he described using overdoses of salicin, nitrate of sodium, gelseminum, and other toxic agents on charity children, many under the age of ten.  The only criticism the publication of this book elicited was from The Lancet, which complained that such experiments would inflame the Anti-vivisectionists.  Dr. Leffingwell comments that Dr. Ringer already had the support of Dr. Keen, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Morehouse, distinguished American doctors who had laid down "the rule that in the study of poisons 'in order to appreciate properly any toxic agent, we must follow its effects through a wide range of created existence from vegetable to man.'" [20]The Handbook on Therapeutics was not an erratic episode in human experimentation: it went through eight editions.

What disturbed Dr. Leffingwell perhaps as much as the experiments, is that there seemed to be silent public approval.  He noted experiments made in Europe which were quoted in 'an American work without expression of disapprobation," though ,

A distressing feature of many of these experiments is the fact that the men and wom en upon whom they were performed were not only ignorant, but under constraint.  In this horrible case certain patients in the hospital were not merely poisoned once, but were obliged 'on compulsion,' to undergo the convulsive paroxyms and all the other agonizing symptoms a second time.[21]

His short book is a dismal account of suffering inflicted upon the unsuspecting, often for purposes of mere curiosity, by a profession which by now assumed this right as its prerogative.  What exhausted his indignation was the fact that these experiments wer-e published not only in esoteric journals, but frequently in newspapers without disapproval, and he indicted human vivisection as "the greatest vice of modern science." . It was a short step before wholesale populations, such as soldiers, the poor, the mentally retarded and the imprisoned for whatever purpose, were being used for experimentation, done in league with or with the knowledge of eminent institutions such as The Rockefeller Insitute and The League of Nations.  The defense. of the Nazi doctors rested, for example, on the argument that human experimentation had not been considered a crime but was accepted as a norm of medical practice.  In support of this position, their attorneys exhibited three volumes recording human experimentations conducted internationally by scientifically oriented countries. Of the dilemma of the Nazi doctors, Dr. W. B. Bean observed that "The degradation of physicians in Germany exemplifies the decline and fall of a group whose moral obligations went by default in a single generation.  The house would not have fallen had not many of the timbers been rotten."[231 The prosecution correctly rebutted the argument that such crimes committed elsewhere excused these crimes, but the rotten timbers were spread far further than in Germany.  Hum an experimentation was then, and continues to be, acceptable practice in medical science, and all efforts to restrain it against incursions into human rights and human dignity have proven futile.  There are now thirty-three codes relating to hum an experimentation.  None prove adequate because one of the essential problems has not been addressed, and that is that all judgment of such ethical questions is le ft solely to the medical prof ession itself to arbitrate.  Dr. Leffingwell ended his book on Human Vivisection, in 1907, with these words:

At the beginning of a new century, we are confronted by great problems.  One of these is human vivisection in the name of scientific research.  We appeal, then, to the medical press of America to break that unfortunate silence which seems to justify or, at least, to condone it. Now and henceforth, will it not join us in condemning every such vivisector of little children, every such experimenter upon human beings?  We make this appeal to it, in the name of Justice and Humanity and for the sake of millions yet unborn.

Humans and Animals as Victims

But there is a paradigm in cruelty common to all historical categories: To be without protection of the law, "right--less," depleted of status or meaning, the living soul sucked out and denied reality, reduced to an object, without recourse to redress for grievances, to be compelled into com pliance for whatever frivolous or bizarre or painful purpose, to be utterly at the mercy of human brute force, whatever the cause, degree, severity, or longevity, to be beyond hearing or help or sympathy, to endure and endure and then to die!  In the third century B.C.E., the author of Ecclesiastes wrote: "That which happens to humans happens to the beasts.  As the one dies, so die the others, yea, they have all one breath." He was writing about our common destiny in suffering and death, a destiny ever more obvious in our ce n tu ry.

Nazi breeding experiments on human beings were inspired by the theory of socialdarwinism, and based on the great successes in animal breeding in the 19th cen tu ry.  Contemporary arguments which perm i t cruelty, whether in the concentration camps or in the laboratories, have the common "Auschwitz reasoning" of brutal utilitarianism: "These are going to die anyway, might as well experiment on them."

Inherent in institutionalized cruelty is the use of secrecy, a primary weapon of the cruel.  Hence, inspections are pro forma and useless.  The Red Cross reported that it saw no evil in a concentration camp after an inspection of it --- while zyklone B gas was being carried in Red Cross marked trucks.  The cruel understand the principle of camouflage.  Hence, too, evil institutions are located in architectural arrangements to hide their practices from the public, at great distances from its scrutiny, or below ground, in the basements of respectable institutions.

Reform is irrelevant.  An evil institution absorbs reforms, while secrecy, whether in laboratories, in slaughterhouses or on fur farms, protects the illusions of infallibility or the necessity for these institutions and their practitioners.  Relevant to this is the respectable status of those who com m it the cruelties.  Repeatedly, we heard, "Who could believe that in the country of Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and Goethe such things could have taken place!' And who will believe that in our own cherished, seemingly pristine academic' institutions, live animals have been flayed to death to test reaction to shock.

The subject of human vivisection is regarded as solely related to the Jewish Holocaust, as if human vivisection first arose when Dr. Karl Rascher, a Nazi doctor, made his request on May 15, 1941 from the Reich leader, Himmler, for two or three professional criminals for high altitude test experiments--and that experiments on human beings ended with the liberation 'of the camps.  But human vivisection neither began nor ended with the Jewish Holocaust.  The renowned historian of this period, Raul Hilberg, observed that the medical experiments were essentially extrinsic to the Holocaust (The Destruction of The European Jews).  Th-e Holocaust-@the destruction of European jewry--could and would have happened, given the racist politics of Nazism, whether Dr. Karl Rascher made his request or not.

The pertinent history of human vivisection begins with the history of the institutionalization of animal vivisection, with the rise of the experimental method in medicine.  It has accompanied animal vivisection ever since, and its history is more appropriately
related to the history of medicine in the last century, than to the history of Nazism.  Experimentation on human beings is tacitly accepted everywhere as a given of modern medical research.  Its ethos was expressed by Dr. Henry K. Beecher of Harvard University, in his book, Research and the Individual (1970), 'The well-being, the health, even the actual or potential life of all human beings, born or unbom, depends upon the continuing experimentation in man.  Proceed it must, proceed it will." The right to experiment on hum an beings is not questioned, what the issue involves are questions of moral restraint: how far should the medical experimenter go in u sing his "material,' the codeword used for the subject of an experiment, questions of "informed consent," and whether the rights of the indivdual should supercede those of the community--or vice versa.  Occasionally, an argument is made to justify human experimentation by equating the meaning of "experiment," with "unpredictable accident," as when a baby may fall off the examining table, with "unforeseen consequences." This reverses the meaning of "experiment," which in its classical scientific sense, meant a controlled operation--hardly a synonym or metaphor for "accident.' The desperate argument bodes no good for the scientific or moral atmosphere of experiments on human beings.

In 1967, Dr. M.H. Pappworth wrote Human Guinea Pigs to 'protest flagrant violations of "human experimentation and gave illustrations of unsavory practices from the mid-1930s to the mid- 1960s, well past the Nazi era.  The hostile reactions and arguments he met with while collecting his material parallel the reactions Anti-vivisectionists encounter:
 

I have frequently been attacked by doctors who contend that by such publication I am doing a great disservice to my profession, and more especially I am undermining the faith and trust that lay people have in doctors.  When I have spoken on this subject of human experimentation to medical societies, the usual reaction has been, 'This does not concern us, as we do not do such things,' and the problems posed are ignored.  Mundane, material matters of pay, status and terms of service would, in contrast, produce a lively discussion.

It is at the extreme level of suffering visited upon rightless creatures that the relationship between animal and human suffering is perceived, or at the extreme reduction of life, such as in a poignant photograph by Mary Ellen Mark, of an abandoned child in India, sitting in a field surrounded by monkeys with chains on their neck s. In the consolation of child and animals for one another we feel the commonality of suffering among all destitute creatures.  Such is the commonality in the laboratory world of humans and animals where both are de-creatured.

Mod Science

For some of us less specialized human beings, it's far more than we would like to know.  Within its 144 illustrated pages are 1,000 assorted devices, such as the Rodent Emulsifier, described as a "heavy-duty 1/2 HP two-speed emulsifier [which] will quickly reduce the rem ains of a small anim al to a homogeneous suspension, for research involving total bone, body, and tissue." Resembling the ordinary kitchen fruit juice blender, but selling for a good deal more at $350 it "features all stainless steel, 1.2 liter container with lid, and super sharp blades."

In this same section, called Harvard Dispatchers, one can purchase guillotines for animals, in two sizes, a "Small-Animal Decapitator," starting at $288 ficonstructed of hardened and ground surgical stainless steel blades, a cast aluminum base and stainless steel ha rdw a re. 11 The buyer i s assured that "The decapitator cuts cleanly through bone and tissue, and is still sharp enough to cut hair." The Large Animal Decapitator is briefly described as "Same as the small animal decapitator, but larger.  For use with rabbits, small monkeys, and similar sized animals."

There is a delux model in animal guillotines called "the luxator' which reassuringly "provides a humane way of sacrificing small research animals without exsanguination.  A blunt bar quickly and effectively separates the cervical vertebrae,' and features a handle that 'can be relocated for left-or-right hand use." (Catalogue No. 52-9537)

Equipment in the Harvard Bioscience W H 0 L E R A T Catalogue is featured according to such research requirements as Respiration and Metabolism," Surgery, Housing, Experimentation, and Environment.  There are also books that can be ordered, and there is the handy tear out business reply card at the back -of the catalogue.  In the Environment section there is an electronic air cleaner that would be the envy of a busy housewife: "Now--get rid of that smell!  Animal room% no matter how clean, generate odor.  The odor is composed of invisible air-borne particles as small as .01 micron in diameter--particles which are not removed by inexpensive air fresheners and purifiers.  It takes a professional triple cleaning system to m ake the air smell clean." For researchers with more serious problems than animal smells, there are biohazard disposable baggies, printed with the "standard Biohazard symbol and precautionary procedures," caps, boots, sleeves and gloves to protect you against yourself, and a wardrobe of extra-duty gloves to protect you against the animals: small-primate gloves made of double thickness: "Six inch cuff... made of -split steer hide.  Glove has snap or rivet-type boot with chain sewn on back of forefinger I ' and a padded forefinger [to protect against the uncooperative primate that bites], and for those who graduate to larger monkeys, there is a provocative set of "Extremely Heavy Primate Handling Gloves." If leather gloves don't fit your style or need, there are chain mail gloves for $87.50 and New Harvard Cryo-gloves, which will allow you to handle any animal in any temperature from ultra cold -125 C to ultra hot + 261 C, "no thicker than dress winter gloves, machine washable and dryable.  Will rem ain flexible f or long periods in ultra-cold,"-unlike the animals who go stiff when put into freezer fluids.

The Harvard Bioscience W H 0 L E RAT Catalogue should be compulsory reading in philosophy and ethics classes.  No less morally disconcerting than the catalogue of macabre equipment is the introduction, filled with affable appreciation for the rat --- the indispensable tool of modem science.  The rat is used to determine human protein requirements, exercise needs, cancer agents, and even sex roles by studying rat brains exposed to testosterone or other closely related sex hormones during critical periods of its development, to see whether it will develop male or female behavior.  Assuming we still know what that i,% the rat is very important to human health and happiness and the writer's appreciation for this animal is rightly earned.

No mere 'test tube with whiskers,' the rat is the subject of a great variety of research undertakings.  Yet ... we are co ' ntinually surprised by what we learn.  In a study of inhalation toxicity of tobacco some years ago, various rodents were exposed singly in glass cylinders to cigarette smoke diluted 1:100 in clean air.  They were exposed for four hours a day for two weeks, and the experiment would have continued longer but the method had to be changed --- the rats hated the tobacco smoke and did something about it.  By the third day of the exper im ent, the rats, acting independently, kicked their own fecal material underneath the inlet tube of the cylinders, lifted it up in their mouths and hands, and patted the make-shift plaster until the inlet tubes were sealed.

The Animal Estate, by Harriet Ritvo

Ms. Ritvo's history is embedded in the modern, industrial world, with its emphasis on domesticity, family, imperial and state institutions, and how animals symbolized, enhanced, and reflected these institutions: cattle breeding in England underwent such transformations in response to social changes.  In the 18th century, it was a rich man's sport.  Only the landed classes who had sufficient acreage, money md leisure could indulge in the sport or "art" of breeding, as it was considered.  Much cattle was bred for show, with emphasis on elegance and ampleness, so that huge, sleek fat cows often had to be conveyed by special wagons, because they were too heavy to walk.  Many of the breeders had their prize cattle painted by artists: "Such cattle became, in a sense, collector's it em s, and sales of genealogically distinguished animals began to resemble the sales of other precious objects." These animals were intended to reflect pride of lineage.

It was not until the end of the 18th century, with the advent of the cattle breeder, Robert Bakewell, that cattle was raised primarily for money rather than prestige.  Robert Bakewell, who died in 1795, "epitomized the new agricultural technologists" and was among the first to regard an agricultural animal as a machine that could make money.  Here are the origins of the factory farming mentality, reflected in the conflict between the landed classes and the new entrepreneurial spirit.  By this time, roast beef and John Bull became national symbols, much as a soft drink and a hamburger are today in the United States.

The theory of evolution gave further impetus to the breeding ambitions of squires and cattle-growers.  Breeding celebrated human ingenuity, the fact that humans could "design" animals, as they came to do in the evolving pet industry.  It also reflected the aristocratic values of their owners and endorsed ideas of racial purity, articulated into human history by the 20th century.

Similar social impulses of snobbishness and class rivalry were reflected in t he new industry of pet-breeding, with events in kennel clubs and pet shows.  Most modem dog and cat breeds trace their origins to the 18th and 19th century.  On the dark
side of this frivolous activity was the suspicion of "mongrelization." There is throughout the book a subliminal but persistent relationship between animal breeding and racism to be explored in a further study.  In this book, the wealth of material excavated from the documents of kennel clubs, diaries, memorabilia, records of animal protection societies, newspapers, journals, the daily and weekly expressions of a century and a culture, is very impressive.  One is both amused and depressed at the persistence of human vanity.  Human beings simply love prizes.  They will spend years engineering a pig who is too overweight to walk and has to be wheeled about, in order to get a blue ribbon.

That is the sad record of how we treat animals.  The malevolent record concerns bloodsports: cock fighting, bull-baiting, hunting, dog-fighting, setting fire to cats, bears, big-game hunting, vivisection, and the constant use of animals in national rivalry and for imperialistic purposes.  The persistence and numbers are overpowering.  Zoos, ill-kept and crowded, were manifest symbols of Britain's empire.  Bengal tigers and African elephants were trophies brought in from the colonies, to be admired on London streets.  Big-game hunting became a sport identified with Britain's empire, and carried out so effectively that not since the days of Rom e's imperial powers expressed in the caravans of animals it brought back from the East and Gaul, have continents been so emptied of their anim al population, as an expression of imperial dominion.  It was not unusual for a colonial officer to have killed as many as 1,000 tigers during his stay in India.  By the century's end, big game had been hunted so mercilessly, and some to extinction, that protective policies were finally evolved.

Animal protection societies grew up in response to this monumental brutality, and as an extension of other reform movements dedicated to eliminate slavery, child and wife abuse.  In the 19 th century, concern for animals was comm on to many social reformers.  However, class conflict pervaded the animal reform movement and cruelty to animals, as with breeding and cattle-raising, became a class issue, with the practices of the lower classes regarded as particularly "vulgar," while the "chase," and big-game hunting of the upper classes went uncriticized, since many of the animal welfare institutions such as the RSPCA were often presided over by the upper classes.  'The identification of cruelty as a lower-class propensity implied a rhetoric of moral distinction which potential patrons found comforting and attractive.' The practice of vivisection, uncontestably brutal (the French physiologist, Nbgendie, caused street riots when he gave a demonstration, cutting into the backs of unanesthetized dogs), presented the RSPCA and similar organizations with its gravest conflict, for "vivisection was the exclusive prerogative of the responsible and the highly educated." With pressure from other growing, more activist organizations, the RSPCA managed to prosecute one French physiologist and three English doctors in 1874, though their role in fighting this form of animal cruelty diminished afterwards.  It was inevitable that newer and more vocal organizations would arise, more 'grass roots' oriented, less rooted in upper class establishments---but that history belongs to the 20th century.  By the time the Anti-vivisection movements matured in Victorian England, they had broadened their cause into a philosophy and a crusade which "offered a radical critique of Victorian materialism.'

Nature and animals became transformed in the 19th century mind, as populations became urbanized.  Animals became symbols for women and class distinctions.  Animals entered the lives of Victorians, not only pragmatically, but as a vast metaphoric network fo r def ining 'vulgarity," 'aristocracy,' "savage,' 'catlike,' "barbaric,' "gentle,' to distinguish class and gender.  The Animal Estate is not only a history of animals in the Victorian age, but a history of its human manners and sensibility.  Even the study of diseases spread by animals, such as rabies, serves as a model for the malignancy of stereotyping: the poor were invariably condemned for keeping rabid, wild dogs, and fear of rabies rivaled fear of masturbation.  Rabid animals were 'located on a social map that connected their disease with their ownerst status.'

There was, throughout this human contact with the animal world, an "insistent retreat to the metaphoric level," invariably reflective of class snobbery or national rivalry.  It has often been said that the human is the most dangerous animal in the world.  He is obviously also the silliest.  The Animal Estate is a good scholarly read.  It is not only educational, but as entertaining as a comedy on social mores.

Animals: An Historical Perspective

At a minimalist point, there is the early Confucian tradition, which primarily addressed hum an relationships: husband-wife, father-son, king-subject, etc., but a parable illuminates the superior moral bearing of the person who cannot bear to see the suffering of an animal.  Mencius, a disciple of Confucius, responds to a question from a king who asks why he is distraught upon seeing an ox being led to slaughter, and requests that a sheep be substituted for the ox:

Your conduct was an artifice of benevolence.  You saw the ox, and had not seen the sheep.  So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die, having heard their dying cries, he cannot bear to eat their flesh.  Therefore he keeps away from Its cooki-oom.[1]

In Eastern religions the problem of animal suffering is addressed mainly through theories of metempsychosis.  Christianity, on the one hand, because of its stress upon human immortality, human sin and human salvation, did not integrate animal suffering into its spiritual economy.  The modern world, on the other hand, encouraged by the values of science, attempts to deny altogether both the reality of animal suffering and the reality of human distress at animal suffering, yet the art historian, Kenneth Clark wrote that "The idea that man and animals should live together in harmony lies deep in the human imagination,' [2] and the historian and sociologist, W.E.H. Lecky, in his ambitious History of European Morals, [3] believed that there is a relationship between human morality and concern for animals.

The modern Animal Rights Movement is a response to both this ancient inst inct and to the unprecedented cruelty to animal life in the modern world.  The idea that affection or concern for animals is, as the notorious vivisector, Dr. Robert White, has described it, "a special form of madness,' is a modern view, deliberately cultivated in the nineteenth century by the newly growing branch of experimental medicine which desired a free hand in experimenting on animals and whose propaganda was developed to convince the public that "sentiment for animals' was effete, foolish, derisable.  As Kenneth Clark observed, 'The love of animals is sometimes spoken of by intellectuals as an example of modern sentimentality," reminding us that the wily Odysseus wept at the sight of his old dog.

"...primitive man,' Clark writes, "was far closer to the animals than we can imagine." [4] His interpretation of such prehistoric cave drawings as at Altamira are that they are, "records of admiration," not drawings of magical rites intended to give hunters power over the animals: 'Hunting for their necessary food and admiring to the point of worship a life endowment greater than their own, men thus established from the earliest times a dual relationship that has persisted to the present day: love and worship, enmity and f ear."[ 5] The paradoxical relationship of humans to animals is uniquely skewed, demonstrating throughout history, the extremes of worship and sacrifice, affection and gratuitous torture, admiration and debasement, with a continuing escalation in the modem world towards destruction of animal life.

The Christian west was heir to two traditions concerning animals: the Hebraic and the classical Greek tradition.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) had placed man at the head of the Scala Natura, above other animals intellectually, but in other respects similar to them.  The majority opinion, and that taken by Heraclitus (circa 540475 BCE) and then the Stoics was, however, that men and gods were entirely separated from all other living creatures by their capacity for reason.  Man alone among mortals was rational, the irrational brute creation behaved automatically and without reflection.

Heraclitus added the opinion that only gods and men possess souls and with minor variations this arrogant view has persisted in Europe for many centuries.  Reason, or perhaps consciousness, became associated with the concepts of 'free will' and 'soul.' [6]

The concept of animal rights has both a formal and an informal history, a recent history dating back about a century and a half, and a history dating back millennia, a forgotten history, r-eplete with concepts and legislation concerning animals.  This inform al history, as far as western civilization is concerned, has its roots in the Bible, though the Bible does not recognize equivalence or equality between humans and animals, and it is this issue of "equality of rights" among living creatures, human and non-human, which animates much of the contemporary movement's philosophical disputes.  The language of animal rights has its own history, reflecting and paralleling the concepts of each era which addressed itself to the problem of animal abuse.

In place of "rights' language in the Bible, there is the language of "covenant" or "contract,' and the covenantal or contractual relationship between God and the animal world is stated unambiguously time and again: i.e. the animal world is taken seriously by God and is involved in the presupposition of God!s justice and mercy working in nature and in history.

The covenantal concept and the values of justice, mercy and compassion, governed the thinking of most people who fought animal abuse up to the beginning of the twentieth century.  A religious divine such as Humphrey Primatt, who wrote The Duty of Mercy and The Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (1834), based fits arguments-on Godrs universal goodness and justice, though he distinguished between "the circle of compassion" and 'the circle of kinship." Even the atheist Voltaire argued for animal rights on the basis of the Biblical world view.  A review of the language and literature of the animal rights concept reveals that the categories of 'compassion," 'justice and "mercy' tenaciously transcend anthropological arguments about the kinship or lack of kinship between humans and animals, the superiority of humans to animals, or whether animals have souls.
Noah Cohen in his study of the Jewish tradition with respect to animals, Tsa'ar Ba'ale Hayim: The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Its Bases, Development and Legislation in Hebrew Literature, wrote:

... the Hebrew sages considered the wall of partition between man and beasts as rather thin .... the Jew was forever to remember that the beast reflects similar affections and passions as himself .... Consequently, he was admonished to seek its welfare and its comfort as an integral part of his daily routine and instructed that the more he considers its wellbeing and contentment, the more would he be exalted in the eyes of his Maker ... Examination of the biblical, talmudic and m edieval jurisprudence concerning the lower creatures reflects a coherent system of legislation whose purpose is to defend the sub-human creation and to make humans more humane.

The major categories of thought which shape arguments about animal abuse today were developed in the Middle Ages, and were concerned with the problems of "human superiority," the 'rationality' of human beings as compared with the supposed "irrationality" of animals, what constitutes "necessity" in abusive treatment of animals, and whether animals partake of Gocrs redemptive mercy. (A decisive difference between western and eastern views of animals does not rest on the principle of hierarchy, but on the relationship between animals and humans vis a vis the supranatural world.) This discourse was worked out in varying ways against an anthropology which appeared to dictate human superiority and the inescapable necessity to use animal life as a resource for human survival while, at the same time, positing belief in the existence of a merciful God, who is also merciful to animals.  Thu,% in the fourteenth century, a book called Iggeret Baalei Hayy!n or The Book of Animals and Men, was published by an Islamic association known as the Society of Pure Brethren or the Brothers of Purity, to which Jews, Christians and Muslims belonged.  It set forth the classical debate between animals and humans about "superiority," but as Elias Schochet writes in Animal Life In The Jewish Tradition:[8] 'However impressive the philosophical and theological arguments testifying to man's superiority over the animals might be..." the "moving and impressive" lamentation at injustice is voiced by the animals.  The rooster laments:

At midnight I rise to pray....
But the sleeping ones lay hold of me...
They slaughter me and eat me.
Have we not one father?
Has not one God created us all'?"

Animals that do harrn, such as snakes, scorpions, lions and wolves, may be killed in any way.  On the other hand, living creatures that do not hurt us and that are also not needed for food or healing should not be killed and ft is even f or bidden to make them suffer .... the Creator did not deprive animals of a due reward, and we may believe that all creatures, the killing of which has been permitted, will be rewarded for their pains, for ther-e is no doubt that God the Holy One does not deny just recompense to any of His creatures.  In this sense the animal has, therefore, not been created in order that evil should be inflicted upon it but in order that good should be done to it, nor is it in any means created for the purpose of being slaughtered, although this has been permitted to man.

The distinctions between 'harmless' animals and "harmful" animals, and "necessary" and unnecessary" thread themselves persistently through discourse about animal abuse.  Even Kenneth Clark observes that "... when we pass from the destruction of animals for food to their destruction as a source Of money-making, we may be permitted a different stance," though seen from the point of view of vegetarianism, the destruction of animals for food is simply one more use of animals "as a source of money-making," not different from the fur-trade which he rightly scorns.  Humphrey Primatt too accepted slaughtering animals for food, and regarded all other 'unnecessary' killing as demonic.  His exception rests, as does so much animal abuse, on the mistaken idea that animals are a necessary food source.  This error has had a baleful influence on past and present views about animal rights.  The two evils of animal abuse in the modern world, factory farming and vivisection, draw their justification from this argument.  'Me proponents of factory farming argue that via this method they can supply the world with a cheap source of meat protein--as if this is a necessity.  And the proponents of vivisection have drawn traditional justification from the history of butchering.

The idea of a hierarchical food chain, which appeared to endorse predatory behavior by human beings, has been accepted by the western world as an ontological "tragedy, proof of the corrupted, 'fallen" state of nature. Side by side with such statements as Rabbi Gaon's that eating m eat is not a necessity--only a "permitted" act has existed the persistent notion that eating meat is a necessity, as inherent in the nature of things as death.

Yet there was a debate in western civilization about eating meat which can be traced to the beginnings of Christianity and to the Talmudic era.  Paul in addressing a crowd, says: "If my eating meat offends you, I will give it up." The statement suggests that this subject was significant at the time. [9] The Talmud allows for the use of a beet, or a potato to replace the shankbone at the Passover seder for vegetarians.  The Ebionites, who are best d