A Dog's Life

Give an animal four legs, and it is always easy to get the two-legged kind excited about it. This fact was remarkably well demonstrated in the early days of the New Deal, when move furor was created over the A.A.A. slaughter of "the little pigs" to maintain the Chicago price than all the Chinese babies that were bounced around on Japanese bayonets. This backwash of barbaristic animal worship has cropped up vigorously upon the local scene in the hearings of the Miles-Nolan vivisection bill at the State House, where pet owners have been explaining daily why the life of a stray dog is worth more than any diabetic, paralysis victim, or ricket patient just as long as he is a human being.

Of course the numerous school girls rallied by the editorials of William Randolph Hearst's Boston outlets don't see it that way. The general conviction maintained by attackers of the Miles-Nolan bill, which would legalize medical experimentation upon five percent of Boston's annual 3500 crop of stray dogs, is that the brethren of the medical profession are all natural sadists who derive orgiastic joy from the sufferings of mute beasts. A plethora of theological arguments are also adduced to show that what God hath made, no mere man should rend asunder.

Sane perusal of the situation finds no legitimate and non-hysterical opinion marshalled against the Bill. The sacrificial dogs, which are killed anyway, die in the cause of science instead of mere sanitation. Medical witnesses at the legislature have repeatedly emphasized that general anesthesia is always employed in animal operations Furthermore, clerical views from all major denominations have contended that no theological tenets oppose regulated vivisection Perhaps the waiting period in the pound for captured canines should be extended from seven to fourteen days, and certainly irresponsible personal experiments should be restricted to discourage such dog torturing as occured in a recent Stanford University fraternity initiation. But the real, basic issue is clear-cut. In New Jersey, where vivisection is outlawed, there are no medical schools. The life of 5000 dogs a year is not worth the strangulation of all Commonwealth medical research, which can easily balance a human life saved for every dog killed.