On this day in vegan history · January 27, 1832
The Man Who Wrote Alice Also Took On Vivisection
Before he sent a girl down a rabbit hole, Charles Dodgson spent years picking apart the arguments scientists used to justify cutting into live animals.
The facts
- Born
- January 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England
- Given name
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
- Essay
- "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection," Fortnightly Review, June 1875
- Day job
- Mathematics lecturer, Christ Church, Oxford
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, and grew up to teach mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, writing as Lewis Carroll. In June 1875, the Fortnightly Review published his essay 'Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection,' a point-by-point takedown of the justifications researchers gave for experimenting on live, unanesthetized animals. Carroll wasn't a scientist and made no claim to expertise on physiology; he argued as a logician, walking through each defense of the practice and showing where it broke down. It was a strange pairing, the invented world of a girl and a pack of talking animals coming from the same pen that dismantled the case for hurting real ones.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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At a time when this painful subject is engrossing so large a share of public attention, no apology, I trust, is needed for the following attempt to formulate and classify some of the many fallacies
Lewis Carroll, "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection," Fortnightly Review, June 1875
Source: Wikisource -
All who recognise the difference of right and wrong must admit, if the question be closely pressed, that the infliction of pain is in
Lewis Carroll, "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection," Fortnightly Review, June 1875
Source: Wikisource
Why it still matters
It's an early example of the anti-vivisection argument being made from outside science, on grounds anyone could follow, and it shows the movement against animal experimentation had serious, unexpected voices behind it more than a century before ethics committees existed.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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