Britain Licenses the Vivisector

On 15 August 1876, the Cruelty to Animals Act received royal assent, becoming the first national statute anywhere to govern experiments on living animals. It followed a Royal Commission on Vivisection set up in July 1875, after a former vivisector, George Hoggan, published a letter accusing physiologists of using anaesthesia unreliably at best. The act required researchers to hold a government license, keep animals anaesthetised for painful procedures, and kill them afterward rather than experiment on the same animal a second time. Frances Power Cobbe and the anti-vivisection societies she built had wanted the practice stopped outright, and what they got instead was paperwork, which they said so out loud within months.