Animal Protectors

"It is not an appropriate occasion at lunch to go into detail," said Dr. John S. Codman, vice president, New England Anti-Vivisection Society, in Manhattan last week. Members of the International Conference of Societies for the Investigation of Vivisection were eating. Dr. Codman continued: "The cruelties of the laboratories are frightful and the practice [of vivisection] is being extended, with the approbation of the American Medical Association, to human beings."*

Anti-vivisectionists argued that the moral danger to man from experimenting on animals in laboratories was greater than any medical danger that vivisection might avert.

At Quincy, Mass., last week, one Benjamin F. Earl, argued that to inject anti-rabies serum into dogs was cruel and needless because, he believed, there was no such disease as rabies. Dogs clubbed to death or shot as "mad" suffered only from distemper or a similar relatively mild disease. To establish his belief he offered to let any rabid dog bite him. No rabid dog was handy; no experimenter callous enough to jeopardize Theorist Earl's life.

*In England recently Scientist J. B. S. Haldane let laboratory technicians experiment on his body (TIME, May 16).