CLAUDE Bernard, France's national hero and apostle of the modern animal experimentation cult, had an oven built, that would leave the head of an animal outside while the body was roasting inside. This enabled him to write one of his many psuedo-scientific works: Leçons sur la chaleur animale, sur les effets de la chaleur et sur la fièvre (1876), meaning "Lessons on animal heat, on the effects of heat, and on fever." The founder of today's vivisectionist method actually hoped to discover through that oven "the secret of the fever": as if body heat caused by baking in an oven were the same thing as a fever caused by an infection. Neither Bernard nor his disciples ever realized that he was confusing cause and consequence - that in a patient the high heat is the consequence of the malady, not the cause. Bernard described in detail the slow death of dogs and rabbits roasted alive, his oven's only contribution to science being the information that a dog with its head outside the oven takes longer to die than one which is entirely locked in.
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Ever since Claude Bernard palmed off that sophism about true science on a credulous world still groggy from the long sleep of medievalism, the horrible kitchen has
widened immeasurably, its horrors have multiplied, taking on forms that even his deranged brain had not conceived of, its miasmas have engulfed half the globe, spreading
incurable diseases among mankind; but the "superb salon" has receded further and further, making room for ever larger hospitals, where increasingly perplexed priests in white robes
perform mechanistic rituals that have replaced yesterday's and will be replaced by tomorrow's, and are as incomprehensible to the performers as to the patients on whom they are
inflicted.
The moral law, whose existence the vivisectionists deny because they can't reproduce it in a laboratory much less grasp it intuitively, operates in many different ways, most of them
extremely subtle, but all equally devastating in the long run.
To believe that the crimes which humanity is inflicting against the animals in the pseudo-scientific laboratories can go unpunished is not just a sign of obtuseness but of folly. The
child who is born retarded or malformed or dies of cancer or leukemia because its mother was prescribed a harmful hormone or tranquilizer that had been proved harmless in long, drawn-out,
cruel animal tests - this child pays for the crimes committed by others. But so have billions of animals had to pay in the cruelest way for the callousness not only of the vivisectors but
of humanity at large, which bears at the very least the guilt of indifference - indifference to the infinite tortures other sentient beings have been subjected to; and many people bear
the responsibility of having actively supported the inhuman methods that now fall back on them and their offspring. A great many innocent human beings must also pay for the continual
violations of the moral law, simply because they are members of the human race, and that can't be helped. The moral law, once it starts operating, lets the chips fall where they may, and
all one can say is that those chips are very effective.
The prolonged sufferings people are subjected to before being allowed to die are among the more obvious, short-term demonstrations of the moral law at work.
Richard Kunnes, the young doctor who once declared that the American Medical Association (AMA) should be referred to as the American Murder Association, and set fire to his membership
card at an AMA convention, wrote in Your Money or Your Life (Dodd, Mead, New York, l974):
"The 1960 - l97O decade was the period of greatest U.S. health research expenditures in history and yet produced the least results." ('Research' has been put in italics by me here to remind the reader of something Dr. Kunnes didn't consider necessary to point out: that the research activity which looms so importantly in his reflections involves mainly, and often exclusively, animal experimentation.) And further: "What can be predicted with utmost certainty is that the continued diversion of resources towards research will render health care more and more unavailable, resulting in the deaths of thousands, and cause undue suffering to hundreds of thousands every year. Many medical schools have had to drain money allocated for patient services in order to put it into research ."
(from: Slaughter of the Innocent, by Hans Ruesch, CIVIS)