256 OUR OBLIGATIONS TO THE LOWER ANIMALS 



there is something to be said for regulated vivisection, 

 Avithout which no effective advance could have been 

 made in dealing with tuberculosis, which, until Koch, 

 by experiment on living animals, had devised means 

 for detecting the presence of this dire disease, five- 

 and-twenty years ago was rampant in the dairy stock 

 of this and other countries. The Danish Govern- 

 ment led the attack against the enemy. In 1897 I 

 saw the test applied to a herd of three hundred red 

 Zealand cows. Three or four re-acted to the tuberculin 

 test and were forthwith isolated, to be fattened for the 

 butcher. In the same year the test revealed the pre- 

 sence of tubercle in 77 per cent, of a herd of ninety 

 cows in Cheshire no unusual proportion at the time, 

 as subsequent observations proved. Vivisection, then, 

 has been the means whereby veterinary science has 

 been enabled to protect cattle from one of the sorest 

 diseases that afflict them. 



' Oh, but we don't want cattle any more ! ' was, in 

 effect, the answer of the vegetarian members of the 

 Women's Congress ; for it appears that when what they 

 consider the rights of animals, wild or domesticated, 

 are recognised by the Legislature, flesh and milk will 

 cease to be articles of human diet. It is wicked, they 

 maintain, to support human life at the expense of ani- 

 mal life : cakes and ale those may still have who can 

 command them, but down with the roast-beef of Old 

 England ! be Scotch collops anathema, and Irish stew 

 accounted an unclean thing! This is where ultra- 

 humanitarian squeamishness will land us a very 

 caricature of the humane treatment of animals. How 



