HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 85 
view is that each editor must be exactly that [an arbiter] in as impartially a 
scientific sense as he is the arbiter of the scientific adequacy of the man’s experi- 
mentaT design and the validity of his conclusions. The American Physiological 
Society could scarcely condone by publication results obtained in experiments 
violating our accepted code for the humane care and use of animals.” Subse- 
quently the society adopted the policy whereby papers could be refused for 
publication if they did not meet the editors’ humane standards. Two such cases 
have come to my attention. In one, the director of the laboratory referred to 
above did not approve of the experiments on curarised dogs, yet he permitted 
these and other painful experiments to' be done and left it to the editors of the 
American Journal of Physiology to say in effect, “This is too cruel. We cannot 
condone it, and we will not publish it.” 
The National Society for Medical Research, chief opponent and organizer of 
scientific opposition to H.R. 1937, sent out a survey to the editors of 465 scientific 
journals to ask them “how they feel about censorship of scientific reports on 
humane grounds.” They gleefully reported that less than 1 percent of those 
who replied would refuse to publish on these grounds. In short, the view of 
the NSMR and such editors as wrote to it, is that no torment is too frightful, no 
agony too prolonged to be inflicted in the name of science — or as Dr. Maurice 
Visscher put it, “There can be no cruelty in the pursuit of knowledge.” 
These are chlling thoughts, but they must be faced squarely, for this ruthless 
ideology has adherents in many laboratories, and its proponents are seeking to 
develop it wherever they can, in high school and even, sometimes, in grade school 
children, by teaching them to perform painful experiments on animals — expe- 
riments which can provide no useful knowledge but which create callousness and 
offer fertile ground for any sadistic tendencies to grow. 
Men who wish to indoctrinate untrained youths in useless pain infliction 
cannot be expected to be concerned about unplanned and improperly conducted 
experiments inside scientific institutions. Many such experiments are not 
even submitted for publication, much less published. Such work involves none 
of the burdensome recordkeeping to which some opponents of H.R. 1937 have so 
passionately objected, I will mention just one of the reports we received, in 
which a student cut legs off frogs and put the still living animals in various 
fluids to see if the legs would regenerate. No one hindered this crude parody 
of a scientific experiment. 
Here is a report we received on student surgery in a leading veterinary college : 
“Whenever dogs were to be operated on, they were by many surgical teams al- 
lowed to come so far out of their anesthesia that they actually made attempts to 
rise and walk. It is unnecessary to describe, is it not, just how unpleasant a 
series of sensations must have been felt by these victims, with the tops of their 
skulls chopped off, their carotid arteries exposed and cannulated and several 
nerves exposed ?” 
I have seen dogs in medical schools upon which a series of major operations 
has been done, pitiful, cringing, emaciated creatures. Let me show you a picture 
from a scientific journal that will give you an idea of how some of the dogs in 
laboratories look. Fortunately, there is some tendency away from this type of 
practice surgery course, for example, the University of Florida Medical School 
recently eliminated this course from the curriculum. However, others still 
cling to the practice. That it leads to grave abuses even beyond the long-drawn- 
out pain caused by the series of operations will be testified to by another witness, 
and I would quote from a letter from a student who writes that “Veterinary 
students at do survival surgery on dogs. They do a series of operations 
such as opening the stomach, removing the spleen, removing parts of the in- 
testine and joining it together again, routine castration and spaying, and other 
operations. The dogs become thin and pitiful looking and if they become ill as 
a result of the operations, they receive no treatment because they are going to 
die anyway. The doors of the kennel are closed at 5 p.m. so that if the opera- 
tion is done late in the afternoon, the student cannot see that the dog comes out 
of the anesthetic all right. It is stated that dogs are hard to get. Owned dogs 
which owners have asked to have desroyed and which have been left at the 
veterinary college with that understanding are sometimes used for the surgery 
classes and kept alive for a, series of operations toy students. The owners are 
not aware of this.” 
Opponents of H.R. 1937 will tell this committee that even larger amounts 
of money than they are now receiving from the Government is all that is needed. 
It is our experience that in visiting new laboratories it is common to find large 
