JCP on Cruelty to Animals

John Cowper Powys was a compassionate human being who abhorred cruelty.  He had a deep respect for life in all its forms and across his writings pours forth his scorn and anger at the mistreatment of  human, and all sentient beings, who suffer at the hands of others.  He despised vivisection and below is an extract from his Autobiography on the subject.

"The public in America has been kept in the dark, even more than the public in England, about this matter of vivisection. There has never been upon any human subject so much crafty and deliberately misleading propaganda as that which the vivisectors have used to pull wool over the eyes of the world. The “sentimentality” in this matter is to be found, not in those who oppose themselves to this monstrous crime, but in the ridiculously emotional awe with which the average person, hypnotized by these crafty scientists and their sycophantic press, regards the whole problem. Totally unnecessary cruelty on a scale that the general public has no conception of, is going on all the while. The word “science” covers every kind of atrocity; and the issue is perfectly clear.

My opposition to vivisection, particularly to the Vivisection of dogs, is based upon an argument that is unanswerable. This wickedness contradicts and cancels the one single advantage that our race has got from what is called evolution, namely the development of our sense of right and wrong. If vivisection, as it is increasingly practised by these unscrupulous, pitiless, unphilosophical scientists, is allowed to go on unchecked—and it will go on unchecked until people feel as strongly about it as women did about women’s suffrage—something that the mysterious forces of the Universe have themselves developed in us will soon have its spiritual throat cut to the bone. In other words certain forms of sickening and unthinkable cruelty that hitherto, when perpetrated by individuals, have been stopped at once, condemned by both moral opinion and law, are now—as long as we vaguely assume it is done for the advantage of science —tolerated as an unfortunate but inescapable necessity.

Vivisection is the new superstition, the new tyranny, the new incarnation of the powers of evil. Like all abominable wickedness that has once got into the saddle, this vivisecting science has now begun to brand as “sentimental,” as “emotional,” as “idealistic,” as “unpractical” the deep honest realistic human instinct which it is deliberately seeking to kill. What science—using Vivisection, for the obtaining of what is often entirely irrelevant knowledge, and simply because vivisection is an interesting thing in itself—what science, I say, is really doing, is nothing less than suggesting to the conscience of our race, this conscience that evolution itself has produced, that it is a sign of superior intellect to be completely devoid of natural goodness, of natural pity, and of all natural sensitiveness."

(John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)