Over the years, I have collaborated on and off with an organization called White Coat Waste (WCW). Their mission is to expose and advocate against experimentation on animals by the federal government. It’s an area of pretty bipartisan outrage every time news leaks into the public square about the gruesome things being done in government labs for no discernible reason.
The most recent incident involved $10M flowing through the Department of Defense to expose the spinal cords of adult male cats so as to deliver electric shocks through their vertebral column to produce erections…...
Another round of experiments involved inserting marbles into the digestive tract to see if these cats could pass them in their stools. There are many more stories that will shock your conscience and leave you asking, “Why?!”
One Thing Leads To Another
Of course, this is Geeky Stoics and not a public policy newsletter. Why am I telling you about this? Animal experimentation, or vivisection (as it used to be known) is a frequent topic of concern in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis, all of whom were in their prime during the American progressive era, which brought about a renewed interest in vivisection in the scientific community. This is a common theme in early 20th stories, such as Red Dead Redemption with Dr. Harold MacDougal. There are so many mad scientists in that game, bridging the uptick in interest in vivisection with eugenics. The dots are not hard to connect and infamously culminate in the Nazi experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
There is a curiosity within the human spirit to understand how every little thing works. As much as we like to think of it as a strength, one that has taken mankind to extraordinary heights, it’s also a legacy of darkness.
You only get intricate mappings of the inner workings of a rabbit if a rabbit was taken apart by people of good intent and a few who just liked it. You can only say with certainty the side effects of a pharmaceutical if there were tests done on living subjects to know what can go wrong.
In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf famously confronts his old friend and mentor, Saruman the White, who now is in service of the Dark Lord Sauron. Something that didn’t make it into the beloved Peter Jackson film adaptations is that Saruman the White gives up the white cloth, symbolizing purity and truth, and adopts a shimmering robe of many colors.