The Pains of Lowly Life (1900)

AUTHOR: Twain, Mark

KEYWORDS: animals, experimentation, vivisection

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

A forceful denunciation of the practice of vivisection and the practitioners of vivisection to the point where Twain outright rejects experimentation on living, conscious animals, despite any findings which may come from it. He claims that he would only have a “sort of qualified satisfaction” at witnessing a vivisector being subjected himself  to the practice: “I have read and re-read these arguments [for vivisection], and have tried to understand why it should be considered a kind of credit and a handsome thing to belong to a human race that has vivisectors in it” (1). There follows a page of very explicit descriptions of experiments performed on conscious animals that have been medicated so they neither resist nor express their pain (2). Indeed, as Twain writes: “I could quote still more shameful vivisection records from this paper, but I lack the stomach for it” (2).