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Animal Rights History Timeline » [1837-1901] Victorian Age » George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

Conflict: Science and Common Sense

Humane Review

[1900-Apr] George Bernard Shaw, "The Conflict Between Science and Common Sense," Humane Review 1 (April 1900): 3-15; Google Books Free Online Library of eBooks).

Vegetarian scientific humbug is not wicked, like that of the Metabolists who have starved so many dogs to death in order to be able to assure us positively that "during starvation the output is greater than the intakes," and that if the process is continued long enough the animal will get weaker and finally die. But it is almost as silly. Why, I ask, are we vegetarians ashamed of our instincts? Why, if we prefer a clean and humane way of feeding ourselves to a nasty and cruel way, may we not say so, instead of raising foolish amateurish arguments about nitrogen and hydro-carbons an the rest of the figments of the science of "metabolism." Has mankind ever been plagued with such an idle babble as the wranglings of the people who, because they want to eat meat, are bent on proving that they ought to eat it, and would die, or be beaten by the Boers, without it, and the vegetarians who, because they do not want to ear meat, are bent on proving that meat is the cause of all disease, decay, immorality, and finally of death? What is more certain in the world than that there is nothing to choose between these rival contentions in point of glaring falsehood and pigheaded insensibility to everyday experience? I have not the slightest doubt, myself, that a diet of nice tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed, and tenderly cooked, would make us far healthier and handsomer than the haphazard dinners of to-day, whether carnivorous or vegetarian. The great incidental social benefits of the trade in baby-flesh were pointed out long ago by Swift, whose demonstration of them has never been refuted. There is no objection whatever to a baby from the nitrogenous point of view. Eaten with sugar, or with beer, it would leave nothing to be desired in the way of carbon. My sole objection to such a diet is that it happens to be repugnant to me.

The scientist who, with a thousand humane departments of research open to him, deliberately prefers cruel experiments, and pleads that the man who ascertains how long it takes to bake a dog to death confers as great a boon on humanity as the man who discovers the Rontgen rays and their application to surgery. The cruel (loving to read the descriptions of his experiments), the selfish (hoping for cures), the sportsman (anxious to be kept in countenance), and the cowardly (seeking and excuse for tolerating an evil they dare not attack) will accept his excuse: the humane will not. The final conflict is not the excuses in their logical disguise of scientific arguments, but between the cruel will and the humane will.