Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Surrogate Suffering: Paradigms of Sin, Salvation, and Sacrifice Within the Vivisection Movement

 Surrogate Suffering: Paradigms of Sin, Salvation, and Sacrifice Within the Vivisection Movement A N T O N I A G O R M A N Vivisection: The cutting of or operation on a living animal usu. for physiological or pathological investigation; broadly: animal experimentation, esp. if considered to cause distress to the subject. —Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary I have no pleasure in the blood of lambs and goats. —isaiah 1:11 INTRODUCTION At the end of the nineteenth century, philanthropist Frances Power Cobbe bemoaned the nearly religious reverence bestowed upon the scientific community by the general populace.1 Of particular concern to her was the newly emergent, yet increasingly powerful, discipline of vivisection —a discipline that promised medical salvation for humanity in exchange for the sacrifice and suffering of nonhuman animals. ‘‘To thousands of worthy people,’’ lamented Cobbe, ‘‘it is enough to say that Science teaches this or that, or that the interests of Science require such and such a sacrifice, to cause them to bow their heads, as pious ones of old did at the message of a Prophet: ‘it is Science! Let it do what seemeth it good.’’’2 In a perhaps unconscious mimesis of the sacrificial paradigm identified by Cobbe, Anna Kingsford, one of England’s first licensed female physicians, announced her intention to offer up her own living body for medical experimentation on the condition that thereafter the 374 兩 e c os p i ri t medical community forever forswear experiments on nonhuman animals . Kingsford eventually was convinced not to follow through with her intention by her companion, Edward Maitland, who believed that the medical establishment would deride the offer as insincere and ascribe to her either ‘‘downright insanity’’ or ‘‘an inordinate vanity and craving for notoriety.’’ Yet Kingsford, wrote Maitland, continued to insist that ‘‘if she could not sacrifice herself for the animals in that way, she would in some other which, if less painful, would be far more protracted.’’3 The statements of these two women point to a powerful nexus of sacred and secular salvational imagery that was coalescing around the vivisection debate in the Victorian era. While the obligations of humanity to the nonhuman world and the place of nonhumans within the salvational economy had been a consistent, albeit often a peripheral, part of the Western conversation in prior generations, in the nineteenth century the conversation took on a new tone of urgency and a new praxis of compassion that momentarily appeared poised to alter forever the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Although different models of sin and salvation, based upon different understandings of human-animal kinship/dissociation, struggled with each other over the course of the century, as we shall see, by century’s end a particular understanding and secular application of atonement Christology had gained ascendancy—an ascendancy that continues to exercise its field of force to this day. This permutation of atonement Christology (a Christology that itself was based upon the ancient Hebraic practice of sacrificing animals upon the altar of Yahweh) took as a priori the premise that the torture and crucifixion of Jesus not only was an acceptable price to pay for the salvation of humankind, it was the essential price. Through the mystification of secular and sacred actors, the logic of sacrificial atonement came to justify, indeed to dictate, the sacrifice of innocent animal victims for the secular ‘‘salvation’’ of the elect among humanity. It is not my intention in this article to argue for or against atonement Christology as a religious doctrine; others before me have pointed out both the liberating and oppressive possibilities inherent within it.4 Rather, it is my intention to lift up for recognition the presence of a particular, secularized formulation of the atonement model within vivisection in the hope that through recognition we may dislodge this model’s psychic hold a n to n i a g o r ma n 兩 375 upon, and undergirding support for, the Western anthropocentric imagination . My own experience in the field of animal advocacy has convinced me that arguments for the subjectivity and inherent value of nonhuman animals,5 while providing essential ground upon which to cultivate an ethos of animal care and protection, nevertheless are insufficient when faced with the power and predominance of the sacrificial paradigm that permeates not only the practice of vivisection...