Vivisection

Inspiring, educational, moving, sometimes distressing, this is a riveting visual history of man’s best friend. Thomas Laqueur, from a German Jewish family, whose mother owned boxers, introduces us to many hitherto unexplored facts. Who knew that in 1938 guard dogs, using Bedouin herding dogs, were specially bred for ‘the new Zion’? Or that Darwin thought that dogs have a conscience?   We are encouraged to scrutinise master- pieces of art with a fresh eye. In ‘The Wedding at Cana’ (1563), Paolo Veronese includes one white dog, who is ‘looking up at Jesus’s white shining face and invites us to join it’. Five dogs feature in this painting, and I took some time to spot each.

I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I put my head in my hands when I realised there were photographs), it was also dispiriting, because it showed up my hypocrisy. Like so many, I would gratefully accept perfusion brain-cooling techniques if they helped me survive surgery, yet I do not wish to read about how these techniques were developed on primates. It would be enough for me just to know that their suffering was minimised. This book asks even more of its reader, by focusing on gruelling experiments that lead nowhere.