The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Britain from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish feminists, battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a that divided the country.; .
The controversy was triggered by allegations that, in February 1903, William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London performed an illegal vivisection, before an audience of 60 medical students, on a brown terrier dog—adequately anaesthetised, according to Bayliss and his team; conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists. The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful by the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Outraged by the assault on his reputation, Bayliss, whose research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones, sued for libel and won.
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled on the Latchmere Recreation Ground in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque—"Men and women of England, how long shall these Things be?"—leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called anti-doggers.; . On 10 December 1907, hundreds of medical students marched through central London waving effigies of the brown dog on sticks, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists and 300 police officers, one of a series of battles known as the Brown Dog riots.; .
In March 1910, tired of the controversy, Battersea Council sent four workers accompanied by 120 police officers to remove the statue under cover of darkness, after which it was reportedly melted down by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog, commissioned by anti-vivisection groups, was erected in Battersea Park in 1985. On 6 September 2021, the 115th anniversary of when the original statue was unveiled, a new campaign was launched by the author Paula S. Owen to recast the original statue.
Background Cruelty to Animals Act 1876
There was significant opposition to vivisection in England, in both houses of Parliament, during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901); the Queen herself strongly opposed it.; . The term vivisection referred to the dissection of living animals, with or without anaesthesia, often in front of audiences of medical students. In 1878 there were under 300 experiments on animals in the UK, a figure that had risen to 19,084 in 1903 when the brown dog was vivisected (according to the inscription on the second Brown Dog statue), and to five million by 1970.For 1878 and 1970: ; for 1903: "Monument to the Little Brown Dog, Battersea Park", Public Monument and Sculpture Association's National Recording Project.
Physiologists in the 19th century were frequently criticised for their work. The prominent French physiologist Claude Bernard appears to have shared the distaste of his critics, who included his wife, referring to "the science of life" as a "superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen". In 1875, Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in London and in 1898 the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV). The former sought to restrict vivisection and the latter to abolish it.
The opposition led the British government, in July 1875, to set up the first Royal Commission on the "Practice of Subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes".; . After hearing that researchers did not use anaesthesia regularly—one scientist, Emmanuel Klein, told the commission he had "no regard at all" for the suffering of the animals—the commission recommended a series of measures, including a ban on experiments on dogs, cats, horses, donkeys and mules. The General Medical Council and British Medical Journal objected, so additional protection was introduced instead.; for Klein, see . The result was the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, criticised by NAVS as "infamous but well-named".; . "An Act to amend the Law relating to Cruelty to Animals (15th August 1876)", archive.org.
The act stipulated that researchers could not be prosecuted for cruelty, but that the animal must be anaesthetised, unless the anaesthesia would interfere with the point of the experiment. Each animal could be used only once, although several procedures regarded as part of the same experiment were permitted. The animal had to be killed when the study was over, unless doing so would frustrate the object of the experiment. Prosecutions could take place only with the approval of the home secretary. At the time of the Brown Dog affair, this was Aretas Akers-Douglas, who was unsympathetic to the anti-vivisectionist cause.
Ernest Starling and William Bayliss
In the early 20th century, Ernest Starling, professor of physiology at University College London, and his brother-in-law William Bayliss, were using vivisection on dogs to determine whether the nervous system controls pancreatic secretions, as postulated by Ivan Pavlov. Bayliss had held a licence to practice vivisection since 1890 and had taught physiology since 1900. According to Starling's biographer John Henderson, Starling and Bayliss were "compulsive experimenters", and Starling's lab was the busiest in London.
The men knew that the pancreas produces digestive juices in response to increased acidity in the duodenum and jejunum, because of the arrival of chyme there. By severing the duodenal and jejunal nerves in anaesthetised dogs, while leaving the blood vessels intact, then introducing acid into the duodenum and jejunum, they discovered that the process is not mediated by a nervous response, but by a new type of chemical reflex. They named the chemical messenger secretin, because it is secreted by the intestinal lining into the bloodstream, stimulating the pancreas on circulation. In 1905 Starling coined the term hormone—from the Greek hormao meaning "I arouse" or "I excite"—to describe chemicals such as secretin that are capable, in extremely small quantities, of stimulating organs from a distance.
Bayliss and Starling had also used vivisection on anaesthetised dogs to discover peristalsis in 1899. They went on to discover a variety of other important physiological phenomena and principles, many of which were based on their experimental work involving animal vivisection.; for peristalsis, ; also see . "Ernest Henry Starling" and "Sir William Maddock Bayliss". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007.
Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau
Starling and Bayliss's lectures had been infiltrated by two Swedish feminists and anti-vivisection activists, Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau. The women had known each other since childhood and came from distinguished families; Lind af Hageby, who had attended Cheltenham Ladies College, was the granddaughter of a chamberlain to the king of Sweden."Her Career Arranged by a Little Brown Dog". The Oregon Daily Journal. 7 March 1909, 31.
In 1900, the women visited the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a centre of animal experimentation, and were shocked by the rooms full of caged animals given diseases by the researchers. When they returned home, they founded the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden, and to gain medical training to help their campaigning, enrolled in 1902 at the London School of Medicine for Women, a vivisection-free college that had visiting arrangements with other colleges. They attended 100 lectures and demonstrations at King's and University College, including 50 experiments on live animals, of which 20 were what Peter Mason, author of the book The Brown Dog Affair, called "full-scale vivisection". Their diary, at first called Eye-Witnesses, was later published as The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology (1903); shambles was a name for a slaughterhouse.; . The women were present when the brown dog was vivisected, and wrote a chapter about it entitled "Fun", referring to the laughter they said they heard in the lecture room during the procedure.; The following year, a revised edition was published without that chapter; the authors wrote: "The story of the thrice vivisected brown dog as told by its vivisectors to the Lord Chief Justice and a special jury, and as it is found in the verbatim report of the trial, proved the true nature of vivisection far better than the chapter 'Fun' which can now be dispensed with.".
The brown dog Vivisection of the dog
According to Starling, the brown dog was "a small brown mongrel allied to a terrier with short roughish hair, about 14–15 lb [c. 6 kg] in weight". He was first used in a vivisection in December 1902 by Starling, who cut open his abdomen and ligated the pancreatic duct. For the next two months he lived in a cage, until Starling and Bayliss used him again for two procedures on 2 February 1903, the day the Swedish women were present."The little brown dog". National Anti-Vivisection Society, accessed 12 December 2013.
Outside the lecture room before the students arrived, according to testimony Starling and others gave in court, Starling cut the dog open again to inspect the results of the previous surgery, which took about 45 minutes, after which he clamped the wound with forceps and handed the dog over to Bayliss. Bayliss cut a new opening in the dog's neck to expose the lingual nerves of the salivary glands, to which he attached electrodes. The aim was to stimulate the nerves with electricity to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure.; The dog was then carried to the lecture theatre, stretched on his back on an operating board, with his legs tied to the board, his head clamped and his mouth muzzled.
According to Bayliss, the dog had been given a morphine injection earlier in the day, then was anaesthetised during the procedure with six fluid ounces of alcohol, chloroform and ether (ACE), delivered from an ante-room to a tube in his trachea, via a pipe hidden behind the bench on which the men were working. The Swedish students disputed that the dog had been adequately anaesthetised. They said the dog had appeared conscious during the procedure, had tried to lift himself off the board, and that there was no smell of anaesthesia or the usual hissing sound of the apparatus. Other students said the dog had not struggled, but had merely twitched.; ; .
In front of around 60 students, Bayliss stimulated the nerves with electricity for half an hour, but was unable to demonstrate his point. The dog was then handed to a student, Henry Dale, a future Nobel laureate, who removed the dog's pancreas, then killed him with a knife through the heart. This became a point of embarrassment during the libel trial, when Bayliss's laboratory assistant, Charles Scuttle, testified that the dog had been killed with chloroform or the ACE mixture. After Scuttle's testimony, Dale told the court that he had, in fact, used a knife.
Women's diary