She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Bureaucracy of Empathy: Law, Vivisection, and Animal Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain, and reported the following:
From page 99:Follow Shira Shmuely on Twitter.In December 1881, Roy applied to the Home Office for a certificate B, which would allow him to keep dogs and other animals alive after inoculating them with distemper, a virus affecting respiratory, gastrointestinal, and nervous systems. The operation consisted “simply” in piercing “slightly with a needle […] a minute portion of the skin.” The effects of the operation “if any, will be to cause a disease which all or nearly all dogs suffer at one period of their life and which seldom or never attacks the same animal twice.” Lushington deferred his decision maintaining that the application was incomplete, and asked Roy to duly submit a signed certificate.If reading page 99 gives you the impression that this book is packed with old letters, forms, and administrative memos about suffering animals, that’s because it is! The project aims to unearth from nineteenth-century official and unofficial documents the concept of (animal) pain. The Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) stipulated that any experiment “calculated to give pain” to a living animal should adhere to a set of requirements. The above peek into page 99 demonstrates how the Act was implemented on the ground in a daily bureaucratic routine. Here we see the beginning of a long correspondence in which a civil servant (here home office undersecretary Lushington) negotiated with a scientist (pathologist and animal experimenter Charles Roy) the terms of his experiments. Inoculation research challenged scientists and civil servants on whether a lab-induced disease constituted an experiment under the Act. It therefore contributes to our understanding of what legislators and the scientific community meant when they referred to pain.
--Marshal Zeringue
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