Free A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa Page B

pain of one’s own species, Edward thought, so more or less impossible to understand the pain of other animals.
    Ferrets who had experienced the hypodermic shied away, trembling, from the white-gloved hand; they panted in fear. Edward, now that he was perched on a stool before the cages and trying to enter into that, was tempted to interpret this as memory. It was reflexive behaviour, prompted by nociceptive neurons in the spinal cord and not by the brain, but it was still the result of negative experiences. If this was a primitive form of physical memory , couldn’t one also speak of a primitive form of suffering? The physiology of the mammals in the lab did not differ essentially from that of humans — the similarity was precisely why they were used. And, just like people, they were ruled by pain and pleasure. It was less complex, but the same principle.
    The consequence of Bentham’s reasoning, he thought, would have to be a new categorical system, a taxonomy of suffering. A new Linnaeus would have to arise to classify the pain. There was still no instrument that could objectively measure it. To rate pains in humans, a scale from 1 to 10 was used, whereby the patients themselves could report on the intensity. But there was as yet no instrument like a thermometer to read off the pain in tissues and organs. In order to arrive at a new system like that, Edward thought, one would first have to be able to measure pain. The pain stimulus might be objective (the pulling-out of a fingernail, or the poking-out of an eye), but the experience of that stimulus was personal. And how could you measure these things in creatures who could not express themselves verbally: in a horse, a dog, in Morris?
    In his daydream, pain is accorded the same kind of fanaticism they applied to AIDS in his day. Laboratories work overtime; instruments gleam in the cold light. The mammalian nociceptive chain is poked at with sophisticated tools, the network of nerve endings, fibres, and ganglia laid bare — somewhere in that chain must lie the secret. The tortures become increasingly refined; needle-thin pointers give scores to the umpteenth decimal point. To what extent do animals experience pain? Do they remember pain, and fear new pain? Can they suffer …?
    The world waits in anticipation of the new taxonomy from the pain factories. If the suffering of other species corresponds to or is even equal to the measure in which humans suffer, the consequences will be inestimable. The anthropocentric view that places man at the centre of the kingdom of pain will become obsolete, and the torture of billions of test and farm animals will be seen as mankind’s greatest disgrace. When animals are given the right to suffer , there will be no end to the mea culpas , the apologies, the commemorative centres and monuments of remorse.
    All sounds from the laboratories are broadcast on a radio frequency allotted specially to that purpose. The pain of vertebrates; the pain of invertebrates. Some animals writhe and shudder, but cannot make themselves understood. (The radio falls silent.) Other animals roar, screech, whistle, peep, hiss, and sigh — all fairly clear graduators of pain, but most of them hard to interpret. Radio Pain is on the air around the clock; we listen to their cries in the darkness.
    The Bhagavad Gita defines man as a wound with nine openings. The great pain project defines the whole world as a gaping wound, its openings innumerable.
    Edward rubbed his eyes. He was so tired.
    â€¢ • •
    In late May, Edward takes part in a four-hour live radio program organised by the VPRO, one of the major Dutch broadcast organisations. It involves the simulation of an outbreak of H5N1; a crisis team has been assembled to take the requisite measures. Jaap Gerson is the team leader; the others include a police chief, a senior official from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and a retired general from Wassenaar. Edward has been