Mark Twain's A Dog's Tale: A Century-Old Critique of Animal Experimentation Still Relevant Today

In 1903, Mark Twain published A Dog’s Tale, a short story told from the perspective of a dog named Aileen. Half-collie, half–Saint Bernard, Aileen lives with Mr. Gray, a scientist; his wife; and their two children.

One winter, a fire starts in the nursery, and Aileen pulls the one-year-old to safety. Mr. Gray and his scientist friends celebrate the rescue, debating whether the animal acted out of instinct or reason. Their discussion then shifts to another topic: Is the ability to see located in a certain area of dogs’ brains?

When Mr. Gray’s wife and children go on vacation, the scientists use Aileen’s newly born puppy to find out.

The experiment is gruesomely successful.

“Suddenly the puppy shrieked, and they set him on the floor, and he went staggering around, with his head all bloody, and the master clapped his hands and shouted: ‘There, I’ve won—confess it! He’s as blind as a bat!’”

“And they all said: ‘It’s so—You’ve proved your theory, and suffering humanity owes you a great debt from henceforth,’ and they crowded around him, and wrung his hand cordially and thankfully, and praised him.”

Aileen, the dog that had saved her owner’s child, is rewarded with the killing of her own. Confused about why her puppy is buried in the yard, she grows sick with grief and dies.

Twain’s tragic fable poignantly articulated the writer’s concerns about animal experimentation—his fear, in some cases justified, that men of science were blithely maiming innocent creatures to settle banal scientific disagreements.

The National Anti-Vivisection Society, a group that formed in London in 1875 to protest animal experimentation, reprinted A Dog’s Tale in its campaigns to shut down laboratories.

For peak emotional impact, the society’s choice to highlight dogs was smart, as the animals have been human companions for thousands of years. Research even suggests that their brow bones evolved so that we might register their facial expressions more sympathetically.

In February of last year, a similar choice was made at a congressional meeting of the Committee of Oversight and Government Reform.

At the hearing, which was called “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer-Funded Animal Cruelty,” three beagle puppies—Nellie, Oliver, and Beasley—sat behind the witnesses testifying. Led by Republican Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina, the hour-long meeting harshly critiqued the use of taxpayer dollars going to research that uses animals, particularly dogs.

“The beagles are a reminder of the real costs of animal experimentation,” Mace said in her opening statement.

Nancy Mace has said that animal testing unites the “QAnon side of the party and the socialist squad.” PETA recently sent flowers to the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya.

As a conservative who once described herself as “Trump in high heels,” Mace may seem an odd champion of animal rights, an issue stereotypically associated with left-leaning groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, which opposes animal testing as well as hunting, eating meat, and wearing fur or leather. But since Donald Trump first took office, the