Animal House: A Guinea-Pig Discusses Vivisection

By Frank McGillion

Animal House - a Guinea Pig Discusses Vivisection
Animal House is an account of vivisection from the point of view of a guinea pig in an animal house awaiting sacrifice in the interests of medicine and humankind. He is initially supportive of his role in life, but gradually realises that using animals to benefit the welfare of humans is not quite as straightforward or innocent as he thought. Written in the style of George Orwell's masterpiece, Animal Farm, the book draws attention to the moral issues involved in a controversial and ongoing debate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796088090

Frank McGillion

Frank McGillion is the author of over a dozen books. They include On the Edge of a Lifetime, The Opening Eye, Blinded by starlight, The Leaf: a Novel of Alchemy and, his most recent novel, A Walk in the Park. A graduate of the University of Glasgow he carried out postgraduate work at Oxford University and City University, London. He has also worked internationally in the corporate sector and as Tutor in English Literature in higher education. A recent guest of the CBS broadcast, People of Distinction he has wide media experience.

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Copyright © 2020 by Frank McGillion.

ISBN:                Softcover                        978-1-7960-8810-6

                          eBook                             978-1-7960-8809-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 02/14/2020

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I’d be less than truthful if I said that life where I used to live was easy. It wasn’t. But a life of self-sacrifice is never easy. And, anyway, what sort of life would it be if you didn’t help-out others considered more deserving than you?

The tradition I followed was an honourable one and my colleagues and I lived it to the best of our abilities by upholding the Five Rules of Living to Serve Others; the five tried and tested diktats that explained why we were caged-up in an animal house, while the humans who assisted us roamed free.

It was an avuncular guinea-pig called Claude, who lived in the cage next to me, who introduced me to the Rules. And while they say it’s better to have your parents do that, as often happens in this line of work they’d been sacrificed to the Cause before they could get around to it. So, it was Claude, with his serious but affable demeanour, who taught me Rule One as soon as I was old enough to learn it:

We wouldn’t even be here if we hadn’t been born and bred for it, it said, and I accepted that without as much as a squeak back then. After all, the self-evident is self-evident. Or at least it seems to be before you bump into what it really means head on. After all, I was alive and well and being well-treated. What was there to be negative about?

In addition to teaching me the basics of the Rules one-to-one, Claude also went into detail about them on a collective basis during weekly meetings called Rule Remembrance Sessions. These were particularly useful for those of us who had reached adolescence and started to question things, as developing youngsters tend to.

Claude was one of the brightest guinea-pigs of his generation and he went into the sort of detail in these sessions that some of the more discerning animals demanded. But he didn’t have to say a great deal to convince anyone about Rule One. What he did say was more than adequate:

‘Who can argue with the self-evident truth that animals intended for vivisection wouldn’t even exist if they hadn’t been bred for that specific purpose?’ he said, reinforcing my own thoughts on the subject. ‘Who could take issue with the fact that a shot at life however uncertain is better than no shot at all?

‘It’s simply better to exist than not to,’ is how he put it informally and, as I’ve indicated, and until you are obliged to face your destiny head on, that makes perfect sense.

I may have had morbid thoughts at times, but life wasn’t all that bad. My associates and I shared the Rodents & Related Block of the Animal House—a purpose-built building where we were billeted for the duration. Some of us doubled up for various reasons and I shared a large cage with William Harvey another guinea-pig with a certain degree of refinement but no real pedigree. Indeed, word had it that William was descended from a family of what were known as ‘Reluctants’. Despite this we got on well. The Prince and the pauper, I used to joke with him, and he took it well enough though I never heard him laugh at it. Not once!

We were all treated as well as we merited. We were kept warm, dry and safe from any natural predators. And, while we did have somewhat restricted social lives, we were fed, watered and had a regular routine complete with fixed times to go to sleep and waken up. As for those of us who tended towards the nocturnal; there was a red light kept on at night so we could stick our noses through the mesh of our cages and have a quick look round and a good hard sniff at what was going on. And there was always something going on in the Animal House. Even if it wasn’t always pleasant.

A number of my acquaintances had difficulty sleeping, a noted example being an irascible female albino rat called Madame Curie with whom I often differed as we didn’t have a lot in common. Such occasional bouts of insomnia weren’t surprising given the nature of our calling. Indeed, I was a