It is an issue that has been discussed in Oxford for nearly 150 years. In 1876, the first Cruelty to Animals Act was passed, partly in response to a call for the abolition of animal experiments by the newly founded National Anti-­Vivisection Society. This was supp­orted by a number of Oxford acad­emics, including E.B.W. Nicholson, the Bodleian librarian. In 1885, he led an ­attack on the construction of the first physiology laboratory in ­Oxford, which was to be opened by John Burdon Sanderson, developer of the electrocardiograph. The ensuing debates generated greater heat than even the celebrated debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution 25 years earlier.

Then, as now, the opposition was strong on emotion, weak on facts. It became one of poet Matthew Arnold’s “lost causes” mainly due to ridiculous claims, including an assertion that Burdon Sanderson’s heart experiments were causing agonising pain to the animals. When Burdon Sanderson pointed out that pain was impossible ­because the experiments had been carried out on headless frogs, there was uproar. Another claim was that syphilitic goats might escape into the parks and infect the undergraduates; what the undergraduates might have been doing with the goats was left unstated.

Nicholson was part of a tradition led by Matthew Arnold and continued by George Bernard Shaw and C.S. Lewis (who was quite happy to take vitamin B12 derived from animal experiments when he contracted pernicious anaemia). They saw science, and vivisection in particular, as undermining the spirit­ual dimension of life by threatening to explain everything in terms of atoms and molecules.