§ Lieut.-Colonel FREMANTLEI beg to present a petition, signed by all the leading members of the medical profession concerned in medical education, including 1,497 names of medical members of university staffs, medical schools, and teaching hospitals in Great Britain and Northern Ireland—and I want to say that not one of them has refused his signature—to this effect:
The humble petition of the undersigned showeth as follows: Your petitioners, medical members of university staffs, medical schools, and teaching hospitals in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, pray that your honourable House will not support any Bill which has for its object further restrictions upon experimental work on dogs or other animals, believing that any withdrawal or curtailment of the powers at present granted under licence will hinder medical research, to the detriment of the health and well-being of the community.Further, your petitioners would pray that you will endeavour to secure such an alteration in the existing law as will permit, under proper provision for the prevention of pain and for efficient inspection and control, the use for purposes of research, of some of the numerous stray and unowned dogs now taken up by the police and condemned to the lethal chamber, thus ensuring conditions which are essential to progress in physiological knowledge and to the application of this knowledge to the practice of medicine.