If antivivisection was alive in America before the mid-1880s, it had very little to aim at. Slowly, that changed, and from the outset, American antivivisectionists targeted both state and federal legislation as the most likely way to generate support and to secure change. Medical scientists, and Henry P. Bowditch chief among them, found themselves having to work beyond the laboratory, making a case for laboratory work in the legislature. This chapter details the early defence of experiment in the United States in Massachusetts, New York and Washington, DC.