Ernest Howard Crosby, Elisée Reclus

“ It is the ugliness of the deed which fills us with disgust when we see a naturalist pinning live butterflies into his box, or destroying an ant-hill in order to count the ants. We turn with dislike from the engineer who robs Nature of her beauty by imprisoning a cascade in conduit-pipes, and from the Californian woodsman who cuts down a tree, four thousand years and three hundred feet high, to show its rings at fairs and exhibitions. Ugliness in persons, in deeds, in life, in surrounding Nature—this is our worst foe. Let us become beautiful ourselves, and let our life be beautiful. ”

“ It is brutalising work as well as cruel work, and those who create the demand for it are responsible for it. Where, as in rural regions, slaughter is less of a machine-like occupation it is hardly less revolting. I know of nothing more like a human murder than the killing of a pig on a farm, and the long-continued cries of the doomed beast are not unlike those of a terrified child. And here we have, too, that the ugliest ugliness of treachery. The pig, the hen, the turkey, as the case may be, has learned to look upon you as its best friend—the source of unfailing nourishment and care. ”

“ Every age before us has had its barbarisms—we admit that—and we may be pretty sure that our age has its barbarisms too; and if so, is there one more evident, one which has less to say for itself, than this habit of eating flesh and blood? And from every point of view the lines of reform converge upon a non-flesh diet: from the point of view of health, cleanliness, and an undefiled instinct; from the point of view of humanity and kindness to our animal kin ”

“ It is clear that we have no intention of subordinating all our practices and actions, of every hour and every minute, to a respect for the life of the infinitely little; we shall not let ourselves die of hunger and thirst, like some Buddhist, when the microscope has shown us a drop of water swarming with animalculæ. We shall not hesitate now and then to cut ourselves a stick in the forest, or to pick a flower in a garden; we shall even go so far as to take a lettuce, or cut cabbages and asparagus for our food, although we fully recognise the life in the plant as well as in animals. ”

“ Thirdly, in addition to the uncleanness and unwholesomeness of meat, it is easy to show that it is also an unnatural food for man. If it were a natural food, would you not be willing to go into the first butcher's shop, cut a slice from a carcass, and put it in your mouth? You would not hesitate to do so to any fruit or vegetable. If meat is a natural food, would you feel any repugnance at eating dog-flesh or cat-flesh merely because you are not accustomed to it? ”

“ But when the affection is reciprocated by the good woman who takes care of the pig, fondling him and speaking in terms of endearment to him, is she not considered ridiculous—as if it were absurd, even degrading, to love an animal that loves us? ”

“ We aspire to the time when we shall not have to walk swiftly to shorten that hideous minute of passing the haunts of butchery with their rivulets of blood and rows of sharp hooks, whereon carcases are hung up by blood-stained men, armed with horrible knives. ”

“ And so it is that we invariably shrink from corpses except when we eat them!
And the uncleanliness of meat-eating is not confined to the table. It befouls the kitchen too. Almost all that is perilous to cleanliness in the preparation of food in the household is connected with meat; and, with flesh, fish, and fowl once banished, a vast advance towards neatness and purity would be assured in the externals of life. Then, as we have seen, the butcher's trade is a filthy one, and the raising of certain domestic animals, and especially the pig, is not the most tidy of occupations. ”

“ An evil deed ought to look ugly, and has no business to look anything else. There is no hypocrisy, at any rate, in ugliness, and hypocrisy is the worst sin, because it is the sin of pretended beauty. Ugliness can at least tell the truth, and in the case of the slaughter-house it tells a great truth, which, though we suppress it to the best of our ability, will utter itself louder and louder until we give heed to the fact that in butchering our fellow-animals we are indulging in a totally unnecessary cruelty. ”

“ In some cases death must be prolonged to make the meat white. The animal comes to the place of execution, as a rule, in a state of frenzy, and to overcome its resistance the eye must be gouged of the tail twisted till the gristle cracks. It is futile to preach humanity to men engaged in such a trade. You or I, enlisted in such a profession, would act in the same way.
The essential idea of butchery for food is cruel, and you cannot be cruel humanely. ”

“ There is the cow first of all, an animal which we raise by careful selection on account of the size of its udder. Conceive of doing the same thing with any other female animal—the dog or cat or horse—and you will see what a monstrosity the prize cow is. The sooner such a distortion of animalhood passes away the better. And how is it with sheep? The wild sheep, like the chamois and wild goat, is a swift, alert, discerning creature, full of life and alacrity. ”

“ They are eggs, grains, fruits; that is say, the products of animal and vegetable life which represent in their organisms both the temporary arrest of vitality and the concentration of the elements necessary to the formation of new lives. The egg of the animal, the seed of the plant, the fruits of the tree, are the end of an organism which is no more, and the beginning of an organism which does not yet exist. Man gets them for his food without killing the being that provides them, since they are formed at the point of contact between two generations. ”

“ It is better to take our proteids direct from plant-life than to receive them at second hand from a Quadruped; and experiments show that in plant form they are soluble much more readily in the gastric juice than in animal form. The proverbial wisdom of our own language has preserved the truth for us. Bread is the staff of life, and not meat.
The proofs that a non-flesh diet is quite as good as a flesh diet are plentiful. The races which eat little or no meat are stronger than those which eat much. ”

“ That vegetable food, including fruit and cereals is wholesome food is pretty generally admitted. Plants may have diseases, but none that human beings can catch from them. There are poisonous plants, but it is easy to avoid them. That vegetable food is natural to us is shown by our unsophisticated tastes and bodily structure. Such food, then, is, unlike animal food, clean, wholesome, and natural.
That vegetable food forms a perfect substitute for animal food results from the fact that it contains all the useful elements of meat in a form easily assimilated. ”

“ What reason our domestic animals have for despising the human race! And with strange perversity we pick out the most inoffensive animals for slaughter. There might be an element of justice in preying upon beasts of prey, but we prefer to slay the harmless deer and cow and sheep. Is carnivorous flesh offensive? Then, why do we make our own flesh offensive by being carnivorous? ”

“ I am quite sure that if we were cannibals we should insist on eating people whom we had not known. And yet when it is a matter of the less educated and dirtier animals, we are ready to swallow the first-comer without asking any questions! And there is no scientific difference between dead bodies. The body, after death, whether it be that of a man or ox or dog, is a corpse, and nothing but a corpse, and we feel instinctively that a corpse is unclean. ”

“ And we all know that when men are in training for athletic contests it is customary to cut down to very small proportions the allowance of meat.
As to the effect of a vegetarian diet, we may reason by analogy from the animals. The strongest animals are vegetarian—the horse, the ox, the camel, the reindeer, and the elephant. In power and endurance the lion and tiger are no match for them, for the strength of the carnivora as a rule shows itself only in short efforts. The longest-lived of the mammals are vegetarian, the elephant living to an age of a hundred years. ”

“ Milk is redolent of the wild onions eaten by the cow. I have been told on good authority that the eggs of a hen allowed to feed too much on the dunghill will taste of it. Plants, on the other hand, almost invariably disguise their food beyond recognition, and the strawberry or mushroom grown in manure will not disclose a trace of it. Cut into a tree or plant, and you will find all sweet and clean. There are no disgusting secrets as there are in every animal, healthy though he be. And vegetable products do not begin to decay as soon as severed from the parent stock. ”

“ It is just one of the sorriest results of our flesh-eating habits that the animals sacrificed to man's appetite have been systematically and methodically made hideous, shapeless, and debased in intelligence and moral worth. The name even of the animal into which the boar has been transformed is used as the grossest of insults; the mass of flesh we see wallowing in noisome pools is so loathsome to look at that we agree to avoid all similarity of name between the beast and the dishes we make out of it. ”

“ We all eat too much, and meat seems to act as an appetiser, making us eat more than is good for us. I have read a learned argument written by the editor of a leading medical review, in which he admits that a meatless diet will furnish all the necessary proteids, but holds that in order to obtain them we must eat a vastly larger quantity of food, containing an excess of starch, which is harmful and produces obesity. ”

“ That butchery is cruel is so self-evident that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon the fact, and cruelty usually attends the life of the victim from the beginning. On the cattle-ranges of the West the animals are left to themselves all winter, the thermometer often falling to 40 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and the herbage being frequently buried in snow. A large number are expected to die from cold and starvation every year. They are transferred for thousands of miles on trains in the dead of winter or in the scorching heats of summer, left for hours and even days without food or water. ”

“ It is a part of the business of man to mould his environment, and help to create the environment of posterity; and even in the case of our own bodies, if after so many years of a mistaken diet it proved to be difficult to return to the right path, it would still be our duty to make the attempt. It is little short of miraculous that the return should be so easy. Ages ago, and before the historical period, our ancestors rose from a condition of cannibalism, and doubtless the medicine-men of the time took the conservative side, and they really had a good deal to say for themselves. ”

“ Tuberculosis rages in the most carefully guarded herds of cattle, and the recent Royal Commission in England has reported that the disease may be communicated to men by the meat. Anthrax, a sudden, mysterious disease which carries off a steer in a few hours, is very infectious to man, and how often may the animal have been slaughtered a few minutes before the attack! It is the interest of the breeder to hurry away his diseased stock to market as fast as possible, and no inspection can overtake his eagerness. Sheep are exceedingly unhealthy for the most part. ”

“ And eggs and cheese—particularly cheese—are complete substitutes for all that is good in meat, if such animal food is to be taken.
We must have proteids; the only question is, Where shall we get them? If we take them from the ox or the sheep, they got them originally from the vegetable world, and what good does it do us to receive them after they have travelled through the infirm bodies of these animals? From the point of view of economy it is foolish, for the field that will feed several families with wheat will scarcely suffice for a single heifer. ”

“ How can it be that men having had the happiness of being caressed by their mother, and taught in school the words "justice" and "kindness," how can it be that these wild beasts with human faces takes pleasure in tying Chinese together by their garments and their pigtails before throwing them into a river? How is it that they kill off the wounded, and make the prisoners dig their own graves before shooting them? And who are these frightful assassins? They are men like ourselves, who study and read as we do, who have brothers, friends, a wife or a sweetheart ”