Moreover, intimacy with an animal easily takes away the appetite for its flesh. Among ourselves, as Mandeville observes, “some people are not to be persuaded to taste of any creatures they have daily seen and been acquainted with, whilst they were alive; others extend their scruple no further than to their own poultry, and refuse to eat what they fed and took care of themselves; yet all of them will feed heartily and without remorse on beef, mutton, and fowls, when they are bought in the market.”[83] Among other races we meet with feelings no less refined. Mencius, the Chinese moralist, said:—“So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die; having heard their dying cries, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. Therefore he keeps away from his slaughter house and cook-room.”[84] The abstinence from domestic fowls and their eggs, as also from the tame pig, may occasionally have sprung from sympathy. Dr. von den Steinen states that the Brazilian Yuruna cannot be induced to eat any animal which they have bred themselves, and that they apparently considered it very immoral when he and his party ate hen-eggs.[85] In the sacred books of India it is represented as a particularly bad action to eat certain domestic animals, including village pigs and tame cocks; a twice-born man who does so knowingly will become an outcast.[86] Among the Bechuanas in South Africa dogs and tame cats are not eaten, though wild cats are.[87] The Arabs of Dukkâla in Morocco eat their neighbours’ cats but not their own. Among the Dinka only such cows as die naturally or by an accident are used for food; but a dead cow is never eaten by the bereaved owner himself, who is too much afflicted at the loss to be able to touch a morsel of the carcase of his departed beast.[88] Herodotus says that the Libyans would not taste the flesh of the cow, though they ate oxen;[89] and the same rule prevailed among the Egyptians and Phœnicians, who would sooner have partaken of human flesh than of the meat of a cow.[90] The eating of cow’s flesh is prohibited by the law of Brahmanism.[91] According to Dr. Rájendralála Mitra, the idea of beef as an article of food “is so shocking to the Hindus, that thousands over thousands of the more orthodox among them never repeat the counterpart of the word in their vernaculars, and many and dire have been the sanguinary conflicts which the shedding of the blood of cows has caused.”[92] In China “the slaughter of buffaloes for food is unlawful, according to the assertions of the people, and the abstaining from the eating of beef is regarded as very meritorious.”[93] It is said in the ‘Divine Panorama’ that he who partakes of beef or dog’s flesh will be punished by the deity.[94] In Japan neither cattle nor sheep were in former days killed for food;[95] and in the rural districts many people still think it wrong to eat beef.[96] In Rome the slaughter of a labouring ox was in olden days punished with excommunication;[97] and at Athens and in Peloponnesus it was prohibited even on penalty of death.[98] Indeed, the ancient idea has survived up to modern times in Greece, where it has been held as a maxim that the animal which tills the ground ought not to be used for food.[99] These prohibitions are no doubt to some extent expressions of kindly feelings towards the animals to which they refer.[100] A Dinka is said to be fonder of his cattle than of his wife and children;[101] and according to classical writers, the ploughing ox is not allowed to be slaughtered because he is himself an agriculturist, the servant of Ceres, and a companion to the labourer in his work.[102] But at the same time the restrictions in question are very largely due to prudential motives. Peoples who live chiefly on the products of their cattle show a strong disinclination to reduce their herds, especially by killing cows or calves;[103] and agricultural races are naturally anxious to preserve the animal which is used for work on the field. With reference to the Egyptian and Phœnician custom of eating bulls but abstaining from cows, Porphyry observes that “for the sake of utility in one and the same species of animals distinction is made between that which is pious and that which is impious,” cows being spared on account of their progeny.[104] Until quite recently in Egypt no one was allowed to kill a calf, and permission from the government was required for the slaughter of a bull.[105] Moreover, domestic animals are frequently regarded as sacred in consequence of their utility, and for that reason also abstained from. The Dinka pay a kind of reverence to their cattle.[106] In Egypt, according to Herodotus, the cow was sacred to Isis.[107] In India she has been the object of a special worship.[108]
[83] Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, p. 188.
[84] Mencius, i. 1. 7. 8.
[85] von den Steinen, Durch Central-Brasilien, p. 262. See also Juan and Ulloa, Voyage to South America, i. 426 (Indians of Quito).
[86] Institutes of Vishnu, li. 3. Laws of Manu, v. 19.
[87] Campbell, Second Journey in the Interior of South Africa, ii. 203.
[88] Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa, i. 163 sq.
[89] Herodotus, iv. 186.
[90] Ibid. ii. 41. Porphyry, op. cit. ii. 11.
[91] Institutes of Vishnu, li. 3.